Very encouraging New Yorker story on the treatment of muscular dystrophy.
According to Tim Weiner's history of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover fell out with Nixon over the Pentagon Papers case. Hoover refused to investigate Daniel Ellsberg because Ellsberg's father-in-law was a "friend of the FBI" who gave every year to Hoover's Christmas charity.
Fifteen translations of a famous passage from Euripides.
Restoring the mosaics in Hagia Sophia.
The medal that Isaac Van Wart received for helping to capture British spy John Andre and thus exposing Benedict Arnold's plot to surrender West Point, one of the first three ever given to an American soldier, has been given to the New York Historical Society. (NY Times)
Interesting interview with a scholar of Yunnan on China's southern frontier, much about cultural contacts and diversity. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I knew absolutely nothing about any of this.
Kevin Drum looks at Florida's controversial new standards for teaching about slavery in the public schools.
Fascinating letter that Richard Nixon sent to Bill Clinton after a trip to Eastern Europe in 1994. Including this: "You will be urged to scatter the available aid money all over the former Soviet Union. This would be a mistake. You have very limited funds. All the other nations in the near abroad are important. But Ukraine is in a different class -- it is indispensable."
French archaeologists have found a shipwreck dating to around 100 AD that was mostly full of glass vessels and raw glass blocks, which they are recovering.
The political crisis in Sri Lanka – which started when the country ran out of money to pay for imports like oil and fertilizer and tried to cover up for this by announcing a transition to entirely organic farming – is still rumbling on.
Excellent article by Colin Dickey about the Underground Railroad as a conspiracy theory.
Spring in a Small Town, the 1948 film sometimes acclaimed as the greatest Chinese movie, is on YouTube with English subtitles. Discussion of the film and its history here.
Wonderful email from a Marginal Revolutions reader explaining the role of Singapore's scholarship system for college students in creating their elite; as the author notes, the parallel to the ancient Chinese exam system is quite strong.
Michael Pollack essay on what sidewalks are for and how to manage these important public spaces.
Crazy overhead drone footage of sharks and schools of fish off Long Island.
Study of admissions to elite colleges and their impact on students who get in. Interesting that one factor skewing admissions toward the rich is athletics, since athletes at elite schools tend to come from rich families.
Scary numbers for the temperature of the ocean this year.
Over opening weekend, 200,000 people watched the Barbenheimer double feature.
London's 800-year-old Smithfield meat market is closing and moving to a new facility in the suburbs.
"Israel's Crisis is Just Beginning"
Robert F. Kennedy makes a bunch of statements about Ukraine that are even more deluded than his position on vaccines. Off Twitter here, but if you're curious you really need to watch the video of Kennedy grasping in the air for bizarre ways to blame the US and Ukraine for Russian aggression.
And in other campaign news, Ron DeSantis says he would consider putting Robert F. Kennedy in charge of the FDA or the CDC.
The people who think wind farms are harming their health.
Since 2012 Japan's population has shrunk by 2.6 million, or 2%.
Investment in US manufacturing construction (new and expanded factories) has soared, from $80 billion in 2020 to $153 billion in 2022. Some of this is probably due to Biden administration initiatives like the Chips and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act, some to businesspeople getting nervous about overseas supply chains.
Biden has all but eliminated US drone warfare.
Iron age grave in the Scilly Islands off southwest England contained a sword and a mirror, and the bones were not well preserved, so nobody knew the gender of the occupant. The DNA obtained from the bones was of poor quality but it does suggest this was a woman. As most people suspected, a woman with a sword was more likely than a man with a mirror.
Ukraine Links
Very amusing 10-second video.
Eight-minute video showing a Ukraining squad assaulting a Russian trench defended by six men.
Kyiv Post reports bad morale in some Ukrainian units because "for every 100 meters we advance, 4 to 5 men are lost."
Russian milbloggers are getting worried about losses of Russian artillery.
LPR volunteer Murz with a gloomy assessment, says Ukraine is pressing relentlessly forward. And even worse here.
Official Russian news reports that of the 49,000 prisoners recruited for the Bakhmut campaign, 31% were killed (15,000) and 51% wounded (25,000). Well, Prigozhin warned them before they signed up that they would probably die. People are very curious what the casualties were among the 100,000 mobilized men who were thrown into the fighting with minimal training last year, but of course no statements on that.
Map of Russian gains in the north, as of July 26. Lots of bloggers have reported this but the Ukrainian MOD has denied it.
One Russian officer explains that Ukrainian advances south of Bakhmut are the result of disorganization and low morale.
NY Times, July 26: "The main thrust of Ukraine’s nearly two-month-old counteroffensive is now underway in the country’s southeast, two Pentagon officials said on Wednesday, with thousands of reinforcements pouring into the grinding battle." But Thomas Theiner says, "Ukraine rotating the 118th Mechanized Brigade into the Robotyne front isn't Phase 2 of the Offensive. The @nytimes should fact check." And more doubt here. And on July 28 the Times pretty much retracted. This is what happens when a major newspaper tries to compete with OSINT guys on Twitter.
Phillips O'Brien, "The War that Defied Expectations," on why analysts were wrong about how the war would unfold.
Another case of DPR reserve forces formed back in 2014 being the last hold-outs defending a town, this time Staromaiorske. It amazes me that these guys have fought for so long.
On July 27, video confirmation that Ukraine has finally reached the main Russian defensive line in Zaporizhia.
Visually confirmed losses in the Zaporizhia counter offensive, July 21:
Ukraine: 210 total, including 31 tanks, 152 other armored vehicles, 6 self-propelled artillery, 5 towed artillery
Russia: 225 total, including 55 tanks, 65 other armored vehicles, 7 surface-to-air missile systems, 15 multiple rocket launch systems, 24 self-propelled artillery, 10 towed artillery
7 comments:
1/2
Fascinating letter that Richard Nixon sent to Bill Clinton after a trip to Eastern Europe in 1994. Incluidng this: "You will be urged to scatter the available aid money all over the former Soviet Union. This would be a mistake. You have very limited funds. All the other nations in the near abroad are important. But Ukraine is in a different class -- it is indispensable."
Quite interesting - both in what is said, and in what is not said.
Nixon referring in all seriousness to "communist capitalism" in China made me shake my head in wonder. It always stuns me how frequently Cold War era commenters used to use "communism" not to refer to what it actually is (a different economic model), but rather simply to mean "authoritarianism" - as if it were somehow impossible for capitalism to end up authoritarian in nature, or impossible for communism not to.
His comment about Ukraine being "an enormously wealthy country" intrigues me, because he doesn't elaborate. Given the economic slump that all the former Soviet states faced during the 90s, I can only assume Nixon was speaking of the wealth of the Ukrainian SSR, which I must confess, I am almost wholly unfamiliar with. Some quick searching online suggests that the URSR saw industry declining after 1965, fully stagnating in the 70s, and more or less not improving until the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
So what is he talking about, "enormously wealthy"? Perhaps agriculturally? Ukraine has long been a breadbasket region, and as recent events have shown, Ukrainian agriculture is extremely important to the global food supply at large, but I'm not sure that's what Nixon was referring to - particularly since few societies ever get "enormously wealthy" off mere agricultural exports.
But if not that... then what was Nixon referring to? Was he perhaps thinking of Ukraine's relative urbanization - particularly compared to the other former Soviet states? I'm not sure that really qualifies either. It just seems strange - if anything, I would have thought Nixon would value Russia itself far more highly, as it retained massive oil reserves, rich mineral sources, rare earth metals, etc, which Ukraine more or less lacks.
2/2
I also find it fascinating how many now totally unfamiliar names of political figures Nixon brings up. And I also took note of how there is no mention at all of one Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin - although upon reflection, that's not surprising, as in 1994, Putin was still a relatively minor figure, at that point mostly concerned with local matters in St. Petersburg, and it would be another two years before he joined the Yeltsin administration.
It's interesting how Nixon had fantastic insight into the fact that Yeltsin was losing power, but also how he seemed to think he'd be out of power much sooner than he was in reality.
It's also interesting how he identifies the Russians as being "serious people" (which feels correct to me, if perhaps a bit too simplistic), and remarks that part of how Krushchev lost power was that the Russians found his behavior shameful (which also feels correct, if simplistic) - and yet, I can't help contrasting that with the president day tendency for Russians to seemingly not take anything seriously, and to shrug off Putin and his administration behaving in ways that are just as shameful as anything Krushchev ever did, if not much moreso.
But most of all, what I was struck by was how earnest Nixon was in his writing, how bi-partisan his behavior, how reasonable and insightful his views were, and how much he seemed to genuinely care about everything going on in a shockingly non-cynical or self-obsessed way. The man was a snake in many ways, but good god does he make a shocking comparison to the most recent Republican to serve as president, in terms of intellect, competency, and principles!
It's a comparison that forcefully reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Dumas: "Rogues are preferable to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest." Despite always having agreed with it, never has it felt truer to me than in the light of that comparison.
Biden has all but eliminated US drone warfare.
Completely wrong takeaway.
Drone strikes haven't been "eliminated" any more than traditional bombings have been. What has happened if we finally pulled completely out of both Iraq and Afghanistan, and are no longer engaging in active conflicts / warzones - and hence, we're not dropping any bombs right now.
We still have "drone warfare", we're just not currently at war. The moment we go back to war, we're going to resume drone strikes as if nothing happened - because nothing has happened. The doctrine of drone warfare is alive and well, and shows no signs of suffering any time soon - because it's literally just having a pilot fly a plane and drop bombs (which we've always done), except without needing to have the pilot literally sit in the airplane to do it.
"Drone warfare" isn't any more morally outrageous than America's conventional bomb-dropping - it just got more media attention because people are dumb and think "OMG! The military is using ROBOTS to bomb people!", which... it isn't. These machines are piloted by people, just remotely. It's not any more or less horrific than when we did it by putting the pilots in cockpits.
@Verloren
I completely agree about that line, "Biden has all but eliminated US drone warfare." It's pure misleading clickbait on the part of Kevin Drum. As worded, it implies that Biden has removed drones from the US arsenal (and I suspect some right-wing types will happily take it that way, as a sign of liberal wimpiness). I fell for it and clicked the link. A more accurate wording would be something like, "Biden has all but eliminated the Bush-Obama policy of drone strikes on targets identified as terrorist-related." But that's not very clickable.
@Verloren
I also sympathize with your esteem for Nixon. A rat (as John has called him) in many ways, but also a brilliant and fascinating person--for my money, the most interesting of our presidents after Lincoln. Lincoln was our greatest, and Nixon one of the worst, but both were brilliant and fascinating.
I think when Nixon called Ukraine "wealthy" he was referring mainly to potential: the grain fields, the coal and gas fields, etc.
The coal and gas fields in Ukraine are peanuts compared to Russian-held reserves, though.
Was he perhaps not even considering Russia - presumably because he'd already written off the possibility of ever really getting them "on our side" politically? I suppose if we're only talking about the various former Soviet states besides Russia, then Ukraine probably does rank as the highest.
Thinking about my own perceptions, I realize I tend to think of Latvia and Estonia as being much "wealthier" countries, but that 1] is a sense built from modern day economic realities rather than 1990s ones and 2] does not account for the fact that Latvia and Estonia are so much smaller as countries (and consequently, as economies).
Anywho, I think perhaps my biggest takeaway from all of this is just how much potential for good seems to have been wasted in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse. Nixon talks about how little financial support there was available, which seems insane - we should have invested tremendously into the post-Soviet world, in the manner of the Marshall Plan, in order to usher in the kind of meaningful and lasting political changes we hoped to see. We also should have gone to the utmost lengths on nuclear disarmament.
And yet, despite the general peace, prosperity, and positivity of the 1990s, we somehow lacked the will to take steps toward securing a better future, and instead just chose to largely neglect the former Soviet sphere, paving the way for all the problems which plague it to this day. To the victor of the Cold War go the spoils! Except... nah, that's too much trouble, let it all rot and fester instead. What a mindset!
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