TheVat

Max Boot waxes optimistic.... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/21/ukraine-is-winning-war-russia-offensive-putin/ Accessible URL for the paywall blocked.... https://archive.ph/2022.03.21-131404/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/21/ukraine-is-winning-war-russia-offensive-putin/ Suggesting this is a win for Ukraine might be an overstatement. No one wins here, but I agree there could be a stalemate if Putin doesn't decide his humiliation is too much to bear and drop a tac nuke. Or two. I think there's less chance of that, given the pariah status already attained with conventional weapons directed at civilians.

Weird that I like Matt Dillon, and atmospheric movies in exotic locales, and yet haven't seen this film. Thanks for a nudge. Currently listening to ragtime selections on youtube. (once in a while, someone gets the tempo right, doesnt rush it)

As power was cut to the Chernobyl plant this month, nuclear engineers explained the importance of the electricity grid — even for plants that have been out of operation for decades. Chernobyl’s molten radioactive lava self-heats inside the belly of the blown reactor. Without ventilation, which requires electricity, hot air forms condensation that rains down inside the building, corroding and damaging equipment. With no electricity, the operators, who are working at gunpoint, have no idea of radiation levels inside the shelter. All anyone knows is that monitoring devices across the Chernobyl zone showed a spike in radioactivity a few days after the invasion. Then the monitors were hacked and went radio silent. Chernobyl’s spent fuel is another danger. Left to its own devices, it can heat up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. At high temperatures, the zirconium sleeves covering the fuel can ignite. After the Chernobyl accident in 1986, Soviet liquidators hastily built huge basins to store highly radioactive spent fuel rods. Water pumped into the basins cools the fuel and blocks radioactive gamma rays that emanate from the irradiated uranium. Now 20,000 fuel rods are stored in Chernobyl basins designed for 17,000. Officials at the IAEA stated March 9 that there is little risk the fuel will catch fire, since the rods are no longer very hot. Yet a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission study from 2000 found that “the possibility of a zirconium fire cannot be dismissed even many years after a final reactor shutdown.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/03/18/chernobyl-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-ukraine/ Some of the problems with cutting power to either long dormant reactors or to recently shut down ones.

While there is much truth there regarding TFGs competence, I fear you may underestimate the power of an angry monkey with a big box of wrenches that it can hurl into a large delicate piece of machinery. Appointment of incompetent and/or corrupt cabinet members, larding science-based agencies with partisan kooks and science deniers, tilting the balance of federal courts and (as @swansontnoted) the SCOTUS, ripping up carefully wrought treaties and other overseas relationships, abandoning Green programs and initiatives that need multi term momentum to succeed, etc. (a very short sampling of governance mayhem) While I agree more competent sabotage could be worse (as @iNow suggested), and RWers like DeSantis or Rick Scott (google his mean-spirited Rescue American Plan) are fearsome to contemplate in the Oval, TFGs flailing around could be pretty disastrous. And next time around, there might not be a Mark Milley or a James Mattis to step in at key moments and deflect those tossed wrenches.

Greene is the reigning queen of BSC, imo, based on her psychotic stalking of fellow Congresswoman Alexandria Octavio-Cortez. The mail slot incident was a notable low point. I don't think Trump will run again. His pro Putin ravings have whittled off enough of his base and distanced enough moderate Independents to render him nonviable in 2024. The primary winner will be whoever is best at kissing Trump's ring while edging away from his more toxic views at the same time.

Vlad may not be pleased with this koolaid antidote: Arnold speaks of the harsh realities to the people of Russia, and weaves in some personal history with his father's WW2 sufferings.

https://www.theonion.com/oil-companies-lament-rising-price-of-joe-manchin-1848656304

The word "performative" never seemed more applicable.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/a-uniquely-perilous-moment/627040/ David French offers a clearer picture on why calling Putin's bluff could be a dangerous move.

May I suggest you don't require the participant to fill out the apportionment section twice? The first go-through is already annoying enough in requiring one to do the math by keeping up with one's total and then weight each answer in currency amount. I wouldn't have changed my original answers (I am a biologist, and follow endangered species coverage) so it was a nuisance that there was no "same as above" option. Also, too many choices of donation size makes the process really slow. Perhaps better to have the choice be binary - donate or not donate. It would still be clear that, say, most people care more about tigers than snakes. And you wouldn't force people to endlessly scroll back and forth to remember what their amounts were in the first apportionment. JMO.

This topic is a compelling case for just making an omelette.

If you have any other 6" possessions you feel like bragging about, I humbly request that you restrain yourself. Consensus building is what he ran on in 2020, and was his MO in the Senate years. So one can hope.

They don't call them "echo chambers" for nothing. The power they have to gaslight people (especially those who don't stray from one platform, and don't regularly clear cache and cookies) is creepy. The other distortion that bothers me is from platforms that favor brevity, like Twit(ter). Many issues are complex, and reducing one's thoughts to 288 characters may lead to shallowness and sloganeering. (For zen wisdom, it might be okay, and I do sometimes see very pithy stuff that is valuable)

Electrics have disappointed me somewhat, since you have to drive them 15-25,000 miles to break even on carbon. (the car you already have doesn't require any mining, smelting, fabrication, etc) If, like me, you walk and bike a lot and put only a couple thousand miles on a car per year, then it's quite a few years before you net lower carbon footprint. And, to worsen the carbon picture, selling your old IC car means someone on a tight budget can now afford one and starts driving yours and quite possibly putting higher miles on it. The upside of that gloomy picture, however is that electrics look to be fairly long lasting, so when I die someone will be able to buy an affordable used EV.

Class and ethnicity get quite muddled in the USA. Personnel people can form biased opinions of candidates whose speech patterns suggest to them a lower class upbringing. If they reject, it is correlated with ethnic groups that have higher poverty rates. So a Black person may come into an interview knowing they are fighting the "bigotry of lowered expectations." An interview subject who looks like Gwyneth Paltrow could have a verbal stumble and the interviewer may interpret that as nervousness. A Black prospect has the same verbal stumble and the interviewer might see that as poor communication skills. IOW, though the bias here, on the surface, appears to be racial, it is also about class: Gwyneth is presumed to belong to a "higher" class than LaShondra. Racism, in the US, attaches class. IOW bias and bigotry are about perceived clusters of traits (fairly obvious statement). If a Black prospect walks through the door and speaks in a posh British accent (RP, "Received Pronunciation"), that's going to alter the perception of a biased American personnel director who has been using skin color as a marker for a certain class origin. It's not what gets asked in an interview, it's more what colors (NPI) the perceptions at the outset of the interview. Even without ethnic differences, speech patterns are very hard to ignore. Imagine two ethnically European prospects are late and one rushes in, saying "There seemed to be some sort of street festivities and Third Avenue was utterly impassable," and the other says, "Man, they got some big do goin on down there," it's likely the hearer may settle into some class assumptions.

A bunch of names are redacted in that post, which I am guessing is some sort of "meta" joke. I think the prior restraint issue will torpedo this legislation in federal court. What do YOU think , @Orion ? In your own words?

Have to admit, there is something kinda nihilistic about it. Makes me think of that (possibly apocryphal) American major in Vietnam who was quoted as saying "We had to destroy the village to save it." Great teeshirt, btw.

Seems to me a central problem here would be defining poverty and its causal powers. While economic disadvantage can lead to learning disadvantage (home has fewer books and other cultural amenities, parents have less disposable income for music lessons, travel, etc), it is by no means certain. Mom could be a poet who reads to the kids every night and pushes creative writing and books and so on. Dad could be a champion of work ethic and showing kids all sorts of skills around the house. The examples are endless. And a wealthy family could have a child who is lazy, entitled, and opts to goof off. You really need to look at the individual and try to get a sense of how they respond to challenges. Bias arises from the ignorant application of broad categories to individual human beings. So it's never justified.

It gets worse... https://thehill.com/policy/international/597482-ukraine-says-russian-forces-disconnected-chernobyl-plant-from-power-grid I still can't tell if this is all a deliberate attempt to intimidate (as in Herman Kahn's "play crazy" which @iNow mentioned last week) or if it's a lot of raw recruits in the invasion force with poor supervision, firing artillery and rockets wildly. Maybe some of both?

Should we expect a letter mailed to law enforcement, composed of glued-on letters cut out from magazines? Stop me before I post again!

Pretty close tie between Ada Lovelace, Rachel Carson, and Emmy Noether. Carson pretty much rocked my world when I was a child in the sixties and increased my interest in biology and ecology. Her book The Sea Around Us was the first science book I owned. LOL, @CharonY

What a terrible idea. Buy oil from one fascist tyrant to make up the small shortfall of oil (what, three percent of our oil?) from another fascist tyrant? Three percent - we can't sell breaking out the bikes and scooters (it's March, folks) as a patriotic act and expanding the arsenal in the war on obesity? Or bring bigger federal subsidies for purchasing hybrids, electrics, and fuel miser IC cars? If we mean to go Green, and move away from fossil fuels, this seems like the perfect two birds/one stone set-up.

So many possible flashpoints now. Would Russia try to seize the Suwalki corridor if it felt Kaliningrad exclave was threatened? What if NATO were to flip Vlads territorial logic back on him, point out that the exclave is not really historically part of Russia? Or what if Putin saw NATO movements around the exclave and misinterpreted them as directed towards a land grab? Another random thought - how does a NATO ally deliver fighter jets to Ukraine without, erm, you know? Or do Ukraine pilots go to that donor country and pick them up, fly a sortie from there? IIRC, Poland is looking into something like that. Does that send Vlad off the rails and he declares war on the donating nation? Seems likely. All this "we're helping the war but hey we're not really in the war" stuff seems like thin ice to me.

I was. I remember thinking Jaynes was fascinatingly wrong, and thus a good stimulant to the field. Events in the RW conspire atm, but will get back to your question tomorrow I hope.

I see a good case for cultural selection, as societies grow in size. Those which deal with, say, crop failures by tossing virgins down volcanoes tend to collapse more rapidly than those which respond by assigning members tasks like meteorological observation, experimenting with mulching materials, methods of water diversion, trying different seed stocks, etc. IOW, societies where a religious hierarchy and metaphysics dominates life intensively may be less likely to thrive. Societies where both faith and reason are allowed some scope will do better and lead to more divisions of labor that allow innovation. Brain architecture doesn't have to change at some deep anatomical level, culture just needs to allow both hemispheres to actively engage.