I’m back with The Private Citizen! Last night, I released a new episode focused on, what else, the Russian war in Ukraine.

→ The Private Citizen 109: Agitprop Ahoy!

The war in Ukraine has been raging for eight years, largely ignored by the West. It is not new. Neither are the policy blunders by NATO and the EU that have led to the current full-scale invasion. Putin is to blame for the war, but the West has created the situation that enabled Putin to wage it.

If you want to get notified automatically when new episodes of The Private Citizen are released, you can subscribe to the show via a number of methods:

What happened in Ukraine last week was an obvious consequence of The West’s ambitions and goals in the last thirty years. It is also a direct consequence of Obama’s and Merkel’s disastrous foreign policy. This should have been obvious to anyone who knows the first thing about foreign policy and history. A war has been fought in Ukraine for eight years now, anyone who was surprised about WAR IN EUROPE last week hasn’t been paying attention. The people who wrote those headlines and the politicians who claimed something “unthinkable” or “unforeseen” just happened are idiots and should be fired immediately.

The West forced regime change in Ukraine in 2014, the Russians responded, both sides escalated again and again over the last few years and now Russia invaded. This is a tragedy. It is a failure of diplomacy that is as much the fault of Vladimir Putin as it is the fault of us in Germany and the US who elected warmongers and people who know more about gender policy than they know about foreign policy.

Ted Galen Carpenter wrote a great opinion piece in 1945, which was also republished in The Guardian, and which explains exactly what went wrong very concisely:

→ Ignored Warnings: How NATO Expansion Led to the Current Ukraine Tragedy

History will show that Washington’s treatment of Russia in the decades following the demise of the Soviet Union was a policy blunder of epic proportions. It was entirely predictable that NATO expansion would ultimately lead to a tragic, perhaps violent, breach of relations with Moscow. Perceptive analysts warned of the likely consequences, but those warnings went unheeded. We are now paying the price for the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s myopia and arrogance.

Please be aware that I won’t be posting much on this blog in February. I’m taking the month off to try and finish my novel to do justice to the grant I have received from the German government for this goal. This is something I’m going to call Grim February.

You will find updates about how I am doing with this on the Grim Deep blog and my author account on Twitter.

Here you go. I’ve just released the last episode of The Private Citizen in a while. I’m going to take a month off now. I’ll be back with more episodes in March.

→ The Private Citizen 108: The Biggest Security Vulnerability of All Time

Log4Shell, a vulnerability in the Java application logging framework Log4J has been called the worst security vulnerability ever. Is that just the usual hype, though? Or why haven’t we seen the forecast large scale exploitation of this bug? Is there something more sinister at play here?

If you want to get notified automatically when new episodes of The Private Citizen are released, you can subscribe to the show via a number of methods:

Last night, I released The Private Citizen episode 107 with my take on the Neil Young / Joe Rogan / Spotify story. I’m planning to release an additional episode tonight before taking February off from the podcast. But first, here’s episode 107:

→ The Private Citizen 107: Neil Young is Being a Dick

Neil Young has had his record label pull his music from Spotify because he doesn’t like that Joe Rogan interviews people who have a different opinion than Neil Young. The story of a counterculture rebel turned censorship advocate.

If you want to get notified automatically when new episodes of The Private Citizen are released, you can subscribe to the show via a number of methods:

On episode 106 of The Private Citizen, I once again try to wind down my coverage of the pandemic. Will I be able to manage it this time? Only time will tell…

→ The Private Citizen 106: Concluding the Coronavirus Coverage, Part 2

Taking stock of the civil liberty and privacy nightmare we have built for ourselves in the pandemic and explaining why I don’t think reporting on it accomplishes much at this point.

If you want to get notified automatically when new episodes of The Private Citizen are released, you can subscribe to the show via a number of methods:

For years, I tried to explain to Dave on Geek News Radio why me caring about the fictional integrity of a story wasn’t simply me being old, inflexible and resenting change. It is important for the suspension of disbelief. For you giving a shit about what you are watching.

The Critical Drinker explains this better than I ever could in the following video. He also explains why this is one of the major problems with Hollywood today.

This week’s episode of The Private Citizen was delayed, but yesterday, I finally managed to release it. It’s a bit of a companion piece to episodes 104 and 94. It is also unusually philosophical.

→ The Private Citizen 105: Law vs. Justice

The law is not the same as justice. There can be unjust laws and illegal actions can beget justice. So why is it that many people can’t tell the difference between these two concepts? And how can we reconcile them in our society?

If you want to get notified automatically when new episodes of The Private Citizen are released, you can subscribe to the show via a number of methods:

Yesterday, the great Michael Koschel finished the first part of my new ink. Which is why I can’t use my right arm properly for a few days now.

This snake is a blue pit viper (Trimeresurus insularis). And yes, the colour is accurate. What a beautiful animal! They have a special IR sensing organ that enables them to pinpoint and attack prey in absolute darkness by sensing heat differences as small as a 0.2°C deviation from the background temperature. I also love the look it gives you. Totally my kind of character!

A few days ago, I received the first fanart for my novel project Grim Deep. I thought that was extremely cool and it made me very happy.

This week’s Private Citizen episode is about a Constitutional Court decision in Germany that has tasked the government with passing a law that regulates triage during the pandemic. This is an exceptionally bad idea, I think.

→ The Private Citizen 104: Triage is Too Logical for Germans

When who to save in case of a medical emergency becomes a moral, or even worse, a legal decision instead of a medical one, we all lose. This will soon be the reality in Germany, though, as the Constitutional Court has just passed a very unfortunate ruling in this regard.

If you want to get notified automatically when new episodes of The Private Citizen are released, you can subscribe to the show via a number of methods:

I’ve just discovered Hildegard von Blingin’. Her stuff is amazing! It starts with the name, but it’s the complete package. Her singing is great and the lyrics are probably the best part. Her pseudo-Medieval style makes even the most boring pop songs interesting.

Check it out!