Tell the truth: You’ve always wanted to do that.

Armor: Tanks As Weapons Not Targets

Former Russian foreign minister reveals precisely when Putin may pull trigger on nuclear weapons

Natural gas surges to highest level since 2008 as Russia’s war upends energy markets (CNBC)

Inside The Ukraine-Induced Defense Contractor ‘Gold Rush’ At The Pentagon

To Arm or Not to Arm?

Wargame Simulating the Sinking of the Moskva

Explaining Germany’s Russian Gas Problem

IMF Slashes Global Growth Outlook, Blames Putin; Fears ‘Social Unrest’ & ‘Global Instability’

Lavrov Denies Russia Could Use Nukes In Ukraine

AirPods looted by Russians giving away their location via Find My  Now that’s comedy.

“Battle Of Donbas” In Full Swing As Russia Launches ‘Hellish’ All-Out Assault

EU’s Hope To Rely On LNG Is Weak Point In Plan To Wean Off Of Russian Gas

Russia Must Prepare For “Possible Aggressive Action” From NATO, Putin Advisor Says

EU To Impose Full Embargo On Russian Oil Next Week, Will Send Price Above $185 According To JPMorgan  Those of us who own shares in oil MLPs appreciate the heads-up, so we can stock up.

Russian Ambassador To US Says Biden Officials Won’t Speak With Him  Of course not – not until Biden’s poll numbers start going back up.

On Ukraine: being wrong over and over doesn’t seem to stop Colonel Macgregor

Russia Tells Azov Fighters Trapped In Giant ‘Fortress’ Steel Plant: “Lay Down Arms Or We’ll Level Everything”

The Tank Is Dead: Long Live the Javelin, the Switchblade, the … ?

Climateer blows the whistle.

My topic for today: All numbers are wrong.

Like, seriously. Whenever you see a number – in a tweet, newspaper headline, office email, technical report, textbook, anywhere – assume it is wrong. Treat it as enemy misinformation, deliberate sabotage of your understanding of the world, and disregard it.

You’re thinking, ha ha, I’m exaggerating for effect. I’m not. Seriously I am not. I mean, of course not not all numbers are literally incorrect; but it happens so very, very much more often than your intuition, that I do literally mean it is a good practice to treat all numbers as incorrect by default.

I’ve come to this position slowly, over the years, one screwup at a time. But now that I’ve really started paying attention, the mistakes are everywhere.

Read it.

Easy to say – but who gets to pay for it? The taxpayer, of course.

Fund your own damned research.

Some days are better than others. We take our victories where we can.

Read it.

For many people nowadays, the first port of call upon discovering an unusual rash or feeling a worrying pain is not the doctor, but rather Google.

Considering the behavior of doctors throughout the Pandemic Panic, can you blame them?

Fareed Zakaria: We must stop Putin’s plan B (CNN) And, of course, a talking head at CNN knows what Putin’s Plan B is. Never doubt it.

Biden and US allies face new dilemma on Ukraine aid (CNN)

Dusty Johnson among hundreds of U.S. Representatives sanctioned by Kremlin, calls it a ‘badge of honor’

‘They mean nothing to me,’ Langevin says of Russia’s sanctions on members of Congress  I mean, it’s not as if people are fighting to go to Russia the way they’re fighting to come to America.

Germany’s Economic Minister Warned Of Unrest If Russian Gas Is Immediately Cut Off

James Lileks: Vladophilia

Shades Of Gray In The Russia-Ukraine War

R.I.P., Another Russian General

US, EU Sacrificing Ukraine To “Weaken Russia”: Former NATO Adviser

Austrian Chancellor: Putin “Believes He Is Winning The War”

LOGISTICS: The War Reserve Stockpile War

FORCES: Ukraine Must Decide

Russia Expands ‘Powerful’ Cruise Missile Strikes To Western City Of Lviv

Willing Victims

British Elite SAS Soldiers Are Training Troops On Ukrainian Territory

Captured Britons Appear On Russian TV Urging Boris Johnson To Negotiate Ukraine Prisoner Swap

It isn’t just Putin — Russia vs. Ukraine

A current sticking point of the Iran deal (also, how the Deal and the Ukraine War intersect)

Top Democratic Senator Favors Sending US Troops To Ukraine  But not to the southern border.

Read it.

Small, deployable nuclear reactors, an idea that the United States military has been experimenting with for decades, will receive new life under a program the Defense Department announced Thursday.

And unlike previous efforts to deploy alternatives to diesel and other fossil-fuel generators, which were stalled by high costs and little political support, this new effort may succeed in helping the military, and eventually commercial energy providers, wean themselves off carbon-intensive power. As one expert explained, while the physics haven’t changed, increasing concerns about the geopolitics of fossil fuels coupled with growing concerns about climate change have made the effort more critical.

Imagine the fights when localities try to set up one of these and the NIMBY/EcoNazi crowd attempt to regulate it to death:

But a number of nuclear scientists and watchdogs have questioned the need for such a device. In recent years, they have publishing scathing reports, commentary and analyses about the potential contamination should the reactor or its fuel be damaged during an attack, stolen or experience a catastrophic failure.

“Not only have my concerns not been alleviated, they’ve actually grown,” Professor Alan J. Kuperman told Military Times.

Calls for US to issue visa bans for UK lawyers enabling Russian oligarchs (The Guardian) It’s all about the oligarchs.

Russia’s Oil Industry Is Suffering As The West Shuns Its Crude

Europe has yet to hit Russia where it would hurt the most: banning its oil and gas  I guess some ‘journalists’ didn’t get the memo.

INTELLIGENCE: Epic Fails

Blinken: Ukraine War Will Last Through 2022

Mariupol Has Been “Wiped Off The Face Of The Earth,” Ukrainian Governor Says

Scott Adams (on his Locals podcast COFFEE WITH SCOTT ADAMS, which I highly recommend) points out that the reason Twitter has power in this world is that it has both Left and Right arguing with each other. If one side went away, it would just be one side talking to themselves and it would fail. (This is why the various right-wing alternatives to Twitter never succeed; nobody from the Left ever goes there, or ever will go there, so there is no chance of it ever having power.) This is why the Elon Musk thing is seen as such a threat — Mommeee! Billy hit me back!

Why do ‘right-wing’ people fight so hard not to Get Canceled on Twitter? Because they want to be on Twitter so badly that they’ll fight to be there, even when they are being regularly and routinely abused. It reminds me of the classic story of the guy whose job was shoveling up elephant shit all day. When somebody suggested that he go into another line of work, he responed ‘What? And give up show business?’ If this kind of ‘show business’ is so important to you that you are willing to spend your days shoveling up elephant shit, THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOU>

This is psychotic. Twitter (in its present form) is an stage for left-wing people to abuse right-wing people; the right-wing people are necessary for this process because their Role In Life is to serve as whipping-boys for the proglodytes. The same can be said of alleged ‘conservatives’ who accept invitations to appear on networks like CNN and MSNBC when everybody and his dog knows that the only reason for such an invitation is that it provides the Usual Suspects with a target for abuse. Why put up with that? A character defect is the only reason I can think of.

Conservatives, stop using Twitter. If you did, it would die, and yet another arena for the Left to abuse their natural victims would cease to exist. You have the key to Hell in your own hands; leave whenever you decide to do so. That’s all it takes.

Read it.

he central bank of France has covertly repatriated 221 tonnes of gold between 2013 and 2016. Since then, all its monetary gold is stored in La Souterraine in Paris. Repatriating all gold is related to France’s aim to revamp Paris as a gold trading center.

They used to keep their gold in New York just in case the Soviets invaded Western Europe. I guess that’s no longer a concern.

Freeberg nails it.

So, Elon has made his move on Twitter. And now we’re all talking about free speech, and those awful terrible billionaires doing…stuff.

This debate over “free speech” is about to drift over into “Yeah but what about truth?” The narrative is going to be that we can’t have speech that’s so free that people can sling about untrue things. So it’s like a hose, you see? Or a coffee filter. You can constrict it and be anti-free-speech, but if you open it up too much, a bunch of “disinformation” gets in there…so we have to find a happy medium.

Back up the truck. Before we even get there, let’s inspect this.

Read it.

“What happened to that guy?” A lot of us have asked this question in the past few years about columnists, pundits, and thinkers we’ve always agreed with, only to see them taking a wildly different tack. Next, we’ll ask, “Did I change or did they?” I know I’ve changed quite a bit, but to see influential conservatives pushing “the conservative case for voting Democrat/Promoting CRT and Queer Theory/censoring Republicans/etc.” remains tough to stomach.

Every time I see “The Conservative Case For [insert proglodyte scheme here]” I want to barf.

ZMan does some detecting.

When Trump famously came down the escalator to declare his candidacy, many assumed it was just a publicity stunt from a guy known for showmanship. Some went a bit far in criticizing it but Trump is one of those guys who can rub some people the wrong way. Once it was clear that he was a serious threat to be nominated, it also became clear that those harsh critics had contracted this new mind virus.

Granted, we did not know it was a mind virus. When Bill Kristol started waving around Hillary Clinton signs, it was just assumed he was bitter. In fact, that was the assumption about all of the neocons who were ranting about Trump. He had torpedoed their guy Jeb Bush so their attacks were just sour grapes. Jonah Goldberg was sure his old lady was going to land a job in the next Republican administration so Trump was a huge blow to his plans.

We now think that Trump triggered the forgotten Trotsky gene. All of those old neoconservatives and their progeny who had been posing as conservatives for fifty years have the Trotsky gene. Trump triggered it and as a result they instinctively returned to their natural state as hyper-violent leftists. At least it was assumed that Trump triggered it. Further evidence suggests that a virus of some sort was in the air that was the real cause of the neocon reaction.

“It’s only a matter of time before the people with guns feel entitled to tell the people without guns what to do. That’s why the Second Amendment is so important.”  — Charlie Kirk

Joel Kotkin.

In 1946, the American author John Gunther described Houston as “mostly ugly and barren, without a single good restaurant and hotels with cockroaches”. The only reasons to live in the city, he claimed, were financial; it was a place “where few people think about anything but money”.

This view was widespread at the time, and has lingered well into the 21st century. Forget Houston. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are the cities most frequently associated with the urban American dream.

Fast forward to today, however, and a new urban renaissance is taking shape — and this time, it’s in the heart of Texas. Never before in American history have two metros in one state — Houston and Dallas-Ft. Worth — been in the nation’s five largest. So much for its cockroaches; at its current rate of growth, Houston could replace Chicago as the nation’s third largest municipality by 2030.

Why Putin’s invasion failed

More Than 100 Russian Jets Stranded In Dubai After Being Flown There To Escape Sanctions

Zelensky on NATO: ‘no longer interested in their diplomacy’ (The Hill)

Name the eight oligarchs given ‘golden visas’, demands Labour (The Guardian) It’s all about the oligarchs.

Bucha & Truth

China Undercuts Sanctions On Russia: Where Are The “Consequences”?

Russian Oil Continues To Flow To India And China

WINNING: Russian Recruiting Ruined

Ericsson pulls out of Russia ‘indefinitely’ to protest war in Ukraine

Russian Military Says It Successfully Destroyed S-300 Systems Provided By EU State

Finland and Sweden set to join NATO as soon as summer

Finland Set For NATO Entry As Soon As Summer – Russian Official Warns “Destruction Of Their Country” Coming

Ukraine War Meant To Stop US World Domination, Russia’s Top Diplomat Says

Read it.

Economists, politicians and business leaders, it seems, have given up on trying to imagine completely different economic systems. But we have not.

And neither has a small group of brainy, visionary science fiction authors: Cory Doctorow (peer production and abundance in Walkaway), Bruce Sterling (nomads + cheap open source technology + reputation servers in Distraction), Neal Stephenson (phyla in The Diamond Age), Peter Watts (tons of insights from biology in the Rifters trilogy), and others.

We organize a meeting of minds where we can learn from each other what future economies might look like. And maybe even how we can help bring them into the world.

Cory Doctorow is a proglodyte, and I’ve never heard of Peter Watts, but I’ll listen to whatever Bruce Sterling or Neal Stephenson have to say on any subject.

“All disinformation comes from either the media or the government. That’s it.”  — ZMan

Read it.

I have always wondered why nobody ever built a graphical programming lanuage (i.e. a language where, rather than coding in words, one dropped symbols on a ‘coding surface’ and connected them with symbols representing what you could do, such as branches and loops). The SQL Server Integration Services design tool does this to a certain degree, but only at a very high level.

Hey, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

Read it.

Late last month, Donald Trump filed suit against the conspirators who conceived and propagated the falsehood that he had colluded with the Russians to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Like most of Trump’s ventures, the suit is ambitious, even grandiose. Trump is suing, among others, Hillary Clinton, the DNC, Marc Elias, the international law firm Perkins Cole, Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, ABC, and other yet to be named media corporations. He is suing them for, among other things, injurious falsehood, computer fraud, theft of trade secrets, malicious prosecution, and violation of the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) act.

Most people can’t push back effectively when the Woke Mob comes for them because they can’t afford to pursue their formal legal remedeis. Trump, however, has deep pockets and doesn’t take shit from anybody.

Read it.

It’s hard to Follow The Science when they’re just making it up.

Hacker News.

I’ve seen quite a bit of discussion on inflation, as a result of an increased supply of money in the system. Some have suggested that the stimulus checks increased the supply of money which may have, in part, led to inflation. I’m curious, if the government instituted a universal basic income, would this lead to inflation?

PhD in econometrics speaking, here’s my handy guide to macro-economics:
– The main variables of interest are (aggregate) real production / income (GDP/GDI), unemployment and inflation (arguably in that order)
– Nobody knows much wrt the causes, effects and future trajectories of any of these. Not professional Ivy League economists who publish in journals like AER, QJE, JPE or Econometrica, nor traders getting paid millions at hedge funds or prop trading desks, nor fringe bloggers, gold/crypto-bugs or neophytes from different fields (traditionally from physics, but probably increasingly from CS/AI/ML). Especially beware when they sound very sure of themselves, often using correct wonky economic jargon or details like the plumbing of money flows. Top academic economist are at least (usually) somewhat honest that they know very very little.
– Even if someone did know anything, 3rd parties like you or I can’t distinguish the Real Truth from quackery.
– The root cause of this knowledge deficiency is the inability to run proper controlled experiments. Pretty much no theory about macro-economics is convincingly testable/falsifiable, except banal trivialities like we can’t make everybody rich by sending everyone a $10M check. This will not change in our lifetime, if ever.
– All the writing on macro-economics is story-telling and catering to their specific audiences. Academics write foremost for other academics to gain a position at a prestigious faculty (and incidentally to influence politics). Crypto-bugs write to sell you crypto-coins. Fringe bloggers like Shadowstats write to get newsletter signups and ad-dollars. Most of them employ the effective mechanism that the reader is initiated to advanced/semi-hidden knowledge, which makes the reader feel better about themselves.
Given this, the answer to your question is: maybe, maybe not, who knows?

The YCombinator Hacker News site often has more than the tech-related stuff you might expect. Highly recommended.

Read it.

These tiny satellites uncover daily images of climate change, Chinese labor camps, and hidden government areas – and make them publicly available.

We have the technology.

Read it.

The media consensus here in the UK is very much that everyone involved in the event is an extremist. Trying to determine that for oneself is rather hard. For one thing, the opinions of the majority of my parent’s generation would now be considered incredibly extreme, as indeed is anyone who upholds even the mildest version of, say, traditional religious ethics and orthodoxy. What is extreme is shifting every year, and you can join the ranks of extremists just by pausing too long on the path of inexorable progress.

Read it.

David Horowitz authored this essay on the progressive mind. Too many conservatives fail to appreciate the radical evil that lies at the heart of progressivism by, e.g., giving progressives credit for good intentions and assuming that the disasters caused by their policies are inadvertent. David disagrees.

Read it.

National Conservatism, if people have heard of it at all, is regarded by many in the English-speaking press as an extremist ideology. In 2020, when the first conference was held in Rome, Daniel Kawczynski MP was furiously criticised by the press for appearing at a conference that also included Victor Orban. Resentment at the hostility of the Anglo-American media still lingered, and I heard from multiple people who felt their movement had been cynically misrepresented by a journalistic establishment that is ideologically hostile to nationalism, even when nationalism is wedded (as many speakers suggested) to civil liberties, democracy, and anti-racism.

Big enough to drive a truck through.

Read it.

Memorization means purposely learning something so that you remember it with muscle memory; that is, you know the information without needing to look it up.

Every educator knows that memorization is passé in today’s day and age. Facts are so effortlessly accessible with modern technology and the internet that it’s understanding how to analyze them that’s important. Names, places, dates, and other kinds of trivia don’t matter, so much as the ability to logically reason about them. Today anything can be easily looked up.

But as I’ve gotten older I’ve started to understand that memorization is important, much more than we give it credit for. Knowledge is at our fingertips and we can look anything up, but it’s knowing what knowledge is available and how to integrate it into our existing knowledge base that’s important.

Read it.

The blight that is wheat took root 10,000 years ago, when Triticum aestivum, or bread wheat, was domesticated from wild grasses in the “Fertile Crescent” of the Middle East. Initially, the local Neolithics cultivated wheat alongside traditional hunter-gathering and incipient pastoralism (livestock farming). But wheat is a slave-master, demanding in its specific and daily needs, not least the endless — or so it seems to us who have ever grown the stuff — weeding. Wheat locked us into a seasonal cycle of planting, weeding and harvesting from which we have been unable to escape ever since. It also made us more sedentary, both in terms of chaining us to static settlements, and becoming less active. Guarding a wheat field from wild boar requires less energy than hunting wild boar; the lineal ancestor of the couch potato was the campfire bun.

“Carbs! Carbs will kill ya, kid! Stay away from carbs! You’ll thank me.”

How Russian oligarchs are finding safe havens outside the West (Washington Post)  All oligarchs, all ghd gimd.

Who is Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich? (Washington Post) All oligarchs, all the time.

Has the Ukraine war saved Orbán?

The Frozen Russian Superyachts (And Those That Got Away)  All oligarchs, all the time.

The war in Ukraine may have only just begun

Troll Farms Aren’t Actually as Strategic of a Weapon as the Kremlin and New York Times Assumed

Behind the Ukraine war  Lefty SF writer Charlie Stross has some thoughts.

IMF Warns That Sanctions Against Russia Threaten To Weaken The Dominance Of The Dollar

Gazprom Halts Gas Shipments To Europe Via Critical Pipeline

Unless democracies defend themselves, the forces of autocracy will destroy them (The Atlantic)

Roman Abramovich’s $1 Billion Five-Yacht Fleet Exposed  All oligarchs, all the time.

Ukraine Announces Million Dollars Reward Per Russian Helicopter, Fighter Jet, Warship

Putin’s Game Ends

China Accused Of Massive Ukraine Cyberattack Days Before Russian Invasion  We’ll get by with a little help from our friends….

Pope Frances For 1st Time Denounces Putin As “Potentate” Fomenting “Savage War” – Mulls Ukraine Trip

Google Threatens To Demonetize Publishers Over Ukraine Views

Foreign Threats Demand a Muscular Domestic Response

Read it.

There is a famous Wizard of Id cartoon in which the king is sitting on his throne when a messenger rushes in to say ‘The moat monsters are starving!” The next panel shows the king and the duke looking down into the moat from the top of a wall when another messenger rushes in to say “The peasants are revolting!” The king turns to the duke and says something on the order of “I think this could work out.”

So I see this article and think of the Amazon workers in New York who just voted to join a union. “I think this could work out.”

Can’t say he’s wrong.

Read it.

It is now apparent that the oligarchy has authorized the truth about Hunter Biden, and hence “the Big Guy”, to come out. One can see the end game: no re-election campaign for sure, but resignation a real possibility.

The key is timing. Is there any reason why the MSM acknowledgement of the truth that they buried could not remain buried? They still haven’t done an expose on the Russia hoax and various other slanders. Even the Durham investigation isn’t stampeding them. So it doesn’t seem that the timing is designed to get out in front of something momentous. It just seems that somebody has a plan that has been put into effect.

ZMan does a deep dive.

Regime-ology is a new field of study so the practitioners are still working out the tools and methods for interpreting regime activity. Unlike Kremlinology, on which regime-ology is modeled, the focus is not on a hierarchical structure. The Soviet empire was run by a vertical organization that operated like a corporation. The American empire is a horizontal organization modeled on the Mafia. It is a collection of elite gangster organizations jostling for power within the elite.

Read it.

Psychedelics catalyze the invention of better forms of life, imaginary and real. That was not just the hope of the 1960s counterculture but also of the scientists and activists who have paved the way for the current renaissance of hallucinogen research. But what counts as a better form of life?

Today, the classmate who gave me my first LSD trip for my eighteenth birthday does what he can to limit social inclusion of immigrants in Germany. He came to represent the far-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland in the parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia. Consciousness expansion and rightist thought have never been mutually exclusive and they are currently reconnecting.