TheVat

I've wondered if government funds would be better spent buying out people on low lying land than on dealing with disaster remediation, infrastructure repair, berms, etc. I have had forehead slapping moments as I've watched such neighborhoods in the US furiously at work rebuilding neighborhoods that are just going to face the same nightmare all over again in a few years. Both governments and private insurers need to find ways to discourage this idiocy.

You mean the coup that removed a corrupt Putin puppet and mass murderer, Yanukovich, and replaced it with a functioning democracy in which a new president was elected in a landslide? Yeah, damn those sneaky bastards at the CIA! As for the "she was asking for it" argument, I think Charon and Swanson addressed that pretty well.

I think resisting people handing out DV "tickets" is kind of the opposite of policing. But you do inadvertently make my point, again, which is that an anonymous DV is one which is unclear as to what exactly is being critiqued or disapproved. I don't want to make this a big bone of contention, since I like your posting persona and style at SFN, so I'll just leave it that the anti-DV position is only my own and reflects no ill will towards those who use it. "Mega Twat" seemed pretty overheated, for sure.

Connect the electrodes, Igor! Yes, Dr. Frankenjesus!

Thanks for your frankness. Though I disagree, I cancelled one of your downvotes because I do not object to you having a different interpretation. I don't believe that Zelenskyy affirming a non-NATO stance would have protected his country from invasion. Putin has long held Ukraine to belong to Russia, and when his puppet was removed in 2014 by the Maidan Revolution, he began looking into schemes to restore Ukraine to the empire. I'll leave it there for now.

The sanctions will hit ordinary citizens hard in Russia, a country whose per capita GDP is (IIRC) around that of Romania. A popular uprising seems quite possible now, especially if you add lots of war mortality and the country mired in a "Vietnam" with raw disheartened recruits. And, as @kotipoints out, the prospect of empty stomachs can concentrate the mind wonderfully. My concern is that Putin may not have any sober advisors in the Russian command now, and might respond to a Ukraine "embedded in the brickwork" (great turn of phrase, @String Junky) with carpet bombing and scorched earth. Or worse.

Zelenskyy is a man of courage, leadership, and grace under pressure. I don't say such things about politicians very often. I predict people will be quoting "I need ammunition, I don't need a ride," for many years to come. Хай живе Зеленський!

😂 Where do you stand on an American in missile country (Dakotas) laying in extra canned goods? Pessimist or just covering all the bases? As for a Russian Mark Milley, that's nice to imagine but I really see Putin as surrounded by asslickers. I think that Doomsday clock that the BoAS maintains just ticked closer to midnight.

I've been missing the soothing cheerful hum of germophobic hand-wringing that once came from this thread. Stunted immune systems are proliferating wildly as people refuse to eat floor food and the like. The best course is to take the bottle cap, swirl it around in the cat's litter box, then rinse off in the toilet bowl, then put back on the bottle. You're welcome.

The conflict is between two camps with different views of the Constitution, generally called Originalists and Living Document (aka loose constructionism). Originalists, who believe in strict adherence to a map laid out ca. 1790, tend to be conservative - Antonin Scalia was a prominent Originalist. Living Document justices, who believe that society has changed and evolved since 1790, and that our laws must be adaptive to those changes, tend towards more Liberal. The reality, for a long time, has been that loose constructionists guided a lot of seminal decisions and been influenced by changes in society such that some amendments have been seen as archaic and in need of clarification in a modern world. Their decisions, the so-called landmark cases, have done more than just confirm constitutionality. Roe v Wade, for example, defined and expanded a constitutional right to privacy that was never previously made explicit in the original document.

If victories were won on the basis of sense of humor, Ukraine would win handily. Not only did they elect a comedian as president, but they really know how to welcome invaders... https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1497570787557097476?s=20&t=OiOQpwFS3bBuDVqkvvuNcg

True. Given possible ecological stresses limiting food supply, I think insular dwarfism could become a planet-wide thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_dwarfism IOW, insular dwarfism could manifest on a planetary scale where we have a planet that is functionally an island with limited nutrition and space for members of a species. Smaller persons in each generation, needing less food to survive and attain fertility, will be selected for. Future humans could look like Kristin Chenoweth, and be quite cute. Or Peter Dinklage, and be handsome and funny. So the story of human evolution could be called The _______ of the ____!

One measure of a candidate's worth is when Tucker Carlson says nasty things about your selection process. <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Tucker Carlson says that Ketanji Brown Jackson&#39;s nomination to the Supreme Court indicates that Joe Biden wants to &quot;humiliate, degrade&quot; and undermine America&#39;s &quot;ancient institutions.&quot; <a href="https://t.co/DN5MfSpHMV">pic.twitter.com/DN5MfSpHMV</a></p>&mdash; nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) <a href="https://twitter.com/NikkiMcR/status/1497377830770028549?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 26, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> Hmm. Still not quite sure how to embed here. Let's try.... Yeessssss!

Found a freebie link to Friedman.... https://www.dailykos.com/story/2022/2/25/2082461/-I-m-not-usually-impressed-by-Tom-Friedman-but-he-may-have-a-point-or-two-about-Ukraine-and-Russia (Note that the link at the top of this article gives you free "subscribers friend" access to the original article) A few paragraphs, to keep our esteemed mods happy... The seven most dangerous words in journalism are: “The world will never be the same.” In over four decades of reporting, I have rarely dared use that phrase. But I’m going there now in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Our world is not going to be the same again because this war has no historical parallel. It is a raw, 18th-century-style land grab by a superpower — but in a 21st-century globalized world. This is the first war that will be covered on TikTok by super-empowered individuals armed only with smartphones, so acts of brutality will be documented and broadcast worldwide without any editors or filters. On the first day of the war, we saw invading Russian tank units unexpectedly being exposed by Google maps, because Google wanted to alert drivers that the Russian armor was causing traffic jams. You have never seen this play before. Yes, the Russian attempt to seize Ukraine is a throwback to earlier centuries — before the democracy revolutions in America and France — when a European monarch or Russian czar could simply decide that he wanted more territory, that the time was ripe to grab it, and so he did. And everyone in the region knew he would devour as much as he could and there was no global community to stop him. In acting this way today, though, Putin is not only aiming to unilaterally rewrite the rules of the international system that have been in place since World War II — that no nation can just devour the nation next door — he is also out to alter that balance of power that he feels was imposed on Russia after the Cold War. That balance — or imbalance in Putin’s view — was the humiliating equivalent of the Versailles Treaty’s impositions on Germany after World War I. In Russia’s case, it meant Moscow having to swallow NATO’s expansion not only to include the old Eastern European countries that had been part of the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, like Poland, but even, in principle, states that were part of the Soviet Union itself, like Ukraine. I see many people citing Robert Kagan’s fine book “The Jungle Grows Back” as a kind of shorthand for the return of this nasty and brutish style of geopolitics that Putin’s invasion manifests. But that picture is incomplete. Because this is not 1945 or 1989. We may be back in the jungle — but today the jungle is wired. It is wired together more intimately than ever before by telecommunications; satellites; trade; the internet; road, rail and air networks; financial markets; and supply chains. So while the drama of war is playing out within the borders of Ukraine, the risks and repercussions of Putin’s invasion are being felt across the globe — even in China, which has good cause to worry about its friend in the Kremlin. Welcome to World War Wired — the first war in a totally interconnected world. This will be the Cossacks meet the World Wide Web. Like I said, you haven’t been here before....

Yep. @Sensei perhaps it is helpful to post Friedman's article. (I think nonsubscribers get the first three paragraphs free, then 4 free articles if they give an email address) https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/opinion/putin-russia-ukraine.html ETA - posted a freebie link, two posts down, in a Daily Kos article. BTW, many thanks to @Alex_Krycek for posting Rachel Maddow's refreshingly clearheaded summation of the situation. I don't watch cable news, so I only see her when someone links to a segment, and never regret clicking.

I liked Thomas Friedman's observation that a major invasion like this has no historical precedent because people didn't use to have smartphones -- acts of brutality, troop locations, etc are now less likely to be concealed in the fog of war. All kinds of horror are released into the infosphere, raw and unfiltered. Now we have situations like Russian convoys exposed by Google Maps because their traffic service wanted users to be aware of potential traffic jams. That would be almost comical, if the stakes were not so horrible. Re latest post, a no-fly zone declared would be the on-ramp to WW3, possibly.

Smiled, reading that last - I had posted that same about sweaters and thermostats at another website a few days ago. I really wonder what Putin et al have in mind as picking up the economic slack when western markets turn their backs on them. Do they think China will buy coal from their newly acquired coal country? Or Ukraine grain? The history of Donetsk and coal is interesting. Apparently the Czar imported Welshmen, including a master metallurgist named Hughes, to start up a steel industry and collieries there, and Donetsk was originally called Yuzovka in honor of Hughes. Some background here... https://www.juancole.com/2022/02/welshman-founded-disaster.html

Busy morning, finally looked at news feeds. I think "holy shit" would be my first reaction. @geordief nails it - Putin has silenced more rational advisors and is in full autocrat mode. And @Alex_Krycek second guess, "or they'll steamroll...make puppet regime," does look more plausible now. And, just in case anyone's getting too comfy, there's this development: (From NYT) KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s interior ministry announced Thursday that Russian troops had pushed from Belarus, north of Ukraine, into the highly radioactive Chernobyl exclusion zone, touching off a battle that risked damaging the cement-encased nuclear reactor that melted down in 1986. “National Guard troops responsible for protecting the storage unit for dangerous radioactive waste are putting up fierce resistance,” said Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to the interior minister. Should an artillery shell hit the storage unit, Mr. Herashchenko said, “radioactive dust could cover the territory of Ukraine, Belarus and the countries of the European Union.”

That forum name seems to be really overselling the post content.

I sense a translation difficulty with Buai. I think Russell's neutral monism was one of the clearest definitions of a panpsychist theory. I recall Dave Chalmers, perhaps the best known current supporter of panpsychism, much admires Russell. If, as the Russellian view would have it, consciousness is structurally intrinsic to matter, then it would not be a big leap to posit that a universal mind (or some ground of being) already exists. When we ask a question with our curiosity driven neural nets, we are focusing that universal mind. The universe is looking at itself.

This was posted by the US Embassy in Kyiv. An amusing rejoinder to Putin's statement that Ukraine had never been a country.

This question came up decades ago at an astronomy club. Our best guess, based on Whitman's geographic locations in the time around the Civil War (the poem published 1867), was that Simon Newcomb could have been the lecturer (if there was an actual lecture, and Whitman wasn't just fabricating the experience for artistic purposes). As I'm sure at least one of our moderators knows, Newcomb was a professor of mathematics and an astronomer at the US Naval Observatory. Whitman worked in DC during the Civil War and possibly could have attended lectures? @swansont

The New York Post is a tabloid owned by the Murdochs. It is not ever trustworthy as a source.

On the theory that a taste of unpleasant medicine now means we don't have to maintain a longterm prescription and all the expense that involves for everyone. Debatable, yes, and this is based only on my sense that Putin doesn't take sanctions talk seriously. It seems to me his personality is that type that needs prompt and substantial pain (and looking bad at home) to gain his attention. YMMV.

This, from @Prometheus link, seems a suitable coda: "National security restrictions and the ethics of psychological research mean that the outcomes of torture cannot be evaluated empirically." Which means that any ethical analysis that depends on a determination of utility will fail. This leaves us with deontological ethics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontology We don't know the consequences, therefore we must consider the act in and of itself, as it relates to our moral duties and obligations.