Or perhaps “dropped word of the day”, and it goes to Paul Fidalgo of The Morning Heresy:
A new video by Kite & Key Media explains the ridiculousness of the anti-GMO movement, especially when one considers how many billions of lives the “green revolution” of genetically modified crops.
Read creatively, I think he achieves the opposite of his intention.
Or perhaps he’s just frantically signaling the heroic conspiracy theorists for help.
In case you were wondering, Wikipedia provides a map of NATO’s reach:
(The black background should be white, and is an artifact of converting from PNG to JPG format. The blue is actual NATO members; the balance of the key is at the link.)
Russia is the orange. Keeping in mind that the United States lies across the Bering Strait from Russia, it’s clear why Russia feels threatened by NATO, but then NATO was created to counter the Soviet Union, which included Russia as the dominant member way back when, and was also the dominant member of the Eastern Bloc.
Now it’s just Russia and whatever it can acquire. And it turns out that an autocracy doesn’t lead to a dominant military, for what are becoming obvious reasons.
The Old Bailey, of London, England, has a database of the cases it’s sat on:
The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913
A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.
At some obscure level, I find this disturbing:
The Digital Panopticon: The Global Impact of London Punishments, 1780-1925
This new AHRC funded website traces the lives of 90,000 convicts sentenced at the Old Bailey between 1780 and 1875, linking Old Bailey trials to relevant entries in fifty databases of criminal justice and civil records, including the census. The ‘Life Archives’ allow users to discover both the pre- and post-trial histories of Old Bailey convicts. They allow users to see differences between the punishment sentences handed down by the court and the punishments convicts actually experienced, and make it possible to compare the impact of the punishments of imprisonment and transportation on convicts’ lives.
A physical panopticon looks like this:
Image Credit: Designing Buildings
The central tower houses the guards on duty, and the surrounding walls have the prisoner cells. The concept of privacy, as dubious as some would see it for the inmates, disappears. Some prisoners suffered mental breakdowns.
Sure, I get that the Old Bailey people are trying to say nothing’s hidden, but it sends shivers up my spine.
In NewScientist (12 March 2022, paywall), Lucy Cooke recounts the natural history of female animals sleeping around, and then misinterprets the bigger picture:
When Patricia Gowaty began doing DNA paternity tests on songbird eggs in 1984, she discovered that each nest frequently contained multiple fathers, despite the apparent monogamy of their parents.
Members of the male ornithological establishment responded by insisting the females had been “raped”. But radio trackers subsequently revealed females actively seeking sex with neighbouring cocks. Since then, a polyandry revolution has revealed that multiple mating is the norm for females, from lions to lizards. The reason is quite obvious: don’t put all your eggs in one basket – greater genetic diversity means healthier offspring.
Gowaty, like me, has never tried to hide her politics. She believes in equal representation of both sexes. But, as Darwin’s Victorian values show us, science is always political. A feminist perspective is urgently needed to topple centuries of androcentrism and rebrand female sexual agency, in lionesses or songbirds, from unexpected to a winning maternal strategy.
Not political, but culturally biased. The intellectual error of projection, of anthropomorphism, is a well-known problem in science, from physics to natural history, by which I mean the study of animals’ social structures. Early scientists grew up in societies in which females were nominally monogamous. This is a cultural tradition. They made the mistake of applying cultural mores to turtles, and that just doesn’t fly.
Politics is about governance. Science is about reality, wherever that may lead. Her ornithologists were using bad assumptions. But to call it politics is just wrong.
But I think what we’re seeing here is the influence of the far-left’s view that everything is politics, particularly if someone’s feeling offended by it. Call it politics, turn the weapons du jour upon all those who happen to hold such a view, and pull the trigger.
It’s crude, it’s intellectual bullying, and, unlike in many areas, it doesn’t really get the job done. Science depends on studying reality and coming to conclusions based on evidence, not imposing a conclusion and then twisting the evidence to match. That disastrous approach has been tried a time or two before, most notably by Soviet scientist Lysenko.
Call it misapplication of cultural mores and be done with it. Call it politics and end up paying for that mistake for decades.
For those who are unaware, Dr. Oz, a TV celebrity and surgeon, is running for the Republican nomination for Senator from Pennsylvania, and it appears he’s well and truly in the grasp of the Sirens of Greek myth. Here’s HuffPo’s take on the matter:
Mehmet Oz, the celebrity TV surgeon better known as Dr. Oz, used to write and tweet about the health benefits of coconut oil, lavender oil, CBD oil, MCT oil, avocado and olive oil.
He also appeared to be a strong opponent of fracking, warning his readers in multiple articles about the potential health risks associated with one of the more controversial fossil fuel extracting technologies.
And now?
But now that Oz is a GOP Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, he is apparently less concerned about fracking’s possible health effects on his potential constituents and more interested in preserving an industry active in the state.
“Back off Biden! Give us freedom to frack!” Oz said Wednesday in a rambling TikTok video while pumping gas somewhere in the Keystone State.
Oz’s campaign is even denying that he ever voiced any concern about fracking in the first place, claiming that he had no part in any of those earlier columns — even though he is listed as their primary author.
That denial calls into question which of Oz’s medical advice columns he actually stands behind and raises questions about his brand as a trusted health professional.
If he’d said, Well, on further investigation, my team found that fracking does not introduce dangerous chemicals into aquifers, then at least he’s be showing some smoothness and planning. People do accept that viewpoints evolve as more information is discovered. Although we’d be depending on his truthfulness.
But, no, like his brethren, he’s a fourth-rater. Maybe he’s a great surgeon, like Dr. Carson, but as a politician goes, he’s in thrall to the sweet flavor of political power.
And I think his opponents will use that to beat him at the polls.
Foreign Policy reports on GOP hijinks in the US Senate:
In recent weeks, the Biden administration and key Republican lawmakers have forged a rare consensus on the need for a tougher response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, advocating for providing deadlier weapons, imposing ruinous sanctions, and promoting vigorous efforts to address the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.
Yet, at the same time, Republican lawmakers, including Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and Roger Marshall of Kansas, have placed holds on the confirmation of several key Biden administration appointees with critical roles in addressing Ukraine’s crisis, including top officials destined for the U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development as well as who are responsible for managing U.S. policy on sanctions, humanitarian relief, refugees, and nuclear and chemical security.
Let’s add in some Gallup data:
Americans are following the Ukraine situation closely, as might be imagined given its dominance of daily news coverage. A recent Wall Street Journal poll shows 89% of U.S. voters are following the situation there very or somewhat closely. Pew Research shows 69% of Americans have read or heard a lot about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with most of the rest saying they have read or heard at least a little.
The next time these Senators are up for re-election, their opponents, both intra- and inter-party, have a ready-made attack available. Here’s my interpretation:
Senator, you personally did your best to cripple the American response to the Russian attack on Ukraine, and by extension autocrats everywhere. For how long have you been anti-American?
The Gallup data indicates that most Americans will know precisely the context of the question: The innocent victim status of the Ukrainians, the brutality of the Russian attacks, the bravery of the Ukrainians, etc.
And, with a little careful messaging by the Democrats, the importance of stifling an autocratic regime – a regime to which Americans should be automatically allergic.
An ambitious messaging operation would attempt to use the incompetency of the Russians to connect incompetency with autocrats everywhere. It’d be a difficult pull, but not outside the realm of possibility.
And to what important issue are the Republicans so desperate as to interfere in defending against an attack on freedom?
Scott, who has placed the largest number of holds, has blocked [several nominees essential to the Ukraine situation] confirmation, demanding that the Biden administration first take action on an unrelated issue: the Cuban government’s practice of siphoning the salaries of Cuban doctors exported to other Latin American countries.
No doubt annoying to the doctors, but not of earthshaking importance. Indeed, it’s not a critical American priority.
But here’s the thing: the Gingrichian strategy of opposition to the Democrats at every point, from stealing SCOTUS seats to denying necessary tax increases to denigrating climate science conclusions with utter nonsense, has brought us to this idiotic point in our politics. Prior to Gingrich, these sorts of things would have been dealt with by quiet contacts between Senators and President, regardless of Party. A disappointed Senator might have made noise about it, but holding up essential personnel or other such extreme measures? It wouldn’t have crossed their minds, in most cases.
But the days of collegial governance are gone, abolished by the ego of Gingrich[1] and his ideological inheritors, and opposition politicians can no longer hope to have a quiet talk with the Executive in hopes of getting something done. Instead, it’s all about profile and interference in a domain in which the Senate, frankly, has little official reach: foreign policy is an Executive function, with only advice and consent from the Senate.
The ego endangers a nation’s response. Can’t say it’s the first time, but it’s still a shame on the honor of these Senators.
Ecology of fear:
The ecology of fear is a conceptual framework describing the psychological impact that predator-induced stress experienced by animals has on populations and ecosystems. Within ecology, the impact of predators has been traditionally viewed as limited to the animals that they directly kill, while the ecology of fear advances evidence that predators may have a far more substantial impact on the individuals that they predate, reducing fecundity, survival and population sizes.[1][2] To avoid being killed, animals that are preyed upon will employ anti-predator defenses which aid survival but may carry substantial costs. [Wikipedia]
Noted in “How a rodent’s fear of cats shapes rainforests in Panama,” Jake Buehler, NewScientist (12 March 2022, paywall):
A game of cat and mouse is playing out in Panama’s rainforests, with large rodents called agoutis using their keen sense of smell to avoid ocelots that hunt them. The fear the rodents have for these predators and the ways it directs their behaviour have ripple effects that could alter the diversity of plants around them.
Most research on this “ecology of fear” has been centred on temperate ecosystems, says Dumas Gálvez at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City. To see how the phenomenon could play out in the tropics, he and Marisol Hernández at the University of Panama looked to Central American agoutis (Dasyprocta punctata) and ocelots (Leopardus pardalis).
Mr. Popper bronzed and displayed the first batch of penguins. The second batch were put through BodyWorks. The third were coated in plastic in life-like positions and used for small arms practice. The fourth batch were the charm.
Mr. Popper’s Penguins (2011) is a pleasantly derivative story of how a pack of penguins save the soul of Mr. Popper, a corporate drone who’s already lost his wife in the backwash of his ambition, and is now in danger of losing his kids.
To Godzilla.
Just kidding! Checking to see if you’ve read this far. There’s nothing particularly offensive, and while penguins are cool and all that sort of thing, there’s nothing innovative here.
I blame it all on my Arts Editor, who wanted to see this.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale has continually updated lists of companies that have, sort of, or have not withdrawn from doing business in Russia. The last category includes consumer brands such as Subway, LG Electronics, and Young Living, as well as lesser known companies such as Gruma and the far-right Koch Industries.
If you’re invested in them, or use them, give them hell. Remember, Ukraine’s getting hell just for existing.
Gematria:
Gematria (/ɡəˈmeɪtriə/; Hebrew: גמטריא or gimatria גימטריה, plural גמטראות or גימטריאות, gimatriot) is the practice of assigning a numerical value to a name, word or phrase according to an alphanumerical cipher. A single word can yield several values depending on the cipher which is used. [Wikipedia]
Noted in “Trucker Convoy Protester Spouts Wild COVID Conspiracy Theory in Viral Video,” Gerrard Kaonga, Newsweek:
She insisted that COVID-19 was a coded message for “see sheep surrender,” a conspiracy theory that was already debunked by a Reuters fact-check report in 2020.
“When it came out it was ‘corona’ right?” the woman said.
“Corona is six letters, when you use gematria and say A is 1, B is 2, C is 3 and you put Corona lined up is 6-6. So that is 6-6-6.
Dreadful incoherence. I wonder if gematria is related to pareidolia?
Religion News Service has an AP report:
The curators of raptureready.com — which shares commentary about “end of days” prophesies — suggest things could move quickly. Their “Rapture Index,” — on which any reading above 160 means “Fasten your seatbelts” — was raised this week to 187, close to its record high of 189 in 2016.
Which leaves me to wonder, At what number do they stop believing that a Rapture will ever occur? At what number do they stop believing in God?
One of the most detailed alerts came from televangelist Pat Robertson, who came out of retirement on Feb. 28 to assert on “The 700 Club” that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “compelled by God” to invade Ukraine as a prelude to an eventual climactic battle in Israel. Robertson said verses of the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel support this scenario.
“You can say, well, Putin’s out of his mind. Yes, maybe so,” Robertson said. “But at the same time, he’s being compelled by God. He went into the Ukraine, but that wasn’t his goal. His goal was to move against Israel, ultimately.”
“It’s all there,” added Robertson, referring to Ezekiel. “And God is getting ready to do something amazing and that will be fulfilled.”
Which leaves me with the terrifying visual of God as sock-puppet guy. Poor Vlad, eh? But I suppose it absolves him of guilt.
Or does it?
Perhaps Robertson’s conception of God, and interpretation of the Bible, bedevils – if you’ll permit – the idea of free will, which in turn leads to a God that’s, at best, juvenile in behavior.
Bah, the whole thing is silly. Drama queens, the lot of them.
The intelligence news that Russia may be requesting military and financial assistance from China is, I think, one of the more shocking incidents to occur in this invasion of Ukraine by Russia. For most folks on both ends of the political spectrum Russia is, or now past tense, was the Bear, grumpy and vicious and apt to eat the unwary.
Their failure to topple Ukraine in 3 days – it’s now close to 3 weeks – is signal evidence of failures in the military’s planning, logistics, resources, professionalism, top to bottom.
That they – read Putin – have to ask China for help, even if it’s only symbolic in the arena of military assistance, since such usually takes training, or, a chancy business, China sending military personnel, is a measure of their desperation. Why?
Because China’s Russia’s own bugaboo. China, the world’s most populous nation, has a huge Army, nuclear weapons, few scruples, and big ambitions. Now Russia, through the foolishness of Putin, has revealed a critical weakness.
And everyone is well aware that Russia is replete with natural resources – including China. This makes them desirable, not only as a trade partner, but as a subject territory.
I wonder if this has ever crossed Putin’s mind.
Will this happen? I don’t know. I’m not a military strategist, nor a specialist in China military, or indeed anything applicable. But I know China’s leader Xi is ambitious, he has a populace that must be kept distracted from its own many problems, and Russia is the prime example of a major power going downhill. It’s like a three legged sheep sighted by the wolf pack. Is the shepherd around, or is that sheep about to become dinner.
Russia’s internal powers had better start thinking about these possibilities, because right now Ukraine’s becoming a distraction and not a goal.
Senator Manchin (D-WV) is opposed to government subsidies for building electric charging stations for EVs, because …
“I’m very reluctant to go down the path of electric vehicles,” Manchin said at the conference. “I’m old enough to remember standing in line in 1974 trying to buy gas.” He added he doesn’t want to wait in line “for a battery for my vehicle, because we’re now dependent on a foreign supply chain.”
“I’ve read history, and I remember Henry Ford inventing the Model-T,” Manchin also said, “but I sure as hell don’t remember the U.S. government building filling stations — the market did that.” [WaPo]
Skipping both obvious and nuanced arguments, such as the observation that the market is neither prescient nor wise, let’s just go to what the writer, Gary Sargent, forgot, and that’s the billions in subsidies provided to the fossil fuel industries over the decades. By enabling the extraction and refinement activities, along with applications, it’s not hard to deduce:
That’s what built the filling stations.
Manchin’s exercising a deeply dishonest argument.
If you like ostriches, here’s some interesting facts.
Just kidding!
Not a good sign.
There is a lot of grim news for President Biden and Democrats in the latest Wall Street Journal poll (Cliff Notes version is that while more Americans approve of his handling of Ukraine, they give him low marks for his handling of other issues more important to them, particularly inflation). But I just wanted to take a moment to flag this part of the poll, which is remarkable and not something I can recall ever seeing before:
The survey also found Republicans making gains among minority groups. By 9 percentage points, Hispanic voters in the new poll said they would back a Republican candidate for Congress over a Democrat. The two parties had been tied among Hispanic voters in the Journal’s survey in November.
Democratic margins also eroded among Black voters, who favored a Democrat for Congress by 35 percentage points in the new survey, down from 56 points in November. Support for a Republican candidate rose to 27% among Black voters, up from 12% in November.
[Philip Klein, Editor, National Review]
When your target demographics seem to be moving away, you should pay attention. The saddest part is that the Democrats who lose are replaced by the fourth raters in the Republican Party.
If the guy pulls that trigger, not only does Raffles end up with a hole in his leg, but his fingers’ll get scorched, too. And Lady Melrose will not be happy with a hole in her carpet.
Raffles (1939) follows A. J. Raffles, Brit cricket star, thievery addict, and all-around good guy, as he finds a friend of his, a gambling fiend named Bunny Maunders, is well below the surface of the gambling swamp, and in desperate need of immediate help.
Which could be found in the form of Lady Melrose’s jewelry.
Lord Melrose, a fan of cricket, has conveniently invited Raffles to visit their estate for a party, and the guest list includes Inspector MacKenzie of Scotland Yard, incognito, who suspects the thief will be present, and Bunny’s sister, Gwen.
The latter for whom Raffles falls, hard. So hard he bounces.
Thieves are hardly romantic figures, though, even in 1930s England, so Raffles finds his challenge to be coming off as heroic to Gwen, not at all a thief to MacKenzie, and at least not offensive to the Melroses – as offending landed British gentry can introduce unneeded burdens to one’s career.
Even one as dubious as Raffles’.
It’s fun, but only the final scene, in which Raffles must face Gwen, MacKenzie, and the man he’s framing for the theft – did I forget to mention Raffles is just a bit of a cad? – approaches memorability.
Watch if you need a bit of diversion for an hour or so. Or you love David Niven, whose tiny little mustache must, as usual, do all the work of being charming for him.
Last October on Artnome, NFT enthusiast Jason Bailey detailed one of the lurking snakes of NFTs:
One line that made it into all my interviews and presentations was: “Even if the marketplaces go out of business, your CryptoArt (this was before we called them NFTs) will always be safe because they are decentralized on the blockchain.” I was wrong.
By mid-2018, cryptocurrencies started to crash and NFT marketplaces disappeared along with the art, and sometimes even the NFTs themselves. I still own the first NFT by the artist XCOPY, whose works have recently sold to collectors like Snoop Dog for millions of dollars. Mine, too, would be worth millions of dollars today, but I purchased it from a marketplace that went out of business. Now, it is worth nothing.
Similarly, I purchased several works on R.A.R.E Art Network, but most of them are no longer supported since that marketplace went out of business. Though, to their credit, they are trying to help recover them. Same story for works I bought on many other marketplaces that did not survive the 2018 bear market… Editional, Digital Objects… the list goes on.
And thus his creation of ClubNFT.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the abyss is Molly White (no relation, at least of which I’m aware) and her team, and their chronicle of miscreants of NFTs, blockchains, and cryptocurrencies, Web3 is going just great. A post:
A trader set very low limit order on Ripple’s XRP token, and was delighted to see it executed with XRP very briefly plummeted in value in what’s known as a flash crash. The price recovered quickly, and the trader found themselves $458,000 wealthier. However, when they tried to withdraw some of their money from the exchange they were using, LAToken, the withdrawal was declined and their account was restricted for 24 hours for an unspecified terms of use violation. When the trader regained access to their account, the XRP they bought was nowhere to be found.
Oooops. Not that this couldn’t happen with an unscrupulous traditional stockbroker, but at least you’d have a shot at recovering the money. This guy? Not so much.
Not sure about web3? Here’s a link.
Aestivation:
Over the winter, most slugs and snails hibernate and, yes, as it warms up in the spring, they come out to feed. Then they activate a summer hibernation phase called aestivation, where they seek shelter again – slugs below ground; snails above ground. And then they come out again in the autumn. Here in Oregon, once we get the first fall rains, that activates them to come out again. This pattern is pretty typical for here in the US, western Europe, the UK and Ireland. In more tropical areas, like Hawaii or the north of Australia, slugs and snails are active all the time. [“Rory Mc Donnell interview: The slug hunter with a strange new weapon,” Brendan Knapp, NewScientist (5 March 2022)]
David Von Drehle briefly chronicles the recent corporate migration from maximizing profits to being what we might call corporate moral entities:
Gone are the days of the Friedman Doctrine, enunciated in 1970 by the influential laissez-faire economist Milton Friedman. The social responsibility of a corporation, Friedman declared, is exclusively to maximize the satisfaction of shareholders — measured by rising revenue and stock prices (unless the shareholders themselves decide otherwise). Executives are to think only of the bottom line. …
In truth, there was always some pushback against Friedman’s fiat as companies tried to demonstrate that doing good could coexist with doing well. Coca-Cola promoted global harmony in a memorable 1971 TV ad campaign. The Benetton fashion house put diversity and inclusion front and center in its magazine campaigns of the 1990s. But the doctrine remained in favor until the gap between flat wages and steeply escalating super-wealth grew so great that the folks in the penthouses began worrying about folks with pitchforks.
In 2019, the Business Roundtable, a public policy organization of major American chief executives, called an end to the Friedman Doctrine. Its “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation” replaced the exclusive focus on shareholders with a broader obligation to all “stakeholders.” As if to test the sincerity of the brass, there immediately followed a succession of crises — the covid-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, the Jan. 6 insurrection — in which corporations were urged to take various steps and positions that served aims other than the immediate balance sheet. [WaPo]
I think it helps to remember that morality is a mechanism of social evolution. That is, accepting that the simultaneous points of social evolution is survival and propagation, we can then explain that morality is not an arbitrary collection of rules and regulations, promulgated from on high, but a collection of practical observations, debated extensively even into the present, abstracted, and codified, all as a shortcut, if you will, for guidance of one’s own behavior, and more importantly the evaluation of the behavior and character of others.
When Friedman proclaimed corporations’ responsibilities lay in satisfying shareholders’ desires, and no more, he took a very mechanistic and static view of society, a mistaken view in which the negative consequences, once removed, of corporate actions do not and can not exist simultaneously with positive consequences.
That is, if your quarterly profits set a new record, then good for you. Never mind you’ve just enabled a national adversary to, say, defeat your own country’s armed forces, swarm over the border, and execute all corporate officers in the country. Can’t happen. You just set a new record.
And if that seems a trifle overstated on my part, don’t be entirely doubtful. Just reading or listening to Rep Cawthorn (R-NC) rant about the ‘evil’ of President Zelensky(y) is enough to question the general rationality of a lot of people.
Returning to the point, morality provides a shortcut for identifying actions as threatening to our own well-being; if a person, a corporation, or a government persists in actions which are in conflict with moral dictates, this is not merely a doubtful condemnation of a possibly existent soul, individual or corporate, but, in fact, a threat, potentially existential, to the actors in the drama in which all are embedded.
That is, enabling and, through successful ventures, encouraging the genocidal institution may result in that genocide being inflicted on you, and most observers would then consider the genocided venture a failure. Not only is this a condemnation of Friedman’s deeply disconnected from reality Doctrine, but also the concentration on quarterly profits as a meaningful measure of corporate success.
And quite possibly the entire stock market and its scanting of the premise that stockholder behavior should enhance corporate morality. But that’s a thought for another time.
From this WaPo report, it appears we were on the brink of reviving the JCPOA, aka the Iran nuclear deal, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and now Russia, one of the signatories of the original deal, is raising an objection. Iran’s feeling the squeeze:
But Tehran has also made it clear that Iran feels it can’t risk a public rift with Russia by turning its back on Russia’s concerns and aligning with the United States, according to a person familiar with the details of the talks, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive subjects.
Someone should whisper in Iran’s ear concerning the trustability of Russia on anything. Of course, that might not make Iran’s leadership any happier, seeing as their options of the United States and China are unappetizing – at least to an Islamic theocracy. Under former American President Trump, we proved volatile and untrustable in pulling out of the JCPOA and reimposing sanctions, and that, sadly, remains a solid potential:
Comments by former vice president Mike Pence in an interview earlier this week with an Israeli newspaper that a future Republican administration would again withdraw from any revived deal also did not help, said a senior Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive subjects.
It’s deeply shameful that the former vice president made such a remark, which paints America as a dishonorable entity that does not live up to its commitments. Thus we see the descent of the American political class into vast, self-centered incompetence. The Republicans lead the way, but I suspect the Democrats are not far behind.
Back to the main plot, but China has what might be argued an even worse guilt in their relentless persecution of the their Islamic Uighur minority. Do the theocrats in Tehran really want to ally with a country whose leadership is dedicated to wiping out their religion?
But the unstable nature of autocracy, inevitably streaked as it is with splashes of brutality, incompetence, and arbitrariness, and possibly seasoned with an obscure religious zealotry peculiar to Russia and alien to Iran, has been revealed in all its repulsive glory. Do the theocrats feel entirely comfortable buying the arms of Russia when they’ve been revealed to be of surprisingly inferior quality by this conflict? I have to wonder if Supreme Leader Khamenei has nightmares featuring scenes from the American advance into Kuwait during the First Gulf War, in which American tanks easily outclassed their Russian-made counterparts used by the Iraqi Army.
I’d wake up in a cold sweat if I were him.
Nor can Russia offer relief from American sanctions any longer. The ruble is being rapidly reduced to a joke, Russia’s suffering a brain drain, and only its nuclear arms and immense natural resources retain their value.
I wonder if we’ll be seeing the Iranians trying to inch their way to signing on the dotted line soon.
I don’t know if I should be taking this post, concerning a letter from a Ukraine official to the Russian Defense Minister on various bits of sub-standard military gear found in Ukraine on Russian tanks, from Irenaeus on Daily Kos seriously:
In particular, the protection of Russian tanks T-72 and T-80 made from cardboard egg trays. Without a doubt, these means of protecting military equipment deserve to become a separate assessment factor in the PowerIndex when forming the Global Firepower rating of the strongest armies in the world.
There are corroborating pictures.
And they remind me of my school lessons in High School, when they claimed Russian arms merchants of World War I were delivering arms and munitions that not only didn’t work, but couldn’t work – replacement of gunpowder with sand, for example – all due, again, to corruption at the highest levels.
History rhymes.
Practicing the double-humped camel yoga position is the best way to escape prison.
Murderous Trance (2018) is a fictionalized recounting of real-life events that happened in Denmark in the 1950s, to wit, a bank robbery and murder of two bank clerks, in which the perpetrator, Palle Hardrup, is caught rapidly, if in a bone-chilling manner.
The case initially looks open and shut, but there’s the question of another robbery, which seems to fit the same pattern, but the booty was not recovered, and the suspect claims not to have committed that crime. Complications ensue, between collaborations with the occupying Nazis just a scant few years ago, and the friendship of Hardrup, while in prison, with cellmate Bjørn Schouw Nielsen, a hypnotist.
And Nielsen’s sudden friendship with detective Olsen’s frustrated and grief-stricken wife, Marie, should certain raise, concerns, hackles, and perhaps a ghost or two.
Throw in a researcher with a shady background, and this is a tense thriller. It’s not a bad little story, and it lacks the distraction of big name stars – if that bothers you. But the kicker is that something much like this did happen in Denmark, leaving one to wonder at the cold inhumanity of some humans.
Groyne:
a low wall built out from the coast into the sea, to prevent the repeated movement of the waves from removing parts of the land [Cambridge Dictionary]
Noted in “Rising seas could submerge Rio and Jakarta by 2100 – what can we do?” Simon Usborne, NewScientist (26 February 2022, paywall):
But physical defences like these are expensive, impermanent and, in some cases, unintentionally harmful. Take groynes, structures built perpendicularly out from beaches into the sea. A series of these is good at stopping protective sediment such as sand from being washed away along the coast through a process called longshore drift, but it can actually increase erosion after the last groyne because this area receives less sand than it would otherwise.
If you’ve been looking for a way to test your predictive capabilities on international issues, Lawfare has the contest for you:
Rare are the moments when policy wonks get to put their theory into practice. But today we are happy to announce the White Hat Cyber Forecasting Challenge! We invite every Lawfare reader to take up the challenge of issuing predictions on future developments in the world of cybersecurity.
I’ve registered and answered some of the questions. I’m not sure if I’ll get prodded to answer more as they become available, or if I’m supposed to be responsible for my behavior.
