The Boiling Outrage Against Putin’s Ukraine War Has Settled to a Simmer

Ah well, so it is and so it has always been.  The first rule of cookery is to follow the goddamn recipe. And now I see Joe Biden turning down the heat while he scratches his head over how much sauce to add to the gravy.

The media, it seems, is less and less interested in what’s for dinner

And what is NATO, if not a media exercise? If you think the presidents and/or prime ministers of the 30 NATO countries are not subject to local political pressures, you’re not paying attention.

But the cost of setting the dinner-table is enormously disparate

It’s a critique upon our times that media’s money-machine now has a desperately short shelf-life, and by desperate I mean existential. It is and always has been a business, formerly profitable and trustworthy, which is as it should be, think Walter Cronkite and Edward R, Murrow.

But today’s internet competition is free to any nit-wit’s opinion (including mine) and free is hard to beat. The top ten social networks worldwide lasso 14 billion visitors ev…