‘We were just dodging bullets’ Mobilized men from Novosibirsk refused to fight after they were sent to the front with no training
9:56 am, November 16, 2022Source: NGS
Since the beginning of mobilization, Russian conscripts have often reported being sent to the frontline without adequate preparation, training, equipment, or even food and essential medications. There are also cases of soldiers being coerced to return to the frontline, in spite of their objections. Here is another story, of 12 men from Novosibirsk who tried to persuade their command to let them out of the frontline combat units.
30-year-old Aleksey (his name has been changed) from Novosibirsk served in the army around 10 years ago. He was mobilized on September 26, 2022, and a month later he was put in a train alongside other draftees and promised that training would continue when they reached their destination. Instead, reports online Novosibirsk outlet NGS.ru, they were stationed in a village (its name has not been disclosed) and spent the next four days building a camp in a nearby forest. On November 1, said Aleskey’s wife Elizaveta (her name has also been changed), the mobilized men were given bulletproof vests and helmets. Then they lost touch for 10 days. The next time Aleksey called his wife was November 12.
“Long story short, they were sent to the front lines immediately, under fire. Artillery was going non-stop. They found some sort of abandoned house there and slept in it. They had no food or water. They clearly had no command. They didn’t know what to do next. On November 8, he and his colleagues wrote a report saying that they couldn’t continue to serve. They handed in their weapons, and they were removed to a safe place,” Elizabeth said, reporting what her husband had told her.
Yuliya, the wife of another mobilized man from Novosibirsk, told reporters what happened to the men during that period: “On the 3rd they were sent to the front. […] They hid in a little house, under fire from Grad rocket launchers. I asked, ‘Did you shoot at anything during those days?’ My husband said they didn’t fire at all, they didn’t have the chance, they were just dodging bullets.”
According to Elizaveta, in addition to her husband, 11 men refused to take part in combat. They wrote a joint report, which said: “I do not agree to carry out service in forward combat units, due to a lack of moral, psychological, and physical preparation. I agree to carry out service in units in the rear, and in already liberated territory.”
Yuliya said that those who refused to serve at the front were sent to an encampment in a border region, where military police arrived on November 15. She said they promised to transfer the mobilized men to a repair unit, though she doubts commanders will keep the promise.
“Our husbands didn’t refuse to serve! But they did ask for a medical examination, which was never carried out, and to give them some kind of work in the rear, or maybe in a factory. They’ll agree to work round the clock, just not at the front under those Grad rockets and shelling, without proper preparation,” she said.
Well, at least there’s some good news out of Los Angeles. Both the local elections I posted out earlier had positive results. Of course, in both cases, it’s not that the winning candidate was particularly good; it’s that the losing candidate was really, really bad. The thoroughly corrupt, abusive sheriff Alex Villanueva lost his bid for reelection; the new sheriff, Robert Luna, is nothing special and isn’t likely to make the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department into a bastion of decency and honor, but you can’t get much worse than Villanueva. Meanwhile, billionaire Democrat-come-lately Rick Caruso was defeated by his opponent Karen Bass despite spending a hundred million dollars of his own money on his campaign. I’m not expecting great things from Bass; she’s kind of a centrist and wasn’t my pick in the primaries; but at least she’s not a billionaire developer who almost certainly was only interested in the Los Angeles mayorship as a stepping stone to a later gubernatorial or presidential run.
I know this is local news so I’m not sure how much anyone else cares about this, but since Los Angeles is one of the biggest cities in the U.S. what happens here may have repercussions elsewhere, so maybe this is at least somewhat of interest.
“Tucker: This [US military support for Ukraine] is so obviously a scam. It’s an ideological jihad, a holy war being waged by some on the left against Russia..”
Video at the (Twitter) link.
Don Jr. tweeted earlier: “Since it was Ukraine’s missile that hit our NATO ally Poland, can we at least stop spending billions to arm them now?”
Over the past couple of years, Oxford Street and other parts of central London have been mysteriously taken over by a scourge of American Candy Shops flogging US sweets (sometimes out of date), super-strength vapes and tacky souvenirs. An investigation by Time Out revealed that many of them were fronts for illegitimate businesses and were being used to avoid business rates, and sometimes commit ‘other civil or criminal offences’.
To combat the clandestine activity and save the flailing high-street, Westminster Council put a hit out on the ubiquitous candy, vape and souvenir shops, and it appears to be doing something.
After raids seizing oodles of candy, alongside legal action, the council says that one-third of the shops have now disappeared, falling from 30 to 21 stores on the street. ‘For unscrupulous sweetshop traders on Oxford Street, life is becoming increasingly sour,’ said councillor Adam Hug…
johnson catmansays
re Reginald Selkirk @6 from the article:
Tobacco smoke is also filtered, but marijuana smoke is not.
I haven’t smoked marijuana for many years, but 99% of the pot I smoked back in the day was through a water bong. I would consider that “filtered”.
The bashing of Donald Trump by Rupert Murdoch’s US newspapers looks like a familiar pattern of the Australian-born media baron turning on political leaders who are no longer useful to him…
The chilly shift in tone among the media baron’s formerly Trump-friendly outlets has been noticeable since Republicans fizzled out in last week’s midterm elections…
The hostile tone is all the more remarkable bearing in mind that Trump is the first US president with whom Murdoch has been able to cultivate a friendship.
But as Trump is no doubt aware, the media baron’s idea of a personal connection is just as transactional as his own is often said to be…
I suspect that it may be missing the joke, but it also may be the conservative political approach to humour. Almost all GOP/conservative ‘jokes’ belittle and insult a person, insinuate lies into political discourse, deflection, or throw red meat to their base. Most Americans use humour for humour’s sake. Humour for humours sake seems to be foreign to the American right. Which means that they tend to assume that any humour, across the entire political spectrum, has a purpose — demean, belittle, insult, lie, deflect. The idea of a political wife poking fun at her spouse for, well, grins and giggles? is so far out of what the right considers normal that it never even crosses their mind that maybe she is having fun.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian (support them if you can!) Ukraine liveblog. From there:
Flight MH17 shot down by Russian-made missile, Dutch court confirms
A Dutch court is reading its verdict in the trial of three Russians and a Ukrainian over the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 above Ukraine in 2014 that left 298 passengers and crew dead.
The four suspects – Russians Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov and Ukrainian separatist Leonid Kharchenko – were not in court to hear the verdict as they refused to attend the trial.
All 298 people on board were killed when the Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on 17 July 2014 was shot out of the sky over separatist-held eastern Ukraine.
An international investigation found that the plane was hit by a missile supplied by Moscow fired from a village that was held at the time by pro-Russian rebels. Moscow has repeatedly denied any responsibility for the incident.
Reading the verdict, head judge Hendrik Steenhuis said the court has determined that MH17 was shot down by a Russian-made BUK missile from an agricultural field in eastern Ukraine.
Prosecutors have asked for life sentences and warrants for the arrest of the four men, who remain at large. None of the men appeared in court and only Pulatov chose to appoint lawyers, who pleaded not guilty on his behalf.
The latest wave of Russian rocket, drone and missile strikes across Ukraine earlier today, which Kyiv said was aimed at destroying the country’s energy system, came as temperatures dropped and winter sets in.
There are reports that the fresh strikes had come with snow falling for the first time this season, while officials warned of “difficult” days ahead with a cold spell approaching.
…
The massive wave of Russian missiles on cities in Ukraine earlier this week cut power to seven million homes. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s state energy company Naftogaz confirmed strikes earlier today damaged or destroyed some of Ukraine’s gas production facilities.
Ukrainian investigators in the region of Kherson have uncovered 63 bodies bearing signs of torture after Russian forces left, said Ukraine’s interior minister Denys Monastyrsky.
“The search has only just started, so many more dungeons and burial places will be uncovered’’, the minister told Interfax news agency.
On Wednesday we visited a “torture room“ in Kherson city where dozens of men were detained, electrocuted, beaten and some of them killed.
Important court decision in The Hague. First sentences for the perpetrators of #MH17 downing. Holding to account masterminds is crucial too, as the feeling of impunity leads to new crimes. We must dispel this illusion. Punishment for all RF’s atrocities then & now is inevitable.
ravensays
Pavlovka is part of the Eastern front and about midway between Kharkiv and Mariupol.
It looks like Ukraine managed to find a concentration of Russians and hit them with artillery and HIMARS.
The number of mobilized killed or wounded is running around 10,000 in just a few weeks.
Russia confirms defeat near Pavlovka: up to 2,400 Russian soldiers were killed and wounded during the assault –
dialogue.ua November 17, 2022
Source: Russian sources on military uniforms confirm the heaviest losses during the assault on Pavlovka in the Ugledar direction.
Russian sources report the heaviest losses of the Russian army in Pavlovka on the Uglegorsk direction of the front, where the units of the invaders fell into the trap of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. On one of the Russian military forums, a local user, citing sources among the military in the combat zone, reported that the total losses of the Russian military reached 2,400 people since the start of the assault on Pavlovka.
It was there that the Russians got into the fire bag of the artillery of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which is located in neighboring Ugledar at higher positions and shoots the approaching Armed Forces of the Russian Federation from a distance. A screenshot of the correspondence on his page on the social network Twitter was published by Necro Mancer, a Ukrainian blogger from Donbass who monitors social networks and information resources of the Russian Federation.
A user with the nickname Wesker, in response to a request to comment on the losses, published information that confirms the data on the military defeat of Russian units. “If possible, orient by our losses. There were reports in the information field that more than the total for both Chechen companies in the marine corps. How true is this?” – asked one of the Russian users. “I don’t even know how to put it. At least 1,000-1,200 people, but I would multiply this number by two more, ” the forum participant replied, citing his own source. “The strength of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is, of course, the possession of drones and artillery. They are very heaped with both MLRS and barrels, which sometimes really scares,” he added below.
NEW: On the House floor at noon, Pelosi will say in a speech crafted in part by Jon Meacham that she intends to pass the torch to the next generation of leadership but will stay on as a backbencher to help guide future leader Hakeem Jeffries
World leaders welcomed the news that an agreement was reached in Istanbul to prolong the Black Sea grain initiative for a further 120 days. The deal enables Russian and Ukrainian wheat and fertilisers to be exported through the Black Sea and to avert a global food crisis.
Meet a junior sergeant callsign “Witch” from the 241 Kyiv TDF Brigade. During the defense of Bakhmut, the platoon under her leadership repulsed six enemy infantry attacks in just one night. [Tweet and great photo of female sergeant at the link]
Who knows if her platoon truly did what the tweet says it did, but it is true that women are deeply embedded in Ukraine’s armed forces—even in the darkest, most difficult corner of Ukraine. While Ukraine might be advancing everywhere else, Russia (and its Wagner war-criminal mercenaries) are still trying desperately to notch their victory in this godforsaken slice of the Donbas. [map at the link]
You might remember Popasna, to the east of Bakhmut, from way earlier in the war. Russia captured it on May 7. It is 32 kilometers from Popasna to Bakhmut, and yet here we are, more than six months later, and Russia is still banging its head against the town. And as we’ve mentioned time and time again, there isn’t even anything special or strategic about Bakhmut. It does literally nothing to advance Russia’s broader war aims. Thousands of soldiers have lost their lives, on both sides, for a plot of land that means nothing to the overall outcome of the war.
I’m bringing it up today because of this:
Bakhmut. No attacks were reported by Ukrainian general staff. I think that is a first. I think relocated artillery assets have a cooling effect on the Russian cannon fodder. [map at the link]
This is remarkable, but it’s not the first time this has happened. I was fooled almost exactly a month ago into thinking Russia’s Bakhmut campaign had culminated. In fact, it was just a short pause. This might be a short pause.
Ukraine has been rushing reinforcements from the new, victorious Kherson front to shore up this front. Russian sources report HIMARS have been working this front, which stymie their ability to properly resource any attacks. And 155mm barrel artillery will make it harder for Russians to surge forward in the no-man’s land between their positions and Bakhmut. It’s legit desolate, hostile terrain for any attacker: [video at the link]
We’ve oft celebrated the Ukrainian defenders on these difficult Donbas lines, as Ukraine first trained and equipped entire new brigades, then used them to launch successful counteroffensives in Kharkiv and Kherson oblast. It is fitting that those fighting around Bakhmut finally get their well-deserved reinforcements.
Wagner, for its part, is trying to explain away its failures.
A report on the ongoing battles of the Wagner Group for the liberation of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region. Someone, most of the opponents, has recently begun to jokingly say, well, how much longer will Wagner release him? In principle, against the backdrop of a number of large and lightning-fast successes of the enemy in the Kharkov and Kherson regions, the irony of the enemy is quite justified, only on those fronts where our allies retreated, the fighters of the “orchestra” did not conduct either offensive or defensive actions.
The “Wagner Group” has its own front and its own range of tasks, which is provided by the forces and means of the Office itself, for example, earlier, with the main participation, as well as all possible assistance from our republican allied forces, such large settlements as Severodonetsk (population ~105,000 people), Lisichansk (population ~98,000 people) and Popasnaya (population ~19,000 people). Having completed the above military campaigns, the “musicians”, by occupying approaches with other settlements, reached Bakhmut by July 29 (population ~ 73,000 people).
With its own forces, the Wagner Group ensures a slow but productive advance solely on its own, which is much smaller in relative comparison than the armed forces of Russia or Ukraine. In addition, both the leadership of the “orchestra” and its fighters have never said anything “hating” in relation to the enemy. On the contrary, it has been repeatedly stated that the Ukrainian side is putting up strong and worthy resistance there, realizing for its part the strategic importance of the city. In fact, Bakhmut has been turned into one big fortress, including its outskirts. Rotation after rotation of the enemy makes an attempt to hold the settlement and the front. So everything is known in comparison and objective analysis, for this reason, progress and results are on our side. At least no one from the Wagner Group spoke about Bakhmut for three days.
LOL okay. “We’re not the Russian army, we’ve got our own corner, and we’re doing just fine, thank you.” I wonder what will happen when Wagner runs out of prison cannon fodder. Maybe that already happened. I do love how sensitive they are to being ridiculed for their failures. They deserve all the scorn headed their way.
Meanwhile, we recently took a look at Russia’s disastrous efforts to take Pavlivka, farther south on the Donbas front line. [map at the link]
See that east-west dark line, south of Pavlivka? That is the only rail line from Mariupol and the original Russian-held Donbas to Melitopol. It is currently under “fire control” from Ukrainian artillery. Speculation is that Russia is trying to move the Ukrainian front line farther north, away from that rail line.
Ukraine has plenty of ways to reach that rail line without its shorter-range 155mm howitzers, so it won’t be operational as long as Russia occupies that territory. But whatever their motivations, it looks as if the town is getting the Bakhmut treatment—wave after wave of Russian attacks. Here is yet another Russian column decimated on its approach to Pavlivka: [tweet and video at the link]
Indeed, both sides are now claiming that the town is a trap designed to continuously lull Russians into successive attacks. Ukrainians are gleefully celebrating the trap. Russians are… well, they are not.
“Regarding Pavlivka, the enemy (AFU) used aviation – there are dead. If we don’t move on, Pavlivka will become a trap.”
Says Alexander Khodakovsky, commander of the pro-Russian Vostok Battalion
Funny enough, propaganda Telegram sources have claimed Pavlivka conquered multiple times over the past week. Yet when the sun rises the next morning, there’s new video of yet another failed Russian assault. At worst, the rubble of the town is now a gray zone, with neither side occupying it, but with Ukraine holding advantageous defensive high-ground positions in next-door Vuhledar, bedeviling any Russian effort to move in or out.
Here is a Ukrainian soldier firing an anti-tank rocket in between three destroyed Russian armored vehicles we already saw destroyed in the previous Pavlivka post, underscoring Russia’s inability to advance: [Tweets and videos at the link]
Russian milblogger Alexander Khodakovsky, who has nearly 650,000 followers on Telegram, reports on Russia’s ongoing disaster:
I will continue the publication, moving from general reasoning to specifics – I will return to the ill-fated Pavlovka. When the idea was hatched, it was assumed that the offensive would go in two directions. The brigade commanders and I, discussing our ability to develop such an offensive at the current moment in time, came to the conclusion that it was unequivocally impossible to realize this plan: the reinforcements were not trained, no matter how they saved it, it was only enough for the first surge … But the brigade commanders , who had to solve the problem, could not reach out to those who were above them – those who needed any result at any cost.
The superiors then […] turned off the offensive plan in two directions and threw all the poor forces on Pavlovka, like in a furnace, without stretching the enemy and giving him the opportunity to concentrate all his attention on a narrow area. We have already learned that we have turned off the second direction in the process. And when I wrote that I consider the offensive premature, but I hope for success – we did not know this, and therefore … we hoped, although we understood that there were not enough forces […]
Now that planning errors have led to unjustified losses with a meager result, they want to blame the brigade commander of the fortieth, allegedly because he was too slow on his flank, which led to the losses of his colleagues from one hundred and fifty-fifth. They want to hang a criminal case on the peasant and make it extreme in a situation where it was clear to everyone that only those who formed the plan were guilty, and not the executors who fulfilled their duty to the end. It would be right for Commander-in-Chief Surovikin to study this episode in detail and not allow an innocent person to be devoured.
[…] you might remember the 155th as the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade of the Russian Pacific Fleet, a more capable unit than your typical Russian cannon fodder. It had been half wiped out in this “furnace,” and it looks like they’re trying to scapegoat its commander, per this report.
So that’s what’s left of the Russian war effort—small, strategically irrelevant assaults in a handful of places, while Ukraine liberates entire oblasts. Russia celebrates tactical advances measuring in the dozens of meters, while Ukraine shapes the battlefield for gains in the thousands of square kilometers.
…McCarthy is reportedly not in the chamber. Asshole.
“We the people, one country, on destiny,” she applauds the changing face of Congress with people of color, with women. All Democrats stood and applauded for that. Tepid response from the GOP.
“When I first came to the floor at six years old, never would I have thought that I would go from homemaker to House speaker,” Pelosi says. Her parents, she said, instilled in their children the importance of service. She speaks of the three presidents under which she’s served and their achievements, Bush, Obama, and Biden—entirely skipping Trump.
“There is no greater official honor for me than to stand on this floor speaking for the people of San Francisco…. With great confidence in our caucus, I will not seek re election to Democratic leadership in the next Congress.”
She thanks her colleagues for their prayers and good wishes for her husband Paul, and even Republicans bring themselves to stand and applaud for that. Sustained applause.
She will stay on as representative, step down from official leadership. “This I will continue to do as a member of the House speaking for the people of San Francisco, serving the great state of California and defending our Constitution, and with great confidence in our caucus, I will not seek reelection to Democratic leadership in the next Congress.”
…
She did not name a successor. “For me, the hours come for a new generation to lead the Democratic caucus that I so deeply respect and I’m grateful that so many are ready and willing to shoulder this awesome responsibility.” …
Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba has said Ukrainian experts are already in Poland to investigate the site where a missile killed two people on Tuesday.
Ukraine and Poland “will cooperate constructively and openly” on the investigation, Kuleba said, adding that he expected the investigators to swiftly get access to the site in south-eastern Poland.
A member of Russia’s armed forces who took part in the invasion of Ukraine has requested political asylum after landing in Madrid, the Guardian has learned.
Nikita Chibrin, 27, said that he spent more than four months in Ukraine as part of the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, a unit accused of committing war crimes in the Kyiv region in March.
Chibrin landed in the Spanish capital on Tuesday and was being held at the airport’s immigration centre. In a phone interview from the airport on Wednesday evening, Chibrin denied involvement in the reported war crimes of his unit, saying he did not fire a gun “once” while in Ukraine.
He said he was eager to testify in an international court about his experiences in Ukraine. “I have nothing to hide,” he said.
This is a criminal war that Russia started. I want to do everything I can to make it stop.
Chibrin said he decided to flee Russia after deserting from his unit in Ukraine in June. According to Chibrin, he told his commanders of his opposition to the war on 24 February, the first day of the invasion. Chibrin says he was removed from his rank as an army mechanic after he spoke out and was then tasked with performing manual labour.
“They threatened to jail me. In the end, my commanders decided to use me as a cleaner and a loader. I was placed away from the battlefield,” he said of his time in Ukraine.
The Guardian has not been able to verify all the details of Chibrin’s story independently. Chibrin has supplied documents and photographs showing he was stationed with the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade in Ukraine.
I have exciting news: While it took a few days for votes to be counted, we’ve won!
As Elizabeth Warren says, nobody wins alone. It’s so true—the greatest strength of our campaign is our grassroots support. I’m so thankful for every person who was a part of our campaign.
I’ll continue my work in Congress to be a voice for the people I met on the campaign trail—families trying to make a living and get by, people who play by the rules but can’t seem to get ahead. And I can promise I’ll keep standing up to corporate special interests and Republicans who are making everything more expensive and taking away our rights.
Thank you for being a part of this campaign.—Katie Porter
Wow, Karen Bass and Katie Porter both win the same day — 2 of my favorite powerful women!!!!
Key soon-to-be House Republican committee chairs, flanked by members with funereal expressions and unintelligible visual aids, unveiled their big investigatory plans for January: something something Hunter Biden.
For those not well-versed in the rabbit holes of the right’s Hunter Biden fixation, the “crimes” were a bit hard to follow.
Rep. James Comer (R-KY), who will soon be in charge of the Oversight Committee, swung from one accusation to the next, as committee members shuffled back and forth to clear sightlines to the arresting poster boards.
As every good investigator knows, the best way to convince an audience of the severity of the crimes committed is to present them in a language most of the assembled people don’t read.
You could practically hear reporters start to salivate as he crescendoed on the ever-titillating phrases “direct equity holder,” “PowerPoint presentation,” “keys to his new office space.” [LOL]
After delivering the phrase “human trafficking” three times in quick succession, at helpfully high volume, Comer berated the crowd — hey now, this is not about the prostitute he accidentally mentioned multiple times.
“I dont want this to be about the prostitute,” Comer said humbly. “Here’s the thing: Hunter Biden isn’t this innocent guy that just got a bad rap because he had a drug problem and Republicans don’t need to waste any time on Hunter Biden — we’re not trying to prove that Hunter Biden is a bad actor, he is,” he said, adding what should have been obvious from the past 20 minutes: “Our investigation is about Joe Biden.”
So Hunter Biden is a drug addicted human trafficker, but Republicans don’t need to bother doing a 33-minute press conference detailing his supposed sins because THIS ISN’T ABOUT HIM GODDAMNIT, it’s just about his prostitute and his white collar crimes and his general suckishness. Got it?! [LOL, I think this so-called “investigation” is going to backfire on Republicans.]
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) stepped in for an assist, helpfully coatless, the better to flap around a Politico article print-out. In his auctioneer’s cadence, he reminded the crowd that Republicans also have many a bone to pick with the FBI, the newest chapter of their enduring, unshakeable support for American law enforcement. [LOL]
As reporters tried to shift the conversation to reports that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and others extracted a promise from Kevin McCarthy that Republicans would investigate the conditions Jan. 6 insurrectionists were held in, Comer desperately tried to wrench the conversation back on track: “If we can keep it about Hunter Biden, this is kind of a big deal we think” he squeakily implored, a crafty twist on the old “this is not about Hunter Biden” chestnut. [LOL]
Comer offered Jordan the mic back to round things off, but Jordan opted to stump out with the rest of the silent committee. He’s saving his fire for investigations “more serious” than this bombshell probe into Hunter Biden’s existence, per CNN.
But what could possibly be more serious than this?
“I don’t want this to be about the prostitute!” Comer insisted to reporters on his way out of the room. […]
Although their majority in the House is slim, Republicans did win the majority. So instead of a press conference to celebrate that, and to tout a list of good legislation they intend to pass, Republicans held a press conference about Hunter Biden.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
Lynna@24 Great news. I’m sure some CEO’s will have continuing nightmares about testifying before her in committee meetings.
whheydtsays
A court in Turkey has sentenced a televangelist, who surrounded himself with young women he referred to as his “kittens”, to 8,658 years in prison.
Adnan Oktar, who has been described as a cult leader, was convicted of sexual assault and abuse of minors.
Oktar, 66, fronted his own television channel, through which he delivered religious sermons.
He is a fierce opponent of the theory of evolution, and wrote a widely mocked book on creationism.
He was originally given a jail sentence of 1,075 years but an appeal court ordered a retrial involving 215 defendants.
Ten of them were also given 8,658 years in prison by the court in Istanbul. Many of the other defendants were given shorter terms.
Oktar and hundreds of his followers were arrested in 2018 from his home on a litany of charges, including running a criminal organisation, tax offences, sexual abuse, and counter-terrorism laws.
During his arrest, Oktar told journalists that the allegations made against him were “lies” and “a game by the British deep state”, a topic he had frequently spoken about in the past.
In January 2021 he was convicted of 10 separate charges, including leading a criminal gang, engaging in political and military espionage, sexual abuse of minors, rape, blackmail and causing torment.
He was also charged over alleged links with exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, who the Turkish government accuses of masterminding a failed military coup in 2016 which killed 251 people and injured more than 2,000.
An upper court overturned that ruling.
Oktar’s views have earned him a degree of notoriety both in Turkey and abroad, having been arrested multiple times before 2018 and having spent time both in prison and a psychiatric unit over the years.
Multiple copies of his widely ridiculed book “the Atlas of Creation” were reportedly shipped unrequested to academics and libraries. In the book he claimed Darwin’s theory of evolution lay at the root of global terrorism.
Nerd @27, yep. Katie Porter is uniquely talented at calling CEO’s to account. I don’t think anyone else in the House of Congress can match her in that regard.
The big frontline news in Ukraine today is, as it often has been and was yesterday, the lack of big frontline news. [maps at the link]
The liberation of Kherson City and frantic retreat of Russian forces across the Dnipro will likely result in a long operational pause along that southern front as Ukrainian troops consolidate new defensive positions facing the river while sussing out just how far Russian forces have fled. HIMAR systems and other reinforcements from the Kherson offensive are now being dispatched to Donbas frontlines.
Russia, in the meantime, continues to sputter along with attacks that appear premised on killing Russian troops and conscripts as efficiently as possible while making no actual gains. That’s not new either, but a momentary pause by Wagner Group mercenaries in their continual but near-pointless attacks on Bakhmut is a bit unusual. Are they running out of prisoners to use as cannon fodder, or just pausing to consider what a new flush of Ukrainian defenses might mean for their little privatized slice of the war?
Who knows, but the pause in Wagner’s attacks on Bakhumut weren’t matched in Pavlivka, to the south. Russia is continuing to shove troops and equipment into the same Ukrainian trap that already wiped out Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade. Over and over, Russian commanders send insufficient numbers of poorly geared troops into uncoordinated attacks against Ukrainian defenses that quickly mop them up.
It’s self-evident why Russia found it necessary to mount a large-scale mobilization. Russian commanders don’t know any method of warfare that doesn’t depend on piling up Russian bodies until the defenders simply run out of ammo to shoot them with. It’s also evident that even at this late date, Russia simply can’t reform a kleptocratic military culture in which individual commanders work for their own self-glory (or more often, self-preservation) while thumbing their nose at whatever larger tactical plans their own bosses dream up.
This operational pause by both sides isn’t likely to last long. It seems most likely that the action will resume just as soon as the Ukrainian forces that have liberated Kherson and the north side of the Dnipro have been resupplied and repositioned to the likely new Ukrainian priorities: an offensive to cut off Russian troops in and everywhere west of Melitopol, and another to neutralize Russian supply routes passing not just through Svatove, but Starobilsk to its east. [map at the link]
When that might happen, and along what routes, is purely in the realm of speculation. Winter will put new constraints on both attackers and defenders, but Ukraine is much, much better situated for new assaults than Russia’s depleted and newly conscript-stacked forces are.
In Poland: It’s now looking more likely than not that the missile(s) that struck inside Poland’s borders was a Ukrainian air defense missile. That’s the current NATO thinking, and it’s backed up with competent sleuthing—even if not everyone is convinced yet. [Tweet and images at the link]
Russia has been cavalier in targeting locations close to the Poland-Ukraine border, and with missile systems inaccurate enough to suggest that Russia doesn’t particularly care if Poland takes some damage. It follows, then, that a Ukrainian missile defending Lviv might end up chasing one of those strays across the border itself. There’s also speculation of possible human error being involved, but we’ll put that down as pure theory, for now. [Yeah, that sums up my thinking on the subject … for now.]
Outside Ukraine: Ukraine has kept a well-maintained list of its most urgent military necessities, from infantry vehicles to anti-missile systems, but in the wake of Russian attacks on the nation’s energy infrastructure there’s a new top-line request going out: replacement parts to, literally, keep the lights on. Russian’s bumbling and seemingly uncoordinated missile attacks (and, now, Iranian-supplied drone attacks) have of late been doing steady damage to Ukrainian electrical grids and gas networks, and there simply aren’t enough replacement parts in the whole of the country for what’s being damaged.
The new Ukrainian request to its partners, then: replacement parts, and as many as can be secured. Ukrainian winters are cold, and a lack of heat or electricity could result in mass civilian casualties or a need for large-scale evacuations of cities nowhere near the current frontlines.
Because some of these parts, whether they be industrial-scale generators or specialized pipeline parts, tend to be big and expensive, there aren’t necessarily big stockpiles of the things to be had. It’s going to be a worldwide scramble to find and ship them. Here’s hoping Russia, with their obsessive desire to commit war crimes and cause widespread civilian damage for the sake of doing so, is running low enough on those missiles and drones that they can’t commit to larger-scale infrastructure attacks—but the damage already being done is dire enough to make this a top priority for the Ukrainian war effort. Blackouts are already commonplace in Kyiv and elsewhere; if that continues, civilian deaths will assuredly follow this winter. [tweets and videos at the link]
Mehmet Oz’s streak of consistently being out of touch is, well, untouchable. The failed politician whose only tie to Pennsylvania is the fact the whole state rallied against him is looking to recoup his campaign losses in a last-ditch effort to support Herschel Walker. The man who really shouldn’t have the honorific “doctor” attached to his name (what with that Senate inquiry that one time) sent an email to supporters on Tuesday thanking them and giving one more ask for help.
“We still have an opportunity to create a better and brighter future for our nation, and right now, it boils down to Georgia. Herschel Walker is officially in a runoff, and he needs our help,” the email reads. After raising more than $3 million in the first day of his runoff campaign, does Walker really need any assistance? Probably not. But Oz sank more than $25 million into his own campaign and probably misses that cash, which is why his email begging recipients to boost Walker’s campaign reserves splits those donations between the Walker campaign and Oz himself.
As you can see by the tweet from a parody account of the beloved Wegner’s Grocery Store, Pennsylvanians are still finding time to dunk on Oz. He sure does make it easy. [Tweet at the link: “And the grift goes on …]
Oz isn’t the only Republican trying to get rich off of Walker’s runoff: Former President Donald Trump, who trapped supporters in a 2024 presidential campaign announcement speech Tuesday night that lasted about an hour, also wants a piece of Walker’s campaign donations. [Tweet at the link]
The grift is such a problem that even Walker has taken notice, with his own campaign manager begging fellow Republicans to “cut it out” with the donation-splitting that, in some cases, has sent 90% of funds away from Walker. It seems like the only thing Walker is winning is another chance for the GOP to enrich itself.
Debunking (at least to some degree) and fighting back against one of Herschel Walker’s lies:
U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) said GOP candidate Herschel Walker has “crossed a line” after Walker accused the Democrat of being a negligent father.
“I know that politics is ugly,” Warnock, the father of two, said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “People play all kinds of games, unfortunately. But Herschel Walker and his allies have crossed a line where my family is concerned.”
“I want to set the record straight: My children live with me. I am present with my children in every way that a father should be, from breakfast in the morning to bedtime prayers at night. I can’t continue to let him lie about our family.”
At a campaign stop in Augusta earlier this week, Walker said Warnock doesn’t “keep his own kids.”
“He paid himself for child care, all that stuff – why don’t he keep his own kids?” Walker said. “Don’t have nobody keep your kids. … I keep my own even though he lied about me.” [So not true.]
[…] Walker’s campaign has been steeped in controversies surrounding his own parenting after it revealed Walker had three additional children he had not publicly acknowledged and, later, his son, 22-year-old Christian Walker, heavily criticized his father. He has also been accused of paying for multiple abortions.
Warnock is currently in a custody battle with his ex-wife, Oulèye Ndoye, who has accused the pastor of neglecting to see his children during his custody days and leaving her with unpaid child care expenses.
Earlier this year, Ndoye filed for additional custody of their children so she could move them to Massachusetts as she completes a Harvard University program.
[…] “My children are the two brightest stars in my universe – my reason for just about everything I do,” Warnock told AJC. “They are in my care. And they lack for nothing.”
Walker and Warnock are embroiled in a highly watched runoff after neither candidate secured 50 percent of the vote on Nov. 8. The two will face each other again on Dec. 6.
I am so old, I remember when Nancy Pelosi, the gentlewoman from San Francisco by way of Baltimore, was first elected speaker of the House, in 2007. […] I am so old, I remember that the first thing Nancy Pelosi did when President Barack Obama was elected two years later was immediately pass Obamacare, with a public option, as well as 17 other things before breakfast. Then, with an afternoon free, she passed climate change legislation too. (Senate killed it. Senate loves to KILL KILL.)
I am so old, I remember young people and idiots blaming Nancy Pelosi for Obamacare not having a public option, because the Senate, of which she is not a member, had Max Baucus in it. (Max Baucus supports single-payer now. As Slate headlined it, WTF?) […]
Nancy Pelosi is not a terrific speechifyer or communicator, and sometimes that was reflected in a lack of messaging from Democrats and House Democrats as a whole. But what Nancy Pelosi was unequaled at is passing legislation, good legislation, legislation that doesn’t hurt people and doesn’t suck.
Nancy Pelosi is 82 years old. Her husband Paul last month was attacked with a hammer in their home, after years and decades of the Republican Party vilifying her as actually evil and eats actual babies. The Republicans’ closing argument in the midterms of “LOLLLLL Nancy Pelosi’s husband got attacked with a hammer YAY!” does not seem to have ameliorated their “overturned Roe v. Wade” losses as much as they’d presumably hoped.
Nancy Pelosi has earned a goddamned break.
[…] Young, Gifted and Black Hakeem Jeffries takes over the leadership. [presumably]
Now jump into Obama’s time machine with us for a few of our favorite (out of more than 1500! yikes!) stories, or as many as I can paste before I get tired of copy and pasting.
I’m Nancy Pelosi And I Will Punch Donald Trump’s Head Right Through The Wall
Who Would Win, Nancy Pelosi Or An Army Of Tiny Mike Ditkas?
Guys? Shut The Fuck Up About Nancy Pelosi
Nancy Pelosi Not NOT Saying Kevin McCarthy Is A Moron
Nancy Pelosi ToKevin McCarthy: Try Again, MFer
Nancy Pelosi Will Be On Your Show Never, Bill O’Reilly, Does Never Work For You?
Man Deballed By Nancy Pelosi Very Sad He Now Got No Balls
A Children’s Treasury Of Nancy Pelosi Animated .GIFs
[…] I’m not embarrassed to be a middle-aged woman who fucking loves Nancy Pelosi and thinks she’s goddamn terrific. […]
Shop our small number of Nancy Pelosi items […] here.
Among the mostly Colombian migrant adults and children moved to Pennsylvania this week by right-wing governor Greg Abbott is a 10-year-old girl who arrived in Philadelphia so sick that she had to be immediately hospitalized.
Numerous reports say the child was suffering from a high fever and dehydration, and was taken to get immediate medical care after arriving on Wednesday under an expansion of Abbott’s busing.
The Texas governor had in a press release the day before touted using more children and families as human props, and, as with his busing stunts to other cities, intentionally did not coordinate with local officials. NBC News reports that officials in Philadelphia “lashed out” at Abbott following the sick child’s arrival.
“There’s a 10-year-old who’s completely dehydrated,” Philadelphia council member Helen Gym said in the NBC News report. “It’s one of the more inhumane aspects that they would put a child who was dehydrated with a fever now, a very high fever (on the bus) … It’s a terrible situation.”
The truly deplorable governor made clear in his announcement that the busing had nothing to do with addressing arrivals at the southern border, but rather about trolling and political retribution. “Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney has long-celebrated and fought for sanctuary city status, making the city an ideal addition to Texas’ list of drop-off locations,” Abbott’s office said.
[…] “Kenney said his office was told last week that a bus of about 30 asylum-seekers would be expected to travel to his city from Del Rio, Texas, but he said Texas officials did not coordinate their arrival.” Abbott last month admitted he lied when he claimed during his gubernatorial debate against Beto O’Rourke and claimed New York City’s mayor had not contacted him.
He’d said Eric Adams “never called my office, never talked to anybody in my administration,” but Abbott was actually just a damned liar. [Tweet at the link]
[…] “Time and time again, immigrants are used as tokens to advance the political agendas of individuals who have no interest in our communities’ well-being,” Juntos executive director Erika Guadalupe Núñez told The Philadelphia Inquirer. The outlet said families were being fed and sheltered by local groups and volunteers, and nearly all planned to eventually move on to other parts of the country. “It’s not the Four Seasons,” Casa De Venezuela founder Emilio Buitrago said in the report. “They have a room to rest, they have a little TV, a microwave. Their basic needs are going to be covered right now.”
“Seeking asylum is a human right,” Gym told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Our country has always welcomed people seeking refuge here, and we have flourished because of that.”
Frustrated, bitter and out of a job, Nancy Pelosi believes it’s her turn to get hammered
Commentary from Wonkette:
[…] Such sophisticated wordplay from a guy who likes to remind people he graduated from Dartmouth. Also he is a staunch defender of Christian values. Really makes you wonder why more people don’t flock to the GOP. (Of course, Nancy Pelosi famously doesn’t drink, but when has the truth ever mattered to Dinesh D’souza?) […]
Eric Swalwell:
My daughter and every little girl like her has countless more opportunities today than girls before them because @SpeakerPelosi served.
“Spectacular footage: Two Russian Kalibr cruise missiles shot down within seconds over Kyiv Oblast on Nov. 15. First is audible explosion and glow on horizon, second a clear view of interception by German Iris-T air defense system.”
In other news … a different kind of war, from NBC News:
A night of violence flared across at least two Iranian cities as anti-government protests challenging the regime on an unprecedented level entered their third month. … The violence comes just over two months after Mahsa Amini, 22, died after being detained for allegedly failing to abide by the country’s strict dress codes.
The Senate passed a bill designed to expand medical marijuana research on Wednesday by unanimous consent.
Roll Call:
With nearly two centuries of expectations on his back, Cherokee Nation Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. faced the House Rules Committee on Wednesday as the panel examined the path forward to seating the first-ever tribal nation delegate in Congress.
Fox News significantly decreased its volume of violent crime coverage in the week of the midterms, down 63% from the week prior.
The network averaged 141 weekday violent crime segments per week from Labor Day through the Friday before the election; in the week of the midterms, Fox aired 71 weekday violent crime segments — a decrease of 50% compared to the prior average.
Fox was open in its strategy of using violent crime as a political cudgel against Democrats throughout the midterms. Driven in part by Fox host Tucker Carlson’s calls for Republicans to run on the issue, the network engaged in a monthslong campaign to tie Democrats and the Biden administration to violent crime, often by highlighting specific incidents in “Democratic cities” and blaming progressive criminal justice reform for individual violent crimes. […]
Cawthorn bugs out early, and leaves his constituents in the lurch.
The disappearance of Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), who lost his primary and is on his way out of Congress, has been well documented.
Both his Washington and North Carolina district offices appear to have been cleaned out. His name was wiped from his Cannon Building office. His staff is reportedly not taking on any new constituent cases, and he’s bought a house in Florida. He’s made heavy use of voting by proxy and was the only sitting member of Congress spotted supporting Donald Trump at his 2024 Mar-a-Lago announcement.
Now, incoming Representative-Elect Chuck Edwards (R), who toppled Cawthorn in a crowded primary field in May, is offering up his current state Senate office for Cawthorn’s constituents.
“I have always made it a priority to assist constituents when they face difficulty navigating the bureaucracy of a state government agency,” he said in a statement. “I’ve heard from many people, they’re now having difficulty getting their federal office to respond to their needs. My office stands ready to help those who can not get a call returned.” […]
“We’ve heard reports that NC-11 district offices are closed and phones are not being answered. At the same time, our Raleigh office is seeing a dramatic increase in the number of federal issues being brought to us by constituents,” she [Edwards staffer Heather Millett] said, adding that it was clear constituents needed help “navigating the federal government.”
[…] “No one expects that he’s gonna stay in his office until term is done,” Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, told TPM. “But the degree to which he quit working is unusual. He’s the Where’s Waldo of American politics.”
“The majority of his constituent offices have been closed for months,” he added.
Cawthorn made clear upon his entry to Congress that he was more interested in showmanship than work-horsing. He famously boasted to his colleagues that he “built his staff around comms rather than legislation.”
His brief tenure was roiled by a series of scandals, including allegations of sexual assault, his calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “thug,” repeatedly getting caught trying to bring a gun through airport security and gossiping on a podcast about cocaine-fueled orgies that members of Congress had supposedly invited him to […]
Major members of the North Carolina delegation like Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), top members of the state legislature and the North Carolina Republican party flocked to Edwards instead, ending Cawthorn’s reign. […]
PORTLAND, Ore. — U.S. regulators approved a plan Thursday to demolish four dams on a California river and open up hundreds of miles of salmon habitat that would be the largest dam removal and river restoration project in the world when it goes forward.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s unanimous vote on the lower Klamath River dams is the last major regulatory hurdle and the biggest milestone for a $500 million demolition proposal championed by Native American tribes and environmentalists for years. The project would return the lower half of California’s second-largest river to a free-flowing state for the first time in more than a century.
Native tribes that rely on the Klamath River and its salmon for their way of life have been a driving force behind bringing the dams down in a wild and remote area that spans the California and Oregon border. Barring any unforeseen complications, Oregon, California and the entity formed to oversee the project will accept the license transfer and could begin dam removal as early as this summer, proponents said.
“The Klamath salmon are coming home,” Yurok Chairman Joseph James said after the vote. “The people have earned this victory and with it, we carry on our sacred duty to the fish that have sustained our people since the beginning of time.”
[…]
Approval of the order to surrender the dams’ operating license is the bedrock of the most ambitious salmon restoration plan in history and the project’s scope — measured by the number of dams and the amount of river habitat that would reopen to salmon — makes it the largest of its kind in the world, said Amy Souers Kober, spokesperson for American Rivers, which monitors dam removals and advocates for river restoration.
More than 300 miles of salmon habitat in the Klamath River and its tributaries would benefit, she said.
Several tribes in the region, including the Yurok, have been fighting for years to see dams on the river come down to aid the recovery of struggling salmon populations.
The decision is in line with a trend toward removing aging and outdated dams across the U.S. as they come up for license renewal and confront the same government-mandated upgrade costs as the Klamath River dams would have had.
Across the U.S., 1,951 dams have been demolished as of February, including 57 in 2021, American Rivers said. Most of those have come down in the past 25 years as facilities age and come up for relicensing.
Commissioners on Thursday called the decision “momentous” and “historic” and spoke of the importance of taking the action during National Native American Heritage Month because of its importance to restoring salmon and reviving the river that is at the heart of the culture of several tribes in the region.
“Some people might ask in this time of great need for zero emissions, ‘Why are we removing the dams?’ First, we have to understand this doesn’t happen every day … a lot of these projects were licensed a number of years back when there wasn’t as much focus on environmental issues,” said FERC Chairman Richard Glick. “Some of these projects have a significant impact on the environment and a significant impact on fish.”
Glick added that, in the past, the commission did not consider the effect of energy projects on tribes but said that was a “very important element” of Thursday’s decision.
[…]
Members of the Yurok, Karuk and Hoopa Valley tribes and other supporters lit a bonfire and watched the vote on a remote Klamath River sandbar via a satellite uplink to symbolize their hopes for the river’s renewal.
“I understand that some of those tribes are watching this meeting today on the (river) bar and I raise a toast to you,” Commissioner Willie Phillips said.
“Someone has to say it: Elon Musk has lied for 27 years about his credentials. He does not have a BS in Physics, or any technical field. Did not get into a PhD program. Dropped out in 1995 & was illegal [undocumented immigrant from South Africa]. Later, investors quietly arranged a diploma – but not in science….”
PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona voters who overwhelmingly cast their ballots by mail have rejected a measure that would have required them to add more information to the simple signature and date they now put on the back of the return envelope.
Proposition 309 also would have eliminated the ability of registered voters who do not have a state or federally-issued photo ID with them when they vote in-person to provide other proof of identity to cast a ballot.
New tallies from Maricopa County and several smaller counties released on Wednesday showed there was no chance for the measure to pass. It had been too close to call in the eight days since polls closed on Nov. 8 and was the last of 10 measures on the ballot to be called by The Associated Press.
The measure was falling about 20,000 votes short of passing, well above the margin for a recount under a new law that boosts the difference between ballot measures or candidates from 1/10 of a percent to 1%.
Democrats and voting rights groups said that the changes would lead to more mail-in ballots being rejected and people being turned away at the polls. They also pointed out that citizenship and other requirements for voting are already confirmed during the voter registration process.
A federal jury convicted a Republican political operative on Thursday for funneling illegal campaign contributions from a Russian national into former President Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Jesse Benton, who previously worked for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), worked with another GOP political operative to arrange for the Russian national to attend a fundraiser and take a picture with Trump.
Since the event required a contribution, the Russian national sent $100,000 to Benton’s political consulting firm — $25,000 of which he donated in his own name to the Trump campaign and the other $75,000 of which he pocketed. […]
In 2030, Ukraine’s population expected to drop to 35M – sociologists
17.11.2022 Ukinform.net
M. V. Ptukha Institute of Demography and Social Research predicts that by 2030, Ukraine’s population will stand at 35 million.
This was announced by Ella Libanova, the facility chief, who spoke at the Kyiv International Economic Forum, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.
“According to our outlook, by 2030, some 35 million people will live in Ukraine within the borders of 1991. And it will be great if this turns out to be the case,” said Libanova.
At the same time, according to the expert, this means that the rate of population aging will rise.
Read also: Russians have issued at least 1,500 draft notices to Crimean Tatars
“Accordingly, we will have more social costs, more burden on the pension and health care systems. And in the end, this means a tougher burden on the working population,” said the sociologist.
In her opinion, it is worth expecting a mass return of Ukrainians who fled the war “provided that the quality of life in Ukraine improves to a level comparable to that in Europe.”
“Although I am convinced that we can follow the same path as the Mediterranean nations. Spain, Italy, Portugal – they were all countries of emigration at one time. And now they have turned into countries of immigration,” Libanova noted.
As Ukrinform reported earlier, almost 9 million people have left Ukraine since war-start. Between 1.3 and 1.4 million of these Ukrainians remain beyond their home country’s borders.
Why is it “a problem”? Just let in some of the many, many refugees who have been created by US/EU foreign policy, that’ll keep populations as high as you like for the time being. Or is the “problem” that that will mean the population won’t be pure white any more?
The closest House race in the nation appears to be headed toward a recount.
Nine days after the election, the contest in Colorado’s Third Congressional District, between Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican, and her Democratic challenger, Adam Frisch, remains undecided. As of Thursday evening, according to The Associated Press, Ms. Boebert leads by a mere 0.16 percentage points — or, 551 votes of nearly 327,000 counted to date.
Nearly all of the votes have been counted, according to The A.P., which declared the race too close to call. The margin qualifies for an automatic recount under state law, which would further delay a call — possibly for weeks.
A full accounting is anticipated by Friday, which is the deadline for counties to submit their tabulations to the Colorado secretary of state.
Under state law, a recount is mandatory if the margin is half a percentage point or less of the top vote-getter’s total. That recount must be ordered by Dec. 5 and would need to be completed by Dec. 13, according to the secretary of state’s office.
[…]
The total ballot count in the race remained stagnant for much of the past week because of two factors.
One, mail ballots from members of the military and Americans living overseas were allowed to arrive as late as Wednesday. And also, voters whose ballots were rejected for reasons like mismatched signatures had until Wednesday to correct those problems, a process known as curing. Democrats and Republicans alike have been pleading with voters to complete that process.
KGsays
During his arrest, Oktar told journalists that the allegations made against him were “lies” and “a game by the British deep state”, a topic he had frequently spoken about in the past. whheydt@28 quoting BBC
Well, I must say it’s nice to hear about the British deep state doing something useful for a change, rather than supporting Middle Eastern tyrants, cosying up to Russian oligarchs, and sending police spies to rape by deception women in peaceful protest groups!
KGsays
The Vicar@53,
Amusingly, I’ve seen worried articles about falling sperm counts and countries with current or expected population falls practically alongside others bemoaning the somewhat artificial milestone of global population exceeding 8 billion. Of course, falling sperm counts (assuming they are not an artefact of changing methods of counting, as at least some experts still think) could be a sign of serious pollution problems, and too rapid a fall in the ratio of working to retired population can cause genuine problems, but as you say, there’s a ready supply of refugees and other potential migrants.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From their latest summary:
The Swedish prosecutor who is leading the investigation into the damage to the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines has confirmed Friday that the incident was sabotage, and said that traces of explosives have been found.
…
Winter’s first snow fell in Kyiv on Thursday while authorities said they were working to restore power nationwide after Russia earlier this week unleashed what Ukraine said was the heaviest bombardment of civilian infrastructure of the war.
About 10 million people were without power, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a Thursday evening video address. Authorities in some places had ordered forced emergency blackouts, he said.
The crisis at Twitter reached new heights on Friday as hundreds of employees were reported to have rejected Elon Musk’s ultimatum to keep working for the business, threatening its ability to keep operating….
(“In an apparent jab at Musk’s call for employees to be ‘hardcore’, the Twitter profile bios of several departing engineers on Thursday described themselves as ‘softcore engineers’ or ‘ex-hardcore engineers’.”)
Amid ongoing fallout from Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, speculation of the platform’s imminent collapse is swirling – leaving users wondering what parts of their online selves they’ll get to keep….
Fifa have confirmed the news, as expected, that fans will no longer be able to buy alcoholic beverages inside the stadium perimeters, as previously promised.
Fifa’s statement on the booze ban offers zero clarity on why the decision has been made at this late point. Zero transparency from them on this matter. What’s new?
Budweiser have now deleted their “Well, this is awkward” tweet.
Sean Ingle writes: “Football’s governing body will now be looking nervously over its shoulders at the prospect of legal action from Budweiser, which has a $75m (£63m) sponsorship agreement with Fifa, and is likely to regard this as a major breach of contract.”…
Guardian – featuring all the usual tropes of their reporting on rightwing parties and movements in Europe – “Dutch pro-farming party fires up the anti-establishment vote”: “A movement rooted in a protest against plans to cut livestock [sic] numbers is rapidly picking up support in the Netherlands…”
Just realize: any territorial “compromises” will not bring peace, but multiply victims. Any concessions to RF will be Putin’s victory, will legalize murder and make war a tool of international relations. This will be the end of international law. Does anyone really want that?
…
What is surprising, however, is that almost 50% of all macOS malware only comes from one source: MacKeeper. Ironically, MacKeeper is a program that advertises itself as a way to “keep your Mac clean and safe with zero effort.” But as Elastic explains, the program can be abused by threat actors because it has extensive permissions and access to processes and files. This means that a program designed to keep Macs secure from cyberthreats can put your system at risk…
This interview illustrates some key fallacies, shortcomings and outright intellectual dishonesty associated with Mearsheimer’s realist approach. And since his authority is instrumental in legitimising the appeasement advocacy, I will discuss it in detail…
It’s an interview in which Mearsheimer concedes that Hitler lied at Munich and in “one or two other instances.”
Russia’s proxies in occupied Crimea claim fortification works started on peninsula.
Russian forces in occupied Crimea began to build fortification structures on the peninsula, preparing for possible Ukrainian advances in the south, according to Moscow-installed head proxy.
The Dutch government will summon the Russian ambassador in the Netherlands over Russia’s response to the verdict in the trial over the downing of passenger flight MH17, news agency ANP reported, citing foreign minister Wopke Hoekstra.
Russia said on Thursday the Dutch court’s decision to convict two former Russian intelligence agents and a Ukrainian separatist leader over the 2014 downing of the Malaysian airliner “neglected impartiality”.
Reuters reports the Bank of Canada on Friday said it will issue a five-year, $500m bond that will offer Canadians the opportunity to directly support Ukraine.
The bond, called the “Ukraine Sovereignty Bond,” will be denominated in Canadian dollars and issued in late November, the bank said is a statement.
ravensays
A source who worked closely with Musk for several years described this thinking as core to the billionaire’s pronatalist ideology. “He’s very serious about the idea that your wealth is directly linked to your IQ,” he said. The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for this article, also said Musk urged “all the rich men he knew” to have as many children as possible.
This is an article about the genetic imperialists who want to outbreed the rest of the world. Elon Musk is one of them. There are more.
These aren’t gentically superior people though. They are loons, lunatic fringers, narcissists, sociopaths, and other creeps.
There is so much wrong with this idea of self eugenics that it would take pages to point out.
There are often attempts of one group to outbreed others, something called biological colonialism. It almost never works.
The next generation of children decide they have better things to do with their time and money than have lots of kids because mom and dad had lots of kids and it was a miserable experience for them.
And oh yeah, wealth is only lowly correlated with IQ.
College professors and scientists aren’t known for their wealth. Ask PZ about that.
Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take ‘control of human evolution.’
Malcolm and Simone Collins
Malcolm and Simone Collins are self-proclaimed pronatalists. Simone told Insider they viewed “the pathway to immortality as being through having children.” Hannah Yoon for Insider
Photograph of Julia Black
Julia Black
Nov 17, 2022, 11:00 AM
Sitting in their toy-filled family room on a sunny September afternoon, Simone and Malcolm Collins were forced to compete with the wails of two toddlers as they mapped out their plans for humankind.
“I do not think humanity is in a great situation right now. And I think if somebody doesn’t fix the problem, we could be gone,” Malcolm half-shouted as he pushed his sniffling 18-month-old, Torsten, back and forth in a child-size Tonka truck.
Along with his 3-year-old brother, Octavian, and his newborn sister, Titan Invictus, Torsten has unwittingly joined an audacious experiment. According to his parents’ calculations, as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population.
If they succeed, Malcolm continued, “we could set the future of our species.”
Malcolm, 36, and his wife, Simone, 35, are “pronatalists,” part of a quiet but growing movement taking hold in wealthy tech and venture-capitalist circles. People like the Collinses fear that falling birth rates in certain developed countries like the United States and most of Europe will lead to the extinction of cultures, the breakdown of economies, and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization.
It’s a theory that Elon Musk has championed on his Twitter feed, that Ross Douthat has defended in The New York Times’ opinion pages, and that Joe Rogan and the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen bantered about on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” It’s also, alarmingly, been used by some to justify white supremacy around the world, from the tiki-torch-carrying marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “You will not replace us” to the mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who opened his 2019 manifesto: “It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates.”
Google searches for “population collapse” spiked this summer, after Musk continued to raise the issue in response to Insider’s report that he’d fathered twins with one of his employees. According to the United Nations, more than a quarter of the world’s countries now have pronatalist policies, including infertility-treatment benefits and “baby bonus” cash incentives. Meanwhile, a spate of new assisted reproductive technology startups are attracting big-name investors such as Peter Thiel and Steve Jurvetson, fueling a global fertility-services market that Research and Markets projects will reach $78.2 billion by 2025.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, stands with his fiancee Talulah Riley and his twin sons Griffin, left, 6, and Xavier at the Nasdaq’s opening bell to celebrate the electric automaker’s initial public offering, Tuesday, June, 29, 2010, in New York.
The billionaire Elon Musk has promoted pronatalist ideas, often tweeting about birth rates and population decline. Mark Lennihan/AP Photo
I reached out to the Collinses after I received a tip about a company called Genomic Prediction, where Musk’s OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman was an early investor. (Altman, who is gay, also invests in a company called Conception. The startup plans to grow viable human eggs out of stem cells and could allow two biological males to reproduce. “I think having a lot of kids is great,” Altman recently told an audience at Greylock’s Intelligent Future event. “I want to do that now even more than I did when I was younger.”)
Genomic Prediction is one of the first companies to offer PGT-P, a controversial new type of genetic testing that allows parents who are undergoing in vitro fertilization to select the “best” available embryos based on a variety of polygenic risk factors.
The Collinses became the public face of the technology after being featured in a May Bloomberg article, “The Pandora’s Box of Embryo Testing Is Officially Open.” After the piece went live, Malcolm said, they began hearing from wealthy pronatalists around the country.
“We are the Underground Railroad of ‘Gattaca’ babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids,” Malcolm told me.
The Collinses invited me to stay at their home in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, before we’d even spoken on the phone. (Following our first call, in which I disclosed that I was single but hoped to have children one day, Simone also emailed to invite me to join their matchmaking network for “high-achieving” individuals: “As you can probably tell, we’re heavily invested in helping people have families, as the headwinds against having kids are strong these days!”)
We are the Underground Railroad of ‘Gattaca’ babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids.
While I didn’t fill out the matchmaking form, which listed both “Four +” and “As many as possible” as options for how many children I wanted, I did take them up on a visit to their 18th-century farmhouse. Upon arrival, I was greeted at the gate by The Professor, a brown corgi with a slightly manic air, followed by Malcolm, cheerful and clean-cut in a black polo.
Inside, Simone, statuesque even one month shy of her delivery date, wore her pregnancy uniform of a crisp white oxford shirt, a long black skirt, Doc Martens, and red lipstick (ignoring, she would later tell me, her mother-in-law’s plea not to “dress like a fucking pilgrim” in front of the press). Their wardrobes, Simone told me later, are meticulously curated to project the kind of gravitas their work requires. Beneath their thick, black-rimmed glasses — hers round, his rectangular — the couple look, as they would put it, “biologically young.”
Together they write books and work in the VC and private-equity worlds. Simone has previously served as managing director for Dialog, the secretive retreat cofounded by Thiel. While they relate to the anti-institutional wing of the Republican Party, they’re wary of affiliating with what they called the “crazy conservatives.” Above all, they are focused on branding pronatalism as hip, socially acceptable, and welcoming — especially to certain people. Last year, they cofounded the nonprofit initiative Pronatalist.org.
Torsten and Octavian Collins sit in high chairs
Torsten, 1, whose nickname is “Toastie,” got his name from his mother’s Scandinavian heritage. Octavian, 3, was named after the ruler who ushered in the Roman Empire. Hannah Yoon for Insider
An obsession with producing heirs is hardly a new phenomenon. Elites have used lineage to consolidate money and power for most of human history. But as couples in the developed world are increasingly putting off parenthood until later in life — or abandoning it altogether — people like the Collinses are looking for hacks to make large families feasible in a modern, secular society.
They both said they were warned by friends not to talk to me. After all, a political minefield awaits anyone who wanders into this space. The last major figure to be associated with pronatalism was Jeffrey Epstein, who schemed to impregnate 20 women at a time on his New Mexico ranch. Genetic screening, and the underlying assumption that some humans are born better than others, often invites comparisons to Nazi eugenic experiments. And then there’s the fact that our primary cultural reference point for a pronatalist society is the brutally misogynist world of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
The Collinses, who call themselves “ruthless pragmatists,” consider the inevitable backlash a small price to pay.
“We’re frustrated that one of the inherent points of this culture is that people are super private within it,” Simone said. They not only hope that their transparency will encourage other members of the upper class to have more children; they want to build a culture and economy around the high-birth-rate lifestyle.
The payoff won’t be immediate, Simone said, but she believes if that small circle puts the right plans into place, their successors will “become the new dominant leading classes in the world.”
The tech industry’s biggest players have been preoccupied with their legacies for years. In the 2010s, the longevity craze swept Silicon Valley and industry titans like Jeff Bezos, 58, Sergey Brin, 49, and Larry Ellison, 78, poured billions of dollars into biotech companies they thought could help them defy death. Jeffrey Epstein reached out to scientists about freezing his head and penis to be revitalized hundreds of years later, while Peter Thiel, 55, was said to have sought blood transfusions from the young. (In response to the rumor, Thiel stated: “On the record, I am not a vampire.”)
Antiaging research has had some success in targeting specific diseases, but as the Ellisons and Bezoses of the world get older, the chance of radical life extension in their lifetime becomes more unlikely. So some are turning to the next best thing: their progeny. For people who believe deeply in the genetic heritability of traits, passing on what they see as their superior DNA can be the ultimate path to influence.
The Genomic Prediction cofounder Stephen Hsu told me he knew many ultrahigh-net-worth, high-birth-rate parents.
“With everything these guys do, whether it’s their investments or even their social lives, they’re applying a very analytic, quantitative way of thinking. And that goes for reproduction too,” Hsu said.
Jeffrey Epstein zorro ranch
At his now-infamous Zorro ranch, Jeffrey Epstein was said to have made plans to impregnate up to 20 women at a time. US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York
In 2018, Brin and his then-wife, Nicole Shanahan, who faced fertility troubles of their own, founded the Buck Institute’s Center for Female Reproductive Longevity. Thiel, who has at least one child with his partner, has invested in the egg-freezing startup TMRW and a new period-tracking app called 28, which has stirred controversy over its affiliation with an antiabortion publication. Ellison, meanwhile, who has two children in their 30s, has reportedly resumed having kids — with his 31-year-old girlfriend.
While pronatalism is often associated with religious extremism, the version now trending in this community has more in common with dystopian sci-fi. The Collinses, who identify as secular Calvinists, are particularly drawn to the tenet of predestination, which suggests that certain people are chosen to be superior on earth and that free will is an illusion. They believe pronatalism is a natural extension of the philosophical movements sweeping tech hubs like the Silicon Hills of Austin, Texas. Our conversations frequently return to transhumanism (efforts to merge human and machine capabilities to create superior beings), longtermism (a philosophy that argues the true cost of human extinction wouldn’t be the death of billions today but the preemptive loss of trillions, or more, unborn future people), and effective altruism (or EA, a philanthropic system currently focused on preventing artificial intelligence from wiping out the human population).
What these movements all have in common is a fixation on the future. And as that future starts to look more and more apocalyptic to some of the world’s wealthiest people, the idea of pronatalism starts to look more heroic. It’s a proposition uniquely suited to Silicon Valley’s brand of hubris: If humanity is on the brink, and they alone can save us, then they owe it to society to replicate themselves as many times as possible.
“The person of this subculture really sees the pathway to immortality as being through having children,” Simone said.
According to tech-industry insiders, this type of rhetoric is spreading at intimate gatherings among some of the most powerful figures in America. It’s “big here in Austin,” the 23andMe cofounder Linda Avey told me. Raffi Grinberg, a pronatalist who is the executive director of Dialog, said population decline was a common topic among the CEOs, elected officials, and other powerful figures who attended the group’s off-the-record retreats. In February, the PayPal cofounder Luke Nosek, a close Musk ally, hosted a gathering at his home on Austin’s Lake Travis to discuss “The End of Western Civilization,” another common catchphrase in the birth-rate discourse.
The person of this subculture really sees the pathway to immortality as being through having children.
Meanwhile, the Collinses said a mutual friend had been encouraging them to fly to Austin to meet with Claire Boucher, the musician known professionally as Grimes who is the mother of two of Musk’s children. (Grimes, who follows about 1,470 people on Twitter, followed the Collinses while this piece was being reported.) It makes sense considering that Musk, who has fathered 10 known children with three women, is the tech world’s highest-profile pronatalist, albeit unofficially. He has been open about his obsession with Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongol ruler whose DNA can still be traced to a significant portion of the human population. One person who has worked directly with Musk and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for this article recalled Musk expressing his interest as early as 2005 in “populating the world with his offspring.”
Musk has increasingly used his public platform to advocate the cause, tweeting dozens of times in the past two years about the threat of population decline. “If the alarming collapse in birth rate continues, civilization will indeed die with a whimper in adult diapers,” he tweeted in January.
These worries tend to focus on one class of people in particular, which pronatalists use various euphemisms to express. In August, Elon’s father, Errol Musk, told me that he was worried about low birth rates in what he called “productive nations.” The Collinses call it “cosmopolitan society.” Elon Musk himself has tweeted about the movie “Idiocracy,” in which the intelligent elite stop procreating, allowing the unintelligent to populate the earth.
“Contrary to what many think, the richer someone is, the fewer kids they have. I am a rare exception,” he wrote in another tweet this past May. “Most people I know have zero or one kid.”
Elon Musk attending the Met Gala with ex-partner Grimes.
Musk had two of his 10 children, X Æ A-Xii and Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, with the singer Grimes. He has also fathered six children with his ex-wife Justine Musk and twins with his employee Shivon Zilis. Theo Wargo/Getty Images
Musk was echoing an argument made by Nick Bostrom, one of the founding fathers of longtermism, who wrote that he worried declining fertility among “intellectually talented individuals” could lead to the demise of “advanced civilized society.” Émile P. Torres, a former longtermist philosopher who has become one of the movement’s most outspoken critics, put it more bluntly: “The longtermist view itself implies that really, people in rich countries matter more.”
A source who worked closely with Musk for several years described this thinking as core to the billionaire’s pronatalist ideology. “He’s very serious about the idea that your wealth is directly linked to your IQ,” he said. The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for this article, also said Musk urged “all the rich men he knew” to have as many children as possible.
Musk’s ties to the EA and longtermist communities have been gradually revealed in recent months. In September, text logs released as part of Musk’s legal battle with Twitter showed conversations between Musk and the prominent longtermist William MacAskill, who works at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, where Musk is a major donor. In the messages, MacAskill offered to introduce Musk to Sam Bankman-Fried, a now-disgraced cryptocurrency entrepreneur who had donated millions of dollars to longtermist organizations.
MacAskill has never explicitly endorsed pronatalism, and he declined to be interviewed for this article. He did, however, devote a chapter of his best-selling book, “What We Owe the Future,” to his fear that dwindling birth rates would lead to “technological stagnation,” which would increase the likelihood of extinction or civilizational collapse. One solution he offered was cloning or genetically optimizing a small subset of the population to have “Einstein-level research abilities” to “compensate for having fewer people overall.”
Malcolm said he was glad to see Musk bring these issues to the forefront. “He’s not as afraid of being canceled as everyone else,” Malcolm told me. “Any smart person with a certain cultural aesthetics of their life is looking at this world and saying, ‘How do we create intergenerationally, durable cultures that will lead to our species being a diverse, thriving, innovative interplanetary empire one day that isn’t at risk from, you know, a single asteroid strike or a single huge disease?'”
Sitting around the breakfast table after the 6 a.m. day-care drop-off and “morning strategy walk” the Collinses take every day, Malcolm read aloud a text message from his mother. She wanted to know how he and Simone planned to monetize their pronatalism “hobby.” “Remember: Everything is transactional,” she texted.
Born into a storied and monied family in Dallas, Malcolm said his ancestors included prominent members of the jayhawkers, antislavery activists who rebelled against the Confederate Army. Following his parents’ divorce, Malcolm was shipped off to a “troubled teen” facility, an experience he compares to that depicted in the movie “Holes,” in which children are sent to work at labor camps in the desert. Malcolm says his father managed to squander the family fortune throughout his five marriages. “He at one point had bought the most expensive thing at Christies,” Malcolm said. “He has nothing now. No money.”
Simone, meanwhile, came from polyamorous, tai-chi-practicing, hippie parents in Alameda, California. “I was kind of the black sheep of the family,” she said. “Like, they would tell me to go out and drink and experiment, but I would rebel by staying home and doing my homework.”
Before she met Malcolm, Simone was convinced she wanted to live her life single and child-free. But when she was 24, she decided to have her heart broken once just to say she’d done it. As she does with all her goals, she created a system: She made a profile on OKCupid, where a picture of her dressed as a Stormtrooper in a sultry pose was catnip for the nerds of Silicon Valley, and rated her dates out of 50. After a string of 16s, Malcolm scored a 42. She made him promise to break up with her after four months. “I resent being in love with him,” she said. “I was so disturbed when I fell for him.”
A year and a half later, Malcolm proposed to her via a viral campaign that landed on the front page of Reddit. Once they were married, Simone got a master’s in technology policy at Cambridge, eager to keep pace with her husband’s Stanford MBA.
During a stint at a venture-capital fund in South Korea, where the fertility rate has fallen to about 0.81, Malcolm became obsessed with the idea of what he calls “demographic catastrophe.”
“He was astounded by people’s fatalistic take on it,” Simone said. So, following up on a conversation Malcolm had broached on their second date, the couple committed to having seven to 13 children. Because of their relatively late start and Simone’s preexisting fertility issues, they knew they would have to freeze their embryos for later use. In 2018, which they now call “The Year of the Harvest,” they devoted themselves to producing and freezing as many viable embryos as possible.
IVF
In a 2018 Pew Research study, about half of college-educated adults said they’d undergone fertility treatment or knew someone who had. Getty
After five rounds of IVF, Simone heard Stephen Hsu talking about his company Genomic Prediction on a podcast. Preimplantation testing for chromosomal abnormalities like down syndrome and single-gene disorders like cystic fibrosis has become a relatively common step in the IVF process, but only recently have some practitioners begun to offer tests for more complex genetic traits. While full-blown genetic engineering through CRISPR or similar technology is banned in most countries, the field of preimplantation genetic screening is still unregulated by the US Food and Drug Administration.
The Collinses decided to embark on a sixth round of IVF to use the service. Though Genomic Prediction’s “LifeView” test officially offers risk scores only for 11 polygenic disorders — including schizophrenia and five types of cancer — they allowed the Collinses to access the raw genetic data for their own analysis.
Simone and Malcolm then took their data export to a company called SelfDecode, which typically runs tests on adult DNA samples, to analyze what the Collinses called “the fun stuff.”
Sitting on the couch, Simone pulled up a spreadsheet filled with red and green numbers. Each row represented one of their embryos from the sixth batch, and the columns a variety of relative risk factors, from obesity to heart disease to headaches. (The “relative” part means these scores can only compare each embryo’s risk to that of other individuals with different genetic constitutions, as opposed to “absolute” risk scores.)
The Collinses’ top priority was one of the most disputed categories: what they called “mental-performance-adjacent traits,” including stress, chronically low mood, brain fog, mood swings, fatigue, anxiety, and ADHD.
The tests they performed also provided a risk score for autism, a diagnosis Simone herself has received, which they decided not to take into account. Simone compared her autism to a “fine-tuned race car”: Even if she struggles with certain “real-world” situations, she said, “If I’m on the track and I have my pit crew and I have the perfect fuel—”
“—she can dramatically outcompete other people,” Malcolm said, finishing her sentence.
“I’m also really hesitant to select against any type of extreme mental peculiarity in a person,” he added. “Unless it has to do just with severe low function.”
With a large number of green columns and a score of 1.9, Embryo No. 3 — aka Titan Invictus (an experiment in nominative determinism) — was selected to become the Collinses’ third child.
Even with all that planning, the Collinses may not be striking genetic gold. The field of behavioral genetics, which assumes a connection between genes and character traits, is heavily contested — if not outright rejected for its dangerous societal implications. “It’s not clear how much genetics contributes to many of the things that they’re looking for,” Hank Greely, a Stanford Law professor who wrote “The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction,” told me.
Arguments that trace mental aptitude back to genetics are particularly controversial. Hsu, the Genomic Prediction cofounder, was forced to resign from his position at Michigan State University after the graduate-student union claimed Hsu believed “in innate biological differences between human populations, especially regarding intelligence.” (Hsu responded to these allegations by saying: “If the GEU made the claim in your quote, they misrepresented my beliefs. I am quite explicit in my writing and in interviews that we do not know whether there are genetic group differences in intelligence between different ancestry groups.”) Simone said two PGT-P startups planning to test for the “fun stuff” were fundraising in stealth mode because “they anticipate being essentially canceled as soon as they go public.”
The Collinses themselves have been called “hipster eugenicists” online, something Simone called “amazing” when I brought it to her attention.
Malcolm’s “going to want to make business cards that say ‘Simone and Malcolm Collins: Hipster Eugenicists,” she said with a laugh.
“It’s funny that people are so afraid of being accused of Nazism,” when they’re just improving their own embryos, Simone added, after noting that her Jewish grandmother escaped Nazi-occupied France. “I’m not eliminating people. I mean, I’m eliminating from my own genetic pool, but these are all only Malcolm and me.”
According to the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet, 183 of the world’s 195 countries are forecast to drop below the replacement rate of roughly 2.1 children per woman by 2100. Even nations like China and India, which have previously struggled with overpopulation, are looking at a sharp turnaround in the coming years.
Demographers have pushed back on population anxiety like Musk’s, pointing out that international migration from countries with growing populations will help stabilize global conditions. Others have argued that it is an actively harmful distraction from more pressing issues like the climate crisis and global inequality.
Crowded Salem street.
Demographers have pushed back on claims about population collapse, pointing to a growing global population that just reached 8 billion people. Ann Matica
Still, governments that fear the economic impacts of a top-heavy population pyramid, in which the old dramatically outnumber the young, have begun taking extreme measures. “Some countries are becoming less ambitious in ensuring universal access to family planning; some are restricting the right to abortion; some are banning sex education from school curricula; and some are propagating gender stereotypes that run counter to the empowerment and equality of women,” Michael Herrmann, a senior advisor on economics and demography at the United Nations Population Fund, wrote in the UN Chronicle on World Population Day.
And after decades of investors snubbing the so-called reproductive-health femtech market, the corporate world has taken note, too. Martín Varsavsky, a fertility entrepreneur who is a father of seven, told me that when he started in the space in 2016 after founding four unicorns in the telecom and renewable-energy industries, it was “very hard” to find investors. But now, as wealthy, career-oriented couples are waking up in their 30s and 40s and realizing it’s too late to realize their reproductive goals, investors — many of whom are in the same boat — are throwing cash at everything from IVF to artificial wombs.
Varsavsky’s latest venture, Gameto, which hopes to extend women’s fertility windows, has raised $40 million from investors like the XPrize cofounder Peter Diamandis, the Future Ventures founder Steve Jurvetson, and the 23andMe cofounder Anne Wojcicki. Conception, the company that hopes to create viable human eggs out of stem cells, has attracted the attention of Altman as well as top EA donors like the Recursion Pharmaceuticals cofounder Blake Borgeson and the Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn, a father of five.
“If our technology works,” the Conception cofounder Matt Krisiloff said, “it really will open the door to women being able to have children into their 40s and 50s comfortably.”
According to PitchBook data assembled for Insider, there were 138 VC deals in the US femtech space in 2021, up from 57 in 2016. This summer, rumors started to spread that Musk was looking at buying a large chain of fertility clinics, which he denied to the Financial Times.
The 20th century was about atoms and bits. The 21st century is about biology and babies.
Some investors see improved fertility technology as a key part of maintaining a competitive advantage in the global market. Delian Asparouhov, a principal at Founders Fund who has been an outspoken advocate of Genomic Prediction’s competitor Orchid, told The Times of London that his interest in the technology came from a desire to “beat China,” which he said was the biggest single threat to Western democracy.
“The 20th century was about atoms and bits,” one Genomic Prediction investor said. “The 21st century is about biology and babies.”
Simone and Malcolm weren’t particularly surprised to learn that, at 31, I have only one close friend with a baby. The median age for women having their first child passed 30 for the first time in 2019, according to the US Census Bureau, up from 27 in 1990.
The Collinses aren’t just worried that some people are waiting to have kids until later in life. They fear that cultural pressures, from the rise of dating apps and economic strains to the kind of nihilism embodied by China’s “last generation” meme, are convincing people that having children is a bad idea, period.
In 2021, a survey of young people in 10 countries found that among 16- to 25-year-olds, four in 10 feared having children because of climate-change anxieties. (A 2017 study found that each additional child in developed countries accounted for 58.6 metric tons of carbon a year, though that number doesn’t account for any future policy changes.) Pew Research conducted a 2021 survey that found that a growing share of adults were committing to remaining childless, citing reasons that include “the state of the world.”
The Collinses worry that the overlap between the types of people deciding not to have children with the part of the population that values things like gay rights, education for women, and climate activism — traits they believe are genetically coded — is so great that these values could ultimately disappear.
A lot of people assume that pronatalists want to ban abortion, but nearly all of the pronatalist supporters interviewed for this article identified themselves as “pro-choice.” In fact, IVF, which inevitably results in the destruction of fertilized embryos, could be under threat in a strict antiabortion society. The Collinses don’t expect — or even want — everyone in low-birth-rate countries to suddenly start having seven or more children. Instead, they see themselves as part of an elite subset of people responsible for growing their broods to offset all the Americans who will choose not to.
Malcolm and Simone Collins sit at a picnic table with their sons Octavian, 3, and Torsten, 1
Octavian and Torsten were born before PGT-P testing was available, but their parents hope to select future embryos using the emerging technology. Hannah Yoon for Insider
I asked what set their vision apart from Gilead, the totalitarian regime depicted in “The Handmaid’s Tale” that designates certain women as breeders.
“Gilead is what happens without a soft landing for demographic collapse!” Simone replied eagerly.
Still, many observers are troubled by the fact that pronatalists worry less about how many children people are having and more about who is having them.
“There is just kind of a whiff of eugenics in worrying about demographic shifts,” Torres said.
“I find the whole thing elitist,” Avey added.
Questions about class and bodily autonomy may be exacerbated by new fertility technologies. Demand for surrogate mothers, who are often low-income parents themselves, has skyrocketed in recent years, especially among the ultrawealthy. Last month, a company called Cofertility made headlines with its promises to make egg freezing accessible to those who can’t afford it — as long as the customer agrees to donate half of the eggs retrieved to paying families.
“Is there fair access to fertility treatments today in the United States? My answer would be no,” Varsavsky said. “But I would also say that there’s not even fair access to medicine in the United States.”
Gilead is what happens without a soft landing for demographic collapse!
Children from rich families have always enjoyed advantages, from high-quality healthcare and nutrition to expensive education and extracurricular activities. Now some worry that gatekeeping genetic-testing technologies will give the ultrawealthy yet another leg up before they’ve even left the womb.
“It’s in some ways the most brutal form of inequality that this guy’s going to be able to have 20 kids and actually 20 very, very healthy — as good as modern technology can make them — kids,” Hsu said. “Whereas other people can’t avail themselves of that.”
During our initial tour of the farmhouse, Simone pointed out one of its many peculiarities: the toilet tucked away in the corner of her office, where she muted herself during virtual meetings to secretly throw up during bouts of morning sickness. The Collinses said that some potential investors backed out of their search fund when they learned about their plans to have children. Determined to prove them wrong, she said, she even took sales calls during labor.
“She hates when people say you can’t have it all,” Malcolm told me.
I asked the couple whether they really believed their seemingly boundless energy was feasible for high-birth-rate parents on a wide scale. “I think it’s a mindset thing,” answered Simone, who has no plans to stop working as she grows her family, though she does intend to outsource a significant amount of childcare to both paid professionals and communal child-rearing strategies.
Once pronatalists reach critical mass, the Collinses hope, they can begin to shape society around their needs.
“You have to create cultures that reward” and have structures for large families, Simone explained. Pronatalist pet issues include everything from increasing housing development to changing laws around car-seat regulation (one study found that people would stop having children when they couldn’t fit any more car seats in their vehicle). During the coronavirus pandemic, the Collinses tried to raise money for a family-friendly “startup town” they called Project Eureka, where all community rules would be “ultimately set — all disputes resolved” by the Collinses.
When fundraising stalled, they redirected their focus to the Collins Institute for the Gifted, a specialized online lab school that is partnering with the Bari Weiss-cofounded University of Austin and the Thiel-backed 1517 Fund. (Musk similarly created a boutique education program, Ad Astra, for his family and employees’ children that has since expanded into the online school Astra Nova.)
The logic behind the Collins Institute reflects their thinking at large: “If you want to make the future better for everyone and you could choose to dramatically increase the educational outcomes of the bottom 10% of people or the top 0.1% of people,” the Collinses say to choose the 0.1%.
The Collinses also developed a system to track their family’s future progress called The Index. “We record how your kids do emotionally, how your kids do in terms of their career, and do your kids stay within the culture they were raised with,” Malcolm explained. He said he looked forward to watching his own children disagree with his parenting paradigm and expected them to be competitive enough to come up with their own. Then, 11 generations down the line, when the extended Collins family is the Earth’s (or Mars’) dominant culture, they’ll have hundreds of years’ worth of data to look back on and learn from.
A little over a month after my visit to Pennsylvania, Simone sent a series of updates on Titan’s birth, including a selfie from her hospital bed, newborn baby in her arms, wearing her signature immaculate red lipstick. She resumed her normal work schedule on the Monday after her Friday C-section, and nine months down the line, it will be time to queue up the next embryo transfer.
Simone Collins with her son Torsten
Simone Collins plans to keep working as she has more children (seven to 13 is the goal). “I think it’s a mindset thing,” she said. Hannah Yoon for Insider
She also weighed in on the stunning implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX, which represented one of the largest financial hubs for the effective-altruism movement. The Collinses, who never directly associated with the top Democratic donor Bankman-Fried, spied an opportunity in his demise.
“This means our faction (more conservative, pronatalist, long-termist-civilization-building-focused, likely to self fund) is now 100X more likely to become a real, dominant faction in the EA space,” Simone wrote in a text message on November 12.
The Collinses hope that advances in technology will keep pace with their growing family. The reproductive entrepreneurs who spoke with me seemed confident that the science would progress quickly. “I think we are reaching a point in which we are reinventing reproduction,” Varsavsky said.
If scientists at companies like Conception succeed in creating viable embryos out of stem cells, they could in theory produce a massive number of them. Combined with enhanced genetic screening, parents could pick the “optimal” baby from a much larger pool. “There’s a seductiveness to these ideas, because it’s very grand,” Torres said. “It’s about taking control of human evolution.”
As for Simone and Malcolm Collins, Malcolm said, “We’re trying to give our kids the best shot in life.” They just happen to believe that their kids’ best shot is also humanity’s.
Jesse Benton, a former top aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), was convicted Thursday of helping a Russian citizen illegally funnel a political donation to former President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Benton, 44, purchased a $25,000 ticket to a September 2016 Republican National Committee event for Trump and gave the ticket to Russian multilevel marketer Roman Vasilenko. Vasilenko then gave Benton $100,000.
Elections “reflect the values and the priorities and the beliefs of American citizens,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Parikh said at Benton’s trial this week. “Jesse Benton by his actions did damage to those principles.”
This is Benton’s second conviction for campaign finance violations. In May 2016, he was found guilty of illegally facilitating the transfer of $73,000 to an Iowa state senator in exchange for endorsing Ron Paul during his 2012 presidential bid. Trump pardoned Benton in December 2020, soon before leaving office.
Prosecutors indicted Benton and Doug Wead, a conservative evangelical pundit involved in multilevel marketing, in September 2021. Wead, who died later that year at age 75, was accused of connecting Vasilenko to Benton….
ravensays
From the pro-breeder article above which is full of fallacies, incorrect facts, and just plain craziness.
What these movements all have in common is a fixation on the future. And as that future starts to look more and more apocalyptic to some of the world’s wealthiest people, the idea of pronatalism starts to look more heroic. It’s a proposition uniquely suited to Silicon Valley’s brand of hubris: If humanity is on the brink, and they alone can save us, then they owe it to society to replicate themselves as many times as possible.
The world now has 8 billion people and is feeling the effects, from global warming to tens of millions of refugees in camps, energy shortages, etc..
So the pro-breeders solution to over population is…to have more kids.
FWIW, AFAICT, the genetically superior Collins in the article support their breeder project by scamming money from rich tech bros. Not impressed.
PM Shmyhal: Russian strikes disabled nearly half of Ukraine’s energy system.
According to Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, Ukraine needs support from European partners in the energy sector, such as the supply of additional equipment, and extra financial aid.
[…] Daily Kos and Civic Shout commissioned Civiqs to conduct a survey about how Democratic voters feel about unsolicited fundraising emails and texts. There is a whole lot for the DNC, the DSCC, the DCCC, and every candidate to learn from this. Number one: Stop it.
The survey was of self-identified Democrats and Independents who voted Democratic in the 2016 or 2020 presidential elections, asking about the unsolicited contacts. These voters are not fans, as John Nelson, CEO of Civic Shout, tweets.
Here’s a sample of what we heard from respondents about spam emails and texts:
“It makes me want to never donate again.” [Yep.]
“I did not vote for any of the candidates that were harassing me by email and text.”
“Extremely annoyed and less likely to donate or volunteer.”
That’s just a smattering of the responses. According to Civiqs director Drew Linzer, there’s much, much more like that. They also heard:
“It is very annoying and counterproductive to building meaningful relationships with voters, volunteers, and donors. Receiving messages on behalf of out of state candidates makes even less sense and should be generally abolished as a practice.”
“I find it very annoying and it makes it clear my email has been shared or sold without my permission. This reduces trust which is important with political candidates. It also makes me regret the donations that I have made.”
In other words, “Make it stop.” (It’s worth noting at this point that neither Daily Kos nor Act Blue will sell your email addresses when you donate through us. Don’t blame us for your inbox!)
Clear majorities of both independent voters (57% of them) and the critical group of all voters aged 18-34 (59%) agreed with this statement: “I get too many impersonal emails and text messages from Democratic campaigns that I never signed up for.” Out of the whole group of respondents, 60% said that Democratic campaigns should not be sending out emails and text messages to people who didn’t sign up for them. Just 18% of people are okay with that.
A big majority, 57%, said they got “a lot” of emails, and 46% said they didn’t sign up for them. One-third of them said that those emails were “mostly annoying,” 35% said they were “tolerable,” and only 14% found them helpful. Not as many said they got “a lot” of texts (36%), but 54% said they had never signed up to get them, and 32% found them “mostly annoying.”
Here’s a really troubling finding: 24% said have been demotivated by the cold contacts because getting involved in the campaign would just result in them receiving more unwanted emails and texts. They agreed with statement that ”There have been times when I have decided not to donate to or volunteer for a Democratic campaign because that just means I’ll get more emails and text messages.”
Campaigns might counter, “yeah, but it works.” Except for the response to this question: “Did you donate any money to a Democratic political campaign based on any emails or text messages that you received from Democratic groups in recent months?” More than two-thirds—68%—said “no.” Oh, and to reiterate what that one person said: “I did not vote for any of the candidates that were harassing me by email and text.”
Overwhelmingly voters said they wanted out: 57% of all of the surveyed voters said if there was a universal way to opt out of all these unsolicited contacts, they would use it; a full 72% of independents and 67% of 18- to 34-year-olds (the people who got Democrats elected this time around) said they would to stop receiving all political campaign emails and texts if they could.
The survey didn’t get into the content of the messages, the never-ending “DOOM” and “THE END IS NEAR” and “WE’RE IN CRISIS MODE” subject lines screaming across the internet to land in your inbox, multiple times. It would be helpful to see as well just how motivating—or not—that is. But based on conversations with all the people I know who follow campaigns closely and give money, they hate them.
[…] “If Democrats want to preserve their major advantage in grassroots online fundraising, they must stop spamming and scamming potential supporters.” […]
!!! “I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” “There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”
The America First Policy Institute, a think tank founded by Donald Trump’s allies, held an event yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, and Kari Lake, fresh off her defeat in Arizona’s gubernatorial race, was in attendance. The far-right Republican reportedly received a standing ovation.
whheydtsays
Re: Lynna, OM @ #75…
The nearest analog to unsolicited campaign contribution e-mail is unsolicited phone calls. The problem is that, even if your phone is on the Federal Do Not Call list, “surveys” (real or fake), political solicitation, and non-profit calls are all exempt. Because–of course–the people that write such laws aren’t about to cut off their access to try to get more money.
On top of all that, being on the Do Not Call list doesn’t stop the spammers and scammers. It doesn’t do much to slow down just plain business calls, either. Bluntly put, neither scammers nor local businesses pay any attention to Federal law and regulation in this area. So there’s no reason to expect that putting similar restrictions on e-mail would bar political campaign contacts nor have any real effect slowing down any of the crap that clutters our in boxes.
[…] you’ve probably heard about FTX (short for “Futures Exchange”) and its various connected companies crashing and burning in the marketplace. What does it all mean? To be completely honest, it is mostly crypto Ponzi scheme magic unfolding in real time. On Nov. 11, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (who is also known by the moniker “SBF”) announced he was stepping down and his crypto exchange was filing for bankruptcy. On Wednesday, FTX Digital Markets, based in the Bahamas, filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protections in New York. Chapter 15 is what you do when you want U.S. protections for a company that is “based” offshore.
FTX had been touted as,[…] “the most stable and responsible companies in the freewheeling, loosely regulated crypto industry.” In January it was valued at an estimated $32 billion. It turns out that this reputation was based on … nothing. It was based on magic. It has very quickly unfolded that the unregulated crypto exchange, with “digital assets” in a range between $10 billion and $50 billion,* was giving out billions in loans using customers’ money and just doing all sorts of (alleged) securities fraud, regular fraud, banking fraud, and wire fraud behavior.
However, conservatives (and Elon Musk) are seizing on the connections the Democratic Party had with SBF. Bankman-Fried was a big Democratic donator this past cycle. The now 30-year-old Bankman-Fried, who went from being worth about $17 billion to nothing in about a week, wasn’t the only person at the top of the FTX food chain giving money to politicians. His co-CEO, Ryan Salame, was donating at a pace that was neck and neck with SBF, except his donations went to conservatives.
In the beginning, FTX said that the company’s sudden plunge in stock numbers were the result of an old time-y run on the bank. Then the full extent of this rose-colored glasses “run on the bank” began to unfold. A timeline:
The largest U.S. crypto exchange, CoinDesk, published a report on Alameda Research (Bankman-Fried’s original FTX crypto trading firm) and its leaked balance sheet. This revealed that Alameda Research was wildly overleveraged by the FTT token issued by FTX itself. This is the equivalent of me telling you that I have tons of money in the bank and when you look at my vault, you see that the “money” I have are pictures of my cats with word bubbles saying “I.O.U purrr.”
FTX customers began trading off their digital assets and hitting FTX with a reported $5 billion in withdrawal requests, forcing the firm to pause customer withdrawals. FTX quickly realized it needed to find big investors.
Then the other crypto trade and exchange giant, Binance, announced that it would be getting out of the FTX token business. This led FTT token prices to beginning to drop exchange value ]…]
The following day, Binance announced it had reached a deal with its rival to buy out FTX. Twenty-four hours after that, Binance walked away from this deal, stating that “as a result of corporate due diligence, as well as the latest news reports regarding mishandled customer funds and alleged US agency investigations, we have decided that we will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX.com.”
Two days later, Alameda Research filed for bankruptcy. The Wall Street Journal reported that Bankman-Fried was telling his investors that Alameda Research owed FTX about $10 billion. By then, SBF had also resigned his position. Why did his one company owe this other company more than half of the other company’s supposed customers’ money? You don’t have to be a finance wizard to understand.
Bankman-Fried seems to have used most of his customers’ money (FTX) in order to cover loans his trading firm (Alameda Research) had received to gamble with but had lost.
The following day, reports came out that “between $1 billion and $2 billion in client money is unaccounted.”
Politico reports that some of that money being spread around Congress is being given back symbolically right now:
Campaigns for Reps. Chuy García (D-Ill.) and Kevin Hern (R-Okla.) have given local charities money equal to the amount they received from FTX leaders, according to their spokespeople.
But I thought this was a big Democratic Party money-laundering scam? Bankman-Fried reportedly funneled almost $40 million into Democratic Party hands through direct contributions and super PACs.
What has been lost in all of this is that is Salame served as co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets Ltd., hanging in the Bahamas with Bankman-Fried. Instead of showering Dems with money like SBF, Salame donated around $24 million to Republicans. Between the two men, their bases were covered. Anyway, as The Berkshire Eagle points out, Salame, just like Bankman-Fried, has some dubious finance questions to answer. One of the FTX units, FTV Trading Ltd., seems to have an outstanding loan with Salame of (checks notes) $55 million. Yeeghaaaad, man!
As of right now, Forbes reports that lawyers for the “liquidators” of FTX are battling between whether to allow the Chapter 15 filing for the Bahamas-based business to take place in Delaware or New York. FTX has turned over control of the bankruptcy of the company to John J. Ray III. If you remember that name, it’s because he was the same “restructuring specialist” who handled Enron’s collapse.
Is this the last you and I will speak about FTX? Probably not. Throw it on the Hunter Biden pile of investigations.
Quoting Marjorie Taylor Greene: We’re just finding out about the situation with FTX. Is American people’s tax dollars going to fund aid in Ukraine but it’s really funding something else
The sad part here is that there really is something here to investigate, and there is a very good chance that lots of elected politicians with red and blue badges have some skin in the game. Unfortunately, […] The crypto world is made up of a lot of Ponzi schemes. Some might argue there is no crypto market that isn’t a Ponzi scheme.
Nicholas Weaver is a senior staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute and lecturer in the computer science department at UC Berkeley. He has been very critical of cryptocurrencies. During an interview in May, he said the last decade with unregulated cryptocurrency markets open to the world has been like “speed-running 500 years of financial history” with booms and busts and every example of why regulatory markets were adopted in our financial market in the first place.
The fact of the matter is that there is a good chance more crypto exchanges and trading firms will go down in flames with the failure of FTX. How deep FTX’s penetration is into the market on the whole remains to be seen, and what will come of this in regards to oversight also remains to be seen. It is a big fish going down, and there will be all kinds of waves.
Cryptocurrency lender Genesis was seeking an emergency loan of $1 billion from investors, per WSJ.
[…]
The Securities Commission of The Bahamas reportedly now controls of all FTX digital assets.
For the first time in 12 years, Democrats will control the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, capping a very nice election indeed for Democrats in the state—Gov-elect Josh Shapiro, Sen-elect John Fetterman, and now this flip. This was a massive come-from-behind win that saw Democrats flip an incredible 12 seats.
As a result, Pennsylvania will have its first Black woman House speaker, Joanna McClinton, and it will be almost impossible for Trump (or DeSantis, or whatever cheater they come up with) to try to steal its electoral votes in 2024. […]
Thanks to a flip of the state Supreme Court to Democrats several years ago, this election was run on a new, fair map.
This is the second major win of an important swing state. Michigan had new fair maps for this election as well. Democrats needed to flip just three seats to get the House and ended up taking the whole damn government.
It came down to the wire—just two seats in the Philadelphia suburbs. Democrats needed to win one of them for control—and on Thursday, they got it. Democrat Melissa Cerrato ended up 59 votes ahead of incumbent Republican Rep. Todd Stephens in one race. Stephens conceded on Thursday. […]
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has established a subcommittee to craft possible criminal referrals and examine “all outstanding issues” facing the panel as it races a deadline to complete its work. […]
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) is leading the subcommittee, serving alongside Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.).
“We’re looking at potential referrals or criminal offenses and for civil offenses and for general lawlessness where it might not otherwise be obvious,” Raskin said.
“We’re looking at criminal and civil referrals for people who have broken the law and may have escaped scrutiny,” he added, declining to answer questions seeking greater specificity.
Poland will not grant a Russian delegation visas to attend an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (Osce) meeting in Lodz on 1-2 December, a foreign ministry spokesman said on Friday.
“We are not giving them visas,” Lukasz Jasina said.
In an important victory for educators’ rights to teach free from censorship and discrimination, a federal judge issued an order that will immediately block members of the Florida Board of Governors from enforcing Florida’s HB 7 — also known as the Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees (“Stop W.O.K.E. Act) in public higher education institutions. The order granted a preliminary injunction to six plaintiffs in Pernell v. Florida Board of Governors, a lawsuit filed by a multi-racial group of educators and a student in Florida colleges and universities challenging the discriminatory classroom censorship law that severely restricts Florida educators and students from learning and talking about issues related to race and gender.
The court order found the Stop W.O.K.E. Act violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The judge found, “The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints. Defendants argue that, under this Act, professors enjoy ‘academic freedom’ so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves. This is positively dystopian. It should go without saying that ‘[i]f liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’”
[…]
Rather than allow important issues around race and gender discrimination to be explored in public education, Florida lawmakers — working together with Gov. DeSantis — have moved to impose their own viewpoints in state higher education through the Stop W.O.K.E. Act. The law prohibits educators from expressing viewpoints around racism and sexism that are disfavored by Florida lawmakers, even where those viewpoints are widely accepted and considered foundational information in their academic disciplines. The law specifically targets and places vague restrictions on educators’ ability to teach and discuss concepts around the legacy of slavery in America, white privilege, and anti-racism.
[…]
The preliminary injunction will immediately block members of the Boards of Governors from enforcing the law against public higher education institutions in Florida. And in separate litigation, Judge Walker blocked the law’s application to Florida employers. However, K-12 schools are still being impacted by this classroom censorship law. The preliminary victory in the case could bolster similar challenges to classroom censorship efforts in other states.
Three years ago, it seemed as if Donald Trump had tweeted classified intelligence about Iran. There’s now fresh evidence that he did exactly that.
Three years ago, Iranian officials tried and failed to launch a purported satellite, prompting Donald Trump to publish a tweet insisting the United States was not involved in the incident. The point of the then-president’s tweet wasn’t altogether clear, though by most measures, the Republican simply seemed eager to taunt Tehran.
[…] Trump’s tweet didn’t just feature text; it also included a detailed photo of the Iranian launch pad. As MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported at the time, it wasn’t long before observers started wondering whether Trump had publicly released classified material.
Three years later, the answer has come into focus. NPR reported:
[A]erospace experts quickly determined it was photographed using one of America’s most prized intelligence assets: a classified spacecraft called USA 224 that is widely believed to be a multibillion-dollar KH-11 reconnaissance satellite. Now, three years after Trump’s tweet, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has formally declassified the original image.
[…] declassification came as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request by NPR, and followed “a grueling Pentagon-wide review to determine whether the briefing slide it came from could be shared with the public.”
At issue is a striking series of events. On Aug. 29, an Iranian rocket exploded at a launch site deep within the country. One day later, the then-American president shared an incredibly detailed image with the world.
Many assumed it was a classified reconnaissance photograph. Based on NPR’s findings, we now know it was.
The point is not that Trump did something illegal. He suggested at the time that he’d declassified the image, and while in office, he had the authority to do so.
Rather, the point is that the Republican president was careless to the point of recklessness — for no apparent reason and with no apparent benefit for his own country — with sensitive, classified information.
Steven Aftergood, a specialist in secrecy and classification at the Federation of American Scientists, told NPR, “He was getting literally a bird’s eye view of some of the most sensitive U.S. intelligence on Iran. And the first thing he seemed to want to do was to blurt it out over Twitter.”
If this were an isolated incident, it would still be embarrassing and highly controversial. After all, American presidents aren’t supposed to be irresponsible with classified intelligence.
But what makes a story like this vastly worse is that it’s part of a pattern: Trump mishandled national secrets with such frequency that I put together a Top 10 list a couple of years ago, highlighting the most dramatic examples.
And that was before we knew about [Trump’s] willingness to bring classified materials to his unsecured glorified country club.
The entire point of the Hillary Clinton email “controversy” in 2016 was that the Democrat had been irresponsible with sensitive information, and she therefore couldn’t be trusted. Six years later, where are the GOP hysterics about Trump repeatedly blurting out secrets?
What’s more, now that the former president is on the comeback trail, how confident can the public be about his ability to keep classified intelligence secret, given how frequently he’s done the opposite?
I was really hoping that Boebert would lose. She came closer to losing than was expected, but still she won the race for Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District.
[…] In a video call with reporters, Frisch said that he had called Boebert to offer his concession. He said that while the race appeared to be headed for a mandatory recount, “the likelihood of this recount changing more than a handful of votes is very small.”
“We are not asking for this recount. It is one that the citizens of Colorado mandate through our election system,” he said, telling supporters not to donate to his campaign for the recount effort.
“Please save your money for your groceries, your rent, your children,” he said.
Now that’s a graceful concession announcement.
tomhsays
Re: #89 Frisch concedes
This is very irritating. State law mandates an automatic recount, so the recount will happen, concession or not. What if he wins the recount? And why would his supporters donate to his compaign for the recount, when his campaign has nothing to do with it. All in all, he just looks dumb over this concession.
And he couldn’t help throwing into his speech, “Democrats have abandoned rural America and working class America for the last many years,” he said.
[…] A senior Justice Department official confirmed to NBC News that the special counsel will examine both the former president’s Mar-a-Lago scandal and “key aspects” of the federal investigation into Jan. 6.
This will be the second special counsel investigation Trump has faced, following Robert Mueller’s appointment to oversee the probe into the Russia scandal.
Other American presidents have faced criminal investigations, but Trump has broken new ground by facing multiple criminal investigations.
Today’s news is striking, though not entirely unexpected: The New York Times reported two weeks ago that federal prosecutors have been “compiling evidence and case law that could be used to frame a memo that would be the basis for any prosecution” against the former president, adding that the Justice Department was “considering appointing a special counsel to oversee investigations of him if he runs again.”
Eleven days later, the Republican launched his 2024 candidacy.
This has been a logistics war, and when I say that, I mean it’s been an artillery war.
Logistics is about moving troops, food, water, fuel, lubricants, ammunition, weapons, spare parts, and everything else needed to fight a war to the front lines. How do you fight a logistics war? By stopping those supplies from moving. How do you stop those supplies from moving? You disrupt supply lines—by destroying supply depots, trucks, rail lines, and bridges. And how do you do that? Well, it depends.
If you’re NATO, you use air power. You first suppress enemy air defenses, air bases, and aircraft. Then you systematically degrade those logistical targets.
If you’re Russia, you … you don’t. Other than some random railhead strikes here and there, Russia inexplicably prefers to blow up playgrounds and apartment buildings rather than suppress Ukraine’s ability to move supplies to the front.
And if you’re Ukraine, devoid of significant air power? You use artillery. The arrival of HIMARS/MLRS longer-range rocket artillery dramatically changed the trajectory of the war, creating the conditions that allowed the stunning success of the battles of Kharkiv and Kherson. That meant destroying ammunition dumps, key bridges, and disabling rail transport within 80 kilometers of the front. Russia struggles with truck logistics at anything past 25 kilometers from a railhead.
But HIMARS/MLRS isn’t Ukraine’s only long-range option. Its extended-range precision guided tube-artillery munitions can hit 40-50 kilometers from the front lines. French Caesars self-propelled artillery guns can hit that range with regular artillery shells. Most of Russia’s artillery tops out at around 25 kilometers. (They have longer range stuff, but in smaller quantities.)
Just as the debate over the future of the tank rages, there will be new debates over the role of air power in a future battlefield. Why maintain horrifically expensive fighter-bomber jets when much-cheaper HIMARS/MLRS and drones can perform much of the same tasks? An F-35 jet, the most advanced warplane in the world and what most of NATO is transitioning to, costs around $78 million a copy and costs $33,000 per hour to fly. Factoring in logistical costs like spare parts and maintenance facilities, the actual per-unit cost is around $110 million per plane, with a lifetime cost estimated at three times that amount, or $1.27 trillion dollars by 2036 for the U.S. fleet.
Suddenly, the HIMARS per-unit cost of $4 million seems like the biggest bargain in the entire Pentagon’s budget. Maintenance is infinitely cheaper. And yes, ammunition is expensive, but those F-35s are firing their own expensive precision-guided munitions. Still, I don’t mean to get into that debate. It’s a complex one, and it’s academic to Ukraine. It doesn’t have many aircraft, so it has managed to effectively replace air power, in NATO combined-arms doctrine, with its expert use of artillery.
Here’s the problem: NATO artillery isn’t designed to be pushed as hard as Ukraine has pushed it. For the West, artillery supplements airpower. For Ukraine, artillery is the whole ballgame. And this has consequences. [Tweet and image at the link]
The PzH 2000 is one of the best artillery systems in the world, yet it has been pushed to its operational limit, knocking the whole fleet out of commission. Lithuania has offered to repair it, but there is little indication that they have the spare parts that Germany is scrambling to find. I’ve made this point numerous times: The real challenge with war equipment isn’t the initial cost or training for its operation, it’s keeping spare parts flowing and training the maintenance crew. That’s why the West has been reluctant to deliver Western tanks and aircraft. What good is it if it’s all sitting in repair yards?
Meanwhile, Russia understands the importance of these artillery pieces and knows their limited supply in the West. [Tweet and video at the link]
That’s the first confirmed hit of a French Caesar. The Oryx database of confirmed equipment losses also lists 20 American M777 howitzers destroyed (of 142 delivered). M777s are towed howitzers, thus less mobile and more vulnerable to Russian counterbattery fire and drones. Three of 18 Polish Krab self-propelled artillery guns delivered have also been destroyed. There is definite attrition, both logistically and militarily.
Earlier in the war, Slovakia set up depots to service and maintain Ukrainian equipment in a safe location, away from possible harm. War takes a severe toll on all equipment, but modern western gear, dependent on complex electronics, is even more severely impacted. This makes it more important that Ukraine get additional artillery units (France is sending more Caesars, new Krabs are delivered regularly, and don’t be surprised if the U.S. preps a new batch for delivery), as well as longer-range HIMARS/MLRS ammo. And understand that while we all want Ukraine to get even more Western gear, the PzH 2000 challenges shows us why it’s so difficult to send the most modern gear.
P.S. A “logistics war” is also an artillery war the other way around—feeding artillery batteries puts an extremely heavy load on a logistics chain. Russia reportedly fires over 20,000 artillery shells per day. (Ukraine, sporting more accurate Western guns and precision-guided rounds, doesn’t need to fire as many to get the same effect, but it’s still in the high-four-figures, low five-figures per day.) Indeed, Russia retreated from Kherson when its compromised logistics couldn’t feed its guns.
[Tweets, images and maps at the link, with some showing the Ukrainian railway system.]
I really don’t understand why Russia always has that calendar guy helping Ukraine gauge the effectiveness of its strikes (“battle damage assessment”). It’s hilarious. Anyway, note just how accurate those rocket strikes were. Some of the rockets landed dead-center on the tracks, centered over bridges, making them that much harder to repair.
The map is also helpful as it shows how that rail junction cuts off an entire logistics line from Russia. If Ukraine can cut Russia’s lines from Belgorod in the north by liberating both Svatove and Starobilsk, and if Crimea remains cut off, Russia will be forced to shift all of its supply lines to that eastern approach. Ukraine just demonstrated how it can easily degrade those lines.
With the Kherson front now dormant, both sides are rushing those freed-up forces to the Donbas, to both the Bakhmut and Pavlivka directions. This rail line likely supplies both approaches. Much like Ukraine did in Kharkiv and Kherson, they are now “shaping the battlefield” in southeastern Donbas to finally quell Russian ambitions on that front once and for all.
Snow has arrived in Ukraine. [Tweet and video at the link]
That’s some slushy-ass mess, making it hard to move outside of roads. And roads are easy to target with artillery and ambushes. Ukraine is eager for that ground to hard-freeze, though snow can act as an insulator and delay that freeze.
I’m this close to starting regular coverage of the Iranian protest movement. Time is the challenge, as with everything, but I’m so inspired by it that I feel that it would be warranted. Wouldn’t be daily, but maybe several times a week. I’ll likely test it out next week.
[Tweets and images of Ukrainians who supported the Kherson underground, risking their lives.]
I’m really rooting for Twitter to survive despite all of Elon Musk’s sabotage because it’s easily the most effective way to tell stories such as this one. Lilya “hung yellow ribbons in Kherson when Russians patrolled the city and gathered a team of like-minded people, painted graffiti, pasted leaflets and passed information to the Defense Forces of Ukraine.” A resistance fighter doesn’t always look like you might expect. “Evorog bot” is an app Ukrainians in occupied territories can use to report on Russian troop movements.
Attorney General Merrick Garland is appointing longtime Justice Department prosecutor Jack Smith as special counsel to oversee investigations into former President Donald Trump.
His probes will center on the retention of national defense information at former Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and parts of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Garland described Smith as a veteran attorney who began a decades-long prosecutorial career in New York in the mid-1990s. He is a former acting US attorney in Tennessee and once led the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, which handles election crimes and public corruption investigations.
Most recently, Smith served as a chief prosecutor for the special court in The Hague, where he investigated and adjudicated war crimes in Kosovo.
Smith will begin his work as special counsel immediately and will return to the United States soon from The Hague, Garland said.
The attorney general said Smith has “built a reputation as an impartial and determined prosecutor, who leads teams with energy and focus to follow the facts wherever they lead.”
Garland added that Smith will have independent prosecutorial judgment to decide whether charges should be brought in either investigation.
“Lock Trump up.” That is what was spray painted across a homeowner’s garage and lawn in Collier County. The culprit was caught on surveillance video…
They wonder why people with different opinions can’t just get along…
They are Trump supporters, and they don’t understand why people can’t just get along?
snarkratessays
Lynna@89 It is disappointing that Frisch has conceded to Insurrectionist Barbie. However, we can take heart that this will make the Shitshow that will be the 118th Congress all that much more of a flaming shitshow. It makes me feel almost sorry for Kevin McCarthy…almost.
[…] Some are arguing that this is a clear cut case of holding criminals accountable. There is no reasonable argument that Merrick Garland is letting politics to guide his decision. We should dispense with the knee jerk response that everything has to be turned over to an outside person. The public chose Joe Biden as President. Biden chose a deeply apolitical former Judge to serve as AG. There’s no issue here that needs to be resolved. Mostly I agree with that argument. But I also don’t think going down this path is a problem. If you are choosing to indict a former President it shouldn’t be a close call. I feel confident that Jack Smith, who I don’t think I’d heard of before today, will make the right call on the law. From what I’ve seen of the Mar-a-Lago investigation so far, I doubt that will be a decision Donald Trump is happy with.
Notably, Garland seemed clear that these investigations are on-going. Smith is not being called in to start from scratch or start these probes over. He’s being brought in to bring them to a conclusion. I see no reason to believe this will slow anything down.
I see others arguing that this is the prosecutorial equivalent of appointing a blue ribbon commission, a pomp and circumstance way to make the issue go away. I don’t buy that. That’s not how special prosecutors operate – if anything the opposite, and sometimes to a fault. I just don’t buy that. It’s also a nice touch that Garland chose a guy who in recent years has focused on prosecuting international outlaws and war criminals.
If you’re one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, as I interpret this, this is bad news.
I have less of a read of the Jan 6th investigation. But with the Mar-a-Lago case there has always hung over the probe the idea that it might really be more of an administrative exercise – not so much an effort to indict anyone but mainly one to recover the government’s documents and secrets. That’s not what this looks like. You don’t appoint a special prosecutor for a case that’s wrapping up without indictments or for one that is not on a path to one.
What I think this tells us is that these investigations are being conducted on a path toward and with the assumption of eventual indictments. By that I don’t mean that a final decision has been made or that indictments will definitely happen. But it’s that kind of investigation. Trump is the target. He’s being investigated for serious federal crimes. You make this kind of appointment because you think that that is where this is going and you want an outside prosecutor to come up to speed on the investigation, bring it to a conclusion and make that final call. I don’t see how any of that is good news for Donald Trump.
Here’s a steaming pile from evangelical commentator/journalist/author Mike Evans, who was one of several prominent evangelicals who worked to put the orange stain in the oval office.
“He used us to win the White House. We had to close our mouths and eyes when he said things that horrified us. I cannot do that anymore.”
Not anymore, huh, Mike? Not anymore? After how many years of p*ssy grabbing, grifting, mocking the disabled, racism, taking children from their parents and putting them in cages and generally punching down on “the least of my brothers” at every opportunity — NOW you’ve had enough?
Ummmm, no. Just no.
You didn’t have to close your mouths and eyes. You chose to.
If evangelicals were willing to accept all of that which is awful about Trump (and which so obviously and blatantly contradicts even the most narrow understanding of the take-home message of the Christian faith), they weren’t used.
The Biden administration filed an appeal today to the Supreme Court asking that it cut the malarkey and reinstate President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. The program was put on hold Monday by an injunction from the Eighth US Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis. […]
In the new case sent to the Supremes, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said the hold on the loan program
leaves millions of economically vulnerable borrowers in limbo, uncertain about the size of their debt and unable to make financial decisions with an accurate understanding of their future repayment obligations.
And then probably some 23-year-old intern from the Federalist Society glanced up and muttered “if they wanted to plan for the future, they should have made more responsible decisions, like I did when I got into Yale as a legacy.” Then he went back to working on the crossword […]
NBC News explains the case involves claims brought against the loan forgiveness program by Republican attorneys general in six states; the lawsuit had initially been dismissed in federal court when the judge ruled the states didn’t have standing to sue, because they weren’t harmed by the program. The appeals court then
disagreed, focusing on a Missouri agency that services federal student loans. The state argues that the agency would lose revenue if loans are forgiven.
See? A completely ruinous program, if you squint just right. The big problem in challenges to the loan forgiveness program has been finding anyone who can credibly claim to be harmed by someone else having their debts forgiven, but rightwing foundations and law firms are nothing if not enterprising in scraping up plaintiffs if there’s a chance to wreck a popular federal program.
The Biden administration has temporarily stopped taking applications for debt forgiveness while the cases work their ways through various courts. The plaintiffs in the six-state case say Biden lacked the authority to direct the federal Department of Education to forgive loans without Congress passing a law to spend the money. Should the Supremes decide that the plaintiffs do have standing, it seems likely they’ll be all pissy about the lack of congressional authorization, and the administration might well be smacked upside the head by an appeal to the power of the purse.
Besides, only Republican presidents have unlimited executive authority, as established in the landmark case Obvious Straw Man v Exhausted Blogger Who Should Know Better […]
In conclusion, just wait’ll you see what we come up with about Hunter Biden’s laptop, man.
And he couldn’t help throwing into his speech, “Democrats have abandoned rural America and working class America for the last many years,” he said.
Oh! And just what does he suggest we do to get back in the good graces of the inbred hicks and the blue collar slobs? Which marginalized group would he have us throw under the bus? Nonwhites? Women? LGBTQ people? Atheists–Oh, that’s a good scapegoat. Conservatives and liberals both hate us!
As the Amazon rainforest goes dry, a desperate wait for water
In her 60 years of life in the Amazon, Antonia Franco dos Santos has never had much money. Food was sometimes scarce. But never in the forest, with its heavy rains and endless rivers, had she known a life without water — not until she moved to this city along the southern crest, where her reserves are now down to the last gallon and the deliveryman is nowhere to be seen.
“He’ll come,” Franco says, looking into the distance. “He will.”
It hasn’t rained in more than a month, and probably won’t for another. The community pond that Franco and her neighbors used during the rainy season has dried to a muddy puddle. A water hole they’ve dug in desperation hasn’t conserved a drop. And inside her wooden shack this Monday morning is a stack of dishes, unwashed; a pile of clothes, unwashed; and an infant great-grandchild named Samuel. He needs a washing, too.
For Franco, this makes three drought-racked years in a row, living in a landscape she never imagined: an Amazon gone dry.
“I have to hope,” she says, glancing down at her mismatched socks. “Today will be different. Enough water will come.”
For years, scientists have been warning that the Amazon is speeding toward a tipping point — the moment when deforestation and global warming would trigger an irreversible cascade of climatic forces, killing large swaths of what remained. If somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of the forest were lost, models suggested, much of the Amazon would perish.
About 18 percent of the rainforest is now gone, and the evidence increasingly supports the warnings. Whether or not the tipping point has arrived — and some scientists think it has — the Amazon is beginning to collapse.
More than three-quarters of the rainforest, research indicates, is showing signs of lost resilience. In fire-scorched areas of the Rio Negro floodplains, one research group noted a “drastic ecosystem shift” that has reduced jungle to savanna. In the southeastern Amazon, which has been assaulted by rapacious cattle ranching, trees are dying off and being pushed aside by species better acclimated to drier climes. In the southwestern Amazon, fast-growing bamboo is overtaking lands ravaged by fire and drought. And in the devastated transitional forests of Mato Grosso state, researchers believe a local tipping point is imminent. [maps and images of local residents are available at the link]
The rainforest has never been closer to what scientists predict would be a global calamity. Because it stores an estimated 123 billion tons of carbon, the Amazon is seen as vital to forestalling catastrophic global warming. But during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, who supports its development, deforestation has risen to a 15-year high. Parts of the forest now emit more carbon than they absorb. If the rest follows, the impact will be felt all over the world.
The stakes are highest in the forest itself, where millions of people are for the first time reckoning with a hotter, smokier and drier Amazon. Strange sights are being reported: Wells that have gone dry. Streams that have vanished. The arrival of the maned wolf, a species native to South American savannas. Even a scourge familiar elsewhere in Brazil but not here: thirst.
One place in its stranglehold is the remote city of Rio Branco in Acre state, where scientists fear that the climate has already changed. Every rainy season seems to bring floods, when the rivers swell with runoff once caught by the forest. And nearly every dry season ushers in a drought, when a growing number of people are forced to choose between using dirty water or none at all.
The impact on public health is already apparent, particularly among the young. Acre state was struck by an outbreak of acute diarrhea last year that killed two children, and cases surged again this year. Smoke from rampant forest fires has so polluted Rio Branco’s air that dozens of people are sent to hospitals every dry season with respiratory illnesses. […]
Water cycles through the biome, to be used and reused. The trees, with deep root systems, drink up rainwater, then secrete the moisture into the atmosphere. Easterly winds from the Atlantic then carry it farther inland, where it forms into rain and the process repeats. A single water molecule can be recycled up to six times.
[…] “Cascading tipping events” is how one research team this year described it.
Rio Branco, the Acre state capital, is particularly vulnerable to this sequence. Distant from the Atlantic, dependent on recycled rain, it also sits at the western edge of the arc of deforestation, where three-fourths of the Brazilian Amazon’s losses are concentrated. Over the past four decades in Acre, the mean monthly precipitation from June through August — the height of the dry season — has dropped by nearly a third, Utrecht University researcher Arie Staal found. In Rio Branco, it has plunged to a deeper low, from 2.2 inches to 1.4 inches.
“No other region is more affected by the arc of deforestation than the southwest,” climate scientist Bernardo Flores said. “We see it already happening: Deforestation is depriving the forest of rain.”
The effect is local as well. When Rio Branco knocked down much of its forest, it killed about 200 sources of water that fed the city’s central artery, the Acre River. In the coming decades, if trends continue, the river will dip so low that “not even sewer runoff will go down it,” said Claudemir Mesquita, a former state environmental official. “It’s an atomic bomb, and it’s armed.” […]
Tom Brady and ex-wife Gisele Bündchen’s…
But despite such impressive wealth, the couple’s nonprofit the Luz Foundation managed to squeeze out less than 0.1% of their worth to charity between the years 2007 and 2019.
“My life is devoted to this,” Bündchen told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2015 regarding the foundation that executed a whopping $300 donation to a Costa Rican environmental group in 2018…
The majority of donations in that decade were to yoga and meditation groups, including a $25,000 donation to the David Lynch Foundation in 2017…
After Americans voted in favor of abortion rights in five state ballot measures during the midterm elections—and in another state earlier this year—activists want to put the issue directly in front of even more voters…
n Thursday, in allegedly unrelated news, Ohio Republicans announced that they want to make it harder to pass ballot initiatives. Currently, ballot measures need 50 percent of the vote to pass, but Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state Rep. Brian Stewart want to up that to 60 percent. In a press conference, LaRose said the proposed change would make it harder for “special interest groups” to influence changes to the state constitution…
A federal judge on Friday sentenced disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes to more than 11 years in prison for duping investors in the failed startup that promised to revolutionize blood testing but instead made her a symbol of Silicon Valley’s culture of audacious self-promotion.
[…] Holmes, who was CEO throughout the company’s turbulent 15-year history, was convicted in January in the scheme, which revolved around the company’s claims to have developed a medical device that could detect a multitude of diseases and conditions from a few drops of blood. But the technology never worked.
While wooing investors, Holmes leveraged a high-powered Theranos board that included former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who testified against her during her trial, and two former secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and the late George Shultz, whose son submitted a statement blasting Holmes for concocting a scheme that played Shultz “for the fool.”
Holmes must report to prison on April 27. After giving birth to a son shortly before her trial started last year, she became pregnant at some point while free on bail this year.
[…] According to a 2016 survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than half of women entering federal prison — 58% — reported being mothers of minor children.
Federal prosecutor Robert Leach declared that Holmes deserves a severe punishment for engineering a scam that he described as one of the most egregious white-collar crimes ever committed in Silicon Valley. […]
Luna, from Kingsthorpe village near Northampton, won the 10th annual event, run by Wicksteed Park in Kettering.
Entrants who submitted videos were scored on criteria including jumping ability, enthusiasm and splashing distance.
ravensays
@ 90
And he couldn’t help throwing into his speech, “Democrats have abandoned rural America and working class America for the last many years,” he said.
How so?
What does this even mean?
Examples?
I’ve got news for this guy.
The GOP has also abandoned rural American and working class Americans for many…decades.
These are the people who always beat up on the lower income segments. To note just one example, the GOP has voted against expanding Medicaid to 11 Red states.
Unless you consider persecuting Trans kids and sucking up to the Russians as helping rural people.
You could make a better argument that the Democrats have done more for rural people and the working classes than the GOP by a huge amount.
Ukraine’s military targets Russian concentration of troops, equipment in Ukraine’s south.
Southern Operational Command reported that Ukraine’s military killed 26 Russian troops and destroyed two tanks near Oleshky, Kherson Oblast.
The Ukrainian army also struck the Russian concentration of military equipment and personnel near Kinburnska spit in Mykolaiv Oblast, killing seven Russian troops and destroying two armored vehicles.
…Prior to Israel and Lisbon, another vegan pop-up occured at a Burger King location in Bristol, United Kingdom from October 26 to November 6—the second such pop-up to occur in the UK this year.
In Bristol, Burger King served up 24 plant-based versions of classic menu items, including a big innovation: the Bakon King. This burger is made with vegan bacon by La Vie, a Parisian startup backed by vegan actress Natalie Portman. The vegan bacon first made an appearance at Burger King locations in France in March.
…
Vegan fast-food revolution underway
Burger King is embracing plant-based options more widely and quickly than its competitors, including McDonald’s—which is currently working on its McPlant platform with launches of a meatless burger in several countries. And while international fast-food chains are slowly updating menus to include more plant-based options, a fast-food revolution is already underway courtesy of existing vegan chains….
The wrongness isn’t in saying “the Democrats have abandoned rural America and working class America”, it’s in the unspoken addition — which he may or may not have intended, but you very clearly added, yourself, “in favor of minorities”. In truth, Democrats abandoned their entire base when the Clintons took over back in the 90s, and have been running on nostalgia ever since.
Somewhere in the comments on this very board, but buried a few years back, you can find an anecdote about how, when southern Illinois — reliably a blue state, remember — flooded in 1993, the local governments were begging for help. The Democrats sent out a bunch of Clinton cronies who sneered at the local people, decided not to fund aid, and joked about how maybe they should permanently submerge the area to have a place to sail their yachts.
“Oh, but that’s just an anecdote, not data!” you cry. It was noticeable at all levels — I’m an urbanite myself, always have been, but I know that small farmers used to be a key Democratic demographic. Rural Democratic House members would keep lists of stuff they had passed in each session so that if they were asked “why should I vote for you?” by their constituents they could have a physical list ready — farm aid, adjustments to tax policy, strong regulation on corporate farming operations, you name it. When the Clintons and the DLC took over the DNC, all those candidates lost the support of the national and state parties, got primaried out, and all the policies they have championed stopped. If you want to know why rural people were susceptible to right-wing hate radio, it is because the Democrats had already kicked them to the curb, and they knew it. Portraying them as somehow ungrateful for failing to support a party which — as you so amply demonstrate in your phrasing — actively hates them.
The same goes for the working class. The Rust Belt hates the Clintons quite justly for being the ones to push NAFTA through after Bush couldn’t get Congress to ratify it, destroying all the factory jobs. (It also helped alienate rural voters again, because NAFTA was hugely advantageous to multinational agrocorps.) Then Clinton let the big-L Libertarian Alan Greenspan dictate economic policy, which destroyed savings and pushed people into the high-risk stock market. At every turn, Clinton — and, later, Obama — screwed over the actual workers in favor of the rich. (Obama saved Ford! …except that he bailed out their management while using federal authority to override union-negotiated contracts and lower salaries and destroy benefits for the actual workers. Obama cleaned up the economic meltdown! …except that he bailed out the banks who issued bad mortgages and predatory credit cards, and left the homeowner citizens and credit card debtors in debt.)
And then the party had the unmitigated gall to nominate first Hillary Clinton, a relic of the Clinton years that screwed everyone over, and then Joe Biden, a creature of the banking industry who was literally responsible for turning student loan debt from a “problem” into a “crisis” (before his 2005 bankruptcy bill, if you couldn’t pay your student loans you could declare bankruptcy and have them cleared — more or less at the same time, Biden’s son Hunter got a very well-paying consultancy with MBNA for which he was dubiously qualified; if you keep telling yourself it wasn’t a bribe, maybe someday you’ll believe it).
And it isn’t just the rural voters and the working class who are getting screwed. Obama actually made a campaign promise in 2008 to encode abortion access into law — you might have noticed that the Democrats didn’t do that, although they sure like to pretend that it’s a top priority. We’re supposed to think that Trump was worse for immigrants than Obama, but at no point during his 4 years in office did Trump manage to equal the number of immigrants detained or deported that Obama had reached at the equivalent point in his first 4 years. Congressional Democrats took a knee for Black Lives Matter — but passed no laws to help them, budgeted no money to relieve the desperate, and then nominated Joe “Piggy’s Best Friend” Biden, who has increased annual federal funding for cops, regardless of violence, by more than $30 billion. (And that’s not to mention that the really bad racial violence by police keeps happening in cities where the mayor and city council — and usually the state legislature and governor — are Democratic, too: Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis…)
The Democrats are running on people’s vague recollection that at some time in the past, Democrats did good things, plus the impassioned “we’re not the Republicans!!!!!” we keep hearing. And, as they are rapidly showing as you read this, every time they squeak through another election, they immediately turn around and announce they aren’t even going to bother with a symbolic attempt to carry out the promises they made while campaigning. Fuck them all, and fuck all their apologists. The Republicans are evil. The Democrats, by destroying any chance for real opposition to Republicans to operate, are arguably worse.
ravensays
This article is from CEPA, the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington DC think tank.
The amount of money we are spending on Ukraine, $77 billion for 2022, is low for what we are getting back in returns.
We spent $2.3 trillion on Afghanistan and have almost nothing to show for it.
Of course, Ukraine is spending far more than they get from anyone. They are spending the blood and lives of their young people, something not replaceable in the next budget cycle.
It’s Costing Peanuts for the US to Defeat Russia
November 18, 2022 cepa.org
Timothy Ash
The cost-benefit analysis of US support for Ukraine is incontrovertible. It’s producing wins at almost every level.
Former President Trump, and others in the US including some Democrats as well as Republicans, have criticized continued US support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. They have called for military and financial support to Ukraine to be cut, even ended. They downplay the risk from Russia and argue that the money should be spent at home.
Yet from numerous perspectives, when viewed from a bang-per-buck perspective, US and Western support for Ukraine is an incredibly cost-effective investment.
Altogether, the Biden administration received Congressional approval for $40bn in aid for Ukraine for 2022 and has requested an additional $37.7bn for 2022. More than half of this aid has been earmarked for defense.
These sums pale into insignificance when set against a total US defense budget of $715bn for 2022. The assistance represents 5.6% of total US defense spending. But Russia is a primary adversary of the US, a top tier rival not too far behind China, its number one strategic challenger. In cold, geopolitical terms, this war provides a prime opportunity for the US to erode and degrade Russia’s conventional defense capability, with no boots on the ground and little risk to US lives.
The Ukrainian armed forces have already killed or wounded upwards of 100,000 Russian troops, half its original fighting force; there have been almost 8,000 confirmed losses of armored vehicles including thousands of tanks, thousands of APCs, artillery pieces, hundreds of fixed and rotary wing aircraft, and numerous naval vessels. US spending of 5.6% of its defense budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s conventional military capability seems like an absolutely incredible investment. If we divide out the US defense budget to the threats it faces, Russia would perhaps be of the order of $100bn-150bn in spend-to-threat. So spending just $40bn a year, erodes a threat value of $100-150bn, a two-to-three time return.
The US military might reasonably wish Russia to continue deploying military forces for Ukraine to destroy.
Meanwhile, replacing destroyed kit, and keeping up with the new arms race that it has now triggered with the West will surely end up bankrupting the Russian economy; especially an economy subject to aggressive Western sanctions. How can Russia possibly hope to win an arms race when the combined GDP of the West is $40 trillion, and its defense spending amounting to 2% of GDP totals well in excess of $1 trillion when the disproportionate US defense contribution is considered? Russia’s total GDP is only $1.8 trillion. Vladimir Putin will have to divert spending from consumption to defense, risking social and political unrest over the medium term, and a real and soon-to-be present danger to his regime. Just imagine how much more of a bargain Western military aid will be if it ultimately brings positive regime change in Russia.
Second, the war has served to destroy the myth that Russian military technology is somehow comparable to that of the US and West. Remember that Ukraine is using only upgraded second generation US technology but is consistently beating whatever Russia’s military can deploy. Wars are shop windows for defense manufacturers; any buyer in their right mind will want the technology made by the winner. Putin’s misjudgment has merely provided a fantastic marketing opportunity for its Western competitors.
Note also that the war is also pushing NATO partners to quickly increase spending to the 2% of GDP and above target. Given the US’ technological advantage in defense equipment, a sizeable share of this additional military outlay will be spent on US equipment.
The Ukrainians are also showing remarkable innovation in their own defense, improving the performance of equipment in battlefield conditions, which again brings technological advantages to the US defense sector.
Third, the revelation that Russia’s defense industry is something of a Potemkin village also generates other strategic and diplomatic wins for the US. Countries eager to secure defense capability to meet their own threats – think of Turkey, India, Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia — might have opted for cheaper, “value” Russian defense offerings. However, with the quality/capability of this equipment now being questioned because of poor battlefield performance, they will likely be vying to acquire a better US kit. But this will require improved diplomatic relations. This is currently evident in the improved US–Pakistan relationship, with Pakistan securing upgrade kits for its F-16s.
Fourth, helping Ukraine beat Russia surely also sends a powerful signal to China that the US and its allies are strong and determined when challenged on issues of core importance. This may raise questions in the minds of Xi Jinping and the People’s Liberation Army generals about their ability to win a conflict against countries armed with US/Western military technology, for example in Taiwan. Surely Russia’s difficulty in winning the war in Ukraine will cause second thoughts in China about the wisdom and perhaps the viability of efforts to conquer Taiwan.
Fifth, the war in Ukraine is encouraging and accelerating the energy transition in Europe, but also Europe’s diversification away from Russian energy. Europe is desperately trying to source alternative energy supplies, and US liquefied natural gas (LNG) is proving to be the obvious beneficiary.
In conclusion, on so many levels, continued US support for Ukraine is a no-brainer from a bang for buck perspective. Ukraine is no Vietnam or Afghanistan for the US, but it is exactly that for Russia. A Russia continually mired in a war it cannot win is a huge strategic win for the US.
Why would anyone object to that?
Timothy Ash is a Senior Emerging Markets Sovereign Strategist at RBC BlueBay Asset Management. He is an Associate Fellow at Chatham House on their Russia and Eurasian program.
whheydtsays
Re: raven @ #114…
Those who think the aid to the Ukraine should be spent in the US are making the same mistake that led to the same criticism of the money spent on the manned Moon mission. The money is spent here. It will be spent by having US suppliers make either new or replacement equipment for what goes to Ukraine, just as every bit of money spent to put men on the Moon was spent on Earth.
StevoRsays
@ 115. whheydt : Truth. Seconded by me. Absolutely.
No doubt helping Ukraine will also provide the American arms industry with knowledge and experience that will help them later but that’s another issue.
.***
Well, this is worrying with Victoria going to the polls soon :
Victoria Police are investigating reports of inciteful behaviour outside Flinders Street Station, where independent MP Catherine Cumming appeared to threaten Premier Daniel Andrews in speech at a rally. … (snip) .. Dr Cumming is a Member of the Victorian Legislative Council for Western Metropolitan Region and aligned herself with the Angry Victorians Party (AVP) in November.
In a video capturing Dr Cumming standing on the steps of Flinders Street Station, the Member for Western Metropolitan Region said she joined the AVP to make Mr Andrews turn into “red mist”.
A police spokesperson confirmed that authorities were looking into the matter.
Renee Heath, the candidate for Eastern Victoria, is a senior member of the conservative City Builders Church.
In September, an ABC Regional Investigation revealed concerns from members in Gippsland that local branches were being stacked with members from Pentecostal groups, including the Sale-based City Builders Church, to influence preselections.
In October, a subsequent ABC investigation highlighted how Brian Heath, Renee Heath’s father, called on his congregation to “produce the next generation of godly leadership” and was vice-president of the Liberal Party’s Morwell state electorate conference branch.
Our thankfully ex-PM Scummo was also a Pentecostal Christianist who very much pushed his religious bigotry on others including unwanted secret creepy “blessings” by touching people without their consent & preaching in Church after losing the election in a landslide that.people should’t trust govts.. afterleaidng our most blatantly dishonest and corrupt one ever.
@60. SC (Salty Current) : As far as the Booze ban in Qatar goes – shades of the old US Prohibtion era maybe?
It is part of the country’s alcohol underground, a network of pubs, bars and clubs that have quietly emerged in the country’s underbelly as it has opened its arms to the rest of the world over the past two decades. So while it may be banned according to the letter of the law, alcohol is readily available if you know where to look. And everybody in Qatar knows where to look.
I’m shocked! Shocked! Well, not that shocked as the old line goes..
North Korea’s Rodong Simmun newspaper revealed a series of images of Kim and his daughter, who wore a puffy white coat and red shoes to observe the soaring missile from a distance with her father.
State media did not name the girl or disclose her age. It is the first confirmed public appearance of a child of the North Korean leader, whose personal life remains shrouded in mystery
Kim Jong Un, 38, is the third generation of the Kim dynasty to rule over the reclusive state but has not publicly declared an heir, making the identities of his children a source of strong outside interest. Kim is believed to have three children, born between 2010 and 2017, with his wife Ri, a former singer.
“Today I feel Qatari,” Infantino said Saturday at the start of his first news conference of the World Cup. “Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker.”
Infantino later shot back at one reporter who noticed he left women out of his unusual declaration.
“I feel like a woman,” the FIFA president responded.
TAHOKA, Texas (KLBK) — A family-owned farm in Tahoka specializes in growing the most expensive spice in the world, saffron.
In the last three years, Meraki Meadows has grown saffron, a spice that could sell for a minimum of $9,000 a pound…
rorschachsays
Does anyone have the link to that pdf of The Authoritarians that the fishman sent around some 25000 years ago here?
ravensays
Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en
Posting a clip of a Russian TV commentator
Russian:
“We need to start hurting United States and Great Britain, it’s obvious”.
All terrorists can come up with are more threats of terror.
More and more it just looks like the Russians are phoning it in.
An old idiom meaning just going through the motions.
Today we might call it “quiet quitting”.
This is an incredibly intelligent idea.
.1. The population of NATO is 949 million to Russia’s 143 million.
The GDP of NATO is, “… $32.4 trillion, the total GDP of NATO nations equals 45 percent of the world economy.” The GDP of Russia was (it is shrinking) $1.8 trillion.
NATO is far larger and far stronger than Russia.
It wouldn’t be much of a battle or a war.
So far there major attack against the West is to blow up their own Nordstream pipelines.
.2. Almost no one likes the Russians any more.
Their former captive nations hate them for good reasons.
Hurting the UK and the USA is just going to make us send Ukraine another $100 billion of advanced weapons and maybe kick the Russian elites out of their European holiday destinations.
It is true and crazy that there is some Russian support in the USA.
After all, we have three generations of animosity and fear for Russia in our recent history.
ravensays
The headline could read, Russian invaders steal everything portable and destroy the rest.
One of their tactics in the occupied lands is to search for Ukrainian language books and then burn them.
This is part of their genocidal campaign against Ukrainians.
The New Voice of Ukraine Invaders looting museums and burning Ukrainian books, says General Staff
24
October 19, 2022·1 min read
The invaders are robbing museums and burning Ukrainian literature and textbooks, the General Staff said.
Early, it was reported the occupation “authorities” of Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimea had issued a “decree” on the procedure for evacuating museums both internal (within the occupied area) and external (to Russian mainland). Priority is being given to the most valuable museum pieces.
Read also: Russian military stole all valuable exhibits from Mariupol museums
The Ministry of Culture and Information Policy has already registered 500 cases of Russian war crimes against Ukrainian culture heritage.
Because of this, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has several times called for Russia to be excluded from UNESCO.
According to the Minister of Culture and Information Policy Oleksandr Tkachenko, the occupiers have looted almost 40 Ukrainian museums. The economic losses from the thefts are estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
[…] as you know, the Once and Future Crotchtumor officially reinflicted himself upon the nation’s politics, in a rambling, unendurable, Stephen Miller-scripted diatribe, titled American Carnage II: Yes I Just Cost You the Senate But I Really Don’t Want to Go to Prison Boogaloo.
The announcement event was, as you can imagine, the bottom-feedingest shindig on the white nationalist social calendar. Like, already-forgotten Hitler youth Madison Cawthorn showed up, but Matt Gaetz sent his regrets. Matt. Gaetz. Good lord, how much loserstink do you have to emit to repel that clout-hungry pervert? Only Donald Trump knows.
But the Republican establishment is gonna stand up to him this time. For real and for serious. Not like Charlottesville or Lafayette Square or either impeachment trial or the Capitol Riot or that time he made Lindsey Graham give MBS a lap dance at Camp David.
It’ll work, too. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Why, the QAnon Shaman was so impressed with Rupert Murdoch’s “Florida Man Makes Announcement” slight in the New York Post, he immediately endorsed Larry Hogan.
Of course, the whole “moderate” Republican plan is to lob the occasional plausibly deniable half-criticism, Mike Pompeo-style, while privately praying shiny new special counsel Jack Smith incarcerates their problems away. Real profiles-in-courage shit.
That special counsel appointment was the cherry on top of a rough legal week for MAGA, between the Weisselberg testimony and the Oath Keepers trial and the former McConnell/Paul aide convicted of funneling Russian money to the Trump campaign and the federal judge blocking DeSantistan’s fashy little “Stop Woke” law and the news about Off-Brand Orbán abusing the IRS to target enemies and laundering foreign bribes through his D.C hotel and I’m setting the newspaper down before this paragraph collapses under the weight of the links.
We also learned Herschel Walker would rather be a werewolf than a vampire, and so long as he’s not a Senator, I say let him do what he wants. […]
[…] now that I’ve read what Rhodes [Oath Keeper founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes] was like as a “husband” and “father”, I realize that he is also a world-class abuser and an even shittier person than I had supposed.
Here are a few quotes from an interview with Rhodes’ three adult children. Read the whole article at the Southern Poverty Law Center site.
But on the bright side, as you read this horror story, join with me in rejoicing that these young people found the strength to reject the coercive conditioning laid down by their fascist wacko daddy, and that he may soon be facing the consequences of his actions.
Sequoia: We had no idea how delayed the divorce papers were going to be. We thought that they were going to be delivered that day. We thought that if he is here and we are here when they are delivered, he would kill all of us. We felt that we were running for our lives. […]
Sedona: I was worried that whatever animals were left behind, he would slaughter them.
No, dammit it, you do not take it out on the animals!
Sequoia: He had a hoard of the most expensive survivalist gear available, but yeah, we never saw any money. He spent a lot of money on trips. He’d come home and there would be no food in the house, because my mom was struggling to figure out how to pay the bills, and she would always be selling silver or something like that, and he’d tell us about the fancy restaurants he had been to while he was away.
Is this guy out of a Dickens novel? “While you nibble on dry crusts, let me tell you about the largest steak I have ever eaten.”
Sedona: … Most of the things he did were so he could get exposure. Everything ran on donations. Sometimes [he’d] be on the phone saying, “Oh, well I need money. We need to create an emergency.” And so they’d find something. That’s why they started doing disaster relief.
Oh, that’s why they started doing disaster relief. Everything is a grift with demagogues.
Sequoia: For my childhood and early middle school years, I did not think I had a future – he told us that the world was going to end.
… We were home-schooled in theory, but I had to teach myself how to read and do math. But because the world was going to end, it was hard to even see a reason why I should learn to read. I had no future.
Stewart Rhodes, motivational speaker.
Sequoia: [Las Vegas is] a very high-turnover place. People are constantly pulling through, so when Stewart burned everyone around him, he could hop over to a whole new group of people who had never heard of him.
He managed to run a grift in Vegas without getting his legs broken, so there’s that.
Sequoia: … when he was abusive to us, he’d say, “It’s not my fault, I was abused,” so it may have been exaggerated to some extent. It was always his excuse for being terrible, and then he would cry and we were supposed to apologize to him for whatever he had experienced.
“Please forgive me for you hitting me, Daddy.”
Dakota: He despised the whole Malheur thing, because it was all about Ammon Bundy trying to be the messiah and trying to fix everything that was wrong in his life by starting a civil war.
It’s hilarious because that is basically what Stewart ended up doing. By January 6th everything was falling apart for him, he was afraid of going to prison, so he decided to double down.
The trial of Rhodes et al for seditious conspiracy is nearing its end. The defense should finish their closing arguments Monday or Tuesday, and then it’s in the hands of the jurors.
The Kyiv Independent reports that Ukraine is going to produce weapons jointly with at least 6 NATO countries. Poland, the Czech Republic, France, Denmark, and other NATO countries will produce and develop heavy weapons and other military equipment jointly with Ukraine, Ukraine’s main defense company Ukroboronprom said.
Ukroboronprom said that they would produce ammunition, armored vehicles, and multiple rocket launchers.
lumipunasays
I understand that the burst Nord Stream gas pipelines haven’t been repaired, and possibly won’t be in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, something seems to have just blown the pipeline near St. Petersburg that feeds Nord stream I:
“There is a difference even compared to Kharkiv and Kyiv regions… I have never seen such scale,” Dmytro Lubinets, Ukrainian Ombudsman, about torture in the Kherson region.
Russians beat people with metal pipes, broke bones, electrocuted and killed them.
Underwater video taken of the blast site by @ErikWiman rules out a rupture caused b a detonation interior to the casement. The straight-line damage exhibited is the result of the close exterior application of linear shaped charges. These charges were emplaced by Naval Special Warfare Operators, likely deployed by submarine. This indicates a Nation-state actor.
Former President Trump could face a surprising problem as he mounts his 2024 campaign: a cash crunch as wealthy megadonors gravitate toward Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and other potential contenders.
A loyal army of small-dollar donors will power Trump’s presidential bid, potentially making up for the exodus of billionaire backers, but they’ve shown signs of scaling back their giving.
And while Trump’s political machine is starting off with a war chest of more than $110 million, federal law prevents him from using most of that money to advance his White House campaign.
I don’t think that will stop him. He’ll find a loophole, or he’ll just break the law again.
Meanwhile, Trump’s political committees are shelling out huge sums on his legal defense, totals that only seem likely to rise after the Department of Justice on Friday appointed a special counsel to oversee probes into him.
[…] Hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, the second-most prolific GOP donor of the midterms, said Tuesday that he would support DeSantis over Trump, pointing to the Florida governor’s dominant reelection victory in a state that was considered competitive until recently.
“I’d like to think that the Republican Party is ready to move on from somebody who has been for this party a three-time loser,” Griffin said at Bloomberg’s New Economy Forum in Singapore, referring to the last three election cycles. […]
ravensays
@Lynna 124
[…] now that I’ve read what Rhodes [Oath Keeper founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes] was like as a “husband” and “father”, I realize that he is also a world-class abuser and an even shittier person than I had supposed.
I’ve noticed this too.
Most of the right wingnut crazies and white supremacists have a hard time relating to society in general and human beings in particular.
They usually have a history of domestic violence and divorce.
They usually have poor employment records with long stretches of unemployment.
It appears that Rhodes was an unemployed conperson.
They often have a long history of arrests and convictions by law enforcement.
Steve Bannon to take one example, was once arrested for domestic violence, is a convicted felon pardoned by Trump, and now indicted once again for conspiracy and money laundering.
ravensays
These charges were enplaced by Naval Special Warfare Operators, likely deployed by submarine. This indicates a Nation-state actor.
That was my conclusion early on.
The Nordstream pipelines were 300 feet down in the middle of nowhere. Meaning it is hard to find anything on the ocean floor because the ocean is big and flat.
It really would take a sophisticated nation to have the capability of blowing up a pipeline like that underwater.
Which really limits who did it.
Motive, means, and opportunity.
I can’t see it being Ukraine. They don’t even have a navy right now, no submarines.
The USA? We have nothing to gain by doing it. Those pipelines weren’t even being used and probaby never were going to be.
Which leaves the Russians.
Who destroyed a billion or so dollars of pipeline for reasons we can only guess at.
raven @131, good points. We are not surprised to hear that Rhodes had a history of domestic violence. Seems to be a thing with the “right wing nut crazies” as you call them.
When this war is over, and Russia has been pushed out of Ukraine, the story of Bakhmut is going to be tragic, epic, grueling, and heartbreaking. For more than six months now, after breaking through the line at Popasna, Russia has been trying to take the city. Under the command of Wagner Group mercenaries, Russia has sent literally tens of thousands of prisoners to die in the attempt to capture Bakhmut, so many that Yahoo News reports that Russian prisons are “unusually empty.”
During the months of September-October, a record-breaking 23,000 inmates of Russian penitentiaries were drafted to serve in the war in Ukraine against the backdrop of recruitment conducted by the Wagner Group.
Whatever kind of sentences they had before, those prisoners have a death sentence now. Their role is to be part of one of the endless human waves Wagner has directed at Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Pavlivka on the eastern front. Those prisoners surely understood that they were putting their lives at risk when they “volunteered” to pitch in with Wagner, or were force-marched out of their prisons. It’s unlikely that they understand their role is to run forward, catch bullets, and bleed out on streets where thousands of others have already died.
No matter what the conditions were inside Russian prisons, it’s unlikely they were worse than what those men are finding when they get to Russian military camps in both Russia and occupied areas of Ukraine. Believe it or not, this urine-soaked trash pit, where the previous occupants haven’t bother to so much as step outside to relieve themselves, is among the best conditions these troops can expect to find.
Omsk mobiks reviewing a sleeping tent that is in a disastrous condition. As we can understand from the video, they are meant to be moving into these tents, and the terrible mess was left by the previous shift of mobiks. [video at the link, with English subtitles]
What could be worse? […] you can find numerous examples of people building emergency shelters out of plastic wrap. Why someone might be lost in the wilderness with nothing but a few hundred rolls of Saran Wrap isn’t clear. However, these videos certainly make it look inviting—since none of them seem to be working in the dark, or struggling against biting winds, or dealing with icy rain or heavy snow.
The idea that this is an actual solution to creating a shelter in the wilderness should be laughable. But apparently the Russian army took it seriously, because there have been dozens of such “tents” found when formerly Russian-occupied areas were liberated. Now that winter is arriving, it turns out that a house of straw would hold up better than a house of discount plastic-wrap. This pitiful example isn’t even in Ukraine. It’s also not housing for inmates dragged from prison. This is what “mobilized” Russian troops can look forward to as their houses.
The first snow fell. And that means it’s time to check out the innovative “tents” made of plastic film for the Russian newly mobilized. Voronezh region, Russia. [video at the link. It's not even heavy duty plastic wrap. You can see through it. I have camped in winter conditions, and this looks awful when compared to my good civilian equipment.]
Yeah, that’s going to be fine. […] conditions in Ukraine are tough right now. The early snows are only contributing to previous weeks of rain, turning many areas—especially the northeast, around Luhansk—into mud bogs where it’s difficult to move any kind of heavy equipment. That has definitely slowed the pace of combat as Ukraine pushes toward Svatove (though there are Telegram reports of Ukrainian progress this morning, including the possible liberation of two small villages — stay tuned for updates). Even those areas that had nominally paved streets are now no easier to travel because the passage of dozens of tanks has destroyed the blacktop (and that, Donald, is why we don’t run military parades of heavy equipment through the streets of D.C.)
The first snows are falling, but that white snow is only barely disguising the underlying black mud. Even so, as the ground begins to freeze, movement is actually becoming more certain. It may be a pain for your holiday travels, but for Ukrainian tanks and armored transports, snow and ice is a welcome change. We’re soon going to see a lot of videos that look like this one. [Tweet and video at the link]
Winter is definitely coming to Ukraine, and it will bring with it a change in the pace and style of warfare. For those who have a warm shelter, well-maintained equipment, winter uniforms, and winter camouflage for both men and machines, this change could be welcome. For those sleeping in plastic wrap, or the urine-soaked remains of a broken tent, whose gear and uniforms have been sold by corrupt higher-ups, and whose equipment was last inspected sometime around 1945, the change in seasons may be a bit less welcome.
Meanwhile, the tactics being used at Bakhmut—in which artillery fires above forces as they advance—is as old as any tactic on earth. The Sumerians did it with bows and chariots. The English did it with longbows and armored knights. Both sides did it in the American Civil War with cannons and infantry. But to do it well requires a coordination of forces that Russia has so far not delivered, despite all those months of trying and dying.
The cost of this failed offensive for Russia has been as least as great as the losses in any counteroffensive so far launched by Ukraine. As the loss of Kherson came closer, Russia clearly became even more desperate for some kind of victory in the east, and the pace of attacks on Bakhmut (along with other towns and cities along that line) increased. Those days in which Ukraine reported the death of 700, 800, 900 or more Russian soldiers, also marked the days of the most desperate push at these locations.
What this is costing Ukraine isn’t known. In the last few days, it seems that Russia has gained ground, though most of that ground is the same area it lost when Ukraine shoved it back a few weeks ago. There’s no doubt that those defending Bakhmut are suffering in a way that perhaps no soldiers have experienced since the horrors of World War I, fighting day after day after day in a battlefield plowed by explosions, with the scream of shells always overhead.
And they are not the only ones. For now … Bakhmut holds. [Tweet with image of 7-year-old child in a shelter in Bakhmut]
Just because Vladimir Putin declared that Kherson oblast was “Russia forever” doesn’t mean they’re not ready to conduct the same kind of atrocities there that they’ve inflicted on other Ukrainian cities. Russia has now shelled residential areas of both Beryslav and Kherson.Last night one of liberated Kherson’s high-rises was hit.
Russia’s high pressure gas line has sufferer a major explosion outside St. Petersburg. [see lumipuna’s comment 127] Another view taken from inside the city. It’s unclear how this happened, but assuming that it’s not just an issue caused by poor maintenance (always a possibility with Russia) this could represent the activity of some group within Russia. Not necessarily pro-Ukrainian partisans. [video, with impressive roaring sound, at the link] Unclear how this might affect power and heat in Russia’s second-largest city.
Mike Pence is angry and defiant. Can’t you tell? His customary blanched-potato pout has abruptly given way to a sinister shade of ecru […]
More importantly, now that the GOP has taken control of the lower chamber, Pence has decided that the House Jan. 6 committee is too “partisan” to cooperate with. Which is true, in a way. After all, we didn’t hear word one from the pro-hang-Mike Pence camp. Shameful.
While promoting his new book, So Help Me God, I Have No Idea Who’s Gonna Buy This Thing [LOL], Pence told CBS News that he’ll never testify for the Jan. 6 committee because they have “no right” to his testimony.
As NBC News explains:
In a CBS News interview that aired Wednesday evening, Pence claimed when asked if he would sit for questioning that Congress has “no right” to his testimony, adding, “I’m closing the door on that.”
In his answer, the former vice president criticized the makeup of the committee, which has two Republican lawmakers, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois.
“I served for 12 years in the Congress,” he said. “It’s inconceivable to me that one party would appoint every member of a committee in Congress. That’s antithetical to the whole idea of the committee system. That being said, I never stood in the way of senior members of my team cooperating with the committee and testifying, but Congress has no right to my testimony.”
Pence wasn’t done complaining about the supposedly “partisan” makeup of the committee.
“But I must say again, the partisan nature of the January 6 committee has been a disappointment to me,” the former veep groused. “It seemed to me in the beginning, there was an opportunity to examine every aspect of what happened on Jan. 6, and to do so more in the spirit of the 9/11 Commission, nonpartisan, nonpolitical, and that was an opportunity lost.”
Seems the same guy who somehow blocked out those raucous “hang Mike Pence” chants conveniently forgot how we got here. In May 2021, every House Democrat and 35 House Republicans voted to establish a bipartisan 9/11-style Jan. 6 commission but—oh, lookee here!—Senate Republicans killed it.
So House Democrats had to form a select committee. Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to submit a list of names for that committee, but when Pelosi rejected two of those picks—Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, two extremely Trumpy election deniers who likely should have been material witnesses instead of inquisitors—McCarthy took his ball and went home.
So yes, Mike, it was an opportunity lost. Because Republicans decided to take that opportunity, shove it down a well, and scream […] until everyone just forgot the whole thing.
Fellow Republican Liz Cheney, who’s somehow never succumbed to Donald Trump’s oleaginous charms (and lost her House primary as a result), isn’t having it. In response to Pence’s comments, Cheney, the committee vice chair, released a statement Thursday with committee Chair Bennie Thompson, to remind him of how that “opportunity” was actually lost (and insert a mild mocking of his book tour).
It read, in part:
“The Select Committee has proceeded respectfully and responsibly in our engagement with Vice President Pence, so it is disappointing that he is misrepresenting the nature of our investigation while giving interviews to promote his new book.
“Our investigation has publicly presented the testimony of more than 50 Republican witnesses, including senior members of the Trump White House, the Trump Campaign, and the Trump Justice Department. This testimony, subject to criminal penalties for lying to Congress, was not ‘partisan.’ It was truthful.
“Every member of the Select Committee supported the creation of an independent bipartisan commission. After initially supporting such a commission, Leader McCarthy withdrew his support and the bipartisan plan to create the commission was defeated by Republicans in the Senate. The Select Committee was formed only after the proposal for an outside commission was defeated.
“Leader McCarthy had the opportunity to nominate five members of the Select Committee. Speaker Pelosi initially accepted three of those nominees and invited Leader McCarthy to propose two others. Rather than doing so, McCarthy chose to withdraw all his nominees and refused to participate at all—so that he could make the false claim that the Committee was entirely one-sided. This was a cynical choice by Mr. McCarthy. […]
“The Select Committee has consistently praised the former Vice President’s refusal to bow to former President Trump’s pressure to illegally refuse to count electoral votes on January 6th. But his recent statements about the Select Committee are not accurate.”
Pence knows this, even if he wants Americans to forget. Yet judging by the results of the Nov. 8 midterms, Americans haven’t memory-holed Jan. 6 just yet, despite Pence having used his vast stores of simpering twit energy to keep the wolves at bay.
But why should Pence stop covering for Trump and his coterie of crooks now? He’s got loads of practice. In fact, it might be the only real skill he has left.
Yesterday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the appointment of former Hague war crimes prosecutor Jack Smith as a special counsel to lead the Trump investigation, in light of the fact that Trump had officially announced that his run for President. Why? Because there are obviously some ethical questions about an Attorney General appointed by the President of the United States personally bringing charges against a political challenger.
Granted, we can talk about whether Trump already should have been indicted by now, but he wasn’t, we don’t have a time machine and this seems like the way to go at this particular moment in time. We can also have our own questions about what this means or what is happening with that purple Star Trek outfit. [photo at the link]
However! Team Trump seems to be very confused about this whole situation, particularly the fact that the whole point of this is fairness to him. [Tweets and video from Aaron Rupar at the link]
“I thought the investigation into the document hoax was dying, or dead or over,” Trump said during a speech at Mar-a-lago, “And the investigation into January 6 and my very peaceful and patriotic speech — Remember? Peaceful and patriotic. — was dead, especially after the record-setting 40 point loss of Liz Cheney in the great state of Wyoming. I thought it was dead. I thought that put the final nail in the coffin only to find out that the corrupt and highly political Justice Department just appointed a super radical left special counsel, better referred to as a special prosecutor, to start the process all over again.”
As someone who is, in fact, “super radical left,” I am pretty sure that special counsel Jack Smith is not.
That being said, obviously the investigations into him were not over and it was weird of him to think that.
“No collusion, they want to do bad things to the greatest movement in the history of our country and particularly bad things to me,” he word salad-ed. “But I have got used to it luckily. This is a rigged deal just like the 2020 election was rigged and we cannot let them get away with it.”
On her end, Marjorie Taylor-Greene seemed to think it would be possible to “defund” the special counsel and thus stop the investigation into Trump that was already underway and happening.
“Republicans will need to refuse to appropriate any funding to Merrick Garland’s Special Counsel and defund any part of the DOJ acting on behalf of the Democrat party as a taxpayer funded campaign arm for the Democrat’s 2024 presidential nominee,” she wrote on Twitter. [Tweet and video at the link]
However, the budget has already been set for 2023 and she has absolutely no power to do that. It’s not a thing. Even if Steve Bannon also thinks it’s a thing. [head/desk]
Steve Bannon called on House Republicans to defund the Department of Justice in response to the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Trump and called the FBI, “the American gestapo.”
It’s hard to tell if they’re truly this daft or just pretending, and on some level it doesn’t really matter.
Rishi Sunak made a surprise visit to Kyiv on Saturday to meet Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy – his first visit to the country since taking office.
Sunak announced that Britain will provide a £50m air defence package for Ukraine, including anti-aircraft guns and technology to counter Iranian-supplied drones.
Zelenskiy thanked Sunak, for his support and tweeted: “With friends like you by our side, we are confident in our victory. Both of our nations know what it means to stand up for freedom.”
…
Kyiv is in a “critical situation” with power shortages while the country faces hours-long blackouts, officials say, amid Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
Ukrainians should consider leaving the country to help save energy, Maxim Timchenko, chief executive of Ukraine’s biggest private energy firm, DTEK, said.
Ukrainian forces could be in Crimea by the end of December, the country’s deputy defence minister, Volodymyr Havrylov, has said.
The UK Ministry of Defence has released its latest intelligence update on the war Ukraine. Russia made its largest single-day issuance of debt in history on Wednesday, it said.
Moscow has not officially contacted Kyiv about peace negotiations, but Russia would have to completely withdraw its forces for talks to take place, Andriy Yermak, the Ukrainian presidential chief of staff said.
The first passenger train to the recently liberated Kherson city has arrived from Kyiv for the first time since Russian troops occupied the southern Ukrainian city.
The funeral took place on Saturday of a Polish man who was one of two victims killed when a missile crashed into a grain storage facility in the Polish village of Przewodow.
US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said China and Russia are seeking a world where force is used to resolve disputes and he vowed the United States will continue to defend humanitarian principles and international law.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a political adviser to the Ukrainian president, has dismissed “conspiracy theories” about his country surrendering. “Ukraine will not kneel to Russians,” Podolyak wrote on Twitter.
Asia-Pacific leaders added their voices on Saturday to international pressure on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, issuing a summit statement saying “most” of them condemned the war.
Alito leaked Dobbs. Alito leaked Hobby Lobby. Worse, there’s an active conservative influence program to sway SCOTUS, one that John Roberts is turning a blind eye to.
The Court is corrupt and bankrupt and pretending it isn’t deepens the rot of democracy.
NYT link at the (Twitter) link. I don’t know if the part about the leaks is Jeffery’s reading or what it reports.
David Brooks became liberals’ famous conservative by telling them what they wanted to hear. But … why did they want to hear something that was lazy and wrong?
The largest mass sedition trial in American history churns on. And continues descending into chaos. But the dozens of sedition defendants attempting to wreak havoc on the proceedings would soon get a high-profile assist. From serving members of Congress injecting themselves into the trial and coming to the defense of the accused seditionists standing trial. Before a verdict can be reached, one final twist calls into question whether the Justice Department will see the case to the end, or cut bait entirely.
The trope of the “Asiatic criminal mastermind” has haunted Asians for over a century, from the notorious Fu Manchu right up to the myths of dastardly Wuhan virologists circulating in the COVID era. But these myths, which have helped fuel a historic spike in anti-Asian racism, didn’t start with Sax Rohmer’s “Devil Doctor.” Before Fu Manchu, there was Dr. Yen How, the villain of M.P. Shiel’s smash hit The Yellow Danger (1898). In this episode, we examine how Asians today live not only in the shadow of the ruthless Yen How, but also in the shadow of the mindless monster that Yen How commands: the “Heathen Chinee.”
In Episode 149 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes that the UN Human Rights Office determination that China may be guilty of “crimes against humanity” in its mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang province is dismissed by the tankie-left ANSWER Coalition as “propagandistic.” Meanwhile, it falls to Radio Free Asia, media arm of the US State Department, to aggressively cover the very real conditions of forced labor faced by the Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples of Xinjiang—and how Western corporations benefit from it. While the Western pseudo-left betrays the Uyghurs, US imperialism exploits their suffering for propaganda against a rising China in the Great Game for the Asia-Pacific region. Figures such as Australia’s Kevin Rudd incorrectly portray a “Return of Red China,” blaming the PRC’s increasingly totalitarian direction on a supposed neo-Marxism. Fortunately, the new anthology Xinjiang Year Zero offers a corrective perspective, placing the industrial-detention complex and techno-security state in the context of global capitalism and settler colonialism.
Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, there has been nothing short of crisis — leading to massive layoffs and lost advertisers. On this week’s On the Media, what this chaos means for activists worldwide who used the platform as a public square. Plus, how political predictions distort coverage of elections.
1. James Fallows…, writer of the “Breaking the News” newsletter on Substack, on the political press’ obsession with telling the future and the narratives that have a chokehold on elections coverage.
2. Zoë Schiffer…, Managing Editor of Platformer, on the mass exodus of employees from one of the world’s most significant social media sites.
3. Avi Asher-Schapiro…, tech reporter for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, on the impact of Musk’s leadership on Twitter users around the world.
4. Clive Thompson…, journalist and author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, on the website many are fleeing to amid chaos at Twitter.
“Iran has arrested prominent musician Navid Afagh amid the ongoing brutal crackdown on protests triggered by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini. [Some] 100 musicians and artists have been reportedly arrested or banned from work and travel in past weeks.”
tomhsays
Re: SC @ #138, SC leaks
No, that’s Clara Jeffery’s take. The Times story only relates to the Dobbs leak because it is about another alleged leak, in the Hobby Lobby case, a much less clear-cut one than Dobbs.
Years before the leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, a landmark contraception ruling was disclosed, according to a minister who led a secretive effort to influence justices.
….a former anti-abortion leader has come forward claiming that another breach occurred in a 2014 landmark case involving contraception and religious rights.
In a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and in interviews with The New York Times, the Rev. Rob Schenck said he was told the outcome of the 2014 case weeks before it was announced. He used that information to prepare a public relations push, records show, and he said that at the last minute he tipped off the president of Hobby Lobby, the craft store chain owned by Christian evangelicals that was the winning party in the case.
It’s a convoluted story, but the gist is that Alito and his wife had dinner with a couple who were Schenck’s star donors, and Schenk has claimed that the wife told him that Alito let slip the result of the opinion, which he wrote, in the Hobby Lobby case. Everyone involved has denied it, of course, but the Times investigated and concluded that it was possibly true. Who knows.
In October, a United Nations tribunal put Felician Kabuga, a Rwandan businessman and radio persona, and one of the architects of the 1994 Rwandan genocide on trial, charging him with direct involvement in genocide, public incitement to genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, and human rights violations. The case may set a precedent for Russian propagandists, whose crucial role in justifying – and perhaps initiating – the war in Ukraine is well known. Less well understood is what consequences Russian architects of the war might face. Meduza explains the challenges the international community will face in bringing Russian propagandists to court, and what the charges could be if they ever do stand trial….
Progressive judicial groups Demand Justice and Take Back The Court called on the Senate to open an investigation into U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and the lobbying campaign targeting the high court after The New York Times alleged he leaked the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision to wealthy evangelicals engaged in an influence campaign targeting conservative justices.
“The Senate Judiciary Committee should immediately move to investigate the apparent leak by Justice Alito,” Brian Fallon, Demand Justice executive director, said in a statement. “The whistleblower in this report, Rev. Rob Schenck, should be called to testify about both the leak and the years-long lobbying effort he once led to cultivate Alito and other Republican justices.”
Fallon continued: “This bombshell report is the latest proof that the Republican justices on the Court are little more than politicians in robes. It’s no wonder trust in the Court has hit a record low. Structural reform of the Court, including strict new ethics rules, is needed now more than ever.”
Sarah Lipton-Lubet, executive director of Take Back The Court, also spoke out, urging Congress to “step up” to investigate the Supreme Court’s reported, “leaking [of] sensitive information to right-wing political allies.”
The pro-abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America also called for a Senate investigation into the alleged leak….
More from the NYT article (by Jodi Kantor and Jo Becker):
…Mr. Schenck, who used to lead an evangelical nonprofit in Washington, said he learned about the Hobby Lobby opinion because he had worked for years to exploit the court’s permeability. He gained access through faith, through favors traded with gatekeepers and through wealthy donors to his organization, abortion opponents whom he called “stealth missionaries.”
The minister’s account comes at a time of rising concerns about the court’s legitimacy. A majority of Americans are losing confidence in the institution, polls show, and its approval ratings are at a historic low. Critics charge that the court has become increasingly politicized, especially as a new conservative supermajority holds sway.
In May, after the draft opinion in the abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, was leaked in what Justice Alito recently called “a grave betrayal,” the chief justice took the unusual step of ordering an investigation by the Supreme Court’s marshal. Two months later, Mr. Schenck sent his letter to Chief Justice Roberts, saying he believed his information about the Hobby Lobby case was relevant to the inquiry. He said he has not gotten any response.
…
In interviews and thousands of emails and other records he shared with The Times, Mr. Schenck provided details of the effort he called the “Ministry of Emboldenment.”
Mr. Schenck recruited wealthy donors like Mrs. Wright and her husband, Donald, encouraging them to invite some of the justices to meals, to their vacation homes or to private clubs. He advised allies to contribute money to the Supreme Court Historical Society and then mingle with justices at its functions. He ingratiated himself with court officials who could help give him access, records show.
All the while, he leveraged his connections to raise money for his nonprofit, Faith and Action. Mr. Schenck said he pursued the Hobby Lobby information to cultivate the business’s president, Steve Green, as a donor.
…
Justices are given lifetime appointments to promote independence and buffer them from lobbying and politicking. But Mr. Schenck wanted the conservatives on the court to hear from people who would hail them as heroes if they seized the opportunity to strike down Roe one day. The goal, he said in an interview, was to “embolden the justices” to lay the legal groundwork for an eventual reversal by delivering “unapologetically conservative dissents.”…
Some of the evidence:
In early June 2014, an Ohio couple who were Mr. Schenck’s star donors shared a meal with Justice Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann. A day later, Gayle Wright, one of the pair, contacted Mr. Schenck, according to an email reviewed by The Times. “Rob, if you want some interesting news please call. No emails,” she wrote.
Mr. Schenck was not present at the meal and has no written record of his conversation with Mrs. Wright. But The Times interviewed four people who said he told them years ago about the breach, and emails from June 2014 show him suggesting he had confidential information and directing his staff to prepare for victory. In another email, sent in 2017, he described the disclosure as “one of the most difficult secrets I’ve ever kept in my life.”
On June 29, the day before the ruling, [Schenck] emailed a staff member that “if it’s positive (confidential: I have good reason to believe it will be),” she should publicly laud Justice Alito as a “reliable defender” of religious freedom. No other justice was mentioned.
[In 2017], he recounted the episode to a potential ghostwriter for his memoir in an email, calling the ruling “a decision I already knew was a done deal weeks before it was announced from the bench.”
Much, much more in the article. I feel sick after reading it.
[…] The leak of the draft decision in Dobbs was more than just a breach of Supreme Court tradition and security. By putting out a version of the opinion that was incredibly harsh, and which went far beyond the limits of what many had expected in the ruling, that draft put a stake in the ground that may have forced even conservative members of the Court to move faster than they had wanted in completely demolishing Roe and the entire concept of privacy rights.
Many have suspected that this is exactly why the leak was made in the first place; not to warn people about what was coming, but to put conservative members of the Court into a position where they either signed on, or were marked out as traitors to the anti-abortion cause. In short, there was a lot more to gain for Alito to have leaked the decision he wrote, than for any of the more moderate Justices on the Court to have made the text available before the justices made their final decisions.
As The New York Times reports, both Dobbs and the Hobby Lobby case were “triumphs for conservatives and the religious right.” Not only did the Dobbs decision shatter a right that had been in place for fifty years, and repudiate the ruling of that past Court, but the Burwell case elevated the religious rights of corporations above those of employees. It continued the wall of protection that corporate owners enjoy, but allowed their religious preferences to leak through that wall so that they could refuse to include, not just abortions, but even contraceptives in their health care plans. It was one of a string of rulings that have made corporations into ungovernable super-citizens</b?.
Alito reportedly leaked the ruling on the Hobby Lobby case to a small group of supporters and religious rights advocates. However, the leak of the Dobbs opinion was made to the public, dropping like a bombshell into national politics when it was published in full by Politico. In September, Joan McCarter reported that the leak of the draft Dobbs opinion was still being investigated, but Justice Neil Gorsuch revealed that the outcome of that investigation might “not be made public.” Which would seem to limit the possible consequences of the leak to something less than a slap on the wrist. That there has been no announcement of findings seven months after the opinion was released makes it seem more likely that no public report is forthcoming.
By releasing his information concerning Alito and making public his letter to Roberts, Schenck, who was not supportive of the outcome in Dobbs, would seem to have returned at least some pressure for Roberts to treat the leak with the serious attention it deserves.
This wasn’t just a betrayal of the Court’s security, it was a deliberate effort to manipulate the outcome of a decision still in progress. If Alito actually used this leak to strongarm other justices into signing onto his extremist position … surely that’s something the public should know. And if the Court decides to hand down no punishment for this, that’s also something the public should know. […]
I don’t have any tweets I want to save, but others might find this helpful
Twitter is in a sink-or-swim situation, with employee mistreatment bordering on outright labor violations causing the exodus of thousands, either via layoff or resignation. The future of the company doesn’t look like much of anything. Twitter’s offices are closed until Nov. 21, but plenty of folks aren’t all that encouraged about the platform actually making it to that date—myself included. Hopefully, between now and then, that gives Twitter users enough time to archive their data.
The Washington Post has a fairly helpful explainer on that front: Simply head to Twitter, sign in, then go to the Settings tab. From there, a menu should appear with “Your Account” as one of the options. Tap or click that option, then use the secondary menu option of “Download an Archive of Your Data” to request an archive. This includes account information, history, activity, and even interests and ads. That data might end up being a nice walk down memory lane as you view your past tweets and messages. And it might be helpful to stay in contact with the connections you’ve made on Twitter.
An informal survey of some of my Twitter friends indicated that the lag time on this request, which could take 24 hours or more, appears to be getting much longer as Twitter continues its implosion, so you might want to act fast. Experts believe there are a few ways Twitter could shut down, though it likely won’t be a matter of the social media company suddenly disappearing. Even if new owner Elon Musk declared Twitter bankrupt, it would probably take a bit for Twitter to wind down its services.
There are fears, of course, of hacking and cybersecurity issues. This also makes it a good time to employ safer security measures on your own Twitter accounts, such as activating two-factor authentication and changing your password—be sure to choose something unique and not previously used by you or that is more difficult to guess. That can be accomplished through a password generator. Keeping track of that password can also be made easier through a password manager […]
It’s been as long as infrastructure week since Trump promised not to use Twitter. Now Elon Musk is polling Twitter users/bots to reinstate him with 5 hours remaining.
[Daniel Uhlfelder responded with a Twitter poll offering a “yes” or a “no” answer to the question: “Indict former President Trump.”]
Since he was removed from Twitter, Trump has maintained contact with his supporters via press releases and from Truth Social, which launched earlier this year. Trump suggested that […] he will conduct his 2024 campaign communications only on Truth. He said he’s confident that his messages would be well circulated if he used Truth.
“[…] I will only use Truth,” he said. “When I put out a Truth, it is all over the place.”
[Barbara Boxer responded with: Latest Trump quote: “I am the most honest and innocent person in our country.” Really? And I am a 6 foot tall Nobel peace prize winner.]
Elon Musk’s poll will be swamped with responses from bots. And, in addition to that part of the farce, Trump was kicked off Twitter for encouraging his cult followers to stop the peaceful transition of power. Trump’s ejection from Twitter was, supposedly, permanent.
tomhsays
Re SC leaks.
I don’t know why the religious lobbyists thought they had to pressure the justices to do what they were going to do in any case. And the idea that the Dobbs leak swayed a single justice from how they were going to vote anyway….sorry, but I find that laughable.
Mr. Schenck provided details of the effort he called the “Ministry of Emboldenment.”
Mr. Schenck wanted the conservatives on the court to hear from people who would hail them as heroes if they seized the opportunity to strike down Roe one day. The goal, he said in an interview, was to “embolden the justices” to lay the legal groundwork for an eventual reversal by delivering “unapologetically conservative dissents.”
It is unclear if Mr. Schenck’s efforts had any impact on legal decisions, given that only Justices Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas proved amenable to the outreach, records show, and they were already inclined to overturn Roe v. Wade. That decision was only reversed this year after the addition of new conservative justices altered the court’s ideological makeup. But Mr. Schenck said his aim was not to change minds, but rather to stiffen the resolve of the court’s conservatives in taking uncompromising stances that could eventually lead to a reversal of Roe.
The goal wasn’t to sway anyone’s opinion but to encourage them to be reactionary extremists to the greatest possible extent. They surrounded them with rightwing religious zealots, hoping to prevent anyone’s views from moderating and to stiffen their resolve to render what they would otherwise recognize as unpopular opinions that were contrary to existing precedent and would have devastating effects.
And Schenck’s own trajectory, in which he’s gone from being a staunch opponent of reproductive rights to seeing his previous position and actions as immoral and harmful to women and becoming a progressive points to the need for these forces to constantly battle to keep the arc of the moral universe from bending toward justice.
Meanwhile in Russia: a lawmaker argues that the strikes against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure are meant to express Russia’s “holy hatred” towards Ukrainians and prompt them to overthrow Zelensky. Others pontificate that freezing Ukrainian civilians will prompt a capitulation….
Subtitled video at the (Twitter) link.
whheydtsays
Re: SC Salty Current) @ #156…
The statements probably sound better in the original German.
Oggie: Mathomsays
I guess I just don’t get it. When I see
meant to express Russia’s “holy hatred” towards Ukrainians and prompt them to overthrow Zelensky
I have to wonder what the actual mechanism would be. Do they really think anyone in the world is going to think that if Ukrainians know just how much Russia hates Ukrainians that they will overthrow the man who has rallied Ukraine (not just Ukrainians) to defeat Russia? Seriously. This is inept propaganda. Pravda would think it inept and pathetic.
ravensays
According to the ISW, Russia is about to mobilize more people.
Because the last mobilization worked so well.
They also seem to be lacking in the most basic of equipment, good rifles, tents, personal armor, food, etc..
This has got to be putting huge strains on their society, not least because the cannon fodder is dying by the tens of thousands. Fewer workers, more widows and orphans for the state to (supposedly) take care of.
Russia Has Not Stopped Mobilization, Another Wave is being Prepared – ISW
Defense Express ukr.defense.news@gmail.com
November 19, 2022
According to the American analysts believe that Russia is preparing another wave of mobilization, which will worsen the overall quality of Russian troops who are being sent to the front in Ukraine
This is reported by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
“The continuation of covert mobilization measures and the potential preparation for the next wave of mobilization in tandem with the current autumn conscription cycle is likely to create a significant burden on the already overburdened Russian apparatus of formation of the Armed Forces,” the message reads.
In russia, They Announced “Completion of Mobilization” and Recruited Another 18 Thousand People to Be Disposed in Ukraine
Analysts recall that the Kremlin previously stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin did not need to sign a decree formally ending the mobilization period.
According to ISW, Putin likely ordered the end of so-called partial mobilization to free up bureaucratic and administrative capacity for conscription.
“However, it is clear that the Russian authorities have never stopped mobilization efforts completely, which means that a limited number of mobilized conscripts are still going through the training system at the same time as the conscripts go through their own training cycle,” the analysts said.
Another wave of mobilization, ISW suggests, is likely to lead to even lower quality training for both mobilized conscripts and conscripts as they compete for an insufficient number of “training” places.
“The next wave of mobilization in the coming months will only worsen the situation and will probably worsen the overall quality of the Russian troops that will be sent to the front in Ukraine,” the analysts conclude.
ravensays
Musk restores Trump’ Twitter account after online poll
by ALEX VEIGA | ASSOCIATED PRESSSaturday, November 19th 2022
I’m not going to bother posting the article.
Three months ago, I was neutral about Elon Musk.
I now find that no matter how much I dislike the guy, he is capable of making me dislike him even more.
I will never buy anything associated with Musk.
whheydtsays
Re: raven @ #159…
Hard to see how the Russian troops being fed into the front lines could get much worse. Are they planning to send the next tranches to the front wearing sandals and bathing suits and carrying a few toy shovels? Perhaps the Russian commanders are hoping that the Ukrainian forces will laugh themselves to death at the sight…
StevoRsays
@ 160 . raven : I used to respect and admire Musk – and was certainly massivley impressed with Tesla and even more so with SpaceX. I still love SpaceX and think they have done some amazing things and fully deserve respect, support and admiration. But Musk has really destroyed his credibility and shown himself to be an utter douchebag who does NOT deserve respect or admiration and is a contemptible excuse for a human being.
Mr Musk, who bought the social media site last month, asked users in a poll whether Mr Trump should be reinstated and 51.8 per cent of the 15,085,458 responses voted yes.
“The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated,” Mr Musk tweeted.
Damn. Pity we couldn’t have pharyngulated that particular poll to the negative. (Remember those days folks?)
I doubt it was a true indication of most people’s wishes and not affected by some body – or some bots and warping.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that it seems Trump doesn’t want to return -or so he says now :
Mr Trump had appeared less than keen earlier in the day.
“I don’t see any reason for it,” Mr Trump said when asked whether he planned to return to Twitter..
Also on the positive side, I guess is that Kathy Griffin has also bene reinstated on Twitter too.
Short version – its going really well so far. It’s sceheduled toskim past the Lunar surface closely on the 21st of November coming within 81 km of the regolith then enter a distant lunar orbit before retruning to earth splashing down on the 11th of December.
“Evangelicals: “Trump Used Us!””
Oh, nonono!
This affair was entirely consensual.
You were warned going into it that he was a Terrible Social Disease.
You Trumped Around, and now you are Finding Out.
_
tomhsays
Schenk described to Politico how his group tried to influence Alito, Thomas, and Scalia on issues like abortion, gun control, and other rightwing favorites. Does anyone seriously think that those three needed their resolve stiffened? That they would moderate their views if they weren’t wined and dined at fancy restaurants? It sounds to me like Schenk was just another preacher who managed to convince rich folks that they could influence right wing judges to be bravely conservative by buying them dinners (and donating to Schenk’s foundation.)
When his “Faith and Action” group dissolved he founded The Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute, which opines (from their web page) “The foundation of ethical behavior is how the reality of the world and the reality of God are reconciled. We cannot do our work of transforming society without you,” just above a convenient box that says “GIVE TODAY.” His real skill seems to be soliciting donations.
tomhsays
Sorry, #166 above was a reply to SC @ #153.
KGsays
raven@132,
On the Nordstream pipelines, if Russia was responsible for the explosions, it could have been a practice run for attacking undersea infrastruture which is actually in use, of which there is a great deal around Europe. But they’d only have done this if they’d concluded there was little chance of those pipelines ever being used again. The other possibility is that it was a western power, determined to prevent Germany and others resuming close commercial relations with Putin. I don’t think this can be ruled out, and my candidate would be the UK, possibly at the behest of Zelensky – who I wouldn’t blame if this was his initiative. The explosions happened during Truss’s brief period as premier, although it would probably have to have been planned under Johnson. Both are irresponsible enough for anything, and were very keen to curry favour with Zelensky.
Does anyone seriously think that those three needed their resolve stiffened?
I think the key point is that Schenck and the other people involved seriously thought that. This effort spanned decades and involved tens of millions of dollars. Had Schenck raised the money and developed the connections and then just used them for himself, that would be different. But whatever else he did with them, he and the others went to extremes to try to guarantee the justices would act as they wished.
(This also appears to have been what motivated the Dobbs leak – to eliminate even the slight chance anyone would waver from signing on to the most ultra position. As Mark Sumner says in Lynna’s #148:
By putting out a version of the opinion that was incredibly harsh, and which went far beyond the limits of what many had expected in the ruling, that draft put a stake in the ground that may have forced even conservative members of the Court to move faster than they had wanted in completely demolishing Roe and the entire concept of privacy rights.
Perhaps this wasn’t necessary, but it was a huge, risky tactic which presumably no one would have resorted to had they been fully confident that all of the rightwing justices were comfortably on board. If Alito was involved, it would show the success of their efforts and also that he believed this sort of manipulation was needed.)
I wouldn’t underestimate the role of people’s self-image and status concerns on their actions. This was manifestly central to Schenck’s campaign. From the Politico piece (and that’s all the Politico I can take for today):
“We would rehearse lines like, ‘We believe you are here for a time like this,’” which is a reference to the Old Testament Book of Esther in which the Hebrew woman born with the name Hadassah becomes queen of Persia and succeeds in preventing a genocide of her people.
From the NYT:
Mr. Schenck wanted the conservatives on the court to hear from people who would hail them as heroes if they seized the opportunity to strike down Roe one day.
Yes, the rightwing justices already had despicable views on these issues, wanted to put them into practice, and knew this was the expectation of the people who got them on the court. At the same time, they would reasonably expect blowback and real-world consequences from these decisions. Were Schenck and the others wrong to believe in the necessity or usefulness of these decades of work to surround the justices with people who confirmed and cheered their terrible views, celebrated their intellectual dishonesty and specious reasoning, coordinated PR campaigns in support of their unpopular opinions, encouraged callousness and hostility toward those who would suffer because of their actions, told them they’d be seen as heroes, and led them to dismiss the backlash and regard themselves as righteous martyrs? We probably won’t ever know, but it didn’t hurt their cause.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian (support them if you can!) Ukraine liveblog. From there:
Russia has reached agreement with Iran to begin manufacturing hundreds of unmanned weaponised aircraft on Russian soil, the Washington Post reports.
Citing intelligence seen by US and other western security agencies, the newspaper said officials from Moscow and Tehran finalised the deal during a meeting in Iran earlier this month.
Russia and Iran are moving rapidly to transfer designs and key components that could allow production to begin within months, three officials familiar with the matter are reported to have said.
Russia’s defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment from the Post.
At least five people were killed and 18 others injured in a mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub on Saturday in Colorado Springs, Colorado, according to police.
Authorities received numerous 911 calls starting at 11:57 p.m. local time and responded to the scene at Club Q, said Colorado Springs Police Lt. Pamela Castro.
“They did locate one individual who we believe to be the suspect inside,” said Castro. “At this point in time, the suspect is being treated, but is in custody.”
Castro did not clarify whether the suspect was included in the count of people who were injured in the shooting.
Police declined to speak about a possible motive. Colorado Springs Fire Capt. Mike Smaldino said 11 ambulances responded to the scene after multiple 911 calls were received.
“We will be here for many, many hours to come,” said Castro, adding that the FBI is on the scene and assisting.
In a statement on Facebook, Club Q said it was “devastated by the senseless attack on our community” and offered condolences to victims and their families.
“We thank the quick reactions of heroic customers that subdued the gunman and ended this hate attack,” the statement said….
The suspect, who is in custody, has been identified as Anderson Lee Aldrich (I don’t know if that’s the correct spelling).
Tweets hurling racist abuse at footballers, including the N-word, monkey emojis and calls for them to be deported, are not being removed by Twitter.
New research shows the platform failed to act on 99 out of 100 racist tweets reported to it in the week before the World Cup.
Only one was removed after being flagged on Wednesday, a tweet that repeated a racial slur 16 times. All the others remained live this weekend.
The abuse was aimed at 43 players including England stars Raheem Sterling and Bukayo Saka, who were among several players targeted after the Euro 2020 final.
The analysis, conducted by researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and seen by the Observer, included 100 tweets reported to Twitter. Of those, 11 used the N-word to describe footballers, 25 used monkey or banana emojis directed at players, 13 called for players to be deported, and 25 attacked players by telling them to “go back to” other countries. Thirteen tweets targeted footballers over their English skills.
The findings come at a turbulent time for Twitter and will fuel concerns about players possibly being targeted during the World Cup.
…
Twitter was contacted for comment but did not respond. It has laid off much of its communications team….
StevoRsays
So who knew that the tallest active volcano in Eurasia is …
Klyuchevskaya Sopka in Kamchatka?
Or that it is currently exploding with as many as 10 explosions an hour as this :
@171. SC (Salty Current) : I don’t care how his name is spelled. I will not use it on principle.
How are his victims names spelled? What were their lives like and what more could they have done before they were murdered by this vile homophobic bigot?
What will happen now to make these sort of hate crimes and murders less likely?
Nothing?
Fucks sake. Just .. fucking hell, Does it ever end? Can people ever just be allowed to fucking live and love and be who they are without being fucking murdered for it? Fuck.
A victory for the Democratic Party of Georgia and Sen. Raphael Warnock’s campaign
Kyle Griffin’s Tweet: A Fulton County judge has ruled that the Georgia Secretary of State *cannot prohibit counties from voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving — a victory for the Democratic Party of Georgia and Sen. Raphael Warnock’s campaign.
^ Or rather what more could they have done if they hadn’t been murdered buy this piece of excrement I mean..
ravensays
Tweet
Dash Dobrofsky @DashDobrofsky
One of the most under-looked stories, in my opinion, is the fact that Elon Musk reportedly spoke with Vladimir Putin about Putin’s “peace plan” — then posted Putin’s demands on Twitter, purchased the app for $44B, then endorsed the GOP, who vowed to cut off US funding to Ukraine.
2:50 PM · Nov 19, 2022
Ironically, Dash Dobrofsky made this observation on twitter.
He is stretching his point a little bit.
Parts of the MAGA GOP are indeed pro-Russia and pro-Ukrainian Genocide for unclear reasons.
Parts of the GOP remember the Cold War, Vietnam, Cuba, Czechoslovakia 1968 invasion, Hungary invasion, and the Berlin wall and look at Russia as the latest version of the Soviet Union.
Elon Musk also shut down part of Ukraine’s Starlink system for unexplained reasons.
The more I see of Musk, the more I get the impression that he is missing large parts of a normal personality.
A few more details, and more commentary, regarding the shooting in Colorado Springs:
[…] Colorado Springs Police Lt. Pamela Castro said at a media briefing early Sunday that the suspect is in custody and being treated at a local hospital for injuries. Dispatchers received the call about the shooting minutes before midnight Sunday, which happens to be Transgender Day of Remembrance. The observance was started in 1999 to memorialize those murdered as a result of transphobia. Social media users weren’t willing to separate the shooting from the LGBTQ hate that Republicans and one billionaire, in particular, continue to inspire on social media and in policy decisions.
That billionaire, Elon Musk, tweeted in 2020, “Pronouns suck.” And in his attempt to walk back the language, he defended it. “I absolutely support trans, but all these pronouns are an aesthetic nightmare,” Musk continued.
Fast forward to this October when Musk purchased Twitter. One of his first decisions was to hack away at moderation tools and rules in place to curb hate speech and misgendering language while GOP politicians worked to terrorize the families of those with transgender children and oppose same-sex marriage rights.
[…] Thirty-seven Republicans voted against the Respect for Marriage Act last week, which would grant statutory authority for same-sex and interracial marriage. [snipped list of Republicans]
So please, spare us the tweets of condolences from these accounts. These legislators have already shown through their actions that they do not care. Sadly, they only begin the list of inhumane politicians working to spread division and hate.
In her latest attack on human rights, Lauren Boebert says equality measures are “LGBTQ+ supremacy”….
This disgusting projection of bigotry isn’t new for modern day White Hoods. [video at the link]
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott instructed child welfare employees earlier this year to investigate gender-affirming medical procedures as child abuse. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin introduced rules in September to prevent students from participating in programming that respects their gender identity.
In Arizona, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, Republicans passed at least four anti-trans laws since 2018. Arkansas and Alabama passed three, according to The Washington Post.
”This year has seen nearly 240 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced across the country, the bulk of them targeting transgender people’s access to gender-affirming health care, ability to participate in school sports, and in Oklahoma, to use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity,” journalist Heidi Beedle wrote for the Colorado Times Recorder in June. “The moral panic over the existence of transgender people has manifested itself in a renewed interest by conservatives in drag queen events, rekindling the performative hand-wringing and protesting of 2018.”
Lauren Benet Stephenson, the director of communications at the Colorado Education Association, pointed to Beedle’s work in a tweet encouraging journalists to read the post “on how Colorado got here — the many reps and radio hosts who’ve been prepping the kindling with anti-LGBTQ, anti-trans, anti-drag hatred.” [see tweets and chart at the link]
For those paying attention, the nightclub shooting wasn’t difficult to predict.
”This mass shooting in Colorado Springs is horrifying and exactly what LGBTQ organizations and leaders have been warning would happen if the violent rhetoric toward our community continued,” activist Charlotte Clymer tweeted. “This is what happens when hateful propaganda goes unchecked.”
Journalist Jeff Sharlet tweeted: “As a human being, I’m broken-hearted by news from Colorado Springs. As a journalist covering the Right, I’m furious about the latest in our slow civil war. As parent of a nonbinary kid who’s working hard to feel hope, I’m terrified of what happens when they see the news today.” […]
Additional social media responses and videos are available at the link.
ravensays
More on the Colorado gay bar mass shooting incident.
Although not much more information.
The club is calling it a hate attack.
Colorado Springs is notorious for its high concentration of fundie xians and was the scene of another mass shooting at an abortion clinic a few years ago, by a fundie xian terrorist.
What we know about Anderson Lee Aldrich, the alleged Colorado Springs Club Q shooter
Denver Post 11/20.2022
Police say Aldrich, 22, is in custody and being treated for injuries
An attacker opened fire in a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs late Saturday, killing five people and wounding at least 18, officials said. The club said the suspect was subdued by patrons, and Colorado Springs police said he was taken into custody and hospitalized for treatment of his injuries.
Here’s what we know about the suspect:
Who is Anderson Lee Aldrich?
Colorado Springs police Chief Adrian Vasquez identified the suspect as 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich at a news conference Sunday morning. Investigators recovered two guns on scene and said Aldrich used a long gun during the shooting, Vasquez said. Aldrich remains in a local hospital.
Does Aldrich have a criminal history?
Law enforcement officials said Aldrich’s “interactions with law enforcement” are part of the broader investigation, and they would not say if he’d previously been contacted by police. A man with the same name and matching age was arrested in June 2021 for threatening his mother with “a homemade bomb, multiple weapons, and ammunition,” according to media reports at the time. That man was arrested after a brief standoff.
Howard Black, spokesman for the 4th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, would not confirm Sunday morning that Aldrich was the same man arrested in June 2021. Black said the June 2021 incident “is all part of the investigation and will be released as appropriate.”
What do police believe was Aldrich’s motive in the Club Q shooting?
As of Sunday morning, officials declined to answer questions about the suspect’s motive for the shooting, citing the ongoing investigation.
In a statement, Club Q termed the shooting a hate attack.
“Club Q is devastated by the senseless attack on our community,” the club posted on its Facebook page. It said its prayers were with victims and families, adding: “We thank the quick reactions of heroic customers that subdued the gunman and ended this hate attack.”
GLAAD — the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation — called the attack “unspeakable.”
“You can draw a straight line from the false and vile rhetoric about LGBTQ people spread by extremists and amplified across social media, to the nearly 300 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced this year, to the dozens of attacks on our community like this one,” GLAAD’s president and CEO, Sarah Kate Ellis, said. “That this mass shooting took place on the eve of on Transgender Day of Remembrance, when we honor the memory of the trans people killed the prior year, deepens the trauma and tragedy for all in the LGBTQ community.
Sometime in May 2020, Payton Gendron, a 16-year-old in upstate New York, was browsing the website 4chan when he came across a GIF.
It was taken from a livestream recording made the previous year by a gunman as he killed 51 people and wounded more than 40 others at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The killer had written a manifesto explaining that he was motivated by the fear of great replacement theory, the racist belief that secretive forces are importing nonwhite people to dilute countries’ white majorities.
Seeing the video and the manifesto “started my real research into the problems with immigration and foreigners in our white lands — without his livestream I would likely have no idea about the real problems the West is facing,” Mr. Gendron wrote in his own manifesto, posted on the internet shortly before, officials say, he drove to a Tops grocery store in Buffalo and carried out a massacre of his own that left 10 Black people dead.
The authorities say Mr. Gendron’s attack in May mimicked the massacre in Christchurch not just in its motivation but also in tactics. He reduced his caloric intake and cataloged his diet to prepare physically, as the Christchurch killer did. He practiced shooting. He wrote slogans on his rifle, as the Christchurch gunman did. He livestreamed his attack with a GoPro camera attached to his helmet, with the idea of inspiring other attacks by fellow extremists. Mr. Gendron’s screed ran to 180 pages, with 23 percent of those pages copied word-for-word from the Christchurch killer’s manifesto, according to an investigative report on the attacks released last month by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.
On the day of the shooting, State Senator James Sanders echoed the horrified response of many: “Although this is probably a lone-wolf incident, this is not the first mass shooting we have seen, and sadly it will not be the last,” he said.
It’s unfortunate that the term “lone wolf” has come into such casual use in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. It aims to describe a person — nearly always a man — who is radicalized to violence but unconnected to an organized terrorist group like Al Qaeda. But it is wrong to think about violent white supremacists as isolated actors.
There are formal white supremacist organizations going by names like Atomwaffen Division (Canada, Germany, Italy, Britain, United States), Honor and Nation (France), the All-Polish Youth (Poland). But while the majority of adherents to the white supremacist cause aren’t directly affiliated with these groups, they describe themselves as part of a global movement of like-minded people, some of whom commit acts of leaderless violence in the hopes of winning more adherents and destabilizing society. […]
One missing piece of any solution is acknowledging that right-wing extremist violence in the United States is part of a global phenomenon and should be treated that way.
There has been a steady rise in political violence in the United States in the years since Donald Trump became president. Threats against sitting members of Congress have skyrocketed. The husband of the speaker of the House was assaulted in his home by a man wielding a hammer. This year, venues from school board meetings to libraries have been the sites of physical clashes. The majority of the political violence in the past few years has come from right-wing extremists, experts say.
The country cannot accept violence as a method of mediating its political disagreements. There are steps the United States should take now, including cracking down on illegal right-wing paramilitary groups and weeding extremists out of positions of power in law enforcement and the military. Extremists succeed when they have access to power — be that positions of power, the sympathy of those in power or a voice in the national conversation. They should be denied all three. […] some good ideas about solutions to the threat, such as wider and deeper information sharing between the U.S. government and foreign nations about extremist groups and their networks, their finances and their movements. […]
About two minutes after the first shots were fired, the stream was taken offline. As social media experts told The Times, that was “the best that could reasonably be expected.”
The quick response and the scrubbing of subsequent copies of the video and the manifesto from the internet was made possible in part by groups like the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, which was founded by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube in 2017 and now includes more than a dozen platforms.
The consortium can flag extremist content like videos of shootings and tag it in a way that other platforms can search for and remove copies that pop up on their services. In the nine weeks after the Buffalo shooting, Meta automatically removed around one million pieces of content related to the attacks.
Of course, the automated tools aren’t perfect. The New York attorney general’s office found videos of the shooting or links to them on Reddit, Instagram and Twitter, and links to the manifesto on Rumble, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. Tech companies can and should invest more money and resources in content moderation at scale, but that alone will not purge the internet of extremism — especially when the networks for sharing it cross international borders, span continents and come in countless languages.
Recognizing that violent white supremacy is a global problem should help the United States and its allies develop more cooperative, international solutions. Success will be difficult to measure; the ideology may never disappear, but levels of violence can be reduced. Most important, if lawmakers and ordinary Americans make a concerted effort to drive extremist rhetoric out of mainstream politics, the influence of these groups will again fade.
Jeremy Corbyn was supposed to be speaking at this awful “let’s discuss the future of Ukraine but not invite any Ukrainians” [tankie ANSWER Coalition] event yesterday but couldn’t attend due to “technical questions”, according to the host.
The host also said:
“The only group of people who benefit from this war, the only people who benefit from there not being peace negotiations, continue to be the elites in Washington.”
And:
“Our enemies aren’t in Moscow, our enemies are in Langley.”
Speaker Jill Stein said: “Putin’s invasion was the latest response to the buildup and escalation of mutual attacks, including the US support for the 2014 coup in Maidan in which Nazis had a major role to play.”
I couldn’t bring myself to watch the whole thing but the host at least did not condemn Russia once.
If Corbyn’s only reason for not attending was he couldn’t get his laptop to work, then that is truly despicable.
whheydtsays
Re: Steve R @ #174…
Quite familiar with it, but then, I do follow various news sources that report on volcanoes.
Now researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland think they’ve found a new approach to vaccine design that could lead them to a long-lasting jab. As a bonus, it also might work on other coronaviruses, not just the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.
The NIH team reported its findings in a peer-reviewed study that appeared in the journal Cell Host & Microbe earlier this month.
The key to the NIH’s potential vaccine design is a part of the virus called the “spine helix.” It’s a coil-shaped structure inside the spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it grab onto and infect our cells…
Whereas many regions of the spike protein tend to change a lot as the virus mutates, the spine helix doesn’t…
Don’t break out the champagne quite yet. “Although these data are useful for vaccine design, we have not performed vaccination experiments in this study and thus cannot draw any definitive conclusions with regard to the efficacy of stem helix-based vaccines,” the NIH team warned.
ravensays
An article about the new Ukraine navy.
Of necessity, it consists of aerial drones and Neptune/Harpoon anti-ship cruise missiles.
The latest addition are drone Kamikazi surface boats that can reach 50 mph.
AFAICT, the engine on these boats is just a jet ski boat engine.
All that is enough to keep the Russian Black sea fleet away from Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Drone Boats Are Winning The Black Sea Naval War
Forbes David AxeForbes Staff
I write about ships, planes, tanks, drones, missiles and satellites
Edited for length
Nov 20, 2022,08:00am EST
An apparent Ukrainian drone-boat strike on Novorossiysk, a hundred miles from Russian-occupied Crimea in southern Russia, should sound the alarm in Sevastopol, the Crimean headquarters of the Russian navy’s beleaguered Black Sea Fleet.
A nighttime explosion in Novorossiysk’s harbor seems to indicate that the city is the latest target of the Ukrainian navy’s growing fleet of explosives-laden drone boats.
The 18-foot, radio-controlled boats apparently have been prowling the Black Sea for months. A swarm of the 50-mile-per-hour robotic vessels assaulted the main Black Sea Fleet anchorage back in October, blowing up at least one auxiliary vessel and possibly damaging the fleet’s flagship, the 409-foot frigate Makarov.
plus missile-armed TB-2 unmanned aerial vehicles and a solitary ground battery firing locally-produced, 170-mile-range Neptune anti-ship missiles.
While the Ukrainians gradually liberated Snake Island, their fleet transformed. The Ukrainian navy got Harpoon anti-ship missiles from Denmark and the United States. And a class of exploding, robotic speedboats, made in Ukraine and steered via radio by crews safely inside free Ukraine, filled the gap left by the scuttled frigate Hetman Sahaydachniy.
A month later, identical drone boats struck the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s home port of Sevastopol, in occupied Crimea. Fragmentary videos painted a confusing picture. Near-misses. Explosions.
It’s possible the drone boats struck the new Black Sea Fleet flagship Makarov. It also is possible the Russians prevented a catastrophic strike. In either case, it was clear that the Black Sea Fleet no longer was safe in the western Black Sea, even while in port.
The publicity signaled new confidence. And on Friday, something exploded in Novorossiysk. The apparent latest victim of Ukraine’s new navy. A drone navy.
A drone navy that, along with shore-based missile batteries, is more than a match for the Russian navy with its big, expensive—and manpower-intensive—old-fashioned warships.
Turkey has launched air strikes on Kurdish targets in Iraq and Syria, a week after a bombing in Istanbul which it blames on Kurdish militants.
The strikes – dubbed Operation Claw-Sword – hit Kurdish bases which were being used to launch attacks on Turkey, the defence ministry said.
A Syrian-Kurdish spokesperson said two villages populated with internally displaced people were hit.
The banned Kurdish PKK group denies carrying out the Istanbul attack…
Instead of a day of work, the workers endured no water, no food and no toilets under the hot desert sun.
A group of more than 200 migrant laborers hired to work concession stalls at the Qatar World Cup’s opening game said they had been left without food, water and toilet facilities for seven hours while they waited for their assignments.
Standing in front of the Bedouin-tent-shaped Al Bayt stadium in Al Khor, the group were desperately trying to contact their employer without success. Several said they had been asked to report to a facility close to the arena before 10 a.m., nine hours before the game was scheduled to start.
The group, mostly made of men from India, said they had signed contracts to work at the World Cup that guaranteed one meal a day and just under $1,000 for 55 days. “It’s a very bad experience,” said one member of the group. The worker declined to give his name out of fear that it would upset his employers, but added, “Our coordinator told us to come here before 9 a.m. but no one was here.”
The group of concession workers were just a tiny part of the army of low-paid workers Qatar has hired to prepare the country to host the World Cup. The treatment of workers in Qatar and elsewhere in the Gulf has drawn much scrutiny in the yearslong buildup to the event. Human rights groups estimating several thousand migrants have died as a result of injuries, heat-related problems and other health concerns as Qatar embarked on a $200 billion reconstruction to prepare for the one-month tournament. Qatar strongly disputes that total, and notes that it has made reforms to its labor laws.
The concession workers were not the only ones left frustrated under the hot desert sun on Sunday: A group of 20 women from the Philippines, hired to sell scarves, found themselves in a similar situation: Three hours after arriving at the stadium, they had been unable to locate the company that hired them. “We’ve walked so much, this isn’t good,” said one of the women. They, too, were trying to contact representatives of their company without success.
If this war was a long-running television series, we’d be in the off season, with writers writing new scripts, actors resting up, and the props department designing new sets, gear, and costumes. Season 1 was the Battle of Kyiv. Season 2 was the grinding battle for the Donbas, ending with Russia’s capture of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. Season 3 was Russian culmination at Izyum, and the liberation of Kharkiv Oblast. Season 4 was the liberation of Kherson. Now we wonder what the writers have in store for us in the coming season. Is it Melitopol? Northern Luhansk (Svatove and Starobilsk) in northeastern Ukraine? More Donbas carnage?
Artillery is slamming into both sides of the contact line, and fierce battles are happening, but check out these two reports from Ukraine’s General Staff. First, the usual rundown of Russian suicide attacks:
The troops repelled Russian attacks in the areas of – Bilohorivka, Luhansk region. and Spirne, Yakovlivka, Bakhmutske, Bakhmut, Opytne and Klishchiivka in Donetsk region.
With Kherson removed, and Ukraine in control of most of Kharkiv oblast, Russia’s sputtering offensive operations are relegated to just the two Donbas oblasts of Luhansk and Donetsk. Still, that’s five assaults, so compare that to this: [list showing the losses is available at the link]
One tank? Two armored personnel carriers? One artillery gun? Just one drone? The only number with any heft is the 330 claimed Russian dead, and even that is far below numbers we’ve seen in recent weeks of 500-800 personnel and Russian tank losses in the dozens. We can probably assume these claims are are generally inflated, but the trends are still worth tracking—it made sense the Russia’s losses were far higher during Ukraine’s Kherson counteroffensive, and now that it’s over, a single tank kill is logical.
Yet Ukraine is repulsing attacks on those cities, and Ukraine did claim 330 Russian dead. That means that Russia is assaulting those villages without much armor, using human waves, marching them into a wall of Ukrainian artillery.
What a wretched way to fight a war. There are tons of videos of massed Russian casualties on the outskirts of some of these towns, and while I doubt my wisdom in sharing it, here are two examples. [I am not including the embedded links, but you can find them in the article at the main link.] Extremely disturbing video, so click with caution. I link only to show that I’m not exaggerating. There’s lots more video like that, with at least one Ukrainian Telegram channel devoted to the gore. I follow it, but I avoid it.
I can’t quantify it, but I’m certainly seeing more dead infantry videos. Going back to the seasons metaphor, the Battle of Kyiv was all about St. Javelin, with video after video of Javelin and NLAW anti-tank rockets slamming into Russian armor. Season 2 was mostly artillery barrages and the first videos of WWI-style trench warfare. Season 3 was kinda fun—Kharkiv liberation videos, smiling babushkas, trampled Russian flags, replaced with Ukrainian ones, and POWs. It was also the introduction of HIMARS/MLRS videos. Remember HIMARS o’clock? Season 4, We were back to tube artillery, but this time with precision-guided Excalibur shells systematically slamming into tanks, as well as HIMARS taking out bridges and barges. And the spectacular Kerch bridge operation.
Now it was clear people were dying in those videos, but it was sanitized, the carnage hidden from our view. How many videos did we see of burnt out Russian vehicles with nary a Russian body in the frame? Now, it is impossible to sanitize the results of a human wave attack. But given the decimation of Russia’s armored fleet, this is all Russia seems to have left for offensive operations. And those hundreds of thousands of untrained mobiliks will remain a gruesome speed bump in Ukraine efforts to liberate its lands.
Anyway, things aren’t literally quiet in Ukraine right now. Artillery is loud. People are dying. But there’s a definite lull as both sides shift their Kherson armies to new locations, and Ukraine waits for the ground to freeze.
Remember when Russia claimed they had to invade Ukraine because of NATO, then it was because they needed to save Russian-speakers from some undetermined threat, and then it was because of Nazis, and then a couple of weeks ago it was because of Satan? [snipped tweet from Julia Davis]
“Holy hatred” is right—hatred that Ukraine had the gall to want independence from the dystopian hellhole that is Russia. They want Ukrainians to “freeze and rot” for the crime of standing by their president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. They even act surprised! Why aren’t the masses rising up? Oh, it’s because they’ll get gunned down! The projection is … breathtaking, as is their ridiculous notion that the Ukrainian people will surrender because it’s too cold. Yes, winter will be hard, people will suffer, many will die, but this isn’t new for any country in Russia’s sphere of influence. Remember, Stalin literally starved millions in Ukraine during the 1932-1933 Holodomor in order to squelch the country’s bid for independence.
We have even seen hatred in Russian phone intercepts from Ukraine, with soldiers furious that Ukrainian standards of living are so much higher than their own. (And to be clear, Ukraine is among the poorest nations in Europe. The bar was already low.)
It is fun, however, when nuggets of truth emerge from Russian state TV propaganda.
Literally the best summary of Putin’s medieval Russia & its disastrous invasion of #Ukraine “We don’t have toilet bowls, but they (🇺🇦) do.” And the all time classic, “We (🇷🇺) weren’t ready for a war that we started.”
[…] Meanwhile in Russia: pundits and experts are appalled their saboteurs and sleeper cells aren’t blowing up local tractor factories in Ukraine. They propose recruiting Ukrainian children from disadvantaged families for Russia’s nefarious plans against the nation it invaded. [Images and video available at the link]
It’s true! Russia has a toilet bowl problem.
More than one-fifth of Russian households do not have access to indoor plumbing, according to official statistics obtained by the RBC news website on Tuesday.
Russia leads the developed world with the worst sanitation record, according to the London-based WaterAid NGO. A 2012 estimate citing official data placed the number of Russians whose households are only equipped with outhouses at 35 million, or roughly a quarter of the population.
Sure, Ukraine is leaning toward Europe and the West because it offers an escape from Russian world. But … the West also promises the kind of prosperity Russia doesn’t even pretend to deliver to its own people (aside from the oligarchs, of course). Compare Poland’s economic development (25th of 45 in Europe), measured by per capita GDP, compared to Belarus (36th). They both started out in the same place post Soviet breakup.
In fact, look at the bottom of Europe’s per-capita GDP chart: Almost all of them are part of Russia’s sphere, or have been screwed by Serbia, also part of Russia’s sphere: [List at the link]
In fact, there are Russian troops in Belarus, plus Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. To remain in Russia’s sphere of influence means to remain an economic backwater.
This has always been Russia’s biggest PR problem—not their brutality and imperialism. The United States and Europe have their own legacy of brutality and imperialism, yet the world gravitates toward them because in the end, economic prosperity is more attractive than shitting in a hole in an outhouse in the middle of winter.
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has tried to explain that all away by wrapping himself in the Russian Orthodox Church,
“The battle for cultural supremacy is growing on the world stage,” according to the statement Putin signed Monday on Russia’s “humanitarian policy” abroad. “Centuries of history have given Russia a rich cultural heritage and spiritual potential that has put it in a unique position to successfully spread traditional Russian moral and religious values.”
The decree calls for the country’s foreign policy to counter what it terms a campaign to discredit Russia and its goals. It claims Russia is increasingly seen abroad as a guardian of traditional moral, social and family values against what it describes as “the aggressive imposition of neoliberal views by a number of states.”
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill (who also has a super yacht, just like Jesus intended), is in charge of promoting this anti-Western message, and homophobia anchors it all:
For eight years, there have been efforts to destroy what exists in the Donbas. What exists in the Donbas is a rejection, a principled rejection of the so-called values that are now being offered by those who lay claim to global domination. Today, there is a certain test for loyalty to that power, a certain pass into that “happy” world, the world of excessive consumption, the world of illusory freedom. Do you know what that test is? It’s very simple but also horrific: it’s a gay parade. The demand to hold a gay parade is in fact a test for loyalty to that powerful world, and we know that if people or countries resist this demand, they are excluded from that world and treated as alien.
Sound familiar? There’s a reason MAGA Republicans are so enchanted by Putin.
Meanwhile, this is a thing that happens in the Russian army:
A former #Russian military official explains that in the Army there is male-male sexual contact, but it is non-consensual, a “tradition of punitive sex”, thus it is okay, unlike “literal [F-word, slur against homosexuals] … in the degenerate West”.
And that “excessive consumption” is such an evil, that Russian theft of Ukrainian washing machines is one of the most pervasive memes of the war. Are “Russian values” so devoid of humanity that they allow for the mass murder and misery they’ve inflicted on Ukraine (and Georgia, Moldova, Chechnya, Syria, Chad, Libya, etc), and also on their own people, and even their own army?
Those aren’t “values” anyone is buying. Even Russians themselves would be happy to trade their homes for one in the United States or France.
Akira MacKenziesays
@178
Parts of the MAGA GOP are indeed pro-Russia and pro-Ukrainian Genocide for unclear reasons.
Unclear!? Putin’s Russia is the MAGA cult’s ideal society: A totalitarian, hyper-Christian, jingoistic, toxically masculine, militaristic state ruled by corrupt billionaire oligarchs (or as American conservatives would call them “winners,” “achievers,”and “job creators”) who brutalize, imprison or murder dissidents and minorities (especially LGBTQ people).
Meanwhile in Russia: propagandist admits that Russia is in Ukraine “not to liberate anyone,” but to take whatever Russia perceives as its own—including Kyiv—and terrorizing Ukrainians into shedding their national identity and being afraid “to breathe wrong in Russia’s direction.”
Subtitled video at the (Twitter) link.
“Kyiv, at the minimum, they should not be able to keep. Beyond that, we’ll see what kind of beautiful life we’ll create for them and how they’ll again want to rethink their identity…”
The WaPo asked security experts Matt Green (who worked with his Johns Hopkins students) and Jake Williams to review the drive to see what they could authenticate.
They discovered that people had kept adding content to the “laptop,” making it impossible to say what was on the “laptop” when it was provided to the blind computer repairman.
In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.
Maxey had alerted The Washington Post to this issue in advance, saying that others had accessed the data to examine its contents and make copies of files. But the lack of what experts call a “clean chain of custody” undermined Green’s and Williams’s ability to determine the authenticity of most of the drive’s contents.
“The drive is a mess,” Green said…
This incident in Makiivka has been on the news feeds for a few days.
A group of 10 Russians tried to surrender to Ukrainians. The last one decided to play Rambo or Trump or something and opened fire on the Ukrainians.
They fired back and at the end the Russian shooter and 10 surrendering Russians were dead.
The way the Geneva convention reads, this wasn’t a war crime. You aren’t surrendering if someone is shooting at the people you are surrendering to.
Basically Russian Rambo killed his 10 fellow soldiers.
One Ukrainian also died here.
I’m trying to see the point here and there really isn’t much of one.
Don’t join the Russian army and invade Ukraine.
All the people calling what happened in Makiivka a “war crime” know fuck shit about surrender procedures. Surrenders of enemy forces larger than one’s own force are TRAINED and follow procedures. The Ukrainian troops followed the procedure and because of that they are alive. If the enemy wants to surrender but outnumbers you, then you tell the enemy soldiers to move unarmed and with their hands up to a spot in front of one or two of your machine guns.
Make all the enemy troops lay down. Now if one of them changes his mind – he is in the machine gunner’s sight and can be neutralized easily. And the machine gunner’s task is TO FIRE immediately if an enemy soldiers moves without being asked to do so. Once all the enemy troops are on the ground, you call them one by one over to a spot BEHIND the machine gun. You never move to the enemy on the ground as then you block your machine gunner’s sight. Call the enemy troops over one by one, search them, handcuff them, sit them down behind the machine gun to the side. Proceed until all enemy soldiers are searched and handcuffed.
This is trained! Troops are expected to follow this procedure to ensure the safety of their own side. The Ukrainian squad set up their heavy machine gun, told the Russians to follow protocol, and all of them would be alive if the last Russian didn’t decide to murder them all by opening fire.
The machine gunner did as trained – open fire immediately to ensure no risk comes from the line of Russian soldiers on the ground. Smaller units taking larger units prisoner is dangerous for both sides, that is why this is trained. If you now say that this was a war crime – you show you know shit. The only war crime committed was the Russian soldier opening fire. And he took all his comrades with him by forcing the Ukrainian machine gunner to do his job and open fire.
I feel pity for the Russians, who surrendered, but this wasn’t a war crime.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From their latest summary:
…The UN nuclear watchdog will conduct an assessment of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant on Monday after the site was shelled more than a dozen times over the weekend. The blasts damaged buildings and equipment, though none had been “critical” for nuclear safety and security, the International Atomic Energy Agency said.
…
Russian forces launched almost 400 strikes on Sunday in Ukraine’s east as part of a campaign of artillery fire, president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a Sunday night address. “The fiercest battles, as before, are in the Donetsk region. Although there were fewer attacks today due to worsening weather, the amount of Russian shelling unfortunately remains extremely high,” Zelenskiy said.
Russian forces are constructing defensive positions partially staffed by poorly trained mobilised reservists around the Svatove sector in the Luhansk region in north-eastern Ukraine, according to the UK Ministry of Defence. With Russia’s south-western frontline now more readily defendable along the east bank of the Dnipro River, the Svatove sector is likely now a more vulnerable operational flank of the Russian force, the latest British intelligence report reads.
A new training centre for Ukrainian troops in the central Spanish city of Toledo will start operating at the end of November, Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, told the Nato parliamentary assembly. Spanish police will also be deployed in Ukraine over the coming weeks to help investigate alleged Russian war crimes, Sanchez added.
A video purportedly showing the detention of two Russian servicemen who refused to fight against Ukraine has appeared across multiple Russian and Ukrainian Telegram channels. The video shows two men – each dressed in military uniform – called to appear in front of their commander.
…
Forty-five countries and institutions will meet in Paris on Monday to pledge millions of euros of aid for Moldova, as fears mount that it could be further destabilised by the conflict in Ukraine, according to a Reuters report. Moldova, which lies between Ukraine and Romania, has felt the effects of rising food and energy prices as well as an influx of thousands of refugees arriving in the country of about 2.5 million people.
Ukraine has exported almost 16.2m tonnes of grain so far in the 2022-23 season, down 31.7% from the 23.8m tonnes exported by the same stage of the previous season, agriculture ministry data showed. The volume included almost 6.3m tonnes of wheat, 8.6m tonnes of corn and 1.3m tonnes of barley, Reuters reported.
…
The first Ukrainian supermarket has opened in Kherson since the city was liberated earlier this month. ATB, a 24/7 shop in the city, had queues of people outside on Sunday as it welcomed customers back. Kherson remains without electricity, running water or heating, but residents found some relief in being able to purchase Ukrainian pickled gherkins, dumplings, horseradish and other favourites….
Also from there:
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his wife, Olena, have been pictured attending a commemoration ceremony in Kyiv at a monument to the so-called “Heavenly Hundred” for the people killed during the Ukrainian pro-EU mass demonstrations in 2013/2014.
US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, said Ukraine is in a “much better condition” than Russia to keep fighting through the winter.
Speaking during a press conference in Indonesia, Austin said:
We’ve done a lot to try to prepare the Ukrainians to be prepared for a fight in the winter, and enable them to continue to keep pressure on our adversaries throughout the winter months.
He added that it was “hard to predict how things will evolve and on what timeline, but we’re in this in support of Ukraine for as long as it takes”.
“‘Very frustrated’: England and Wales back down over OneLove armband”: “England, Wales and five other European nations have backed down from wearing the OneLove armband that was intended as a protest at all forms of discrimination at the World Cup in Qatar. The decision came after they were warned by Fifa they would face sporting sanctions, and that their captains could be booked or even forced to leave the pitch….”
Meanwhile in Russia: accused war criminal Zakhar Prilepin—who spends a lot of time on the frontlines and previously boasted of “killing many” in Ukraine—admits that Russia wants to negotiate merely to regroup and finish fighting later, any potential peace accords notwithstanding.
New Zealand’s Supreme Court has ruled that the country’s current voting age of 18 is discriminatory, meaning parliament must discuss whether it should be lowered.
The case was brought by campaign group Make It 16, which wants the voting age reduced to include 16 and 17 year olds.
…
The issue must now be brought to parliament, after the court ruled that New Zealand’s minimum voting age of 18 was inconsistent with the country’s Bill of Rights – which gives people who are 16 years and over the right to be free from age discrimination…
Mastodon has emerged as the most recognizable Twitter alternative as of late, but there’s more than enough time for others to emerge. Former Waze CEO Noam Bardin is now trying with Post to create a “civil place to debate ideas; learn from experts, journalists, individual creators, and each other; converse freely; and have some fun.”
Noam Bardin led Waze for 12 years (until 2021) and Post is “what’s next.” At a high-level, it’s described as a “Social Platform for Real People, Real News, and Civil Conversations.” LinkedIn notes a May 2022 start date, with buzz around Post emerging in the past week…
As some people have pointed out, Twitter is not really a technology company, it is a social company. If you don’t put the effort into maintaining a safe, welcoming environment through content moderation, etc. you will not succeed.
“My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame,” Musk tweeted.
Musk’s first child, Nevada Alexander, was born in 2002 to his first wife Justine Musk. Nevada passed away at 10 weeks old of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, commonly known by its abbreviation SIDS. Elon and Justine have five other children together.
Oggie: Mathomsays
(Not national, international, or even local news, just me venting)
So, since June, both the water company and the gas company have been digging up our street. New gas lines and meters. A new water main and all new connections from the main to the curbside valve. Which, of course, means that winter is coming and our street is some pavement, some sunken paved patches, some unsunken paved patches, and some dirt and gravel filled in holes.
Now, I have always had some water in my basement. When it rains, my sump pump pumps out the sump hole. But, over the past month, the water coming into my basement has increased. From one or two sump pump cycles a day to 20 cycles per hour. And the water was coming from the old coal bin under the porch. I went in there and discovered a stream of water coming in around my feed pipe.
So the water company checked it out and couldn’t find any leak along the old main (the new one is not connected yet) or my line (all based on listening). So they decided (how? I don’t know.) that the leak was on my service line. But, because of the timing, the water company (or, more likely, their contractor) assumed responsibility and, today, a different contractor showed up to install a new feed line.
They dug down and the hole filled with water. They shut my water off and the hole continued to fill. Lo and behold! the water is coming from the street side of my feed line valve. So now the water company, the contractor putting in the new main and all the news roadside feed lines, and the contractor who is here to put in my new curbside feed line are engaged in a round of ‘who’s going to pay for this’. As they stand around in the 20F weather, pumping muddy water out of the hole where my grass used to be and out into the street.
They have turned my water back on, but that’ll change as they dig up the street to find the leak. Which could be opposite my house or could be way up the hill.
All we need is circus music.
ravensays
Stochastic terrorism against LGBTQ+ is increasing.
The attack on the Colorado Springs nightclub that left 5 people dead and 25 wounded is just the latest in a series of attacks.
One of the main weapons of the stochastic terrorists is…Twitter, which can be bothered to clean up their content and stop supporting terrorists.
“Two accounts on Twitter targeting the LGBTQ+ public are Gays Against Groomers and Libs of TikTok. Both accounts strategically packaged messages to their followers, knowing that drawing attention to LGBTQ+ events will outrage and anger them.”
The Advocate
Club Q Shooting Comes Amid Increased Attacks on LGBTQ+ Venues
Christopher Wiggins
Sun, November 20, 2022 at 12:40 PM
In the wake of Saturday’s mass shooting at the queer club Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colo., which left five people dead and at least 18 wounded, advocates point to the increased anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric online and the numerous anti-LGBTQ+ bills drafted in recent months.
Far-right influencers have set their sights on the LGBTQ+ community, specifically the transgender community and drag queens, to generate a divisive culture war issue in the run-up to the recent midterm election. For months, experts have warned that the attacks targeting the LGBTQ+ community were not only bigoted but also dangerous.
Now in the wake of the massacre, this time at Club Q, authorities are trying to piece together a motive. However, some say one of the factors is clear: targeted online extremism and stochastic terrorism.
While authorities in Colorado Springs have not said why the suspect gunned down at least five patrons at Club Q, the venue called the shooting a “hate attack.”
A public information officer for the Colorado Springs Police Department said on Sunday that the department is still investigating the reason for the shooting and would not speculate on the motivation. However, a prosecutor told reporters that the case would be investigated through a lens of a hate crime.
LGBTQ+ communities have seen an increase in threats and acts of violence, largely because of a hateful discourse that falsely smeared members of the community as “groomers” and child sexual predators.
Two accounts on Twitter targeting the LGBTQ+ public are Gays Against Groomers and Libs of TikTok. Both accounts strategically packaged messages to their followers, knowing that drawing attention to LGBTQ+ events will outrage and anger them.
Former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, author, and analyst Juliette Kayyem warned in an interview with The Advocate last summer that accounts that engage in stochastic terrorism were rising and becoming more and more effective.
In listening to social media and right-wing propaganda, listeners interpret the demonization of groups as promoting targeted violence — terrorism — which can lead to overt acts. However, Kayyem emphasizes that these acts are often motivated by vague language that allows the agitator to deny responsibility for the act.
According to Kayyem, there is a direct correlation between accounts like Chaya Raichik’s Libs of TikTok and angry and potentially violent extremists.
In the hours after news of the Club Q shooting spread, Raichik, for example, doubled down on her anti-LGBTQ+ messaging by posting about other drag-inclusive events in the state.
“This organization in Colorado teaches kids how to become drag queens and helps kids ‘safely experience the art of drag on stage.’ Colorado state reps @leslieherod and @BriannaForCO promoted and encouraged this child drag organization and performance,” she wrote, tagging Colorado Democrats Leslie Herod and Brianna Titone.
If one were expecting Twitter to control accounts like Libs of TikTok, one would be sadly mistaken. Last week, Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, engaged with Raichik’s account to make an ableist joke about a former Twitter employee.
Attacks against LGBTQ+ people have become a regular happening since Libs of TikTok began targeting them.
In June, a group of men interrupted a drag queen story hour at a library in the San Francisco Bay Area fter Libs of TikTok highlighted the event to its more than 1 million followers. The men, who police believe to be part of the far-right Proud Boys, yelled anti-LGBTQ+ slurs.
Earlier that month, a North Carolina drag queen story hour had to be canceled after organizers received threats of violence and deemed it unsafe to continue with the event.
When someone in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, spotted a large group of men loaded into a U-Haul truck headed toward an LGBTQ+ Pride celebration in June wearing khakis and blue shirts, with baseball caps and face coverings with riot shields and other gear, he reported them, and authorities thwarted the incident. Police arrested 31 members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front during the stop.
The gun safety advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety released a report highlighting gun violence’s effects on LGBTQ+ communities.
The U.S. records more than 25,000 hate crimes involving firearms each year, many of which are directed at LGBTQ individuals.
According to the report, LGBTQ+ youth are more likely to experience bias-motivated violence involving weapons than non-LGBTQ+ youth. According to research cited by Everytown for Gun Safety, 17 percent of LGBTQ+ youth have been injured or threatened by a weapon at school, compared to 6 percent of non-LGBTQ youth. In addition, about 29 percent of queer youth identify as transgender, and 30 percent of queer youth are questioning their sexuality.
While the motivations for the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs are unknown, it will be no shock to anybody if authorities declare the shooting a hate crime.
In recent months, as Libs of TikTok and Gays Against Groomers have directed unwanted attention at organizations, including children’s hospitals, incidents of violence or threats of violence have increased.
Much of this attention has acted as a catalyst for disenchanted and angry people to target LGBTQ+ communities. And the number of incidents against queer people continues to grow.
In October, a doughnut shop in Tulsa, Okla., that had hosted an art installation featuring drag queens was attacked with a Molotov cocktail.
In California, the Castro Valley Unified School District became the target of online attacks in September for merely painting Pride-inclusive murals on school properties.
A former Nevada Democratic Party official who turned Republican in 2018 was arrested in October for threatening to commit a mass shooting event at an LGBTQ+ event in Las Vegas.
Also in October, an Idaho man was arrested for allegedly yelling homophobic slurs as he attempted to run over two women with his car.
In September, Florida police began investigating an incident of vandalism at the Pride Community Center of North Central Florida in Gainesville as a hate crime after windows were smashed and a note was left behind.
Earlier this month, a man was indicted for a series of anti-LGBTQ+ arsons across Manhattan in August 2021.
ravensays
This is a blog post and only a few paragraphs are quoted.
It does explain why nuclear weapons need to be maintained to work and why Russia’s may not be.
More or less all modern nuclear weapons are boosted with a deuterium-tritium mixture that fuses during the blast. Including tactical nuclear weapons.
Tritium has a short half life of 12.5 years and is hard to make.
You make it in nuclear reactors by irradiating lithium.
Russia has a long history of not taking care of much of anything including in the present case, their army and its stockpiles.
We of course, don’t have the slightest idea in reality of how many of their nuclear weapons are being updated.
Will Lockett
Oct 25 2022 medium.com edited for length
Russia’s Nuclear Weapons May Be Useless
Nuclear physics may have rendered Russia’s atomic threat hollow.
Putin seems to be on a nostalgia trip and is desperately trying to relive his Cold War days. Not only has he sparked a deadly war to try and reclaim the old Soviet state of Ukraine, but he is also throwing nuclear threats at the West left, right, and centre.
Fortunately, thanks to a quirk of nuclear physics, there is a chance that Putin’s nuclear weapons have been rendered useless. But how? And what does this mean for Ukraine and NATO?
Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, with 4,447 active strategic nuclear weapons and 1,912 tactical nuclear weapons in reserve (all of which are ready to be rolled out quickly).
But these two types of nuclear weapons actually use very different types of nuclear reactions. You see, to fit a nuclear bomb into a shell or small missile, it has to be a pure fission bomb, as this design is relatively compact. All fission bombs’ main explosion comes from a nuclear decay reaction, and all early nuclear weapons used this design. But this technology is very inefficient when making a nuclear bomb with a yield of over 50 kilotonnes. Instead, these larger bombs use the thermonuclear design. Thermonuclear weapons use a small fission bomb to heavily compress and heat a capsule of hydrogen, which then undergoes fusion and releases far more energy than the ignition fission reactions, allowing for effective giant bombs. (To read more about fusion, click here).
This is where Russia’s problem comes in.
While deuterium is a naturally occurring and stable isotope which we can easily extract from water, tritium is highly radioactive, with a half-life of only 12.5 years, and as such, needs to be artificially made.
We make tritium by irradiating lithium in nuclear reactors and then painstakingly extracting the gas that is emitted. It may sound simple, but the complexity and cost of this process are astronomical, which is why tritium is one of the most expensive materials ever made at $30,000 per gram!
Well, thermonuclear weapons need a certain amount of tritium to work. Because tritium decays away very quickly, they need to be routinely topped up with tritium at great expense, which is something Russia may struggle to do.
You see, Russia has an economy smaller than the state of New York, yet they are somehow running a full-scale invasion, fending off international sanctions designed to cripple their economy, and still have to refine enough tritium to keep their 4,447 thermonuclear weapon arsenal topped up.
Sadly, if this situation is happening, it doesn’t really help Ukraine. Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons don’t need this expensive refuelling, and they will be far more helpful for the Russian invasion.
We also can’t guarantee that this is happening in Russia. Putin may be prioritising the production of tritium. After all, he, of all people, knows the power of a nuclear deterrent.
This means that, while there is a chance that Russia’s most powerful weapons are now nearly useless, there is also a chance that they are just as deadly as they always have been.
ravensays
Russia has been emptying out their prisons to send men to Ukraine.
Reportedly, they are mostly being used as cannon fodder and most are being killed. Not a good bargain.
And, some of them who retreat or surrender are in fact, being executed.
Russian prison population falls dramatically as convicts are sent to fight in Ukraine
The notorious Wagner mercenary group has been recruiting prisoners including murderers to shore up a faltering front line
By
James Kilner
20 November 2022 • 2:26pm theTelegraph.com
‘If you desert, we’ll execute you’: ‘Putin’s chef’ recruits convicts for war
Russia’s prison population has fallen dramatically since the notorious Wagner mercenary group began recruiting convicts to fight in Ukraine to shore up the Kremlin’s faltering invasion.
Analysis by Mediazona, a Russian news website operating in exile, showed that there were 23,000 fewer men in Russian prisons now when compared with August – when Wagner is believed to have started recruiting convicts en masse.
“Historical data on the number of convicts in prisons show that this number has never been reduced so sharply, even during amnesties,” Mediazona said.
There are still around 325,000 men in Russian prisons.
Reports have said that thousands of convicts had signed up to fight for Wagner in Ukraine but this is the first authoritative assessment of the extent of the mercenary group’s prison recruitment drive.
Russian convicts have been promised pardons in exchange for signing up for a six-month tour on the battlefields of Ukraine with Wagner.
The recruitment process was quick, and often involved Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin flying into remote prisons on a helicopter to give a pep talk.
Recruiters reportedly had no issue with taking murderers out of prison to bolster Russia’s forces in Ukraine.
After a training camp usually lasting a couple of weeks, the convicts-turned-mercenaries are sent to the frontlines in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas and told that if they try to flee or surrender, they will be killed.
Wagner and Mr Prigozhin have come out from the shadows since the start of the war in Ukraine.
The Kremlin had previously denied the mercenary group’s existence, despite deploying it to the Middle East and Africa. It now openly recruits in Russia, is lauded as a vital auxiliary force to the Russian army and has opened a large new office and business centre outside St Petersburg.
Mr Prigozhin has also opened Wagner training centres in the Belgorod and Kursk regions of Russia, which border Ukraine.
Roman Starovoyt, the governor of the Kursk region, appeared to give Wagner his blessing on Saturday when he posted contact details on his Telegram channel of how men in the region can join local militia groups being trained by Wagner.
“The first groups of people’s militia from the Kursk region have already been trained by Wagner,” he said, underneath a promotional video set to music.
John Oliver discusses the Qatar World Cup, the human rights violations happening in the sporting event’s host country, and what perfection really means to David Beckham.
Ukraine is to evacuate civilians from recently liberated areas of the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions, amid fears that the damage to infrastructure caused by the war is too severe for people to endure the winter.
Residents of the two southern regions, which were shelled regularly by Russian forces in the past months, have been advised to move to safer areas in the central and western parts of the country, said Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk.
The government would provide transportation, accommodation and medical care, she added.
The evacuations come just over a week after Ukraine retook the city of Kherson – which remains close to the frontline – and areas around it.
The liberation marked a major battlefield gain, while the evacuations highlight the difficulties Ukraine is facing after heavy Russian shelling of its power infrastructure as winter sets in.
The war’s southern front has been the recent focus of efforts for both Russian and Ukrainian forces before Russia’s retreat from Kherson.
More recently, however, Moscow appears to be building up forces and increasing its military efforts on the eastern Donbas front where the two sides have been locked in a bitter and inconclusive struggle for months, not least around the key town of Bakhmut.
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 28
Could they just reconfigure their stockpiles to old school fission bombs? Even the “trigger” alone would be pretty destructive.
…Try as Boudreaux might to finesse the question of “accountability” promoted by people like Dr. Hodkinson and Boudreaux’s masters at the Brownstone Institute, he’s trying to thread the needle of echoing the anger and thirst for revenge against those whom they falsely perceive as their “oppressors” that antivaxxers have long nurtured dating back to long before the pandemic in order to foment further anger, all while himself appearing to be “reasonable” compared to them in that he doesn’t think that public health officials should be held personally accountable for the “carnage” that he falsely attributes to them. It’s a cynical and obvious ploy, but then Boudreaux does write for the Brownstone Institute….
…Meanwhile, the doctor faces more legal trouble at Ontario’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. After cautioning Gill last year over some of her COVID statements, the regulator ordered her earlier this month to appear on similar charges before a discipline tribunal, a sort of trial where a guilty verdict could lead to revocation of her licence.
…
Gill was originally represented by Rocco Galati, the firebrand Toronto lawyer who has called public-health measures to combat the virus a “vicious fraud” and protective face coverings “slave-trade masks.”
But against the wishes of clients Gill and Lamda, an Ontario judge allowed him to withdraw from the case in May, saying “he had a lengthy hospitalization and was in a coma [due to COVID], from which he is still recovering,” a court order posted by the CanuckLaw[dot]ca blog indicates. In the meantime, Galati had made “superficial” submissions to the judge on the legal-costs issue without the consent of his clients, Saikaley said in a July letter to Stewart.
As the larger case rolls on, Gill is also suing University of Ottawa health law professor Amir Attaran for $7 million over Tweets in which he called her an idiot, among other comments.
Attaran said Wednesday he has also filed a SLAPP motion, but has been holding off to see if the doctor would settle the case. He said he wants her to apologize for suing and admit she was wrong about COVID, but so far Gill has declined to do so.
“She now has 1.1 million reasons to reconsider her position,” said Attaran. “We are prepared to go to court.”
Ukraine says military operation underway on left bank of Dnipro River.
Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command said that the operation had been launched on the Kinburn Spit in Mykolaiv Oblast, and a storm in the sea is helping Ukrainian troops to liberate this territory.
Ukrainian troops’ attempts to venture into the Kinburn Spit on the left bank of the Dnipro River follow the liberation of Kherson and other areas on the river’s right bank on Nov. 11.
I have no idea what’s going on here, but I’m taking an admittedly disproportionate interest in this little spit.
ravensays
@ 28
Could they just reconfigure their stockpiles to old school fission bombs? Even the “trigger” alone would be pretty destructive.
Probably.
Every thing I know about nuclear weapons design, I learned on Wikipedia.
Which isn’t as bad as it sounds.
There is a huge amount of detailed information about that subject on Wikipedia.
One of the problems with a pure fission bomb is deliverability.
They don’t produce much blast for the weight and tend to be heavy which matters on missiles and cannon shells.
Nonetheless, we destroyed Hiroshima with a 20 kt fission bomb.
Russia couldn’t do a lot with fission bombs but not a lot with nuclear weapons is still…more than we want to see.
Steve Benen commented on the Justice Department’s investigations into Trump’s suspected crimes. Benen noted that Trump’s Republican lackeys are, at best, not offering any realistic menu options:
[…] An American citizen is suspected of breaking the law. Republicans who deem this disgraceful should necessarily consider the obvious follow-up question: What should federal law enforcement do in this situation? Members such Cruz and Biggs can choose from a narrow menu of options:
They can recommend that the Justice Department ignore the suspected crimes.
They can recommend that the Justice Department pursue the suspected crimes.
Or they can recommend some kind of special exception to our legal system, concluding that alleged crimes committed by former presidents don’t count.
Re: SC (Salty Current) @ #216…
One thing that might be going on… The tip of the Kinburn Spit is the only part of Mykolaiv Oblast still under Russian control. While I am dubious about the wisdom of an amphibious landing to free more territory by attacking the spit, it would probably be a PR victory to be able to claim having freed all Mykolaiv Oblast from the Russian army.
[…] The Associated Press reported that Obama has scheduled a Dec. 1 event in Georgia, hoping to give incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock a boost. Dec. 1, the AP noted, is the final day of early in-person voting.
In other midterm political news: Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski has inched into the lead in Alaska thanks to the state’s ranked-choice voting system.
[…] Most of the Freedom Caucus [in the House of Congress] voted against McCarthy. And a number have already said they will never vote for him on the House floor where he needs a majority of the whole House to vote in his favor. They say they won’t vote for him. But they also won’t say who else they’ll vote for. And that’s the point. None of this is about choosing someone besides Kevin McCarthy. It’s about pushing McCarthy into a weak and compliant position where he runs the caucus at the behest of the House Freedom Caucus. […]
Today McCarthy is already out trying to sway Freedom Caucus Members with threats to purge an expanding list of Democratic reps from any committee assignments – Ilhan Omar (MN), Eric Swallwell (CA), Adam Schiff (CA). Certainly more are to come. That’s what the next two years will be like, if indeed Kevin McCarthy makes it the whole way.
The suspect accused of shooting up an L.G.B.T.Q. nightclub in Colorado Springs on Saturday night, killing five people, was being held Monday on murder and hate crimes charges. […]
Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22, was facing five counts of murder and five counts of bias-motivated crime causing bodily injury. […]
Mayor John Suthers of Colorado Springs said that someone had acted quickly to grab the man’s handgun and hit him with it, subduing him. Two patrons then pinned the gunman down until the police arrived, according to the club’s owners, who viewed security video. […]
Workers at the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen voted for the deal. The SMART-TD union voted it down. If a deal is not reached, workers could strike by Dec. 9. Some commuter lines would be affected.
Workers at two of the country’s biggest rail unions split over a tentative contract their leaders had hashed out with freight rail companies — leaving open the possibility of a debilitating rail strike in the middle of the holiday season.
The 28,000-member SMART-TD union, which represents rail conductors, rejected the contract after one of its divisions voted it down.
Members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, which represents some 24,000 freight train engineers, voted in favor of the deal.
The no vote is a rejection of the compromise worked out in September with the help of the White House and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh. Several unions have signaled their discontent primarily over the proposed contract’s lack of fully paid sick leave and other scheduling requirements.
Union leaders said Monday they were ready to go back to the bargaining table.
“This can all be settled through negotiations and without a strike,” Jeremy Ferguson, the president of the Transportation Division of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers, or SMART-TD, said in a statement. “A settlement would be in the best interests of the workers, the railroads, shippers and the American people.”
But if any one of the unions decides to strike, all 12 unions will honor it, bringing the system to a standstill. A strike could also affect the country’s commuter rail system, with the potential to halt some lines serviced by freight rail workers, and cause backlogs and traffic snarls on others. […]
It wasn’t enough that five people died and 25 were injured when an LGBTQ club was the target of a mass shooting on Saturday night in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Right-wing commentator Matt Walsh kept spreading hate about a community already suffering largely because of a concentrated effort from Republicans to translate misguided fear about the trans community into political power.
”Leftists are using a mass shooting to try and blackmail us into accepting the castration and sexualization of children,” Walsh tweeted. “These people are just beyond evil. I have never felt more motivated to oppose everything they stand for, with every fiber of my being. Despicable scumbags.”
That’s what Walsh boiled an entire community down to: “castration and sexualization of children.” In doing so, he practically followed a Republican script, villainizing human beings in a way that almost calls for violence against them.
“Matt Walsh isn’t upset that someone shot up a gay bar, he’s upset that more people weren’t killed,” Alejandra Caraballo, a civil rights attorney, tweeted. “He has a bloodlust for the murder of LGBTQ people. He’s doubling down on it and wants more of it.” [Tweets at the link]
Walsh, however, failed to call Patricia Kent of Utah a groomer. She is the founder of the far-right extremist organization Liberty Action Coalition and a failed write-in candidate for a Washington County clerk and auditor’s position. She fueled transphobic hate, mischaracterizing drag shows with an educational purpose as an effort to groom children “for immoral satanic worship.”
She also resigned from a teaching job at Hurricane Middle School in the 1990s and had her teaching credential revoked “for unprofessional conduct as evidenced by overly familiar and physically intimate personal relationships with students and inappropriate discussions of religion and other topics,” The Salt Lake Tribune reported.
”When she was a teacher, Kent was accused of unprofessional conduct and having inappropriate and overly familiar relationships with students,” journalist Mark Eddington wrote. “This led to her resignation from her job at Hurricane Middle School and the eventual suspension of her teaching certificate.”
Interestingly enough, the GOP hasn’t rallied around protecting children from people like Kent.
t was a point Jessee Graham, a resident of Columbia, Tennessee, made at a Maury County Library Board meeting last month when she spoke out against transphobic and homophobic hate amid the faulty claim that books exploring gender were “age-inappropriate.”
“I’ve never been sexually assaulted at a drag show, but I have been in church—twice,” Graham said.
I’ll just keep waiting on the GOP outrage about cases like Graham’s while extremist groups continue to target the trans community, making no exceptions for children. [Tweets and video at the link]
Back in August, the Boston Children’s Hospital had to release a statement responding to backlash about its Gender Multispecialty Service Program. “In response to commentary last week critical of our Gender Multispecialty Service (GeMS) Program, Boston Children’s Hospital has been the target of a large volume of hostile internet activity, phone calls, and harassing emails including threats of violence toward our clinicians and staff,” the hospital wrote. “We are deeply concerned by these attacks on our clinicians and staff fueled by misinformation and a lack of understanding and respect for our transgender community.” [Tweets at the link]
part of the misinformation included the hospital offering young children hysterectomies and gender-affirming genital surgeries, which aren’t available to those under 18 years old.
“It’s clear the right wants to demonize trans folks and all of their allies, whether that happens by getting people falsely outraged over sports, health care, bathrooms, or books,” Higgins wrote.
Chaya Raichik, who runs the right-wing account Libs of TikTok, has “Stochastic terrorist” in her bio, and she has cycled through several different social media identities to do exactly that: terrorize others.
“By January, Raichik’s page was leaning hard into ‘groomer’ discourse, calling for any teacher who comes out as gay to their students to be ‘fired on the spot,’” journalist Taylor Lorenz wrote for The Washington Post. “Her anti-trans tweets went especially viral.”
Lorenz added:
She called on her followers to contact schools that were allowing “boys in the girls bathrooms” and pushed the false conspiracy theory that schools were installing litter boxes in bathrooms for children who identify as cats. She also purported that adults who teach children about LGBTQ+ identities are “abusive,” that being gender-nonconforming or an ally to the LGBTQ+ community is a “mental illness,” and referred to schools as “government run indoctrination camps” for the LGBTQ+ community.
Following the recent mass shooting, Democrat Keith Edwards tweeted: “The real ‘groomer’ is @libsoftiktok, who grooms her followers to hate and to kill LGBTQ people.”
Anyone with a soul might have expected the recent shooting to inspire the GOP to reverse courses, but those who know the Republican thirst for power all too well knew not to expect much.
“They’re saying I’m a groomer and this tragedy is because of us,” Edwards wrote in another tweet. “Just deranged. Don’t stop sharing. Don’t back down.” [Tweets at the link]
BREAKING: #Iran football team captain defies regime, backs protests: “We have to accept that conditions in our country are not right & our people are not happy. They should know that we are with them. And we support them. And we sympathize with them regarding the conditions.”
“Whatever we have is from them and we have to fight, we have to perform the best we can and score goals and represent the people. I hope conditions change [to reflect the] expectations of the people.”
Subtitled video at the (Twitter) link.
Oggie: Mathomsays
Akira MacKenzie
Could they just reconfigure their stockpiles to old school fission bombs? Even the “trigger” alone would be pretty destructive.
Yes and no. Fusion bombs use the initial fission reaction as an initiator for the fusion reaction. Which means that the way that the fissionable material is brought together (very quickly) to ‘squeeze’ the tritium requires a very specific configuration for the conventional explosive lenses. The conventional explosive lenses have to compress the fissionable material together with enough force to create a full cascade without pushing the tritium into an unusable configuration. If the calculations are off, if the explosives have a defect, if the tritium has changed, then the thermonuclear devise will fizzle – still a nuclear event, but very small (for a nuclear explosion).
Fission bombs also use explosives to bring the fissionable material together quickly enough for the fission to occur explosively. A fission bomb using U235 uses a ‘cup’ of U235 placed at one end of the barrel of a gun with a cylinder, or plug, of the stuff at the other end of the gun. An explosion propels the U235 plug into the cup. U235 fissions slowly enough that most of the U235 is consumed by the chain reaction.
This will not work for a P238. Plutonium is far more reactive (it requires a mass about 1/3 that of U235) and if one used the plug/cannon/cup form, the Plutonium would begin fissioning long before full insertion and would go off prematurely. This is what is called a fizzle. A hollow sphere of P238, with an accelerator element inside, is surrounded by carefully shaped explosive lenses of explosives that explode at different rates. If all lenses are initiated in the same microsecond, the energy from the explosives will hit the entire sphere at the same time, crushing the P238 and transforming it from a subcritical to a critical mass. If the explosives or the plutonium are not configured correctly, or if either has a defect, or the initiator wiring or wires do not do their job, the bomb will fizzle.
In order to use either plutonium or uranium from one type of bomb and moving it to another requires completely reshaping the fissionable material (both uranium and plutonium can be worked like any other metal, with the added adventure that getting too much in the same place at the same time will initiate a nuclear event) as well as creating new explosive lenses. Shaping the metal is easy compared to creating lenses.
So, yes, it can be done. Is it easy? No. Is it expensive? Yes. The labour requires moderate skill. The calculations and planning, as well as overseeing the implementation, installation, wiring, and timing, require a great deal of skill. Expensive skills. Yes, old calculations can be used, but reusing material changes how it behaves (introduced impurities can do strange things to fissionable materials). The US, Great Britain, France, China, etc. do reuse fissionable materials. But these are nations that can afford to do it. Much cheaper to ignore the weapons until you need them for threats.
Riley Williams, a Pennsylvania woman who barged into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s offices on January 6, 2021, was found guilty on Monday of multiple counts she faced over the Capitol attack.
Williams was found guilty of six of the eight counts she was charged with, including assaulting or resisting an officer and disorderly conduct in the Capitol.
A mistrial was declared on two of the remaining counts, including the government’s charge that Riley had aided and abetted in the theft of a laptop from Pelosi’s office. The jury also could not come to a unanimous decision on the charge of obstructing the certification of the electoral college, which carried a maximum sentence of 20 years.
This is the first time a jury has not convicted a January 6 Capitol defendant of each count charged.
Williams was detained following her conviction Monday, taking off her plaid tie before a Deputy US Marshal took her away.
In agreeing with the Justice Department’s request that Williams be immediately locked up, Judge Amy Berman Jackson heavily reprimanded Williams and her actions on January 6.
“She was profane, she was obnoxious and she was threatening,” Jackson said of Williams.
“This is a person who was packed and ready to flee once before,” the judge added, saying that Williams’ father had offered her places to hide in the wake of the Capitol attack.
Prosecutors say they are still determining whether to retry the case against Williams on the charges of obstruction and aiding and abetting in the laptop theft.
“I don’t want to go to jail,” Williams said to her attorney Lori Ulrich, who told Williams as she was being taken away “You won. Riley, remember that. You won,” referring to the two counts the jury could not reach a unanimous decision on.
During the trial prosecutors argued that while Williams, a 23-year-old with long amber hair, didn’t appear dangerous she in fact stirred up the mob, recruited and coordinated rioters to attack police and directed others to steal the laptop from Pelosi’s office.
“Looks can be deceiving but evidence is not,” prosecutor Michael Gordon told the jury.
During the trial, multiple videos were played of Riley – some of which she shared with people she knew online who gave them to law enforcement agents – inside of Pelosi’s offices allegedly yelling “take the f**king laptop” as well as pushing against officers in the Capitol with her back.
The laptop was primarily used for conference videos and did not contain sensitive information, prosecutors said.
…
Ulrich told the jury that what her client did on January 6 “was wrong,” but said she was young and simply “a girl wanting to be a somebody.” [That somebody being a Nazi.]
According to prosecutors, Williams was “consumed” by far-right white nationalist Nick Fuentes – whose internet show “she watched obsessively” – and the Stop the Steal movement, attending rallies in the lead up to January 6.
After the riot, Williams bragged to people on the social media platform Discord that she had stolen the laptop and a gavel from the speaker’s office, none of which was true, her attorneys said.
“Riley Williams lived in a fantasy world of sorts,” Ulrich said of her client’s online presence, where she messaged people she had never met about her alleged exploits that day, much of which was made up, according to her attorney.
Williams will be sentenced on February 22 and, according to prosecutors, could face two to three years in prison, according to sentencing guidelines.
Update: Canadians can now purchase Ukraine Sovereignty Bonds. These bonds allow Canadians to provide direct support to Ukraine, so the Ukrainian government can keep providing essential services. Find out more here:…
Now meet the “Never-Again Trumpers.”
That’s how former House Speaker Paul Ryan described himself in an interview with ABC News that aired over the weekend. Here’s what he said:
“I’m proud of the accomplishments [during the Trump administration] – of the tax reform, the deregulation and criminal justice reform – I’m really excited about the judges we got on the bench, not just the Supreme Court, but throughout the judiciary. But I am a Never-Again Trumper. Why? Because I want to win, and we lose with Trump. It was really clear to us in ’18, in ‘20 and now in 2022.”
Translation: horrible person wants to get rid of other horrible person, not because he’s horrible, but because he doesn’t win elections.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From their latest summary:
Ukraine’s SBU security service and police raided a 1,000-year-old Orthodox Christian monastery in Kyiv early on Tuesday as part of operations to counter suspected “subversive activities by Russian special services”, the SBU said. The Kyiv Pechersk Lavra complex that was raided is a Ukrainian cultural treasure and the headquarters of the Russian-backed wing of the Ukrainian Orthodox church known as the Moscow Patriarchate, Reuters reported.
Ukrainians are likely to live with blackouts at least until the end of March, the head of a major energy provider said on Monday, as the government started free evacuations for people in Kherson to other regions. Half of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure had been damaged by Russian attacks, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, leaving millions of people without electricity and water as winter sets in and temperatures drop below freezing.
…
Russians have murdered, tortured and kidnapped Ukrainians in a systematic pattern that could implicate top officials in war crimes, the US state department’s ambassador for global criminal justice said Monday. There is mounting evidence that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “has been accompanied by systemic war crimes committed in every region where Russian forces have been deployed”, said the US ambassador at large, Beth Van Schaack.
The Ukrainian government has been offering people in the recently liberated city of Kherson, which remains mostly without electricity and running water, free evacuations to regions with better infrastructure, as well as free accommodation. “Given the difficult security situation in the city and infrastructure problems, you can evacuate for the winter to safer regions of the country,” the deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said on the Telegram messaging app.
…
The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that Ukraine’s health system is “facing its darkest days in the war so far”. The WHO regional director for Europe, Dr Hans Henri P Kluge, called for a “humanitarian health corridor” to be created to all areas of Ukraine newly recaptured by Kyiv, as well as those occupied by Russian forces.
Russian troops have been accused of burning bodies at a landfill on the edge of Kherson during their occupation. Residents and workers at the site told the Guardian they saw Russian open trucks arriving to the site carrying black bags that were then set on fire, filling the air with a large cloud of smoke and a stench of burning flesh.
Brendan and Andrew welcome Sergey Romanov, who has researched denial of the Katyn Massacre and the Holocaust for more than two decades, and Dr. Nicholas Terry, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Exeter. Sergey and Nick discuss the purpose of the Holocaust Controversies website, on which they work together, and how they each became involved with it. The rest of the interview focuses largely on the USSR’s massacre of more than 20,000 Polish prisoners in 1940––the Katyn Massacre––and the refusal by pro-Stalin writers to concede that the massacre was perpetrated by Stalin’s regime. One such Katyn denialist is Grover Furr, whose work we discussed in an episode two years ago. Sergey details his exchanges with Furr and some of his research that refutes Katyn denialists’ claims. He and Nick discuss Katyn denialists’ inability to account for the totality of the evidence as well as the influence of right-wing Russian denialists on Furr and other tankies in the West.
Current-events segment: Red Wave Goodbye––analysis of the results and implications of last week’s midterm elections in the US….
My own contribution to the current discussion about how Putin tries to use and abuse history, and how he doesn’t even get Russian history right.
And, after the break, the costs of the war to Russia and the all-too-often overlooked (not least by Putin) regional dimension.
(In a discussion of Russian productivity, he talks about groups of people in the Soviet Union turning up to work drunk as a form of “passive” protest or resistance. It’s interesting context for the videos of drunken mobiks.)
The Russian govt is very eager to squelch rumours of a 2nd wave of mobilisations, with good reason….
The 1st wave shattered the implicit assumption (maybe even call it a tacit social compact) that Putin could have his war without it affecting most Russians (unless they were Dagestanis, Buryats, etc)
It also seriously strained relations with the regional leaders who are now being expected to do the Kremlin’s hard and unpopular work while, as usual, Putin his behind them. No one can openly complain, but the signs of dissatisfaction were clear
eg Sobyanin’s announcement of the end of mobilisation and the way this was pitched by the sympathetic media as very much his initiative.
Given the massive outflow of young and youngish men with the first wave, many of the most skilled and solvent of whom are not coming back, the Kremlin has ever reason not to allow these rumours to run, to reassure elites and masses alike
In fairness, it seems pretty unlikely. The military is stretched to the limits digesting the first wave, with some 80k being used as cannon fodder ‘speed bumps’ in Ukraine and 150k being organised into units (of sorts) for spring
This involved having to send people to Belarus as well for (minimal) training and accommodation, and issuing rusted bottom-of-the-barrel weapons from old stocks. I can’t see how they could handle another wave
But the fact that the Kremlin is in such quick and attentive damage control mode is another sign of restiveness in the country, a willingness to believe whatever is the next alarmist rumour. This doesn’t suggest a happy, patriotic, mobilised nation…
Ukraine will summon the ambassador of Hungary to demand an apology after its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, appeared in public wearing a scarf depicting some Ukrainian territory as part of Hungary, the foreign ministry said.
Orbán was pictured attending a football match wearing a scarf which the newspaper, Ukrainska Pravda, said showed a map of “Greater Hungary” including territory that is now part of the neighbouring states of Austria, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, Serbia and Ukraine.
In a statement on Facebook, ministry spokesperson Oleg Nikolenko said:
The promotion of revisionism ideas in Hungary does not contribute to the development of Ukrainian-Hungarian relations and does not comply with the principles of European policy.
He added that Ukraine wanted an apology and a rebuttal of any Hungarian claims on Ukrainian territory.
A father and a drag performer managed to subdue a gunman who opened fire at an LGBT nightclub in the US state of Colorado, it has emerged.
The attacker killed five people and left 17 others with injuries at Club Q in Colorado Springs on Saturday night.
Officials named the “heroes” who halted the attack as Richard Fierro and Thomas James, without detailing their actions.
Mr Fierro provided his account of events, saying he tackled the suspect, took the weapon and hit him with it.
It is not clear if Mr James is the drag performer Mr Fierro says then stepped in to help.
At a Monday afternoon press conference, police identified the victims as Daniel Aston, Derrick Rump, Kelly Loving, Ashley Paugh and Raymond Vance. Family members say Aston and Rump were both bartenders at Club Q.
The suspect, named by police as 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich, is in police custody in hospital.
The gunman was stopped by a 15-year US Army veteran who was attending a drag performance at the club with his wife and daughter.
Speaking to reporters on Monday evening, Richard Fierro said his combat training kicked in as he pounced on the gunman, pulling him to the floor by his body armour.
“I just ran over there. Got him. I’m thinking, ‘I gotta kill this guy. He’s gonna kill my kid. He’s gonna kill my wife’,” said the Iraq and Afghanistan veteran.
“It’s the reflex,” Mr Fierro said from the front yard of his suburban Colorado Springs home. “Go. Go to the fire. Stop the action. Stop the activity. Don’t let no-one get hurt.”
The local brewery owner said he and his family had dropped to the floor as the bullets began to fly.
He described seeing the gunman move in the direction of a patio where other club-goers had fled, before charging at him.
He said the man dropped his rifle as he fell. They began wrestling on the ground. Mr Fierro said he snatched the attacker’s pistol from him and used it to beat him.
“I kept whaling on [hitting] him. I’m a big dude and this guy was bigger,” Mr Fierro said.
He told reporters that he urged a drag performer to kick the attacker in the head.
“One of the performers was walking by and I told her kick him,” he said. “And she took her high heel and stuffed it in his face.”
Mr Fierro said one of the dead included his daughter’s boyfriend, 22-year-old Raymond Vance.
Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers hailed the bystanders’ “incredible act of heroism”.
…
Police are looking into who owned the rifle allegedly used in the shooting, as well as a handgun the suspect was carrying at the time of his arrest.
The investigation will determine whether the shooting – which came on the eve of Sunday’s Transgender Day of Remembrance – was a hate crime, and if the suspect acted alone.
The suspect is facing five murder charges and five charges of committing a bias-motivated crime causing bodily injury, according to US media. Investigators said on Tuesday that no charges had yet been formally filed.
Club Q has been described as the heart of the LGBT community in Colorado Springs, a city 70 miles (110km) south of Denver.
The suspect had reportedly previously come to police attention over an alleged bomb threat in 2021.
According to a police report at the time, his mother had called emergency services saying “he was threatening to cause harm to her with a homemade bomb, multiple weapons, and ammunition”….
Col Kedrick Wills, director of the Idaho state police in the small northern Idaho city of Moscow, had a simple message. “We know that people want answers. We want answers, too,” he said a recent press conference.
A manhunt has now been underway for more than a week in this remote college town where a still-unidentified suspect stabbed four University of Idaho students to death in the early morning hours of 13 November.
The victims of the quadruple homicide – Ethan Chapin, 20, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Madison Mogen, 21 – were killed as they slept in an off-campus house on King Road, located near the university’s sorority and fraternity houses. A motive and the identity of who did the appalling crime remain unknown.
When Wills made his appeal before the television cameras he was not just speaking for the traumatized university community or the terrified college town that surrounds it. He was speaking for his state and the wider American public, which has watched in horror as more grim details of the gruesome slayings have come to light except for the most crucial ones of all – why this happened and who did it.
There are few clues….
Reginald Selkirksays
@238: “Manhunt” is not the right word when you don’t know whom you are looking for, or where. It conjures images of squads of deputies beating through the swamp with bloodhounds.
James LaPorta was terminated Monday, according to the Daily Beast. The original report last Tuesday authored by LaPorta, as well as AP writer John Leicester, claimed that “a senior U.S. intelligence official” said Russia launched missiles into NATO member Poland, killing two people. Leicester still reportedly has his job.
Shitcoins have always been the major highlights of the crypto community as they can give returns as high as 50-500% or even more. As this year ends and the year 2023 approaches, investors need to prepare their portfolios for the bullish market. The key is to recognize shitcoins that have potential and invest in them early while they’re still relatively cheap…
I think the real key is to realize why they are called “shitcoins.”
A Vancouver naturopath has been fined and temporarily suspended after a patient complained he failed to notice a rectal tumour during four months of treatment for hemorrhoids.
Jordan Atkinson will have to pay $5,000 and lose his licence for 16 days after signing a consent agreement with the College of Naturopathic Physicians of B.C., according to a public notice posted Friday.
Reginald Selkirksays
ibid:
Atkinson is also the subject of a lawsuit from a patient who alleges he seriously injured her while injecting Botox into her face at the base of her nose.
Naturopaths use botox? That is surprising to me. It doesn’t seem very nature-y.
Yet more spy arrests in Sweden. They follow Sweden’s arrest of two other suspected Russian spies earlier this month, Norway’s arrest of a suspected GRU illegal in October, the Netherlands’ arrest of another in June (now jailed in Brazil) & Poland’s arrest of yet another in March.
It’s been a bad year for Russian Intelligence Services.
I’m also curious as to what happened to these folks picked up in Albania, after they attacked guards at a weapons factory in August….
…Artem Zinchenko isn’t just any spy. He was the first agent of Russia’s military intelligence arrested by Estonia, in 2017, then traded back to Moscow a year later for an Estonian citizen in Russian custody. Zinchenko has now sought asylum from the very NATO country that unmasked and imprisoned him for spying against it.
…
As Zinchenko told it, his decision to defect was as much motivated by the Kremlin’s brutality at home and abroad as it was by what he saw as Estonia’s humanity toward him, an enemy agent. His cautionary tale is also an indictment of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB case officer whose own spy apparatus has been weakened amid his Ukraine war, according to British intelligence….
A birth certificate recently obtained by CBC directly contradicts Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond’s public claims about her father’s ancestry and the identity of his parents.
The government-issued document says William Turpel is the natural-born child of British parents, not an adopted Cree boy of undetermined parentage as Turpel-Lafond has claimed her father was.
Turpel-Lafond, considered to be one of Canada’s most successful and decorated Indigenous scholars and legal professionals, has for decades claimed to be of Indigenous ancestry through her father William Turpel, who she said was Cree. She has said she was the “first Treaty Indian” appointed to the judicial bench in Saskatchewan history…
In 2007, during a national radio interview, Turpel-Lafond claimed that she was born in Norway House, Man.
The claim is surprising, because CBC has found no evidence that it’s true and plenty of evidence that it’s incorrect — that in fact she was born and raised in the Niagara Falls, Ont., area…
An illness-causing fungus known as histoplasma is in the soil of nearly all U.S. states, a new study suggests. The researchers behind the work say doctors may be relying on outdated risk maps and therefore missing diagnoses of the infections, which can sometimes be deadly.
Another MAGA Republican just put a bullseye on the back of an innocent American citizen; this time, it is Randi Weingarten, the President of the American Federation of Teachers. Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State under Donald Trump, accused the teacher of being more dangerous than Kim Il Jong, XI, and even Putin, who is actively committing genocide in Ukraine and threatening nuclear warheads to be used in Europe.
You can bet right-wing media and politicians will not be satisfied until this woman dies. The echo chamber has only begun; violence is part of the GQP SOP.
In response, Weingarten posted a tweet.
I know that Mike Pompeo’s is running for president, and frankly I don’t know whether to characterize his characterization of me in the interview as ridiculous or dangerous.
Olafimihan Oshin writes in The Hill:
In an interview with Semafor, Pompeo, who is thought to be eyeing a potential 2024 White House bid, said that education is one of the central issues that Republicans should focus on, noting his criticism of Weingarten and the current teaching curriculum in U.S. school systems.
“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’ The most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten,” Pompeo said.
“It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing,” the former top U.S. diplomat added.
“These are the things that candidates should speak to in a way that says, ‘Here’s the problem. Here’s a proposal for how to solve it. And if given the opportunity, these are the things I will go work on to try and deliver that outcome that fixes that problem,’” Pompeo concluded. “Pretty straightforward stuff.”
IMO, this unhinged rant on Randi Weingarten is not an oops moment. Pompeo was a former SoS, Harvard Graduate, Director of the CIA, and first in his class at the United States Military Academy at West Point; he knows his words will rile up the violence and murderous wrath that the GQP thrives on.
He believes that education is his path to the Whitehouse. Not improving the education of students, mind you, but to scare the beejeebus out of parents about gay schoolchildren, critical race theory, and other demonizations of people he hates….
Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov had clearly given up on the idea of defeating Ukraine militarily. In his desperation to scare the West into stopping its support, he resorts to nuclear threats—but even fellow propagandists are sick of it & say he lost all sense of reality.
Subtitled video at the (Twitter) link. It’s been abundantly clear for the past several weeks that not even the paid state propagandists consider “annexed” Ukrainian territories to be part of Russia. No one ever bought this fiction.
ravensays
Tweet
Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en
Russia is getting ready for 2nd wave of mobilization in January. The plan is to draft 500,000-700,000. The 300,000 drafted before – already killed/wounded/demoralized.
Russians are starting to be quietly unhappy about authorities – they can’t understand losses in praised army.
3:07 AM · Nov 22, 2022
Anton Gerashchenko is a high Ukraine government official.
The last mobilization was a disaster.
I can’t see that the next one will work any better.
Russia doesn’t have the equipment and military infrastructure for another 500,000 soldiers.
Plus it is winter and not a good time to be camping out in a trench in Ukraine.
ravensays
Pompeo…said that education is one of the central issues that Republicans should focus on, noting his criticism of Weingarten and the current teaching curriculum in U.S. school systems.
Pompeo is an idiot.
Education and the education curriculum in US schools is set at the local level, not the Federal level. That is why we have school board elections.
Not much of an issue to run on but the GOP ran out of ideas long ago.
ravensays
Crude oil prices are going down.
They somehow spiked right before the election and now are falling rapidly.
The price of gas in my area is down almost $1/gallon from its peak.
It is all just a coincidence, I’m sure.
Investing.com — There are another two weeks to go for the OPEC+ meeting, but the Saudis and Russians have decided not to sit back and let the market collapse continue.
In an urgent response to a Wall Street Journal story on Monday, Saudi Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman denied that the 23-nation oil producing alliance under his charge was working on a production hike of 500,000 barrels per day to announce at OPEC+’s Dec. 4 meeting.
If the WSJ report had been true, it would have been a pivot to the 2-million-barrel per day cut that OPEC+ had announced for November. It would have been a hike small in barrels, yet huge in goodwill, doing wonders for Saudi-U.S. relations but, unfortunately, further hammering already free-falling crude prices.
Both New York-traded West Texas Intermediate crude, or WTI, the benchmark for U.S. crude, and London’s Brent, the global gauge for oil, hit their lowest since the beginning of the year in Monday’s early trading, partly based on the WSJ story.
But the report wasn’t true,
tomhsays
Oregon Pot Pardons
SALEM, Ore. — Outgoing Oregon Governor Kate Brown on Monday pardoned some 45,000 people with marijuana convictions and forgave nearly $14 million in fines and fees related to pot convictions. Courthouse News Service
ravensays
Russia has lost a lot of its oil markets.
Reports are that Urals crude is down to $65 a barrel.
That is going to make it harder to finance their invasion of Ukraine.
Russia Has Lost Over 90% Of Its European Oil Market Share
By Josh Owens – Nov 21, 2022, 2:30 PM CST oilprice.com edited for length
Russia has already lost over 90% of its previous top European market—northern Europe—as shipments have slumped to below 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) in recent weeks from more than 1.2 million bpd before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to Bloomberg’s estimates.
The EU embargo on seaborne imports of Russian crude oil and the attached price cap mechanism on Russian crude are set to enter into force on December 5.
Around 75% of the Russian crude oil now being loaded at the Baltic ports in Russia is heading to Asia, where Indian and Chinese buyers haven’t shied away from purchasing Russian cargoes, especially earlier this year, at deep discounts.
The EU embargo on Russian oil will create huge uncertainties in the global oil and product markets in just a few weeks, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its monthly Oil Market Report last week.
quotetheunquotesays
@Reginald Selkirk #243:
Poor choice of words, I would think, on their part: the idea of things “exploding” has at least a couple of possible interpretations….
(I picture Wiley Coyote any one of a number of times he tried to work with sticks of dynamite).
Ukrainians are bracing for what is expected to be the hardest winter in the country’s history.
The Ukrainian cold is coming and with it a nightmare for millions as they face it without electricity, water or heating.
Ukrainian authorities have warned citizens not to head into the woods without consulting the military, because Russian troops may have left behind mines, tripwires and unexploded shells.
But with the price of firewood rising, many have no choice but to take the risk. If a mine doesn’t kill them, the cold might.
While people living in houses can burn wood – if they can get it – those who live in flats often rely on old Soviet centralised heating systems. The Russians have bombed many of the country’s thermal power plants, which used to pump hot water into the flats’ radiators.
Perched as it is in an upmarket neighbourhood overlooking the scenic Vondelpark, it is not hard to imagine why a Russian billionaire would have been interested in the 1879 five-storey Amsterdam property with a lush private garden.
That billionaire was Arkady Volozh, a co-founder of Russia’s biggest search engine, Yandex. He bought the £3m house in 2019, becoming one of the dozens of wealthy Russians who have invested in property in the Dutch capital.
But since October, the mansion, which had been undergoing extensive refurbishment, has been taken over by a group of squatters, who issued a statement saying they had done so in a protest against Volozh’s reported ties to the Kremlin, and the wider housing crisis in Amsterdam.
Last Wednesday, a Dutch court ruled the squatters did not have to vacate the property.
When the Guardian visited the house, it was hung with banners criticising the war in Ukraine. The Guardian was refused entry to the apartment by one of the squatters, who declined to give her name, citing security issues.
Lighting a cigarette, the squatter said she was relieved by the judge’s verdict. “The law is finally on our side,” she smiled.
A video message recorded by the Ukrainian Nobel peace laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk has been beamed onto the building of the Red Bull Formula 1 racing headquarters outside London appealing to world champion driver Max Verstappen to use his influence to persuade Red Bull to pull out of Russia.
Unlike many global brands, Red Bull has refused to cut ties with Putin’s Russia and the energy drink is still on sale in supermarkets across the country….
Graphic at the (Twitter) link. Another 400 troops lost, bringing the estimated total to 85,000. That’s a pretty typical number in recent days/weeks, amounting to about 4,000 troops lost every 10 days. I don’t see how that’s at all sustainable for Russia.
On November 7, 2022, the Tohono O’odham Nation and the Gila River Indian Community filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona challenging the proof of address requirements included in Arizona H.B. 2492. Under the new law, individuals must provide a government-issued photo ID that contains or is paired with another document that contains the person’s current physical address, or the individual must provide two documents that contain their current physical address.
The requirements ignore the lack of standardized addressing on homes on tribal lands in Arizona, which will make it difficult if not impossible for many tribal members to register to vote. Homes on tribal reservations in Arizona are significantly more likely to lack a standard physical address than homes in non-Native areas. The lack of postal delivery also means most residents of the two tribes’ reservations do not have any documents that include both their name and an address corresponding with the physical location of their home.
If Arizona implements the new requirement, most people who lack a standard physical address on their home will be completely unable to register to vote. Others who lack a standard physical address will be unable to vote until obtaining a standard street address for their home—a severely burdensome process, beyond the control of the individual, that can take years, or even decades.
The new restrictions do not comply with federal voter registration requirements in the National Voter Registration Act. That law requires states to use the federal voter registration form for federal elections.
“Arizona cannot disenfranchise Native voters by creating an illegal obstacle course that eliminates many tribal citizens from participating in U.S. elections. The inequitable effect that H.B. 2492 would have on Native voters who live on the Tohono O’odham reservation is absolutely unconstitutional and severely restricts our freedom to vote,” said Tohono O’odham Chairman Ned Norris, Jr.
“The proof of address requirements in H.B. 2492 is a way for elected officials to pick and choose who can vote in Arizona, however, the Tohono O’odham and Gila River tribal governments will defend the legal rights that our peoples share with other U.S. voters,” said Gila River Indian Community Governor Stephen Roe Lewis.
SC @247, it’s so interesting to see that Russia’s spy apparatus is also falling apart. I hadn’t realized that that particular aspect of Putin’s regime was also weakened by the illegal invasion of Ukraine. By now, there must be no level of Russian government, society, culture, finances, or education that is not ready to collapse.
The word hubris comes from Ancient Greece, meaning “exaggerated pride or self-confidence.” And no word seems more fitting to describe […] Trump walking into Trump Tower in New York City with his son Eric Trump last week to sign a reported $4 billion deal with a Saudi Arabian real estate company to build a mammoth project in Oman.
The word hypocrite also comes from the Ancient Greek word hypokrites, which means “an actor,” another word most fitting to describe the Republican Party, which, after winning the House by a razor-thin margin, is promising to spend every minute of its time impeaching President Joe Biden and investigating his son, Hunter Biden, amid unabashedly bogus allegations of conflict of interest.
Trump is no stranger to selling his brand, but the Saudi deal is a bold move [more like a stupid move] considering that he’s just thrown his name in the hat for a third run at the presidency.
This particular deal puts him directly into murky waters.[…] the project isn’t just some random real estate deal—it’s a deal with the government of Oman itself. Conflict of interest much?
Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, tells the Times, “This is yet another example of Trump getting a personal financial benefit in exchange for past or future political power. … The Saudis and Oman government may believe that giving Trump this licensing deal will benefit them in the future, should Trump become president again. This deal could be a way to ensure that they will be in Trump’s good graces.”
The behemoth AIDA project is led by the Saudi-based Dar-Al Arkan and is in conjunction with the government of Oman, which the New York Times reports owns the land. The concept includes 3,500 high-end villas, two hotels with around 450 rooms, a golf course (of course), and retail shops and restaurants.
This is just Trump’s most recent project with the Saudi government. Trump also hosted two Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournaments […]
According to Newsweek, when Trump was asked about the 9/11 families’ plans to protest the LIV Golf event, Trump told an ESPN reporter, “Nobody’s gotten to the bottom of 9/11, unfortunately.”
He added that the people who committed the attack on 9/11 were “maniacs” and that they did a “horrible thing to our city, to our country, to the world. … But I can tell you that there are a lot of really great people that are out here today, and we’re gonna have a lot of fun, and we’re going to celebrate. Money’s going to charity—a lot of money’s going to charity,” he said.
[…] During his time in the White House, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who worked for the administration, took in a $2 billion investment from the Saudi government to his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, per the Times.
Of course, let’s not forget the massive grifting Trump was involved in during his reign as he took in millions to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. According to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, between 2017 and 2020, Trump’s hotel received $3.75 million from foreign governments. […]
This new Trump-Saudi project hopes to build a more robust tourism sector for Oman […]
All of this was announced just as Trump declared his candidacy, and the Trump family and the Trump Organization are being investigated on charges of tax fraud.
[…] according to a report from the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, Trump is the same guy who committed 3,403 conflicts of interest during his presidency. So far, the Republicans have announced zero investigations into even one of those.
A Republican who voted to impeach Donald Trump in the House of Representatives has won re-election in California, making him only the second of the 10 to do so still in Congress. David Valadao was called the winner of his competitive race with Democrat Rudy Salas late on Monday, almost two weeks after election day.
Other than Dan Newhouse, who swept to victory in his Washington state race, none of the Republicans who voted for Trump’s impeachment last year will serve another term…
Excerpts from a discussion about the melding of fascism and religion, (that’s an inadequate description, so read the entire essay if you want more detail, more history, more logic):
[…] the reappearance of Christian Dominionism. This is an old declared heretical movement we have seen before in history. This idea believes it is right and proper to take over a nation to establish a physical representation of their concept of the kingdom of God. The concept is completely incompatible with a proper interpretation of New Testament theology which teaches the kingdom of God is a kingdom of the heart. Besides, it doesn’t work in practice. Other groups tried this idea before and it has never worked. […] Would we even want to live in it, especially since a minority of religious fanatics would violently create the thing, thereby cancelling out the intentions of the founder of the faith who described the kingdom in entirely different terms?
So where did this Dominionism idea come from? My answer to that is what I call the Long Con. […] I must again caution that I am astonishingly conflating complex historical interactions in order keep this posting decently short and to make a point. But first, a little background is needed.
In the first century of the Christian era the fledgling Christian community sent out emissaries (missionaries overseen by the apostles) to establish cultic centers of worship in largely urban areas throughout the Roman Empire. Over the next few decades, a message emerged from the growing Christian movement that centered around human freedom. “… And you shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” said the community […] The message communicated that even though you may be a slave in Rome, yet within your heart and in your own soul, you can be free.
This message was very counter-cultural in an authoritarian empire built on the backs of slaves (sound familiar?). The Roman Empire found it intolerable and took steps to quash the idea and the community that carried it. The problem was that the empire was collapsing within from structural corruption […]
It was here the Long Con began. It took a while, but the civil authorities realized that if they could not destroy the movement then they would simply co-opt it. This happened during the reign of Constantine, and this counter-cultural movement became the official religion of the Roman Empire. In short, it has never been the same since. The core of the Con was the change in theology. The bishops of the church (St. Augustine, in particular) subtly shifted the emphasis of the message from human freedom to the equally important doctrine of repentance and forgiveness. All that was present in the teachings; however, it was the elegant and subtle change in emphasis that allowed both the state and church authority decision-level control over the populace.
We have been living with the Long Con ever since, and we have never recovered the original counter-cultural message of the faith, which was never intended to be the official religion of any civil authority or state. If one buys into the Con, however, then Dominionism, with some mental gymnastics, may sound like common sense. If one does not buy into the Con but wants to remain faithful to the original message of the founder, then a person of “faith seeking understanding” struggles against the centuries-long inertia of misdirection and, quite frankly, propaganda to find their way.
So let me sum up. There are three historical currents described in this post: poorly trained clergy, an old Christian heresy, and the Long Con. Their interaction makes it appear the Christian faith has gone off the rails. The historical currents have played havoc with the freewheeling churches that were born in America […]
Hopefully what has been described here makes a start in understanding why we are in this current religious predicament. I am uncomfortably aware of the density of this posting. I wish I could write it simply. It is just that this stuff is not simple and there is even more that I have not described. If many of you are still not satisfied or better yet want to make a deeper dive into these questions, then I recommend heading over to Mastodon and type in their search window, #theologidon. There are highly qualified people there who live and breathe this stuff and will be more than happy to point you in new directions and have certainly given me a great deal of hope.
[…] as The Hill reported over the weekend, now that Republicans know they will be in the majority, the GOP leader continues to push this to the top of his to-do list.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) reiterated his pledge to remove Democratic Reps. Eric Swalwell (Calif.), Adam Schiff (Calif.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.) from their committee posts if he becomes Speaker in the next Congress. McCarthy told Fox News “Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria Bartiromo that he would remove Swalwell and Schiff from their posts on the House Intelligence Committee, accusing them of being compromised or biased.
As for Omar, McCarthy cited the Minnesotan’s “antisemitic comments” as a justification for kicking her off the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
At this point, we could spend a few paragraphs explaining that Schiff and Swalwell are not, in reality, “compromised.” We could also marvel at the irony of McCarthy targeting Omar as “antisemitic” while simultaneously making plans to reward Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, despite her ugly record of antisemitism. We could even note the inconvenient fact that McCarthy used to have a problem with Taylor Greene’s antisemitism, even as he pretends to have forgotten about his earlier criticisms.
For now, however, let’s put these details aside and consider a couple of broader angles.
The first has to do with standards. […] Republicans are firmly of the opinion that Democrats effectively rewrote the rules when they stripped two far-right congressional extremists — Taylor Greene and Rep. Paul Gosar — of their committee assignments.
As far as McCarthy and other GOP leaders are concerned, this opened the flood gates: If Democrats can make such decisions about Greene and Gosar, then Republicans can make related decisions about Schiff, Swalwell, and Omar. The retaliatory plans are part of a straightforward tit-for-tat dynamic: Democrats removed some Republicans from their committees, so the GOP feels justified in removing some Democrats from their committees.
And while I have no doubt that much of the commentary will take such an argument seriously, the details matter. Gosar and Greene were punished for a specific reason: They’re members who were accused of espousing violence. Democrats didn’t change the rules so much as they set a standard: To endorse political violence is to cross an important line that warrants congressional consequences. [Marjorie Taylor Greene endorsed the idea of shooting Nancy Pelosi in the head. She was kicked off Twitter for that.]
If McCarthy has evidence of Omar, Schiff, or Swalwell endorsing violence, he’d have a compelling point. But he doesn’t, which makes his vow ridiculous.
The second has to do with process. Under normal circumstances, Democratic leaders make committee assignments for Democratic members, just as Republican leaders make committee assignments for Republican members. To create an exception would require the vote of the full House.
And third, it ordinarily wouldn’t matter whether one party’s leadership doesn’t like another party leadership’s committee assignments. If Schiff wants to remain on the House Intelligence Committee in the next Congress, he’d need the support of Democratic leaders, not GOP leaders.
Will 218 House Republicans agree to retaliate against Omar, Schiff, and Swalwell as part of a petty partisan exercise? Perhaps, but if they do, the door to similar measures will swing wider, and future ugliness will become inevitable.
Midterm campaign news, as summarized by Steve Benen:
* In Arizona’s attorney general race, a final tally found Democrat Kris Mayes ahead of Republican Abe Hamadeh by just 510 votes. Given the narrow margin, there will now be an automatic recount as required by state law. [Good news so far.]
* Georgia’s U.S. Senate runoff election is two weeks from today, and a newly released AARP poll found incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock with a small lead over Republican Herschel Walker, 51% to 47%. [Good news.]
* In related news, a state judge ruled late last week that Georgia law allows Saturday voting before the U.S. Senate runoff election, and the Georgia Court of Appeals yesterday denied an attempt to undo the lower court’s decision. [Good news.]
* For his part, part of Walker’s closing message in Georgia is a new anti-trans television ad. It’s worth noting for context that the GOP candidate recently told Fox News that trans athletes represent “the biggest threat to democracy.” [Yuck]
[…] * It was close, but Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug La Follette has won re-election and Republican Amy Loudenbeck conceded defeat yesterday. [Good news]
[…]
Just one month ago, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito spoke publicly for the first time about the leak of his draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning abortion rights. The leak, he said, was a “grave betrayal” and “shock,” which made the individual justices in the conservative majority “targets for assassination” by activists trying to keep the final decision “from happening by killing one of us.”
At the time and since, speculation has been rampant that Alito himself leaked the draft as a way of pinning down his conservative colleagues who were wavering on the harsh, complete reversal of a half-century of precedence. Given the bombshell reporting out this weekend from The New York Times, that speculation seems to have proved out. The allegations in the Times come from a Rev. Rob Schenck, a former and prominent forced birth activist who alleges that Alito leaked a previous decision he wrote in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which gave corporations the religious right to refuse reproductive health coverage to employees.
Schenck had created a powerful network of rich religious zealots, and used them to befriend and influence conservative justices. It was one of these couples who had befriended Alito to whom Schenck says Alito leaked the decision. Schenck provided this information to Chief Justice John Roberts in a letter he also provided to the Times. The leak and the hypocrisy of Alito is one big, glaring ethics issue. The deliberations of the Court are supposed to be sacrosanct, just as the justices are expected to separate themselves from political influence.
Alito, of course, denies the whole story, admitting to a “casual and purely social relationship” with Wright, but saying the allegation that he revealed the Hobby Lobby outcome “completely false.”
That’s a piece of the much larger issue, that the Court’s conservatives are following a blatantly political course but also are acting as political actors, open to lobbying and outside influence. Schenk proved this. He obtained a building just across the street from the Court, he recruited like-minded forced birth mucky-mucks to hang around at receptions and events for the Court—the favorite target being the Supreme Court Historical Society—and become part of the justices’ inner circles.
It worked with Justices Antonin Scalia, Alito, and Clarence Thomas. The Wrights, the couple who got the Hobby Lobby leak, become part of the social circle for all three, sharing meals with them and their families, hosting the Alitos during vacations at their Jackson Hole home, and getting seats in the Court chamber to watch hearings.
Meanwhile, the Court is holding itself above the fray, insisting that they’ve checked the rules for all these activities and deemed themselves cleared. Alito, of course, denies the whole story, admitting to a “casual and purely social relationship” with Wright, but saying the allegation that he revealed the Hobby Lobby outcome “completely false.”
That’s not good enough for congressional Democrats. Sen. Dick Durbin, chair of the Judiciary Committee, released a statement announcing the Committee “is reviewing these serious allegations, which highlight once again the inexcusable ‘Supreme Court loophole’ in federal judicial ethics rules.” He called for congress to pass the Supreme Court Ethics Act which would require the Court to adopt a code of ethics.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA), who chair Senate and House courts subcommittees, wrote to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts requesting he investigate this potential leak and suggesting that if he doesn’t, they will. The pair previously wrote to Roberts following reports of Schenck’s Faith and Action group in Politico and Rolling Stone about the intensive lobbying efforts his group undertook to sway the justices.
A Supreme Court ethics attorney responded to the pair, outlining the Court’s policies and practices but not answering their specific concerns. “A response pointing out the existence of rules is not responsive to questions about whether those rules were broken,” Whitehouse and Johnson wrote in their new letter.
“It seems that the underlying issue is the absence of a formal facility for complaint or investigation into possible ethics or reporting violations. …. If the Court, as your letter suggests, is not willing to undertake fact-finding inquiries into possible ethics violations that leaves Congress as the only forum.”
In a statement, the pair called the new report “another black mark on the Supreme Court’s increasingly marred ethical record” and said they “intend to get to the bottom of these serious allegations.” They joined with Durbin in calling for Congress to force the Court into adopting a code of ethics.
That’s the minimum that should be done. The judiciary committees should be undertaking full investigations into Alito’s ties to this group and this potential leak. Thomas should likewise be subject to investigation for his conflicts of interest around Jan. 6. Congressional Democrats should use the next two years to build the case for serious Court reforms including—but not limited to—court expansion. Nothing can pass with a Republican House, but they can lay the groundwork and start making the case for future reform. It might even be enough of a threat to restrain the Court, just a little.
“Speculation is mounting over a new Russian ‘goodwill gesture’ – this time, Putin’s demoralised troops are reportedly preparing to retreat from Zaporizhzhia Atomic Energy Plant…”
Would be very good news if true. Lots of rumors, though.
So these horrifying murders in Colorado over the weekend quickly became a pretext for yet more censorship of your speech. You are responsible for this, they told you, because you said the wrong things. You are guilty of stochastic terrorism, inspiring violence by your beliefs. Anderson Lee Aldrich committed mass murder because you complained about the sexualizing of children. Every time you object to drag time story hour for fifth graders or point out that genital mutilation is being committed on minors — which it is — every time you say that, you are putting people’s lives at risk.
Commentary from Wonkette:
[…] Whenever Tucker emphasizes that something is true, whenever he feels the need to stop in the middle of a sentence and say something like “which it is” or “this is just true,” it’s a tell that he’s not telling the truth. It’s like a nervous tic.
Does that mean Tucker knows he is actively lying to his viewers when he says that rampant “genital mutilation” is happening to children in America’s hospitals, or when he lies to the white supremacist […] windsocks who watch him about what happens at drag shows? […]
Tucker played a clip of NBC reporter Brandy Zadrozny, who has done some of the best reporting on the American rightwing’s violence incitement campaign against LGBTQ people, and then continued:
When you point out the truth, indisputably …
There’s that tic again. Once you notice it, you never miss it again. If we ever have an opportunity to play poker with this dude, we will end up with all his unearned fish stick riches.
and the truth is
Kaching.
that some adults in this country, apparently a growing number,
A growing number, huh?
have a deeply unhealthy fixation on the sexuality of children — when you say that out loud, you get people killed. That is what Brandy Zadrozny is saying. And by saying that, Brandy Zadrozny and the many people like her are effectively defending that same deeply unhealthy fixation on the sexuality of children.
Here is an extended thread with many videos of Tucker Carlson talking about children’s genitals. Who has the deeply unhealthy fixation? [Tweets and videos at the link]
By the way, it’s absolutely real.
Kaching.
You’re not imagining that.
Kaching.
It’s happening.
Kaching.
The evidence is everywhere.
Kaching.
After that Tucker talked more about the Children’s Hospital in Boston, where they’ve already dealt with bomb threats incited by pigs like Tucker and the vile scum person who runs the Libs of TikTok Twitter account, over and over again accusing the hospital of “sexually mutilating kids” and saying it’s “very common.”
But of course Tucker says this isn’t an attack on gay people. No, that’s when he and the Critical Race Theory liar guy do their song-and-dance about drag queens.
Like the secretary of Transportation said, if you’re a public figure who’s spent one second demonizing LGBTQ people for whatever reasons, political or personal, cynical or sincere, religious or otherwise, don’t you dare.
Pete Buttigieg:
If you’re a politician or media figure who sets up the LGBTQ community to be hated and feared – not because any of us ever harmed you but because you find it useful – then don’t you dare act surprised when this kind of violence follows.
Another example of fundie xians being horrible people.
This is the case of the 10 year old rape victim in Indiana.
“Dr. Caitlin Bernard testified during the second day of a court hearing on an attempt to block Indiana’s Republican attorney general from seeking patient medical records.”He has no reason or right to those medical records.
“The attorney general’s office says it is investigating whether Bernard properly reported child abuse and possibly violated patient privacy laws by telling a newspaper reporter about the girl’s case.”He is not doing that at all.
What he is doing is harassing the doctor for doing an abortion on a 10 year old rape victim, which was legal in Indiana at the time.
He is simply being a christofascist bully.
As noted by many, since Roe versus Wade was repealed, the fundie xians have gone from abortion is wrong to, “it is OK for a third grader to be raped and pregnant.”
And launched a witchhunt against the doctor who treated her.
Associated Press
Indiana doctor defends actions in 10-year-old’s abortion
TOM DAVIES
Mon, November 21, 2022 at 5:21 PM·2 min read
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — An Indianapolis doctor who provided abortion drugs to a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio defended her actions before a judge Monday in an episode that drew national attention in the weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Dr. Caitlin Bernard testified during the second day of a court hearing on an attempt to block Indiana’s Republican attorney general from seeking patient medical records. The attorney general’s office says it is investigating whether Bernard properly reported child abuse and possibly violated patient privacy laws by telling a newspaper reporter about the girl’s case.
The Marion County judge said she expected to issue a decision next week on whether to issue a preliminary injunction against the attorney general’s office.
Bernard treated the girl in Indianapolis in late June, as the girl was unable to have an abortion in neighboring Ohio. That’s because Ohio’s “fetal heartbeat” law took effect with the Supreme Court’s decision. Such laws ban abortions from the time cardiac activity can be detected in an embryo, which is typically around the sixth week of pregnancy.
Bernard and her lawyers maintain the girl’s abuse had already been reported to Ohio police and child protective services officials before the doctor ever saw the child. Bernard said during her nearly 90 minutes of testimony that her lawsuit was aimed at protecting the girl’s privacy.
“There is no evidence of any crime being committed … so there should be no investigation necessary,” Bernard said.
Deputy Attorney General Caryn Nieman-Szyper argued that state law still required Indiana police and child welfare officials be notified immediately about the abuse so that they could assess the child’s safety even if an investigation had already started in Ohio.
After Bernard told The Indianapolis Star about the girl seeking an abortion, some news outlets and Republican politicians suggested her account was fabricated. President Joe Biden expressed empathy for the child while signing an executive order protecting some abortion access.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita told Fox News in July that he would look into whether Bernard violated child abuse notification or abortion reporting laws. Rokita has kept the investigation going even after a 27-year-old man was charged in Columbus, Ohio, with raping the girl, and public records show Bernard met Indiana’s required three-day reporting period for an abortion performed on a girl younger than 16.
Nieman-Szyper said Bernard wouldn’t be under investigation if she had not disclosed the girl’s rape to a reporter to advance her own advocacy of abortion rights. Nieman-Szyper said Bernard had not shown she had permission from the girl’s family to discuss her care in public, exposing the child to national attention.
Bernard said she had not yet seen the girl when she told the reporter about her as an example of the impact of tighter abortion laws going into effect across the country, but did not reveal identifying information about her.
“I did say that the patient had been raped,” Bernard said. “That is how a 10-year-old becomes pregnant.”
Bernard said she told an Indiana University Health social worker that the girl would be getting abortion treatment. She said those staffers were the ones who make sure that child about reports are made to the proper authorities.
Marion County Judge Heather Welch gave lawyers a Wednesday deadline for additional court filings.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an emergency appeal from former President Trump seeking to shield his tax returns from House Democrats.
Trump filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court late last month after a lower court declined to reverse its ruling mandating that he turn over his tax records to the House Ways and Means Committee.
The order — which had no noted dissents — caps a multi-year legal battle and paves the way for the release of Trump’s tax records.
Chief Justice John Roberts had temporarily blocked their release in a Nov. 1 order while the court considered the matter.
House Democrats have been seeking the records for years, saying they need to probe how the IRS conducts its routine presidential audits, while Trump’s attorneys have argued the matter is purely political.
[…] U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, dismissed Trump’s suit late last year. His ruling was later affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which in October rejected Trump’s request to rehear the case, prompting his turn to the Supreme Court.
Over the course of the past hour, former President Trump lost at the Supreme Court and saw his lawyer knocked around like a piñata by the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The timing was coincidental, but wow what a flurry of legal activity.
The Supreme Court turned away a Trump effort to block the House Ways & Means Committee from obtaining his tax returns. That was Trump’s last legal chance to avoid turning over the tax returns, which he succeeded in delaying for years.
The more significant case though is probably the Mar-a-Lago documents case that the 11th Circuit was hearing. The three-judge panel showed no sign it would side with Trump in the matter. The only real question is how quickly the appeals court would put an end to the special master review process unleashed by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon. Appeals courts are slow by nature, but I would expect to see a ruling in days, perhaps hours. […]
New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that the updated, bivalent COVID-19 boosters provided better protection against infection when compared to multiple doses of the original mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
The study, conducted between September and November, analyzed more than 360,000 viral tests for adults. The tests came from nearly 10,000 retail pharmacy locations and only included adults who had symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 and did not have immunocompromising conditions.
Findings from the CDC study indicated that the bivalent booster shots from Pfizer and Moderna, made to specifically protect against the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron subvariants, provided stronger protection when those who received it were compared to people who only received two, three or four doses of the original monoclonal vaccine.
Among the individuals in the study who tested positive for COVID-19, 72 percent had received two, three or four doses of the monoclonal vaccine and 5 percent reported having received the bivalent booster.
White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci commented on the findings of the study in a press briefing on Tuesday. Currently, only about 11 percent of eligible people have received an updated booster.
“It is clear now, despite the initial bit of confusion, that the BA.4-5 bivalent booster, what we refer to as the updated vaccine, clearly induces a better response against BA.4-5 and sublineages of BA.4-5 than does the ancestral strain,” Fauci said. “So we know it’s safe. We know that it is effective.” […]
When the Russians occupying her city came for the maritime college where she worked, Maryna Ivanovka refused to fall in line. The 60-year-old administrator was fired and banned from campus. Her house was raided and her phone, computers and passport were confiscated. A pro-Russian underling was installed in her place.
Months later, the occupation of Kherson suddenly began to crumble. Russian soldiers fled. And so, too, did the woman who had taken her job and office.
No sooner had Ukrainian authorities swept the college for booby traps than Ivanovka was back at her desk on Wednesday, sifting through the evidence her Russian-backed replacement had left behind: a ledger of employees who had worked for the Russians, a list of students who had voluntarily gone to Crimea and, peering from beside a potted plant, a portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“We’re going to put it in the bathroom above the toilet,” Ivanovka said as a colleague slammed the portrait face down, “so everyone will show him their rear.”
Undoing eight months of occupation will not be so easy, however.
About a week after the last Russian soldier fled across the Dnieper River, the mood in Kherson remained largely celebratory. Hundreds still gathered each day in the central square to hug soldiers. Electrical power was mostly still out, but businesses were coming back to life. Russian propaganda billboards were being torn down, and Ukrainian ones were going up.
But in institutions across this regional capital, from the city council to hospitals and schools, newly restored leaders like Ivanovka are facing a double conundrum. How to rebuild without the thousands of Russia sympathizers who fled? And even more vexing, what to do with those who remain? […]
Kherson was spared the scorched-earth strategy Russia employed elsewhere in Ukraine. Despite widespread detention and torture in the city, few of its buildings were shelled. Until sabotaging utilities on the way out, the Russians kept the lights on and the taps running. Kherson, a Black Sea port founded by Catherine the Great, was a place Putin aimed to assimilate, not annihilate.
Russia’s fleeting success in Kherson is a reflection not only of its brute force, but also of the connection many here felt to Moscow. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in Kherson accepted Russian passports in the hope of receiving benefits. Many more accepted thick envelopes of Russian rubles on top of their pay as an inducement to stay in their jobs.
As Ivanovka rifled through documents, a Ukrainian intelligence agent poked his head in to ask for information on the woman who replaced her. Ivanovka suggested he question a security guard named Vyacheslav Maksymov, who was close to the woman and had also kept working.
“And take the keys away from him,” she said.
The agent rebuffed a reporter’s request to observe the questioning. […]
Across the street from the prison where Russians allegedly executed some of their enemies sits a soaring performance hall. If Kherson’s torture chambers were the hidden side of the occupation, the hall — transformed into a humanitarian aid hub — was the image the Russians hoped to project.
A few days after they fled, however, the building was in disarray. Papers were strewn about. Glass windows and doors were shattered, and a ripped sign for Putin’s political party lay on the floor.
But amid the debris remained signs of a concerted attempt to curry favor with locals. Children’s backpacks featured a cheery Russian teddy bear sailor urging kids to “stay the course.” Crayon drawings showed smiling stick figures atop Russian tanks and warships with the words “United Russia.” An old man wandering through the building grabbed a collection of plays by Anton Chekhov.
“Of course, it’s Russian,” he said when asked whether the books were leftover handouts from the occupation. “What else would it be?”
The clearest picture of Russia’s persuasion campaign lay in a disheveled office. There, piles of documents catalogued Kherson residents applying for aid, pensions, passports and employment. One listed children sent to a summer camp in Crimea. Applications to volunteer at the aid center filled binder after binder.
The Washington Post visited addresses for almost three dozen applicants. A few addresses appeared to be false, perhaps a sign that people felt forced to apply. Most were real but the homes were empty. Neighbors or relatives said the applicants had fled days or weeks before the city was liberated, often to Crimea. […]
Some residents said they were swayed by billboards and social media posts promising that a Russian passport would enable them to obtain medical care or a Russian pension worth four times as much as their Ukrainian one.
Sasha, 60 […] said he lined up for six hours to receive the first of four 10,000 ruble payments at what was once the Ukrainian post office. Without telling his wife, Sasha also applied for a Russian passport so he could receive a permanent Russian pension.
“I have a [Ukrainian] pension, but it’s not enough to live or get medicine,” he said. As soon as the Russians fled, however, the rubles were nearly worthless and he was left with little but the shame of having taken the payments and the passport.
[…] Sasha said he accepted responsibility for his mistake but also felt betrayed by Russia, which he always thought of as a “brotherly” country. “They looted my birthplace,” he said of the Russian withdrawal from Kherson. “If before I had some loyalty to Russia, now I have only disgust.”
[…] officials gathered in small groups to discuss bread deliveries and repairs to the electrical grid. But again and again, the conversation turned to collaborators. Of the nine councilors before the invasion, five had conspired with the Russians, she said. One, a wealthy real estate magnate, was appointed mayor. The real mayor was still missing.
“They fled to Crimea and took everything with them,” said Luhova, who is now the head of the city military administration.
In some institutions, workers simply refused to follow Russian orders. Teachers risked their lives to offer classes online to students, an alternative to the Russian propaganda offered in their schools. And the staff at one of the main hospitals simply ignored many demands from their new bosses.
When the Russians fled, the hospital’s director, Leonid Rymyga, emerged from hiding and went back to work. To his surprise, his Russian-installed replacement did not flee but tried to negotiate to keep a job
.
“I told him to negotiate with the SBU,” Rymyga said, referring to the Ukrainian intelligence service.
The Russians initially kept their distance from Kherson Maritime College, a hulking Soviet-era institution where young men and women learn to be commercial ship captains. But then one day, they burst into the head offices and held officials at gunpoint.
In May, Russian-appointed officials visited and said that the college, like Kherson, was “Russian now.” When Ivanovka and others objected, they were fired and barred from campus. […]
In her place, the Russians installed a low-level teacher whose eagerness to work under occupation elevated her to deputy director.
“I never thought a teacher of Ukrainian history and patriotic education would collaborate with the occupiers,” Ivanovka said of her replacement […]
The staff shriveled from 178 to 51, and the number of cadets from 1,200 to 71. Yet, the payroll nearly doubled. Those who continued working were rewarded with salaries in rubles nearly triple their Ukrainian pay. […]
That’s a complicated picture, but one thing is certain: the rubles the Russians paid out are now worthless. The people who fled to Crimea helped to steal some of Kherson’s cultural wealth.
Way back in March, we were celebrating mud as a savior in Ukraine’s defense from Russia’s military onslaught. The headline, in fact, was “Let’s talk about mud, the greatest friend Ukraine ever had.”
Known locally as rasputitsa, Russia’s decision to wait for the Beijing Winter Olympics to end before launching their invasion was one of the most consequential decisions of this entire war—rather than attack over frozen ground, Russian armor and supply trucks got stuck in that unforgiving mud. By early March, the spring thaw was an active participant in the Battle of Kyiv—on the side of the Ukrainian victors.
After a dry summer, the mud is back, and it’s just as unforgiving. Except this time, it’s bedeviling both sides. Here is a look at the miserable conditions in a Russian camp near Svatove. [Video at the link]
Just as we saw in the spring, entire tanks are getting swallowed in the mud. But this time, the advancing army is the Ukrainian one. And it’s Ukrainian tanks getting eaten: [video at the link]
Remember that video when you hear people say that tracked vehicles are better in these conditions than wheeled ones. Everything suffers in weather like this. Here are some Ukrainian wheeled vehicles flopping all over the place: [video at the link]
And more Ukrainian armor stuck in the mud: [video at the link]
Hummers are certainly not immune: [video at the link]
None of this is new to Ukraine. [images at the link]
All of this means that no one is moving much, anywhere. There’ll be a bunch of that “shaping the battlefield” stuff (hitting troop concentrations, supply depots, command and control centers, bridges, and logistical hubs) over the next month as everyone waits for the ground to freeze. It’s just not feasible to wage war from main roads, many of them a muddy mess anyway, after nine months of heavy armor and artillery shells shredding pavement. Too easy to target roads with artillery and set up ambushes—exactly as Ukraine did back in February and March.
Still, it looks like Ukraine has a new friend in its efforts to shape that battlefield. [Tweet, map and image at the link, “TRLG 230 can actually hit targets 150km away …]
This is double the range of HIMARS/MLRS rockets, and assuming this is all accurate, will dramatically complicate Russia’s logistical picture, forcing it to pull its main supply depots even farther from the front lines and rendering much of its rail network obsolete.
This is what the attack on Dzhankoi sounded like: [video at the link]
This is what I mean by “logistical hubs”: [Tweet and maps at the link, “unconfirmed reports of a strike on Dzhankoi, occupied Crimea. It is a major logistic hub, at the intersection of two rail lines & two highways, and also hosts a major airbase. It is 150 km from the closest possible Ukrainian firing position.]
There’s something to be said about Turkey providing longer-range rockets while the U.S. and the rest of NATO dither on long-range ATACMS rockets, particularly since Turkey has positioned itself as the chief negotiator between Ukraine and Russia.
That said, Turkey already imposed the grain corridor on Russia, asserting its will in a way that let Putin know who was the boss. This just puts an exclamation mark on Russia’s submission to Turkey, with major consequences for the regional balance of power for decades to come.
We’ve known for some time now that the presence of far-right extremists within the ranks of our police forces is a serious problem, one that was amplified by the Jan. 6 insurrection, where a number of officers were participants. Despite that, there’s been little effort among either police authorities themselves or their civic and federal overseers to confront the issue and begin rooting white supremacists out of our policing system.
Of course, when these bigots and their activities are publicly exposed, as with the neo-Nazi Massachusetts officer exposed by HuffPost’s Christopher Mathias last month, there’s an immediate uproar and the affected local authorities scramble to repair the damage. The same dynamic is occurring now in Idaho, where a now-retired Boise police captain was recently exposed as a contributor and speaker for this year’s white-nationalist American Renaissance (AR) conference. And it’s going to keep happening.
The Boise cop, Matthew Bryngleson, was exposed by researcher Molly Conger this weekend in a thread that detailed the officer’s real identity leading up to the annual AR gathering in Burns, Tennessee. Using the pseudonym Daniel Vinyard (taken from a racist skinhead character in the film American History X), Bryngleson was a scheduled speaker described as “a retired, race-realist police officer.” The title of his speech: “The Vilification of the Police and What It Means for America.”
American Renaissance is one of the longest-running white-nationalist operations, founded in the 1990s by Jared Taylor, who specializes in giving an academic veneer to old-fashioned racial bigotry, particularly of the eugenicist variety. One of Taylor’s most durable propaganda campaigns involves blaming black people for crime in America; among the people influenced by his spurious smears was mass killer Dylann Roof.
That was the topic, too, when Bryngleson and Taylor engaged in an interview that was posted to the AR website in September. Bryngelson told Taylor stories from his career and his interactions with Black people, whom he described as criminals whose crimes “the sound human mind can’t even comprehend … let alone carry them out.” At one point, Bryngelson used a transphobic slur to describe someone.
Taylor asked Bryngleson to describe his experience as a police officer in dealing with nonwhites, and he replied:
Whatever the worst crime of the day is, it’s usually a black person or a nonwhite. Of course white people do DUIs, they do domestic violence, they steal, but when it’s something where you pause and go, ‘Holy cow, I can’t believe that happened in this town,’ almost always it’s someone who is not from there, and it’s a black person, almost always without fail.
It’s a script. It’s what happens every single time no matter what the case is. You can catch them just finishing beating someone and during the subsequent resisting of arrest, the fight, we’re called racists. We can catch them in the act and the mere fact that we are catching them is racist. It’s 100 percent of the time we’re accused of being racist. Especially in this town, obviously, there are so few Black people there, but when we do encounter them, of course it’s going to be white officers because that’s mostly what we have, and when they get arrested they’re going to scream racism every single time.
Under the Daniel Vinland pseudonym, Bryngleson also authored a couple of pieces for the American Renaissance website. One of them described how he reached a point in his police career when he “became aware of the violent tendencies of Blacks.” Another recounted “microaggressions” from nonwhite and liberal members of the Boise City Council.
“Vinland” described growing up in southern California before moving to a predominantly white Northwest city 22 years before—in fact, following the blueprint of multiple other right-wing officers who have moved to Idaho in the same time period, and becoming a leading component in the state’s far-right radicalization.
“I picked the location because it was mostly white,” wrote “Vinland” […]
Mayor Lauren McLean launched an investigation into Bryngleson’s history with the department and whether his views affected the cases he handled, and particularly any convictions he may have been responsible for, as well as how widespread his malign influence was within the department, and whether its culture tolerated him knowingly. […]
And for those in BPD: if you cannot or will not cooperate fully and honestly, I suggest that now is the time to leave this department. And honestly, the profession. The people of Boise rely on you to protect and serve them. The people of Boise deserve better. Everyone should trust that they will be treated fairly. We can’t expect that one would be able to trust that someone who perpetuates such blatant racism, while serving as an officer, would be able to treat those he reviles so deeply in a fair way. In the way that members of our community—any community—deserve and expect.
Other law-enforcement officials also condemned Bryngelson, including former Ada County Sheriff Gary Raney, the Treasure Valley Fraternal Order of Police, and Boise’s Police Union.
[…] this is a systemic problem related to police culture and training, and it’s a problem within every law-enforcement body in the country. Responding to a scandal here and another one there won’t address how deeply this is embedded in law enforcement nationally, and how profound its ramifications are both for how policing is conducted in America, but how it affects its relations with an increasingly angry public.
A powerful indicator of how deep the infection runs within law-enforcement culture is how police officials have responded to efforts in Minnesota—where a cop’s murder of a black Minneapolis man in 2020 set off months of protests nationwide—to ban police officers from being involved in hate, extremist or white supremacist groups. Police groups have come out in opposition to such bans, they say, because the wording is too vague and they might infringe on people’s 1st Amendment rights.
[…] Until the nation’s civil authorities—from mayors to governors to senators and presidents—make it a top priority to weed out bigoted extremists from the ranks of our law-enforcement bodies, Police Captain Matt Brynglesons will keep happening. And so will George Floyds.
As we all know, American Thanksgiving is a celebration of the time white people from Europe came and invaded and stole everything from indigenous peoples in America and gave them diseases and now kids learn fake lessons in school about how this was all just SUPER fuckin’ great.
If you point any of this out, white conservatives EE-HAW like donkeys about how you are taking away their freedoms and are probably grooming them. […] a holiday can simultaneously be a special time of togetherness and also have shitty origins.
Point is, Thanksgiving is like if Russia actually won its war against Ukraine and then ate turkey and pumpkin pie about it every year. […]
Luckily for us and for the Ukrainians, that ain’t never gonna fuckin’ happen.
Anyway, we are babbling like we are already smoking tryptophan doobies, so here is a nice tweet about Chef José Andrés getting a nice award from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. [video at the link]
Talk about two of the best people in the entire world walking next to each other.
As Andrés’s World Central Kitchen explains on Twitter, they’ve worked together with Ukrainians to serve 180 million meals since Vladimir Putin declared war on Ukraine in February. That’s why Zelenskyy awarded him the country’s Order of Merit.
“Thank you very much for your support. We feel that you have been with us since the very beginning of this tragedy – the full-scale invasion of the Russian aggressor. Thank you very much for standing with Ukrainians,” Zelenskyy said to Andrés during the plaque’s unveiling.
[…] Kinda hard to believe there are Americans so confused about which side is the “good” side here.
Oh well, not the first time, not the last time.
Have fun celebrating your BAD HOLIDAY, America! Make a donation to the World Central Kitchen […]
are endemic to other lands or don’t match the appearance for the other photos (it’s not a species we have locally or that I’ve seen in person) but very much not an expert here.
If anyone could please confirm my Bulbophyllum macphersonii working conclusion or provide a different more accurate ID that would be very greatly appreciated.
On how the eastern states tree genus Cadellia got its botanical name from the second person to steam up our Murray river. (Or Dhungala to give it (one of?) it’s Indigenous name(s).)
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian (support them if you can!) Ukraine liveblog, From there:
The European parliament has declared Russia “a terrorist regime” over its brutal war on Ukraine and called on democracies around the world to follow suit.
In a non-binding resolution approved by a large majority of MEPs, the European parliament said Russia was “a terrorist regime as a consequence of its deliberate physical destruction of civilian infrastructure and mass murder of Ukrainian civilians with the aim of eliminating the Ukrainian people”. It urged the EU’s 27 member states to make the same designation “with all the negative consequences this implies”.
The vote was passed by 494 MEPs, with 58 votes against and 44 abstentions.
The parliament, which often takes bold foreign policy stances, cannot compel EU governments or the European Commission to follow its policy recommendations, which include changing EU law to allow states to be designated as a sponsor or perpetrator of terrorism.
MEPs say this legal step would allow the EU to widen its sanctions against Russia, to target its political, legislative, military and executive bodies as well as holding it responsible for the crime of military aggression. MEPs have also called for Russia to be excluded from the UN security council.
Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the EU has adopted sanctions against 1,241 individuals and 118 organisations, including Russian president Vladimir Putin, his leading ministers and allies, many Russian oligarchs and Russian Duma deputies.
Five EU countries – Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states – have already declared Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, while the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe – which is not part of the EU – has also declared the current Russian regime “a terrorist one”.
The resolution listed Russia’s “terrorist acts”, including supplying weapons to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and deliberate atttacks on Syrian civilians; the poisoning of the Skripals and the downing of flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, which killed 298 people.
In Ukraine, the resolution said that Ukrainian authorities had documented more than 34,000 war crimes committed by Russian and proxy troops. More than 90 % of these attacks were against civilian population and, or are with the aim of destroying civilian facilities.
An air raid alert has been issued across almost all of Ukraine, according to reports.
Russia launches new missile strikes on Ukraine
Russia has launched new missile strikes on Ukraine, hitting at least one critical infrastructure target in Kyiv with explosions heard echoing across the capital.
An air raid alert was issued across the country. Ukrainian media reported air defence systems in action in several parts of the country.
Vitaliy Kim, governor of the southern Mykolaiv Oblast, said Russian forces had launched five missiles in the region.
Explosions have also been reported in Lviv.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head office of Ukraine’s president, said a new “massive attack” on the country’s infrastructure facilities was underway.
Emergency power outages began in Kyiv, a local energy provider said.
In the wake of the sedition trial’s collapse, Justice Department prosecutor John Rogge travels overseas and uncovers a bombshell. He finds evidence of a coordinated effort to subvert American democracy… as well as the names of high-profile Americans involved. Rogge then returns to America… and goes rogue. Risking his career as a prosecutor, he makes public what he’s discovered about the fascist threat and the Americans who supported it. And he offers a prescient warning about an American criminal justice system that is ill-equipped to defend democracy from those who seek to destroy it.
This is the final episode of the series. Well worth listening to on its own, but the entire series is excellent.
What can be that breaking point in a person’s life? Class 20 brings us to Maidan and the Self-Understanding that resulted. Guest lecturer is Marci Shore, Associate Professor of History at Yale University.
Is Twitter really going to “go crazy” now that new owner Elon Musk has allowed previously banned users like former President Donald Trump back on the platform? Hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill discuss the prospects for the beleaguered social media site on this week’s episode of Fever Dreams. Also on the episode, Heidi Beedle, a reporter for the Colorado Times Recorder and host of the Western Fringe podcast, tells Sommer and Weill that anti-LGBT hate from Colorado Springs community leaders began peaking before this weekend’s shooting at queer venue Club Q.
…The US continued to experience significantly higher COVID-19 and excess all-cause mortality compared with peer countries during 2021 and early 2022, a difference accounting for 150 000 to 470 000 deaths.This difference was muted in the 10 states with highest vaccination coverage; remaining gaps may be explained by greater vaccination uptake in peer countries, better vaccination targeting to older age groups, and differences in health and social infrastructure….
At least three people have been killed and six injured after a Russian missile strike in Kyiv, according to the city administration.
Oleksii Kuleba, head of the regional military administration, said the entire Kyiv region was without electricity after Moscow’s air strikes targeted critical infrastructure.
The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, also reported on Telegram that the city’s water supply had been cut off.
“The entire Ukrainian city of Lviv, home to 700,000 people, is without power today as a result of mass Russian missile strikes. The temperature there now is 1 degree Celsius. Moldova also reporting blackouts.”
A top Ukrainian security official has said that suspected Russian citizens and cash documents were seized in a raid on a 1,000-year-old Orthodox Christian monastery in Kyiv and other Orthodox sites early on Tuesday as part of operations to counter suspected “subversive activities by Russian special services”.
Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of the National Security and Defence Council, said there was an ongoing investigation into what had been going on in the network of catacombs.
The SBU website said the agency had found pro-Russian literature, over $100,000 in cash, and “dubious” Russian citizens.
“We are not going to talk about money right now,” Danilov told the Guardian.
There’s certain documents were found there. And certain citizens were found there … most likely citizens of the Russian federation. And now we’re trying to find out what they do in there and why they were there.
Located south of the city centre, the sprawling Kyiv Pechersk Lavra complex – or Kyiv Monastery of the Caves – is the headquarters of the Russian-backed wing of the Ukrainian Orthodox church that falls under the Moscow patriarchate, as well as being a Ukrainian cultural treasure and a Unesco World Heritage site.
The raid on Pechersk Lavra was part of a broad sweep of the church’s property. The SBU said in all, about 850 people had their identities checked and 50 underwent “in-depth counterintelligence interviews”, including with the use of a polygraph. More than 350 church buildings were searched including two other monasteries and the headquarters of the Moscow Patriarchate’s diocese in western Ukraine, the agency said.
ATLANTA (CN) — Republicans filed an emergency petition Tuesday asking the Georgia Supreme Court to block Saturday voting for the U.S. Senate runoff after a lower court ruled to allow it.
On Monday evening, the Georgia Court of Appeals denied the GOP’s attempt to prevent early voting this Saturday. The party, along with Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, argued that state law prohibits Saturday voting if there is a state holiday on the Thursday or Friday before.
Tuesday’s petition – filed by the Georgia Republican Party, National Republican Senatorial Committee and Republican National Committee – comes just after several major metro Atlanta counties said they would open voting locations Saturday. Most of those counties leaned Democratic in the 2020 election.
[…]
The Republicans argue that under state law, counties are required to provide voters with a notice of the times, dates and locations for early voting “no later than seven days” before voting starts.
The election law governing Saturday voting was passed in 2016, but the Georgia General Assembly removed the word “runoff” from it the following year.
Russia is targeting 44 million civilians and this is a war crime and a crime against humanity.
So what can we, the world do?
A lot, some of which we are already doing.
We should supply Ukraine with long range missiles and let them wreck Russian infrastructure for a while.
This is a war and there shouldn’t be rules for one side that don’t apply to the other side.
The Russians say they want to drive millions of Ukrainians into western Europe so western Europe can suffer as well, taking care of them and then end the war on Russian terms.
That might sort of work.
The Europeans might get fed up enough to end the war…on Ukrainian terms.
The EU and NATO are far stronger than Russia and it is time for them to act like it.
‘I’m a 16yo orphan from an African country escaping a war zone & religious persecution. I have a sibling legally in UK at moment. What is the safe & legal route for me to come to the UK?'”
Moldova has also lost all its electricity due to the Russian attacks today.
They aren’t happy.
Apparently, some of the Moldovan power lines run through part of Ukraine and they might also get some of their electricity from Ukraine.
Moldova also knows that if Ukraine falls, they are next.
They won’t last a week.
ravensays
Tweet
C4H10FO2P
3 ☢️Nuklear Power Plants in #Ukraine put into emergency operation mode or emergency shutdown
South Ukrainian, Khmelnytskyi and Rivne
6:22 AM · Nov 23, 2022
This isn’t at all surprising.
Nuclear power plants need to be connected to the electric grid to function.
The electricity powers their cooling pumps including their emergency core cooling systems.
If they lose electric power, they go to backup diesel generators.
If the diesel generators fail like at Fukushima, then the power reactors melt down.
European parliament under cyberattack by pro-Kremlin group, says official
The president of the European parliament, Roberta Metsola, has confirmed that it came under “sophisticated cyberattacks, hours after MEPs voted to declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism.
A pro-Kremlin group [IOW, the Kremlin] has claimed responsibility for the denial of service attack on the European parliament’s website, she said.
She added that IT experts were “pushing back” against the cyberattack and protecting their systems. She added:
My response: #SlavaUkraini
ravensays
Tweet
Liveuamap@Liveuamap
Almost complete blackout in Ukraine after Russian missile strikes, reportedly Pivdenno-Ukrainska Nuclear Power plant shutting down all units
4:48 AM · Nov 23, 2022
More.
More of the same.
Reports are that almost all of Ukraine is without electricity and water right now.
Today on Russian state TV, Igor Korotchenko has been attacking what he calls the “generation of aggressive European women” occupying top political roles across the continent
He says Baerbock, von der Leyen, Kallas and Marin are the “provocateurs and arsonists of the new war” …
But they have great respect for you, Olga. You’re not one of those bad women.
51 out of 70 enemy cruise missiles and 5 kamikaze drones were shot down today. The launches were carried out from 10 Tu-95ms missile-carrying aircraft from the Volgodonsk region, the Rostov region and the Caspian Sea, as well as from two small missile boats from the Black Sea.
The drones were of the ‘LANCET’ type, not Shaheds.
Commentary:
[…] No way to know if this is true, but it’s worth nothing that only five kamikaze drones were shot down—and Ukraine doesn’t say how many total were fired. It’s actually easier to shoot down a fast-flying cruise missile with modern air defense systems, than slow, small, low-flying suicide drones. I’d suspect most of the extensive damage in this raid was drones hitting their marks.
As another 100-rocket wave hits Ukrainian power and thermal plants, it’s worth nothing the logic of hitting such civilian targets.
Russia thinks that by freezing Ukraine’s civilian population in the dark, they will either riot against their government and overthrow it, thus welcoming Russian saviors (not joking, they think that’s a possibility), or in the alternative, it’ll generate a mass wave of refugees toward Europe, leading the allies to force Ukraine to the negotiating table.
The former is comically implausible. If anything, the missile strikes are hardening global sentiment of Russia as a terrorist state. The latter is within the realm of possibilities.
[Tweet from Moldova’s president] Moldova was already orienting Westward, but this makes it explicit, with consequences to the Russian-occupied breakaway split of land in Transnistria, on the border with Ukraine. It’s days of “independence” are numbered.
[Tweet about 3 nuclear power plants put into emergency operation mode or emergency shutdown]
… or in the alternative, it’ll generate a mass wave of refugees toward Europe, leading the allies to force Ukraine to the negotiating table.
and
(This) The latter is within the realm of possibilities.
More millions or tens of millions of Ukrainians fleeing to western Europe would be a huge strain on the EU.
It doesn’t mean though that the EU would force Urkaine to negotiate an unfavorable agreement.
It could just as easily mean the EU/NATO get fed up with Russia and help end the war on terms favorable to Ukraine.
That works for me.
The ethics of us paying lots of money and weapons while the Ukrainians pay in the blood of their children isn’t all that good.
As it turns out, it is our war as well. Russia threatens everyone in the world.
Kyiv mayor warns city facing ‘worst winter since WWII’
The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, said warned the Ukrainian capital faces “the worst winter since World War II” after Russian attacks on the city’s energy infrastructure.
Residents in Kyiv had to be ready for the “worst case scenario” of widespread power cuts at low temperatures, he said in an interview with the German newspaper Bild.
Parts of the capital would have to be evacuated in this scenario he said….
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said Ukrainians are “unbreakable” after new Russian strikes across the country.
Ukraine will rebuild infrastructure damaged by today’s attacks and “get through all of this”, he said in a video address posted to Telegram.
Zelenskiy said:
Today, the European Parliament recognized Russia as a terrorist state… And then Russia proved that all this is true by using 67 missiles against our infrastructure, our energy grid, and ordinary people.
He also said Ukraine will request an urgent meeting of the UN’s security council to discuss the latest Russian strikes against power-generating facilities.
Families of drafted Russian soldiers accuse Putin of snubbing them
Two months after mobilising tens of thousands of Russian men, the Kremlin has said that Vladimir Putin will grant some of their mothers and wives an audience to quell fears over the mass call-up.
But advocates for soldiers’ families have said they were passed over for the meeting and are expecting it to be a whitewash covering up the Kremlin’s disregard for its own soldiers fighting in Ukraine.
Valentina Melnikova, a veteran advocate for soldiers’ families going back to 1989, said in an interview with the Guardian that she had not been approached about the meeting with Putin, which is expected to take place later this week.
“Of course they didn’t invite us and we of course don’t want to go,” she said.
She said it would be one thing to go alone and meet the Russian president as representative of the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee, which she says has received thousands of complaints, more than in the years of the Russian war in Chechnya.
But she said that, like other rights activists who have not been chosen to take part in the meeting, she believed the Kremlin would handpick its representatives or perhaps even fill out their ranks with planted audience members, in order to stage Putin’s meeting with the “public”.
To go together with the relatives of mobilised [soldiers] who are agreed to their husbands and sons dying on the front is not comfortable for us. We have somewhat different interests and different problems.
US to send additional $400m in new military aid for Ukraine
The US has announced a new $400m (£332.5m) aid package to Ukraine which will include weapons, munitions and air defence equipment.
In a statement, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said:
The artillery ammunition, precision fires, air defence missiles, and tactical vehicles that we are providing will best serve Ukraine on the battlefield.
The Pentagon said the package included additional munitions for NASAMS air defence systems, high mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS), plus heavy machine guns with thermal imagery sights to counter Russian drones, and more than 20m rounds of small arms ammunition.
The package also includes more than 200 generators to help Ukraine deal with power outages caused by Russian attacks on energy infrastructure.
Pentagon press secretary, Brig Gen Pat Ryder, said the generators are “intended to support both civilian and military power needs… to ease the pressure on the grid”.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, thanked President Joe Biden for the new package and vowed his country “will not be scared by cowardly inhumane terrorist attacks of Russian war criminals”.
The UN’s security council will hold an urgent meeting later today on Russia’s latest strikes across Ukraine at the request of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
A spokesperson for the US mission to the UN said the US, Albania and Ukraine requested the meeting to discuss “Russia’s massive missile strikes today damaging critical civilian infrastructure across Ukraine.”
According to the Kyiv mayor, 21 of the 31 cruise missiles fired at the capital were intercepted. One of the ten which evaded the defences hit an apartment block in Vyshgorod, a northern suburb of Kyiv, killing three people and wounding 15.
There was a kindergarten in the lower ground floor of the building, but it was evacuated just in time after the air raid sirens went off. The blast left a 3 metre crater just in front of the building, destroying the apartments around it, blowing the tops of nearby trees and leaving a children’s playground a charred wreck filled with debris.
“It flew right over us. We heard a whistling sound and then it came round down on the building,” Ruslan Vorona, a local resident, said. He and his eight year-old son, Oleksii, were sheltering and charging their phones in an insulated tent set up by the emergency services.
“There were a few explosions. Two were quieter and one was louder, and one of the missiles went straight over my head,” a 28 year-old local man, Oleksandr, who would not give his last name, said.
Rescue workers were last night trying to salvage the remaining household possessions of the families left homeless by the blast, tying what they could find in sheets and throwing them to the ground from the four-storey brick building. There was not much left, but the emergency workers had made promises theey would save what they could and they risked serious injury clambering through the wreckage to keep their word.
“Why would anybody be surprised that the Supreme Court has ruled against me, they always do!” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social account. “The Supreme Court has lost its honor, prestige, and standing, & has become nothing more than a political body, with our Country paying the price.”
Whose fault is it that the Supreme Court is what it is today?
johnson catmansays
re Reginald Selkirk @322:
The Supreme Court has lost its honor, prestige, and standing, & has become nothing more than a political body, with our Country paying the price.
For once, the Orange Menace spoke the truth, although the truth is not quite as he imagines it to be.
KGsays
So today, the UK Supreme court ruled that the Scottish Parliament does not have the power to legislate for an advisory referendum on independence. This was not a surprise, although many thought it likely the court would rule that it could not make a decision about hypothetical legislation. The SNP is proposing to treat the next UK general election as a de facto referendum in Scotland, so that if the pro-independence parties get over 50% of the vote in Scottish constituencies, they will take it as authority to negotiate independence. I don’t think this is a good strategy: the unionist parties will say they refuse to recognise the election as being about that single issue – unless and until the pro-independence parties fail to get 50% (as they probably will – there are considerable numbers who normally vote for unionist parties, but would probably vote “Yes” in a referendum (this happened in 2014), and in a general election campaign, other issues will inevitably get a lot of attention even in Scotland. Then they will say: “Right, you’ve had your second referendum, you lost again, now go away and shut up.” If the pro-independence parties do get the majority of the vote, that would increase pressure on the UK government to agree a new referendum, but how great that pressure would be would depend on the overall UK political situation (specifically, whether SNP support or at least neutrality would be needed for either Labour or the Tories to form a govenrment), and on whether the independence movement could generate sufficient extra-parliamentary action. So in short, it looks to me like a gamble with the odds on failure, and the price of failure greater than the reward of success. I think the best course would be to start building a mass-movement now, on the basis that this decision proves the Union is not a voluntary one of equals, but one in which one of the supposed partners, England, holds all the power – that is, a quasi-colonial or abusive relationship.
Yes, Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a garbage fire. Here are some of the more recent details:
A new Media Matters analysis reports that 50 of the top 100 recent advertisers on Twitter have effectively stopped advertising on the platform in the last few weeks. Some announced the suspension of their ad campaigns, while others ended their ad campaigns without public explanation. The advertisers who paused their campaigns were big spenders before the Musk takeover, accounting for more than $750 million in revenue in 2022. A similar analysis by The Washington Post counts the number of top-100 advertisers who have now paused Twitter ad campaigns in the last two weeks at “more than a third.”
By either metric, Twitter’s spendiest advertisers are holding off on giving Elon Musk money until they get a clearer idea of what, exactly, their brands might soon become tied to. As an expert told the Post, Musk is becoming “a very strong brand himself, and a controversial brand.”
That might be an understatement. One of Musk’s first public acts after taking over Twitter was to personally promote a hoax news site’s fake coverage of the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. He’s mingled with some of the most notorious conspiracy promoters on the hellsite, both before and after, in apparently unending quests to seek out public approval from anyone willing to give him some. [Tweets at the link]
The man has a brand indeed, and the brand is “what if MAGA conspiracy crank, but rich.” [alarming tweet posted by Aaron Rupar is available at the link]
As for why Elon Musk is proving so blazingly incapable of managing a social network, we all have our theories. One anecdotal account that’s getting traction today is a Tumblr post by a self-identified former SpaceX intern who describes high-level company management as being focused primarily on keeping Musk from doing damage: “I cannot stress enough how much of the company culture was oriented around managing this one guy.”
“Twitter has neither of those things going for it. There is no company culture or internal structure around the problem of managing Elon Musk, and I think for the first time we’re seeing what happens when people actually take that man seriously and at face value.”
[Yep. That strikes me as an apt analysis.]
We can’t vouch for that account, though it does contain some anecdotes (ahem, “rocket cake”) that can be verified elsewhere. Almost anyone who has worked inside corporate culture, however, is very familiar with the notion of instituting layers of management whose primary task is to keep the higher-level boss from constantly shattering underlings’ projects by instituting new weird demands that range from the impossible to the absurd.
Sure enough, when Musk came to Twitter, he brought along a team of top-level yes men from his companies to perform “code reviews” and otherwise allegedly judge the fitness of Twitter’s current architects, and nearly all of the Twitter executives who did not have years of experience fluffing Elon Musk’s ego were swiftly kicked to the curb. [Tweet at the link]
It’s a vanity project for Elon; he imagines himself enough of a genius to turn around a company he knows nothing about and wants to learn nothing about. His primary tool to turn Twitter into a profit center will be to insult people incessantly until that magically happens, but, in the meantime? He’s losing more of the company’s top advertisers by the day, even as his Twitter purchase is putting a billion dollars worth of new pressure on the social network. That still doesn’t sound like a plan to us, but what do we know?
Ah, it is terrible that we have to do this, but here is an update on the latest mass shootings:
The latest on the mass shooting in Virginia: “The employee who killed six people at a Walmart in Virginia and wounded at least a half-dozen others was identified by the company Wednesday as 31-year-old Andre Bing. Bing, who took his own life after opening fire on his co-workers Tuesday, was a manager on the overnight shift at the Walmart Supercenter in the city of Chesapeake and a longtime employee, the company said in a statement.”
The latest on the mass shooting in Colorado: “A Colorado judge ordered the suspect accused of gunning down five people at a gay nightclub held without bond Wednesday, during the defendant’s first court appearance. The public got its first glimpse of Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22, who made a virtual appearance from jail before 4th Judicial District Court Judge Charlotte Ankeny.”
The latest on the mass shooting in Pennsylvania: “Four students were injured in a drive-by shooting near Overbrook High School shortly before noon on Wednesday, Philadelphia police said. … The four students involved appeared to have nonlife-threatening injuries, according to a spokesperson with the Philadelphia School District.”
For those keeping track, there have been eight mass shootings in the United States over the last week.
The Biden administration announced Tuesday that it’s seeing a big uptick in the number of new customers buying private health insurance for 2023 from the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace. Nearly 3.4 million people have signed up for coverage — an increase of 17% compared to the same time last year. The boost in enrollment comes as the number of uninsured Americans this year reached a historic low of 8%.
“Next year,” Kevin McCarthy vowed, “Republicans will start every day of Congress with prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance.” But Congress already does this.
Kevin McCarthy seems determined to prove that he is a useless git.
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 330
But Congress already does this.
Yes, but millions upon millions of paranoid Christian right-wingers don’t know that. They think that under the “godless” liberals/Democrats/progressives who hate ‘Murica, the government has the gall not to swear their fealty to ‘Murica with a fascistic loyalty oath and not praise this country’s true ruler: An invisible, immortal, magical space dictator who is obsessed with who and how we are fucking. McCarthy is playing on the redneck’s hatred of what they’d deem “unpatriotic” and the “irreligious.”
There’s no way to consider Russia anything but a terrorist nation. More than its unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine, its indiscriminate targeting of civilians is textbook terrorism. Russia doesn’t even hide it—Russia is demanding negotiations to freeze the conflict in exchange for stopping its terror campaign against civilian targets.
The European Union has finally responded. [Tweet, with video of the moment when the European Parliament adopted a resolution which recognized Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.]
The United States has refused to follow along for complicated legal and diplomatic reasons. A terror designation, under U.S. law, would mean anyone doing business with Russia would be subject to U.S. sanctions. That would include … Europe. While trade has been severely curtailed between Russia and Western nations, there are still goods excluded from the current sanction regime. An American terror designation wouldn’t account for those exceptions, hence Joe Biden’s caution. Europe isn’t operating under such stringent legal requirements.
Regardless, Russia is furious. Why, how could anyone accuse it of terrorism? So, in a very Russian fashion, it decided to respond with more terror, launching 70 cruise missiles and an untold number of suicide drones against Ukraine’s electrical and thermal grid, plunging Ukraine into darkness. […]
Meanwhile, Russia thinks Ukrainians will rise up against the Ukrainian government because of the cold and the dark. But this is how Ukrainians respond:
Even the absence of electricity caused by yet another massive russian rocket attack cannot stop our musicians. Today’s concert in the Column Hall of the National Philharmonic of Ukraine in Kyiv was held by candlelight and light from flashlights and smartphones. [images at the link]
Some Russians are daring to utter this, even in Russian state propaganda channels:
Meanwhile in Russia: a rare moment of sanity on Russian state TV, when one panelist was finally fed up with Vladimir Solovyov’s threats to wipe Kyiv or Kharkiv off the face of the earth. [video at the link]
Note the one panelist around the 2:30 mark who says that “it’s obscene, it’s not constructive, it’s criminal to bomb peaceful cities.” He notes that bombing peaceful cities has never led to a people surrendering in war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have something to say about that, but that’s the exception that proves the rule.
This is another remarkable moment, unfortunately related to my Japanese example above:
Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov had clearly given up on the idea of defeating Ukraine militarily. In his desperation to scare the West into stopping its support, he resorts to nuclear threats—but even fellow propagandists are sick of it & say he lost all sense of reality. [See SC’s comment 252]
Note the panelist laughing at the idea that Kherson and the Donbas are Russian territories: “It wasn’t our territory until we declared it as ours.” He also laughs off the notion that Russia is at war with NATO. We all know that if that were true, this war would have been over, and quickly. But this is not the kind of pushback that Russians are used to seeing.
As I publish this, Ukraine announces power is mostly restored: [Hooray!!]
⚡️President’s Office: Electricity restored in 15 Ukrainian oblasts, the city of Kyiv.
Earlier in the day, emergency blackouts were enforced in all Ukrainian regions following a new wave of Russian missile strikes across the country.
Still, each attack makes Ukraine’s grid that much less resilient, likely held together by duct tape, gum, and some MacGyver ingenuity. Russia’s rocket and missile fleet remains substantial, even if today’s missile barrage cost them more than $100 million.
[…] Russian mobilization is going so well:
Out of all mobiks we’ve seen so far, these guys from Serpuhkov were definitely born to lose:
a) no armour given
b) abandoned by commanders
c) shelled by own Russian forced
d) not given any food
e) after retreating, placed in a building with no windows.
The list goes on… [video at the link]
Don’t feel too sorry for them. They still want to fight! I’m sure they’ll get the chance to be human speed bumps to the Ukrainian advance. And I say that with zero relish. I’m tired of senseless death. [Me too!] I’d rather they sneak back to Russia since it’s clear no one knows who or where they are, or even cares about it. Likely no one would notice if they simply went home and told the local authorities they’d been properly released.
This is the alternative:
Mobilized Victor Feld lasted 4 days…
He was called up on 25 September, arrived in the Crimea on 3 October, was sent to the front on 6 October and was gone by 10 October.
At his funeral they talk about the plans of the “civilised West” to exterminate the Russian nation. [image at the link]
I truly do wonder if anyone actually believes this idea that Russia is genuinely threatened. No one wants Russia and its corruption. They have all that empty land mass already—develop that! If they only minded their own business, everyone could go happily on their merry way.
Yesterday, I wrote about the Turkish TRLG-230 MLRS making an appearance in Ukraine, with its 150 km range—doubling Ukraine’s reach from typical HIMARS/MLRS rockets. Now we have video: [video at the link]
That’s the good news. The less-good news is that ammunition supplies are reportedly limited.
CONFIRMED: Turkey supplied laser-guided TRLG-230 missiles to Ukraine earlier this year
• Dozens of missiles shipped but it isn’t a big shipment, the impact might be minimal
Ukraine will have to be judicious about how it uses those rockets, and I do wish that this wasn’t reported publicly. It would be better for Russia to think Ukraine had hundreds of rockets, further motivating it to push its supply depots farther back. With limited supply, Russia may simply decide to absorb some losses in order to benefit from the logistical advantages of the current setup.
On the other hand, those “dozens” of rockets might simply be the initial shipment, with more coming down the pike.
And, in case you’re wondering what the difference is between a rocket and a missile: A missile is guided and can change trajectory during flight, while a rocket depends on the angle of the launch tube and the amount of propellant. Obviously, guided GMLRS rockets and these Turkish ones blur the distinction, but they still require the proper launch angle and merely tweak their flight trajectory to hit the designated target (via GPS for GMLRS, and laser designation for these Turkish ones). […]
There’s a Telegram account that consists of nothing other than pictures and videos of dead Russian soldiers. The images out of Bakhmut and Pavlivka, were Russian forces keep sending wave after wave of infantry, were so bad I finally left that Telegram group. I’ve seen enough mass carnage to last a lifetime. But I also fear that people think Mark Sumner and I are exaggerating when we talk about those mass Russian casualties. So here is a tweet showing some of those images, not the worst by a long shot, but a hint of what Russia is doing to its own people. I promise you, there’s no exaggeration.
The latest trend is for Russians to dig random holes in the middle of fields and huddle together for safety or warmth or to more easily share their vodka as Ukrainian drones drop grenades on top of them. Here’s an example, and again, click at your own discretion. It’s f’n brutal. Their lethargy might be alcohol, sure, but could very well be hypothermia. [Surreal!]
On the diplomatic front, the Collective Security Treaty Organization—Russia’s answer to NATO—had a meeting.
Listen to the Mr. Potato’s lecture. “It’s more up to you,” Lukashenko tries to convince the other CSTO members not to run away from the organization. Pashinyan from Armenia coughs nervously. Tokaev of Kazakhstan smiles ironically.
Russia’s days are over. Luka and Putin know it. [video at the link]
As you might recall, Armenia begged for CSTO assistance when it was recently invaded by Azerbaijan and got only crickets in response. With the West cozying up to Armenia (Nancy Pelosi visited recently), its days in the CSTO are likely limited.
Meanwhile, Kazakhstan is pretty much done with Russia, and China has wrapped an embracing arm around the country, literally threatening Putin to stay out of China’s internal affairs. With Turkey increasing its own aggression in the region, it seems every regional player is interested in increasing its influence in the Middle East and Central Asia at Russia’s expense. Nature, after all, abhors a vacuum. […]
By all indications, Russia has wiped the air over Ukraine clean of TB-2 Bayraktar drones. In fact, they may have been wiped out much earlier in the war than previously indicated, as Russia didn’t really engage its air defense systems until weeks after the invasion began. And despite all its failures, the one thing that seems to be working for Russia is its air defenses. That is also the reason, incidentally, that Russia’s Air Force is inoperable in this war—Ukraine also has Russian-built air defenses. There’s a reason Russia has shifted to killer drones instead of committing its modern warcraft to the battlefield.
Remember, NATO’s war-fighting doctrine depends heavily on air power. So it’s only natural that Russia would expend considerable resources in countering that threat. This means, ultimately, that Ukraine’s allies are better off bolstering Ukraine’s ground forces and anti-drone capabilities than they are investing in expensive (financially and logistically) aircraft with limited ability to impact the outcome of the war.
In other news, Republican doofus admits crime while bloviating on the Tucker Carlson show on Fox:
[…] On Tuesday, Tucker Carlson took a few moments away from hatemongering against the LGBTQ community to bring the CME Group’s CEO, Terry Duffy, on to his show to talk about Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX collapse.
CME Group is also an exchange group like FTX. Unlike FTX, the CME Group has far less crypto exposure in its assets. According to Forbes, the CME Group pulls in more than $2.6 billion in profits every year and holds something in the vicinity of $197 billion worth of assets, and is headquartered in Chicago. Duffy has a solid history of making big statements about how the market is not corrupt while at the same time admitting the market might be corrupt.
Terry Duffy has been openly and justifiably critical of Bankman-Fried and was brought on Tucker’s show to basically attack chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Gary Gensler. For Tucker and Fox News, attacking Gensler is the same as attacking Biden. Duffy’s job is to point to the abject incompetence being shown in a regulatory commission that has been relatively impotent for the last couple of decades, by basically saying that anyone with half an education in finance knew FTX was a hot mess of potential securities fraud. Duffy did his job, and then maybe let the cat out of the bag.
It didn’t go as planned.
When asked by the ever-incredulous Carlson, “where was Gary Gensler”—former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC) and current chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—in all of this market manipulation, Duffy tries to go into a riff about how SEC regulators seem to have tried to use a regulatory statute as an excuse for allowing bad behavior. The point here is two-fold: Duffy shows he’s an expert by quoting statute and making things sound complicated, while also saying that intelligent people like Duffy and others knew this was all hogwash, and so did the supposed regulators.
Unfortunately for Duffy, he makes quite a slip-up to begin, relaying his point as a story of meeting with “his” regulator. “I don’t know where Gary Gensler was, but my regulator at the CFTC, I bribe. I asked them, why in the world are you invoking the Commodity Exchange Act?”
Excuse me, you what?
Now, this could simply be a few things. It could be an admission that CME Group bribes the person who is tasked with making sure they follow legal regulations. If that were so, the cavalier way in which he says it implies that it is a cavalier practice. Of course, Duffy may have simply misspoken for a few reasons that don’t confer guilt on CME Group for participating in corruption. The CEO might believe that bribery was going on, and instead of saying that, slipped the word into the wrong space in his story.
Maybe he just feels like regulators are being bribed and mistakenly stuck it into his section of the story because he meant to imply it about Sam Bankman-Fried later on in the story?
Hard to say. It is pretty funny, regardless. [video at the link
[…] It’s bad. I’ve seen infants having to be flown across state for PICU beds. Pediatric patients put into adult beds. And the number of adult cases of influenza has been increasing exponentially as well.
I can’t speak for every state, but in Virginia, the Governor and our House of Delegates never bothered to help emergency services recover from taking the brunt of the COVID pandemic- in fact, they did the exact opposite, making sure that any and all disease mitigation efforts were made illegal. […]
Look. Asking emergency services to bear the brunt of the entire healthcare system- the everyday work we do in holding our community safety nets intact, being the primary way people connect to the healthcare services they need- with a surge of respiratory illnesses, the consequences of unchecked gun violence- another mass shooting happened in Virginia overnight, and our Governor insists on acting like the victims passed away mysteriously from an unknown cause that nobody could ever have prevented- and, alongside that, we’re asked to handle every other failure of our government to act to protect our people…
It’s just not sustainable.
It’s not.
But I’m not going to ask anyone here to not see their loved ones this Thanksgiving. People were asked to do that in order to give the federal government time to come up with the support and resources that we needed to protect our country’s citizens, and discovered they had a President and administration that was objectively pro-COVID. [During Trump’s administration]
Instead, please, I encourage you and your loved ones to:
Get a flu/COVID shot at the first opportunity
Make sure your family gathering has as good of ventilation as you can manage
PLEASE don’t go to a family event if you’re sick
Use exemplary hand hygiene
Stay out of the emergency department if you can help it, but if you can’t, please be patient with us while we try to make things work.
Thank you, thank all of you, for all the sacrifices you’ve made to keep those of us in emergency services afloat and intact to the greatest extent possible. Without you, we would have been sunk long ago.
This just has to be seen to be believed. The ClubQ shooter’s father was recently interviewed by CBS8 in San Diego and they inadvertently revealed the mindset of your typical MAGA Republican. The guy is literally RELIEVED that his son is a mass murderer and not, in fact, gay.
Watch and weep at what is happening to our country at these people’s hands. These knuckle-draggers are literally dragging us into an Abyss of their own creation. They have painted targets on our back and are OPENLY celebrating the death of five more people who only wanted to live their lives in peace. […]
The Colorado shooter’s dad on finding out his son murdered people: “They started telling me about the incident, a shooting… And then I go on to find out it’s a gay bar. I got scared, ‘Shit, is he gay?’ And he’s not gay, so I said, phew… I am a Mormon. I am a conservative Republican.” [video at the link. WTF]
It’s being called the Pieramoha Plan — the “Victory Plan.” …
The plan for civil resistance in Belarus being touted by opposition leader-in-exile Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya — who is in Canada this week and is set to meet with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — has received very little attention in the West…
The opposition council in exile calls on its members and underground groups to be active, self-organized and ready to act when the right moment arrives.
Tsikhanouskaya insisted they stick to non-violent resistance and don’t anticipate armed resistance to the Belarusian regime…
What needs to happen in Belarus is a “Maidan moment in order to take down Lukashenko,” Schmidt said, referring to the 2014 pro-European uprising that swept a Moscow-friendly government from power in Ukraine…
The disclosure came during an ongoing trial against the Trump Organization.
The accountant, Donald Bender, a partner at Mazars USA, the firm that prepared tax returns for Trump and his company, testified Tuesday that Trump reported losses each year for 10 years from 2009 to 2018…
Trump is not a defendant in the case and the line of questioning had no obvious connection to the tax scheme the Trump Organization is charged with carrying out over a 12-year period when former chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg and other executives were allegedly paid off the books with perks like rent, car leases and private school tuition.
Democrat Mary Peltola has won the race for Alaska’s at-large congressional seat, NBC News projected Wednesday, defeating former governor and GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.
While the election was held earlier this month, the race was not called for weeks because of Alaska’s new ranked-choice voting system where voters rank the candidates in order of preference.
…
The three-way race was a rematch of a special election held earlier this year. Peltola made history in August, becoming the first Native Alaskan seated in Congress after she won the special election to replace longtime GOP Rep. Don Young, who died in March at the age of 88.
Peltola’s victory is a blow to GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy and the Republicans, who were handed a razor-thin majority in this month’s midterm elections. It means that a Democrat will hold the at-large House seat for the next two years, after Young and the GOP had controlled it for nearly five decades.
…
Even before the race had been called, Palin, the late Sen. John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election, announced that she was the first person to sign a new ballot initiative to repeal Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system.
In the Senate contest, incumbent Republican Lisa Murkowski was re-elected Wednesday after ranked-choice runoff rounds, fending off a GOP challenger backed by former President Donald Trump.
After the first round of voting, Peltola led Palin by more than 20 percentage points, with Republican Nick Begich, a scion of one of Alaska’s most well-known political families, in third. But because Peltola failed to win more than 50 percent, the voting went to a second round with Begich eliminated and his votes redistributed to those voters’ second choice.
After the ranked votes were counted, she won by around 10 points.
Re: SC (Salty Current) @ #342…
Occurs to me that McCarthy (or whoever gets to be Speaker of the House) may be better off without Palin even while it reduces the margin of control. The “Freedom Caucus” is going to be bad enough without Palin in the mix.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From their latest summary:
Ukraine expects three nuclear power plants that were switched off because of Russian missile strikes on Wednesday will be operating again by Thursday evening, energy minister German Galushchenko said. “We expect that by evening the nuclear power plants will start working, providing energy to the network, and this will significantly reduce the [energy] deficit,” he said in comments broadcast on national television.
More than two-thirds of the Ukrainian capital was still without power on Thursday morning and a number of residents had no running water, a day after Russian missile strikes caused Kyiv’s biggest outages in nine months of war. The capital was one of the main targets of the latest wave of attacks on energy facilities that cut power in many regions and made emergency blackouts necessary in others to conserve energy and enable repairs as winter sets in.
Representatives from Russia and Ukraine met in the United Arab Emirates last week to discuss the possibility of a prisoner-of-war swap, according to a Reuters report. Any swap would be linked to a resumption of Russian ammonia exports, which go to Asia and Africa, via a Ukrainian pipeline, three sources with knowledge of the meeting told the news agency. [The swap is reported to be planned for today, according to a new update.]
…
Ground battles continue to rage in eastern Ukraine, where Russia is pressing an offensive along a stretch of frontline west of the city of Donetsk, which has been held by its proxies since 2014, Reuters reports. Ukraine’s general staff said Russian forces tried again to make advances on their main targets in the Donetsk region – Bakhmut and Avdiivka. Russian forces shelled both areas and used incendiary devices to set Ukrainian positions ablaze with only limited success, the general staff said.
…
Polish leaders say that an air defence system which Germany offered Poland would be best given to Ukraine to help it protect itself against Russian strikes. Germany said earlier this week that it has offered Warsaw Eurofighter planes and Patriot defence systems to help defend Poland’s airspace after two men were killed when an apparently stray Ukrainian defence projectile fell in Poland near the border with Ukraine, the Associated Press reported.
Hungary will provide €187m ($195m) in financial aid to Ukraine as its contribution to a planned EU support package worth up to €18bn in 2023, according to a government decree. Prime minister Viktor Orbán’s government has said it was willing to pay its share of support for Ukraine but would rather pay it bilaterally than through the EU’s joint borrowing, Reuters reported.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged the United Nations security council to act against Russia over air strikes on civilian infrastructure that have again plunged Ukrainian cities into darkness and cold as winter sets in. Russia unleashed a missile barrage across Ukraine on Wednesday, killing 10 people, forcing shutdowns of nuclear power plants and cutting water and electricity supply in many places.
Neighbouring Moldova said it was suffering massive blackouts caused by the missile barrage and its EU-friendly president, Maia Sandu, accused Russia of leaving her country “in the dark”.
European Union governments failed to reach a deal on Wednesday on the level at which to cap prices for Russian sea-borne oil under the G7 scheme and will resume talks, EU diplomats said. Earlier on Thursday, EU representatives met in Brussels. The move is part of sanctions intended to slash Moscow’s revenue from its oil exports so it has less money to finance the invasion of Ukraine.
The resignation of Russia’s ambassador to Unesco will end the deadlock in a key group he chaired that is charged with preserving cultural sites around the world, a diplomatic source told AFP. The World Heritage Committee, responsible for adding properties to Unesco’s list of world heritage sites, had been unable to function for months after the international backlash against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s military said Russian forces had fired about 70 cruise missiles at targets across the country and also deployed attack drones. The strikes killed 10 people and disconnected three nuclear power stations from the grid, officials said.
“Brazil judge fines Bolsonaro allies millions after ‘bad faith’ election challenge”: “…De Moraes…wrote in his final decision: ‘The complete bad faith of the plaintiff’s bizarre and illicit request … was proven, both by the refusal to add to the initial petition and the total absence of any evidence of irregularities and the existence of a totally fraudulent narrative of the facts’…”
Russia’s lower-house State Duma has passed a bill banning “propaganda of non traditional relationships” + of “gender changes and pedophilia” toward any age group, not just minors as before.
Activists and LGBT Russians say it will silence public LGBT expression once it’s law
@344: The GOP is in some sort of twisted positive feedback loop, continually growing crazier. Some of the people they have now make Palin look almost sane by comparison. You might recall that as of 2008 she was not in the pro-Putin camp.
Reginald Selkirksays
@ Tweet o’ the day:
Perhaps it is time to put a little thought into a post-Tw#tter future
In its latest quarterly threat report, Meta said it had detected and disrupted influence operations originating in the US, and it calls out those it believes are responsible: the American military…
In all, 39 Facebook accounts, 16 Pages, two Groups, and 26 Instagram accounts linked to the US military operation were terminated…
Operators behind the campaign, which involved posing as locals in countries like Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq, managed to attract around 22,000 followers on Facebook and 400 people across the two Groups.
“The majority of this operation’s posts had little to no engagement from authentic communities,” Meta said. ®
It’s directed at aircraft operators conducting multi-crew turbojet operations and at training centers and aims to avoid situations like the Asiana Airlines crash that cost three lives, and many more injured, after an inexperienced pilot stalled the aircraft on landing after ignoring “inconsistencies in the aircraft’s automation logic.”
“Flightpath management is especially important in operating airplanes with highly automated systems,” an FAA spokesperson told The Register in an email. “Even when an airplane is on autopilot, the flight crew should always be aware of the aircraft’s flightpath and be able to intervene if necessary.”
Ukraine’s General Staff published an urgent appeal to Belarusian citizens on Nov. 24, saying that Russian special services are preparing provocations on the territory of Belarus, targeting its critical infrastructure, particularly the nuclear power plant in Astravets in western Belarus, just across the border from Vilnius. According to the Ukrainian military, Russia is trying to involve Belarus in its war with Ukraine “by any means,” but Belarusians’ “safety and future are in their own hands.”
Ukraine’s Armed Forces asked Belarus residents to demand from their leadership compliance with Article 18 of their country’s Constitution, according to which Belarus excludes military aggression from the territory of its state against other countries.
General Staff also urged Belarusians to monitor suspicious actions near critical infrastructure facilities, report this to law enforcement officers, and inform the international community by all available means if there is no reaction from authorities.
“Ukraine does not consider your country, especially your people, as an enemy… We are not going to carry out any aggressive actions on the Belarus territory. This is the official position of Ukraine. Today, a lot depends on each person, we hope for your vigilance and understanding of the situation..,” the video address says….
Just in: the night before Thanksgiving, Twitter fired more software engineers effective immediately because their “code is not satisfactory” following the recent code review.
Dozens of other devs got performance warnings in their inboxes.
How much do Twitter devs have to take?
…
Those fired got 4 weeks severance, by the way. A slap in the face, given that if they chose to not click “yes” to stay just a week ago, they would have gotten 3 months.
They might have believed in Twitter 2.0, but still got a worse deal than those who chose to simply leave….
Some of the people fired are required by the terms of their visas to have such jobs to remain in the US; others were on parental leave. Obviously this behavior is sketchy and reprehensible but some of it also seems potentially illegal.
Reginald Selkirksays
@350: Maybe you need to consider a replacement for “Tweet ‘o the day” in case Tw#tter dies, or in case it becomes morally repugnant to support them.
Donald Trump’s third presidential campaign launched like a fart in an elevator not because Republican elites awoke from their seven-year stupor to reject his racist grievances, conspiracy theories and authoritarian appeals; they turned on him because he bore a stench of defeat so thick that even Trump couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist…
The coin bearing the name of Sponsian and his portrait was found more than 300 years ago in Transylvania, once a far-flung outpost of the Roman empire…
Archaeological studies have established that Dacia was cut off from the rest of the Roman empire in around 260 AD. There was a pandemic, civil war and the empire was fragmenting.
Surrounded by enemies and cut off from Rome, Sponsian likely assumed supreme command during a period of chaos and civil war, protecting the military and civilian population of Dacia until order was restored, and the province evacuated between 271 AD and 275 AD, according to Jesper Ericsson.
Reginald Selkirk @ #357, I don’t know – it’s going to be a lot of work reconfiguring the software, and I’d hate to lose the revenue stream from the TOTD merch right before the holidays…
The leaders of Poland and the Czech Republic have publicly criticised Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban over the war in Ukraine.
Reuters reports:
Unity within the Visegrad Group, set up in 1991 as the region emerged from decades of communist rule, has been sorely tested by the war, with Orban opposing harsher European sanctions on Russia including on energy supplies.
By contrast, Hungary’s three Visegrad neighbours – which also include Slovakia – are among the EU’s toughest critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine.
Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said as he headed for a meeting of Visegrad leaders in Slovakia on Thursday:
This is not the best of times for the (Visegrad) format, and Hungary’s different attitudes are significantly influencing and complicating the situation.
I make no secret of the fact that the views of the Hungarian prime minister, some of which can even be described as provocative, do not help this cooperation to proceed as well as in the past.
This week Orban further annoyed his neighbours by wearing a scarf to a soccer match that depicted some Ukrainian territory as part of Hungary, prompting Kyiv to summon the Hungarian ambassador to lodge a protest.
Fiala said on Wednesday the “Greater Hungary” scarf – which also showed territory now in Austria, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia and Serbia as part of Hungary – would be discussed at Thursday’s summit gathering in the Slovak city of Kosice.
Poland, an ally of Hungary in their past disputes with the EU over the rule of law and human rights, has also turned more critical of Orban because of his stance on Ukraine.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki criticised Hungary’s failure so far to ratify Sweden and Finland’s application to join Nato.
He said:
I will tell (Orban) directly that for Poland this is one of the most important changes in international law, that is the accession of Finland and Sweden.
We can’t allow the Visegrad Group to fall apart. It is a structure which protects the interests of our countries against other interest groups from western Europe.
Foreign ministers from the G7 will discuss how to further support Ukraine in ensuring its energy supply during a meeting in Bucharest next week, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said.
“Russia’s attacks on civilian infrastructure are an intolerable, inhumane crime. Putin may plunge the people of Ukraine into cold and darkness with his missiles. He will never break their will for freedom and our support,” she added.
A meeting of Nato foreign ministers is scheduled to take place in Bucharest on Tuesday and Wednesday, Reuters reported.
A G7 foreign ministers meeting held in Germany earlier this month on Baerbock’s initiative focused on how to support Ukraine through the winter in the face of Russian attacks on its power grid.
Ukrainian cities were plunged into darkness this week after a barrage of Russian missiles triggered one of the worst nationwide power outages of the war yet.
ATLANTA (CN) — The Georgia Supreme Court on Wednesday unanimously rejected a petition filed by Republicans seeking to block Saturday early voting for the state’s closely watched U.S. Senate runoff election.
The justices did not provide any reasoning behind their decision in the single-page order.
The emergency petition was filed Tuesday by the Georgia Republican Party, National Republican Senatorial Committee and Republican National Committee, after a lower court ruled that counties can open polling locations on Saturday, Nov. 26.
US President Joe Biden has confirmed that a price cap on Russian oil being proposed by the United States and its western allies is “in play”, adding that he had spoken to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on the issue.
He made his comments to reporters during a Thanksgiving holiday visit to a fire station on Nantucket Island.
Hungary’s leader confirms support for Sweden and Finland’s Nato membership
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said that Hungary’s parliament will ratify Nato membership for Finland and Sweden early next year.
Orban told a briefing after a meeting of the Visegrad Group in Slovakia that his government had already decided that Hungary would support Finland’s and Sweden’s Nato accession and that the country’s parliament would set this item on its agenda at its first session next year.
Hungary and Turkey are the only members of the alliance who have not yet cleared the accession.
RIO DE JANEIRO — It’s probably the most recognized soccer shirt out there: the canary yellow with bright green trim. Brazil has worn it during all five of its record World Cup titles. But at home, the national colors have been steeped in controversy ever since far-right President Jair Bolsonaro adopted them as the emblem of his brand of nationalist politics.
Bolsonaristas, as the president’s followers are known, wear the jerseys and wrap themselves in the Brazilian flag at marches and rallies supporting his conservative religious, anti-LGBTQ and pro-gun rights messages…
US authorities will block imports of sugar produced in the Dominican Republic by company Central Romana, on suspicion of forced labor at its facilities.
US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will detain the company’s raw sugar and sugar-based products at all US ports of entry effective Wednesday, the agency said in a statement published that day, citing “inhumane practices.”
Central Romana is the largest producer of sugar in the Dominican Republic, acording to its website.
The decision to ban its sugar is “based on information that reasonably indicates the use of forced labor in its operations,” reads the CBP statement.
“CBP identified five of the International Labour Organization’s 11 indicators of forced labor during its investigation: abuse of vulnerability, isolation, withholding of wages, abusive working and living conditions, and excessive overtime,” it said.
…
The company, which started operating in 1912, also works in a number of different industries, including real estate; airport and port operations; and meat and dairy production, according to the company website.
US authorities have been investigating labor issues in the Dominican Republic’s sugar industry for a number of years.
“While the country’s Ministry of Labor and sugar companies have made important progress [doubtful], concerns remain about dangerous working conditions, verification of pay and hours, unsuitable living conditions, workers’ precarious legal status and other potential labor rights abuses,” the US Department of Labor said in a statement published September 13.
The department also added sugarcane from the Dominican Republic to its List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor that month.
…
The Caribbean nation’s sugar industry has traditionally relied on workers from neighboring Haiti. In recent years the Dominican Republic has stepped up efforts to expel undocumented Haitian migrants amid rising xenophobia.
Oggie: Mathomsays
Reginald Selkirk @349:
@344: The GOP is in some sort of twisted positive feedback loop, continually growing crazier. . . .
The GOP faces a real problem. They have turned a blind eye, or supported, conspiracists, election deniers, outright criminals and possible traitors. While the leadership of the GOP (not Trump) know that the conspiracies and claims of election fraud are, and have been, absolute bullshit. But, by embracing them, and, by extension, supporting criminals, they have enabled and encouraged the GOP voters to see them as reality, Which means that, any GOP candidate must, in the primary, please those who see the conspiracies and frauds as reality. So each candidate, to win the primary, must position him or herself even further to the right, further into the conspiracy camp, further into the denialist lies, than the other candidates to win the nomination. This is how the GOP ended up with absolute whackaloon Christian nationalist Qanon believer racist Mastriano in the campaign for governor of Pennsylvania.
I have been watching the GOP do this for decades. Every election cycle, the GOP candidates have to move further and further to the right (and now into Christianist. conspiracist, denialist). The GOP has done this with abortion, guns, Christian nationalism, neo-fascism, tax cuts, deregulation. No matter what idea the GOP embraces, their methods of campaigning (with the reinforcement of Fox News), guarantee it will be taken to its illogical extreme. The GOP has radicalized itself. As you say, a feedback loop.
Even if the leadership of the GOP has decided Trump is no longer viable, how do they convince the voters, especially after supporting, enabling, and spreading Trump’s lies for the past seven years. I wonder what new idea will be added into the GOP radicalization in the next general election: Russia as saviour?
I have no idea how the GOP can escape from this.
ravensays
Tweet
Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en
Nikol Pashinyan refused to sign a declaration following the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) summit.
In fact, it means that the CSTO has collapsed completely.
Putin dropped his pen, Lukashenko is shocked.
Pashinyan is the elected leader of Armenia.
It is an extremely brave thing to do.
Russia is (or was) the only local supporter of Armenia in the region.
Their Muslim neighbor Azerbaijan with 10 million people wants them all dead.
Their Muslim other neighbor, Turkey with 85 million people wants them all dead.
Armenia only has 3 million people.
Given where Armenia is, even the west and NATO couldn’t help them much.
Especially since their nearest NATO country is…Turkey.
I don’t know if it means the CSTO is finished but it never was much anyway.
The countries of the CSTO such as Kazakhstan know that if Ukraine falls, they are next.
The largest is Kazakhstan with 20 million people and not much of an army.
Kazakhstan is large, thinly populated, and rich in oil, gas, and the largest uranium producer in the world.
The Russians would just roll over them.
ravensays
. I wonder what new idea will be added into the GOP radicalization in the next general election: Russia as saviour?
LOL.
Good Question.
2022 is the year of, “GOP hates Trans people especially if they are children.”
Pompeo has already made his main issue to kill the public schools as nests of woke, gay, Trans, normal people.
Which is stupid because by law, schools and the school’s curriculums are locally controlled and not controlled by the Federal govenrment.
Then again, it might fly because nothing the GOP concerns itself with has much presence in reality.
I have no idea how the GOP can escape from this.
By overthrowing the Federal government.
Or by cheating on all the elections.
To celebrate the 163rd anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species today, we have published the full edition of Charles Darwin’s correspondence online! Explore more than 15000 letters, from Darwin’s first letter in 1822 to his death in 1882.
For nearly fifty years successive teams of researchers on both sides of the Atlantic have been working to track down all surviving letters written by or to Charles Darwin, research their content, and publish the complete texts. The thirtieth and final print volume, covering the last four months of Darwin’s life, will be published in early 2023 and all the letter texts – more than 15000 between 1822 and 1882 – are now published online.
Like a 15000 piece jigsaw puzzle, the letters build up a more detailed picture than we have ever had before of the course of Darwin’s life and development of his thought. Like any jigsaw, adding a new piece can alter what we see: the final volume and this online release also contains 400 letters which have come to light, or been reinterpreted in just the last 6 years. Those 400 letters flesh out the whole of Darwin’s life from his time on board HMS Beagle, through the research and writing – and re-writing – of On the Origin of Species, to the years immediately before his death. And the process of discovery has not stopped – this website will already contain letters that arrived too late for the last print volume.
…
Here is a selection of letters from the final volume:
‘My course is nearly run.’
Letter to Lawson Tait, 13 February 1882
In early 1882, Darwin, who turned 73 in February, was still working on botanical experiments, but his health was failing. He died at home in Down on 19 April. Despite ill health, a range of subjects occupied his mind in his final months: the effects of carbonate of ammonia on chlorophyll and on roots; new varieties of sugar cane; and cross-fertilisation in Solanum rostratum.
‘I cannot name a single youngish worker who is not as deeply convinced of the truth of Evolution as I am.’
Letter to John Murray, 21 January 1882
Darwin was by now confident that belief in evolution was established in science, even though he modestly doubted that the mechanism of natural selection was so widely supported. The above quotation comes from his response to a review of his latest book, The formation of vegetable mould through the actions of worms, which was still selling well and generating a large number of reviews—and a mass of personal correspondence.
‘I have felt better today than for 3 weeks & have had as yet no pain.’
Letter to T. H. Huxley, 27 March 1882
Darwin wrote this to Thomas Henry Huxley at the end of March. Huxley had evidently heard of Darwin’s ill health from Darwin’s son Francis and was seriously alarmed. In his letters Darwin gave little sign of his suffering, which can, however, be traced in the correspondence of other members of the family and in diary entries.
‘I cannot realize what life will be without him but I do feel through it all that with my children it is worth having.’
Letter from Emma Darwin to J. D. Hooker, [20 April 1882]
Emma Darwin wrote the news of Darwin’s death to Joseph Dalton Hooker, Darwin’s greatest friend outside the family, on 20 April: this letter concludes the correspondence for 1882. The family had expected Darwin to be buried in Down, but within days, his scientific colleagues had taken steps to have him buried in Westminster Abbey.
During the Battle of Britain, Prime Minister Winston Churchill paid tribute to the Royal Air Force pilots who, though heavily outnumbered, managed to thwart Adolf Hitler’s invasion plans. In an Aug. 20, 1940, speech to the House of Commons, Churchill delivered one of his most famous quotes: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
More than 80 years later, Churchill’s words seem quite fitting to describe the role played by Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces (SOF) in helping turn the tide of the war, starting with the Battle of Kyiv and continuing through the Kharkiv and Kherson offensives.
The motto of Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces is “I Come At You!”—a quote attributed to Sviatoslav the Brave, a grand prince of Kyiv in the 10th century. Known for his courage, Sviatoslav managed to defeat powerful armies. […]
On July 29—which is Special Operations Forces Day—Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said:
“Your exploits are not openly spoken about, and your faces always remain hidden, but we are all confident in the high level of your training, hardening, invincibility of spirit, courage and determination.
“On this day I also would like to mention SOF soldiers who died in the battles for independence and the sovereignty of our state. Eternal memory to them! We all thank the soldiers in gray berets for the worthy fulfillment of their mission to protect the territorial integrity, independence and sovereignty of Ukraine!”
THE BATTLE OF KYIV
Russian President Vladimir Putin envisioned a shock and awe campaign that would capture Kyiv within 72 hours and topple the Ukrainian government. In the initial hours of the invasion, Russia’s elite VDV paratroopers, using about 30 helicopters, conducted an air assault on the Antonov airport near the Ukrainian town of Hostomel, about 20 miles from Kyiv.
The Russians were so confident they wouldn’t meet any resistance that the airborne attack took place without supporting ground forces or barrages of long-range missile fire to weaken the Ukrainian defenses.
Ukrainian defenders opened fire with machine guns as well as anti-tank missiles and rocket-propelled grenades, downing at least three helicopters. But several hundred Russian paratroopers took control of the airport.
Ukrainian artillery, drones, and bombers struck the runway to prevent further landings. And then Ukrainian Special Operations Forces, supported by a mechanized brigade, attacked the airport, preventing Russian cargo planes from bringing in heavy equipment and reinforcements, frustrating them and making a quick capture of Kyiv difficult. [video at the link]
As fighting raged in Kyiv suburbs, special forces units attached to Ukraine’s military intelligence service sneaked behind Russian lines to blow up parts of a dam on the Irpin River to release a torrent of water that flooded the Russian forces and created a muddy quagmire impenetrable for tanks, blocking an attack on Kyiv from the west.
Ukraine’s SOF then played a key role in halting the 40-mile convoy of armored vehicles and supply trucks that Russia sent from Belarus to support the attack on Kyiv, disrupting Russia’s supply lines. A lot of damage was done in a series of night ambushes carried out by a team of 30 Ukrainian SOF soldiers and drone operators on quad bikes, The Guardian reported.
The commander of the Aerorozvidka drone reconnaissance unit, Lt. Col. Yaroslav Honchar, told The Guardian that the Ukrainian fighters on quad bikes were able to approach the advancing Russian column at night by riding through the dense forest on either side of the road leading south toward Kyiv from the direction of Chernobyl.
The Ukrainian soldiers were equipped with night vision goggles, sniper rifles, Javelin anti-tank missiles, remotely detonated mines, drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras, and others capable of dropping small 1.5 kg bombs.
The Guardian wrote:
“This one little unit in the night destroyed two or three vehicles at the head of this convoy, and after that it was stuck. They stayed there two more nights, and [destroyed] many vehicles,” Honchar said.
The Russians broke the column into smaller units to try to make headway towards the Ukrainian capital, but the same assault team was able to mount an attack on its supply depot, he claimed, crippling the Russians’ capacity to advance.
“The first echelon of the Russian force was stuck without heat, without oil, without bombs and without gas. And it all happened because of the work of 30 people,” Honchar said. [video at the link]
After suffering heavy casualties and huge equipment losses, Russia decided to cut its losses and announced in late March that its forces would abandon the attack on Kyiv and refocus on the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. In a David vs. Goliath struggle, Ukraine had managed to win the Battle of Kyiv.
HOW U.S. SPECIAL FORCES TRAINED THE UKRAINIAN SOF TO RESIST THE RUSSIAN INVADERS
When Ukraine declared its independence in 1991, its special forces consisted of the remnants of Soviet Spetsnaz units based in the country. Then in 2011, the pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych dismantled the Special Operations Forces. (Never forget that Paul Manafort was paid millions of dollars to serve as Yanukovych’s political consultant.)
After Yanukovych was ousted in the February 2014 Maidan Revolution, Russia annexed Crimea and supported separatists in the Donbas region. At the time, Ukraine’s Chief of the General Staff, Viktor Muzhenko, described Ukraine’s forces as “an army literally in ruins.”
In September 2014, the new Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko decided to accelerate the process of forming again the Special Operations Forces. At the end of 2015, the Ministry of Defense made the Special Operations Command (known by its Ukrainian initials as the SSO) a new and separate branch of the Ukrainian armed forces.
By this time, the U.S. had established the Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine operating out of a former Soviet base in Yavoriv in western Ukraine. The main focus of the training was to transform Ukraine’s regular army from the rigid hierarchical Soviet model to a modern NATO-style fighting force with a bigger decision-making role for NCOs and junior officers.
But at the same time, U.S. Green Berets and special forces troops from other NATO countries began training their Ukrainian counterparts in carrying out unconventional warfare and guerrilla tactics.
Some elite Ukrainian commandos received special training in the U.S. from the CIA in intelligence gathering and insurgency tactics. Yahoo News wrote:
One person familiar with the program put it more bluntly. “The United States is training an insurgency,” said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians.”
By 2017, Ukrainian commandos had started taking part regularly in joint exercises with special forces from the U.S. and other NATO members in Lithuania, Germany, and the Black Sea region.
And by 2021, two Ukrainian SOF units had been declared eligible for being deployed as part of the NATO Response Force, becoming the first non-NATO special operations units to receive such certification.
By the time the Russians launched their full-scale invasion, Ukraine had built up a Special Operations Force of about 4,000 troops, with land, sea, and airborne units. Gen. Richard Clarke, who recently retired as head of U.S. Special Operations Command, told The Washington Post:
“When the Russians invaded in February, we’d been working with Ukrainian SOF for seven years. With our assistance, they built the capacity, so they grew and they grew in numbers, but more importantly, they built capability,” in both combat assaults and information operations.
To prepare to repel the Russian invasion, each Ukrainian SOF brigade last year created and trained a ‘resistance company’ recruited from the local population in areas such as Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and the Donbas that were likely to be Russian targets. As a result, Clarke said, “If you’re a Russian soldier today, your head must be on a swivel because you don’t know where the threat is. They can’t look at any Ukrainian and know if that person is an enemy.”
“We come at you” was a video released by Ukraine’s SOF before the Russian invasion: [video at the link]
HOW UKRAINE’S SPECIAL FORCES CARRIED OUT THEIR MISSION
Due to operational security, the full story of what missions have been carried out by Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces is not known. For example, we don’t know their possible role in attacking Russian airfields deep in Crimea or blowing up the Kerch bridge connecting the peninsula with Russia.
The tasks assigned to Ukraine’s SOF include taking part in raids behind enemy lines, collecting intelligence and building intelligence networks, undertaking hostage or prisoner rescue missions, helping partisans stage attacks, and carrying out psychological operations. Many of the combat videos and intercepts of Russian soldiers’ phone calls posted on social media have been the work of the SOF’s psy-ops units.
Rescue of Melitopol mayor: After capturing the southern city of Melitopol, Russian forces abducted Mayor Ivan Fedorov after he refused to collaborate with the occupiers. A few days later, Ukrainian special forces rescued Fedorov in a mission whose details have not been revealed. Zelenskyy spoke with Federov after his rescue, declaring “We don’t abandon our people.” [Tweet and video at the link]
Battle of Severodonetsk: After losing the Battle of Kyiv, Russia shifted its focus to the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine in an effort to complete its occupation of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Ukraine needed to hold off the Russians to buy time to train its newly mobilized troops and begin to deploy the more advanced weapons systems it had started receiving from the U.S. and its allies.
Russian forces began the offensive against Severodonetsk in early March, but did not take control of the city until June 25. The Institute for the Study of War said the battle had tied down Russian troops which could have been used elsewhere in the war, saying that Russia had “concentrated the vast majority of its available combat power to capture Severodonetsk and Lysychansk at the expense of other axes of advance and is suffering heavy casualties to do so.”
Ukrainian special forces, skilled at urban combat, ventured out at night to attack Russian units in house-to-house fighting. [video at the link]
Battle of Mariupol: Russian forces surrounded the southern city of Mariupol and drove the Ukrainian defenders into the sprawling Azovstal steelworks. In late March, the defenders were running low on ammunition and medicine.
On March 21, two MI-8 helicopters carrying Ukrainian Special Forces fighters flew barely 20 feet above the ground into the Azovstal compound, bringing crates of Stinger and Javelin missiles and medications. The helicopters evacuated wounded soldiers on the return leg.
Six more helicopter resupply missions were carried out before it became too dangerous to continue. One flight brought in dozens of reinforcements for the besieged garrison. The Azovstal defenders were able to hold out until mid-May when they were ordered to leave the plant. But the defense tied down thousands of Russian troops who could have been deployed elsewhere on the southern and eastern fronts. [video at the link]
Carrying out reconnaissance missions: Special Forces scouts use drones and missions behind Russian lines to seek targets. They would then coordinate with Ukrainian artillery to destroy the target.
In this video provided by the Command of the Special Operations Forces, scouts in the Donetsk region found a Russian column that included six Uragan MLRS, transport and loading vehicles, fuel trucks, fire control vehicles, armored vehicles, and anti-infantry vehicles. The scouts then successfully helped adjust the Ukrainian artillery fire to destroy the Russian convoy. [video at the link]
Liberation of Snake Island: On the first day of the invasion, Russian troops captured Snake Island in the Black Sea. The last communication heard from the Ukrainian defenders was: “Russian warship, go f-ck yourself.”
On July 7, Special Forces combat divers approached the island in underwater vehicles and then surveyed the coastal area for the presence of mines. They then called in engineers who removed any mines and other traps left behind by Russian troops when they left the island a week earlier following Ukrainian attacks.
The commandos then raised their unit’s flag and Ukrainian flags on the island.
Supporting partisan activities in occupied territories: SOF soldiers have helped form partisan groups in Russian-held territories which have carried out acts of sabotage, assassinated Ukrainian collaborators and Russian officials, and provided intelligence on Russian troop positions, equipment, bases, and depots for targeting.
The Kyiv Independent published a detailed report on how Ukrainian special forces worked with local partisans in the town of Kadiivka in the Luhansk region in early June. The local residents informed their Special Forces contact that Wagner Group mercenaries had set up a base at the local stadium.
After verifying the information, the Special Forces called on the Ukrainian military to hit the base with artillery, killing up to 200 mercenaries and destroying their weapons depot.
Videos from the site were published by Russian propagandists after Ukraine hit it. There was disagreement among Ukrainians about what weapons were fired, although the Special Forces contact believed recently acquired U.S.-made HIMARS were used. [image at the link]
Going on offense in Kharkiv and Kherson: When Ukrainian forces launched offensives in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions, Special Operation Forces wreaked havoc behind enemy lines just as they did during the Battle of Kyiv, only then Ukrainian forces were engaged in a defensive battle.
This video shows a small unit of Special Operations Forces operating behind enemy lines ambushing a Russian patrol near the city of Kreminna in the Luhansk region. The footage was shot from a helmet camera. [video at the link]
On Nov. 11, the headquarters of the Special Operations Forces of Ukraine announced that its troops had been the first to enter the southern port city of Kherson, where they were greeted by hundreds of residents holding Ukrainian flags in the city center.
“A moving meeting filled with joy: members of the Special Operations Forces of Ukraine are in the liberated city of Kherson. The emotions of Ukrainians who have been stoically waiting for the liberation of the city and are welcoming their defenders today are just incredible.” [two videos at the link of the welcoming crowds]
An international police operation has dismantled an online spoofing service that allowed cybercriminals to impersonate trusted corporations to steal more than $120 million from victims.
iSpoof, which now displays a message stating that it has been seized by the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service, offered “spoofing” services that enabled paying users to mask their phone numbers with one belonging to a trusted organization, such as banks and tax offices, to carry out social engineering attacks…
London’s Metropolitan Police, which began investigating iSpoof in June 2021 along with international law enforcement agencies, in the U.S., the Netherlands, and Ukraine, said it had arrested the website’s suspected administrator, named as Teejai Fletcher, 34, charged with fraud and offenses related to organized crime. Fletcher was remanded to custody and will appear at Southwark Crown Court in London on December 6…
The site’s infrastructure, which was hosted in the Netherlands but moved to Kyiv earlier in 2022, was seized and taken offline in a joint Ukrainian-U.S. operation earlier this month…
Helen Rance of the Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit said: “Instead of just taking down the website and arresting the administrator, we have gone after the users of iSpoof. Our message to criminals who have used this website is: we have your details and are working hard to locate you, regardless of where you are.”
ravensays
More on the CSTO summit and Armenia.
Armenia keeps getting beat up by Azerbaijan and wants someone to do something.
It isn’t obvious that anyone can actually do anything though.
Russia is a long ways away and occupied at the moment with terrorizing Ukrainian civilians.
November 24, 2022
By RFE/RL’s Armenian Service
RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service Armenian PM Attacks Russian-Led Alliance At Summit In Yerevan
YEREVAN — Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has criticized the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) for its refusal to support Armenia when it faced “Azerbaijan’s aggression.”
Speaking at a CSTO summit in Yerevan on November 23, Pashinian said it was “depressing that Armenia’s membership in the CSTO has failed to contain Azerbaijani aggression.” He said this had been “hugely damaging to the CSTO’s image both in our country and abroad.”
Armenia asked for military help in September after deadly clashes broke out between the two Caucasus neighbors, but the CSTO responded only by sending its secretary-general to the conflict zone and offering to set up a working group to analyse the situation.
Six countries — Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Russia — comprise the CSTO, which was established in October 2002.
Pashinian said his country had supported CSTO member Kazakhstan immediately in early January when Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev asked CSTO troops to enter his country following unprecedented antigovernment protests.
WATCH: Hundreds of Armenians unhappy about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to their country gathered at two separate rallies in Yerevan on November 23.
“Armenia is ending its chairmanship of the CSTO. Although it is an anniversary year [for the CSTO], for Armenia it was not an anniversary year at all. In the last two years, a CSTO member-state has been attacked by Azerbaijan at least three times, and actually, till now, we have not received any reaction from the CSTO regarding Azerbaijan’s aggression, which is a big blow to the CSTO’s image,” Pashinian said.
Armenia says dozens of square kilometers of its sovereign territory were seized by Azerbaijan during the military conflict between the two countries in May 2021, in November 2021, and in September this year.
Pashinian met later on November 23 with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the Yerevan summit to discuss bilateral relations and regional issues.
At the start of the meeting Pashinian reportedly noted that the CSTO did not manage to reach a consensus on all issues on the agenda of the summit.
Pahinian said during the summit that he was not ready to sign draft documents regarding “joint measures on providing assistance to Armenia” that he said did not address Yerevan’s concerns regarding the CSTO’s political position on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
“Under these conditions, the lack of a clear political assessment of the situation and the failure to make the above decision may not only mean the CSTO’s refusal from allied obligations but may also be interpreted by Azerbaijan as a green light from the CSTO for further aggression against Armenia,” Pashinian said at the summit.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the CSTO was a “necessary” organization whose services were “very much in demand” to resolve regional conflicts.
“It is very important that Armenia and Azerbaijan agree on a peace treaty,” said Peskov, who accompanied Putin to Yerevan. “This is our main task. And we all have to do our utmost to…make it happen,” he told reporters after the summit.
During his meeting with Putin, Pashinian raised the issue of honoring agreements that Armenia and Azerbaijan have reached through the Russian president’s mediation.
“These are very important issues, which, of course, we need to discuss, just as we need to discuss the agenda, which, we hope, will lead to a lasting peace in our region,” Pashinian said.
Putin, as quoted by the Kremlin, highlighted the allied nature of Russian-Armenian relations that he said have “deep roots.”
In his remarks at the summit the Russian leader said that a meeting between the leaders of Russia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan in Sochi, Russia, on October 31 and their joint statement afterward created “a good basis for future compromises” between Yerevan and Baku.
Putin said that only through consistent implementation of agreements on border delimitation, unblocking of transport links, and solutions to humanitarian problems will it be possible to achieve normalization of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
“We hope that this will eventually pave the way for a peace treaty between Yerevan and Baku,” Putin said.
Prior to the summit hundreds of activists representing civil society and democratic institution rallied on November 23 in downtown Yerevan, demanding Armenia leave the CSTO. Among the demonstrators were Ukrainian citizens who protested Russia’s ongoing unprovoked invasion of Ukraine launched in late February.
The leaders of the CSTO’s member states — Putin, Pashinian, and Toqaev along with Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus, Sadyr Japarov of Kyrgyzstan, and Emomali Rahmon of Tajikistan — met in the Armenian capital as Russia continued shelling Ukrainian towns and cities with missiles targeting energy infrastructure.
It was announced at the summit that Kazakh politician Imanghali Tasmaghambetov will replace Belarusian politician Stanislau Zas at the post of secretary-general of the CSTO.
The 65-year-old Tasmaghambetov, who has been known as one of the most loyal people to Kazakhstan’s former President Nursultan Nazarbaev, used to serve as Kazakhstan’s prime minister, deputy prime minister, mayor of the Kazakh capital, Astana, and the country’s largest city, Almaty.
His last official position was ambassador to Russia, the position he held before he announced his retirement in 2019.
With reporting by and RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service and AFP
Over 15,000 people missing during Ukraine war – ICMP
More than 15,000 people have gone missing during the war in Ukraine, an official at the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has said.
Reuters reports:
The Hague-based organisation, created in the wake of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, opened an office in Kyiv in July to help Ukraine to document and track down missing people.
The ICMP’s programme director for Europe, Matthew Holliday, said it was unclear how many people had been forcibly transferred, were being held in detention in Russia, were alive and separated from their family members, or had died and had been buried in makeshift graves.
The process of investigating the missing in Ukraine will last years even after fighting stops, Holliday told Reuters in an interview. The 15,000 figure is conservative when considering that in the port city of Mariupol alone authorities estimate as many as 25,000 people are either dead or missing.
He said:
The numbers are huge and the challenges that Ukraine faces are vast. Besides which they’re fighting an ongoing war as well against the Russian Federation.
What is key now is setting in place all the correct measures to ensure that as many persons can be identified.
The vast majority of missing persons, those deceased, are victims of war crimes, and the perpetrators need to be held responsible.
By storing DNA samples on a database and seeking matches with relatives, the ICMP accounted for more than 27,000 out of 40,000 persons reported missing during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.
In Kyiv, the ICMP has started to collect DNA samples and is ramping up capacity for a multi-year process that will also help prosecutors build war crimes cases.
Sick fucks stalk the earth. Earlier today I saw the father of the 22-year-old Club Q murderer being interviewed, and I don’t know what the hell he was on or if that was just Wednesday, but he mumbled on about being Mormon where “We don’t do gay” (you can put that down as incorrect), so because he raised a son not to do gay he didn’t know what his kid was doing at an LGBTQ bar. Then the reporter says his son went to the bar and murdered 5 people and injured another 18, to which the father goes “Whew!” Like my son mighta killed and hurt a lot of people but at least he’s not gay. Sick fuck.
Then I was visiting the website for Atrevida Beer, much in the news lately because of Richard Fierro’s heroism and TV interviews, and it’s a cool business and family if you haven’t checked—good people doing good things. With Army veteran Fierro doing about the best thing anyone can do last Saturday. So I leave that website and stumble right into the story at Vice about Mr. Fierro. More sick fucks.
The far-right … is calling Fierro a “groomer” and a “f*ggot,” while questioning his sexuality for being at the Club Q drag show. Others even questioned the veracity of his entire story, according to an investigation conducted by VICE News and researchers at Advance Democracy Inc, a nonprofit that tracks online extremism.
Some shithead crawled out from under slug feces or something long enough to write:
“Heroes don’t take their kids to drag shows,” one of [Jack] Posobiec’s followers wrote on Telegram in response.
Others joined in: “So a married man, His Wife, Daughter and her boyfriend all go to Gay bar together? I’m gonna call bullshit on this,” a user on far-right Christian platform Gab wrote on Tuesday.
Newsflash knucklehead: Straight couples and families do go to gay bars. I bet your Christ would too. And I’m just guessing that first comment about heroes wasn’t made by someone who retired an Army Major after three tours in Iraq and another in Afghanistan, only to return home with a chest full of medals to serve his community for years, not just last week.
Sick fuck du jour Jenna Ellis said the people murdered at Club Q deserved their eternal damnation because “there is no evidence at all that they were Christians.” Neither is there evidence she is. Tucker Carlson was back at it a day after the tragedy, giving a platform to an anti-trans guest who said LGBTQ attacks will continue “until the ‘evil agenda’ of gender-affirming care is stopped.” And here’s another newsflash we knew wasn’t long in coming: QAnon nutters are running with the false flag bullshit again, saying the attack and response by Mr. Fierro and others looked like a “staged event.” Alex Jones will probably steer clear of that one.
But if Jones isn’t spewing his venom (I know, insulting to snakes), there’s no shortage of it. Vice locates the source of the ugly anti-thoughts and prayers clearly where it belongs:
Figures like Posobiec, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and anti-trans troll Matt Walsh have been doubling down on attacks against the LGBTQ community for years, increasing these attacks in regularity and toxicity in recent months, with accusations that members of the LGBTQ community are sexualizing or “grooming” children. Trans activists have warned that violent responses would be imminent, to little avail.
Fuck you and your grooming, here’s your groomer. If Boebert hasn’t noticed, it’s working [grooming potential murderers to shoot people with AR-15 rifles]. I sometimes wonder, because that pea soup slogging around behind her eyes fears a Toni Morrison book or a drag show more than an unregulated AR-15. [photos at the link show Boebert and her children, even the youngest holding long guns. Ditto for Rep. Thomas Massie.]
In the 1990s, the Food Pyramid was one of the most recognizable symbols in nutrition education. But where did it come from? Why was it created by the agriculture department? And why did it tell us to eat a whole loaf of bread every day?
Oggie: Mathomsays
I have no idea how the GOP can escape from this.
By overthrowing the Federal government.
Or by cheating on all the elections.
Either way, they still have a majority of GOP voters who think that even fascism isn’t enough. Basically, at this point, it is either the destruction of the GOP, or the destruction of the US Constitution.
whheydtsays
Re: Oggie: Mathom @ #368…
How can the GOP end the positive feedback spiral of self-destruction? By one wing or the other splitting to create a separate/new party. The sane wing could then be shut of the insane wing. Granted, it would mean a generation or two of both wings losing elections, but it would mean that there were two, at least nominally, sane parties the choose between.
Another possibility is for the sane Republicans to become Democrats. Since the dominant portion of the Democratic party is actually center-right (as opposed to the completely nuts radical-right of the those now controlling the Republican party), they’d fit a lot better than one might suppose. A point in case would be Lisa Murkowski, who actually campaigned with Mary Peltoloa, even though they are from different parties.
Grey wolves exposed to Toxoplasma gondii — the parasite that causes the disease toxoplasmosis — are more than 46 times more likely to become a pack leader than uninfected wolves, according to a study published Thursday in Communications Biology.
Reginald Selkirksays
@379: Another possibility is for the sane Republicans to become Democrats.”
The fact that they don’t calls their sanity and empathy into question.
This is the problem that ranked choice voting is meant to combat. It takes power away from political parties.
whheydtsays
During nine months of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has spent $82 billion on war, which is a quarter of its annual budget, according to Forbes.
They calculated that Russia used 10,000 to 50,000 shells per day in the war, and the average price of a Soviet-caliber shell is about $1,000. It brings Russia’s spending to more than $5.5 billion on artillery supplies alone. Russia has also fired over 4,000 missiles into Ukraine. The average cost of one Russian missile is $3 million.
Russia has also lost 278 combat aircraft, with an average cost of $18 million, and 261 helicopters, with an average cost of $10.4 million. The total losses of Russian aviation amount to $8 billion.
Orban told a briefing after a meeting of the Visegrad Group in Slovakia that his government had already decided that Hungary would support Finland’s and Sweden’s Nato accession and that the country’s parliament would set this item on its agenda at its first session next year. – Guardian, quoted by SC@365
My guess is that now Sweden has a right-wing government dependent on (supposedly “ex”) neo-Nazi support, and having fallen out with the Polish far right over Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Orbán wants an extra line of defence against EU pro-democracy rulings that threaten the large amounts of money Hungary receives from the EU.
Scientists say they have made a breakthrough designing a vaccine against all 20 known types of flu.
It uses the same messenger-ribonucleic-acid (mRNA) technology as successful Covid vaccines.
Flu mutates and the current annual jab is updated to ensure the best match for the sort circulating but would probably not protect against new pandemic types.
The new vaccine triggered high levels of antibodies, in tests on ferrets and mice, that could fight a broad range.
The antigens it contains – safe copies of recognisable bits of all 20 known subtypes of influenza A and B viruses – can teach the immune system how to fight them and, hopefully, any new strain that could spark a pandemic, the researchers say, in the journal Science…
StevoRsays
Aussie ABC news on the darkness over Ukraine vs their heroic surgeons :
[…] Today is also the nine-month anniversary of Russia’s illegal invasion. Mostly going to do some bullet-point updates today. I’m cranking this out as quickly as I can, and am skipping self-editing. Everyone else is out today. So please forgive the raw prose and whatever grammar, spelling, and clarity mistakes might exist.
[Tweet and video, “Nobody wants to stand next to stinky [Putin]”] These are Vladimir Putin’s “allies” in the Collective Security Treaty Organization, Russia’s laughable response to NATO. Armenia is on its way out, pissed that none of the other countries in the organization (including Russia) came to its aid as neighboring Azerbaijan invaded and occupied large swaths of its territory a couple of months ago.
Two other member states—Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan—have been border-skirmishing the last two months. And Kazakhstan has cozied up to Beijing, with China warning Russia to stop trying and meddle in Kazakh affairs.
That latter development has, predictably, pissed off Russian nationalists.
Dmitry Drobnitsky, so-called expert in politics, stated on Russian federal TV that the next country where Russia would discover the “Nazis” could be Kazakhstan. This was in Solovyov’s recent show. [video at the link]
Oh boy did the Kazakh government not take this well, leading Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov to suggest people “not to listen and not to watch” Russian state propaganda. More awkwardness.
This is … incredible: [Tweet and image showing damaged war machinery] t’s a war-vehicle graveyard near Belgorod, Russia, near Ukraine’s northern border, with hundreds of damaged and destroyed tanks and armored infantry vehicles. Oryx, who maintains the database of visually confirmed equipment kills, is clearly flummoxed on dealing with this.
Ukraine currently claims it has destroyed 2,898 tanks and 5,839 armored vehicles. The Oryx database counts 1,505 Russian destroyed, captured, and damaged tanks, and 3,357 other armored vehicles. While the equipment graveyard above doesn’t close the gap, it certainly shrinks it and suggests that Ukraine’s numbers aren’t as crazy as some might think.
[…] Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban claims he doesn’t oppose Swedish and Finnish NATO membership, and “next year” is barely a month away. That’s all academic regardless, because the real roadblock is Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. That one may be on hold until Turkey’s next presidential elections next June.
Indeed, Turkey’s big beef is Scandinavian support for the Kurdish plight in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran (yet another place where arbitrarily drawn colonial borders continue to split people and create intractable instability). This is also a point of conflict with the United States—two days ago, Turkey bombed a base in northern Syria used by Kurds, Syrian allies, and … our own forces (though none were present at the time of the attack). To say the situation is delicate is putting it mildly, and it’s hard to see Erdogan being placated any time soon. […]
In the Bahmut sector, according to open sources, Wagner PMC fighters have established firm control over the garbage processing plant on the southeastern outskirts of the city.
Ukraine liberates entire oblasts and the only regional capital Russia ever managed to capture, and Russia brags about capturing a garbage dump, literally. Mark Sumner has joked in the past (quoting commenters, I believe) how the battle of Bakhmut reads like a battle for a mall, “Fighting once again at the T.J. Max!”
[…] There is zero military value in these attacks on residential neighborhoods. Russia is attempting to terrorize Ukrainian civilians into submission. [tweet and video of Russian shelling of the city of Kherson]
The amount of shelling locations reported by the UA general staff was higher than usual today. We can see the hot spots are Svatove, Bakhmut and Donetsk. [map at the link]
This was once a five-front war—Kyiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Donbas, and Kherson. All that remains today is Donbas—northern Luhansk (Svatove), and Donetsk (Bakhmut, Donetsk City environs, and Pavlivka/Vulhedar).
Ukraine has systematically pushed Russia into that single front, where it remains incapable of mounting any serious strategically-relevant offensive operations. On the downside, Russia can now concentrate all of its forces, including artillery, into a much smaller front line. Sure, Ukraine can do so as well, but it means that this meat-grinder of a front is becoming even more deadly for both sides.
Ukraine will want to avoid a repeat of the April-June Battle of the Donbas attritional war. Russia has a near-endless supply of mobilized cannon fodder for suicide attacks on Ukrainian trenches. It’s similarly difficult to advance on that mass of Russian bodies in reinforced defensive positions. The key will be to continue degrading Russia’s command and control and logistics. That means Svatove and Starobilsk are must-takes, as those would knock the Belgorod hub out of the war, forcing Russia to route supply lines to Ukraine’s eastern border, as well as Melitopol, which would collapse the Russian presence in southeast Ukraine, cut any remaining supply lines from Crimea, cut its water, and leave it open to Ukrainian liberation.
At that point, we’d be mostly back to the February borders in the Donbas, with Russia severely depleted. It’s no accident that war videos today are mostly exposed Russian infantry getting shredded by drones and artillery, with very little Russian armor in sight. They’ve got nothing left but lives to throw into the grinder.
That means we can expect many more months of mass death around Bakhmut and Svatove and other settlements around those “hot” areas on the map above, as Ukraine merely holds its ground while plotting strategic advances toward Melitopol/Crimea in the south, and Svatove/Starobilsk in the northeast. Sucks for those poor Ukrainian stuck in those trenches. What a nightmare.
My guess? […] Once Ukraine has pushed Russia back to the original February Donbas borders, with Russia’s southern Crimea positions under real Ukrainian threat, the possibilities of negotiations becomes real.
ravensays
Russia tells its troops there must be 5 million of them for victory.
That is 5 times as much as they have now.
They could do it but not without completely wrecking their society.
They would bleed it dry of resources and likely have to ration food, gasoline, and consumer goods.
This is World War II levels of warfare.
Russia tells its troops there must be 5 million of them for victory
KATERYNA TYSHCHENKO — THURSDAY, 24 NOVEMBER 2022, 19:04
Pravda.com.ua
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reports that the military and political command of Russia is spreading a document called “Conclusions of the war with NATO in Ukraine” among the military. It is stated in the document that 5 million Russian troops must be deployed in order for Russia to win.
Source: Ukrinform; Oleksii Hromov, the deputy head of the Main Operative Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, at the briefing
Quote: “A part of this ‘masterpiece’ [‘Conclusions of the war with NATO in Ukraine’ – ed.] among other things focuses of the main problems of the Russian occupying forces such as the commanders’ inability to command troops, low level of discipline and military training, obsolescence of armament and military equipment, commanders’ inability to make decisions without obligatorily coordinating them with higher command etc. Meanwhile it is stated in every document that the Defence Forces of Ukraine have a quite high level of equipment, and commanders on all levels can make decisions in combat conditions themselves.
It is also stated in the document that there has not been such a war in the previous 80 years, and Russia needs its army to consist of nearly 5 million troops in order to win.”
Details: Hromov remarked that according to the estimates of some Russian offices, it may hint at the next mobilisation wave and implementing martial law in the country.
Responding to the question whether the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is also writing a document concerning the needs of the Defence Forces of Ukraine in case the Russian Army is extended, Hromov said that this process is always ongoing.
The 2022 midterm elections brought much for Democrats to be thankful for. Despite predictions of severe losses in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, Democrats managed to keep their majority in the Senate and hold Republicans to the slimmest of leads in the House.
One contest in the Senate remains outstanding. While the the incumbent Democratic senator from Georgia, Raphael Warnock, received more votes than his Republican opponent, Herschel Walker, Georgia law mandates a runoff if no candidate gets more than fifty percent. That runoff is scheduled for December 6th.
In the meantime, Walker is sparing no effort to humiliate himself with public appearances wherein he rambles incoherently about vampires, 1970’s television, and pregnant cows. Even his surrogates are having a hard time coming up with rational reasons to vote for him.
This week Walker visited with ultra-rightist Trump-fluffer, Charlie Kirk. It was a typically vapid interview that offered nothing of substance to Kirk’s audience of already committed Republican cultists. However, there was one moment that provided a little comic relief. Walker, a notoriously inarticulate and pitifully ill-informed former footballer, challenged MSNBC host and Harvard grad, Joy Reid, to a debate “any day of the week … on any subject.” What follows is Walker’s challenge and Reid’s response…
Walker: I’d love to debate Joy Reid. You know, Senator Warnock, he’s a slick talking, smooth dressing guy, but in that debate I took him to school because he found out a lot of things he didn’t know. And I can do the same thing with Joy Reid any time of the day.
I think people sit on TV and they talk. It’s easy to talk. But I’ve been a man that have worked my whole life. I built companies. I’ve signed the front of a paycheck. They’ve never done any of that. They don’t know how to do it. I do. And I say any day of the week she want to debate she can show up here and I’ll debate her as well on any subject. She can come up with the subject, and let’s go at it.
Reid: “Okay, Herschel, come on. It aint but a short walk. We will have you on the ReidOut any day. No, seriously. We reached out to your team. We will have you on the ReidOut any day. And we can debate. Just tell us when.
But I do want to make one thing clear, Herschel. You can’t bring your friends. You see your little friends there? You can’t bring them. You have to do this debate on your own. So come on. The doors to the church are open, like the pastor says.”
Walker has yet to accept Reid’s open offer to debate him. He hasn’t mentioned it at all. So he’s actually proving his point that “It’s easy to talk” on friendly TV programs. But he’s apparently too scared to face Reid for a debate that he insisted he would “love [to do] any day of the week.”
That’s too bad, because It would be an entertaining hour of political television that would put Walker’s unintentional comedic skills on display. Hopefully he will reply soon and set a date for this must see political showdown. Anything would be better than the Fox News donations of its airtime to GOP candidates like Walker.
Rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was seen at Mar-A-Lago earlier this week with far-right leader and white nationalist Nick Fuentes, according to reporters for POLITICO and The Daily Beast
Ye and Fuentes were first spotted together at a Miami airport on Tuesday. Later that day, Ye tweeted about meeting with former President Trump — who just announced his 2024 bid — to be his running mate.
“First time at Mar-a-Lago. Rain and traffic. Can’t believe I kept President Trump waiting,” Ye tweeted.
Ye had dinner with Trump Tuesday night but Fuentes was not present, The Daily Beast reported.
Fuentes is the host of the online show “America First with Nicholas Fuentes,” in which he frequently makes racist, antisemetic and anti-LGBTQ comments. He has also hosted the America First Political Action Conference attended by MAGA-loyalist House Freedom Caucus members like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ).
Ye has also come under strong criticism for his antisemetic comments, leading to his Twitter account being suspended last month. His account has since been reinstated by Elon Musk.
[…] Chinese authorities, who on Thursday reported a record 31,656 infections, are scrambling to protect the most vulnerable populations. They have launched a more aggressive vaccine drive to boost immunity, expanded hospital capacity and started to restrict the movement of at-risk groups. The elderly, who have an especially low vaccination rate, are a key target.
These efforts, which stop short of approving foreign vaccines, are an attempt to keep the virus from overwhelming a health-care system ill-prepared for a flood of very sick covid patients. […]
Yikes. Why do the elderly in China have a low vaccination rate?
[…] In a clip broadcast by Russian state media, Putin is seen sitting down with a group of women around a table adorned with ornate tea cups and fresh berries for a talk coinciding with Russian Mother’s Day.
“I want you to know that I personally, the entire leadership of the country, we share your pain,” Putin said, pausing and clearing his throat. “We understand that nothing can replace the loss of a son, a child, especially for the mother, to whom we all owe the birth.”
“I want you to know that we share this pain with you and, of course, we will do everything so that you do not feel forgotten,” Putin added.
“It’s unavoidable. The question is how we lived,” Putin said. “Some die and it’s not even noticeable … But your son lived. His goal has been achieved. In this sense, of course, his life turned out to be significant, with a result.”
[…] Putin used the meeting as an opportunity to reiterate the familiar list of accusations against the West, which he said uses Ukrainians “as cannon fodder” in the fight against Russia.
“This is not an exaggeration, they don’t care about the losses and they just shoot those who don’t behave the right way in front of other soldiers, those who refuse to fight,” Putin claimed without evidence. “They have a different moral attitude and this just one again proves we are dealing with a neo-Nazi regime.”
[…] The Kremlin only broadcast parts of the meeting and it wasn’t live.
[…] The makeup of attendees to the televised meeting suggested it was orchestrated to avoid any outbursts of public anger in Putin’s presence, as women in the room were primarily functionaries from pro-government movements, mid-level officials, and members of the ruling United Russia party set up by Putin himself. […]
Elon Musk confirms … again … that at least in some ways, he is stupid:
[…] “It is objectively the case that ‘conservative’ political candidates were more negatively affected than ‘progressive’ candidates. Anyone using Twitter knows this. Question is simply one of magnitude,” Musk tweeted about the algorithmic punishments and deboosting doled out to candidates. “Anyone using Twitter knows this. Question is simply one of magnitude.”
The thing is, this is completely false, as multiple studies have shown. Conservatives weren’t more affected—it wasn’t even equal. The reality is that Twitter itself admitted its algorithm was boosting right-wing politicians and media, an admission supported by at least one independent study as well. Musk is claiming to plan to “fix” a problem that is a lie. And he’s planning to do that because it benefits his far-right buddies.
[…] The neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists Musk is planning to bring back and their allies are emboldened, to say the least. Some on the right are circulating a list of 5,000 accounts they’re plotting to get suspended or banned: “Let’s get to work and let the purge begin,” they write. The list, described as “antifa accounts and antifa follower accounts,” includes tons of activists and left media figures, but that’s not all. It includes not just the politicians you’d expect to be on such a list but also names like Sen. Bob Casey. In other words, they’re not just targeting the left, they’re targeting pretty generic establishment Democrats. It includes not just left-wing reporters but turgid establishment media figures like former CBS News reporter Mark Knoller.
[…] And the thing is, this effort stands a decent chance at getting Musk’s attention, if not (yet) his full action.
The New Voice of Ukraine
In wake of defeats, purges of Russian army officers have started, General Staff
Thu, November 24, 2022 at 8:47 AM·1 min read
He didn’t explain the reasoning for the dismissals and suspensions of the officers.
Read also: Russians feeling increasingly gloomy and apathetic towards war, survey says
“A number of logistics department officers in the Russian army have been dismissed or suspended from duty, in particular the Head of the Department of Resource Support, Major General Mumidzhanov, and other officers who were in charge of food, material and rocket fuel supply,” Hromov said.
He added they were sent on leave so that they can be dismissed or transfered to other positions later.
Read also: Evidence of systemic war crimes in every area Russia occupied, US says
Such purges are also taking place across military districts in Russia.
Earlier, Hrovov said about 10,000-15,000 Belarusian troops could potentially participate in a fresh Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It’s a fascinating thing to watch far-right radicalization unfold in real time. I’ve been watching the Elon Musk and Twitter drama with a mix of fascination and awe. He bought Twitter as part of his romance with the “free speech”/anti-“cancel culture” right and Donald Trump. Just what set him off on that path has never been adequately or convincingly explained, though there are a number of very plausible and not-mutually exclusive theories. Over the last four weeks Musk’s attachment to this crowd and that ideology have been constantly apparent. He gave an early and even for him startling taste of this when he tweeted out a rank gay-bashing conspiracy theory about the QAnon dead-ender’s hammer attack on Paul Pelosi days before the November 8th election. The process has only accelerated and intensified over the subsequent four weeks.
As he virtually high-fives supporters on Twitter he’s moved on from “free speech” and ending bans on people like Donald Trump to a much more explicit insistence that old Twitter management ran the site with the express purpose of elevating the left over the right. So just two days ago, for instance, he wrote: “Far left San Francisco/Berkeley views have been propagated to the world via Twitter. I’m sure this comes as no surprise to anyone watching closely. Twitter is moving rapidly to establish an even playing field. No more thumb on the scale!”
Then a few hours later he followed up with this: “It is objectively the case that ‘conservative’ political candidates were more negatively affected than ‘progressive’ candidates. Anyone using Twitter knows this. Question is simply one of magnitude.”
This came in response to a comment from a Bitcoin enthusiast who wrote: “I heard from a primary source that political groups would regularly contact twitter to deboost their candidates’ detractors and twitter would happily do that. That seems to put the finger on the scale of democracy.”
Comments like these have become commonplace from Musk. But in recent days he’s increasingly been promoting far-right theories and white supremacist content that may be rife on Twitter but are not immediately tied to his claims about Twitter’s old management or anti-cancel culture activism.
Recent conversations he engages in have either been applauding him or encouraging him to crack down on “grooming” or pedophile or child exploitation accounts. Now, certainly management at any social network should be monitoring and rooting out such accounts. But it seems highly improbable that Musk’s team is more focused on combatting pedophiles and child exploitation than old Twitter management was. Indeed, Twitter would likely be hard pressed to crackdown on anything at the moment since Musk has already fired most of the workforce that handled content moderation, hate speech and abuse of all kinds.
But you don’t have to look hard at these exchanges to see that pedophilia and child exploitation are not precisely what’s being discussed. They’re calls to crackdown on gay, trans and other accounts which the far right have rebranded as “groomers” and “pedophiles.” Increasingly, it’s even more scattershot and general. It’s a call to crack down on liberal or left-wing accounts or anything connected to the “woke mob,” since all those groups are by definition “groomers” and pedophiles. There’s far too little recognition of how much all of this amounts to little more than a mainstreaming or buttoning up of the PizzaGate and QAnon eliminationist conspiracy theories about Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton running pedophile sex rings.
Just over the last few days Musk has increasingly been promoting white nationalist content too. Indeed, the two often meld together. Here he is, for instance, just yesterday. [Tweet available at the link.]
This tableau requires some translation. “Ramzpaul” is Paul Ray Ramsey, a notorious white nationalist. Here he is casually equating left-wingers with pedophiles and Elon replies validating the slur and saying Twitter is on the case.
It’s worth noting that reducing pedophilia from a scourge to a cudgel isn’t new to Musk. In 2018 he lashed out at a British cave explorer trying to rescue boys trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand when he turned down Musk’s offer to build a special submarine to facilitate a rescue. “Sorry pedo guy,” he tweeted, “you really did ask for it.” At his defamation trial, Musk testified that he meant it not as a factual statement but as an insult. The rejection was “wrong and insulting, so I insulted him back,” Musk testified.
A day before the exchange with Ramsey there was this. [Tweet available at the link.]
Again, some decoding and context is necessary. “Kim Dotcom” is a German national and notorious internet fraudster who has been holed up in New Zealand for years fighting extradition to the U.S. to face charges of racketeering, fraud and money laundering. Here he makes a straightforward statement of the so-called “Great Replacement Theory” and Musk responds with a straight up, “Just so.”
Just as I was writing this post, there was this. [Tweet available at the link, in which Elon endorses the idea that “woke propaganda” is being insinuated into the education of children in the USA]
Or this interaction with Ian Miles Cheong just this morning. Cheong is another far-right influencer who has been banned from numerous platforms for a mix of fraud, harassment, impersonation and simply being a far-right weirdo. [Tweet at the link]
Let’s start with the simple observation that it’s not ideal to have the owner of one of the world’s largest and most influential communication platforms operating in a social and political milieu of white nationalists and international outlaws. What captures my attention, though, is the process, the trajectory. It’s what we might call a narcissism/radicalization maelstrom and it’s at least somewhat similar to what you could observe with Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016.
It’s clear that Donald Trump had dark political impulses and beliefs going back decades. He put his cards on the table pretty clearly when he announced his presidential campaign with denunciations of Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers. But the politics wasn’t as fleshed out ideologically or as clearly articulated as it would soon become. You could watch in his online interactions how his ego followed the praise and fawning. His narcissism pulled him toward the people who became his most loyal online devotees and they were routinely and unsurprisingly the most ardent white nationalists and far-right agitators. They showed up increasingly in his Twitter timeline. He started engaging with them and promoting them. The point isn’t that Trump was some kind of naif pulled into a radicalization spiral. He had all the building blocks. I doubt very much that in mid-2015 he had any real familiarity with the arcana of racist and radical right groups, their keywords or ideological touch-points. But they knew he was one of them, perhaps even more than he did. They pledged their undying devotion and his narcissism did the rest.
We’re seeing something similar with Elon Musk. There are various theories purporting to explain Musk’s hard right turn: a childhood in apartheid South Africa, his connection with Peter Thiel, disappointments in his personal life. Whatever the truth of the matter, whatever right-leaning tendencies he may have had before a couple years ago appear to have been latent or unformed. Now the transformation is almost complete. He’s done with general “free speech” grievance and springing for alternative viewpoints. He’s routinely pushing all the far right storylines from woke groomers to great replacement.
One particularly notable hint about the future came in a fractious interaction on Wednesday when Musk rolled out his own antic Dolchstoßlegende manque. In exchange about advertiser departures and alleged media bias, Musk claimed that he had cut a with civil rights groups to create a “moderation council” but that they had broken the deal. [Tweet at the link]
Perhaps needless to say, this did not happen. The reference is to a chaotic meeting Musk held with a group of leaders of prominent civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the ADL, on November 2nd. Musk actually announced the “moderation council” days earlier. We’re hardly four weeks into the Elon era on Twitter and he’s already cueing up a storyline in which he tried to placate the Blacks and the Jews and the gays but they betrayed him and set out to “kill Twitter.”
Not pretty.
Most of us know what it’s like to be caught up in the moment. In a moment of tense confrontation or ego injury it is natural to pull tight to those who are there to defend you. Some of this is simply human nature. But with the likes of Musk and Trump it operates on a qualitatively different and more explosive level, the consequence of an innate narcissism, an ingrained sense of grievance and entitlement and the unique dynamics of social media. Of course, their power and wealth make their meltdowns vastly more consequential than yours or mine.
About Putin’s claim that Russia needs to commit 5 million troops to defeat Ukraine… Given the equipment problems the Russian army is already having, throwing 5 million under- to un-equipped troops into the Ukraine meat grinder will probably run into a near term sharp drop in population, de facto polygamy, or both. The Russian government is already concerned about being below population replacement rate. Between those leaving and those being killed, it isn’t going to get any better.
Reginald Selkirksays
@393 @395:
“It is objectively the case that ‘conservative’ political candidates were more negatively affected than ‘progressive’ candidates.
No, it is not true, but it should be. Because right-wing candidates objectively promote disinformation, ungrounded conspiracy theories and calls to violence to a much greater degree than anyone on the left.
With left-wing ALP Premier Dan Andrews facing not just the Tory LNP opposition but an absolutely OTT & vile, blatantly biased Murdoch hate and lies media campaign against him. See, for example :
But like thousands of other supporters, they have based themselves in nearby Dubai, the regional trade hub in the United Arab Emirates, making the tiring day-long trip to the Qatari capital Doha via hour-long shuttle flights connecting the cities during the tournament…
A Game of Thrones fan and ice cream shop owner was “gobsmacked” when his store received a visit from a star of the show.
Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys Targaryen in the hit television series, visited ice cream business Game of Cones in Cornwall on Wednesday.
Simon Sassoon has owned the store on Station Road, Fowey, for seven years.
Mr Sassoon said he was a “huge Game of Thrones fan” but was not aware of the visit until after she had gone…
A CBC Marketplace investigation has found that some motorcycle helmets purchased on popular websites would crack and fall apart in a crash — and that the safety certifications on them are counterfeit.
Marketplace purchased helmets for sale on Amazon, eBay and Walmart’s marketplace advertised as U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) certified. Manufacturers, who are responsible for conducting testing, include the letters “DOT” on the back of a helmet to indicate the helmet has met or exceeded the U.S. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard. It’s one of the three required safety certifications for motorcycle helmets in Canada…
Nothing good, however, would come from another draw on the final day of Group B play Tuesday. The United States (two points) must beat Iran (three points) to finish in the top two and advance to the round of 16. With a loss or tie, this World Cup adventure ends.
ravensays
Vladimir Makey, 64, head of Belarus Foreign Affairs Minister, is dead.
If you are anyone in Russia, you don’t just quit your job or get fired.
You often die suddenly of suspicious causes that no one looks too closely at.
If they say Makey might have been poisoned, he was poisoned.
A few weeks ago, one of the Russian collaborators in Kherson, Kirill Stremousov died in an “auto accident”. The pictures of his car showed it to be full of high caliber bullet holes.
Tweet
Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en
Vladimir Makey, 64, head of Belarus Foreign Affairs Minister, is dead. There are rumors he might have been poisoned.
Makey was named as a possible successor of Lukashenko. He was one of the few not under Russian influence.
What misery. [Tweet and video, Ukrainian troops trying to find a way to stay out of the water in their muddy and mostly water-filled trenches.]
As I noted yesterday, what was Russia’s five axes of attack at the start of the war has been gradually whittled down to a single front in The Donbas. Still, it’s a long front line, across two different oblasts (which collectively make up the Donbas), with several directions of action. So let’s take a look at what should be the front lines for the foreseeable future (unless Ukraine surprises everyone with a new push into southern Kherson oblast or even Crimea). [map at the link]
Let’s go clockwise, starting from the north.
Svatove/Starobilsk (northern Luhansk oblast)
This is perhaps the most strategically consequential of the currently active front line. It is the gateway toward a great open expanse of mostly empty agricultural steppe, and the last logistical line from Russia’s Belgorod (it’s main supply hub this war), into Ukraine itself. [map at the link]
If you look closely, every single road and railway in northeastern Ukraine runs through either Svatove or Starobilsk. Every. Single. One. And what’s more, once Svatove falls, it’s an open shot toward Starobilks, giving Russian defenses very little to ward off a strong Ukrainian push.
When Svatove and Starobilks are liberated, that entire swatch of red Russian-held territory will turn yellow. That’ll be great for morale, but it will do more to help end the war than almost any other Ukrainian victory. Remember that this is a war of logistics, and this is Russia’s most important supply rail line.
Kreminna (Luhansk oblast)
There was great hope Ukraine could blitzkrieg their way into Kreminna after Russian lines around Izyum collapsed, but alas, this is where Russia held the line, and continues to do so to this day. [map at the link]
There are forests to the city’s west that are, according to Russian Telegram, under Ukrainian control. Liberating Kreminna opens up Rubizhne, Severodonetsk, and Lysychansk to Ukrainian attack. For their part, Russia keeps attacking this line from the Lysychansk direction in the south, attempting to disrupt what, for the moment, seems to be a cautious Ukrainian approach.
Months back, when Severodonetsk and Lysychansk were still in Ukrainian hands, I argued that this wasn’t a particularly strategic area, and questioned the fierce (and costly) Ukrainian defense. I still question all the lives lost over this corner of the front. Once Ukraine liberates Svatove and Starobilsk to the north, supplying this area will become a serious problem for Russia. Yet whether it’s Ukraine cautiously probing ahead, or Russia trying to push Ukraine back, this is a lively part of the front.
Bakhmut (Donetsk Oblast)
What can I write about Bakhmut that we haven’t already written dozens of times? Wagner war-crime’ing mercenaries rule this corner of the front, and send wave after wave of prison cannon fodder to die in corpse-littered fields. It’s positively medieval, and disconnected from any broader strategic goal beyond “Wagner does whatever it wants, and ignores Russia’s larger goals.” Maybe it does so because Russia lacks any broader strategic goals. Or maybe it thinks gaining meters per day here and there is great advertising for its deadly services. [map at the link]
There is quite literally zero strategic value to Bakhmut. It is not an important logistical hub.The big twin fortress cities of Kramatorsk and Slovyansk to its west are well beyond Russia’s means to threaten. If Wagner were to somehow capture Bakhmut, Russia could get a few days of propaganda value from it, but that would be it. It does nothing to disrupt Ukraine’s war progress.
They won’t even get that. There’s a river running right through town. [map at the link]
f Wagner can’t get beyond the trash dump in the town’s eastern edge, what makes anyone think it can cross an actual river without functioning bridges? This approach is a death sentence to any advancing Russian. (This video alone has at least three dozen dead Russians littering the battlefield east of Bakhmut. As usual, no need to click. It’s disturbing.) [link is embedded in the article, available at the main link]
Avdiivka/Donetsk (Donetsk Oblast)
While we’ve touched on this area from time to time, we haven’t really focused on it as much as other active fronts. [map at the link]
What’s amazing about this front is that it’s RIGHT ON TOP of Russia’s pre-February front lines, and literally abuts one of the two regional capitals Russia still holds (the other being Luhansk city). Like Bakhmut to the north, Russia has sent wave after wave of fodder into this meat grinder (this time, local militias from Russian-occupied Donbas), and like Bakhmut, they keep ending up deceased, littering fields as far as the eye can see.
Russia doesn’t even appear to have any armor left, sending waves of unprotected infantry to be picked apart by Ukrainian artillery and drones. It’s gruesome. But it’s tough for Ukrainian defenders as well, as Russia still has plenty of artillery left to do its murderous task as they try and clear a path for their foot soldiers.
There is, at least, some strategic value to this Russian effort—they want a buffer zone around Donetsk for the inevitable Ukrainian counter-offensive. At the moment, Donetsk city is very exposed. (Not that Ukraine is likely to attack it head-on. That hasn’t been their approach so far, and no reason to engage in such a costly assault.)
Pavlivka/Vuhledar (Donetsk Oblast)
I recently wrote about Pavlivka here. That Naval infantry unit banging its head against the town has apparently been completely annihilated. [Tweet showing a statement from a contract soldier in Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade]
At last report, Russia has the southern half of Pavlivka, while Ukraine has the northern half under fire control—meaning that any Russian venturing across that line gets snuffed out by artillery. That report claims Russia’s dead-to-wounded ratio is 1-to-1, which means that they don’t have a functioning medavac system. For a competent army, that ratio would be closer to 1-to-4 or even higher. For the U.S., it was 1-to-7 in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
So why the Russian desperation to move forward on this approach? Logistics. [map at the link]
155mm tube artillery means that Ukraine can keep that rail line shut with its most plentiful artillery munition. Still, even if Russia has some success and pushes Ukraine back several dozen kilometers (spoiler alert: not gonna happen), HIMARS/MLRS rockets, long-range self-propelled artillery, and long-range precision-guided munitions could still keep the line shut.
So while there’s some logic to the Russian attempts, it’s not particularly good logic. And even then, Russia’s inability to put together anything more substantive than suicidal infantry charges means that all Russia is doing is exchanging the lives of its own for cheap Ukrainian ammunition.
So there you have it, a quick reorientation of the current front lines.
Former Tea Party congressman and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently put a bulls-eye on the back of the president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers.
“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’” Pompeo told Semafor’s Shelby Talcott.
“The most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids…”
I’ve known, respected, and admired Randi for years and she’s been a frequent guest on my program: her number one interest is providing the highest quality education to as many American children as possible. Full stop.
So why would Pompeo, pursuing the 2024 Republican nomination for president, risk triggering an American domestic terrorist to train his sites on her? Why would an educated man have such antipathy toward public school teachers?
Public schools are on the GOP’s hit list, just as they were in Chile during the Pinochet regime, and for the same reasons:
— Fascism flourishes when people are ignorant.
— Private for-profit schools are an efficient way to transfer billions from tax revenues into the coffers of “education entrepreneurs” who then recycle that money into Republican political campaigns (just like they’ve done with private for-profit prisons).
— Private schools are most likely to be segregated by race and class, which appeals to the bigoted base of the Republican party.
— Most public school teachers are unionized, and the GOP hates unions.
— While public school boards are our most basic and vigorous form of democracy, private schools are generally unaccountable to the public.
— Whitewashing America’s racial and genocidal history while ignoring the struggles of minorities, women, and queer folk further empowers straight white male supremacy.
Umberto Eco, who had a ringside seat to the rise of Mussolini, noted in his “14 indicators of fascism” that dumbing down the populace by lowering educational standards was critical to producing a compliant populace.
“All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks,” he wrote, “made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
Ironically, this very use of public schools to promote a political agenda was the foundation David Koch cited when, in 1980, he attacked American public schools during his run for Vice President on the Libertarian Party ticket.
“We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws,” proclaimed his platform. “We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.”
It was a stark contrast from the founders of our nation, who well understood the importance of universal quality public education. The first law mandating public schools paid for with taxpayer dollars was passed in Massachusetts in 1647: to this day, that state is notable for its historic emphasis on education.
[…] John Adams, also weighed in on the importance of public education in a letter to his old friend John Jebb when, in 1785, Adams was serving in London as America’s first Minister to Great Britain. […]
“The social science will never be much improved, until the people unanimously know and consider themselves as the fountain of power, and until they shall know how to manage it wisely and honestly. Reformation must begin with the body of the people, which can be done only, to effect, in their educations.
“The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the expense of the people themselves.”
But the United States spends almost a trillion dollars a year on primary school education, an expense category just below healthcare and even more than the Pentagon budget: there are massive profits to be made if privatized entities can skim even a few percent off the top.
Those profits, in turn, can be used — with the Supreme Court’s blessing — to legally bribe elected officials to further gut public schools and transfer even more of our tax dollars to private schools and their stockholders.
This pursuit of America’s education dollars is nothing new. The first American president to put an anti-public-schools crusader in charge of the Education Department was Ronald Reagan.
At the time, our public schools were the envy of the world and had recently raised up a generation of scientists and innovators that brought us everything from the transistor to putting men on the moon.
Reagan’s Education Secretary Bill Bennett is probably most famous for having claimed that, “You could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” And then aggressively standing behind his quote in repeated media appearances.
Reagan and Bennett oversaw the gutting of Federal support for civics education, cutting the nation’s federal education budget by 18.5%.
This lead to the situation today where the group that runs national exams of eighth-graders across the country, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, determined in 2018 that only 24% of US students were “proficient in civics.” It’s gotten so bad that the Lincoln Project is launching a K-12 civics program of their own called the Franklin Project.
George W. Bush continued the tradition, proposing an 8% cut to education and welfare budgets.
After initiating the privatization of Medicare in 2003 with the Medicare Advantage scam (a model for privatizing education), his Education Secretary, Rod Paige, called the nation’s largest teacher’s union, the National Education Association, a “terrorist organization.”
Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos proposed cutting 12% or $8.5 billion out of the federal education budget, while allocating over $5 billion in taxpayer dollars to flow into the money bins of their private school cronies.
I started this article with Pompeo’s essentially calling Randi Weingarten a terrorist. Unions as saboteurs is a viewpoint widely held across the Republican Party and among rightwing billionaires.
But it’s simply not true: teachers’ unions have been a primary force in improving the quality of American education for almost a century.
Eunice S. Han is an economics professor and researcher at the University of Utah, and formerly was with Wellesley College. She did exhaustive research into the impact of teachers’ unions on teacher quality and educational outcomes: it’s the single-most definitive study done on the subject to date.
Her findings were unambiguous and rebut the GOP’s talking point that teachers’ unions “protect bad teachers”:
“[T]eachers unions, by negotiating higher wages for teachers, lower the quit probability of high-ability teachers but raise the dismissal rate of underperforming teachers, as higher wages provide districts greater incentive to select better teachers.” […]
“The data confirms that, compared to districts with weak unionism, districts with strong unionism dismiss more low-quality teachers and retain more high-quality teachers. The empirical analysis shows that this dynamic of teacher turnover in highly unionized districts raises average teacher quality and improves student achievement.”
[…] John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were right about public education, and privatizing it is as much a crime against the commons and our democracy as was privatizing our prisons […]
Rightwing billionaires are now funding “Liberty” and “Freedom” groups to attack and take over public school boards, seeking to ghettoize their schools, drive out unionized teachers, and impose a gender-bigoted, white supremacist, and anti-science curriculum. (Only 40% of our schools today even teach evolution, as that’s become so “controversial” again.)
Of all our democratic institutions, from Congress to state houses to city councils, the most on-the-ground, closest-to-the-people are school boards.
They’re the most vibrant and often most important of our governmental bodies, designed to express and facilitate the will of local parents and voters. And a great springboard to other elected offices: many members of Congress began their political careers running for a school board.
Private schools, of course, don’t have school boards. They’re accountable to their shareholders and CEOs.
Steve Bannon and other rightwing personalities have, for the past several years as part of their effort to destroy public education, been aggressively encouraging their followers to run for public school boards and, where they don’t win, show up at every meeting to make their board’s lives miserable.
It’s an area where Democrats and progressives have dropped the ball, big time.
If you’re a parent or grandparent, or even just a concerned citizen, there is no better or more crucial time to show up at your local school board than now. And bring your friends and neighbors with you.
[Tweet and video at the link] Back before the election, when Republicans were rubbing their hands over that Red Tsunami on the horizon, they were pretty up front about what they meant to do in Ukraine. […] it wasn’t just the fringiest fringe of the party that was threatening to cut off aid to Ukraine. A week before the election, that idea had become so central to the Republican effort that it was being pushed in speeches from California to New Hampshire. And it was being pushed by the new core of the party — MAGA.
The threat to cut funding marks a sharp turn for a party whose members almost universally embraced aiding Ukraine after Russia invaded in February. Over the past eight months, supporters of former president Donald Trump have joined with skeptics of military intervention and anti-Biden forces within the GOP to challenge traditionally hawkish Republicans.
It’s little wonder then that, going into this month, Russians — from top to bottom — were counting on Republicans to save their illegal, unprovoked, war-crime laden invasion of UKraine.
To see how pervasive the idea that Republicans would save Russia had become, you don’t have to listen to speeches from Vladimir Putin or Sergei Lavrov. It’s in the despair of this conversation between a Russian soldier and his wife following the elections.
Wife: Ukraine is so small. Why is it taking so long? You were telling me you were waiting for the elections on November 8, but what’s the point?
Russian soldiers on the front lines in Donetsk were expecting salvation, not through some action of their own country, but from what Republicans could do after winning the election. […]
But don’t worry. Republicans have a solution to this problem—maybe even an ultimate solution—one that would not just deliver those Russian soldiers from peril, but hand Vladimir Putin a smashing victory that goes infinitely beyond Ukraine. Here it is that solution, delivered by former Reagan aide Bruce Fein writing in The Hill.
“Congress can end the war in Ukraine and win a Nobel Peace Prize by enacting a statute withdrawing the United States from NATO — transforming it from a mighty offensive oak into a tiny acorn unalarming to Russia.”
We’re at the point where a former member of Ronald Reagan’s White House is lecturing us on how we should stop making Russia feel scared and not get in the way of their invasion. For peace.
The entire piece is not only devoted to destroying NATO, but to explaining how poor little Russia was forced to launch its bloody invasion after being “provoked” by the United States. It doesn’t explain how the United States provoked Russia into attacking Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria. But they’ll get around to that.
Could Republicans still pull Putin’s ass out of the fire? If they had both Congress and the White House, they could. It’s a very good bet that they would. This isn’t some new idea expressed by some single outlier. Pulling the United States out of NATO is exactly what Donald Trump threatened to do back in 2018. As Hunter reported at the time, “[Trump] doesn’t joke about his praise for dictators and his willingness to play ball with autocrats, and despite the damage-control efforts of an anonymous senior administration official, he ain’t joking here. He’s been blustering about either ’renegotiating’ the United States position in NATO or abandoning it since the campaign days.”
Giving Russia the freedom to attack Europe might have been something that most Republicans thought ridiculous when Trump was coming down that gold escalator. They don’t think that way now. Starving NATO to please Putin has become a central tenet of Republican politics. They want to gift Russia with something that Russia could never win on the battlefield; not just victory over Ukraine, but victory over NATO. And the United States.
Today is the day of remembrance for the the Holodomor. Though most here are likely already familiar with that term, it refers to a period in 1932 and 1933 when the whole of the Soviet Union was facing a food shortage due to unusual climate conditions and bad planning (this was also a Dust Bowl year in the United States, with back to back years of record high and record low temperatures).
However, Ukraine was the largest grain producing region in the Soviet Union at the time and had a relatively abundant crop. Under the cover of the general shortage, Joseph Stalin placed grain quotas on Ukraine that essentially robbed the nation of all its food. With corn and wheat carried away by the Red Army, Ukrainians were deliberately left to starve. There are even reports of food being destroyed to accelerate this process. Estimates of the resulting genocide range from a low of 3 million to as many as 10 million dead. Stalin followed this by a program of encouraging more Russian settlement in Ukraine.
Both commentators on Russian state media and translated messages from Russian military have suggested that Russia should have a second Holodomor as a means of punishing Ukraine. [Tweet and image at the link]
RUSSIA’S ECONOMY IN STEEP DECLINE
It’s been common since the start of the invasion for pundits in the United States to repeat propaganda from Russian state media claiming that the sanctions are having little impact on the Russian economy. However, […] it’s getting a lot harder to pretend that Russia isn’t hurting. Badly. And that failing economy is having an increasing impact on the battlefield.
For months, Putin claimed that the “economic blitzkrieg” against Russia had failed, but Western sanctions imposed over the invasion of Ukraine are digging ever deeper into Russia’s economy, exacerbating equipment shortages for its army and hampering its ability to launch any new ground offensive or build new missiles, economists and Russian businessmen said. [Tweet and images at the link]
LEAVING TODAY’S UPDATE ON A BETTER NOTE
Just a few of the Ukrainian troops, out there in the cold and snow, facing off with a bloody-minded enemy who is trying to destroy their nation and their people. How are they holding up? [Uplifting tweets and videos at the link, including one Ukrainian soldier dancing to the rhythm of artillery being fired :-)]
On Thanksgiving day, Donald Trump posted more than forty fanatical memes expressing undying adoration for Dear Leader. They included expressions of worshipful love and loyalty in words pasted over artificially iconic images of Trump as superhero or savior. [JFC]
Missing from this avalanche of self-adulation were any wishes for a happy Thanksgiving. However, interspersed among the exaltations and QAnon-sense were Trump’s own outpourings of rage against “Radical left” Democrats, and “rigged” courts and judges, and perennial “witch hunts,” all in his warped cranium determined to stifle him and his MAGA cult movement. It was a Thanksgiving Day parade of pity and victimhood.
At the top of Trump’s miscreant mind was Attorney General Merrick Garland’s recent appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate his criminal activities related to the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol that he incited, and the theft of national security documents that he hoarded – and lied to the FBI about having – at his Mar-a-Lago bunker.
In utter horror over the prospect of his being held accountable, Trump posted several hostile comments on his floundering Twitter ripoff, Truth Social, directed at Special Counsel, Jack Smith, and more disturbingly, at his wife, documentary filmmaker Katy Chevigny. Trump ranted that…
“Democrats argue a Supreme Court justice (Clarence Thomas) must recuse from cases, based upon the personal political views of his wife (Ginni). So why doesn’t Special Counsel Jack Smith have to recuse, based upon his wife’s anti-Trump/pro-Biden large political donation and other major advocacy on behalf of Democrats?”
“The wife of the Special Counsel Biden chose to investigate @realdonaldtrump (his likely opponent in 2024) reportedly produced the Michelle Obama documentary… Yes America, you are reading this correctly.”
Trump’s ravings are typically ego-based and legally befuddled. Analogizing Smith to Clarence Thomas makes no sense. As a Supreme Court justice, Thomas can (and does) make decisions that bear directly on the activities of his wife, Ginni, who was an active participant in the coup staged by Trump and his traitorous StormTrumpers. Thomas has already made rulings that shield his wife from legal scrutiny and potential liability.
On the other hand, Jack Smith’s work as Special Counsel would have no bearing whatsoever on the activities of his wife. Furthermore, unlike Ginni Thomas, Chevigny, and Michele Obama, the subject of her documentary “Becoming,” have not been implicated in efforts to overthrow the government of the United States.
Smith’s wife, like the spouses of all Justice Department attorneys, (and all Americans) is free to support whatever candidates and political parties she wants to. So are the attorneys, for that matter. That doesn’t mean that the career prosecutors to whom they are married are going to exercise bias in the performance of their duties. And it wouldn’t matter if they did. Because the judges who hear the cases aren’t going to adopt any alleged biases if the existed.
Smith’s record in the Justice Department is unblemished by any allegations of political bias. He has prosecuted both Democrats and Republicans in the past. That’s routine for the Justice Department. For instance, special counsel Robert Mueller, who probed Trump’s connections to Russia during the 2016 campaign, was a lifelong Republican.
Trump’s temper tantrum is standard operating procedure for him. It hardly matters what the facts are. He will always strive to contort the circumstances into some sort of personal assault, because all he knows how to do is whine. He has actually bragged that he is “the most fabulous whiner,” a claim that is hard to argue with. And he’s providing another outstanding example of it with his reaction to the Special Counsel appointment and the unconscionable attack on his wife.
The sanctions on Russia are actually working, slowly but steadily.
Russia’s economy is in recession and they are having problems supplying their army.
Russia will have to go over to a full time war type economy and that means the citizens are going to notice their standard of living and quality of life going downhill.
The sanctions won’t do everything but they will do a lot.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched last month a new council for coordinating supplies for the Russian army, he seemed to recognize the scale of the economic problems facing the country, and his sense of urgency was palpable.
“We have to be faster in deciding questions connected to supplying the special military operation and countering restrictions on the economy which, without any exaggeration, are truly unprecedented,” he said.
For months, Putin claimed that the “economic blitzkrieg” against Russia had failed, but Western sanctions imposed over the invasion of Ukraine are digging ever deeper into Russia’s economy, exacerbating equipment shortages for its army and hampering its ability to launch any new ground offensive or build new missiles, economists and Russian business executives said.
Recent figures show the situation has worsened considerably since the summer when, buoyed by a steady stream of oil and gas revenue, the Russian economy seemed to stabilize. Figures released by the Finance Ministry last week show a key economic indicator — tax revenue from the non-oil and gas sector — fell 20 percent in October compared with a year earlier, while the Russian state statistics agency Rosstat reported that retail sales fell 10 percent year on year in September, and cargo turnover fell 7 percent.
“All objective indicators show there is a very strong drop in economic activity,” said Vladimir Milov, a former Russian deputy energy minister who is now a leading opposition politician in exile. “The spiral is escalating, and there is no way out of this now.”
The Western ban on technology imports is affecting most sectors of the economy, while the Kremlin’s forced mobilization of more than 300,000 Russian conscripts to serve in Ukraine, combined with the departure of at least as many abroad fleeing the draft, has dealt a further blow, economists said. In addition, Putin’s own restrictions on gas supplies to Europe, followed by the unexplained explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, has led to a sharp drop in gas production — down 20 percent in October compared with the previous year. Meanwhile, oil sales to Europe are plummeting ahead of the European Union embargo expected to be imposed Dec. 5.
The Kremlin has trumpeted a lower-than-expected decline in GDP, forecast by the International Monetary Fund at only 3.5 percent this year, as demonstrating that the Russian economy can weather the raft of draconian sanctions.
But economists and business executives said the headline GDP figures did not reflect the real state of the Russian economy because the Russian government effectively ended the ruble’s convertibility since the sanctions were imposed. “GDP stopped having any meaning because firstly we don’t know what the real ruble rate is, and secondly if you produce a tank and send it to the front where it is immediately blown up, then it is still considered as value added,” said Milov, who wrote a report explaining the situation for the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies published this month.
Deeper problems were also lurking in the Russian banking sector, where most accounting has been classified. The Russian Central Bank reported this week that a record $14.7 billion in hard currency was withdrawn from the Russian banking system in October, amid increasing anxiety over mobilization and the state of the economy.
Even so, a November report by the Central Bank warned that Russia’s GDP would face a sharper contraction of 7.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022, after falling 4.1 percent and 4 percent compared with last year in the previous two quarters. Last week, as the Russian economy officially entered into recession, Central Bank Chairwoman Elvira Nabiullina told lawmakers that next year the situation could get darker still. “We really need to look at the situation very soberly and with our eyes open. Things may get worse, we understand that,” she said.
Putin’s announcement in September of a partial troop mobilization dealt an enormous blow to business sentiment. “For many Russian companies the reality of the war sank in,” said Janis Kluge, senior associate at the German Institute for Security and International Affairs. “It became clear that this is going to continue for a long time. Now expectations are much worse than they were over the summer.”
Putin’s creation of the coordination council, headed by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, was a sign the Russian president is rattled by the increasing impact of sanctions, economists and analysts said. Putin “is concerned he needs to interfere to make sure supplies will be available,” said Sergei Guriev, provost at France’s Sciences Po. “He is concerned that sanctions have really hit the ability to produce goods.”
It also signals the Russian government is preparing a broader mobilization of the Russian economy to supply the army amid chronic shortages of basic goods such as food and uniforms. New laws will impose hefty fines on business executives who refuse to carry out orders for the Russian military, as well as potential prison sentences, clearing the way for entrepreneurs to be pressured into providing goods at knockdown prices. The creation of the council is “connected to big pressure on business and the need to enforce a tough diktat to make business do what it doesn’t want to do,” said Nikolai Petrov, senior research fellow for Russia and Eurasia at Chatham House in London.
One Moscow businessman with connections to the defense sector said a quiet mobilization of the Russian economy had already been long underway, with many entrepreneurs forced into producing supplies for the Russian army but fearing to speak out against orders at cut-price rates.
“This became necessary right from the very beginning when the war began,” the businessman said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “The main mass of business is silent. If you say you are making supplies or weapons for the Russian state then you could have problems abroad.”
Anecdotal evidence reported in the Russian press has pointed to enormous problems supplying Russia’s newly drafted conscripts with equipment. An in-depth October report in Russian daily Kommersant described huge shortages in ammunition and uniform supplies for conscripts, with manufacturers citing difficulties securing the necessary materials due to sanctions.
Other Russian business executives said Russia’s military debacle in Ukraine had exposed the huge inefficiencies and corruption in Russia’s military industrial complex. “There are huge questions over where all the trillions of rubles of the past decade have been spent,” said one former senior Russian banker with connections to the Russian state.
If the new economic council fails to better coordinate the production of supplies and weaponry, it could impinge on Russia’s ability to launch new offensives in Ukraine, Petrov said. “The main problem ahead of the Kremlin is the question of when the army will be ready to begin new military action in Ukraine, and the preparation of arms and ammunition and so on will determine these plans.”
The outlook appears likely to worsen when the E.U. embargo on Russian oil sales comes into force Dec. 5, economists said. Combined with a price cap expected to be imposed on all sales of Russian oil outside the E.U., the measure could cost the Russian budget at least $120 million in lost revenue per day, Milov said, and already the Russian budget is expected to rack up a deficit by the end of this year.
StevoRsays
A 19-year-old US woman will not be able to see her father executed, after a judge upheld a Missouri law that states she is too young.
Kevin Johnson faces execution on Tuesday for the killing of a police officer in 2005, when he was 19.
He requested that his daughter, Khorry Ramey, attend.
The American Civil Liberties Union had filed an emergency motion on her behalf, arguing that the state law violated her constitutional rights.
They said that the age requirement in the Missouri law – barring anyone under the age of 21 from witnessing an execution – served no safety purpose.
Johnson, 37, has been in prison since Ms Ramey was two years old.
The pair built a bond through visits, phone calls, letters and emails. She brought her newborn son to prison to meet his grandfather last month.
“I’m heartbroken that I won’t be able to be with my dad in his last moments,” Ms Ramey said in a statement, adding that her father had worked hard to rehabilitate himself in prison, and that she was praying for the Missouri governor to grant him clemency.
Russia is running out of all war related products and trying to up their manufacturing rates.
The President of the aggressor state claimed that all the companies that are now working several shifts to meet the needs of the army will serve as a unique impetus to industrial development.I don’t see how that works.
Manufacturing war materials is a cost for the economy, not a benefit.
That ammunition, missiles, tanks, trucks and so on don’t do anything for the average citizen except cost them money through their taxes.
These days they all get sent to Ukraine and destroyed rapidly.
Ukrayinska Pravda
Putin requires increased production for war although plants already working several shifts
Ukrainska Pravda
Fri, November 25, 2022 at 1:31 PM
Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, called on the Russian state corporation Rostech to increase the production and supply of equipment that Russia needs in the war against Ukraine.
Quote: “The production and supply of all categories of the products requested needs to be increased. State targets must be completed strictly and by the deadline.”
“The key task today is to do everything to satisfy all the needs of the Armed Forces…First and foremost of the units that are taking part in the Special Military Operation [the term Russia uses for the war against Ukraine – ed.].”
Details: The President of the aggressor state claimed that all the companies that are now working several shifts to meet the needs of the army will serve as a unique impetus to industrial development.
“Plants in Moscow, St Petersburg, the Urals, Siberia, the Far East – dozens of regions in our country are now working overtime, in several shifts”, he stated.
“Today it is clear that the majority of the armaments produced is for internal use, for the needs of the Armed Forces^, but even in these circumstances we have sold $8 billion worth of armaments on the world markets”, Putin claimed, adding that given the current conditions that is quite a good result.
He states that contracts for even higher sums have been signed.
He also claimed that the experience of counteracting modern Western weapons during the war in Ukraine must be used in order to increase the quality of Russian defence production.
Be thankful you aren’t in Russia or especially a mobilized Russian soldier.
In one of the makeshift mobilization centers, there is an epidemic of some sort of respiratory disease. They are saying it might be Covid-19 which is a good guess.
The local medical personnel don’t seem to have much in the way of medicines or equipment.
Russia’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic was minimal. A vaccine that doesn’t work very well. They didn’t develop any antiviral drugs that we know about.
The number of people who died of Covid-19 in Russia is unknown since they collect statistics like they do everything, i.e. not well.
The common estimate is close to 1 million dead from Covid-19.
1/ Mobilised Russians in Sverdlovsk region are suffering from a mass outbreak of infectious disease, but doctors are unable to treat them due to a lack of equipment and medicine. This is likely the result of overcrowded, insanitary conditions at their training area. ⬇️
2/ The independent Russian SOTA news outlet reports that there has been a mass outbreak of an unknown respiratory illness (possibly COVID) among mobilised men at the Elanskii training area, 129 km east of Yekaterinburg. According to SOTA:
3/ “Local doctors are not provided with the minimum necessary equipment and patients are not provided with medicines.
Thus, doctors ask through volunteers to buy them 3 professional phonendoscopes [a type of stethoscope].
4/ And volunteers collect medicines from a wide list which includes not only the usual cold remedies like nasal drops and throat lozenges, but also analgin, amoxicillin, drotaverine (NO-SPA), lidocaine, etc.
5/ The authorities do not acknowledge and do not comment on the illnesses of the mobilised.”
SOTA notes that the mobilised men are living in extremely crowded conditions, apparently in some kind of sports hall, which has likely contributed to the spread of disease.
6/ This isn’t the first time that health problems have been reported at Elanskii. A mass outbreak of lice among the mobilised was reported in October-November. As one man put it:
7/ “The lice are eating away at me, I’m exhausted. Everyone walks around itching all the time. There are not enough washing facilities as the military camp was not designed for such a large number of people.
2:53 AM · Nov 27, 2022
When people hear the term “hypothermia,” they tend to picture travelers trapped in endless snowdrifts, or huddling on some high ridge of a mountain whipped by raging gales. But it doesn’t take extreme conditions to put people into extreme duress.
Last Tuesday, what should have been a relatively simple hike at Zion National Park by a healthy couple in their early 30’s, turned into tragedy when temperatures dropped and both were incapacitated by hypothermia. One of them died.
A few years ago, three hikers—a father and his two young sons—died within a few miles of my home when they took a wrong turn hiking in the Ozarks and got caught out in a cold rain. It was 65°F (18°C) when they started out, before falling into the 40s. Hypothermia can set in at temperatures well above freezing when conditions are bad. Add wind. Add rain. Add prolonged exposure. Many cases of hypothermia occur at temperatures where people might not even think to reach for a jacket.
But death is only the final act of hypothermia. Well before that last act there is a classic suite of symptoms: exhaustion, confusion, loss of coordination, loss of memory, slurred speech, extreme drowsiness. Put all this together, and it could explain what’s happening with Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.
One of the subjects we’ve returned to over and over since Vladimir Putin launched his illegal invasion of Ukraine is how Russia’s culture of thievery and corruption has left their army short at every point. Whether it’s supposedly amphibious vehicles sinking into rivers because their seals haven’t been serviced, or rows of trucks left idle by rotting tires, funds that were supposed to go to maintaining Russian equipment went into the pocket of some colonel, general, or oligarch. Electronics, and even engines, have been stripped out of tanks.
Many of Russia’s supposed wonder weapons including the Su-57 jet, have been barely present in the fight because Russia has so few operational systems that it doesn’t dare risk them. The T-14 Armata tank, which first rolled out for a Victory Day Parade in 2014, has yet to take the field. Only a handful of T-90 tanks, which started production in 1992, have been seen in Ukraine. T-62 tanks dating from the 1960s, and even T-55 tanks from the 1950s, have been far more common.
That’s all just the big equipment. But the more obvious shortfall of the Russian supply chain isn’t the seen in the aging hardware rolling slowly down the roads. It’s the people standing in the mud.
Freeze Slowly or Burn Quickly: Rashists Burn Fires and Give Out Their Positions
In the Donbass, Russian mobilized soldiers are poorly equipped. To keep warm, they burn bonfires and thus expose their positions to the artillery of the Defense Forces. [Photo at the link of troops in a trench, wearing inadequate uniforms]
It’s not just outdated helmets and summer-weight uniforms that are the issue. Russian forces have been told they need to bring their own sleeping bags. They’ve been making tents out of plastic wrap.
There’s absolutely no doubt that both Russian and Ukrainian forces are existing in miserable conditions, especially on the long established front lines where trench warfare has become unspeakable during the fall mud season. As temperatures in Ukraine drift ever lower, forces on both sides are left dealing with a half-frozen muddy slush, saturated clothing, and days of spitting snow and icy rain. [Tweet and video available at the link]
However, Ukrainian forces seem to be doing an infinitely better job at obtaining what they need to fight under these conditions, as well as creating conditions where people can at least temporarily get out of the freezing mud, to warm up and have a hot meal.
On the other hand, Russia seems to be doing little to assure decent conditions for its troops on the front lines, especially in the area around Bakhmut, where Russia has resorting to throwing a near constant set of human waves at the entrenched Ukrainian positions. (Which is why the Ukrainian military continues to report over 500 Russian deaths a day.)
But in the last couple of weeks, there has been something just … weird. Video after video in which Russian forces barely seem to react to imminent threats. In general, Daily Kos avoids posting images or videos in which people are clearly being killed or severely injured. This is an exception, because it’s not just genuinely odd, it’s an example of a whole class of similar videos. [video at the link]
Ukraine correspondent Tom Warner has the same conclusion after showing this video that we’ve been walking through here—these men are freezing to death. Their body temperatures have lowered to the point where they are so incapable of motion that even a bomb landing in their midst isn’t a reason to stir.
And it’s still November.
Russia keeps making statements about how armies have always made the mistake of attacking Russia in winter as if, somehow, this is a portable defense. But now it’s Russia that is away from home, trying to occupy an area in bitter conditions at the end of overstrained supply lines. They are going to lose so, so many men this winter.
This doesn’t mean that every foolish action by Russians in Ukraine at this point is fueled by hypothermia. They are not. Russia took plenty of boneheaded actions when the weather was warm, and there have even been videos of Russians behaving not too dissimilar to the group above over many months. But there does seem to be a special cluster of WTF going on along the eastern front at the moment, and a bad case of chilled down brains seems as good an explanation as any.
As of late November, Russia seems even more fixed on destroying Ukrainian infrastructure. Those attacks, waged with both missiles and drones, have done billions of dollars in damage and left cities from Kyiv to Lviv in the dark for many hours of the day. However, Ukraine’s other army — the one composed of electricians, carpenters, and construction crews, remains on the job. Many of the damaged substations around Kyiv have now been repaired and the government is expecting increased hours of power over the next week.
Electricity has even been restored to Kherson, where on Saturday the lights went back on in some hospitals and other critical infrastructure. Crews are now working on restoring power to individual homes. Ukraine is even getting assistance from what may be an unexpected source — a member of Russia’s crumbling CSTO alliance.
Azerbaijan will help Ukraine with the supply of equipment for the restoration of power grids, – Ministry of Energy of Azerbaijan
Destroying Ukrainian civilian infrastructure for the express purpose of attempting to freeze the populace into accepting Russian occupation is a war crime. However, that’s not Russia’s biggest problem with this strategy. The biggest problem is that it’s becoming increasingly ineffective.
Even as Russia releases more and more drones / missiles at a time, Ukraine is getting better at shooting them down. Some of that is made possible by new air defense systems that have appeared in Ukrainian cities. Some of it is simply more experience in using existing weapons against the ubiquitous Shahed-136 drone. All of which is leading Russia into what seems like an incredibly desperate measure. That measure can be found in this update from the British MOD. [British update available at the link. To summarize: Russia is cannibalizing nuclear missiles to throw dead weight at Ukraine.]
Go read that again. Russia is taking AS-15 missiles, removing the nuclear warhead, and sticking on a block of something to act as a counterweight to keep the missile flying as designed. Then its throwing this dead weight at Ukraine. It would definitely be unpleasant to be in a house or apartment building hit by one of these things, as that weight on the end is about 410kg (900lbs).
But the biggest reason Russia is launching these is just to put something else in the air. They’re just decoys sent in the hopes that they’ll allow another missile to get through against Ukraine’s constantly improving rate of shoot-downs.
Russia is cannibalizing it’s nuclear arsenal to provide decoys in hopes of taking out electrical substations in Ukraine. That’s pretty amazing.
THESE TANKS ARE NOT ABOUT TO SAVE RUSSIA IN SVATOVE
This video of a column of roughly 40 Russian T-80U tanks has been posted multiple times in the last few days with claims that it is moving “in the direction of Svatove.” However, there’s no reason to think this image is from that area, or even from this year. None of the tanks seems to be marked with a “Z” or any of the other identifying symbols that have been used in this war. The cars that are mingled in the mix either have no plate, or the very wide plate characteristic of the Russian federation. In any case, Russia has already lost at least 89 documented T-80U and another 176 T-80BV tanks since the invasion began. [Tweet and video at the link.]
The Trump Republican Party is giddy about the commencement of the next session of Congress. They managed to get the slimmest of a majority, which entitles them to elect the next House Speaker. Currently GOP minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, is presumed to be in line for that post. However, his ascension isn’t guaranteed because the Republican dumpster fire caucus is being smothered by their uber-rightist flank.
Consequently, McCarthy is taking extraordinary and desperate measures to secure his promotion. Among them is his humiliating condescension to extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and Paul Gosar. He is promising an authoritarian style reign wherein he will try to unilaterally – and without cause – remove Democrats from their committee assignments. It’s a stance that only makes him look weaker and more incompetent than ever.
This week McCarthy floated another proposition that he believes will earn him the support of his party’s loonies. He announced what he plans to do on the first day of his tenure as Speaker, should he get there. And it has nothing to do with inflation, crime, immigration, abortion, or any of the other unpopular initiatives that Republicans campaigned on. But McCarthy’s proposal was met with immediate blowback by Democratic representative Ted Lieu of California. McCarthy stated his intention to stage a transparently exploitative piece of political theater…
McCarthy: On the very first day of the new Republican-led Congress, we will read every single word of the Constitution aloud from the floor of the House—something that hasn’t been done in years.
Lieu: Dear @GOPLeader: I volunteer to read the Insurrection Clause. Also, shouldn’t you and your party be working on passing bills to help the American people?
If McCarthy goes forward with his reading of the Constitution, he’s going to need to decide how to handle the parts that highlight the Republican’s lawlessness and racism. The Insurrection Clause that Lieu referenced seems to apply fittingly to Donald Trump, and many members to the GOP “Freedom” caucus. It says that…
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection [emphasis added] or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
If history is any indication, McCarthy won’t be taking Lieu up on his his offer. The last time the Constitution was read from House floor was in 2011, by the newly elected Tea Party Republicans. They deliberately left out the Insurrection Clause. They all also left out the parts describing the “three-fifths compromise” that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person in the calculation of congressional representation. And they skipped over the language that mandated that “runaway” slaves be “delivered up” to their owners. If those are included this time, who will be the unlucky member who has to read them?
Democrats should not allow such revisionist history to be presented this time around. If McCarthy wants to pay tribute to the Founding Fathers and their work, then the entire record should be on display, warts and all. If Republicans don’t like the fact that the original documents oppressed slaves, women, and anyone that didn’t own property, they should be consoled by the amendments that followed, not by censorship.
What they shouldn’t be doing is editing out the parts of the Constitution that they don’t like because it reflects badly on them and what they are pursuing in the present day. But that’s what McCarthy and his confederates are aiming for. He should know that he’s on the wrong track when even his media mouthpieces on Fox News are criticizing his fecklessness and impotency as a leader.
[…] What’s happened over the last week and especially in response to the Kanye/Fuentes/Trump hoedown illustrates a key feature of the political journalism and news ecosystems.
No, it’s not that the press has turned against Trump. It’s that Republican political elites are not defending him. That changes the tenor of press coverage in clear and immediate ways. If one party is defending something or supporting it, it trips off the framework of ‘bias’ or rather what we might call ‘press bias avoidance’. So such and such happened or so and so did this. Many say it’s bad. But what do their defenders say? Their defenders say X. It’s a story with two sides. Events like the January 6th insurrection and the Big Lie have put this model under strain. But it’s persistent and robust.
The ‘bias’ framework defines bias as not giving equal account to both partisan sides of the story. If one party doesn’t have a side, if they’re collectively sitting this one out, suddenly there’s nothing to balance because there are not two sides. This may sound reductive and cookie-cutterish. Perhaps the two parties shouldn’t shape coverage like this. But this is actually how this works. If one partisan side takes a pass it’s a permissioning moment where the press collectively can simply focus on what happened.
What’s changed is that a handful of factors have come together to make very few Republican elites defend Trump. You might say it’s that the hoedown was just so egregious that it’s indefensible. But that’s clearly not the case. Indefensible has seldom been a problem for Trump. What’s changed is that midterm results suddenly showed Trump to be less dangerous (to Republicans) and less valuable. So there’s both less need to come to his defense and some hope that this might finally be the scandal that rids them of their Trump problem.
You might be saying, Don’t give them too much credit! Basically no prominent Republican has denounced Trump, called on him to apologize or really anything. That’s true. But almost none are defending him and in this context that can actually make the bigger difference. Without one of the two major parties, which serve as custodians of our national political polarization, organizing a defense, suddenly it’s like pushing against an open door. The whole story falls out of the construct of polarization, two sides and that framework of ‘press bias avoidance’. It’s just Holy Crap this person did something inexcusable and awful, let’s find out more about it and keep talking about how awful it is.
Let me stipulate that I don’t think Trump is going anywhere. I think he’s highly likely to be the GOP nominee in 2024 if he runs. It’s hardly like the press is baying for his blood. But there’s a difference […] It’s not a matter of the press turning on him. They weren’t really for him or against him before. It’s this lack of organized partisan support, the existence of which journalists collectively believe they must respect and which profoundly shapes coverage.
Judge Drew Tipton’s order in United States v. Texas is completely lawless. Thus far, the Supreme Court has given him a pass.
In July, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas effectively seized control of parts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency that enforces immigration laws within US borders. Although Judge Drew Tipton’s opinion in United States v. Texas contains a simply astonishing array of legal and factual errors, the Supreme Court has thus far tolerated Tipton’s overreach and permitted his order to remain in effect.
Nearly five months later, the Supreme Court will give the Texas case a full hearing on Tuesday. And there’s a good chance that even this Court, where Republican appointees control two-thirds of the seats, will reverse Tipton’s decision — his opinion is that bad.
The case involves a memo that Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas issued in September 2021, instructing ICE agents to prioritize undocumented immigrants who “pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security and thus threaten America’s well-being” when making arrests or otherwise enforcing immigration law.
A federal statute explicitly states that the homeland security secretary “shall be responsible” for “establishing national immigration enforcement policies and priorities,” and the department issued similar memos setting enforcement priorities in 2005, 2010, 2011, 2014, and 2017.
Nevertheless, the Republican attorneys general of Texas and Louisiana asked Tipton to invalidate Mayorkas’s memo. And Tipton defied the statute permitting Mayorkas to set enforcement priorities — and a whole host of other, well-established legal principles — and declared Mayorkas’s enforcement priorities invalid. This is not the first time that Tipton relied on highly dubious legal reasoning to sabotage the Biden administration’s immigration policies.
In July, shortly after Tipton handed down his decision, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to halt Tipton’s order while this case was still pending, but the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to deny that request — with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett crossing over to vote with the Court’s three liberal justices. That means that, even if the Court does ultimately reject Tipton’s reasoning, his erroneous order will have been in effect for months by the time the Supreme Court strikes it down. […]
But, honestly, listing all of the many errors in Tipton’s omnishambles of an opinion would require me to go on at such length, I fear my readers would lose interest. So I will do all of you the service of stopping here. [snipped a lot, see the main link for the details]
This silliest of seasons is here at last! Ever year at this time, Fox News begins its whine-soaked coverage of the imaginary War on Christmas. The metaphorical shots are fired as soon as a retail employee says “Happy Holidays!” at 4 a.m. on Black Friday or Starbucks serves coffee out of red-and-green cups without overtly wintry designs and inspirational quotes. Nothing is too small to blow out of proportion! Somewhere, there’s a gender non-conforming Santa who’s a bit too jolly for “Fox & Friends.” Let’s not forget all the ways Black people ruin Christmas with our Marxist protests and R&B Santas.
This year, though, they seem off their tiresome game. Maybe it’s the lump of coal Santa left them instead of a Republican Red Wave. Regardless, the less-pleasant Grinches at Fox News are now complaining that President Joe Biden is too full of the Christmas spirit.
Monday, Laura Ingraham, the ghost of segregated Christmases past, said the Bidens had “jumped the gun on Christmas” by having the White House tree delivered before Thanksgiving. This was the same day as Fox News’s own “all-American Christmas tree lighting.” [LOL] (There’s rarely anything about tree lighting to justify the jingoism. It’s not as if the ornaments are made from recycled Bud Light cans.) [Tweets and images at the link]
This isn’t a Biden quirk, though. The White House tree is always delivered before Thanksgiving, so the enslaved elves Democrats smuggle into the country can decorate it over the holiday weekend.
Still, Ingraham and failed insult comic Raymond Arroyo insisted we all take a breath between seasons before decking the halls. Look, Thanksgiving is not a real holiday. It’s just a meal. It doesn’t even have a good song. Thanksgiving is better off accepting its rightful place as a wholly owned subsidiary of Christmas.
Fox News didn’t exactly let viewers savor Thanksgiving, either. Monday, Biden pardoned two turkeys, Chocolate and Chip, while successfully executing some post-midterm humor: “The votes are in,” he proclaimed. “They’ve been counted and verified, no ballot stuffing, no fowl play. The only red wave this season is going to be if German Shepherd Commander knocks over the cranberry sauce.” [LOL]
However, the Fox News coverage of this event reminded everyone that Thanksgiving prices are up, and don’t you dare blame their buddy Vladimir Putin. It’s so bad, the president doesn’t need to pardon turkeys. They could probably skate through the holidays unharmed while Americans settle for pizza topped with slices of deli turkey.
After bashing the Obamas for their supposed communist Christmas ornaments, Fox News spent four years pretending the Trumps were a normal holiday-loving first family. […] Melania Trump committed to her annual holiday decoration task like it was court ordered community service. I could never tell if her nightmare creations were an act of spite or true artistic expression. It’s often a thin line.
And who could forget Melania Trump’s up yours, Christmas rant that her former bestie Stephanie Winston Wolkoff recorded on the sneak?
TRUMP: They say I’m complicit. I’m the same, like him, I support him, I don’t say enough, I don’t do enough, where I am. I’m working like a — my ass off Christmas stuff, that, you know, who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff and decoration? But I need to do it, right? Correct?
WOLKOFF: One hundred percent. You have no choice.
If there is a War on Christmas, Melanie Trump was obviously a draftee, desperately seeking an escape […]
Dr. Jill Biden’s decorations were more traditional and less like the end of The Shining. Yet, Fox News was unified in declaring Dr. Biden’s decorations a “Holiday Bummer,” and complained that mainstream media gushed over her efforts while mocking poor Melania’s Jack Skellington tributes.
Fortunately for the folks at Fox News, they don’t have to worry about internal consistency. They’ll come up with some reason why Joe Biden ruined Christmas for everyone.
Former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Michael Chertoff on Sunday called potential Republican efforts to impeach the agency’s current leader, Alejandro Mayorkas, a “political stunt.”
In an interview with CBS’ “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan, Chertoff, who served under former President George W. Bush, said House Republicans threatening to impeach Mayorkas would be engaging in performative politics, calling any effort to do so a “very sad day.”
“It would basically be putting form over substance to go through a big performance on impeachment that’s never going anywhere,” he said, “rather than actually working with the administration to solve the problem.”
Last week, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) threatened to impeach Mayorkas when the GOP takes control of Congress next month.
Republican lawmakers have been irate with statements Mayorkas has made that the border is under control despite border crossing numbers.
They are also upset about the end of the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which was enacted under the Trump administration and allowed border agents to force migrants to wait in Mexico while asylum claims are heard.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) on Sunday told ABC’s “This Week” that Mayorkas has been “derelict in his responsibility” but they would have to “build a case” to get to impeachment.
Former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, who served under former President Obama and appeared alongside Chertoff on CBS, said the agency handles a wide array of responsibilities including national security and that Mayorkas cannot afford to be deterred by Republican probes.
“We can’t have a secretary who is distracted by a stunt in Congress,” he said.
[…] Chertoff urged Republicans to focus instead on working with the Biden administration to handle the issues at the border.
“Maybe address the standard with respect to asylum, create more resources that are available to adjudicate, and work out additional ways to fund the effort to undermine the cartels and the smugglers,” he said.
ravensays
This is a followup to Lynna’s 426, about Russian soldiers freezing to death in Ukraine.
Strangely enough, winter hasn’t even officially started. Winter Solstice is December 21, 2022.
It gets cold in Ukraine in the winter. The Sea of Azov and the Black Sea sometimes freeze over. Kyiv is pretty far north by our standards, 50 degrees latitude, about the same as Calgary, Alberta.
And it is obvious that the Russian soldiers on the front lines are suffering and dying from hypothermia.
There is all sorts of wrong here. It’s abusive. It’s a crime against humanity. It’s a war crime.
It is also counterproductive.
Why fight and die for a military and a government that cares so little about you that you have to buy your own sleeping bag and make shelters out of plastic wrap in a snow storm?
Needless to say, the Russians are wasting their cannon fodder for more or less nothing.
These soldiers would be far better off surrendering to the first Ukrainian drone that flies by.
They would probably be far better off if they just took their weapons and shot their officers and hoped no one noticed.
Russian Soldiers Are Freezing To Death In Eastern Ukraine
Nov 27, 2022,08:00am EST
David Axe Forbes Staff
I write about ships, planes, tanks, drones, missiles and satellites.
Russians huddle in a trench as a drone bomb explodes among them. VIA SOCIAL MEDIA
The Ukrainian army has deployed some of its best brigades to eastern Ukraine, including the 92nd and 93rd Mechanized Brigades and the 1st Presidential Brigade.
But these elite Ukrainian formations might not be the biggest killer of Russian troops in the east. Under-trained, under-supplied and ambivalently led, Russians in the region are freezing to death by the dozen.
Shocking videos that have circulated online in recent weeks tell a tragic story. The videos, shot by the Ukrainian brigades’ hovering drones, depict Russians in the late stages of hypothermia, so cold and sick that they barely react when the drones drop lethal improvised bombs on them.
Thomas Theiner, an ex-soldier who currently is a filmmaker in Kyiv, predicted winter “would kill more Russian soldiers than Ukraine ever could.” He may have been right.
Winters in Ukraine start wet and cold then get colder and drier. Eastern Ukraine still is in the wet-cold phase—and it’s brutal. Deep mud mires armored vehicles. Daytime temperatures hover around freezing and during the night they dip closer to zero degrees Fahrenheit.
With preparation, sound leadership and reliable logistics, the conditions are survivable. Soldiers bundle up, sleep in roofed, heated trenches with floors, frequently change their wet socks and eat twice as much as they would on warm days. When they get sick, they evacuate to the rear for rest.
The problem for the Russian army is that more and more of its troops are untrained draftees. Officers aren’t leading from the front. And Russian logistics are strained by nonstop Ukrainian bombardment. Starving draftees with no gloves or good boots are huddling in shallow, unheated trenches while their officers squat in abandoned houses potentially miles away, unaware or uncaring as their soldiers succumb to the elements.
When you’re wet, hungry and exposed to the nighttime cold, it doesn’t take long for hypothermia to set in. One bad night is enough. Even moderate hypothermia can cause confusion, decreased reflexes and loss of motor skills in sufferers.
Which explains the drone massacre that’s been playing out lately over contested eastern towns such as Svatove, Pavlivka and Bakhmut. Hypothermic Russian troops aren’t even trying to flee when Ukraine’s bomb-armed quadcopter drones buzz overhead. The soldiers barely flinch when a bomb explodes in their fighting position.
Suicides evidently are on the rise. One especially gut-wrenching video depicts a Russian combatant in scrape outside Bakhmut trying to shoot himself in the chest as a Ukrainian drone watches from directly overhead. The Russian’s ungloved right hand is blue with cold, and he struggles to pull the trigger.
The video feed cuts. When we see the Russian again, he apparently has succeeded in killing himself. He doesn’t move when the drone’s bomb explodes beside him.
It’s hard to say for sure how many Russians have died of the cold. But it’s worth noting that just one Russian marine unit, the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade, reportedly lost as many as 500 killed and 400 wounded in just the last three months fighting around Pavlivka. That’s potentially half the brigade’s original strength.
A nearly one-to-one killed-to-wounded ratio—one to three is normal—speaks to the collapse of Russian leadership … and to the cold. Wounded troops, lying exposed to the elements, are dying before anyone bothers to rescue them.
Expect many, many more Russians to freeze to death as the weather gets worse. As the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C. noted on Saturday, temperatures are forecasted to drop throughout Ukraine over the next week.
whheydtsays
Re: Lynna, OM @ #426…
The Russians attacked Finland in the winter and Finns taught them a rather sharp lesson over it. The Russian army acted on that lesson for the following few years. They appear to have forgotten it in the decades since.
Three stainless steel toddler cups made by the company Green Sprouts contain a lead hazard in the bottom bases of the cups and bottles, according to a recall notice.
Here is an article about the impact of the war on Russia’s villages.
As expected, it isn’t good.
There is already a labor shortage of younger men.
This village doesn’t have a water hauler any more.
My village doesn’t have a water hauler either.
That is because…we have running water and indoor plumbing and this village doesn’t.
The school is barely functioning.
This is also common in Russia. A few decades ago, they decided schools cost too much and stopped funding them very well.
Internet access is sporadic.
At least they have some internet access.
I doubt this village will be much more than a ghost town in another few decades.
We’re Dying Like Flies’: Remote Russian Village Grapples With Shortage Of Men Amid Putin’s War In Ukraine
November 27, 2022 19:22 GMT
By RFE/RL’s Siberia.Realities edited for length
A significant portion of military-age men in the remote village of Bukachacha were mobilized for President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
BUKACHACHA, Russia – Andrei Epov ferries passengers to the small Siberian village of Bukachacha by bus from the nearest major city, the regional capital, Chita.
Set deep in the taiga, the village of 1,200 in Zabaikalsky Krai, in Russia’s Far East, is difficult to reach – and, according to locals, an even more difficult place to live. And Russia’s war on Ukraine, which President Vladimir Putin launched in February and rages on with no end in sight, has only exacerbated the problems for Bukachacha’s residents.
A significant percentage of the village’s military-age men were swept up in the Kremlin’s nationwide mobilization that Putin announced in September, including one man who ran the local bakery and another who delivers water to elderly residents, locals say.
“The authorities forgot about Bukachacha. They remembered it only now, during the mobilization,” Epov says in between calls he fields from people seeking to book a seat on his bus.
RFE/RL’s Siberia.Realities traveled to see firsthand the impact of Putin’s war and mobilization on remote villages like Bukachacha, where Soviet-era factories have long since closed and career prospects for young people lie mostly in coal mining.
Epov drew a comparison between Bukachacha and the eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which was captured by Russian forces following a brutal siege that left the city in ruins.
“[Life] in Bukachacha is like after a war,” Epov says. “There’s just one difference: They’ll rebuild Mariupol, whereas we lived in ruins and will continue to do so.”
‘Taken Away’
In the weeks following Putin’s military mobilization, news emerged from Bukachacha that a local man who had delivered water to village residents, including the elderly, had been enlisted for Russia’s war on Ukraine.
That was confirmed by a local official, Viktor Nadelyayev, who told the news portal Chita.ru that “the drivers we had have been taken away” in the mobilization.
That has left the elderly in Bukachacha, like Natalya, to haul buckets of water from a well up to several kilometers back home by foot.
“It’s still winter, and we have no street cleaners, so it is icy. It’s not easy to haul buckets,” says Natalya, who spoke on condition that only her first name be used.
She says the locals tried to find a replacement but that the candidates turned out to be either alcoholics or fellow pensioners.
“You can negotiate with private individuals and they will bring water – 150 rubles ($2.50) per barrel. But where do we get that kind of money?” says Natalya, who worked at a local store before retiring.
She takes a dim view of protesting or making demands that water be delivered to homes, calling such grassroots pushback largely pointless and “frightening.”
In Bukachacha, women and pensioners like Natalya were left behind after Putin’s mobilization.
Pro-war graffiti – the Latin letters ‘Z’ and ‘V’ that Kremlin loyalists have adopted as patriotic symbols of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – adorns the school bus stop in Bukachacha.
“See how patriotic we are?” Galina, a local resident who also spoke on condition that only her first name be used, says with a laugh. “And nobody mentions the fact that the stop has not been used for more than a year. Earlier, it was intended for a school bus. Now, we do not have a driver.”
Around 200 pupils are enrolled at the local school in Bukachacha. History teacher Yelena Gritsko says the school’s graduates include many talented students who win prizes in a range of competitions.
But the school suffers from an acute lack of financing and resources, Gritsko says.
“Our physical education teacher buys balls at his own expense…. Most of the computers are obsolete and out of order.… And most importantly, we have no Internet. There is almost no mobile communication in the village, and the Internet is only available at night – and not always,” she says.
The lack of reliable Internet has made it difficult to comply with mandatory curriculum, Gritsko says, including new requirements on how to teach about the war in Ukraine, which the Kremlin euphemistically calls a “special military operation.”
Half of the computers in Bukachachi’s school don’t work.
“You have to work according to special manuals that must be downloaded on a weekly basis. These are games, lesson plans. Sometimes you can download them, sometimes not,” she says.
Several years ago, Vladislav Akhmadulin took over the bakery from his mother, Tatyana Akhmadulina, and his father, who had opened it some two decades earlier.
“Baking is my life’s work,” Akhmadulina says. “But soon I may have to close the bakery. True, then the village will be left without bread. And it is already physically difficult for me, and it is not known whether my son will return from Ukraine.”
She says her son purchased his supplies for his deployment at his own expense, “even the spare parts for an armored personnel carrier!”
“He says they don’t give anything government-issue there,” Akhmadulina says.
As the couple speaks with a reporter, Nikolai tosses coal into the stove.
“Do you know what happened to the coal?” Nadezhda asks. “The families of the mobilized men were given wood or coal. We were told that we were not entitled to anything, that we are not entitled to assistance from the authorities. Because, you see, [Aleksandr] was drafted by the military enlistment office in Vladivostok. We told the administration: ‘But he is registered in Bukachacha.’ And they pretend like they don’t even hear us.”
‘We Are Dying Like Flies’
There are two cemeteries in Bukachacha. Andrei, a local retiree, gives a tour of one of them, deep in the woods, which features a memorial for Japanese soldiers who had been buried there.
Around two decades ago, Andrei says, descendants of those Japanese soldiers came to the area to repatriate the remains of their ancestors.
“We dug out the remains, and the Japanese took them home. We were paid with dollars for our work back then,” Andrei says.
The other cemetery in Bukachacha had been filling up fast, Andrei says, even before Putin launched his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February.
“Because of the coal mining in our area, the place is, shall we say, not for living. We’re already dying like flies without war,” Andrei says. “And soon we will have to bury the young — the ones that will be brought from Ukraine. Look, they’ve already prepared a plot of land for new burials.”
Andrei gestures to the snow-covered cemetery grounds.
“They said that if there’s not enough space, they will allocate more.”
Adapted from the original Russian by RFE/RL’s Carl Schreck.
KGsays
It’s that Republican political elites are not defending him. That changes the tenor of press coverage in clear and immediate ways. If one party is defending something or supporting it, it trips off the framework of ‘bias’ or rather what we might call ‘press bias avoidance’. So such and such happened or so and so did this. Many say it’s bad. But what do their defenders say? Their defenders say X. It’s a story with two sides. Events like the January 6th insurrection and the Big Lie have put this model under strain. But it’s persistent and robust.
The ‘bias’ framework defines bias as not giving equal account to both partisan sides of the story. If one party doesn’t have a side, if they’re collectively sitting this one out, suddenly there’s nothing to balance because there are not two sides. This may sound reductive and cookie-cutterish. Perhaps the two parties shouldn’t shape coverage like this. But this is actually how this works. – Josh Marshall quoted by Lynna, OM@429
Marshall draws attention to something I’ve commented on occasionally on Pharyngula: the way the Republican and Democratic parties, long before the advent of Trump or even Reagan, had insinuated themselves into the USA’s de facto constitution – that is, those features of the political system that are not part of the written constitution, but which look just as hard to change, and which an outsider might well think belong to it. No, of course “the two parties shouldn’t shape coverage like this”. It shouldn’t be assumed that there are only (at most) two sides to a political issue (only one if the two parties agree, as is still the case with for example American exceptionalism and specifically the assumed role of the USA as a global exemplar of democracy, the evil of socialism, support for Israel…). Of course it’s not true, as some here allege, that the two big parties are indistinguishable – currently, one is fascist and the other is not – but the assumption that they are permanent, so that effective choice of government is and always will be limited to one or the other, means that calling the USA a democracy is at best an often-misleading approximation. No other country with a pluralist political system, AFAIK, has the same degree of two-party dominance, reinforced as it is by the nature of the electoral system, the MSM, and the huge role played by big-money donors and lobbyists.
After sharing the “antifa” list with their thousands of rabid fans, the Western Chauvinist re-shared a post from another neo-Nazi which boasted about a bot automated to make mass false reports against every profile in the list— a clear and direct abuse of the Twitter report system. The goal here is to purge anyone from Twitter who is against fascism and white supremacy. As you can see, the bot can move faster than any human being can.
The budget carrier last weekend completed its transition to online, mobile and text support, which enables it to ensure that customers get “the information they need as expeditiously and efficiently as possible,” spokeswoman Jennifer de la Cruz told CNBC in an e-mailed statement.
raven @433 and whheydt @434, yes, additional details clarify the situation. It is so bad. Putin is sending conscripted soldiers to die in the cold. We shouldn’t even be calling them “soldiers” perhaps. They aren’t trained, they aren’t properly equipped. They are more like victims than soldiers.
Apparently, this horror will continue until Putin has no one else to send to the front lines.
Photo of the pitiful and sad event is available at the link.
What if you held a protest and no one but kooks showed up? Well, it might look a little like what happened outside the Arizona state capitol on Friday.
On the heels of Donald Trump’s super-low-energy “Puppet Show and Campaign Launch” event, the sight of this phlegmatic phalanx stirs hope that MAGA is fixing to Thelma & Louise off a cliff […] long after anyone had any interest in chasing them. I’ve seen more people spontaneously gather in parking lots to watch two squirrels fight over a Twizzler. […]
In other words, the big #AZRevote protest that was supposed to add rocket fuel to Kari Lake’s own “stop the steal” efforts was nothing but a sore loser soiree that might have been sparsely attended if only a few more people had shown up. [Good. That’s appropriate.]
Newsweek:
Lake has refused to concede in what she claims was a “botched” election, and has filed a number of lawsuits in a bid to overturn the result.
Her supporters organized a protest outside the state capitol at 9 a.m. MST, claiming “hundreds of patriot groups” would unite to “protest the uncertifiable results.”
However, video from the scene, in a tweet by Ron Filipkowski, showed no more than 50 people turned up, including one man waving a large Confederate battle-standard. [OMFG]
Gee, might Americans […] be a little tired of all this “stolen election” nonsense?
It would appear so.
Get a load of this, for instance:
Organizer of protest Joe Oltmann, outside AZ Capitol demanding a revote on Dec 6, asked them about Trump’s post yesterday: “What did he tweet out? ‘Give me freedom or give me death.’ Who here is committed to staying until they revote? (No response) I’ll be here by myself” then. [video at the link]
[…] Of course, if you thought that was pathetic, you’re going to shoot milk out of your nose after seeing this—even if you’re not currently drinking milk. That’s how bad it is.
Here was professional elections grifter David Clements scolding the crowd for not being bigger:
Headliner Dave Clements arrives at the rally demanding a new election outside the AZ Capitol, and is not happy with the turnout: “We’re so fat and comfortable shopping! If you’ve got friends – and I don’t have many left – get them, bring them here.” [video at the link]
CLEMENTS:
“Are you willing to do it, that’s the question? I’m not even from Arizona, for crying out loud. I left my three kids and my wife. We’re staying here until you get a new election. It’s that simple. Brazil’s teaching us Americans on how to do this, folks. It’s almost been 30 days and they have 3 million people outside, and because we’re so fat and comfortable, shopping. … But they’re not scared of you because they’re not scared of this. We haven’t done enough, so dig in, dig in, dig in. This is just the beginning, folks. This is just the beginning. So if you’ve got friends—I don’t have many left—but if you’ve got them, get them. Bring them here. … So let’s just keep this energy going.”
Keep this energy going? Is that even possible? […] Is there any energy to build on?
Of course, the Arizona GOP ran a slate of election deniers who could have warped the state’s elections for decades to come, but they didn’t fare well. Lake, secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, and Senate candidate Blake Masters all lost, while attorney general hopeful Abe Hamadeh’s race is likely headed to a recount, with Hamadeh currently trailing his Democratic opponent by around 500 votes. In fact, all across the country, election deniers did poorly. Meaning American democracy might still have a fighting chance after all.
Yes, even in Arizona. […]
Kari Lake never did show up at that non-event. I can smell the desperation from here.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian (support them if you can!) Ukraine liveblog. From there:
Fighting in Ukraine descends into trench warfare as Russia looks to break through
Fighting around the key eastern Ukraine town of Bakhmut has descended into a bloody morass with hundreds of dead and injured reported daily, as neither Russian or Ukrainian forces were able to make a significant breakthrough after months of fighting.
As Russia moved fresh formations to the area in recent weeks, including reinforcements previously in the Kherson region, the fighting in the Bakhmut sector has descended into trench warfare reminiscent of the first world war.
Over the weekend, images emerged of Ukrainian soldiers in flooded, muddy trenches and battlefields dotted with the stumps of trees cut down by withering artillery barrages.
Heavy fighting continued on Monday around Soledar, with mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner private military corporation – which includes pardoned convicts – in the forefront.
Ukraine’s presidential office said on Monday that at least four civilians had been killed and 11 others wounded in the latest Russian attacks. It said intense fighting was continuing along the frontline in the east, with the Russians shelling Bakhmut and Toretsk at the epicentre of the fighting.
“People are sheltering in the basements, many of which are filled by water,” said the governor of Donetsk, Pavlo Kyrylenko.
They have been living in catastrophic conditions without power or heating.
The focus of much of the recent fighting, however, has been the now-shattered town of Bakhmut itself, largely abandoned by its 70,000 residents, with both sides sending reinforcements for a battle that has continued relentlessly since the summer as Moscow has sought to secure a victory after a series of battlefield setbacks and retreats.
Stoltenberg: We need to be prepared for more attacks on Ukraine
Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has warned that Russia will probably continue to attack Ukraine’s power grid, gas infrastructure and basic services….
From their latest summary:
Russian forces are continuing to shell residential infrastructure and housing in the recently liberated city of Kherson, according to Ukraine’s military. In its latest update, the US thinktank the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said Russian troops were digging trenches and fortifying their positions in preparation for a possible Ukrainian counteroffensive in eastern Kherson.
Russians are sporadically shelling cities with no apparent strategic aim other than to cause casualties. The Guardian visited a residential district in Dnipro, where a series of houses were destroyed by a fragmentation warhead, designed to inflict maximum casualties, which had landed on Saturday.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has claimed Russia will soon launch a series of new missile strikes on his country, warning his defence forces and citizens to prepare for the attack. He gave the ominous caution in his Sunday evening address.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office has said 329 children are currently considered missing in Ukraine, while 12,034 have been deported to Russia. According to the Ukrainian government’s children of war portal, 440 children have been killed as a result of Russia’s war and 851 children are now reported as injured.
Russia has “unilaterally postponed” talks with the US aimed at resuming nuclear weapons inspections in Cairo this week, a US state department spokesperson confirmed. Talks between US and Russian officials were scheduled to begin tomorrow. The Russian foreign ministry confirmed in a statement that talks would no longer take place this week.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant remains under Russian control, the Russia-installed administration of the occupied city of Enerhodar, home to the facility, has said. The announcement comes after the head of Ukraine’s state-run nuclear energy firm suggested that there were signs that Russian forces might be preparing to leave the occupied plant. The Kremlin has denied the reports.
Foreign ministers of Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden are in Kyiv today to show support for Ukraine.…
The US has put forward a “significant” proposal for a deal to free the jailed basketball star Brittney Griner and former marine Paul Whelan, the chargée d’affaires of the US mission to Russia, Elizabeth Rood, said. She told Russia’s state-owned RIA news agency that Moscow had not provided a “serious response” to any of its proposals.
The Pentagon is considering a Boeing proposal to supply Ukraine with cheap, small precision bombs fitted on to abundantly available rockets, allowing Kyiv to strike far behind Russian lines, according to a Reuters report. US and allied military inventories are shrinking, and Ukraine faces an increasing need for more sophisticated weapons as the war drags on.
The head of Ukraine’s state-run nuclear energy firm said on Sunday there were signs that Russian forces might be preparing to leave the vast Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant which they seized in March soon after their invasion. “One gets the impression they’re packing their bags and stealing everything they can,” Petro Kotin, head of Energoatom, said on national television.
The UK Ministry of Defence has confirmed that as part of its aid package, the UK has provided Brimstone 2 missiles, a precision-guided missile, to the Ukrainian armed forces. “This aid has played a crucial role in stalling Russian advancements,” it said.
The Belgian prime minister, Alexander De Croo, was on the second day of an unannounced visit to Ukraine on Sunday. Accompanied by the Belgian foreign minister, Hadja Lahbib, De Croo used the visit to announce additional Belgian support of around €37.4m.
Russian forces have suffered heavy casualties during fighting in Ukraine’s south-central Donetsk province and are unlikely to achieve a breakthrough there, the UK Ministry of Defence says.
Ukrainian authorities are gradually restoring power, aided by the reconnection of the country’s four nuclear plants, but millions of people are still without heat or electricity after the most devastating Russian airstrikes of the war. [That must be such a difficult situation! Meanwhile, I get to return to my warm house after shoveling snow.]
Russia kept up its onslaught on Ukrainian cities on Saturday with an attack on Dnipro which injured six people and destroyed seven houses, said the regional governor, Valentyn Reznichenko.
Thirty-two civilians have been killed in Kherson since 9 November, when Russian forces withdrew from the southern city they had occupied for eight months, the Kyiv Independent quoted Ukraine’s national police chief, Ihor Klymenko, as saying. Since then, Russian troops have shelled Kherson frequently.
Ukraine accused the Kremlin of reviving the “genocidal” tactics of Joseph Stalin as Kyiv commemorated a Soviet-era famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the winter of 1932-33.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy hosted a summit in Kyiv with allied nations on Saturday to launch a “grain from Ukraine” initiative to export $150m worth of grain to countries most vulnerable to famine and drought. Up to 60 Ukrainian grain ships could be sent by the middle of next year to some of the world’s poorest countries in Africa, the Ukrainian president has said in a statement released to the Guardian.
Chinese police have barricaded a street in Shanghai where protesters have gathered for the last two nights in anticipation of further rallies against the government’s rigid zero-Covid policies.
Since Friday, a wave of protests has spread across multiple cities in China, prompted by the death of 10 people in a building fire in Urumqi in Xinjiang. Much of the region had been under lockdown for more than three months, and people blamed the lockdown for the deaths.
Gatherings held to protest or to mourn the victims were held in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and other major Chinese cities on Saturday and Sunday, as well as dozens of university campuses, with some police clashes and detentions in Shanghai.
Protesters demanded an end to lockdowns, while some groups decried censorship and called for democracy and an end to the rule of Xi Jinping. Most protests were peaceful. There were some clashes with police in Shanghai, and protesters in Wuhan pushed over pandemic barriers.
On Monday, authorities erected large blue barriers along Shanghai’s Middle Urumqi Road, where protesters had gathered on Saturday and Sunday. There was a heavy police presence according to people nearby and footage shared online, in an apparent effort to prevent further protests. Edward Lawrence, a BBC journalist who was allegedly detained and beaten by police on Sunday, filmed bystanders having their photos forcibly deleted by police on Monday.
At Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University, where large protests were held on Sunday, school authorities on Monday announced a student symposium on the pandemic, and a free bus to help students get home early for the holidays. The announcement was greeted with some scepticism, given the term is not over yet.
“The school is afraid that passionate youths will make trouble, so the students are given an early holiday.” said one Weibo online commenter. “They are afraid of the student movement,” said another.
Protesters march along a street.
The extraordinary acts of civil disobedience – which observers have said are the most significant protests seen in China for decades – have demonstrated a growing frustration and scepticism with the ruling Communist party’s commitment to zero-Covid. A series of incidents related to the enforcement of the policy, including a bus crash that killed 27 people being taken to quarantine, and numerous suicides and other deaths linked to lockdowns and restrictions, have tested people’s tolerance. Last Thursday’s fire appears to have been a final straw for many.
…
Many protests have heard demands for democracy and rule of law, as well as press freedom and an end to online censorship. There have also been chants echoing the slogans displayed by the Beijing Sitong bridge protester on the eve of last month’s Communist party congress political meeting.
In video showing a crowd that had gathered on Wuyuan Road in Shanghai’s Xuhui district, people cheer and clap as a woman’s voice shouts out: “We want respect, not lies. We want reform, not a cultural revolution. We want a vote, not a leader. We want to be citizens, not slaves.”
…
Online discussion of the protests has been strictly censored, particularly on social media platforms such as Weibo, but information and evidence of the protests are still being shared on more private channels such as WeChat….
Twitter has been flooded with nuisance posts designed to obscure news of the coronavirus lockdown protests in China, in an apparent state-directed attempt to suppress footage of the demonstrations.
Chinese bot accounts – not operated by humans – are being used to flood the social networking service with adverts for sex workers, pornography and gambling when users search for a major city in the country, such as Shanghai or Beijing, using Chinese script.
Alex Stamos, director at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said the Chinese activity indicated the “first major failure” to stop government interference under Twitter’s ownership by Elon Musk. He added that the actions appeared to be designed to limit international observation of the protests as access to Twitter is blocked inside China.
The apparent manipulation of Twitter by Chinese government sources, first reported by the Washington Post, follows widespread job cuts at Twitter, including among members of Twitter’s trust and safety team….
Chinese state television has censored World Cup games to remove shots of maskless crowds after the sight of joyous fans celebrating in packed stadiums stoked anger back home, where hundreds of millions remain under strict pandemic restrictions.
A well-attended opening ceremony in Qatar – with no social distancing – led to users of Chinese social media platforms complaining that it contrasted with the severe isolation they felt under President Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy.
Chinese netizens said it was “weird” to see hundreds of thousands of people gathering in a carnival-like atmosphere while they were still forced to live under a draconian system that most other countries have long abandoned….
This week, according to a Dear Colleagues memo from House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, the House is set to take up two pretty great criminal justice related bills aimed at making our carceral and post-carceral situations slightly less horrifying.
The first bill, H.R. 3372, the One Stop Community Reentry Program Act, was introduced by California Democratic Rep. Karen Bass and would authorize the Department of Justice to provide grants to community-based nonprofits that wish to create reentry programs and provide other resources for formerly incarcerated people. These things are kind of important, since it’s probably a bad idea to just let people out of prison with no ability to survive on the outside. [Yes, just please be careful. Don’t give all those grants to religious fanatics.]
These reentry programs help formerly incarcerated people find jobs, housing, mentorship and skill-training, and get support for mental health and substance abuse issues. Research has repeatedly shown that they have had a positive impact on the reentry experience.
Over 600,000 people are released from prison each year, and about half of those people will not be able to find employment. This is bad, since we know that those who do find employment are far less likely to reoffend. With the way we currently do things, a quarter of those people end up back in prison within a year, and three quarters end up back there within three years. Given this, it seems fairly obvious that ensuring successful reentry into society would be a far more efficient use of our money than just cleaning up the mess afterwards when reentry does not go well.
The bill would also authorize the DOJ “to make grants for states, Indian tribes, and local governments to operate reentry services assistance hotlines,” which also seems like a better use for our tax money than prisons.
Yet, as obviously helpful as this common sense bill would be, there are only 19 co-sponsors (13 Democrats and six Republicans).
The second bill, H.R. 6878, the Pregnant Women in Custody Act, was also introduced by Karen Bass. Yay, Karen Bass! This bill would improve the objectively horrifying treatment of incarcerated pregnant people in the United States prison system and end the barbaric practice of shackling them while they are in labor. This bill has 36 sponsors (33 Democrats, three Republicans).
[…] The bill would create a standard of care for pregnant inmates and their babies, including prenatal and post-delivery care, which currently does not exist, and which would:
– Limit the use of restrictive housing on federal prisoners who are pregnant or who have given birth within the last eight weeks.
– Establish minimum standards for healthcare for pregnant women, fetuses, and newborns in federal custody, and require the DOJ to develop training programs and guidelines for federal correctional officers and US marshals, in consultation with healthcare professionals.
– Require prenatal education, counseling, and birth support services be provided by a qualified trainer.
– Require appropriate evaluations such as screening for substance use disorders or mental health conditions related to pregnancy, birth, or postpartum.
– Require screening and appropriate care for high-risk pregnancies.
– Require reporting on the use of restraints and restrictive housing on any incarcerated individual while pregnant, in labor, or recovering from childbirth to the agency director. Each year, a summary of these reports must be submitted by the agency director to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees
[…] One would think that, given their great love of babies and birth-giving, Republicans would be all over this, but yet again, only three of them have signed on. Hell, one might even think that Ms. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a known fan of fetal Americans, and whose heart has just been breaking all over the place over the suffering of the January 6 prisoners, would be interested. But no. Guess she only cares about the suffering of prisoners who share her political beliefs.
Both bills have been given a two percent chance of passing by Skopos Labs. Hopefully we can do better than that […]
whheydtsays
Perhaps a little out of th ordinary for most people here, but a giant in the computing field has died…
RIP Fred ‘Mythical Man-Month’ Brooks: IBM guru of software project management
10 comment bubble on white
Turing Award winner who helped spread the eight-bit byte
icon
Liam Proven
Mon 28 Nov 2022 // 16:30 UTC
Obit Dr Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr, leader of IBM’s OS/360 project and the man chiefly responsible for the prevalence of the eight-bit byte, has died at the age of 91.
Fred Brooks was the project lead for OS/360, IBM’s flagship OS for its vastly influential S/360 line of computers. His experience on this project led him to write probably the most famous book about project management, The Mythical Man-Month. From that book came several famous dictums about computing. Some notable examples include:
“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
“The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”
“All programmers are optimists.”
There are quite a few pages of Fred Brooks quotations, with good reason – you will probably recognize several of them. For instance, he originated (PDF) the use of the word “architecture” to describe computer design, as well as coining the phrase “second-system effect”.
In 1999, he won the Turing award for “landmark contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering.”
In 2010, WIRED magazine asked him what he felt was his greatest technological achievement. His response was:
The most important single decision I ever made was to change the IBM 360 series from a 6-bit byte to an 8-bit byte, thereby enabling the use of lowercase letters. That change propagated everywhere.
As the Reg has noted before, though, the software industry as a whole has failed to learn what Brooks found and taught.
IBM hired Brooks to direct the OS/360 project because it was running late, although his previous project, the IBM 8000, had failed. Brooks attempted to resign, but this was rebuffed by IBM CEO Thomas J Watson Jr, who said:
I just spent a billion dollars educating you; I’m not letting you go now!
Under Brooks’ direction, OS/360 did finally ship. It changed the direction of the computer industry, introducing the idea of software compatibility across different hardware models. The S/360 range were also the machines on and for which the hypervisor was invented.
Brooks then quit IBM to found the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina. After writing The Mythical Man-Month (PDF), he went on to write and co-author multiple other books including The Design of Design and papers including No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accident in Software Engineering (PDF).
He has been called “a giant of computer science”, a sentiment echoed by one of his students, Professor Steven Bellovin, the co-inventor of USENET and encrypted password exchange.
As his family’s obituary to him notes, he was a committed evangelical Christian. He suffered a stroke in 2020, after which his health declined. He leaves his wife of 66 years Nancy, three children, nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
®
An article from 2019 that caught some media buzz – including from the New York Times – for its analysis of political speeches now bears an expression of concern that’s almost as long as the original paper.
In “Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate: Analyzing complexity and ideology in 381,609 political speeches,” published in PLOS ONE, the authors concluded that “speakers from culturally liberal parties use more complex language than speakers from culturally conservative parties,” as they stated in their abstract.
But after reading the article, Joe McVeigh, a linguistics professor at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, wrote an online comment on the article detailing “several fundamental and critical flaws in its methodology.” A key issue: applying the Flesh-Kincaid test, which was developed for assessing the readability of a written text, to political speeches. As McVeigh told us:
The F-K test is an outdated and inefficient test that was developed for a different style of written language than the one the authors apply it to. It should not be applied to spoken language.
Dr Sood explained that the project concerned “an incipient subfield of global history…currently populated by a very small number of scholars who are very largely male”, so this might not be possible.
I’m now super curious about what subfield this is.
Went back to the exact same place where protests were in Beijing last night in Liangmaqiao. Totally quiet. Instead, entire street of police vans.
This is a police state w/ far-reaching security/surveillance. No social media that allows people to easily mobilize and gather either
The families of Iran’s World Cup soccer team have been threatened with imprisonment and torture if the players fail to “behave” ahead of the match against the USA on Tuesday, a source involved in the security of the games tells @kileycnn
The source, who is closely monitoring Iran’s security agencies operating in Qatar over the World Cup period, said that dozens of officers from the IRGC had been drafted in to monitor the Iranian players who are not allowed to mingle outside the squad or meet with foreigners.
Meanwhile in Russia: the host and his guest concur that Ukraine should be erased off the map and even the memory that it existed should be destroyed. The host says that Russia will always be an empire and being in a state of war is only natural for any empire of Russia’s size….
Chant by students protesting the suspension of 4 professors accused of supporting #IranRevolution at the College of Literature and Humanities, Beheshti University, Tehran….”
The advice of an astrologer to a 54-year-old man from Gobichettipalayam in Erode district to get rid of his nightmare turned disastrous when his tongue was bitten by a Russell’s viper
It’s a popular refrain: Why doesn’t the West supply Ukraine with “X,” where X are advanced weapons platforms like NATO battle tanks, advanced infantry fighting vehicles, Patriot and other air defenses, and fighter jets. Some will darkly mutter that NATO doesn’t want Ukraine to win, that the West prefers Russia to bleed out slowly, that Putin is being protected, etc.
Yet the real answer is the same answer I’ve been giving since the first weeks of the war—operating such gear might not be too hard, but maintaining it is a monumental challenge for Western armies. For Ukraine, dealing with myriad new weapons systems in the middle of a brutal war? Impossible.
Take the M777, a basic piece of military equipment. [image at the link] This is a simple weapons system. No wheels or tracks. Has to be towed. Electronics are basic and modular (not deeply integrated into the howitzer, but snap on externally to help aim better). There is no automation. The howitzer is manually aimed by turning wheels and pulleys. It is the military equivalent of a bicycle. And yet, as The New York Times has found, Ukraine is struggling to maintain these pieces.
A third of the roughly 350 Western-made howitzers donated to Kyiv are out of action at any given time, according to U.S. defense officials and others familiar with Ukraine’s defense needs.
To stress, that’s over 115 of those howitzers out of order at any given time. And it gets worse—since Ukraine doesn’t have the expertise and logistical chain to maintain them, they have to be shipped out of the country to facilities in Poland, Slovakia, and Romania to be serviced. Just think about how inefficient that is.
The same is happening with Germany’s highly touted PzH 2000 self-propelled artillery guns. At one point, it was rumored that all of those guns Germany had given Ukraine were down for servicing. Same with Polish Krabs, etc.
What about MLRS? The New York Times is wrong about this:
The Western artillery weapons provided to Ukraine, in the form of rocket launchers and howitzers, have sharply different maintenance needs. Of the former, HIMARS vehicles need little work to keep firing their ammunition, which is contained in pods of pre-loaded tubes.
I wrote this a while back:
I joined my MLRS unit, A/76 Field Artillery, 3rd Infantry Division, in 1989. This was just six years after the M270 first entered service in 1983. And even then, all of them relatively new, keeping our battery’s nine M270s all up and running at the same time was impossible. They were perpetually broken down—both the drivetrain and the mechanism which swivels the launcher around. I can’t speak to the exact problems with the machinery, but as fire direction, it was my job to send mechanics to a launcher every time it broke down, and I’m not kidding when I say that, out of nine launchers in the battery, three of them were typically out of commission at any given time.
Perhaps that’s why we see so few videos of Ukraine’s M270s in action. They’re likely broken down, maybe even shuttled back to Germany for repair. HIMARS may or may not be more reliable (wheels instead of tracks undoubtedly helps), but the reason Ukraine wanted more launchers wasn’t the ability to hit more targets—the bottleneck is ammunition, not launchers—but having functioning launchers becomes a challenge when a significant number of them are down and being sent back to third countries for maintenance. HIMARS’ electronics and hydraulic swivel system inevitably break down in peacetime conditions, exponentially so in combat conditions.
Remember, the M777 is like a bicycle. That means an F16 fighter jet or M1 Abrams (with its jet turbine engine) are like a Ferrari. If Ukraine is struggling to maintain a simple towed howitzer, how is it going to maintain infinitely more complex Western battle tanks, fighter jets, or Patriot air defense systems (where the basic training for its maintenance crews is over a year)?
Again, the problem isn’t training fighter pilots, tank crew members, and air defense operators. That stuff is easy and can be managed in weeks or a few months. Maintenance is the real challenge, and will continue to be Ukraine’s biggest headache no matter how much people want to claim that Ukraine is “motivated,” “resourceful,” “scrappy,” and other adjectives suggesting Ukraine can simply “figure it out.” Meanwhile, back in the real world, they still haven’t figured out the M777 nine months in.
None of this is meant to cast aspersions on Ukraine and what they’ve been able to accomplish. It’s just that even they aren’t immune to reality, and the monumental challenges of maintaining any modern complex weapons system, and especially so a brand-new one for them.
In another New York Times article, we have this whopper:
To shell Russian positions at Snake Island, for instance, the Ukrainians put Caesars, with a 40-kilometer range, on barges and towed them out 10 kilometers to hit the island, which was 50 kilometers away, astonishing the French.
LOL that’s not a thing that happened. The author doesn’t even bother trying to source that.
The Caesar has a 42-kilometer range. Now look at what is within 42 kilometers of Snake Island: [map at the link]
Snake Island is well within range of the Caesar on the Ukrainian mainland. And while that part of Ukraine is marshland, extended-range Caesar rounds can hit out to 50 kilometers, which is roughly the distance to that little town of Vylkove at the edge of the swamps on the Romanian border.
So what do you think is more likely: that Ukraine placed one of its most prized artillery assets on a floating barge and towed it onto Russian-controlled waters, where an unstable platform would render it half as accurate as normal, or … they just drove the darn thing to the tip of the Ukrainian mainland and accurately shelled the island?
I wrote a big-picture overview on Friday of the state of the current front lines. [map at the link] What was five original axes is down to one: the Donbas, where there are five active lines of advance. Ukraine is pushing forward in Svatove and Kreminna directions, while Russia is pushing forward in Bakhmut, Adviivka, and Vuhledar directions. Read that update for more details.
Compare the map above with today’s heat map of Russian shellings: [map at the link]
It’s a big front, but we’re down to a one-front war, at least until Ukraine decides to push south toward Meltipol, Mariupol, and/or Crimea.
In case you missed it (it was a holiday weekend after all), this story will help orient you for the coming coverage in the weeks and months ahead.
Some 5,000 Ukrainian women serving in combat roles, 101 were killed in action, about 100 wounded, some 50 missing during all-out war – Defense Minister
In total, 59,786 women are serving in Ukraine’s Armed Forces. Of those, about 41,000 are military.
[Photo at the link. They look good—good and deadly.]
“Why doesn’t the West provide Ukraine with long-range rockets like ATACMS.” Okay, that refrain I agree with. Better munitions for Ukraine’s existing weapon’s platforms for sure, please.
ravensays
Another crypto firm files for bankruptcy.
No surprise.
They were tied in to FTX and when crypto fell and FTX fell, they were in big trouble.
BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout ripples through crypto industry
David Hollerith·Senior Reporter
Mon, November 28, 2022 at 11:09 AM
BlockFi, a crypto loan and borrow platform, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday, becoming the latest crypto firm to go under following the rapid collapse of offshore trading venue FTX.
Started in 2017 by Zac Prince and Flori Marquez, BlockFi was one among several crypto companies to introduce lending and borrowing where customers could use cryptocurrencies as collateral.
The practice spelt the end of competitor firms Voyager Digital and Celsius Network earlier this summer as crypto prices plunged. BlockFi faced similar financial woes over the summer, but received an emergency bailout in the form of a $250 million line of credit from FTX, which contained the option for FTX to buy the firm a year later.
“With the collapse of FTX, the BlockFi management team and board of directors immediately took action to protect clients and the Company,” Mark Renzi of Berkley Research Group said in the company’s announcement.
whheydtsays
Re: raven @ #466…
I wonder if David Hollerith is related to Herman.
NEW: A federal judge rejected Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity against a lawsuit accusing him and the RNC of conspiring to disenfranchise voters, esp. voters of color, in the aftermath of the 2020 election
Judge Emmet Sullivan: “If Former President Trump disrupted the certification of the electoral vote count, as Plaintiffs allege here, such actions would not constitute executive action in defense of the Constitution.”
The rejection of Trump’s immunity argument came as part of a ruling allowing the plaintiffs — the NAACP and Michigan voters/advocates — to file an amended complaint. Sullivan found the plaintiffs now sufficiently alleged an ongoing injury to proceed.
Judge Sullivan: “Plaintiffs’ allegations support severe, substantial harm from Former President Trump’s ongoing and continued efforts to intimidate officials, spread false claims of fraud, and imperil the right to vote.”
This case predates Jan. 6, it was filed shortly after the 2020 election in response to efforts by Trump and his allies to try to undermine election results in key states. Trump prev. lost on immunity in separate cases re: Jan. 6 violence, now on appeal.
Getty photos showed the flag carrier wearing a shirt with the words “RESPECT FOR IRANIAN WOMAN” written on the back and “SAVE UKRAINE” writing on the front…
Portugal won the match 2-0
a 15-tonne meteorite found in Somalia, the ninth-largest meteorite ever found…
The new minerals have been named elaliite and elkinstantonite. They were identified by Locock, head of the U of A’s electron microprobe laboratory, because each had been synthetically created before.
“These minerals have been synthesized in a lab by a group in France in the 1980s, so they were known to science in that regard,” Herd explained, “but it doesn’t get to be a called a new mineral until it’s found in nature.” …
based on the ratio of elements that are in there — in this case, iron, phosphorus and oxygen…
A potential third mineral is also being looked at.
The former anchorwoman Kari Lake reportedly “stormed out” of Thanksgiving dinner after losing a pitched battle over the wishbone, multiple witnesses reported.
According to those who saw the ugly scene unfold, Lake was locked in a fierce struggle over the turkey part with a rival identified by several onlookers as her nine-year-old niece Paisley.
After Lake’s attempt to win a majority of the wishbone was soundly defeated, she blasted the contest for being riddled with fraud.
“When the truth comes out, I am going to be your worst nightmare,” she reportedly told her niece.
Just prior to her angry departure from the dinner, Lake had angrily rejected a demotion to the children’s table, relatives said.
For more than a year, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil had warned that he might not accept a loss in last month’s presidential election. Then he lost. In response, he reluctantly agreed to begin the transition of power — while his allies inspected the election results for evidence of anything amiss. This week, his campaign claimed to have found it: a small software bug in the voting machines. On Tuesday, the campaign filed a request to effectively overturn the election in Mr. Bolsonaro’s favor, saying the bug should nullify votes from about 60 percent of the voting machines.
While tens of thousands of supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro camp outside military facilities across Brazil to protest his election loss, members of Bolsonaro’s inner circle are meeting with advisers to former president Donald Trump to discuss next steps.
whheydtsays
Re: Lynna, OM @ #474….
Teaching Bolsonaro how to have tantrums like a 3-year-old hardly seems to be something either useful or well taught by Trump.
ravensays
It’s no secret the Russians have been targeting civilians in their invasion of Ukraine.
97% of the missile strikes have been aimed at civilian targets.
“Ukraine will prevail and will bring the war criminals to justice.”That Ukraine will prevail is not yet proven.
That the Russian war criminals will be brought to justice is dubious.
That never seems to happen, no matter who wins the wars.
The didn’t even bring that many Nazis to justice, a lot fewer Japanese imperialists, and almost none of the Serbian war criminals. Same thing in Rwanda. The latest batch of terrorists were Al Qaeda and ISIS, and very few of them ended up being arrested, tried, and convicted. The best that can be said is that many of them died in battle against their many targets and victims.
Tweet
Oleksii Reznikov @oleksiireznikov
Ukraine government official
Over the past nine months, russia has launched more than 16,000 missile attacks on Ukraine.
97% of russian targets are CIVILIAN.
We are fighting against a terrorist state. Ukraine will prevail and will bring the war criminals to justice.
ravensays
Lukashenko is apparently replacing all of his staff.
His foreign minister died suddenly a few days ago and in Russialand, that usually means they were murdered somehow.
Lukashenko is only in his position as head of Belarus because he is being propped up by the Russian army. They could replace him any time they want.
BREAKING UPDATE: Lukashenko told to fire all staff as Foreign Affairs Minister poisoned
By Peter McLaren-Kennedy • 28 November 2022 • 10:29
10:23 (November 28) – Local and Russian news agencies are reporting that Belarus leader Lukashenko has been told to change all his staff following rumours that Makei was poisoned.
Although there is still no formal word from the government covering the cause of Makei’s death, insiders say that Lukashenko has been advised to get rid of all the staff in his home, as well as all his catering staff and bodyguards. The suggestion is that Makei’s murder (this is not confirmed yet) was an inside job and that Lukashenko could be next.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From their latest summary:
The Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said the alliance will not pull back in its support for Ukraine, calling on partners to pledge more winter aid for Kyiv as it braces itself for more cold and darkness due to Russian attacks on infrastructure. Nato foreign ministers meeting in Bucharest are focusing on ramping up military assistance for Ukraine such as air defence systems and ammunition, even as diplomats acknowledge supply and capacity issues, but also discuss non-lethal aid, Reuters reported.
The United States is expected to announce “substantial” financial aid to Ukraine on Tuesday to help it deal with the damage caused by Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure, senior US officials said. The aid, which will be detailed by secretary of state Antony Blinken on the sidelines of a Nato meeting in the Romanian capital Bucharest, “is substantial and it is not the end”, one senior official told journalists Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity and without giving further details.
Ukrainian authorities are investigating sites where torture allegedly took place in the city of Kherson. More than two weeks after the Russians retreated, investigators say five torture rooms have been found in the southern city and at least four more in the wider Kherson region. Ukrainians allege that they were confined, beaten, given electric shocks, interrogated and threatened with death, AP reported.
…
Rocketing energy bills are forcing Hungary to shutter libraries, theatres, swimming pools and even its new football stadiums for winter, AFP reports. The state-of-the-art grounds – symbols of rightwing nationalist prime minister Viktor Orbán’s 12 years in power – are among a long list of buildings no longer able to cope with rising energy prices in the central European country.
People should not forget the war in Ukraine this Christmas, the country’s first lady has said ahead of a speech to British MPs on Tuesday. Olena Zelenska is expected to address MPs and peers on Tuesday as she visits London, days after Rishi Sunak made his first visit as prime minister to Kyiv to meet Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
The pace of global shipping activity is set to lose steam next year as economic turmoil, conflict in Ukraine and the impact of the pandemic weaken the outlook for trade, UN agency Unctad said on Tuesday. The world’s largest investment banks expect global economic growth to slow further in 2023 following a year roiled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and soaring inflation.
Kyiv plans to erect Christmas trees, minus lights, throughout the battered city in a defiant display of holiday spirit as the capital area’s millions of residents suffer through blackouts due to Russian attacks, officials said. “No one is going to cancel the New Year and Christmas, and the atmosphere of the New Year should be there,” the Kyiv mayor, Vitali Klitschko, told the RBC-Ukraine news agency in an interview. “We cannot allow Putin to steal our Christmas.”…
Also from there:
China’s president, Xi Jinping, has said Beijing is ready to “forge a closer partnership” with Moscow to “maintain international energy security”.…
Russian forces appear to be planning “some quite big air attacks” in Ukraine”, according to a security and defence analyst.
Prof Michael Clarke, the former director general of the Royal United Services Institute, told Sky News:
It looks as though Russians are preparing some big air attacks. There’s a lot of Twitter chat and satellite imagery at air bases … so there may be a lot of air activity.
He added that Moscow’s troops were making “some progress” in the key eastern Ukraine town of Bakhmut, and were “really digging in for winter”.
He said:
The Russians have been pounding away at Bakhmut for about four weeks and they’re trying to attack it from the east, the north, and it looks as though they’ve made some progress from the south of Bakhmut.
Ukraine is considering expelling all Russian citizens who came to Crimea after it was annexed by Moscow in 2014, according to a representative of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
In a piece for the Ukrainian newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, Tamila Tasheva, Zelenskiy’s top representative for Crimea, wrote:
According to Ukrainian legislation, all foreigners who entered the peninsula after 2014 not through Ukrainian checkpoints or through them, but violated the terms of stay, live in the territory of Crimea illegally.
The decision is simple and does not contradict international law: the population that came illegally to the territory of the peninsula must leave the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol through voluntary departure or forced expulsion.
She added that current Ukrainian legislation also provides for the possibility of forced return of foreigners and stateless persons, although it cannot currently be applied to temporarily occupied territories.
Tasheva also wrote that Ukraine does not recognise passports that Russia “forcibly” distributed to residents of the Crimea peninsula under its occupation, adding:
All of them were and remain citizens of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s state energy operator, Ukrenegro, said it is still struggling to restore full power nearly a week after Russian missile strikes damaged energy facilities across the country.
The power deficit was running at 30% as off 11am local time (09:00 GMT), Ukrenegro said in a statement.
The figure represents a slight rise from yesterday following emergency shutdowns at several power plants and an increase in consumption as winter sets in.
The statement by Ukrenegro added:
We emphasise that the general deficit in the energy system is a consequence of seven waves of Russian missile attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure.
…In Borodianka, the home of 60-year-old Tetiana Martynova and her brother was heavily damaged by Russian bombs. She lives with her four cats, two dogs and a rabbit in what is left of it. “I love these kitties. I love all animals. I have three more kittens I found in a dumpster. I took them into the garage I’m renting,” she says. “It will be hard for the winter, but I don’t want to leave my house. Who is going to take care of my pets if I leave?”
At night, Martynova has to move into a dormitory, which was also damaged by the bombings. Melting snow seeps through the roof, making life even more difficult for guests….
…Ukrainians are well aware that their own morale has become the central battlefield of the war, and it is not territory they are prepared to concede to Vladimir Putin….
Ahead of USA and Iran’s crucial World Cup fixture on Tuesday USA’s Tyler Adams and Iran’s Carlos Queiroz spoke to the media in press conferences that were dominated by political discussion.
USA captain Adams responds to a difficult line of questioning from an Iranian reporter over discrimination in the United States.
Iran’s head coach Queiroz spoke about the importance of this game for the people of Iran.
Pope Francis has sparked fury in Russia over an interview in which he suggested that non-Christian members of its armed forces showed more cruelty in Ukraine than ethnic Russian soldiers.
In an interview with the Catholic magazine America published Monday, the pope said that soldiers from the Buddhist region of Buryatia and the Muslim-majority Chechnya republic were “the cruellest” while fighting in Ukraine.
“Generally, the cruellest are perhaps those who are of Russia but are not of the Russian tradition, such as the Chechens, the Buryats and so on,” he said.
Russia has disproportionately relied on ethnic minorities to provide its main fighting force in Ukraine.
La chambre disciplinaire du conseil régional de l’ordre des médecins du Grand-Est a annoncé, vendredi 25 novembre, la suspension pour un an des activités médicales de l’ancienne députée du Bas-Rhin Martine Wonner, psychiatre de formation et figure des « covidosceptiques ». Elle faisait l’objet de deux plaintes pour des propos controversés sur les masques et les vaccins contre le Covid-19.
…
Lors de l’audience, début novembre, les plaignants ont reproché à Mme Wonner d’avoir fait la promotion d’« informations erronées » et diffusé des « protocoles de soins » contre le Covid « sans fondement scientifique », à base notamment d’ivermectine ou d’hydroxychloroquine, sur son compte Twitter, où elle se présente comme psychiatre….
I hope someone is tracking the legal and professional consequences for these COVID quacks. This article mentions the suspension earlier this month of another French physician (and Senator), Alain Houpert. #214 above discusses the case of Canadian doctor Kulvinder Kaur Gill. You have to look to find these reports; meanwhile, these arrogant charlatans continue to harm people while claiming victimization for themselves.
ravensays
Some good news for once.
Oil just set a record low for the year 2022.
Gasoline prices are also falling and I just saw the high $3s a gallon yesterday.
Gas prices rose right before the election and started falling sharply right after the election.
I doubt that is a coincidence.
This is also good news for Ukraine since Russia is financing everything including the war by being a Petrostate.
Today’s newsletter is by Julie Hyman, anchor and correspondent at Yahoo Finance. Yahoo Finance November 29, 2022
The one trade that dominated most of 2022 has given up almost all of its gains.
Oil touched its lowest level of the year on Monday morning, a victim of concerns over political turmoil in China and a potential hit to demand.
Amid deep losses in both stocks in bonds and a cover-your-eyes plunge in crypto assets, oil prices surged in early 2022.
For energy stocks, however, the story was — and remains — even better.
Through Monday’s close, the Energy (XLE) sector had gained more than 60% this year, the only one out of 11 sectors in the S&P 500 to be sitting on year-to-date gains greater than 1%. As recently as November 15, XLE closed at a record high.
“Either oil stocks are way overpriced, or oil itself is way underpriced,” Dan Dicker, founder of the Energy Word, told Yahoo Finance last week. For Dicker’s part, he’s in the latter camp, predicting oil will re-attain triple digits by late spring 2023.
Calls for $200-a-barrel oil came fast and furious as WTI crude oil hit multi-year highs in early summer. As of the end of July, the median forecast for WTI crude oil at year-end 2022 stood at $103, according to a Bloomberg survey.
Then came the letdown.
Oil has slumped by more than 30 percent since that June high, as calls for a global recession sparked fear demand would decline as a result. The drop happened even as Saudi Arabia said in October it would cut production.
And further output reductions may be coming.
OPEC+ meets this Sunday to determine its target output level, and oil steadied on Monday after reports the cartel would consider further production cuts. On the flip side, news European Union representatives are meeting next Monday to decide on a price cap for Russian oil added to the recent stream of negative headlines for oil.
For consumers, of course, much of this comes as welcome news, with the drop in oil feeding through to falling gasoline prices at the pump in the U.S., which have hit their lowest since February, according to GasBuddy data. The firm’s head of petroleum analysis, Patrick de Haan, predicted Monday the average cost per gallon could drop below $3 by Christmas.
Money managers have also been trimming bullish oil bets, according to data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Traders cut net-long positions in ICE Brent crude by the most since early March — the sixth-largest reduction since 2011, when the CFTC started releasing the data.
Still, fund managers are overweight energy stocks for the eighteenth straight month, the longest streak since 2012, according to Bank of America’s latest report. Investors surveyed were net 22 percent overweight energy in November, according to the firm.
Stephen Schork, longtime oil analyst and author of the Schork Report, says that, at the very least, there’s more volatility to come between now and the end of the year.
Between China pressures, potential OPEC changes, and year-end tax effects in Houston which could also trigger swings in oil, Schork sees recent volatility as part of a bottoming process.
“Short of a major economic contraction,” Schork told Yahoo Finance, “I do think we’re plumbing the bottom of the market right now.”
Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, is addressing British MPs and peers in Westminster now. She begins by comparing the experience of Ukrainians with that of the British during the Blitz in World War Two.
She says the British survived the air raids, which were “identical to those that Russia uses now to put us on our knees”.
We’re hearing sirens every day. They are identical to those which were [heard] by British generations.
You did not surrender and we will not surrender. But victory is not the only thing we need. We need justice. I come to you for justice.
The former president claims he didn’t recognize a known white supremacist who tagged along when Kanye West visited Mar-a-Lago, and Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker still claims his Texas home as his primary residence….
Meanwhile in Russia: top propagandists and their friends in high places are getting worried about the possibility of losing the war to Ukraine and being tried at the Hague….
KG, thank you for the question. I have not kept up with the post-election brouhaha in Brazil as well as I should have.
Here is the November 23 article from The New York Times:
For more than a year, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil had warned that he might not accept a loss in last month’s presidential election. Then he lost. In response, he reluctantly agreed to begin the transition of power — while his allies inspected the election results for evidence of anything amiss.
This week, his campaign claimed to have found it: a small software bug in the voting machines. On Tuesday, the campaign filed a request to effectively overturn the election in Mr. Bolsonaro’s favor, saying the bug should nullify votes from about 60 percent of the voting machines.
Of the remaining votes, Mr. Bolsonaro would win 51 percent, the campaign said, making him the victor instead of the leftist former president who defeated him, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The request was a Hail Mary. Independent experts said the bug had no impact on the integrity of the vote. And then, late Wednesday, Brazil’s elections chief dismissed the complaint and fined the three conservative parties behind it $4.3 million for filing it.
Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court justice who runs Brazil’s electoral agency and who has become one of Mr. Bolsonaro’s most prominent political adversaries, said in a decision Wednesday night that the campaign’s arguments were “absolutely false” and that the request to overturn the election was “ostensibly an attack on the democratic rule of law and carried out recklessly, with the aim of encouraging criminal and anti-democratic movements.”
Mr. Moraes had previously given the campaign 24 hours to explain why it had only questioned votes from the election’s second round, in which Mr. Bolsonaro lost, and not the first round, in which his political party won the most seats in Congress using the same voting machines. After the head of Mr. Bolsonaro’s party said on Wednesday that it lacked information about the first round, Mr. Moraes dismissed the complaint.
The back-and-forth is the latest twist in the president’s unusual response to his loss. At first, he waited two days to publicly address his loss. When he did, he refused to concede. Then, as his administration began the transition of power, Mr. Bolsonaro stayed out of the spotlight for weeks.
His vice president said he was dealing with a skin infection that made it difficult to wear pants. Mr. Bolsonaro returned to the presidential offices on Wednesday.
At the same time, thousands of Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters have been protesting outside military bases across the country, begging the armed forces to intervene in the government and prevent Mr. Lula from taking office. Many protesters claim the election was stolen, citing analyses and evidence that have been debunked by experts. The military inspected the vote and found no signs of fraud.
Mr. Moraes, the elections chief, has become one of Brazil’s most powerful political figures in the face of criticism of the elections system from Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies. Mr. Moraes’s aggressive response to what he has called attacks against Brazil’s democracy, including his orders for social networks to take down thousands of posts, has drawn widespread criticism from the Brazilian right.
On short notice on Wednesday afternoon, hours before Mr. Moraes’s decision, Mr. Bolsonaro’s right-wing Liberal Party had called reporters to a hotel in Brasília, the nation’s capital, to explain its findings.
Valdemar Costa Neto, the party’s president, said the software bug demanded a review of the election results. “There can’t be any doubts about the vote,” he said. “If this is a stain on our democracy, we have to solve it now.”
Mr. Moraes on Wednesday also ordered an investigation into Mr. Costa Neto and the official who oversaw the party’s audit.
The software bug highlighted by Mr. Bolsonaro’s campaign causes an error in one document produced by some older voting machines. The error affects the identification number connected to the voting machine. Liberal Party officials argued that made it difficult to verify the votes.
Independent computer security experts who have studied Brazil’s voting machines and who reviewed the campaign’s findings said that was wrong. They said that while the bug exists, it has no bearing on the integrity of the results. That is because there are a variety of other ways to identify the voting machines, including on the very documents that have the error.
“They pointed out a bug that needs to be corrected. That’s great, and it’s actually easy to correct,” said Marcos Simplício, a cybersecurity researcher at the University of São Paulo. But he said that the campaign’s suggestion that votes should be nullified is like arguing a car is totaled because of a scratch on the door.
“Try to convince your insurance company of that,” he said. “It’s nonsense. Complete nonsense.”
Jailed Belarusian protest leader Maria Kolesnikova ‘in intensive care’
The jailed Belarusian senior opposition leader, Maria Kalesnikava, has been taken to the intensive care of a hospital in the city of Gomel, according to reports.
Belarusian opposition politician, Viktor Babariko, posted to Telegram that Kolesnikova, one of the most prominent opponents of President Alexander Lukashenko, was taken to hospital yesterday for unknown reasons.
The leader of the Belarusian opposition, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, wrote on Telegram:
Awful news. Our dear Masha, we all hope that you are going to be okay!
Kolesnikova was sentenced last year to 11 years in prison, after being charged with conspiracy to seize power, calling for action to damage national security, and calling for actions damaging national security using media and the internet.
She was one of three women who in 2020 united to lead an uprising in which tens of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets in the largest protests in the country’s modern history.
She was arrested and taken to the border, where she was told to leave the country. Instead, she reportedly ripped up her passport, risking prison rather than going into exile.
[…] “Only Donald Trump would defend himself by saying, ‘I was only planning to eat with one antisemite,’” Kimmel joked.
Kimmel also referred to a comment Trump made to Axios claiming that the dinner was “intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest I had never met and knew nothing about.” Kimmel joked that that is the “same thing he says whenever Eric [Trump] comes over to eat.”
Kimmel went on to say that Ye said the dinner got tense when he started talking about running for president in 2024. Trump began screaming and “insulting Kim Kardashian.”
“I would have loved to be a fly on the ketchup-covered walls for that conversation,” Kimmel said. “That moment when Kanye asked Trump to be his running mate. No amount of money I wouldn’t give to have seen that. It’s terrifying to think of Trump as president again, but it’s amazing to think of him as vice president.” Kimmel explains that Trump would have to stand up and clap behind the real president and sit down when he or she spoke. “We’d get to watch him die inside every minute of every day.”
Kimmel added that “according to Kanye, Trump was very impressed by his white power pal.” At one point in the dinner, Kimmel says, Fuentes told Trump he loves when the ex-president gives “off the cuff” speeches, as opposed to those using a teleprompter. Trump reportedly said, “He gets me.”
To which Kimmel retorted, “You’re not that hard to get. We all get you. You’re like HPV. It’s only a matter of time.”
“But just to recap, Kanye West went to Mar-a-Lago to have dinner with Donald Trump, which sounds like the beginning of a joke,” he said. “And as his plus-one, he brought a well-known white supremacist Holocaust denier, and Trump claims he didn’t know about.”
Kimmel then asked the audience, “Which is worse? Having the guy over for dinner or having no idea you’re letting a racist rando into a house that was, until very recently, full of unguarded top secret documents? Two words typed into your phone, and you know you’re eating with a scumbag. And Trump is the guy who claims Joe Biden is slipping. Sitting down with a Ku Klux Klanye sharing a chocolate souffle.”
And through all of this recent news that a former U.S. president sat down to dine with two infamous antisemites, not only has Trump himself refused to denounce them, the House GOP members have been all been totally mute on the topic.
As Daily Kos’ David Neiwert explains, Fuentes and his white nationalist clan view the dinner and the fallout afterward as a “propaganda victory.”
“It will be read by them as another sign that they are successfully infiltrating the far-right flank of mainstream GOP politics. So will the silence from many Republican leaders since Trump’s dinner with Fuentes,” writes Greg Sargent for The Washington Post.
Kimmel ended his Trump, Kanye, and Fuentes dinner bit with these wise words: “If Kanye asks to come over for dinner, say no.”
Ukraine’s first lady calls appeals to UK to support Nuremberg-style tribunal for Russian war crimes
Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s wife called for Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and the country’s leaders to be put on trial in a specially created war crimes court for ordering the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and the bloodshed that followed it.
Olena Zelenska was visiting the UK parliament where she gave a speech to a private audience that included former prime minister Boris Johnson and Labour leader Keir Starmer, in which she called for British support in creating a Nuremberg-style tribunal.
“We need to start the special tribunal against the crime of aggression of Russia against Ukraine, which will enhance the work of the ICC [International Criminal Court] and not weaken it,” Zelenska said.
We need to unite the world community just as it happened in January 1942 to support the special tribunal against the aggression of Russia against Ukraine. I’m asking you a small favour to become the world leader in the justice efforts.
The first lady also visited a special photographic exhibition set up in parliament documenting Russian war crimes against civilians, supported by the Pinchuk Foundation, which is designed to rally support among British parliamentarians to support the creation of an international tribunal, which would require the support of the UN and several key states.
Some of the pictures in the exhibition are graphic, although carefully screened from passing viewers. “Every torturer in this war has his face too I really want you to look at those photographs,” Zelenska said. “Then your abstract idea of the war in Ukraine will become real.”
Bjorn Geldhof, the curator of the exhibition, which will run in parliament for 10 days, said the exhibition was intended to be graphic and uncompromising. He said:
People need to start thinking seriously about how to bring these war criminals to justice.
Reginald Selkirksays
… and Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker still claims his Texas home as his primary residence….
Which would mean he can’t vote for himself in Georgia. Or if he did, it was election fraud.
NBC is calling that Republicans have won control of the House.
The MH17 verdict in Amsterdam should come tomorrow.
@ 497 SC
“NBC is calling that Republicans have won control of the House.”
We knew it was coming but it’s still depressing.
tomh @ #499, I know. :(
Another story of mobilized Russian soldiers sent directly to the front.
No supplies, no food, no water.
No orders and no commanders.
This is just a complete waste of valuable (to someone but not the Russian government or military) lives.
It looks like most of the people in Russia are now just going through the motions without any hope.
Meduza (jellyfish in Russian) is a Russian language news service based in Latvia.
Novosibirsk (New Siberia) is a science city in Siberia.
Well, at least there’s some good news out of Los Angeles. Both the local elections I posted out earlier had positive results. Of course, in both cases, it’s not that the winning candidate was particularly good; it’s that the losing candidate was really, really bad. The thoroughly corrupt, abusive sheriff Alex Villanueva lost his bid for reelection; the new sheriff, Robert Luna, is nothing special and isn’t likely to make the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department into a bastion of decency and honor, but you can’t get much worse than Villanueva. Meanwhile, billionaire Democrat-come-lately Rick Caruso was defeated by his opponent Karen Bass despite spending a hundred million dollars of his own money on his campaign. I’m not expecting great things from Bass; she’s kind of a centrist and wasn’t my pick in the primaries; but at least she’s not a billionaire developer who almost certainly was only interested in the Los Angeles mayorship as a stepping stone to a later gubernatorial or presidential run.
I know this is local news so I’m not sure how much anyone else cares about this, but since Los Angeles is one of the biggest cities in the U.S. what happens here may have repercussions elsewhere, so maybe this is at least somewhat of interest.
“Tucker: This [US military support for Ukraine] is so obviously a scam. It’s an ideological jihad, a holy war being waged by some on the left against Russia..”
Video at the (Twitter) link.
Don Jr. tweeted earlier: “Since it was Ukraine’s missile that hit our NATO ally Poland, can we at least stop spending billions to arm them now?”
Kyiv Independent:
Could Trump campaign from jail? Absolutely.
Smoking marijuana may be more harmful to lungs than smoking cigarettes, study finds
One third of the Oxford Street candy shops disappear after police raids
re Reginald Selkirk @6 from the article:
I haven’t smoked marijuana for many years, but 99% of the pot I smoked back in the day was through a water bong. I would consider that “filtered”.
Trump not first politician to be ditched by Rupert Murdoch
Recently, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism & Antiquity has launched the Holy Family Trail, stringing together some 25 stops along the celebrated route of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
Because, you know, they fled to Egypt for several years when Herod was hunting for them (Matthew 2).
Unless you prefer the gospel of Luke, in which case they lived peacefully in Nazareth of Galilee (Luke 2).
Fox News Misses the Joke in Gisele Fetterman Cropping John’s Head Out of Photos
Reginald @11:
I suspect that it may be missing the joke, but it also may be the conservative political approach to humour. Almost all GOP/conservative ‘jokes’ belittle and insult a person, insinuate lies into political discourse, deflection, or throw red meat to their base. Most Americans use humour for humour’s sake. Humour for humours sake seems to be foreign to the American right. Which means that they tend to assume that any humour, across the entire political spectrum, has a purpose — demean, belittle, insult, lie, deflect. The idea of a political wife poking fun at her spouse for, well, grins and giggles? is so far out of what the right considers normal that it never even crosses their mind that maybe she is having fun.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian (support them if you can!) Ukraine liveblog. From there:
Zelenskyy:
Pavlovka is part of the Eastern front and about midway between Kharkiv and Mariupol.
It looks like Ukraine managed to find a concentration of Russians and hit them with artillery and HIMARS.
The number of mobilized killed or wounded is running around 10,000 in just a few weeks.
Tara Palmeri, Puck News:
DK has a livethread on Pelosi’s announcement. It can also be watched live on C-SPAN on YouTube, etc.
Guardian liveblog:
Ukraine update: What’s left of Russia’s sputtering offensive efforts are failing
From the DK livethread linked @ #17:
Guardian liveblog:
“Pravda has released a Buzzfeed-style listicle of the ‘8 Types of Russophobia’. It’s a world tour of racism and self-pity. Buckle up and decide: what kind of Russophobe are you?…”
Twitter thread follows. The list is silly and pathetically delusional but also pretty offensive. So, typical of Russian propaganda these days.
Guardian liveblog:
Good News: Katie Porter Wins in CA-47th!
Sigh. Looks like we are in for more of this. House Republicans Insist Investigations Aren’t About Hunter Biden While Talking Exclusively About Hunter Biden
Followup to comment 25.
Although their majority in the House is slim, Republicans did win the majority. So instead of a press conference to celebrate that, and to tout a list of good legislation they intend to pass, Republicans held a press conference about Hunter Biden.
Lynna@24 Great news. I’m sure some CEO’s will have continuing nightmares about testifying before her in committee meetings.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63668818
Nerd @27, yep. Katie Porter is uniquely talented at calling CEO’s to account. I don’t think anyone else in the House of Congress can match her in that regard.
Ukraine update: Ukraine sends out urgent request for equipment to stabilize its energy grid
Okay, what kind of fuckery is this? Mehmet Oz uses Georgia runoff to raise money for himself, Herschel Walker
Yep.
Debunking (at least to some degree) and fighting back against one of Herschel Walker’s lies:
Link
That’ll Do, Madam Speaker. That’ll Do.
https://www.wonkette.com/that-ll-do-madam-speaker-that-ll-do
Sick child bused by Greg Abbott needed hospitalization after arriving in Philadelphia, reports say
Dinesh D’Souza being irritating and contemptible:
Commentary from Wonkette:
Eric Swalwell:
Wonderfully sweet photo here:
https://twitter.com/RepSwalwell/status/1593311313119305730
“Spectacular footage: Two Russian Kalibr cruise missiles shot down within seconds over Kyiv Oblast on Nov. 15. First is audible explosion and glow on horizon, second a clear view of interception by German Iris-T air defense system.”
Video at the (Twitter) link. Impressive!
SC @36, that is amazing.
In other news … a different kind of war, from NBC News:
Politico:
Roll Call:
From Media Matters:
Amazing chart at the link.
Cawthorn bugs out early, and leaves his constituents in the lurch.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/madison-cawthorn-constituent-congress
Cartoon: Build a wall
NPR
The largest dam demolition in history is approved for a California river
November 17, 20222
The Associated Press
“Someone has to say it: Elon Musk has lied for 27 years about his credentials. He does not have a BS in Physics, or any technical field. Did not get into a PhD program. Dropped out in 1995 & was illegal [undocumented immigrant from South Africa]. Later, investors quietly arranged a diploma – but not in science….”
Twitter thread follows.
AP News
Arizona voters reject effort to enact stricter voter ID law
By BOB CHRISTIE / November 16, 2022
Banner week for crypto bros:
Twitter thread follows.
Link
Ukraine’s population is expected to drop to 35 million by 2030.
That is a steep drop since in 2022 their population is 44 million.
This is a common problem in all First World societies.
It is also happening to the Baltics, Russia, and much of Western Europe.
Some of the refugees will return after the war and some will not.
Foot found in Yellowstone hot pool ID’d as that of LA man
(LA meaning Los Angeles, California, USA)
Multi-tasker Musk expects to reduce time at Twitter, seek another leader
Another leader? Who is going to want to be handed that hot mess? Maybe he should have done that before he destroyed the company.
@49, I think it’s more that Musk is seeking someone to blame when his hot potato explodes.
For thsoe who haven’t yet seen The Digital Cuttlefish has another new rhyme & blog post here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/cuttlefish/2022/11/17/just-in-case/
Also in other news :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-17/sa-magistrate-removed-from-office-over-sexual-harassment/101666950
Local magistrate removed for sexual harrassment – good.
Aeerial photos of the flooding in NSW – which is bad :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-18/nsw-floods-aerial-photos-nearmap-forbes-central-west-condobolin/101668030
& itseems the plastic producers can finally be held accountable for their ugly and destruyctive waste :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-11-18/dna-plastic-can-be-used-to-hold-polluters-responsible/101652588
@#47, raven:
Why is it “a problem”? Just let in some of the many, many refugees who have been created by US/EU foreign policy, that’ll keep populations as high as you like for the time being. Or is the “problem” that that will mean the population won’t be pure white any more?
(Although it should be noted: worldwide sperm counts are not only dropping, but the rate at which they are dropping is increasing over time. Things are the same everywhere measurements were the same. Causation is currently speculative, but if it’s everywhere it’s probably related to chemical pollutants. Pretty soon there will be problems with shrinking populations everywhere.)
NYT:
Lauren Boebert’s House race is nearing a recount.
Nov. 17, 2022
Well, I must say it’s nice to hear about the British deep state doing something useful for a change, rather than supporting Middle Eastern tyrants, cosying up to Russian oligarchs, and sending police spies to rape by deception women in peaceful protest groups!
The Vicar@53,
Amusingly, I’ve seen worried articles about falling sperm counts and countries with current or expected population falls practically alongside others bemoaning the somewhat artificial milestone of global population exceeding 8 billion. Of course, falling sperm counts (assuming they are not an artefact of changing methods of counting, as at least some experts still think) could be a sign of serious pollution problems, and too rapid a fall in the ratio of working to retired population can cause genuine problems, but as you say, there’s a ready supply of refugees and other potential migrants.
My Musk limerick attempt here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/cuttlefish/2022/11/17/just-in-case/#comment-208325
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From their latest summary:
Guardian:
“Twitter ‘closes offices’ after Elon Musk’s loyalty oath sparks wave of resignations”:
(“In an apparent jab at Musk’s call for employees to be ‘hardcore’, the Twitter profile bios of several departing engineers on Thursday described themselves as ‘softcore engineers’ or ‘ex-hardcore engineers’.”)
“Users urged to archive tweets amid rumors of Twitter implosion”:
The Guardian also has a liveblog on the World Cup. Going swimmingly:
Guardian – featuring all the usual tropes of their reporting on rightwing parties and movements in Europe – “Dutch pro-farming party fires up the anti-establishment vote”: “A movement rooted in a protest against plans to cut livestock [sic] numbers is rapidly picking up support in the Netherlands…”
Mykhailo Podolyak:
Euronews – “Video: Iranian protesters start fire at home of Ayatollah Khomeini.”
Study: Almost 50% of macOS malware only comes from one app
Ex-Trump Organization CFO says Trump family was in the dark on tax fraud scheme
Ha ha ha. Sell me a bridge.
Sale of beer with alcohol banned at World Cup stadiums
Kamil Galeev thread on Isaac Chotiner’s interview with John Mearsheimer:
It’s an interview in which Mearsheimer concedes that Hitler lied at Munich and in “one or two other instances.”
“The more Islamic Republic kills the more people come to their funerals and protest
Today in #Mahabad #Iran
#MahsaAmini
#IranRevolution”
Kyiv Independent:
Guardian liveblog:
A source who worked closely with Musk for several years described this thinking as core to the billionaire’s pronatalist ideology. “He’s very serious about the idea that your wealth is directly linked to your IQ,” he said. The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for this article, also said Musk urged “all the rich men he knew” to have as many children as possible.
This is an article about the genetic imperialists who want to outbreed the rest of the world. Elon Musk is one of them. There are more.
These aren’t gentically superior people though. They are loons, lunatic fringers, narcissists, sociopaths, and other creeps.
There is so much wrong with this idea of self eugenics that it would take pages to point out.
There are often attempts of one group to outbreed others, something called biological colonialism. It almost never works.
The next generation of children decide they have better things to do with their time and money than have lots of kids because mom and dad had lots of kids and it was a miserable experience for them.
And oh yeah, wealth is only lowly correlated with IQ.
College professors and scientists aren’t known for their wealth. Ask PZ about that.
Yahoo!/The Week – “GOP operative pardoned by Trump convicted of funneling Russian money to Trump campaign”:
From the pro-breeder article above which is full of fallacies, incorrect facts, and just plain craziness.
The world now has 8 billion people and is feeling the effects, from global warming to tens of millions of refugees in camps, energy shortages, etc..
So the pro-breeders solution to over population is…to have more kids.
FWIW, AFAICT, the genetically superior Collins in the article support their breeder project by scamming money from rich tech bros. Not impressed.
Kyiv Independent:
Democratic voters say Democratic fundraising spam is backfiring
https://twitter.com/nitashatiku/status/1593399704636620800
The death of Twitter is announced on Twitter.
Washington Post:
Re: Lynna, OM @ #75…
The nearest analog to unsolicited campaign contribution e-mail is unsolicited phone calls. The problem is that, even if your phone is on the Federal Do Not Call list, “surveys” (real or fake), political solicitation, and non-profit calls are all exempt. Because–of course–the people that write such laws aren’t about to cut off their access to try to get more money.
On top of all that, being on the Do Not Call list doesn’t stop the spammers and scammers. It doesn’t do much to slow down just plain business calls, either. Bluntly put, neither scammers nor local businesses pay any attention to Federal law and regulation in this area. So there’s no reason to expect that putting similar restrictions on e-mail would bar political campaign contacts nor have any real effect slowing down any of the crap that clutters our in boxes.
Ukraine war: Dashcam footage shows near-miss blast in Dnipro
Here’s a quick explainer of what happened with crypto giant FTX and how the GOP is lying about it
Good news:
Link
The Hill:
I love the terse quote – Guardian liveblog:
Tweet o’ the day.
Judge Blocks Florida’s “Stop W.O.K.E.” Censorship Bill From Taking Effect in Higher Education
A busy 24 hours for the US Supreme Court
Late-night ruling reinstates Alabama execution, but officials cancel it after problems inserting IV lines
Justices allow another execution to proceed, rejecting final appeal of Oklahoma man
Court allows Arizona to execute man who claimed that state withheld evidence
Justices green-light Texas execution of man who raised religious-rights claim
SC @84, OMG, Marjorie Taylor Greene is a garbage pile of a human being. She claims to be Christian, but I don’t think she can be saved by any gods.
Declassified doc reportedly proves Trump tweeted classified image
Three years ago, it seemed as if Donald Trump had tweeted classified intelligence about Iran. There’s now fresh evidence that he did exactly that.
Oh dear: Democrat Adam Frisch concedes to Lauren Boebert in nail biter House race
I was really hoping that Boebert would lose. She came closer to losing than was expected, but still she won the race for Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District.
Now that’s a graceful concession announcement.
Re: #89 Frisch concedes
This is very irritating. State law mandates an automatic recount, so the recount will happen, concession or not. What if he wins the recount? And why would his supporters donate to his compaign for the recount, when his campaign has nothing to do with it. All in all, he just looks dumb over this concession.
And he couldn’t help throwing into his speech, “Democrats have abandoned rural America and working class America for the last many years,” he said.
tomh @90, good points. Thanks.
In other news: Garland to name special counsel to weigh possible Trump charges
Ukraine update: Ukraine replaced airpower with artillery, but that has its own challenges
Follow-up to Lynna’s #91 – CNN has a liveblog:
Vandal caught on camera spray painting properties of Trump supporters in Collier County
They are Trump supporters, and they don’t understand why people can’t just get along?
Lynna@89 It is disappointing that Frisch has conceded to Insurrectionist Barbie. However, we can take heart that this will make the Shitshow that will be the 118th Congress all that much more of a flaming shitshow. It makes me feel almost sorry for Kevin McCarthy…almost.
Followup to SC @93.
From Josh Marshall:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/garland-appointing-jack-smith-is-just-fine
Evangelicals: “Trump Used Us!”
Wonkette link
What could be the direct cause of Twitter’s final demise? Here’s a list.
@ 89
Once again, democracy marches on! 😒
@ 90
Oh! And just what does he suggest we do to get back in the good graces of the inbred hicks and the blue collar slobs? Which marginalized group would he have us throw under the bus? Nonwhites? Women? LGBTQ people? Atheists–Oh, that’s a good scapegoat. Conservatives and liberals both hate us!
THE AMAZON, UNDONE
Washington Post link
As the Amazon rainforest goes dry, a desperate wait for water
Much more at the link.
Crypto Couple’s Charity Gave Almost Nothing…to Charity
Ohio Republicans Want to Make Ballot Measures Harder to Pass, Because Abortion Is Popular
Holmes gets more than 11 years in prison for Theranos scam
Cartoon: Kevin McCarthy’s anti-American agenda
Girl, three, crowned World Puddle Jumping Champion
@ 90
How so?
What does this even mean?
Examples?
I’ve got news for this guy.
The GOP has also abandoned rural American and working class Americans for many…decades.
These are the people who always beat up on the lower income segments. To note just one example, the GOP has voted against expanding Medicaid to 11 Red states.
Unless you consider persecuting Trans kids and sucking up to the Russians as helping rural people.
You could make a better argument that the Democrats have done more for rural people and the working classes than the GOP by a huge amount.
Kyiv Independent:
This Post[dot]News (Twitter link) could have potential.
Damn.
https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-wont-be-renamed
Well this sucks
VegNews – “Burger King Takes All Animal Products Out of the Kitchen at Its Newest Vegan Outpost”: “At Burger King’s first vegan pop-up on the Iberian peninsula, animal products are not only off the menu but also out of the kitchen….”
@#101, Akira MacKenzie:
The wrongness isn’t in saying “the Democrats have abandoned rural America and working class America”, it’s in the unspoken addition — which he may or may not have intended, but you very clearly added, yourself, “in favor of minorities”. In truth, Democrats abandoned their entire base when the Clintons took over back in the 90s, and have been running on nostalgia ever since.
Somewhere in the comments on this very board, but buried a few years back, you can find an anecdote about how, when southern Illinois — reliably a blue state, remember — flooded in 1993, the local governments were begging for help. The Democrats sent out a bunch of Clinton cronies who sneered at the local people, decided not to fund aid, and joked about how maybe they should permanently submerge the area to have a place to sail their yachts.
“Oh, but that’s just an anecdote, not data!” you cry. It was noticeable at all levels — I’m an urbanite myself, always have been, but I know that small farmers used to be a key Democratic demographic. Rural Democratic House members would keep lists of stuff they had passed in each session so that if they were asked “why should I vote for you?” by their constituents they could have a physical list ready — farm aid, adjustments to tax policy, strong regulation on corporate farming operations, you name it. When the Clintons and the DLC took over the DNC, all those candidates lost the support of the national and state parties, got primaried out, and all the policies they have championed stopped. If you want to know why rural people were susceptible to right-wing hate radio, it is because the Democrats had already kicked them to the curb, and they knew it. Portraying them as somehow ungrateful for failing to support a party which — as you so amply demonstrate in your phrasing — actively hates them.
The same goes for the working class. The Rust Belt hates the Clintons quite justly for being the ones to push NAFTA through after Bush couldn’t get Congress to ratify it, destroying all the factory jobs. (It also helped alienate rural voters again, because NAFTA was hugely advantageous to multinational agrocorps.) Then Clinton let the big-L Libertarian Alan Greenspan dictate economic policy, which destroyed savings and pushed people into the high-risk stock market. At every turn, Clinton — and, later, Obama — screwed over the actual workers in favor of the rich. (Obama saved Ford! …except that he bailed out their management while using federal authority to override union-negotiated contracts and lower salaries and destroy benefits for the actual workers. Obama cleaned up the economic meltdown! …except that he bailed out the banks who issued bad mortgages and predatory credit cards, and left the homeowner citizens and credit card debtors in debt.)
And then the party had the unmitigated gall to nominate first Hillary Clinton, a relic of the Clinton years that screwed everyone over, and then Joe Biden, a creature of the banking industry who was literally responsible for turning student loan debt from a “problem” into a “crisis” (before his 2005 bankruptcy bill, if you couldn’t pay your student loans you could declare bankruptcy and have them cleared — more or less at the same time, Biden’s son Hunter got a very well-paying consultancy with MBNA for which he was dubiously qualified; if you keep telling yourself it wasn’t a bribe, maybe someday you’ll believe it).
And it isn’t just the rural voters and the working class who are getting screwed. Obama actually made a campaign promise in 2008 to encode abortion access into law — you might have noticed that the Democrats didn’t do that, although they sure like to pretend that it’s a top priority. We’re supposed to think that Trump was worse for immigrants than Obama, but at no point during his 4 years in office did Trump manage to equal the number of immigrants detained or deported that Obama had reached at the equivalent point in his first 4 years. Congressional Democrats took a knee for Black Lives Matter — but passed no laws to help them, budgeted no money to relieve the desperate, and then nominated Joe “Piggy’s Best Friend” Biden, who has increased annual federal funding for cops, regardless of violence, by more than $30 billion. (And that’s not to mention that the really bad racial violence by police keeps happening in cities where the mayor and city council — and usually the state legislature and governor — are Democratic, too: Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis…)
The Democrats are running on people’s vague recollection that at some time in the past, Democrats did good things, plus the impassioned “we’re not the Republicans!!!!!” we keep hearing. And, as they are rapidly showing as you read this, every time they squeak through another election, they immediately turn around and announce they aren’t even going to bother with a symbolic attempt to carry out the promises they made while campaigning. Fuck them all, and fuck all their apologists. The Republicans are evil. The Democrats, by destroying any chance for real opposition to Republicans to operate, are arguably worse.
This article is from CEPA, the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington DC think tank.
The amount of money we are spending on Ukraine, $77 billion for 2022, is low for what we are getting back in returns.
We spent $2.3 trillion on Afghanistan and have almost nothing to show for it.
Of course, Ukraine is spending far more than they get from anyone. They are spending the blood and lives of their young people, something not replaceable in the next budget cycle.
Re: raven @ #114…
Those who think the aid to the Ukraine should be spent in the US are making the same mistake that led to the same criticism of the money spent on the manned Moon mission. The money is spent here. It will be spent by having US suppliers make either new or replacement equipment for what goes to Ukraine, just as every bit of money spent to put men on the Moon was spent on Earth.
@ 115. whheydt : Truth. Seconded by me. Absolutely.
No doubt helping Ukraine will also provide the American arms industry with knowledge and experience that will help them later but that’s another issue.
.***
Well, this is worrying with Victoria going to the polls soon :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-19/victorian-daniel-andrews-catherine-cumming-threats/101675162
Also this :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-19/victorian-liberal-party-candidate-distance-matthew-guy/101674308
Our thankfully ex-PM Scummo was also a Pentecostal Christianist who very much pushed his religious bigotry on others including unwanted secret creepy “blessings” by touching people without their consent & preaching in Church after losing the election in a landslide that.people should’t trust govts.. afterleaidng our most blatantly dishonest and corrupt one ever.
@60. SC (Salty Current) : As far as the Booze ban in Qatar goes – shades of the old US Prohibtion era maybe?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-19/world-cup-qatar-fifa-beers-alcohol-underground-bars/101675076
I’m shocked! Shocked! Well, not that shocked as the old line goes..
Kim Jong Un reveals his daughter to the world at latest ballistic missile launch
Infantino says double standard behind World Cup critics
A West Texas family farm grows the most expensive spice in the world
Does anyone have the link to that pdf of The Authoritarians that the fishman sent around some 25000 years ago here?
More and more it just looks like the Russians are phoning it in.
An old idiom meaning just going through the motions.
Today we might call it “quiet quitting”.
This is an incredibly intelligent idea.
.1. The population of NATO is 949 million to Russia’s 143 million.
The GDP of NATO is, “… $32.4 trillion, the total GDP of NATO nations equals 45 percent of the world economy.” The GDP of Russia was (it is shrinking) $1.8 trillion.
NATO is far larger and far stronger than Russia.
It wouldn’t be much of a battle or a war.
So far there major attack against the West is to blow up their own Nordstream pipelines.
.2. Almost no one likes the Russians any more.
Their former captive nations hate them for good reasons.
Hurting the UK and the USA is just going to make us send Ukraine another $100 billion of advanced weapons and maybe kick the Russian elites out of their European holiday destinations.
It is true and crazy that there is some Russian support in the USA.
After all, we have three generations of animosity and fear for Russia in our recent history.
The headline could read, Russian invaders steal everything portable and destroy the rest.
One of their tactics in the occupied lands is to search for Ukrainian language books and then burn them.
This is part of their genocidal campaign against Ukrainians.
Link
Embedded links available at the main link.
Link
https://twitter.com/AKamyshin/status/1593642260951977984
Image at the link.
Kiev to Kherson train service has been restored.
The Kyiv Independent reports that Ukraine is going to produce weapons jointly with at least 6 NATO countries. Poland, the Czech Republic, France, Denmark, and other NATO countries will produce and develop heavy weapons and other military equipment jointly with Ukraine, Ukraine’s main defense company Ukroboronprom said.
Ukroboronprom said that they would produce ammunition, armored vehicles, and multiple rocket launchers.
I understand that the burst Nord Stream gas pipelines haven’t been repaired, and possibly won’t be in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, something seems to have just blown the pipeline near St. Petersburg that feeds Nord stream I:
https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1593954688474517505
Map here:
https://twitter.com/Dimmu141/status/1593963505610366976
Earlier today, there was reportedly a residential gas tank explosion in Russian far east that killed several people.
https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1593578013240631296
Video with English subtitles is available at the link.
Link
Scroll down at the link to see the “Nordstream Pipeline Sabotage” illustration.
lumipuna @127, that does look like a really large explosion.
In other, potentially good, news: Trump faces potential fundraising problem as megadonors jump ship
I don’t think that will stop him. He’ll find a loophole, or he’ll just break the law again.
@Lynna 124
I’ve noticed this too.
Most of the right wingnut crazies and white supremacists have a hard time relating to society in general and human beings in particular.
They usually have a history of domestic violence and divorce.
They usually have poor employment records with long stretches of unemployment.
It appears that Rhodes was an unemployed conperson.
They often have a long history of arrests and convictions by law enforcement.
Steve Bannon to take one example, was once arrested for domestic violence, is a convicted felon pardoned by Trump, and now indicted once again for conspiracy and money laundering.
That was my conclusion early on.
The Nordstream pipelines were 300 feet down in the middle of nowhere. Meaning it is hard to find anything on the ocean floor because the ocean is big and flat.
It really would take a sophisticated nation to have the capability of blowing up a pipeline like that underwater.
Which really limits who did it.
Motive, means, and opportunity.
I can’t see it being Ukraine. They don’t even have a navy right now, no submarines.
The USA? We have nothing to gain by doing it. Those pipelines weren’t even being used and probaby never were going to be.
Which leaves the Russians.
Who destroyed a billion or so dollars of pipeline for reasons we can only guess at.
raven @131, good points. We are not surprised to hear that Rhodes had a history of domestic violence. Seems to be a thing with the “right wing nut crazies” as you call them.
Ukraine update: Winter is coming in Ukraine, and so is an extra level of misery for those fighting
Mike Pence claims the Jan. 6 committee has ‘no right’ to his testimony. Liz Cheney has thoughts
Trump, MTG And Bannon All Seem Very Confused About This Special Counsel Thing
https://www.wonkette.com/special-counsel-jack-smith
From the closing summary of today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog:
Clara Jeffery:
NYT link at the (Twitter) link. I don’t know if the part about the leaks is Jeffery’s reading or what it reports.
Some podcast episodes:
If Books Could Kill – “David Brooks’s ‘Bobos in Paradise'”:
Rachel Maddow’s Ultra series – “Episode 7: Rinse, Repeat”:
SWAJ – “Monster in the Mirror: Ep. 3 – The Asiatic Criminal Mastermind”:
CounterVortex – “Podcast: state capitalism and the Uyghur genocide”:
On the Media – “Flipping The Bird”:
Marina Hyde in the Guardian – “Beer ban, Beckham and a vagina stadium: the World Cup in inglorious technicolor.”
Also in the Guardian – “Fans paid to attend World Cup by Qatar have daily allowance cancelled.”
I’ve been watching FIFA Uncovered on Netflix. It’s quite something.
“Iran has arrested prominent musician Navid Afagh amid the ongoing brutal crackdown on protests triggered by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini. [Some] 100 musicians and artists have been reportedly arrested or banned from work and travel in past weeks.”
Re: SC @ #138, SC leaks
No, that’s Clara Jeffery’s take. The Times story only relates to the Dobbs leak because it is about another alleged leak, in the Hobby Lobby case, a much less clear-cut one than Dobbs.
NYT:
Former Anti-Abortion Leader Alleges Another Supreme Court Breach
Years before the leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, a landmark contraception ruling was disclosed, according to a minister who led a secretive effort to influence justices.
It’s a convoluted story, but the gist is that Alito and his wife had dinner with a couple who were Schenck’s star donors, and Schenk has claimed that the wife told him that Alito let slip the result of the opinion, which he wrote, in the Hobby Lobby case. Everyone involved has denied it, of course, but the Times investigated and concluded that it was possibly true. Who knows.
Meduza – “Charged with incitement to genocide: A Rwandan propagandist goes on trial in The Hague – do his Russian ‘colleagues’ await a similar fate?”:
tomh @ #142, thanks!
HuffPo – “Progressive Judicial Groups, Democrats Call For Investigation Into Alleged Alito Leak”:
Seth Hettena has thoughtfully gifted the NYT Alito article. (Twitter link.)
More from the NYT article (by Jodi Kantor and Jo Becker):
Some of the evidence:
Much, much more in the article. I feel sick after reading it.
Followup to SC’s comment 147.
Commentary from Mark Sumner:
Evangelical leader accuses Justice Samuel Alito of leaking Supreme Court decisions
“The protests are not getting any smaller in Iran….”
Video at the (Twitter) link.
As Twitter implodes, here’s how to save all your tweets
I don’t have any tweets I want to save, but others might find this helpful
Link
Elon Musk’s poll will be swamped with responses from bots. And, in addition to that part of the farce, Trump was kicked off Twitter for encouraging his cult followers to stop the peaceful transition of power. Trump’s ejection from Twitter was, supposedly, permanent.
Re SC leaks.
I don’t know why the religious lobbyists thought they had to pressure the justices to do what they were going to do in any case. And the idea that the Dobbs leak swayed a single justice from how they were going to vote anyway….sorry, but I find that laughable.
tomh @ #152, I think it was more this:
The goal wasn’t to sway anyone’s opinion but to encourage them to be reactionary extremists to the greatest possible extent. They surrounded them with rightwing religious zealots, hoping to prevent anyone’s views from moderating and to stiffen their resolve to render what they would otherwise recognize as unpopular opinions that were contrary to existing precedent and would have devastating effects.
And Schenck’s own trajectory, in which he’s gone from being a staunch opponent of reproductive rights to seeing his previous position and actions as immoral and harmful to women and becoming a progressive points to the need for these forces to constantly battle to keep the arc of the moral universe from bending toward justice.
otherwise recognize as unpopular opinions that were contrary to existing precedent and would have devastating effects
…and be hugely destructive to the reputation and credibility of the Court and the party that appointed them.
Tweet o’ the day.
Julia Davis:
Subtitled video at the (Twitter) link.
Re: SC Salty Current) @ #156…
The statements probably sound better in the original German.
I guess I just don’t get it. When I see
I have to wonder what the actual mechanism would be. Do they really think anyone in the world is going to think that if Ukrainians know just how much Russia hates Ukrainians that they will overthrow the man who has rallied Ukraine (not just Ukrainians) to defeat Russia? Seriously. This is inept propaganda. Pravda would think it inept and pathetic.
According to the ISW, Russia is about to mobilize more people.
Because the last mobilization worked so well.
They also seem to be lacking in the most basic of equipment, good rifles, tents, personal armor, food, etc..
This has got to be putting huge strains on their society, not least because the cannon fodder is dying by the tens of thousands. Fewer workers, more widows and orphans for the state to (supposedly) take care of.
I’m not going to bother posting the article.
Three months ago, I was neutral about Elon Musk.
I now find that no matter how much I dislike the guy, he is capable of making me dislike him even more.
I will never buy anything associated with Musk.
Re: raven @ #159…
Hard to see how the Russian troops being fed into the front lines could get much worse. Are they planning to send the next tranches to the front wearing sandals and bathing suits and carrying a few toy shovels? Perhaps the Russian commanders are hoping that the Ukrainian forces will laugh themselves to death at the sight…
@ 160 . raven : I used to respect and admire Musk – and was certainly massivley impressed with Tesla and even more so with SpaceX. I still love SpaceX and think they have done some amazing things and fully deserve respect, support and admiration. But Musk has really destroyed his credibility and shown himself to be an utter douchebag who does NOT deserve respect or admiration and is a contemptible excuse for a human being.
You beat me to posting the news here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-20/elon-musk-to-reinstate-donald-trump-twitter/101675906
Damn. Pity we couldn’t have pharyngulated that particular poll to the negative. (Remember those days folks?)
I doubt it was a true indication of most people’s wishes and not affected by some body – or some bots and warping.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that it seems Trump doesn’t want to return -or so he says now :
Also on the positive side, I guess is that Kathy Griffin has also bene reinstated on Twitter too.
Latest news from the Artemis 1 flight here :
https://www.space.com/nasa-artemis-1-orion-on-track-moon-arrival
Short version – its going really well so far. It’s sceheduled toskim past the Lunar surface closely on the 21st of November coming within 81 km of the regolith then enter a distant lunar orbit before retruning to earth splashing down on the 11th of December.
ABc news here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-20/twitter-breaking-elon-musk-social-media-world-cup/101674494
On Twitter’s plight
“Evangelicals: “Trump Used Us!””
Oh, nonono!
This affair was entirely consensual.
You were warned going into it that he was a Terrible Social Disease.
You Trumped Around, and now you are Finding Out.
_
Schenk described to Politico how his group tried to influence Alito, Thomas, and Scalia on issues like abortion, gun control, and other rightwing favorites. Does anyone seriously think that those three needed their resolve stiffened? That they would moderate their views if they weren’t wined and dined at fancy restaurants? It sounds to me like Schenk was just another preacher who managed to convince rich folks that they could influence right wing judges to be bravely conservative by buying them dinners (and donating to Schenk’s foundation.)
When his “Faith and Action” group dissolved he founded The Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute, which opines (from their web page) “The foundation of ethical behavior is how the reality of the world and the reality of God are reconciled. We cannot do our work of transforming society without you,” just above a convenient box that says “GIVE TODAY.” His real skill seems to be soliciting donations.
Sorry, #166 above was a reply to SC @ #153.
raven@132,
On the Nordstream pipelines, if Russia was responsible for the explosions, it could have been a practice run for attacking undersea infrastruture which is actually in use, of which there is a great deal around Europe. But they’d only have done this if they’d concluded there was little chance of those pipelines ever being used again. The other possibility is that it was a western power, determined to prevent Germany and others resuming close commercial relations with Putin. I don’t think this can be ruled out, and my candidate would be the UK, possibly at the behest of Zelensky – who I wouldn’t blame if this was his initiative. The explosions happened during Truss’s brief period as premier, although it would probably have to have been planned under Johnson. Both are irresponsible enough for anything, and were very keen to curry favour with Zelensky.
tomh @ #166:
I think the key point is that Schenck and the other people involved seriously thought that. This effort spanned decades and involved tens of millions of dollars. Had Schenck raised the money and developed the connections and then just used them for himself, that would be different. But whatever else he did with them, he and the others went to extremes to try to guarantee the justices would act as they wished.
(This also appears to have been what motivated the Dobbs leak – to eliminate even the slight chance anyone would waver from signing on to the most ultra position. As Mark Sumner says in Lynna’s #148:
Perhaps this wasn’t necessary, but it was a huge, risky tactic which presumably no one would have resorted to had they been fully confident that all of the rightwing justices were comfortably on board. If Alito was involved, it would show the success of their efforts and also that he believed this sort of manipulation was needed.)
I wouldn’t underestimate the role of people’s self-image and status concerns on their actions. This was manifestly central to Schenck’s campaign. From the Politico piece (and that’s all the Politico I can take for today):
From the NYT:
Yes, the rightwing justices already had despicable views on these issues, wanted to put them into practice, and knew this was the expectation of the people who got them on the court. At the same time, they would reasonably expect blowback and real-world consequences from these decisions. Were Schenck and the others wrong to believe in the necessity or usefulness of these decades of work to surround the justices with people who confirmed and cheered their terrible views, celebrated their intellectual dishonesty and specious reasoning, coordinated PR campaigns in support of their unpopular opinions, encouraged callousness and hostility toward those who would suffer because of their actions, told them they’d be seen as heroes, and led them to dismiss the backlash and regard themselves as righteous martyrs? We probably won’t ever know, but it didn’t hurt their cause.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian (support them if you can!) Ukraine liveblog. From there:
CNN – “Live Updates: At least 5 killed in shooting at LGBTQ club in Colorado”:
The suspect, who is in custody, has been identified as Anderson Lee Aldrich (I don’t know if that’s the correct spelling).
SC @171, the suspect is a 22-year-old male.
Guardian – “Twitter fails to delete 99% of racist tweets aimed at footballers in run-up to World Cup”:
So who knew that the tallest active volcano in Eurasia is …
Klyuchevskaya Sopka in Kamchatka?
Or that it is currently exploding with as many as 10 explosions an hour as this :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-21/russian-volcanoes-extremely-active-kamchatka-peninsula/101676740
news report observes?
@171. SC (Salty Current) : I don’t care how his name is spelled. I will not use it on principle.
How are his victims names spelled? What were their lives like and what more could they have done before they were murdered by this vile homophobic bigot?
What will happen now to make these sort of hate crimes and murders less likely?
Nothing?
Fucks sake. Just .. fucking hell, Does it ever end? Can people ever just be allowed to fucking live and love and be who they are without being fucking murdered for it? Fuck.
Good news:
Link
^ Or rather what more could they have done if they hadn’t been murdered buy this piece of excrement I mean..
Ironically, Dash Dobrofsky made this observation on twitter.
He is stretching his point a little bit.
Parts of the MAGA GOP are indeed pro-Russia and pro-Ukrainian Genocide for unclear reasons.
Parts of the GOP remember the Cold War, Vietnam, Cuba, Czechoslovakia 1968 invasion, Hungary invasion, and the Berlin wall and look at Russia as the latest version of the Soviet Union.
Elon Musk also shut down part of Ukraine’s Starlink system for unexplained reasons.
The more I see of Musk, the more I get the impression that he is missing large parts of a normal personality.
A few more details, and more commentary, regarding the shooting in Colorado Springs:
Link
Additional social media responses and videos are available at the link.
More on the Colorado gay bar mass shooting incident.
Although not much more information.
The club is calling it a hate attack.
Colorado Springs is notorious for its high concentration of fundie xians and was the scene of another mass shooting at an abortion clinic a few years ago, by a fundie xian terrorist.
New York Times:
New York Times link
More at the link.
Chris York:
Re: Steve R @ #174…
Quite familiar with it, but then, I do follow various news sources that report on volcanoes.
(Representative Adam (D)) Schiff contends Republican House majority will ‘be chaos’ with a ‘very weak leader’
This seems a bit premature:
Vaccine Breakthrough Could Finally Bring COVID to Its Knees
An article about the new Ukraine navy.
Of necessity, it consists of aerial drones and Neptune/Harpoon anti-ship cruise missiles.
The latest addition are drone Kamikazi surface boats that can reach 50 mph.
AFAICT, the engine on these boats is just a jet ski boat engine.
All that is enough to keep the Russian Black sea fleet away from Ukraine.
Turkey Kurdish strikes: Operation Claw-Sword targets militant bases
Fired SpaceX Employees Made a List of Elon Musk’s 25 Worst Tweets
Migrants hired to work at the opening match waited all day without food and water.
(That’s a New York Times link.)
Instead of a day of work, the workers endured no water, no food and no toilets under the hot desert sun.
Ukraine Update: As we prepare for the next phase of the war, a look into the Kremlin’s propaganda
@178
Unclear!? Putin’s Russia is the MAGA cult’s ideal society: A totalitarian, hyper-Christian, jingoistic, toxically masculine, militaristic state ruled by corrupt billionaire oligarchs (or as American conservatives would call them “winners,” “achievers,”and “job creators”) who brutalize, imprison or murder dissidents and minorities (especially LGBTQ people).
Julia Davis:
Subtitled video at the (Twitter) link.
“Kyiv, at the minimum, they should not be able to keep. Beyond that, we’ll see what kind of beautiful life we’ll create for them and how they’ll again want to rethink their identity…”
What that Report Purportedly Authenticating the “Hunter Biden” “Laptop” Really Said
What is it with GOP pukes joking about assault? ANOTHER joke about Mr. Pelosi.
This incident in Makiivka has been on the news feeds for a few days.
A group of 10 Russians tried to surrender to Ukrainians. The last one decided to play Rambo or Trump or something and opened fire on the Ukrainians.
They fired back and at the end the Russian shooter and 10 surrendering Russians were dead.
The way the Geneva convention reads, this wasn’t a war crime. You aren’t surrendering if someone is shooting at the people you are surrendering to.
Basically Russian Rambo killed his 10 fellow soldiers.
One Ukrainian also died here.
I’m trying to see the point here and there really isn’t much of one.
Don’t join the Russian army and invade Ukraine.
Live footage of Artemis 1 approaching the Lunar surface at istclosest here with 35 minutes tll perilune now.
Might’ve linked before & apologies if so but see also :
https://www.space.com/nasa-artemis-1-orion-close-flyby-moon
Oh and we have NASA’s official youtube channel coverage of Artemis 1’s closest appraoch to our planet’s Moon here too.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From their latest summary:
Also from there:
From the Guardian:
“Iran arrests actors for removing headscarves, in wider crackdown on celebrities”: “Prominent Iranians in film and sport have been condemned for expressing solidarity with the protest movement…”
“‘Very frustrated’: England and Wales back down over OneLove armband”: “England, Wales and five other European nations have backed down from wearing the OneLove armband that was intended as a protest at all forms of discrimination at the World Cup in Qatar. The decision came after they were warned by Fifa they would face sporting sanctions, and that their captains could be booked or even forced to leave the pitch….”
“‘Verified’ anti-vax accounts proliferate as Twitter struggles to police content”: “Platform’s paid verification system is being used to give sense of validity to accounts pushing health misinformation…”
Julia Davis:
Subtitled video at the (Twitter) link.
New Zealand Supreme Court rules voting age of 18 is discriminatory
Ex-Waze CEO trying to replicate early Twitter and social media vibes with ‘Post’
As some people have pointed out, Twitter is not really a technology company, it is a social company. If you don’t put the effort into maintaining a safe, welcoming environment through content moderation, etc. you will not succeed.
Trump Says He’ll Stay Off Twitter As Elon Musk Lets Him Back
Nobody tells The Donald what to do! Besides, he has his own nazi site now.
Elon Musk Explains Why He’s Never Letting Alex Jones Back on Twitter
(Not national, international, or even local news, just me venting)
So, since June, both the water company and the gas company have been digging up our street. New gas lines and meters. A new water main and all new connections from the main to the curbside valve. Which, of course, means that winter is coming and our street is some pavement, some sunken paved patches, some unsunken paved patches, and some dirt and gravel filled in holes.
Now, I have always had some water in my basement. When it rains, my sump pump pumps out the sump hole. But, over the past month, the water coming into my basement has increased. From one or two sump pump cycles a day to 20 cycles per hour. And the water was coming from the old coal bin under the porch. I went in there and discovered a stream of water coming in around my feed pipe.
So the water company checked it out and couldn’t find any leak along the old main (the new one is not connected yet) or my line (all based on listening). So they decided (how? I don’t know.) that the leak was on my service line. But, because of the timing, the water company (or, more likely, their contractor) assumed responsibility and, today, a different contractor showed up to install a new feed line.
They dug down and the hole filled with water. They shut my water off and the hole continued to fill. Lo and behold! the water is coming from the street side of my feed line valve. So now the water company, the contractor putting in the new main and all the news roadside feed lines, and the contractor who is here to put in my new curbside feed line are engaged in a round of ‘who’s going to pay for this’. As they stand around in the 20F weather, pumping muddy water out of the hole where my grass used to be and out into the street.
They have turned my water back on, but that’ll change as they dig up the street to find the leak. Which could be opposite my house or could be way up the hill.
All we need is circus music.
Stochastic terrorism against LGBTQ+ is increasing.
The attack on the Colorado Springs nightclub that left 5 people dead and 25 wounded is just the latest in a series of attacks.
One of the main weapons of the stochastic terrorists is…Twitter, which can be bothered to clean up their content and stop supporting terrorists.
“Two accounts on Twitter targeting the LGBTQ+ public are Gays Against Groomers and Libs of TikTok. Both accounts strategically packaged messages to their followers, knowing that drawing attention to LGBTQ+ events will outrage and anger them.”
This is a blog post and only a few paragraphs are quoted.
It does explain why nuclear weapons need to be maintained to work and why Russia’s may not be.
More or less all modern nuclear weapons are boosted with a deuterium-tritium mixture that fuses during the blast. Including tactical nuclear weapons.
Tritium has a short half life of 12.5 years and is hard to make.
You make it in nuclear reactors by irradiating lithium.
Russia has a long history of not taking care of much of anything including in the present case, their army and its stockpiles.
We of course, don’t have the slightest idea in reality of how many of their nuclear weapons are being updated.
Russia has been emptying out their prisons to send men to Ukraine.
Reportedly, they are mostly being used as cannon fodder and most are being killed. Not a good bargain.
And, some of them who retreat or surrender are in fact, being executed.
What century is Russia living in, anyway?
Last Week Tonight (YT link) – “Qatar World Cup: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)”:
Guardian liveblog:
@ 28
Could they just reconfigure their stockpiles to old school fission bombs? Even the “trigger” alone would be pretty destructive.
Sorry, that was for 208.
Somewhat related pieces:
Respectful Insolence – “To Nuremberg or not to Nuremberg? That is the antivax question.”:
Vancouver Sun (I had missed this earlier this month) – “Vaccine-doubting doctor ordered to pay $1 million in legal costs after her libel suit quashed”:
Tweet o’ the day.
Kyiv Independent:
I have no idea what’s going on here, but I’m taking an admittedly disproportionate interest in this little spit.
Probably.
Every thing I know about nuclear weapons design, I learned on Wikipedia.
Which isn’t as bad as it sounds.
There is a huge amount of detailed information about that subject on Wikipedia.
One of the problems with a pure fission bomb is deliverability.
They don’t produce much blast for the weight and tend to be heavy which matters on missiles and cannon shells.
Nonetheless, we destroyed Hiroshima with a 20 kt fission bomb.
Russia couldn’t do a lot with fission bombs but not a lot with nuclear weapons is still…more than we want to see.
Steve Benen commented on the Justice Department’s investigations into Trump’s suspected crimes. Benen noted that Trump’s Republican lackeys are, at best, not offering any realistic menu options:
Link
Re: SC (Salty Current) @ #216…
One thing that might be going on… The tip of the Kinburn Spit is the only part of Mykolaiv Oblast still under Russian control. While I am dubious about the wisdom of an amphibious landing to free more territory by attacking the spit, it would probably be a PR victory to be able to claim having freed all Mykolaiv Oblast from the Russian army.
Hopefully, this is good news for Warnock:
In other midterm political news: Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski has inched into the lead in Alaska thanks to the state’s ranked-choice voting system.
Josh Marshall:
Link
New York Times:
Freight rail workers at the biggest unions split over their contract deal, raising the specter of a strike
Workers at the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen voted for the deal. The SMART-TD union voted it down. If a deal is not reached, workers could strike by Dec. 9. Some commuter lines would be affected.
Matt Walsh only upset ‘more people weren’t killed’ at Club Q [A claim made by a civil rights attorney]
Follow-up to #215:
Follow-up to #s 215 and 225:
Subtitled video at the (Twitter) link.
Akira MacKenzie
Yes and no. Fusion bombs use the initial fission reaction as an initiator for the fusion reaction. Which means that the way that the fissionable material is brought together (very quickly) to ‘squeeze’ the tritium requires a very specific configuration for the conventional explosive lenses. The conventional explosive lenses have to compress the fissionable material together with enough force to create a full cascade without pushing the tritium into an unusable configuration. If the calculations are off, if the explosives have a defect, if the tritium has changed, then the thermonuclear devise will fizzle – still a nuclear event, but very small (for a nuclear explosion).
Fission bombs also use explosives to bring the fissionable material together quickly enough for the fission to occur explosively. A fission bomb using U235 uses a ‘cup’ of U235 placed at one end of the barrel of a gun with a cylinder, or plug, of the stuff at the other end of the gun. An explosion propels the U235 plug into the cup. U235 fissions slowly enough that most of the U235 is consumed by the chain reaction.
This will not work for a P238. Plutonium is far more reactive (it requires a mass about 1/3 that of U235) and if one used the plug/cannon/cup form, the Plutonium would begin fissioning long before full insertion and would go off prematurely. This is what is called a fizzle. A hollow sphere of P238, with an accelerator element inside, is surrounded by carefully shaped explosive lenses of explosives that explode at different rates. If all lenses are initiated in the same microsecond, the energy from the explosives will hit the entire sphere at the same time, crushing the P238 and transforming it from a subcritical to a critical mass. If the explosives or the plutonium are not configured correctly, or if either has a defect, or the initiator wiring or wires do not do their job, the bomb will fizzle.
In order to use either plutonium or uranium from one type of bomb and moving it to another requires completely reshaping the fissionable material (both uranium and plutonium can be worked like any other metal, with the added adventure that getting too much in the same place at the same time will initiate a nuclear event) as well as creating new explosive lenses. Shaping the metal is easy compared to creating lenses.
So, yes, it can be done. Is it easy? No. Is it expensive? Yes. The labour requires moderate skill. The calculations and planning, as well as overseeing the implementation, installation, wiring, and timing, require a great deal of skill. Expensive skills. Yes, old calculations can be used, but reusing material changes how it behaves (introduced impurities can do strange things to fissionable materials). The US, Great Britain, France, China, etc. do reuse fissionable materials. But these are nations that can afford to do it. Much cheaper to ignore the weapons until you need them for threats.
CNN – “January 6 defendant who barged into Pelosi offices during attack found guilty of multiple counts”:
Justin Trudeau:
Link at the (Twitter) link, or here’s another.
Yashar Ali:
Video at the (Twitter) link.
Beyond Meat Pennsylvania Plant Has Apparent Mold and Listeria, Report Says
Paul Ryan invents a new category of anti-Trumpism
Translation: horrible person wants to get rid of other horrible person, not because he’s horrible, but because he doesn’t win elections.
@ 227
Ah! Thank you for the explanation.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From their latest summary:
Radio Free Humanity – “Episode 81: Tankie Denialism, Holocaust Denialism––Interview with Sergey Romanov & Nicholas Terry”:
In Moscow’s Shadows (Mark Galeotti) – “In Moscow’s Shadows 84: Putin the History (Abuse) Man”:
(In a discussion of Russian productivity, he talks about groups of people in the Soviet Union turning up to work drunk as a form of “passive” protest or resistance. It’s interesting context for the videos of drunken mobiks.)
A thread from Galeotti yesterday:
Guardian liveblog:
BBC – “Club Q Colorado shooting: Attack was ended by dad and drag performer”:
Guardian – “Lack of clues about University of Idaho killings fuels fear and rumors”:
@238: “Manhunt” is not the right word when you don’t know whom you are looking for, or where. It conjures images of squads of deputies beating through the swamp with bloodhounds.
Update:
4 people found dead following reported hostage situation in Oklahoma
AP Fires Journalist Who Reported Russia Launched Missiles into Poland
7 Low Value Shitcoins That Will Explode In 2023
I think the real key is to realize why they are called “shitcoins.”
A bold and brilliant Saudi Arabia pulled off one of the biggest shocks in World Cup history as they came from behind to stun two-time winners Argentina in a fantastic Group C opener in Lusail.
Vancouver naturopath suspended after patient says he failed to notice tumour during repeat visits
ibid:
Naturopaths use botox? That is surprising to me. It doesn’t seem very nature-y.
Shashank Joshi:
And this – “Exclusive: Ex-Russian spy flees to the NATO country that captured him, delivering another embarrassing blow to Moscow”:
Birth certificate contradicts Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond’s account of her father’s parentage and ancestry
Ukraine civilian death toll from war tops 6,500; NATO assembly seeks special tribunal on Russian aggression
A Soil Fungus That Causes Lung Infections Is Spreading Across the U.S.
DKos – “Mike Pompeo declares the most dangerous person on earth isn’t Putin or Xi but Randi Weingarten”:
Julia Davis:
Subtitled video at the (Twitter) link. It’s been abundantly clear for the past several weeks that not even the paid state propagandists consider “annexed” Ukrainian territories to be part of Russia. No one ever bought this fiction.
Anton Gerashchenko is a high Ukraine government official.
The last mobilization was a disaster.
I can’t see that the next one will work any better.
Russia doesn’t have the equipment and military infrastructure for another 500,000 soldiers.
Plus it is winter and not a good time to be camping out in a trench in Ukraine.
Pompeo is an idiot.
Education and the education curriculum in US schools is set at the local level, not the Federal level. That is why we have school board elections.
Not much of an issue to run on but the GOP ran out of ideas long ago.
Crude oil prices are going down.
They somehow spiked right before the election and now are falling rapidly.
The price of gas in my area is down almost $1/gallon from its peak.
It is all just a coincidence, I’m sure.
Oregon Pot Pardons
SALEM, Ore. — Outgoing Oregon Governor Kate Brown on Monday pardoned some 45,000 people with marijuana convictions and forgave nearly $14 million in fines and fees related to pot convictions.
Courthouse News Service
Russia has lost a lot of its oil markets.
Reports are that Urals crude is down to $65 a barrel.
That is going to make it harder to finance their invasion of Ukraine.
@Reginald Selkirk #243:
Poor choice of words, I would think, on their part: the idea of things “exploding” has at least a couple of possible interpretations….
(I picture Wiley Coyote any one of a number of times he tried to work with sticks of dynamite).
Guardian liveblog:
“These are the indicative estimates of Russia’s combat losses as of Nov. 22, according to the Armed Forces of Ukraine…”
Graphic at the (Twitter) link. Another 400 troops lost, bringing the estimated total to 85,000. That’s a pretty typical number in recent days/weeks, amounting to about 4,000 troops lost every 10 days. I don’t see how that’s at all sustainable for Russia.
Tribes Challenge Proof Of Address Requirements In Arizona
November 18, 2022
Native American Rights Fund
“Attention, Kazakhstan!
They’re saying you’re next.”
Subtitled video at the (Twitter) link.
SC @247, it’s so interesting to see that Russia’s spy apparatus is also falling apart. I hadn’t realized that that particular aspect of Putin’s regime was also weakened by the illegal invasion of Ukraine. By now, there must be no level of Russian government, society, culture, finances, or education that is not ready to collapse.
Aiyiyiyiyii: Just days after announcing another run, Trump signs $4 billion real estate deal with Saudis and Oman
Republican who voted to impeach Trump re-elected to US House
Excerpts from a discussion about the melding of fascism and religion, (that’s an inadequate description, so read the entire essay if you want more detail, more history, more logic):
“Deus Vult?” uh…maybe not. Why It Only Appears an Entire Religion Has Gone Insane.
Why McCarthy’s plan to retaliate against Dems is tough to defend
Midterm campaign news, as summarized by Steve Benen:
Alito proves John Roberts’ Supreme Court is illegitimate
“Speculation is mounting over a new Russian ‘goodwill gesture’ – this time, Putin’s demoralised troops are reportedly preparing to retreat from Zaporizhzhia Atomic Energy Plant…”
Would be very good news if true. Lots of rumors, though.
TUCKER CARLSON:
Commentary from Wonkette:
https://www.wonkette.com/tucker-carlson-colorado-springs-anti-lgbtq-incitement
Followup to comment 271.
Pete Buttigieg:
https://mobile.twitter.com/PeteButtigieg/status/1594890136851988483
Another example of fundie xians being horrible people.
This is the case of the 10 year old rape victim in Indiana.
“Dr. Caitlin Bernard testified during the second day of a court hearing on an attempt to block Indiana’s Republican attorney general from seeking patient medical records.”He has no reason or right to those medical records.
“The attorney general’s office says it is investigating whether Bernard properly reported child abuse and possibly violated patient privacy laws by telling a newspaper reporter about the girl’s case.”He is not doing that at all.
What he is doing is harassing the doctor for doing an abortion on a 10 year old rape victim, which was legal in Indiana at the time.
He is simply being a christofascist bully.
As noted by many, since Roe versus Wade was repealed, the fundie xians have gone from abortion is wrong to, “it is OK for a third grader to be raped and pregnant.”
And launched a witchhunt against the doctor who treated her.
Major tax-filing websites secretly share income data with Meta
Supreme Court declines to shield Trump tax returns from Congress
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-tax-returns-mar-a-lago-supreme-court-11th-circuit
Omicron boosters better at preventing COVID infection than previous shots: CDC
In Kherson city, sympathies for Russia complicate reintegration into Ukraine
Washington Post link
That’s a complicated picture, but one thing is certain: the rubles the Russians paid out are now worthless. The people who fled to Crimea helped to steal some of Kherson’s cultural wealth.
LA Police Recover $18 Million in Stolen Goods From Train Robbery Rings
The Dengue Virus Has Been Found in Arizona
How To Fight Fascism Before It’s Too Late
“The WSJ: A group of Democratic and Republican Senators has called on Biden to overturn his decision to not send Grey Eagle drones to Ukraine.”
@282: That’s odd. It is from an American manufacturer, reported in an American publication. Why would they not spell it Gray Eagle?
@282 The WSJ does spell it ‘gray’
Gray Eagle drones could ‘drive the strategic course of the war in Ukraine’s favor’ and counter Russia’s use of Iranian drones
Daily Crunch: Finnish tech conference yanks $1M pitch contest prize from Russian co-founders
Reginald Selkirk @ #s 282 and 283, that seems like a lot of effort, but I’m glad you worked it out for yourself.
:)
I remember this from my stats class in college: From, where else, xkcd</a?
And all hail Htmalia, acolyte of Tpyos!
Ukraine update: Mud, mud, and more mud, and Ukraine gets a new long-range weapon
Boise officials scramble to repair damage caused by revelation of white-nationalist police captain
Link
Follow up to comment 291.
Here is the website where you can donate to the World Central Kitchen:
https://wck.org
Another mass shooting.
This is in Virginia, near Washington DC.
No information except the dead are probably less than 10.
Re: raven @ #293…
Per the BBC, the gunman is believed to be the store manager, who–in the end–0shot himself.
Any orchid experts or interested folks her ecare tohelp me out please?
I’m trying to work out which species of Black Orchid grows on the Ooline or Cadellia pentastylis tree seen here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadellia#/media/File:Tregole_NP_Black_Orchids_DSC03273.JPG
& here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-23/ooline-flowering-tregole-national-park-cadellia-pentastylis/101659950
Scroll down.
tentatively concluded it is mostlikely Bulbophyllum macphersonii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbophyllum_macphersonii but would really appreciate any ID help here.
Going via wikipedia as my usual first port of call here and it looks like most of the Black Orchid candidates via :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbophyllum
& https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_orchid
are endemic to other lands or don’t match the appearance for the other photos (it’s not a species we have locally or that I’ve seen in person) but very much not an expert here.
If anyone could please confirm my Bulbophyllum macphersonii working conclusion or provide a different more accurate ID that would be very greatly appreciated.
FWIW an entertaining article here :
http://ianfrasertalkingnaturally.blogspot.com/2015/02/on-this-day-9-february-francis-cadell.html
On how the eastern states tree genus Cadellia got its botanical name from the second person to steam up our Murray river. (Or Dhungala to give it (one of?) it’s Indigenous name(s).)
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian (support them if you can!) Ukraine liveblog, From there:
Some recent podcasts/videos:
Rachel Maddow’s Ultra – “Episode 8: Ultra Vires”:
This is the final episode of the series. Well worth listening to on its own, but the entire series is excellent.
Timothy Snyder’s Yale course (YT link) – “Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine. Class 20. Maidan and Self-Understanding”:
Fever Dreams – “Anti-Woke Bank Collapse w/ Heidi Beedle”:
In the Guardian:
“Oldest cooked leftovers ever found suggest Neanderthals were foodies”: “Pancake/flatbread with a ‘nutty’ taste is first evidence of complex cooking and food culture…” (This shouldn’t be surprising.)
“Ancient Apocalypse is the most dangerous show on Netflix”: “A show with a truly preposterous theory is one of the streaming giant’s biggest hits – and it seems to exist solely for conspiracy theorists. Why has this been allowed?…”
JAMA research letter – “COVID-19 and Excess All-Cause Mortality in the US and 20 Comparison Countries, June 2021-March 2022”:
Guardian liveblog:
“The entire Ukrainian city of Lviv, home to 700,000 people, is without power today as a result of mass Russian missile strikes. The temperature there now is 1 degree Celsius. Moldova also reporting blackouts.”
The world can’t allow this to continue.
Some Russian commanders encouraged sexual violence, says lawyer advising Kyiv
Scotland blocked from holding independence vote by UK’s Supreme Court
World Cup 2022 highlights: Japan stuns Germany 2-1
Update – Guardian liveblog:
Guardian liveblog:
Global menace.
Republicans ask Georgia high court to block Saturday voting for Senate runoff
MEGAN BUTLER / November 22, 2022
Courthouse News Service
Agreed.
Russia is targeting 44 million civilians and this is a war crime and a crime against humanity.
So what can we, the world do?
A lot, some of which we are already doing.
We should supply Ukraine with long range missiles and let them wreck Russian infrastructure for a while.
This is a war and there shouldn’t be rules for one side that don’t apply to the other side.
The Russians say they want to drive millions of Ukrainians into western Europe so western Europe can suffer as well, taking care of them and then end the war on Russian terms.
That might sort of work.
The Europeans might get fed up enough to end the war…on Ukrainian terms.
The EU and NATO are far stronger than Russia and it is time for them to act like it.
“Striking fr Tory MP @timloughton on lack of legal asylum routes.
‘I’m a 16yo orphan from an African country escaping a war zone & religious persecution. I have a sibling legally in UK at moment. What is the safe & legal route for me to come to the UK?'”
Video at the (Twitter) link.
Moldova has also lost all its electricity due to the Russian attacks today.
They aren’t happy.
Apparently, some of the Moldovan power lines run through part of Ukraine and they might also get some of their electricity from Ukraine.
Moldova also knows that if Ukraine falls, they are next.
They won’t last a week.
This isn’t at all surprising.
Nuclear power plants need to be connected to the electric grid to function.
The electricity powers their cooling pumps including their emergency core cooling systems.
If they lose electric power, they go to backup diesel generators.
If the diesel generators fail like at Fukushima, then the power reactors melt down.
More re #307 – Guardian liveblog:
More.
More of the same.
Reports are that almost all of Ukraine is without electricity and water right now.
Francis Scarr (Twitter video):
But they have great respect for you, Olga. You’re not one of those bad women.
Ukrainian claims:
Commentary:
Link
More millions or tens of millions of Ukrainians fleeing to western Europe would be a huge strain on the EU.
It doesn’t mean though that the EU would force Urkaine to negotiate an unfavorable agreement.
It could just as easily mean the EU/NATO get fed up with Russia and help end the war on terms favorable to Ukraine.
That works for me.
The ethics of us paying lots of money and weapons while the Ukrainians pay in the blood of their children isn’t all that good.
As it turns out, it is our war as well. Russia threatens everyone in the world.
Guardian liveblog:
Guardian liveblog:
Update to #240 (Twitter link):
Guardian liveblog:
Trump blasts Supreme Court over tax return ruling after a tough day in 3 other courts
Whose fault is it that the Supreme Court is what it is today?
re Reginald Selkirk @322:
For once, the Orange Menace spoke the truth, although the truth is not quite as he imagines it to be.
So today, the UK Supreme court ruled that the Scottish Parliament does not have the power to legislate for an advisory referendum on independence. This was not a surprise, although many thought it likely the court would rule that it could not make a decision about hypothetical legislation. The SNP is proposing to treat the next UK general election as a de facto referendum in Scotland, so that if the pro-independence parties get over 50% of the vote in Scottish constituencies, they will take it as authority to negotiate independence. I don’t think this is a good strategy: the unionist parties will say they refuse to recognise the election as being about that single issue – unless and until the pro-independence parties fail to get 50% (as they probably will – there are considerable numbers who normally vote for unionist parties, but would probably vote “Yes” in a referendum (this happened in 2014), and in a general election campaign, other issues will inevitably get a lot of attention even in Scotland. Then they will say: “Right, you’ve had your second referendum, you lost again, now go away and shut up.” If the pro-independence parties do get the majority of the vote, that would increase pressure on the UK government to agree a new referendum, but how great that pressure would be would depend on the overall UK political situation (specifically, whether SNP support or at least neutrality would be needed for either Labour or the Tories to form a govenrment), and on whether the independence movement could generate sufficient extra-parliamentary action. So in short, it looks to me like a gamble with the odds on failure, and the price of failure greater than the reward of success. I think the best course would be to start building a mass-movement now, on the basis that this decision proves the Union is not a voluntary one of equals, but one in which one of the supposed partners, England, holds all the power – that is, a quasi-colonial or abusive relationship.
World Cup 2022 highlights: Belgium edges Canada 1-0
Yes, Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a garbage fire. Here are some of the more recent details:
Link
New York Becomes First State to Temporarily Ban Some Crypto Mining
Ah, it is terrible that we have to do this, but here is an update on the latest mass shootings:
Link
Good news, as posted by Associated Press:
Yeah, that’s not necessary:
Kevin McCarthy seems determined to prove that he is a useless git.
@ 330
Yes, but millions upon millions of paranoid Christian right-wingers don’t know that. They think that under the “godless” liberals/Democrats/progressives who hate ‘Murica, the government has the gall not to swear their fealty to ‘Murica with a fascistic loyalty oath and not praise this country’s true ruler: An invisible, immortal, magical space dictator who is obsessed with who and how we are fucking. McCarthy is playing on the redneck’s hatred of what they’d deem “unpatriotic” and the “irreligious.”
Ukraine update:
Link
Akira @331, good points.
In other news, Republican doofus admits crime while bloviating on the Tucker Carlson show on Fox:
Link
Definitely sounds to me like Duffy thinks he owns a CFTC regulator.
https://twitter.com/Alexander_Tin/status/1593366415276400641
A Thanksgiving Plea from an Emergency Department nurse
Link
B.C. judge cancels marriage annulment after finding woman posing as ex-wife was ‘imposter’
Exiled opponents of Belarus regime have a plan for victory — and it could start with Ukraine
Donald Trump reported losses of nearly $1 billion over 2-year period, accountant says
San Francisco police seek permission for its robots to use deadly force
NBC – “Democrat Mary Peltola defeats Sarah Palin in race for Alaska’s at-large House seat”:
Shouldn’t have left this out of #341:
After the ranked votes were counted, she won by around 10 points.
Tweet o’ the day.
Re: SC (Salty Current) @ #342…
Occurs to me that McCarthy (or whoever gets to be Speaker of the House) may be better off without Palin even while it reduces the margin of control. The “Freedom Caucus” is going to be bad enough without Palin in the mix.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From their latest summary:
Also in the Guardian:
“Over 20,000 died in western Europe’s summer heatwaves, figures show”: “This year’s temperatures would have been virtually impossible without climate crisis, scientists say…”
“Police beat protesting iPhone workers as Covid cases hit record high in China”: “Officers kick and hit staff at Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou, with Apple warning of iPhone 14 delivery delays [gasp]…”
“Brazil judge fines Bolsonaro allies millions after ‘bad faith’ election challenge”: “…De Moraes…wrote in his final decision: ‘The complete bad faith of the plaintiff’s bizarre and illicit request … was proven, both by the refusal to add to the initial petition and the total absence of any evidence of irregularities and the existence of a totally fraudulent narrative of the facts’…”
“‘He kind of amps them up’: ‘Kevin’ the ringleader as turkeys terrorize Massachusetts town”: “Residents of Woburn near Boston subjected to attacks and intimidation by group of wild turkeys – and especially Kevin…”
Samantha Berkhead, Moscow Times:
“These are the indicative estimates of Russia’s combat losses as of Nov. 24, according to the Armed Forces of Ukraine….”
Graphic at the (Twitter) link. +310 troops.
@344: The GOP is in some sort of twisted positive feedback loop, continually growing crazier. Some of the people they have now make Palin look almost sane by comparison. You might recall that as of 2008 she was not in the pro-Putin camp.
@ Tweet o’ the day:
Perhaps it is time to put a little thought into a post-Tw#tter future
Meta links US military to fake social media influence campaigns
FAA wants pilots to be less dependent on computer autopilots
Europe names world’s first disabled astronaut
Reginald Selkirk @ #350 – huh?
Kyiv Independent – “Ukraine’s Armed Forces urge Belarusians to prevent their country’s involvement in Russia’s war”:
Update:
Some of the people fired are required by the terms of their visas to have such jobs to remain in the US; others were on parental leave. Obviously this behavior is sketchy and reprehensible but some of it also seems potentially illegal.
@350: Maybe you need to consider a replacement for “Tweet ‘o the day” in case Tw#tter dies, or in case it becomes morally repugnant to support them.
When you elect a bunch of clowns, you end up with a circus
China Covid: Record number of cases as virus surges nationwide
Gold coin proves ‘fake’ Roman emperor was real
Reginald Selkirk @ #357, I don’t know – it’s going to be a lot of work reconfiguring the software, and I’d hate to lose the revenue stream from the TOTD merch right before the holidays…
Guardian liveblog:
Georgia Supreme Court rejects GOP bid to stop Saturday voting in runoff
MEGAN BUTLER / November 23, 2022
Too soon? Amazon commissions FTX mini-series
Guardian liveblog:
Why some Brazilians won’t be wearing their national soccer colors for the World Cup
CNN – “US blocks sugar imports from top Dominican producer over forced labor concerns”:
Reginald Selkirk @349:
The GOP faces a real problem. They have turned a blind eye, or supported, conspiracists, election deniers, outright criminals and possible traitors. While the leadership of the GOP (not Trump) know that the conspiracies and claims of election fraud are, and have been, absolute bullshit. But, by embracing them, and, by extension, supporting criminals, they have enabled and encouraged the GOP voters to see them as reality, Which means that, any GOP candidate must, in the primary, please those who see the conspiracies and frauds as reality. So each candidate, to win the primary, must position him or herself even further to the right, further into the conspiracy camp, further into the denialist lies, than the other candidates to win the nomination. This is how the GOP ended up with absolute whackaloon Christian nationalist Qanon believer racist Mastriano in the campaign for governor of Pennsylvania.
I have been watching the GOP do this for decades. Every election cycle, the GOP candidates have to move further and further to the right (and now into Christianist. conspiracist, denialist). The GOP has done this with abortion, guns, Christian nationalism, neo-fascism, tax cuts, deregulation. No matter what idea the GOP embraces, their methods of campaigning (with the reinforcement of Fox News), guarantee it will be taken to its illogical extreme. The GOP has radicalized itself. As you say, a feedback loop.
Even if the leadership of the GOP has decided Trump is no longer viable, how do they convince the voters, especially after supporting, enabling, and spreading Trump’s lies for the past seven years. I wonder what new idea will be added into the GOP radicalization in the next general election: Russia as saviour?
I have no idea how the GOP can escape from this.
Pashinyan is the elected leader of Armenia.
It is an extremely brave thing to do.
Russia is (or was) the only local supporter of Armenia in the region.
Their Muslim neighbor Azerbaijan with 10 million people wants them all dead.
Their Muslim other neighbor, Turkey with 85 million people wants them all dead.
Armenia only has 3 million people.
Given where Armenia is, even the west and NATO couldn’t help them much.
Especially since their nearest NATO country is…Turkey.
I don’t know if it means the CSTO is finished but it never was much anyway.
The countries of the CSTO such as Kazakhstan know that if Ukraine falls, they are next.
The largest is Kazakhstan with 20 million people and not much of an army.
Kazakhstan is large, thinly populated, and rich in oil, gas, and the largest uranium producer in the world.
The Russians would just roll over them.
LOL.
Good Question.
2022 is the year of, “GOP hates Trans people especially if they are children.”
Pompeo has already made his main issue to kill the public schools as nests of woke, gay, Trans, normal people.
Which is stupid because by law, schools and the school’s curriculums are locally controlled and not controlled by the Federal govenrment.
Then again, it might fly because nothing the GOP concerns itself with has much presence in reality.
By overthrowing the Federal government.
Or by cheating on all the elections.
The Darwin Correspondence Project tweeted:
From the site:
Let us thank Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces: ‘Never was so much owed by so many to so few’
US authorities seize iSpoof, a call spoofing site that stole millions
More on the CSTO summit and Armenia.
Armenia keeps getting beat up by Azerbaijan and wants someone to do something.
It isn’t obvious that anyone can actually do anything though.
Russia is a long ways away and occupied at the moment with terrorizing Ukrainian civilians.
Guardian liveblog:
Link
Maintenance Phase – “The Food Pyramid”:
Either way, they still have a majority of GOP voters who think that even fascism isn’t enough. Basically, at this point, it is either the destruction of the GOP, or the destruction of the US Constitution.
Re: Oggie: Mathom @ #368…
How can the GOP end the positive feedback spiral of self-destruction? By one wing or the other splitting to create a separate/new party. The sane wing could then be shut of the insane wing. Granted, it would mean a generation or two of both wings losing elections, but it would mean that there were two, at least nominally, sane parties the choose between.
Another possibility is for the sane Republicans to become Democrats. Since the dominant portion of the Democratic party is actually center-right (as opposed to the completely nuts radical-right of the those now controlling the Republican party), they’d fit a lot better than one might suppose. A point in case would be Lisa Murkowski, who actually campaigned with Mary Peltoloa, even though they are from different parties.
Grey wolves infected with this parasite are more likely to become pack leaders, scientists say
The fact that they don’t calls their sanity and empathy into question.
This is the problem that ranked choice voting is meant to combat. It takes power away from political parties.
https://kyivindependent.com/news-feed/forbes-estimates-russia-has-spent-82-billion-on-war-with-ukraine-since-feb-24
My guess is that now Sweden has a right-wing government dependent on (supposedly “ex”) neo-Nazi support, and having fallen out with the Polish far right over Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Orbán wants an extra line of defence against EU pro-democracy rulings that threaten the large amounts of money Hungary receives from the EU.
Universal flu vaccine could counter future pandemic
Aussie ABC news on the darkness over Ukraine vs their heroic surgeons :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-25/ukrainian-surgeons-save-child-by-torchlight/101698306
Plus :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-25/scott-morrison-secret-ministry-inquiry-released/101694156
On the werid, creepy power-grabby pentecostal creep of an ex-PM Scummo and his secret ministries dodginess.
Also our cops are racist as F at leats too many of them and particularly one killer one :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-25/police-military-training-more-comfortable-using-force-inquest/101688792
Ukraine Update: What was five Russian axes of attack is down to one: the Donbas
Russia tells its troops there must be 5 million of them for victory.
That is 5 times as much as they have now.
They could do it but not without completely wrecking their society.
They would bleed it dry of resources and likely have to ration food, gasoline, and consumer goods.
This is World War II levels of warfare.
Bad Idea Herschel: Walker Challenges Joy Reid to a Debate – But is Silent After She Accepts
Oh FFS.
Ye Seen At Trump’s Mar-A-Lago With Far-Right Leader and White Nationalist Nick Fuentes
Cartoon: Thanksgiving for Billionaires
Yikes. Why do the elderly in China have a low vaccination rate?
Washington Post link
Putin spews a lot of bullshit:
Washington Post link
Elon Musk confirms … again … that at least in some ways, he is stupid:
Link
In wake of defeats, purges of Russian army officers have started.
No surprise.
This has been happening since the start of the war.
It doesn’t seem to have made any difference though.
Followup to comment 393.
Josh Marshall discusses Elon Musk:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/elon-musk-and-the-narcissism-radicalization-maelstrom
About Putin’s claim that Russia needs to commit 5 million troops to defeat Ukraine… Given the equipment problems the Russian army is already having, throwing 5 million under- to un-equipped troops into the Ukraine meat grinder will probably run into a near term sharp drop in population, de facto polygamy, or both. The Russian government is already concerned about being below population replacement rate. Between those leaving and those being killed, it isn’t going to get any better.
@393 @395:
No, it is not true, but it should be. Because right-wing candidates objectively promote disinformation, ungrounded conspiracy theories and calls to violence to a much greater degree than anyone on the left.
U.S. beats England, 0-0
It’s not just Trump: Midterms show the religious right is an albatross around the GOP’s neck
Qatar eliminated from World Cup
@ ^ Reginald Selkirk : Good!
.***
Australian state of Victoria has its election tonight – live news blog coverage here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-26/vic-election-2022-live-updates-result-daniel-andrews-matthew-guy/101697456
With left-wing ALP Premier Dan Andrews facing not just the Tory LNP opposition but an absolutely OTT & vile, blatantly biased Murdoch hate and lies media campaign against him. See, for example :
https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/hun/101626080
Plus think I shared this before here on the religious reich’s attempt (successful or semi so?) to hijack the misnamed Liberal opposition party :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-07/religious-right-roadmap-infiltrate-liberal-party/101611840
didn’t I? If not, here ’tis and if so, well, reminder.
What a night! Adelaide Strikers win the WBBL series & Dan Andrews wins!
So happy right now.:-D
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-26/wbbl-final-adelaide-strikers-sydney-sixers/101702686
&
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-26/vic-election-2022-live-updates-result-daniel-andrews-matthew-guy/101697456
So.. this song
The people of VIctoria collectively just kicked Rupert Murdoch in the backside tonight. Hard!
Thankyou Victorians, thankyou.
Cruise passenger rescued after 15 hours in the sea
Australia defeated Tunisia 1-0
It gets even better :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-26/vic-election-2022-results-daniel-andrews-matthew-guy-counting/101699708
Greenslide!
World Cup fans choose party city Dubai over buttoned-down Qatar
Game of Thrones star visits Game of Cones ice cream shop
Motorcycle helmets bought from online platforms had counterfeit safety certifications, test finds
For the young USMNT, it’s ‘we win, we’re in’ at the World Cup
Vladimir Makey, 64, head of Belarus Foreign Affairs Minister, is dead.
If you are anyone in Russia, you don’t just quit your job or get fired.
You often die suddenly of suspicious causes that no one looks too closely at.
If they say Makey might have been poisoned, he was poisoned.
A few weeks ago, one of the Russian collaborators in Kherson, Kirill Stremousov died in an “auto accident”. The pictures of his car showed it to be full of high caliber bullet holes.
Ukraine update: Let’s take stock of the current front lines
https://twitter.com/AmirAliNemati07/status/1595686245643886592
Severe flooding in southeastern Australia 🤯
Video at the link.
Why Public Schools Are On the GOP’s Hit List
Ukraine update: Russia completes its conquest of the Republican Party, but Ukraine holds
More news from Ukraine:
Link. Scroll down for this section.
Trump and His Desperate Right-Wing Conspiracy Kooks Go After Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Wife
The boys from Brazil
Boy, 16, ‘wore swastika’ during fatal school shootings in Brazil
@417
Fact Check: Did Trump’s Thanksgiving ‘Truths’ Not Mention ‘Thanksgiving’?
The sanctions on Russia are actually working, slowly but steadily.
Russia’s economy is in recession and they are having problems supplying their army.
Russia will have to go over to a full time war type economy and that means the citizens are going to notice their standard of living and quality of life going downhill.
The sanctions won’t do everything but they will do a lot.
Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63770438
On Dr Karl’s story and what inspired him here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/backstory/2022-11-27/dr-karl-kruszelnicki-40-years-abc-triple-j-science-vaccination/101574716
Russia is running out of all war related products and trying to up their manufacturing rates.
The President of the aggressor state claimed that all the companies that are now working several shifts to meet the needs of the army will serve as a unique impetus to industrial development.I don’t see how that works.
Manufacturing war materials is a cost for the economy, not a benefit.
That ammunition, missiles, tanks, trucks and so on don’t do anything for the average citizen except cost them money through their taxes.
These days they all get sent to Ukraine and destroyed rapidly.
Conservative states are blocking trans medical care. Families are fleeing.
Be thankful you aren’t in Russia or especially a mobilized Russian soldier.
In one of the makeshift mobilization centers, there is an epidemic of some sort of respiratory disease. They are saying it might be Covid-19 which is a good guess.
The local medical personnel don’t seem to have much in the way of medicines or equipment.
Russia’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic was minimal. A vaccine that doesn’t work very well. They didn’t develop any antiviral drugs that we know about.
The number of people who died of Covid-19 in Russia is unknown since they collect statistics like they do everything, i.e. not well.
The common estimate is close to 1 million dead from Covid-19.
Ukraine update: Why are there suddenly so many videos of Russian forces acting like zombies?
Followup to comment 426.
More updates from the war:
Link
Josh Marshall:
Link
A Trump judge seized control of ICE, and the Supreme Court will decide whether to stop him
Judge Drew Tipton’s order in United States v. Texas is completely lawless. Thus far, the Supreme Court has given him a pass.
Wonkette link
Followup, of sorts, to comment 430.
Bush-era DHS secretary calls GOP effort to impeach Mayorkas a ‘stunt’
This is a followup to Lynna’s 426, about Russian soldiers freezing to death in Ukraine.
Strangely enough, winter hasn’t even officially started. Winter Solstice is December 21, 2022.
It gets cold in Ukraine in the winter. The Sea of Azov and the Black Sea sometimes freeze over. Kyiv is pretty far north by our standards, 50 degrees latitude, about the same as Calgary, Alberta.
And it is obvious that the Russian soldiers on the front lines are suffering and dying from hypothermia.
There is all sorts of wrong here. It’s abusive. It’s a crime against humanity. It’s a war crime.
It is also counterproductive.
Why fight and die for a military and a government that cares so little about you that you have to buy your own sleeping bag and make shelters out of plastic wrap in a snow storm?
Needless to say, the Russians are wasting their cannon fodder for more or less nothing.
These soldiers would be far better off surrendering to the first Ukrainian drone that flies by.
They would probably be far better off if they just took their weapons and shot their officers and hoped no one noticed.
Re: Lynna, OM @ #426…
The Russians attacked Finland in the winter and Finns taught them a rather sharp lesson over it. The Russian army acted on that lesson for the following few years. They appear to have forgotten it in the decades since.
Niece of Iran’s Supreme Leader urges world to cut ties with Tehran
Iran calls for US to be kicked out of 2022 World Cup after it changes Iran flag on social media to show support for protesters
By “Iran” they mean the Iran state media, not the soccer team.
‘Natural’ baby product company recalls toddler cups due to lead poisoning hazard
Canada knocked out of World Cup after 4-1 defeat to Croatia
How the American anti-LGBTQ hate machine is posing a threat to Canadians
Here is an article about the impact of the war on Russia’s villages.
As expected, it isn’t good.
There is already a labor shortage of younger men.
This village doesn’t have a water hauler any more.
My village doesn’t have a water hauler either.
That is because…we have running water and indoor plumbing and this village doesn’t.
The school is barely functioning.
This is also common in Russia. A few decades ago, they decided schools cost too much and stopped funding them very well.
Internet access is sporadic.
At least they have some internet access.
I doubt this village will be much more than a ghost town in another few decades.
Marshall draws attention to something I’ve commented on occasionally on Pharyngula: the way the Republican and Democratic parties, long before the advent of Trump or even Reagan, had insinuated themselves into the USA’s de facto constitution – that is, those features of the political system that are not part of the written constitution, but which look just as hard to change, and which an outsider might well think belong to it. No, of course “the two parties shouldn’t shape coverage like this”. It shouldn’t be assumed that there are only (at most) two sides to a political issue (only one if the two parties agree, as is still the case with for example American exceptionalism and specifically the assumed role of the USA as a global exemplar of democracy, the evil of socialism, support for Israel…). Of course it’s not true, as some here allege, that the two big parties are indistinguishable – currently, one is fascist and the other is not – but the assumption that they are permanent, so that effective choice of government is and always will be limited to one or the other, means that calling the USA a democracy is at best an often-misleading approximation. No other country with a pluralist political system, AFAIK, has the same degree of two-party dominance, reinforced as it is by the nature of the electoral system, the MSM, and the huge role played by big-money donors and lobbyists.
What Could Go Wrong?! 48,500-Year-Old Siberian Virus is Revived
Purge lists, Nazi bots, and the richest man on Earth— this is the story of my Twitter suspension
Exclusive: World Cup soccer fans stopped by security officials for wearing rainbow-colored items
China’s protests: Blank paper becomes the symbol of rare demonstrations
Frontier Airlines gets rid of telephone customer service
raven @433 and whheydt @434, yes, additional details clarify the situation. It is so bad. Putin is sending conscripted soldiers to die in the cold. We shouldn’t even be calling them “soldiers” perhaps. They aren’t trained, they aren’t properly equipped. They are more like victims than soldiers.
Apparently, this horror will continue until Putin has no one else to send to the front lines.
Arizona’s latest ‘stop the steal’ protest flops
Photo of the pitiful and sad event is available at the link.
Kari Lake never did show up at that non-event. I can smell the desperation from here.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian (support them if you can!) Ukraine liveblog. From there:
From their latest summary:
This was Thursday’s tweet o’ the day.
That’s the most recent one I have. Still catching up after the long weekend. :)
Ukraine updates:
http://www.theguardian.com/...
From the Guardian re China:
“Police tighten security in Shanghai after two nights of protests”:
“Chinese bots flood Twitter in attempt to obscure Covid protests”:
“China censors maskless crowd footage in World Cup broadcasts”:
From the Guardian:
“If the secret police had a file on you, why wouldn’t you want to see it? Ask the Germans spied on by the Stasi.” (by Laura Spinney)
“The power of women: acclaimed Italian author Elena Ferrante on patriarchy and protest in Iran.”
“‘Russia wins by losing’: Timothy Snyder on raising funds for Ukrainian drone defence.”
“Great Barrier Reef should be placed on world heritage ‘in danger’ list, UN-backed report says.”
“House To Consider Treating Pregnant Inmates With Basic Human Decency.”
https://www.wonkette.com/karen-bass-criminal-justice-bills
Perhaps a little out of th ordinary for most people here, but a giant in the computing field has died…
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/28/fred_mythical_man_month_brooks/
Retraction Watch – “‘Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate’ paper gets lengthy expression of concern”:
More at the link.
Also via Retraction Watch – their Times Higher Education link is paywalled – “Editor quits over ultimatum to add female author to collection.”
I’m now super curious about what subfield this is.
I watched Good Night Oppy over the weekend and it was pretty delightful.
Here’s the trailer (YT link).
Collider review: “‘Good Night Oppy’ Review: Get Ready to Fall in Love with a Robot”: “What was supposed to be a 90-day mission turned into an inspirational 15-year adventure on both Mars and Earth….”
Selina Wang, CNN:
Video at the (Twitter) link.
Follow-up to #226 and above:
Under intense pressure, the Iranian national team halfheartedly sang the national anthem before the game against Wales.
They play the US tomorrow. Natasha Bertrand tweeted:
Twitter is now having trouble paying some employees on time
Julia Davis:
Video at the (Twitter) link.
“‘Students support professors, professors support students!’
Chant by students protesting the suspension of 4 professors accused of supporting #IranRevolution at the College of Literature and Humanities, Beheshti University, Tehran….”
Video at the (Twitter) link.
Newly identified dinosaur that lived on island of dwarfed creatures had an unusual head
Snake bites man’s tongue during worship in Erode
Ukraine update: There’s a good reason Ukraine hasn’t gotten the most modern weapons
Another crypto firm files for bankruptcy.
No surprise.
They were tied in to FTX and when crypto fell and FTX fell, they were in big trouble.
Re: raven @ #466…
I wonder if David Hollerith is related to Herman.
Zoe Tillman:
Pitch invader with rainbow flag interrupts World Cup match between Portugal and Uruguay
Scientist tries dropping eggs from space without breaking. Watch how that ends
(Video is 26:56, so I didn’t watch it)
In meteorite, Alberta researchers discover 2 minerals never before seen on Earth
Satire from Andy Borowitz:
New Yorker link
New York Times:
Oh FFS.
Followup to comment 473.
Washington Post:
Re: Lynna, OM @ #474….
Teaching Bolsonaro how to have tantrums like a 3-year-old hardly seems to be something either useful or well taught by Trump.
It’s no secret the Russians have been targeting civilians in their invasion of Ukraine.
97% of the missile strikes have been aimed at civilian targets.
“Ukraine will prevail and will bring the war criminals to justice.”That Ukraine will prevail is not yet proven.
That the Russian war criminals will be brought to justice is dubious.
That never seems to happen, no matter who wins the wars.
The didn’t even bring that many Nazis to justice, a lot fewer Japanese imperialists, and almost none of the Serbian war criminals. Same thing in Rwanda. The latest batch of terrorists were Al Qaeda and ISIS, and very few of them ended up being arrested, tried, and convicted. The best that can be said is that many of them died in battle against their many targets and victims.
Lukashenko is apparently replacing all of his staff.
His foreign minister died suddenly a few days ago and in Russialand, that usually means they were murdered somehow.
Lukashenko is only in his position as head of Belarus because he is being propped up by the Russian army. They could replace him any time they want.
Lynna, OM@473,
Either this challenge, or a very similar one, has already been dismissed: “Brazil judge fines Bolsonaro allies millions after ‘bad faith’ election challenge”. Is this: the article you refer to (it’s behind a paywall for me), or is there a new one?
A few good science and space related stories here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-29/meteorite-field-found-9-years-after-asteroid-sa-outback/101707426
Where I’m looking forward to seeing the SA Museum exhibition plus here :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-29/nasas-orion-spacecraft-reaches-record-breaking-distance/101711590
Where I’m looking forward to seeing the successful completion of this flight to our Moon.
Plus this :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-29/adelaide-500-to-be-more-inclusive-with-sensory-space/101709786
Good & helpful inclusive idea here in motorsport racing here.
Here’s a link to today’s Guardian Ukraine liveblog. From their latest summary:
Also from there:
Also in the Guardian – “Onset of winter in Ukraine – a photo essay”:
Orion flies far beyond the Moon, returns an instantly iconic photo
YT link – “Tyler Adams responds to Iranian journalist over discrimination in USA”:
Admirable composure from Adams.
Guardian liveblog:
Le Monde – “Martine Wonner suspendue pour un an par l’ordre des médecins”:
I hope someone is tracking the legal and professional consequences for these COVID quacks. This article mentions the suspension earlier this month of another French physician (and Senator), Alain Houpert. #214 above discusses the case of Canadian doctor Kulvinder Kaur Gill. You have to look to find these reports; meanwhile, these arrogant charlatans continue to harm people while claiming victimization for themselves.
Some good news for once.
Oil just set a record low for the year 2022.
Gasoline prices are also falling and I just saw the high $3s a gallon yesterday.
Gas prices rose right before the election and started falling sharply right after the election.
I doubt that is a coincidence.
This is also good news for Ukraine since Russia is financing everything including the war by being a Petrostate.
France 24 has had some good articles lately:
“Loi anti-LGBT en Russie : ‘Le pouvoir cherche à construire un socle conservateur fédérateur’.”
“Mondial-2022 : Iran-États-Unis, un match à enjeux sportif et géopolitique.”
“Cryptomonnaies en berne : des investisseurs au bord de la crise de nerfs.”
“Faillite de FTX : les Bahamas, paradis perdu pour les cryptomonnaies ?”
Guardian liveblog:
Colbert last night (YT link) – “Presidents Know Who Is Coming To Dinner | A Hot New Herschel Walker Scandal”:
Julia Davis:
Video at the (Twitter) link. Villainous people.
Tweet o’ the day.
“Major respect for mainland Chinese students here @Columbia for standing against the Communist Party
Big gathering last night…”
Photos at the (Twitter) link.
KG, thank you for the question. I have not kept up with the post-election brouhaha in Brazil as well as I should have.
Here is the November 23 article from The New York Times:
New York Time link
Guardian liveblog:
Kimmel breaks down full absurdity of Trump’s dinner with ‘Ku Klux Klanye’ and Nick Fuentes
Guardian liveblog:
Which would mean he can’t vote for himself in Georgia. Or if he did, it was election fraud.