Backroom Errata

[Montmorency]

Again, it's not a pure philosophical argument. Something is the default and is currently happening, and will continue happening until you put a stop to it. The humanitarian catastrophe is not some abstract natural disaster, but an occupying force currently in possession of territories where they are carrying out these acts. That's the default. By default, it means what is currently the case, and will continue to be the case until it is changed. Talking about geopolitics and whatnot matters little to those being occupied.

Do you effect change, or do you allow the default to persist?

As an American some generations removed, I'd imagine arguing about the situation in philosophical terms makes for an interesting debate. Things were different on the ground at the time though.

These issues were debated both before and immediately after the fact. What I'm saying is along the same lines as what you are. It is possible to argue that the Allies' overall strategy in 1945 was mindful of their ethical obligations, or the opposite. It is possible to argue the Allies did not act in a way to bring the war to a rapid, less-costly, conclusion, or that they did. Maybe I sound too abstract to you because, as I said, I'm not interested in actually holding those arguments right now. The most important thing for me here is to foreclose on anything that sounds like 'The Japs were brutal warmongers, so anything we did was justified.'

Here, have a Brexit snack to tide you over:
https://www.nfuonline.com/news/latest-news/nfu-calls-on-government-to-prioritise-food-security-and-address-uk-self-sufficiency/
https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/farmers-union-warnings-over-self-sufficiency-day-1-6795904

[Montmorency]

Exxon is being delisted from the Dow. It was originally listed a year before start of the Great Depression, and as I understand it has had the longest tenure of any listed company.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/exxon-ends-92-year-run-on-dow-jones-1844839090

The Russians have just declassified never-before seen archival footage of Tsar Bomba (the full Rosatom video has been made private, have a mirror)!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI1TiNN-Swk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbC7BxXtOlo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJhZ3i-HXS0

[Hooahguy]

Obligatory posting of the nuke map (https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/). I guess the only thing comforting about this is that any nuclear strike on my city (an extremely likely target in any nuclear conflict) would mean that I probably wouldn't know what hit me. :yes:

[Montmorency]

I thought you were in DC.

EDIT: Lol that's just the page default setting.

[Crandar]

I think it just automatically identifies your location. Mine was Selanik.

[Gilrandir]

I think it just automatically identifies your location. Mine was Selanik.

Is it in Alpine Subtundra?

[Crandar]

Well, it's close to the Dinaric Alps and considerably below the Russian tundra, so the answer is yes.

[Montmorency]

Possible unexpected positive externality of the Second Amendment: Insofar as it is used to license the open carry‌ing of firearms for political or other purposes across much of the country, it may be a valve against violence to some extent. That is, in other countries when it comes down to armed partisans stalking city streets the threshold of mass violence has already been reached and is unfolding. Whereas in the US, since armed partisans know they won't be confronted or punished by the government for their brandishment, the act is less escalatory and generally doesn't result in violence. You don't have to be Serious about imminent insurrection or democide to swing a rifle about in the United States, unlike in most other countries. Impunity affords complacency, or something...

(Of course, ceteris paribus a country without such a gun culture and legal cover for it would be less likely to reach this stage in the first place...)
(And most of the armed partisans currently understand that the police and federal government favor them... November and December will be the proper test of my hypothesis.)

[ReluctantSamurai]

November and December will be the proper test of my hypothesis.

You're going to see more of what occurred in Virginia, and I believe when a militia group shows up with rifles to harass voters, there will be likewise retaliation:shrug:

[Montmorency]

Kastellorizo: The Greek Falklands?
Nagorno-Karabakh: Have drones made SAM systems obsolete like antiship missiles have made carriers obsolete?


Why are Georgia (not that Georgia) and North Carolina population-twinsies?
23958

The more thought you give it the more profound it seems.


Wowie EUlluminati confirmed? Sounds like a brainchild of that Hobson fellow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_(board_game)


Imperial is a German-style board game designed by Mac Gerdts in which the object is to accumulate wealth in the form of bond holdings in successful countries and cash. Players take on the role of international financiers who purchase government bonds in the six pre-World War I empires of Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Russia. The principal bondholder of a nation gains control of its government and can order importation or production of armaments and ships; maneuvering of military units; construction of factories; and taxation. During play, an investor card is passed around which allows the purchase of additional bonds. A rondel – a wheel-shaped game mechanism with eight different options – is used to determine the options available to a country. The game box states that it is for 2–6 players, but a developer-supported variant allows play with seven.[1] Imperial 2030 is a follow-up game released in 2009 with similar mechanics.

[Crandar]

Unlike the Falklands and the Argentinians, the Turks have a point about Kastellorizo. Greece's proposal of territorial waters completely violates the principle of equity. The best-case scenario would be if Turkey and Greece resorted to international arbitration, but that will never happen, because the voters in both countries have ridiculously unrealistic expectations. Meanwhile, nationalism has already poisoned the political discourse. Immigrants and journalists reporting abuses are dismissed and demonised as MIT agents.

Many are calling for war (in that case, Erdogan will probably pray in the Rotonda of Selanik in a matter of weeks, our army and officers are like your average red-neck militia of rural Idaho) and a government official (under-secretary for immigration) said that the immigrants being homeless, following a fire that destroyed the slums they lived in, is an appropriate punishment. Hopefully, the entirety of the sea between Greece and Turkey will be given to a third-party, Israel, let's say, since our nationalists hate Jews so deeply, in order to infuriate every available chauvinist on the wider periphery.

[Montmorency]

https://i.imgur.com/2d07sEa.png


Supreme Court joke: Used to be, no Catholics or Jews allowed. Now, it's nothing but Catholics and Jews.

It's not even a joke (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States#Religion) (Barrett is Catholic).

Are Judaism and Catholicism the Harvard and Yale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_schools_attended_by_United_States_Supreme_Court_justices) of religions now? :P




Hopefully, the entirety of the sea between Greece and Turkey will be given to a third-party, Israel, let's say, since our nationalists hate Jews so deeply, in order to infuriate every available chauvinist on the wider periphery.

Then the Aegean would become Nea Palestina.

[Pannonian]

Then the Aegean would become Nea Palestina.

What's that?

[Montmorency]

What's that?

The humor (?) being that if Israel were allowed to dispose of the Aegean islands it would probably try to colonize the Palestinians there.

[Crandar]

It will not be the first time (https://www.catholic.org/bible/book.php?id=20&bible_chapter=12)!

[ReluctantSamurai]

I've been late to cop to this woman's work, but I'm sold-----KATIE PORTER FOR PRESIDENT!:laugh4:

Her latest dress-down of a corporate official:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/01/katie-porter-whiteboard-math-pharma/


By now, the scene is familiar, if never less enthralling: Porter leans into the microphone by her seat in a hearing room. She turns to the board on her left to scribble some numbers. And then, she begins pelting questions at a powerful man in front of her.

It is this kind of clear, insistent inquiry that has made Porter — a consumer protection lawyer and former professor who studied bankruptcy law under Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — so effective at grilling everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to little-known Trump appointees, all with a dry-erase marker and some simple math.

“No one has ever wielded a weapon as terrifying as Katie Porter’s whiteboard,” wrote Molly Wood, a public radio journalist and host of “Marketplace Tech.” “This is just a fact.”

“If you ever wonder why certain types of men don’t want to elevate women into power, this, right here, is why,” said Julie Rodin Zebrak, a political consultant and contributing writer for Washington Monthly. “This is what they fear: Katie Porter calls BS and has the receipts and it is a glorious sight to behold.”

But for Porter, who is the only single mother in Congress, it’s all small potatoes compared to her three children at home in Irvine, Calif.

“I have never encountered a witness,” she said last week, during an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” “that was even close to as difficult as any one of my children.”

Think about that last remark.....:inquisitive: "....even close to as difficult as any one of my children." Business CEO's beware:boxedin:

We need more of this, please!:yes:

[Montmorency]

I've been late to cop to this woman's work, but I'm sold-----KATIE PORTER FOR PRESIDENT!:laugh4:

Her latest dress-down of a corporate official:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/01/katie-porter-whiteboard-math-pharma/



Think about that last remark.....:inquisitive: "....even close to as difficult as any one of my children." Business CEO's beware:boxedin:

We need more of this, please!:yes:

Yeah, she's been notorious at hearings.

Another example of DESTROYING with facts and logic, though powerful for its understatement.
https://twitter.com/BharatRamamurti/status/1306713487306035202 [VIDEO]

[Montmorency]

I do not believe there are thousands of Nigerian Hitlers.

https://i.imgur.com/y2V9aaY.png



I do not believe there are a thousand French Stalins, nor a thousand Indians alike.

https://i.imgur.com/igsyAhq.png
https://i.imgur.com/1JL6oln.png

[Montmorency]

I've been thinking throughout the year, 2020 hasn't had many major public mass shootings of the marked categories. I'd expected the pandemic to have an effect, but by now it looks like a durable one, at least for the short-term.

So I'm going to reprint here a list of gun violence incident summaries for incidents in the US in 2020 with at least 5 fatalities or 10 injuries. On the other hand, it testifies to the nationwide increase in gang-related or hot-blooded shootings since at least May.



Dead
Injured
Description


7
0
A shooting at a large marijuana grow house left seven people dead.


7
0
Shortly before midnight authorities responded to a home fire. Once the fire was extinguished seven adults were discovered dead by gunshot wounds.


7
0
Seven adult members of the same family were killed in an apparent murder suicide and were discovered after reports of shots fired


6
0
A mother killed her neighbor, and four children aged 12, 8, and 5-years-old and a 5-month-old infant, before committing suicide in a murder-suicide.


6
0
Milwaukee brewery shooting: Five people were killed when a gunman opened fire at the local Molson Coors Beverage Company campus, where he had been employed. Afterwards, the gunman committed suicide.


5
2
A shooter killed four people, including a police officer, and injured two others, including another police officer, before committing suicide at a gas station.


5
0
A man killed his wife and three children, aged 12, 10 and 6-years-old, and then himself in an apparent murder-suicide.


5
0
Five people were killed in a home, aged between 14 and 41, with a child being uninjured in the violence. Police are treating the incident as a matter of family violence.


5
0
A man shot and killed his wife and three children, aged between eight months and four years old, along with the family dog. He then killed himself.






Dead
Injured
Description


1
20
A 17-year-old boy was killed and 20 others injured, including an off-duty police officer, at a party in the southeastern section of the nation's capital.


1
17
Seventeen people were wounded and one killed after a shootout between multiple motorcycle clubs after a fight at one of the club's headquarters caused many to be thrown out.


2
15
Two people (including the perpetrator) were killed and fifteen others were injured during a shooting at a nightclub.


0
15
Fifteen people were injured, four critically, after a shooter opened fire at people leaving a funeral home in Chicago's Auburn Gresham neighborhood.


2
14
Rochester shooting - At least two people were killed and 14 others were injured in Rochester at a backyard party on Pennsylvania Avenue.


0
13
Thirteen people were injured in an early morning shooting at a riverfront gathering. An argument between two women led to a man firing two shots into the air. This led to multiple individuals opening fire on the crowd.


0
13
Hundreds of people had gathered for a memorial service when multiple shooters began firing wounding thirteen people.


2
12
A large group of people were watching fireworks, when a fight broke out after a car hit a pedestrian.


1
11
A group of people fired into a crowd, killing one and injuring 11 others.


0
10
Ten people were injured in a drive-by shooting during a family gathering in a park.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Is it any wonder that America's intel community's competence can be called into question by things like this:

https://uproxx.com/viral/richard-grenell-trump-official-thanks-war-criminal-veterans-day/


Should Grenell have recognized Calley’s name? Surely. He’s worked for the State Department and in various foreign policy capacities since 2001. It also appears that Klippenstein tried to trick ex-CIA director Michael Hayden (who worked under Obama and George W. Bush), who realized “exactly what was happening,” but “Grenell surely didn’t [...]

:no:

[Gilrandir]

I do not believe there are thousands of Nigerian Hitlers.

I do not believe there are a thousand French Stalins, nor a thousand Indians alike.



Believe it or not, some of them are even at power.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-55173605

[Montmorency]

Pearl Harbor 1941 attack story map. (https://nhhc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=90ad202de59d4a5bbf70738e5737c3be&fbclid=IwAR1Z7Td7uq8tfy90J8CFMax1WEmdUo83a66WRvm1F4Q2DxLbzO153Q1txoM)

https://i.imgur.com/kqFyidz.png

[Gilrandir]

An unusual twist.

https://www.euronews.com/2020/12/15/paris-fined-90-000-for-breaching-gender-parity-law-by-appointing-too-many-women-in-senior-

[Montmorency]

Let's memorialize our top mislaid (even if provisionally) judgements and predictions of the year.

1. Joe Biden would not win the Democratic primary.
The candidate who always polls with a high favorability, a high ceiling, and a high floor is a good structural bet.

2. The pandemic recession in the US would have a durable trough in macroeconomic terms.
Keynesianism is king, consumption recovers quickly from an external shock in our consumeristic society (debt is a problem for another day), and the economy at large is capable of tolerating increasing pain on the lower margins (non-generalized).

3. Covid19 would kill at least 1 million Americans and 50 million humans by the end of the year.
Humans and their governments overall (with many exceptions) aren't completely stupid about self-preservation, and massive global applied research, praxis, and investment can reap dramatic short-run rewards (hint hint).

4. The pop vote margin in the presidential race would be 10% and the Dems would win a Senate majority outright (with or without Georgia runoffs).
The shadow demographics I first pondered in 2016 do exist, they were concentrated among faux-Undecided voters this cycle, and turnout is only a slight advantage to Democrats in aggregate. I was wrong to emphasize from time to time that Trump hadn't gained support on net and thus couldn't increase his vote share over 2016, when I was aware - and even bruited - the consistent story starting in 2017 that Trump was comprehensively consolidating support among the mass of conservatives who disliked him in 2016. Even be it the case that this consolidation manifested more among 2016 nonvoters than 2016 third party voters.


Moreover, this has been an era of close elections, ever since Ronald Reagan's second term. 14/25 presidential elections in the 20th century were landslides, meaning the popular vote margin was ~10% or higher. In the 9 elections since 1988 (inc.), ZERO have been landslides. Joe Biden's win is actually the second-biggest since 1996 (non-inc). The closest to a landslide was Obama's 7-point margin in 2008, which was startlingly-low given Bush's Hoover-tier unpopularity and the simultaneous escalating global recession.

The last time there had been such a stretch of close elections in American politics (incidentally also featuring two EC victories by candidates who did not win a popular majority or plurality) was the late 19th-century, post-Reconstruction, where both parties were actually very similar in their consensus on white supremacy, settler-colonialism, and consolidation of business interests. That was also known as the Gilded Age. Ironically we are in a Second Gilded Age of catastrophic corporate supremacy, yet the major parties have never been more different - not even compared to 1860. Anyway, the point is that all of this was available at the beginning of the year to sedate observers.

So landslides are presumptively nonfeasible in contemporary American politics, and the polling always recapitulated that trend for this election. Biden's national polling always hovered between 48-52%, and that's where the result landed (51.3%). Same for the states, where in some cases (e.g. RCP on Florida) the aggregates prefigured Biden's vote share perfectly - and merely 'well' for the rest. So the polling didn't "fail," much of the audience just made the same mistake as in 2016 in not taking the data at face value and projecting desire onto it. Believe it or not, in liberal spaces it was often suggested that the polling this time underestimated support for Democrats! This despite the generic ballot being notably and persistently tighter than it had been in 2018, when the Democrats regained a solid majority in the House (the Democratic majority has been reduced to single digits this cycle).

Polisci modelers did fail, or at least they continued to subsist off a misleading form of engagement that provides minimal information of value; probabilistic models of the sort the 538s of the world specialize in are literally meaningless as applied to low-frequency events (this isn't sabermetrics). Continuing the hilarious parallelism of the EC results (306-232 in both 2016 and 2020), Nate Silver assigned roughly the same probability to Biden winning the same or lower EC vote that he asssigned to Trump winning the EC in 2016. Probabilities can't be "wrong" within the range of asymptotic distribution, except as statistically aggregated against themselves - which definitionally doesn't associate with single events.

In elections, the resounding TLDR is: When the polls don't align with your priors, reworking your priors is likely to be more productive than second-guessing the polls. They really do price in underlying variables.

[Crandar]

Aww, so sad (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/georgia-atlanta-couple-jailed-confederate-flag-racist-attack-child-birthday-a7603666.html).

[Montmorency]

I didn't know cruise missiles counted as sorties.

https://i.imgur.com/UUq1HQh.jpg

[ReluctantSamurai]

Sometimes, capitalism can be a good thing:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/27/bernie-sanders-meme-crochet-doll-


After an inauguration day image of the Vermont senator went viral (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/24/bernie-sanders-mittens-meme-sweatshirt-charity), showing him sitting on a folding chair, socially distanced from other guests, hunched against the cold wearing chunky knitted mittens, Tobey King in Texas got to crocheting. She turned the sensational meme that trended for days into a crochet doll.

King, 46, initially posted photos of the nine-inch doll on her Instagram account, and they garnered thousands of likes and comments. By Saturday, she posted the doll on eBay and auctioned it for $20,300, which she said will be donated to Meals on Wheels America.

[Montmorency]

Cool (https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2021/01/27/88901-nalog-na-velichie). (Adam Tooze did translation I believe)

https://i.imgur.com/wloiD0H.jpg


Biden went and :daisy: it all up. Unbelievable (https://www.airforcemag.com/space-force-to-adopt-specialist-other-new-ranks-feb-1/). Our military cannot recover from this.

https://i.imgur.com/DzbyaLe.jpg

[Hooahguy]

The fact that they didn't use Battle-Brother as a rank is a travesty. How else will we erase the heretics from the galaxy?

[Pannonian]

Did you know that American soldiers in WWI were extremely grateful to George Washington?

[ReluctantSamurai]

How do you like us now, Ted Cruz?

https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1296134869320380419

~D

[Hooahguy]

Texas is a great example of why no other state has their own energy grid.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

How do you like us now, Ted Cruz?

https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1296134869320380419

~D

At least Ted took his girls to Cancun. No "some animals" there...

[Montmorency]

How did this happen (https://defector.com/texas-energy-crisis-lying/)? How does an entire giant state run out of energy? How does a power grid fail so drastically? The answer is simple. Texas partitioned its own energy grid from the rest of the country so it could be free from regulation, and that independence comes with a cost. In a 2019 story for the Texas Observer, Amal Ahmed wrote that Texas’s energy grid, ERCOT, “has the lowest reserve margins, or extra supply, out of any grid system in the United States this summer. If customers had needed more electricity than predicted, there wouldn’t be much room for error, and ERCOT might have needed to initiate rolling blackouts to prevent a larger, more dangerous power outage.” The state was warned a decade ago that this might happen. And they did nothing. “The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union,” an expert told the Houston Chronicle. “It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances.” In other words, a lack of capable governing allowed an important and life-sustaining system to rust.

I'm old enough to remember that dead young Polandball Reddit/Youtube guy, brain4breakfast, his video on the geopolitics of Texas and California. One of the decisive factors enabling Texas to be relatively more successful than California in any prospective secession project was supposed to be its independent power grid. :brakelamp:

[Hooahguy]

At least Ted took his girls to Cancun. No "some animals" there...
I think I'm more upset that Ted is coming back than I am that he left.

[ReluctantSamurai]

At least Ted took his girls to Cancun.

And now he's throwing them under the bus:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/us/politics/ted-cruz-storm-cancun.html


Photos of Mr. Cruz and his wife, Heidi, boarding the flight ricocheted quickly across social media and left both his political allies and rivals aghast at a tropical trip as a disaster unfolded at home. The blowback only intensified after Mr. Cruz, a Republican, released a statement saying he had flown to Mexico “to be a good dad” and accompany his daughters and their friends; he noted he was flying back Thursday afternoon, though he did not disclose how long he had originally intended to stay.

“The plan had been to stay through the weekend with the family,” he said, framing the decision as a parent’s attempt to placate his two daughters, ages 10 and 12, after a “tough week.” “On the one hand, all of us who are parents have a responsibility to take care of our kids, take care of our families,” Mr. Cruz said. “But I also have a responsibility that I take very seriously of fighting for the state of Texas.” “As it became a bigger and bigger firestorm, it became all the more compelling that I needed to come back,” he added.

Jeezus this guy is a scumbag...:stupido:

[Hooahguy]

Also can we talk about his horrendous haircut (https://twitter.com/jimmykimmel/status/1362626427749736451?s=20)?

Mullets havent been cool in like what, 30 years?

[Montmorency]

Wish PVC were here to read this (https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/harry-and-meghan-the-union-of-two-great-houses-the-windsors-and-the-celebrities-is-complete-1.4504502):


The contemporary royals have no real power. They serve entirely to enshrine classism in the British nonconstitution. They live in high luxury and low autonomy, cosplaying as their ancestors, and are the subject of constant psychosocial projection from people mourning the loss of empire. They’re basically a Rorschach test that the tabloids hold up in order to gauge what level of hysterical batshittery their readers are capable of at any moment in time.

Harry and Meghan are ultimately going to win. Despite the tabloid frenzy, this was never the story of an ungrateful pauper being elevated by the monarchy. This was about the potential union of two great houses, the Windsors and Californian Celebrity. Only one of those things has a future, and it’s the one with the Netflix deal.

[ReluctantSamurai]

A Republican doing what Republicans are best at:

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/madison-cawthorn-punches-tree-video/

And a young woman who might take down Vladimir Putin one day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvvsKEkoVYY

I can hear Treebeard stumping through the woods, at this moment.....~D

And Katie Porter at it again:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/03/10/dont-patronize-me-katie-porter-tears-oil-exec-claiming-his-industry-doesnt-get

[Montmorency]

Apparently the country has broken its pandemic moratorium on mass shootings now (though to be precise, this was a spree shooting (https://apnews.com/article/georgia-massage-parlor-shooting-8-dead-9e39706c523c733a6d83d9baf4866154), differentiated from mass shootings by the killer's traveling to attack multiple targets).

On top of that, it was the worst incident of anti-Asian violence the country has witnessed since - a very long time.

Notably, all the victims were women, making it the most misogynistic act of mass violence since Eliot Rodger.

It also serves as a reminder of the lethal potential of pistols and of why the 9mm is a celebrated killing implement among criminal circles.


Speaking of cultural pathologies, here's an NYT profile (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/us/rocky-mount-capitol-riot-black-lives-matter.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes) of police officers who, made notable for their tolerance of the BLM protests in the summer, have gained notoriety for participating in the Capitol riot.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Apparently the country has broken its pandemic moratorium on mass shootings now (though to be precise, this was a spree shooting (https://apnews.com/article/georgia-massage-parlor-shooting-8-dead-9e39706c523c733a6d83d9baf4866154), differentiated from mass shootings by the killer's traveling to attack multiple targets).

On top of that, it was the worst incident of anti-Asian violence the country has witnessed since - a very long time.

Notably, all the victims were women, making it the most misogynistic act of mass violence since Eliot Rodger.

It also serves as a reminder of the lethal potential of pistols and of why the 9mm is a celebrated killing implement among criminal circles.


Speaking of cultural pathologies, here's an NYT profile (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/us/rocky-mount-capitol-riot-black-lives-matter.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes) of police officers who, made notable for their tolerance of the BLM protests in the summer, have gained notoriety for participating in the Capitol riot.

NPR reports that the shooter suggests the purpose was to "prevent temptation," so there is the possibility that despite the businesses being Asian-owned and the bulk of the victims of Asian descent, that this was not a racist crime. The local congress person being interviewed disagreed, asserting that it was part of the recent increase in attacks on those of Asian background.

[Hooahguy]

NPR reports that the shooter suggests the purpose was to "prevent temptation," so there is the possibility that despite the businesses being Asian-owned and the bulk of the victims of Asian descent, that this was not a racist crime. The local congress person being interviewed disagreed, asserting that it was part of the recent increase in attacks on those of Asian background.
I am actually from the general area where one of the shootings happened. There is a strip club literally across the street from one of the shootings, so his excuse is a bunch of baloney.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Speaking of cultural pathologies...

An interesting bit on the background of Capt. Baker:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/skbaer/spa-shooter-bad-day-racist-facebook


In a Facebook post from April 2020, Cherokee County Sheriff's Capt. Jay Baker shared an image of T-shirts based off the Corona beer label that said "Covid 19 IMPORTED VIRUS FROM CHY-NA."

"Love my shirt," Baker wrote. "Get yours while they last.'"

:shrug:

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I am actually from the general area where one of the shootings happened. There is a strip club literally across the street from one of the shootings, so his excuse is a bunch of baloney.

Gotcha. As most of my knowledge of the Atlanta area involves Airport Terminal hallways and gates, I defer to your knowledge.


That said, this is one of the things I dislike about "hate crimes" legislation. It is often impossible to really judge intent, but for me the actions themselves merit removal from society, regardless of prompt.

[Montmorency]

"Notably, all the victims were women, making it the most misogynistic act of mass violence since Eliot Rodger."

I was wrong about this, one of the 8 dead was a man and the one survivor was also a man.


Gotcha. As most of my knowledge of the Atlanta area involves Airport Terminal hallways and gates, I defer to your knowledge.

That said, this is one of the things I dislike about "hate crimes" legislation. It is often impossible to really judge intent, but for me the actions themselves merit removal from society, regardless of prompt.

What I dislike about the topic of racism is that whenever it gets implicated there are those who insist on making it the prominent philosophical axiom that intentionality is a mysterious black box in all dimensions.

One doesn't have to be familiar with the intricate debates within philosophy of mind to remember that in everyday affairs we readily accept that intentionality is straightforwardly and ubiquitously evaluated. Heck, an alien could learn as much of our praxis watching people drive from the backseat.

Now, from the standpoint of criminal law it is well known that adjudication of intent is pervasive to a fundamental extent (cf. mens rea); intent is half the law, really. But whether or not one agrees on the specific point that demographic animus should be considered an aggravating factor to crimes, it's also criminologically useful to record such things in the study of the origin and progression of criminal behavior. This goes for reasons that need little explanation, but as an example the policy response for legislatures or police agencies may differ if a series of arsons in an area are of commercial buildings, as opposed to places of worship.

Anyway, from Wiki:


Advocates and scholars have speculated the shootings may have a racial motive due to overlapping stigmas about race, gender, migrant work, and sex work.[27] Politico and People noted the ethnicity of six of the victims, who were women of Asian descent, amidst an increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, or have characterized it as a hate crime.[28][29] The Chosun Ilbo reported an eyewitness told local Atlanta Korean media that the shooter said that "I'm going to kill all Asians."[4][30] Multiple experts have said race cannot be ruled out as a motive given that Asian women have been fetishized in American society.[31][32][33] According to sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen, factors contributing to this intertwining of racism and sexism for Asian-American women include the Page Act of 1875, which effectively banned all immigration to the United States by Chinese women on the basis that they were immoral prostitutes; the widespread availability of sex work around American military bases in Asia; and the portrayal of Asian women as prostitutes in media such as Full Metal Jacket and Miss Saigon.[34]

Seems pretty obvious to me - as the saying goes, starve the (yellow) fever, feed the cold. Is anyone unaware that sexuality and race can intersect?

Speaking of which, it's still a bad thing to massacre women because you hate women regardless of whether you're also doing it because of race or national origin.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

good point about the criminological utility, regardless of animus. I do agree completely with that. Very much useful for investigation as well as for prevention (to the extend such is possible). Sadly, too many people invest too much of their sense of identity in not merely being different from the other but in considering themselves "better" than the other...and the next step of valuing them less and abusing those of perceived lower value is far too simple a step. Saddening.

[Papewaio]

Texas is a great example of why no other state has their own energy grid.

Texas was a great example of why Texas didn’t have its own energy grid.

[Montmorency]

So for some days I've been struggling to secure a vaccination appointment.

Primary care doctors basically don't have access to vaccine.

The city tracker site is full of lies and useless. Sometimes an appointment will flash into the interface around the edges of the city, but usually it will be taken within 5 seconds. For some reason the site does not allow one to view appointments beyond the current day, though I gather that it is meant to.

Calling the city hotline is not helpful because everything is always booked unless you're willing to make inoculation a full two-day excursion.

Pharmacies consistently report no availability through their websites. Attempting by phone gets you results like "there are no appointments within 25 miles of your zip code" or "...within 50 miles of your zip code."

Apparently nowhere schedules first doses beyond the next 3 days.

Frustrating as that has all been, there remained the tantalizing greenlight beacon of Walgreens pharmacy. The city tracker began claiming they had availability. I hadn't checked their availability through their website yet, because they require you to register a profile to use it; I had been calling multiple times a day as part of the multimodal pharmacy circuit, but the automated response always assured nonavailability of slots.

I finally decided to try starting an account because heck it.

...

Whaddaya know, Walgreens specifically has many hundreds of appointments available everywhere across the city and they schedule up to 5 days out, so I promptly scheduled one at a few minutes' walk from my home.

wat da facc




Trouble been cooking off in Northern Ireland this Easter week. The next Ethiopia?
https://twitter.com/trishdevlin/status/1379890239716614148 [VIDEO]


New footage shows moment loyalist rioters hijack bus in west Belfast.
One man can be heard shouting, ‘Tell the driver to drive it down... where’s the driver?’
Another shouts, ‘petrol bomb it’.
Rioter in driver seat releases brake before getting off. Bus seems to have free rolled.




We're doing Mafia (https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php/154424-Sign-ups-Rampage-Out-of-Space-%28Monty-Series-3%29) on the Org again if anyone is interested. Nothing too time-intensive.

[Montmorency]

Video of Iron Dome in action over Israel.
https://twitter.com/gaza_report/status/1392179722747097091


How is this :daisy: possible?

https://i.imgur.com/cCV4TcU.png
https://i.imgur.com/nbdRRbo.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/IBAcgvq.jpg

[Montmorency]

I can't get over what an unmitigated disaster the Iraq War was, and how the motivated, hostile, self-assurance in the probity of the Bush admin's claims (in explicit contradiction of all documented evidence) must confer a lifelong disgrace onto the proponents down to the grassroots - something that demands continuous penance and self-reflection.

[Montmorency]

A bracing history (http://bostonreview.net/politics/adam-przeworski-revolution-reformism) of the transition of European social democracy from its revolutionary roots and long-term programs into neoliberalism:


The two keywords of the socialist movements born in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century were “working class” and “social revolution,” where the latter was expected to realize the “ultimate goal” of abolishing the class system. Yet when socialist parties entered into electoral competition and, for the first time, gained parliamentary power in the aftermath of World War I, “ultimate goals” were not sufficient to mobilize electoral support or to govern. As political leaders, socialists had to offer a program of immediate improvements to the life conditions of the public. Moreover, socialists learned to dilute or obscure the language of class in order to win elections. While communists continued to adhere to “class contra class” strategy, socialists formed coalitions and fronts aimed at appealing to “the people.” Thus reformism was born: the strategy of proceeding toward socialism by steps, through electoral expression of popular support. The social democratic view of the world was one in which there was no choice between reform and revolution.

[...]

Following the success of the Swedish Social Democrats in the 1930s, and in the aftermath of World War II, the Keynesian welfare state institutionalized a compromise between organizations of workers and of capitalists across Western Europe. Gradually abandoning Marxism, social democrats accepted the tenet announced in the German Social Democratic Party’s Godesberg program of 1959: markets when possible, the state when necessary. Social democrats were to administer capitalist societies with the goals of liberty, employment, and equality. And they did accomplish much: they strengthened political democracy, introduced a series of improvements to work conditions, reduced income inequality, expanded access to education and health, and provided a foundation of material security for most people, while promoting investment and growth.

But because it left the property structure intact and allowed markets to allocate resources, the social democratic approach fuelled the causes of inequality at the same time that it aimed to mitigate them. This contradiction reached its limits in the 1970s. As many old ills were overcome, new ones emerged. Indeed, the list of problems to be resolved by socialist programs in the mid-1970s was not any shorter than it had been at the turn of the twentieth century.

The constraints of capitalist economy turned out to be inexorable, and political defeats meant that reforms could be reversed. In office in most Western European countries, social democratic governments desperately searched for responses that would preserve their commitment to “ultimate goals” in the face of the economic crisis. During the early 1970s, socialist parties developed new energy policies, workers’ management schemes, and structures of economic planning. But James Callaghan’s loss to Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom in 1979, and the departure of communists from François Mitterrand’s government in France in 1984, administered fatal blows. Mitterrand’s turn to austerity was the final act of resignation in the face of domestic and international constraints. All that was left were successive “third ways.”

The evolution of social democracy until the advent of neoliberalism has been extensively documented. The capitulation of the left to the neoliberal offensive is more puzzling. It is thus revealing to get a glimpse of how social democratic leaders saw the future when they got the first whiff of the impending crisis of their long-term project. Fortunately, they were articulate about their fears, their hopes, and their plans. Particularly telling is an exchange of letters among German Chancellor Willy Brandt, Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, and Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme on the eve of the first oil crisis of the 1970s.

The exchange included a series of letters and two in-person debates. It was initiated by Brandt on February 17, 1972 and ended with a conversation in Vienna on May 15, 1975. Brandt became chancellor of Germany in 1969, won reelection in 1972, and resigned in 1974. Kreisky became the Chancellor of Austria in 1970 and continued to serve until the summer of 1983. Palme came to office in Sweden in 1969, left after an electoral defeat in 1976, returned to office in 1982, and was assassinated in 1986. Hence, all the three were in office through most of the period of correspondence.

The exchange took place after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and during the onset of the first oil crisis of the 1970s. The economic situation was changing in dire ways. Between October 1973 and March 1974 oil prices increased by about 300 percent. Unemployment in OECD countries rose from an average 3.2 percent between 1960 and 1973 to 5.5 percent between 1974 and 1981; inflation rose during the same periods from 3.9 percent to 10.4 percent, and GDP growth rate fell from 4.9 percent to 2.4 percent.

Brandt initiates the exchange with a call to discuss the fundamental values of democratic socialism. Quoting the Godesberg Program, he declares that the goal of social democrats is to create a society “in which all men could freely develop their personality and cooperate in the political, economic, and cultural life of humanity as members of the community.” This transformative orientation is immediately echoed by Palme: “social democracy is more than a party charged to administer the society. Our task is much more to transform it.” Kreisky even more explicitly refers to the ultimate goal: “Socialists . . . want to eliminate classes and justly divide the product of work of the society.”

Echoing Jaurès, all three reject the choice between reform and revolution. For Brandt it is an artificial distinction “because no one can seriously deny that all reforms tending to increase our sphere of liberty do not also contribute to a transformation of the system.” Palme rejects the idea of a violent revolution as “elitist,” claims that reformism is based on the support of social movements, and sees reformism as nothing but a “process to improve the system.” Kreisky is less certain about the cumulative effect of reforms and more specific about the reforms that would have transformative effects, but he also believes that “there is always a moment in which the quantity [of reforms] becomes transformed into quality.”

All three also worry about the relation between long-term goals and current policies. Resolutely democratic, they condition the progress of reforms on popular support, and they welcome cooperation with other political forces. Yet whatever their commitment to long-term goals, they are leaders of political parties, with the responsibility to win elections. They are acutely aware that people will condition their support on bread-and-butter issues, not on goals far off in the horizon, so this is what preoccupies them. As Palme writes:


It is the problems of everyday life which occupy men most. . . . The relation between the ideas and the practical questions must be explained. . . . It is not sufficient to say: We need to modify the system. All efforts in this direction must be attached to solving human problems.

And problems there were: income inequality and capital concentration were intensifying, unemployment was rising, natural resources were limited, and the environment was increasingly under threat. “Sooner or later,” Kreisky notes, “we will face the problem of how far we can guide ourselves by our principles in practical politics.” He worries about the rise of multinational corporations, environmental limits to growth, and the depreciation of manual work. The letters are forward looking: the three discuss structural reforms that would advance their fundamental values.

On December 2, 1973, the three meet to discuss the consequences of the oil crisis. Brandt recognizes that it constitutes a decisive breakthrough for industrialized countries and will require serious efforts to cope with. Kreisky strikes the first alarm bell:


There is something that seems very important to me, namely, our lack of foresight in matters of social policy. There has been a particularly dangerous development. It was believed that crises like the one in the early 1930s could not be repeated. Yet we now see how from one day to the next political events came to weigh on our economic situation a threat of global proportions which, just a few months ago, would have been held to be impossible. . . . We suddenly see that we confront a situation the seriousness of which cannot be minimized.

Palme spells out the difficulty:


We told the people who were already enjoying a prosperous situation that things would be much better for their children and that we would be able to solve the outstanding problems. . . . [But the new situation] presents a much more difficult task to fulfill. Because from the moment there is no longer a constant surplus to be distributed, the question of distribution is appreciably more difficult to resolve.

Brand echoes these concerns, noting that it is essential to prevent inequality from increasing as growth resumes. Eighteen months later, during another in person meeting on May 25, 1975, Kreisky makes the fiscal constraint even more explicit: “It is precisely now that reforms should be made. It is just a question which. If we strongly develop social policies, we will not be able to finance them.”

As a result, they desperately search for a distinct social-democratic response. “Social Democracy,” Kreisky emphasizes, “must find its own response to the crisis of modern industrial society.” Brandt rejects the accusation that “we have become a party confined to tactical maneuvers. The program of 1959 does not separate us in any way from the grand objectives of the German and international workers’ movement.” They agree that some reforms—those in the realm of social policies—have become much more difficult, but they emphasize that reforms that extend democracy to the economic realm by introducing employee co-management, as well as new energy and environmental policies and increased state intervention in the economy, are not only still possible but necessary. While Palme reflects that “the time of simplistic belief in progress is irrevocably gone,” he searches for a new “third way” between “private capitalism” and “bureaucratic State capitalism of Stalinist variety,” offering a detailed eleven-point program of reforms. And Brandt admonishes that “the effort to reform the society must not cease.”

The reforms did not cease. After Brandt resigned in 1974, his successor Helmut Schmidt pursued stimulus policies, albeit paying increasing attention to fiscal constraints and reducing some public expenditures, until he was removed in 1982 by a vote of no confidence in favor of Helmut Kohl. Palme lost the election in 1976 but returned to office in 1982, restoring most cuts to social policies instituted by the interim government but emphasizing wage restraint and abandoning Keynesian policies. Kreisky won several elections and remained in office until 1983, continuing to expand social policies, particularly in education and health. Hence, while the shadow of fiscal and foreign exchange deficits tempered the reforms, the reformist zeal was not abandoned.

For fifty years social democrats had believed that equality promotes efficiency and growth. In the words of Swedish Social Democratic minister Bertil Ohlin, social expenditures “represent an investment in the most valuable productive instrument of all, the people itself.” Yet suddenly they adopted the neoliberal verbiage about “trade-offs”—between “equality and efficiency,” between “equality and growth.” The world became full of “dilemmas” and “trilemmas.” The sociologist Anthony Giddens invented as many as five dilemmas (none of them agreeing with the logical sense of the term). “The government can do only so much,” social democrats echoed the right. “Responsibility,” a key word in the Thatcherite lexicon, was shifted from the state to individual citizens. As Giddens preached, “One might suggest a prime motto for the new politics, no rights without responsibilities.” And in addition to this linguistic turn, social democrats ran out of ideas. In the grandiosely entitled chapter, “A New Capitalist Order,” from his 2010 book Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, the economist Joseph Stiglitz urged the same reforms of the postwar period: governments should maintain full employment and a stable economy, they should promote innovation, provide social protection and insurance, and prevent exploitation. So much for “new.”

Looking back, the trajectory from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth is stark. The Hague Congress of the First International in 1872 had proclaimed that the “organization of the proletariat into a political party is necessary to insure the victory of social revolution and its ultimate goal: the abolition of classes.” The first Swedish program specified that “Social Democracy differs from other parties in that it aspires to completely transform the economic organization of bourgeois society and bring about the social liberation of the working class.” Socialists were going to abolish exploitation, to eradicate the division of society into classes, to remove economic and political inequalities, to finish the wastefulness and anarchy of capitalist production, to eradicate all sources of injustice and prejudice. They were going to emancipate not only workers but humanity, to build a society based on cooperation, to rationally orient energies and resources toward satisfaction of human needs, to create social conditions for an unlimited development of personality.

These turned out not to be feasible goals. But the vision of transforming the society survived for nearly one hundred years, even when it was imperative to cope with immediate crises, even when some ideas—most prominently nationalization of the means of production—revealed themselves to be mistaken, and even when social democrats experienced political defeats. This is what faded at the end of the 1970s.

[...]

he title of the Brandt, Kreisky, and Palme exchange was Social Democracy and the Future. But this may have been the last time when social democrats struggled to maintain a transformative perspective while coping with an immediate crisis. Perhaps social democrats have transformed as much as they could have; perhaps they have succeeded in making some of their reforms irreversible. They have adapted to cultural changes, promoted gender equality, and became keenly aware of the impending environmental catastrophe. Nothing in this essay is intended to question their achievements. But any vision of a common future to which they would orient their societies faded under the onslaught of the immediate obstacles. What was no longer “ours” for the Andalusian secretary was a language that does not extend beyond a program for the next election, a language that does not guide the society toward long-term goals. And this is what we must regain.


What these eminent figures didn't realize at the time is that the post-war European economic model was premised on an industrial economy under conditions of European/American supremacy (cf. the referenced "constant surplus"). Through the 1970s to the present day these conditions have been upended irrevocably, and the ongoing failure to seek transnational solidarity is exactly what contributed to the decay of the social democratic state and philosophy as the working class changed shape and roles and the private sector grew more in scale than ever in history; it's a hydra against which no single country can go it alone, something I've vocally recognized since at least 2015 here.

The problems of today are too vast and intricate for left parties to address in an electoral timeframe and individually, even assuming promising parliamentary arrangements in any given government. Look at the tragedy of Syriza. Look at the Greens replacing the SPD as the primary center-left party in Germany for their turn at the bat.

https://i.imgur.com/WAmy8O9.png

What a distasteful graph.

To skip a few steps, the problem of solidarity and coordination is such that the American left is literally the only force that can bootstrap whatever this is (https://diem25.org/the-progressive-international-an-open-call-to-all-progressive-forces/). It's not jingoism if you accept it pessimistically.

[Montmorency]

Every American learns that Harry Truman exited the presidency into poverty in 1953.

Paul Campos has done some excellent original research showing that Truman was in fact one of the richest people in the country by that time, having benefited from extensive tax fraud and book deals, on top of the massive presidential salary and perks. He was, however, broke or nearly so during his Senate career prior to the POTUS...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/the-truman-show.html

[Montmorency]

^Holy crap, the author actually put together a 40-page historical paper (https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=578024126025115013104068025000105105030008032048049017077020079065089082018093098100 0050451181110460190960660850120070210640000010610580320461230820711270760841200550000761020100260980 88121114000031127087087092092118096066096006002074008005031086125&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE). Now that's scholarship.

Damn shame about Truman though. Not sure if it makes it better or worse if Truman didn't even apply the money towards his lifestyle (tracking down inheritance would be next-level scholarship for the 21st century).


Harry Truman was a very rich man, who lied about his considerable wealth in order to cajole
Congress into passing the Former Presidents Act. Contrary to the standard historical account,
that law has never had any reasonable justification – and least of all any justification based on
what turns out to be Truman’s fraudulent claims about his supposed financial difficulties.
Exposing that fraud provides a powerful historically-based argument for repealing a law that
should never have been enacted in the first place.


Relevant to the post on the mid-century left, I recalled this 1970s op-ed (https://www.nytimes.com/1977/10/09/archives/natural-gas-and-the-filibuster.html) by a Democratic senator from when I was researching the filibuster. I'm struck by the rhetoric the author uses, rhetoric that I believe would strike most of us as conceptually-rare for the past 30+ years. The former senator is still alive, by the way.


Filibuster is an extended debate, generally in the United States Senate, which, because of its rules, allows unlimited debate for those who can count votes well enough to know that their side will lose should a vote be taken on an issue. Historically, filibusters have been the exclusive province of Southerners who have sought to prevent or to weaken civil rights legislation and, more recently, improvements hi antitrust laws.

Why then would a northern Senator, supposedly in his party's majority, filibuster to prevent a vote on the deregulation of natural gas? This must be answered in light of the criticism lodged against use of the filibuster. When debate on the gas bill began, Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum, Democrat of Ohio, and I were told that even if the Senate did vote for deregulation, the House conference committee would stand firm against it—and, if it didn't, the President would veto the bill.

Bу stacking those arguments the gesture might, on the surface, appear to be Quixotic. The commitment to undertake a filibuster must be one of major proportions. In addition to the physical punishment, it is a severe emotional drain because it is designed to exhaust the other side in order to weaken its commitment to an all‐out position. But exhaustion Is not limited to the other side. Even one's own supporters become impatient at the imposition on their time, and at the chaos rained upon orderly procedures necessary to the Senate's normal operation.

In the natural‐gas filibuster, the leadership, both Democratic and Republican, made every effort to direct our peers’ anger against us. The issue itself was submerged in what eventually became a battle over Senate rules, traditions and personalities. One must wonder then what is at stake in legislation dealing with natural‐gas pricing that requires a resort to such methods?

Continue reading the main story
Five years ago, the Federal Power Commission, which regulates the sale of gas sold across state lines, had set a ceiling price for gas at the wellhead of 26 cents per 1,000 cubic feet.

In its most recent pricing decision, the F.P.C. raised the ceiling to $1.40 per 1,000 cubic feet a staggering 500 percent increase. Yet during that period of rapid escalation in price, both production of natural gas and the amount of proved reserves actually decreased. Although industry arguments have always hammered at the concept that higher prices would produce more gas for the United States, behind the propaganda the claims were utterly false.

An early effort to deregulate natural‐gas prices was stopped cold when the gas industry attempted to bribe a South Dakota Senator, Francis Case, in 1956. The bribe, and its attendant publicity, hampered further efforts until 1973, when the Senate defeated, 45 to 43, an amendment by James L. Buckley, then Republican of New York, that would have lifted the lid on gas prices.

Encouraged by promises from an F.P.C. appointed by President Nixon that deregulation was just around the corner, the industry made withholding of natural‐gas reserves a basic part of its strategy in order to create artificial shortages and to save its reserves for the day deregulation would come.

Taking advantage of the air of crisis that surrounds the energy problem, Senators Lloyd Bentsen, Democrat of Texas, and James B. Pearson, Republican of Kansas, offered another deregulation amendment in 1975. The first Pearson‐Bentsen bill passed the Senate, 50 to 41. The House refused to go along with total deregulation, but by then the industry had established its running game. This year, Senate passage of the bill was aided by fears from last winter's gas shortages, which, incidentally, were created by an unusually severe cold wave and inadequate gas‐transmission facilities.

Natural gas is used to heat 60 percent of the homes in the United States. It is used almost exclusively to bake bread, as an ingredient for agricultural fertilizers, in oil refineries and throughout industry as a boiler fuel.

Deregulation—total removal of price ceilings—will have a direct cost to natural‐gas users of $160 billion by 1990, over and above even the Carter plan. What cannot be measured is the enormous cost to the economy of what ripples outward in the form of higher prices for food, for synthetics and industrial goods.

In my state, South Dakota, pensioners who receive only a couple of hundred dollars a month from the Social Security Administration would have difficulty buying food or paying rent after gas companies had exacted their tribute.

Deregulation would deal a more serious blow to our economy than did the drastic oil‐price increases in 1973 and 1974. I seriously question whether we could recover from such a blow in the near future.

If such a staggering price Increase could be shown to be of commensurate benefit to the public, perhaps the point could be reasonably debated. But as a Congressional Budget Office study has shown, total deregulation would increase our natural‐gas production by no more than 5 percent.

Once the price of natural gas rises high enough, production of synthetic gas from coal becomes economically feasible. As firms with finite resources, oil and gas companies have a gigantic stake in extending their grip on energy resources to include synthetic fuels made from coal. Already, the Senate Finance Committee, under the chairmanship of Senator Russell B. Long, Democrat of Louisiana, is considering resurrecting the Rockefeller plan to establish a multibillion dollar Government fund that would allow the industry to “develop” synthetic fuels, among other things.

The price is too high for the public to pay.

Thus, even though the oil and gas interests have succeeded in convincing a slim majority of the Senate to legalize this plunder of the public's purse, I can see no valid reason to roll over and play dead for an industry that operates solely on the basis of greed.

Continue reading the main story
Reliance on a small Congressional committee or on a Presidential veto is much too risky considering the amounts involved, especially since the oil and gas people are now talking about forcing on the conference committee a majority that supports deregulation.

Although President Carter has announced this year that he would veto a deregulation bill, last year he promised to support the industry's efforts to deregulate.

In light of all of this, Senator Metzenbaum and I agreed between ourselves to undergo what was necessary to delay a final vote on deregulation as long as we were able. It seemed to us that the discomfort to both our colleagues and ourselves was outweighed by the danger deregulation poses to the economy. Although the Carter Administration, which at first claimed to support our position, eventually teamed up with the Senate leadership to break the back of the filibuster, part of our goal has been accomplished. Without the extensive press coverage that came in response to the filibuster, the Senate would have quietly approved deregulation with no one the wiser until after the economic damage had been done.

While those on our side were accused of abusing the rules, the Administration and the leadership succeeded in actually brutalizing Senate procedures to bring about a final vote.

The puzzle went beyond the display of raw power exercised by Vice President Mondale and the majority leader, Robert C. Byrd of Virginia. It included a startling reversal of position by the Administration on the issue—a shock to nearly everyone involved. But that in itself may have accomplished something the gas and the oil industry had not anticipated: the stark realization by many Senate members of the injustice of both the industry's position on deregulation and of the tactics used to achieve it.

Defeating deregulation by filibuster was the end strategy, with the hope that public exposure of the issue would work to that end. We lost, 46 to 50, because during the 13‐day debate not enough votes were switched to change the final outcome. But another unintended result has, I think, been realized: Senate liberals, who have been beaten down, and who have felt a sense of defeat in past years because of the growing conservative trend in the Senate, came to life during the often bitter debate. One can now de tect an uplifting of those whose spirits incline toward protection of а vulnerable and unorganized public.

The battleground in 1977 and for the years to come will be centered on the basic issue of who actually runs the economy and in whose interest. Most Americans accept the characterizations of the energy proЫ em that is brought to them by the oil industry. They may not accept the industry's conclusions, but they consider the issue too complicated to impose their own ideas.

Continue reading the main story
At the same time, the industry uses other methods to create the same acquiescence in Congress. During consideration of the natural‐gas bill, oil lobbyists openly boasted to the press of their computerized bill‐analysis services and other “capabilities” available outside the Senate chamber.

The incessant repetition of the theme that American life as we know it will end unless more and more money is funneled into the oil companies has paralyzed serious debate about real policy alternatives.

The natural‐gas‐pricing issue was the scene of the first battle in a fight that will determine whether our national energy policy is to be established by 20 oil companies in the sole interest of profit, or by 200 million American people in the interest of the nation as a whole.

[Crandar]

What a scumbag (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58077255).

[Hooahguy]

He really should resign. If not, he should be impeached.

[Montmorency]

https://i.imgur.com/DDq0OtB.png
https://i.imgur.com/EYKHKo8.png

[Seamus Fermanagh]

It is impossible that he is unaware of the "harassing environment" component of virtually every sexual harassment policy in use. His denial about "inappropriate touching" can be completely correct and that still does not obviate his responsibility in allowing/inculcating such an environment.

Perhaps he was taking the same New York Bar Association Continuing Education classes in ethics as former mayor Giuliani?

[Montmorency]

It appears Amazon has over 200 million Prime subscribers, and has built a massive transportation fleet that now independently delivers almost all Amazon packages, to the point that Amazon has begun poaching non-Amazon parcels (presumably the highest-margin routes and types) from Fedex, UPS, and USPS.

Seems like a worrisome degree of industrial integration... wait'll China duplicates the model toward a cybernetic command economy.

[Hooahguy]

a massive transportation fleet that now independently delivers almost all Amazon packages, to the point that Amazon has begun poaching non-Amazon parcels (presumably the highest-margin routes and types) from Fedex, UPS, and USPS.

Have they? It seems like 99% of my packages are still through USPS and UPS.

[Montmorency]

Have they? It seems like 99% of my packages are still through USPS and UPS.

Amazon has enough excess capacity to offer Multi-Channel Fulfillment and third-party transport. For example (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/amazons-airplanes-move-cargo-for-u-s-postal-service), and the likes of Ebay or Walmart deliveries being packaged in Amazon facilities or delivered through Amazon carriers is well-known.

[Montmorency]

Some reflection (https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2021/09/the-conqueror-of-karabakh-bayraktar-tb2.html#comment-form) on the Armenian-Azeri 2020 war and how Turkish-sourced UCAV utterly dominated the battlespace.
Crandar You still simpin'?

Whether or not major militaries would find it easy to hunt down offensive UCAV in combined arms warfare, the lesson is obvious: If you're a smaller or poorer country with a crappy military, spam dronz; macro that shit.

I wonder when we'll get the first terrorist attack using autonomous loitering mini-munitions.


The site also compiled (https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2020/09/the-fight-for-nagorno-karabakh.html), or purports to, every single confirmable loss of major military equipment/platforms among the belligerents, with photographic signatures. What a data overload.

The tabulation isn't far off from Wiki figures. Ever since I became aware of contemporary warfare I was impressed by its lethality toward armor. Pre-Cold War armored warfare was somewhat comparable to pre-20th century warfare in general, in that the tank/infantryman was as likely to be neutralized by breakdown/disease than by enemy action. In contemporary context, these figures instead demonstrate the continuing advantage of sweeping offensives in dynamic warfare. If the figures below are accurate or understated then Armenia must have lost nearly its entire operational tank element in the war! Moreover, the amount of equipment captured by the Azeris (see link for disaggregation) must, unless repatriated under the peace, be enough to furnish reserves for much of the Azeri armed forces.


ARMENIA
Tanks: ~250 (100! captured; most destroyed were by drone)
AFV/IFV: 160 (mostly captured)
Artillery (Towed): ~240
Artillery (Mortar): 60 (mostly captured)
Artillery (SPG/MRL): 110
ATGM: 140 (almost all captured)
SAM: 36
Aircraft: 2
UCAV: 6
Trucks: ~700 (half captured)

AZERBAIJAN
Tanks: ~60
AFV/IFV: 90
Artillery: 1 mortar, 2 MRL
Aircraft: 13
UCAV: 26 (mostly loitering)
Trucks: ~60


Surely more aircraft though? Too hard to confirm?

While the Azeri/Turkish TB2 Bayraktar drone racked up an impressive tally against Armenian tanks, the full list suggests, plausibly, it was even more dangerous to artillery and transport vehicles.

spmetla While I said earlier that I don't expect Turkey to wage war against Greece anytime soon, I just realized that Erdogan must entertain plans to annex Cyprus without great delay, mustn't he? No one would be able to stop him in the attempt - certainly not the Cypriot military - and if Greece tried to intervene, it would just fail embarrassingly without hope of a mandatory Article 5 trigger. Would be hilarious if the event rngages Chinese mobilization against Taiwan - how's that for Domino Theory (of Frozen Conflicts)?
https://jamestown.org/program/the-cyprus-dimension-to-the-azerbaijani-turkish-alliance/

[spmetla]

Yeah, the Azeri-Armenian war is incredibly interesting to study. I'm really lamenting being National Guard as I'd love to see the classified reports and conclusions on the fighting.

The biggest point of victory on the Azeri side though was their successful use of all assets together in good combined armed warfare. UCAV destroyed enemy equipment, vehicles, and platforms as well as providing accurate and timely intelligence allowing for effective use of artillery coordinated with infantry/armor assaults on defensive positions.

From the outside though UAVs definitely give countries an ability to have a cheap airforce, the Azeri victory was crushing against the Armenians which essentially stuck with the same outdated equipment and tactics that worked so well for them in the '90s. This is one of the reasons the US is rapidly reversing its stance on air defense systems. Air Defense Artillery (ADA) battalions are once again being stood after their rapid decline post-gulf war. This together with the ADA assets used to defend FOBs from mortars and rockets mean the US can have a decent defense against UCAV in the future.

Major militaries will be far less vulnerable to UCAV so long as they actually invest and deploy the air defense systems together with whatever electronic warfare can take advantage of the requirement for GPS navigation and communication with operators. This vulnerability is exactly why investment in AI is so prolific among all major militaries as any 'drones' that can fight and kill without the umbilical cord to home base will be a huge advantage and can greatly offset shedding of blood with massive shedding of hardware.

Like I always say, Turkey is the wild-card of NATO. They're in a dangerous neighborhood but they like to play equally dangerous games too. Russia is a potent threat that mostly needs to be contained. They're only a threat to NATO if they think NATO or the US won't act to defend each other or the 'partners' with NATO like Sweden, Finland, or the Ukraine.
Turkey on the other hand has no shortage of beef with all of its neighbors including the NATO ones and is very prickly when criticized on the Armenian genocide or its actions against the Kurds domestically and abroad. The recent Erdogan course of opposing Israel also puts it at odds with the US policies there too.
For historical laughs about NATO issues with Turkey and Cyprus:
NATO Is Viewed as Weakened by the War on Cyprus
Aug. 13, 1974

The Greeks wonder if Washington can put leverage on Ankara to make concessions in this conference to Greek interests on Cyprus. The Turks appear to think this is the time to press for an old goal—the formal partition of the island between the Turkish Cypriote community of 140,000 and the Greek Cypriote community of 500,000.
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/08/13/archives/nato-is-viewed-as-weakened-by-the-war-on-cyprus.html

There's also the historical and current issue of Turkey holding US nuclear weapons hostage whenever we put too much pressure on them:
Members of Congress Worried in 1960 That Leaders of a Coup “Might Seize Control” of Weapons
Other U.S. Officials Feared Risks of Accidental War or Overreaction to Local Crises
During Mid-1960s Turkish Officials Were Interested in Producing an “Atomic Bomb”
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2019-10-30/nuclear-weapons-turkey-1959

I do miss Lefteyenine's input on Turkish issues. My viewpoints of course are very biased.

[Crandar]

Well, I am sure drones are lethal, destructive and all that, but most of our vehicles malfunction and fall on their own anyway, so the joke is on them. A bit difficult to bomb helicopters in the bottom of the sea (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSv-rvGrkgU)* or dividable minesweepers (https://marineindustrynews.co.uk/merchant-ship-cuts-minesweeper-kallisto-in-two/).

On a more serious note, the likelihood for a war between Turkey and Greece is a bit less than zero. There wasn't even a war, when we overthrew the government of a sovereign nation and started massacring minorities, with the Turks responding in kind. Journalists, officers and populists have been saying how gravely the tensions between the two countries have been escalating the last 47 years, but, despite their hype, the long-promised war does not happen. That doesn't mean of course that we will not spend a few billions (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/28/greece-to-buy-french-warships-in-multi-billion-euro-defence-deal) buying frigates, which are more threatened by Aegean's shallow waters (https://www.navaltoday.com/2019/10/04/greek-frigate-runs-aground-during-major-exercise/) than Hayreddin Barbarossa's successors.

*Extra cookie for whoever guess why the Apache helicopter was doing these unnecessary exercises so close to the sea's surface. The reason demonstrates the most essential principles of the officer corps' mentality.

[Montmorency]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfFx5UvzSxc

[Montmorency]

An anti-fascist (https://hillreporter.com/florida-anarchist-gets-nearly-4-years-in-prison-115638) activist in Florida was sentenced to 44 months in federal prison for his social media posts that called for armed defense against possible far-right attacks on the state’s Capitol in the wake of the January 6th riots.

Daniel Baker, a 34-year-old yoga teacher and emergency medical technician trainee, had no previous criminal convictions and has already been held for 10 months of harsh pretrial detention, including seven months in solitary confinement. He never brought a weapon near a government building; he amassed no armed anti-fascist forces; he made no threats on a single individual.

Hmmm... almost makes me want to fuck around.

[Crandar]

Xiomara Castro (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/29/xiomara-castro-declares-victory-in-honduras-presidential-election) won the 2021 Honduran presidential elections. She's the wife of Manuel Zelaya, the Honduran president that had been overthrown in 2009, as a result of a military putsch. It's interesting to note that the US had officially condemned the coup, but leaked emails showed that the administration, under Hillary Clinton (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-honduras-coup-memoirs_n_56e34161e4b0b25c91820a08), cooperated (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/09/24/hillary-clinton-emails-and-honduras-coup) with the culprits and even attempted to suppress any serious reaction to it.

[Montmorency]

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.


Just a fantastic little (Anglo) anti-enclosure poem, prefiguring the the emergence of class populism. Pairs well with this tune (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHVo0hJhnK4)...

[spmetla]

yoink

[Montmorency]

ngl I should have noticed earlier but this stuff gives more than an odor of "astrology for men."

[spmetla]

Yeah, perhaps I should put this in the frontroom instead, certainly not discussion worthy, just a bit of fun.

[Montmorency]

PERSISTENCE THROUGH REVOLUTIONS (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27053/revisions/w27053.rev2.pdf?luicode=10000011&lfid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D10%26q%3D%23nber%23&featurecode=newtitle%E5%8E%9F%E4%BD%9C&u=https%3A//www.nber.org/papers/w27053)

Can efforts to eradicate inequality in wealth and education eliminate intergenerational persistence
of socioeconomic status? The Chinese Communist Revolution in the 1950s and Cultural
Revolution from 1966 to 1976 aimed to do exactly that. Using newly digitized archival records
and contemporary census and household survey data, we show that the revolutions were effective
in homogenizing the population economically in the short run. However, the pattern of inequality
that characterized the pre-revolution generation re-emerges today. Almost half a century after the
revolutions, individuals whose grandparents belonged to the pre-revolution elite earn 16 percent
more and have completed more than 11 percent additional years of schooling than those from
non-elite households. In addition, individuals with pre-revolution elite grandparents hold different
values: they are less averse to inequality, more individualistic, more pro-market, and more likely
to see hard work as critical to success. Through intergenerational transmission of values,
socioeconomic conditions thus survived one of the most aggressive attempts to eliminate
differences in the population and to foster mobility.


Sure seems (again) like social mobility is a scam and the answer remains to generate, capture, and broadly redistribute wealth.

https://i.imgur.com/xX2PKLq.png

[Montmorency]

An important research topic. For example (https://www.vox.com/2016/5/18/11691818/barone-mocetti-florence):


Conventional studies of economic mobility generally look at the change across one generation — typically comparing the incomes of fathers and their sons. These studies show that mobility varies significantly from country to country, with a relatively low 0.2 percent elasticity of income in the Nordic countries and a relatively high 0.5 percent elasticity of income in places like the UK, the US, and Italy. An elasticity of 1 would mean that income status is perfectly inherited between father and son, whereas an elasticity of 0 would mean no inheritance.

The important thing is that even a relatively high elasticity implies a great deal of mobility in the long run. An elasticity of 0.5 in one generation implies 0.25 in two generations and 0.125 in three generations. As Gary Becker and Nigel Tomes concluded back in 1986, "Almost all the earnings advantages or disadvantages of ancestors are wiped out in three generations."

But


Barone and Mocetti show that, empirically, this is not the case, and there is meaningful income persistence across seven centuries in Florence. Their paper adds to earlier work by UC Davis economic historian Gregory Clark, which reached a similar conclusion with regard to Sweden going back to the 17th century. The implication is that there's much less economic mobility over the long run than short-term figures would lead you to believe — even in the countries where short-term mobility is very high.

The table below shows some of their most striking findings. They looked at 2011 income data to identity the five highest-earning surnames in present-day Florence. They then looked back at 1427 data to find information about the earnings and occupations with those same five surnames 700 years ago... They show here that the four highest-earning surnames of 2011 were all above-average surnames back in 1427. Indeed, three of the four were in the top 10 percent. This is much greater intergenerational income persistence than could possibly be accounted for by even Italy's relatively high 0.5 percent elasticity. It's also remarkable considering the massive political and social upheavals that have occurred in the city during this time — including several episodes of foreign conquest and domestic revolution.

Although I wonder how autochthonous these surname-members could be after 600 years, or how concentrated or diffuse these surnames were in Florence/Italy 600 back then. The roots in skilled trades and guilds are telling though.


One might, of course, see this as merely a curious fact about Florence. But Gregory Clark conducted a similar study of Sweden and had a broadly similar finding. He did not have access to historical income data, so instead he exploited the fact that when surnames were introduced in 17th-century Sweden they had strong class implications. A defined group of noble families had surnames based on the names of their noble houses. A larger group of middle-class craftspeople adopted a name based on their profession. Peasants usually adopted a name based on the first name of their father — a name like Andersson for a guy whose dad was named Anders.

What he showed was that hundreds of years later in 2008, people with surnames indicating great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents who were members of the nobility were drastically more likely to be in the Swedish financial elite than people with the surname Andersson.

On the one hand, this is less surprising than the Florentine case, since Sweden has had less political upheaval than Italy and the 17th century is much more recent than the 15th. On the other hand, it's more surprising, since Sweden has had much more explicit income redistribution than Italy and has a much greater level of measured economic mobility.

The most plausible explanation of this data is that simply projecting one generation of mobility out across three or four or 30 generations is misleading. Income and occupational social status are linked, but only imperfectly so.

It's not unusual for the child of an economically successful professional to attend an elite educational institution and then move into an artistic or academic or nonprofit career or political career that might still involve traveling in elite circles but at a much lower salary level than his father's. If the professional's grandson then also attended an elite college and moved into a high-paying career in business and law, statistics would show a great deal of economic mobility while common sense would indicate three generations' worth of a high-status family.

Shared family access to real estate assets, social connections, a common gene pool, and elite educational institutions could allow for a great deal of long-term entrenchment even as a close-up view appeared to show instability as people shift in and out of different fields.

The truth, however, is that we don't really know what's going on. Short-term mobility is much easier to study than long-term mobility, since the records are much more precise and complete. The important thing to know is that as best as we can tell, short-term mobility does not translate into long-term mobility — even in countries like Sweden where short-term mobility is very high.

So on the one hand, Becker's reassurance that we don't need to worry about inequality because long-term mobility is high seems wrong. On the other hand, the notion that Sweden-style policies are good because they promote long-term mobility also seems wrong. Perhaps mobility itself is an inherently misguided social goal.

We know through the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries there was just enormous attrition among aristocrats, losing titles or fortunes; after all these folks tended not to have the steadiest sources of income after feudalism, and were often bad or uninterested at adapting to the new capitalist economy. It's unsurprising if surviving or continuous nobility are still larded, but what about those whose lineages sank into obscurity centuries ago? I can't identify any such work done on aristocratic genealogies, which might involve the arduous process of tracking, approaching, and collating the records of individual families.

Social networks have incredible resilience, which is why the likes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot sought to wipe them out. Nepotism is the highest form of human capital unfortunately.

[Montmorency]

Most contentious excerpt from Orban's most recent "Nazi" speech (https://miniszterelnok.hu/speech-by-prime-minister-viktor-orban-at-the-31st-balvanyos-summer-free-university-and-student-camp/) (though AFAICT he's said much the same for years):


The second challenge is migration, which you could call population replacement or inundation. There is an outstanding 1973 book on this issue which was written in French, and recently published in Hungary. It is called “The Camp of the Saints” [Le Camp des Saints], and I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the spiritual developments underlying the West’s inability to defend itself. Migration has split Europe in two – or I could say that it has split the West in two. One half is a world where European and non-European peoples live together. These countries are no longer nations: they are nothing more than a conglomeration of peoples. I could also say that it is no longer the Western world, but the post-Western world. And around 2050, the laws of mathematics will lead to the final demographic shift: cities in this part of the continent – or that part – will see the proportion of residents of non-European origin rising to over 50 per cent of the total. And here we are in Central Europe – in the other half of Europe, or of the West. If it were not somewhat confusing, I could say that the West – let’s say the West in its spiritual sense – has moved to Central Europe: the West is here, and what is left over there is merely the post-West. A battle is in progress between the two halves of Europe. We made an offer to the post-Westerners which was based on tolerance or leaving one another in peace, allowing each to decide for themselves whom they want to live alongside; but they reject this and are continuing to fight against Central Europe, with the goal of making us like them. I shall leave to one side the moral commentary they attach to this – after all, this is such a lovely morning. There is now less talk about migration, but, believe me, nothing has changed: Brussels, reinforced with Soros-affiliated troops, simply wants to force migrants on us. They have also taken us to court over the Hungarian border defence system, and they have delivered a verdict against us. For a number of reasons not much can be said about this now, but we have been pronounced guilty. If it were not for the Ukrainian refugee crisis they would have started to enforce this judgment on us, and how that situation plays out will be accompanied by a great deal of suspense. But now war has broken out and we are receiving arrivals from Ukraine, and so this issue has been put aside – they have not taken it off the agenda, but just put it to one side. It is important that we understand them. It is important that we understand that these good people over there in the West, in the post-West, cannot bear to wake up every morning and find that their days – and indeed their whole lives – are poisoned by the thought that all is lost. So we do not want to confront them with this day and night. All we ask is that they do not try to impose on us a fate which we do not see as simply a fate for a nation, but as its nemesis. This is all we ask, and no more.

In such a multi-ethnic context, there is an ideological feint here that is worth talking about and focusing on. The internationalist left employs a feint, an ideological ruse: the claim – their claim – that Europe by its very nature is populated by peoples of mixed race. This is a historical and semantic sleight of hand, because it conflates two different things. There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe. Now that is a mixed-race world. And there is our world, where people from within Europe mix with one another, move around, work, and relocate. So, for example, in the Carpathian Basin we are not mixed-race: we are simply a mixture of peoples living in our own European homeland. And, given a favourable alignment of stars and a following wind, these peoples merge together in a kind of Hungaro-Pannonian sauce, creating their own new European culture. This is why we have always fought: we are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race

Big words for an Ugrian interloper.

[Montmorency]

The statement that 'China has to keep applying capital punishment in thousands of cases as a deterrence against committing capital crimes' sounds like an obvious self-refutation to me, but there are a lot of people out there who like the idea of governments killing people (yet denounce any government intervention in the economy as "authoritarianism"). :shrug:

[Montmorency]

Worthwhile thread (https://twitter.com/katherinemzhou/status/1582963344314880001), and it bears pointing out that I don't think the second person photographed is even "ethnically" Swedish. It just goes to show how these ideologies filter out.

[Montmorency]

Huuuuuuh (https://www.tankarchives.ca/2014/02/gun-production.html)?

The gist being that Soviet WW2 production figures for tank guns show how the typical production numbers attributed to Soviet tanks models cannot represent unique vehicles.


"But wait", some keen-eyed readers may exclaim, "these numbers are all wrong! Only 34355 F-34s? Less than 20,000 85 mm guns? Wikipedia tells me that there were over 35,000 T-34s and nearly 50,000 T-34-85s, not to mention all other vehicles that used these guns!"

Did they go into battle with no gun, in some kind of bizarre Enemy at the Gates type arrangement? Of course not. Every vehicle had a gun, with ample spares. The discrepancy comes from the definition of "produced". A vehicle that came out of the factory counts as produced regardless of how it came in: as raw materials or as a heavily damaged tank. Where a German bureaucrat would keep track of a single tank regardless of how many times it was knocked out and sent back to the factory, without counting it as a loss until it could no longer be repaired, a Soviet one would count it as a loss if it could not participate in battle, and the factory would count the tank as produced once more. A tank could last throughout the entire war, and if it required major repairs (even due to noncombat damage like engine wear), it would count as multiple casualties and multiple tanks.

As far as I know none of the famous living East Front scholars have written their books with this awareness?

26066

[Montmorency]

I finally cracked an unexpectedly-historic can of condensed milk (https://investory.news/investgid/kupyanskij-molochnokonservnij-kombinat/#:~:text=%E2%80%9C%D0%9A%D1%83%D0%BF'%D1%8F%D0%BD%D1%81%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9%20%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BB %D0%BE%D1%87%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9%20%D0%BA%D0%BE% D0%BC%D0%B1%D1%96%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%82%E2%80%9D,%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BA%20%D0%B7%D0%B3%D1%83%D1% 89%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE%20%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%B0%20%D0%BD%D0%B0%20%D1%80%D1%9 6%D0%BA.) to make a cake this morning.

https://i.imgur.com/7BHIq7B.jpg


"Kupyansky Milk Canning Plant" is one of the oldest enterprises for the production of condensed milk on the territory of Ukraine. The plant was put into operation in 1957, according to the project, up to 20 million cans of condensed milk could be produced there per year. Despite the fact that the range of the enterprise was constantly expanding, the main type of products remained the condensed milk, made according to the classical technology. By the beginning of the 90s, the plant had undergone several large-scale reconstructions and privatization.

I presume my can was produced on July 27 2021. Hearsay (https://2day.kh.ua/ua/politika/kharkivska-sluha-narodu-khoche-pozbutysya-shche-odnoho-deputata-zradnyka) is that the factory supplied Russia during the occupation. Bets on it surviving another round of Kupyansk's contestation?
Gilrandir

[Montmorency]

Interesting points about the Greek election a week ago:

1. Syriza passed PR rules in 2016 that were reversed in 2020 by the current ruling center-right party New Democracy, but because of the Greek constitution's supermajority requirements on electoral reform, the 2016 PR system took effect for the first time only in the just-past election.

2. Because of Greece's tough preexisting bonus seat version of PR, 16% of votes were wasted and only 5 parties made it into parliament.

3. Because the ruling party narrowly lost its majority in the election, and the only other parties making it to Parliament are the traditional center-left PASOK, the new center-left Syriza, the Communists, and the upgraded Golden Dawn neofascists in the form of Greek Solution, a coalition cannot be formed and new elections must be held in a month. These will be held under the 2020 reversion of the PR system, under which New Democracy is guaranteed to regain a majority given current vote shares.

Structure is a powerful thing. But at least the fash won't be in government.

[Shaka_Khan]

I'm starting to see a lot of YouTube channels talk about the financial struggles of large companies such as Disney and Netflix, which the mainstream media is ignoring.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph0Nge6KXvM


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLItgKi9JwU


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTIAyKevFMU

[Shaka_Khan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kbHbGFr1q4

[Montmorency]

How the hell did I not know that the Soviet Union

had a childlessness tax?!