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Orcas frolicking in Monterey Bay; Facebook video, news article.
The State of Pennsylvania is livestreaming the rebuilding of I-95 in Philadelphia on Twitter, and thousands of people have watched; some have stayed on the feed all day. Reminds me of the crowd of hundreds who came to watch the installation of the biggest beams in the new overpass at the I-95/I-495 interchange south of Washington.
The NY Times reports major advances in treating metastatic cancer. New immunotherapy drugs are giving many patients decades of life.
Excavation of Bronze Age barrows on the Salisbury Plain, not far from Stonehenge.
The never-ending battle over whether psychiatrists should ignore politics or encourage their patients to join the resistance, this time over Israel/Palestine.
Tyler Cowen interviews Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's vision is remarkably consistent, for good or ill.
I love the NY Times obituary for Cormac McCarthy, with a great overview of his writing.
Roman mausoleum uncovered in London.
I just discovered that Horatio Alger, author of all those rags-to-riches stories that left a weird imprint on the American psyche, was a minister forced out of his church after he was accused of abusing boys. (NY Times) It's getting to where I am suspicious of any man who takes a strong interest in children.
Until recently historians thought the largest slave auction in US history was the "Weeping Time," the 1859 auction of 436 people in Georgia; but now it appears that a sale of around 600 slaves was held in South Carolina in 1835, part of the estate sale of John Ball, Jr. The difference between the fame of the two events shows the progress of abolitionism; by 1859 abolitionists were well enough organized to make sure that nobody could ignore such an event.
Archaeologists think they have confirmed the location of the Indian village on Roanoke Island where the colonists were feasted in 1584.
One of my vague fears about parenthood was that children raised without any religious identity might have some kind of adolescent or early adult crisis and join a cult. But my children seem to be entirely comfortable with having no church, and experts consulted for this NY Times story agree that "secular, anti-religious or nonreligious people are producing nonreligious, anti-religious children."
We need more power lines: "recent analyses conclude that the United States could reach net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 at relatively low cost using currently available technologies . . . [but] integrating these renewables would require a large expansion in transmission to deliver that power."
Short Brian Eno essay on the language of smell, from 1992.
Ukraine Links
If you're interested in the role drones are playing in Ukraine and whether NATO is ready for that level of drone combat, check out this 2020 article on how the US Army responded to the threat from ISIL drones in Iraq and Syria: "The daunting task ahead does not diminish the fact that ISIL’s small drones failed to successfully strike U.S. ground forces despite hundreds of attempts." Cheap drones are not superweapons and I suspect they have been effective in Ukraine in large part because both sides are too distracted by dealing with other problems to focus on defeating them.
And here is a fairly long and detailed article on the drone arms race in Ukraine. Interesting that anti-drone drones get a lot of play.
Intense video of trench combat.
Mediazona's confirmed count of Russian dead has passed 25,000 and has lately been rising at 500/week.
Thread assessing Russian morale, says units in the south are not anywhere close to cracking. Threadreader here.
Igor Girkin says Russia has completely lost the initiative and has "no chance of winning."
Over the past year the US has been able to increase production of 155mm artillery shells from 14,000 per month to 24,000. The goal is 80,000 per month.
"In its early phases, Ukraine’s counteroffensive is having less success and Russian forces are showing more competence than western assessments expected, two western officials and a senior US military official tell CNN. The counteroffensive is 'not meeting expectations on any front,' one of the officials said."
Prigozhin's rants are getting more and more dangerous, either for him or for Putin.
Did the Pentagon really make a "$6.2 billion accounting error," or did Biden order them to find more money for Ukraine somewhere?
Did the Pentagon really make a "$6.2 billion accounting error," or did Biden order them to find more money for Ukraine somewhere?
ReplyDeleteWho can say?
That said, there have been a number of reports coming out for years now, even before the war began, detailing how the Pentagon overpays tremendously for basically everything, and that despite the Pentagon being aware of this for some time now, they have done virtually nothing about it, and the trend continues.
Given that fact, it's entirely possible that both things are true - perhaps Biden gave some sort of order to find more money knowing full well that the Pentagon routinely overpays, and thus knowing it would be easy to find wholly legitimate places to draw from. That would be a clever and convenient way to address two problems at the same time.
Back in the 90s the Stern showed used to call the NAMBLA hotline fairly regularly, and the hotline referred to the NYC NAMBLA group as the "Horatio Alger Chapter"
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/Ey1pBO0LsQE?t=6