Current Events

As a sea craft, it is called a submersible: a steel tube battened down from the outside and lowered to the ocean floor. From there it putts about, allowing passengers a peek through a window roughly the size of the face pressed against it.

The submersible that visited the graveyard known as the Wreck of the Titanic was called the Titan, and it imploded last week, killing all five on board, some of whom paid $200K USD for its ten-hour tour. It took three days from losing contact for us to learn of this implosion. In the meantime, the news cycle fed on the Titan's absence, at one point giving us James Cameron, who made one of the highest grossing films ever, called The Titanic (1997). No one to my knowledge contacted Wes Anderson, whose The Life Aquatic (2004) was probably closer to the life of Titan founder and captain Stockton Rush than anything Cameron had to say that an ocean scientist couldn't say better.

Now the news cycle returns to Russia, where the non-Western media is reporting that betrayed Russian mercenaries are marching to Moscow to confront Russian President Putin, who allegedly fired on them because -- they weren't attacking Ukrainian-held positions? People in my nabe are cheering this, but I can't think of a worse outcome. Putin has been held in check -- or played -- by global forces, and is being  slowly worn down while the U.S. and China chart the next ten years. Mercenaries, on the other hand, fight for money, and presumably make peace for money, too. What do you pay someone who could, in a week or two, have access to the deployment of nuclear warheads?