A round-up of this week’s news stories, including Jair Bolsonaro’s attack from a colony of bees, an Australian MP’s bizarre rant about the Olympics opening ceremony, pagan rituals and “crocodile gods”. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
We learned this week that despite what would appear mountainous evidence to the contrary, Russia does have a sense of humour.
Huh?
Well, possibly.
We learned that Russia had apparently called the bluff of the tedious legions of western based blowhards, reactionaries, grifters and grandstanders who have in recent years sought to portray modern Russia as some doughty bastion of dignified decorous Christian civilization as opposed to the deca democratic sodoms and licentious liberal gomorrahs they are cursed to call home.
People like this guy, latter day Walter Duranty, Tucker Carlson.
What was radicalizing, very shocking and very disturbing for me was the city of Moscow, where I'd never been the biggest city in Europe.
13 million people and it is so much nicer than any city in my country.
This guy, latter day Lord haw Nigel Farage.
We provoked this war.
Of course it's his fault.
He's used what?
But we provoke the invasion of Ukraine and possibly even this guy, President Vladimir Putin's most conspicuous fan, if not downright Stan.
We just left Moscow.
He could not have been nicer.
He was so nice and so everything.
But you have to give him credit.
We learned that Putin had signed a presidential degree which will offer all foreign citizens the chance to apply for temporary residency of Russia should they have come to find their homelands intolerable in some curiously specific respects, as will now be read by Monocle's obtuse enticements desk chief Fernando Augusto Pacheco on the grounds of non acceptance of the policies implemented by these states that impose destructive neoliberal ideological guidelines that contradict traditional Russian spiritual and moral values provided for by the fundamentals of state policy.
Righto.
And we learned swiftly and inevitably of veritable stampedes at airports across the the western world as grateful hordes of Putin apologists of the political left and right hastened to take advantage of this generous offer anyway.
We learned, however, that if one right wing bloviator might have been tempted, it was former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.