A New Special Military Operation is Born

And some thoughts about the future of affirmative action

Good Evening.

The other day, Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova posted on her Facebook page the remarkable image above by a Ukrainian artist named Nikita Titov.

It’s a little hard to explain the image to those who don’t have even the most basic Ukrainian (my own is super-primitive) and cannot read Cyrillic characters. But the image is the Tryzub (the coat of arms of Ukraine) with the initials of the Armed Force of Ukraine constituting part of it in yellow and the words, “faith,” “hope,” and “love,” tailing off of each letter.

I thought it very clever, so—being me—I took the liberty of projecting it on the Russian embassy. Ambassador Markarova, in a subsequent Facebook post, drew the artist’s attention to the projection, and he has expressed delight at it.

So I’ve decided to do a Special Military Operation featuring Titov’s work more generally.

A lot of his work seems to lend itself particularly well to long distance projection, as it involves very simple line drawings of precisely the type that #LordLaser excels at throwing the 100 meters over the Gates of Hell.

Titov has said he will get me a bunch of images to work with on Monday. Converting them to projectable images may take a little bit of time, as #LordLaser doesn’t like solid colors—only thin lines—so a bunch of the images will have to be redone. What’s more, I want to do it in a way that English speakers are likely to understand, which probably means livestreaming the operation with a Ukrainian who can explain each one.

I will keep folks updated on timing.

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Some very good news for those who have followed my travails with Twitter. Thanks to some very good folks, I have obtained my full Twitter archive: all the #BabyCannon videos and booms; my correspondence with the good people at Clothing Monster about the fate of Fluffy Poodle Shirt, every #footpic I ever tweeted at Ric Grenell, all of the Special Military Operations, everything. (Have you tweeted a #footpic at Ric recently? Just because I’m not on the platform any more does not relieve you of the obligation!)

And here’s the even better news: the good people at the new social media site Spoutible have agreed to host my Twitter archive. (Are you on Spoutible? I am!)

The archive actually came not just as rendered tweets that I could stick up here on #DogShirtDaily but in a code called JSON. It’s not hard to create a visualization out of JSON files, but I want my Twitter history to be reasonably searchable and accessible, as there’s actually some interesting material in there that is of some—if not much—historical interest. This way, it will be accessible and integrated into Spoutible and searchable there.

I’m very grateful to Christopher Bouzy, the founder of Spoutible, for agreeing to host the archive. I will keep readers informed of progress on the project as it develops.

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Meanwhile, Twitter’s self-destruction continues apace, and I’m over here watching from Twitter jail eating popcorn.

It tastes great.

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay, nominated and filmed by Hyemin Han, is this great blue heron, who wishes to remind you that your species does not have the word “great” in it.

So there.

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So I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Yeah, but Wittes, what do you think about this week’s travesties from the Supreme Court?”

The truth of the matter is that I have only read one of the big decisions of the week, the affirmative action decision, and I only read the majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts. I’m honestly not that interested in the debate over whether we should allow race-conscious university admissions, a debate which has been going on almost my entire life and the arguments on both sides of which I know like parts of my own body. So haven’t read the concurrences, and I haven’t read the dissents either.

I’m interested, rather, in only in one question emanating from this case: What is the court as an institution telling universities about what they can and cannot do with respect to admitting a diverse class, and how are universities committed to doing everything they lawfully can do likely to respond?

For this purpose, only the majority opinion is relevant.