They should also make plans to fund a Radio Free America, for once the corporate US press starts fully parroting the party line.

The key to popularity and success is to be yourself—after you have ensured that your self is likeable and not creepy or offputting.

Which is also how you spell Putin in French. (I did a double-take when I first saw a French newspaper headline mentioning the Russian dictator.)

Operation Prairie Storm

Maglevs could revolutionise the future of inflexible point-to-point links (they’re mostly used for things like showpiece airport trains, and future plans are fixed single-line systems like the Japanese one). IIRC, unlike legacy double-rail systems, you can’t have switches for diverting trains between two lines at speed, meaning that the sorts of flexible railway networks that currently exist can’t be replicated with maglev.