All You Need To Know About The Starstreak Missiles Now In The Hands Of Ukrainian Troops

Ukraine’s Military Intelligence Chief Says “Total Guerrilla Warfare” Coming Next

Chinese drone-maker DJI denies aiding Russia’s Ukraine invasion

“Going Dark” Is How Russian Ships Evade Sanctions   As an old Gunnery Sergeant once explained to me, ‘If they can’t find you, they can’t hurt you’.

Nuclear War Survival Skills

Kaspersky is declared a US national security threat and is banned by the FCC

Biden Reveals The US Is Training Ukrainian Troops In Poland

So Why Is it Called “The Ukraine”?

Kremlin Warns Biden’s ‘Emotional’ Rhetoric Could Lead To “Something Irreparable & Dangerous” For Whole World

As Sanctions Bite, Average Russians Turn To Gold

Ukraine’s Inescapable Trade-Offs?

Taiwan Will Defend Differently Than Ukraine In Event Of Chinese Invasion: Expert

Letters of Marque and Reprisal  Emphasis on the ‘reprisal’.

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1. Prioritization(1): Ordering a todo list. You make a giant list of things you could do, things you should do, things you’d like to do… and then you put a unique number next to each item. Now it’s an ordered list.
2. Prioritization(2): Only doing the top item on the list. You already have a giant todo list. Which thing are you actually going to finish?

ZMan.

Broadly speaking, a crisis comes in two forms. There is the internal crisis driven by irreconcilable contradictions. Then there is the external crisis that is driven by some unusual occurrence like a natural disaster. The latter tests mostly the ability of the system to weather the storm and recover. The former tests the ability of the system to radically alter itself in order to address the contradiction. This is the most dangerous crisis and the one that few systems survive.

Of course, the internal crisis can be papered over for a long time until some external crisis comes along and makes that impossible. The external crisis puts pressure on the system, forcing it to respond under duress. The internal problems are then made obvious as the system responds poorly. Efforts to quickly resolve those issues in order to address the immediate problems just create new problems. This was the process that led to the French Revolution.

The Antiplanner peeks behind the curtain.

Now that the war in Ukraine has revealed that Europe is even more dependent on foreign oil than the United States, Americans can smugly sit back and say, “If only those Europeans acted more like, you know, Europeans, they wouldn’t be in this fix.” Because, as everyone knows, Europeans travel mostly by electric public transit and high-speed trains, so they aren’t dependent on oil to get around by car or airplane.

The Antiplanner makes an obvious suggestion.

The recent earthquake off the coast of Japan derailed a high-speed train and forced East Japan Railway to shut down the rail line. Fixing the line, the company admitted, may take “a considerable amount of time.”

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Traditional weights and measures emerged organically as responses to the requirements of human life. Just as scientific hypotheses are proposed to answer intellectual questions, so too are forms of life developed to answer the needs of life. In a reverse Gresham’s law, the good drive out the bad.

The foot, the mile and the pint are all human measures, emerging either from a human reference or for an understood human need. Unlike decimal systems, which can only be divided by 2 & 5, the old shilling — being 12 pennies — could be divided by 2, 3, 4 or 6. Such measures exist at the scale of daily life, and in a world increasingly alienated and atomised they help to bind us to the notion of place and dwelling. The pint is not simply an abstraction of fluid quantity: it’s a social activity, an anticipation and a pleasure.

One of the joys of being an American is that you don’t need to use the fucking metric system unless you choose to do so.

I think he was right the first time.

After crippling rounds of sanctions, these are the oligarchs who are (and aren’t) speaking out against Russia’s war (CNN) All oligarchs, all the time.

The Purges in Putin’s Shrinking Inner Circle (The New Yorker)

That was then, this is now, again Russia/Ukraine edition

Russian Superyachts ‘Go Dark’ To Avoid Tracking

NATO Doubles Battlegroups In ‘Eastern Flank’ States: Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania & Slovakia

US DoJ reveals Russian supply chain attack targeting energy sector

Visualizing The EU’s Energy Dependency

Russia’s Top Space Official Says No More Launching European Satellites

Oil Prices Tumble After EU Fails To Agree On Russian Import Ban

Russia Signals It Will Limit Scope To “Complete Liberation Of Donbas” – Says “No Progress” In Talks

Stinger, Javelin production can be increased, with congressional support: Army official

That was then, this is now: Russia/Ukraine edition

10 Unintended Consequences Of A Protracted Russia/Ukraine War According To JPMorgan

Ukraine: Fighting in Nemishaeve?

Joel Kotkin.

Perhaps nowhere is the gap between America’s cognitive elite and its populace larger than in their preferred urban forms. For nearly a century—interrupted only by the Depression and the Second World War—Americans have been heading further from the urban core, seeking affordable and safe communities with good schools, parks, and a generally more tranquil lifestyle. We keep pushing out despite the contrary desires of planners, academic experts, and some real estate interests. In 1950, the core cities accounted for nearly 24 percent of the U.S. population; today, the share is under 15 percent, according to demographer Wendell Cox. Between 2010 and 2020, the suburbs and exurbs of the major metropolitan areas gained 2.0 million net domestic migrants, while the urban core counties lost 2.7 million.

This is less a growth in “bedroom suburbs,” supplying workers to the urban core, but one that serves multiple employment centers and commercial development. The latest edition of Commuting in America estimates that almost 70 percent of metropolitan-area workers now live and work in the suburbs; trips within suburbs or suburb-to-suburb commutes constitute more than double the commutes with a central business district as the final destination.

Freeberg nails it.

Obama said the question of when life begins, is above His pay grade.

Judge Jackson said she can’t define the word “woman” because she’s “not a biologist.”

Weird that liberals know so much that the rest of us don’t know, until a question emerges with some clear practical ramifications to it. Then suddenly, they can’t answer the basics.

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Evergreen notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects. This is an unusual way to think about writing notes: Most people take only transient notes. That’s because these practices aren’t about writing notes; they’re about effectively developing insight: “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”. When done well, these notes can be quite valuable: Evergreen note-writing as fundamental unit of knowledge work.

Joel Kotkin.

With the seeming deconstruction of the Biden Administration proceeding at a rapid clip, many on the right hope for an end to the conscious stoking of class resentments that has characterized progressive politics. Yet despite the political meltdown, America’s class divides have become so wide, and so bitter, that Biden’s presidency may prove more a prelude than a denouement for the future of class warfare.

Under both parties, American society, traditionally egalitarian, at least in theory, has become ever more divided by financial class. Today, the Federal Reserve demonstrates that the top one percent have more assets than the 60 percent who occupy the middle rungs. The remarkable rise of the tech oligarchy has paced this change, creating a gusher of wealth for the chosen few, including youthful, unproven start-up CEOs turned instant billionaires—as well as an unprecedented boom on Wall Street. The pandemic has accelerated this trend, vastly enriching the elites, and raising executive salaries to the highest ever. Meanwhile much of the working and middle classes may become increasingly dependent on what Marx called “the proletarian alms bag.”

 

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Like a hunter/gatherer stashing their prey, the ideas and the links we stumble upon feel valuable, rare, something worth saving. We ascribe value to the time we spend discovering things online. Surely that time wasn’t in vain.

Then we’re burdened with our findings. It’s tough to focus on something new when you’re still holding the old in your mind.

So we write things down. Bookmark them. Add them to our reading list. Highlight our findings. Make long lists and check them twice. We need a cave, a storehouse, somewhere to stash our findings.

Joel Kotkin.

Once working-class protests were often organised by leftists or even Communists, but many of today’s working-class radical movements take on a different, more populist and distinctly anti-statist character. One can question the positions adopted by protesters, particularly on vaccines, but also recognise that the new wave of working-class unrest, whether in Canada or among the gilets jaunes in France, reflects a deep-seated frustration with diktats issued from above by an increasingly authoritarian state.

Tyler Cowen.

That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, induced by a timely tweet by Conor Sen. It turns out the state of Maryland is abolishing the four-year college degree requirement for many state jobs. In Missour, neither the governor nor the lieutenant governor have a four=year college degree, so perhaps they should follow suit?

ZMan’s weeklypodcast.Highly recommended.

One of the interesting things about politics is that people suspend their normal understanding of the world when the topic shifts to politics. It is as if we have a separate brain that is only used for discussing current events. In our daily lives, our normal brain does the thinking and evaluating for us. It assesses people and decisions by weighing the facts against past practice. When the topic shifts to politics, the normal brain shuts down and the political brain fires up.

The easy example is the people in politics. Normal brain would never take advice from a stranger with no qualifications. If someone you do not know knocks on your door offering advice, you close the door, maybe call the cops. On the other hand, if that guy says he is running for office and wants to tell you what is best for your community, you take the time to listen. The guy could be naked, but if he is clearly talking politics, well, let us hear what naked guy has to say.

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Researchers at the University of Washington reckon handset lidar can determine fluid properties, sparing you from having to use expensive lab gear. The amount of liquid needed for a smartphone lidar test is significantly less than that for a medical lab, too, they said.

One application of lidar would be testing blood for coagulation. The researchers also found their method was able to determine the fat properties of milk and whether the liquid had been adulterated, and to identify a particular liquid from among ten samples.

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Lou Zocchi is a man who cares deeply about dice. Zocchi’s well practiced speech on on dice quality is famous. It’s fairly entertaining if you have 20 minutes to spare. Part of his argument is the above photograph. Zocchi stacked twenty-sided dice from several companies. Each stack places the same numbers on the top and bottom. For example, one stack might have 1 placed on top of 20 repeatedly, while the next stack might have 9 placed on top of 12 repeatedly. Based on the height of the stacks, it appears that everyone’s dice are irregularly shaped. Everyone’s, except for Zocchi’s.

The western elite is preventing us from going after the assets of Russia’s hyper-rich (The Guardian) Thomas Piketty wants to be the European Krugman.

A Russian oligarch’s superyacht is stuck in Norway because no one will sell it fuel Do you get a special ID card if you’re a ‘Russian oligarch’?

Nordic countries wonder if they are next on Putin’s list (CNN) All Putin, all the time.

Anonymous declared a ‘cyber war’ against Russia. Here are the results

China Praises Ukraine Resistance, Pledges Economic Support

Putin only understands strength so it’s time for free world to ‘step up’ and meet this moment: Fmr VP Pence All Putin, all the time.

Andrea Mitchell Hopes War In Ukraine ‘At Least Is Helping the Democrats’

Flotilla Of 12 Tankers Carrying Russian Oil Approaching The US

International army of hackers joins Ukraine’s cyberwar

Ukraine: Yet Another Russian General Killed as Invasion Week Three Concludes

‘Effects of Aggression’ Will Last, Nonprofits Aiding Ukraine Say

Ukraine’s Corn Harvest May Plunge By A Third, Estimates Show

“Mounting Difficulties Replacing Combat Losses”

Soros Worries About Putin-Xi Partnership, Hopes They Can Be Stopped “Before They Destroy Our Civilization”  We must make the world safe … for Soros.

‘Russia–Ukraine War Would Have Never Happened Under Trump’: Rep. Hice

The West is still betraying Ukraine

She Was in Kyiv the Day Russia Invaded Ukraine. Here’s What She Saw.

Should America Enact a No-Fly Zone in Ukraine?

“What I Understand About Ukraine”

Why Russians are fleeing to Armenia

Ruhle: It’s a ‘Far-Right Narrative’ to Say US Isn’t Helping Ukraine

Ukraine War Is Leading To Massive US Military Buildup In Europe

The Nuclear Reactors of the Future Have a Russia Problem

Kremlin: Reports Of Major Progress In Ukraine Talks “Wrong” – Biden’s Putin Remark “Unforgiveable”

U.S. intelligence estimates that 7k Russian soldiers have died in Ukraine

Wimbledon May Force No. 1-Ranked Russian To Denounce Putin

Free Speech and Power in the Time of Ukraine

Always a good policy.

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So many actions that then (in my childhood) branded my family as “cheapskates” are now lauded as “environmental responsibility.” Same actions. Different social status.

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Call it the paradox of meritocracy. When talent is given space to flower, if barriers to success are pushed aside, what happens if success does not come? When society lifts external weights from the shoulders of the downtrodden, a new set of weights inevitably settles in people’s hearts and minds. That deadweight belief, however unrealistic: this is down to me. I failed not because of the system, the man, the establishment, but because of my inadequacy.

No wonder people turn to conspiracies or theories of identity oppression.

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Around a third of Ukrainian refugees arriving in France are actually economic migrants from other areas of the world, mostly North Africa and the Middle East, according to an investigation by newspaper Le Figaro.

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Not until they can do wheat and corn.  Piss-ant vegetables like kale and fruit like strawberries aren’t going to ‘revolutionize’ anything.

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The following clip contains excerpts from an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin that was recorded by NBC News back in 2018. As I understand it, this footage was omitted from the final broadcast version of the interview.

Before I am denounced yet again as a Putin stooge, I must say that I find Mr. Putin’s assertion that the Russians don’t interfere with American elections to be laughable. They may not go so far as to hack into Dominion servers and similar operations — I have no expertise on such matters, so I don’t know — but they plant massive disinformation all over the Internet, and have been doing so for as long as I’ve been paying attention. I personally know a vlogger who was offered money by a Russian to propagate certain material (he refused).

More to the point is that the American intelligence services often do things that are just as bad, and sometimes worse, in an attempt to interfere with Russia.

And the idea that Russia interfered with the 2016 election to help elect Donald Trump is ludicrous on the face of it. Anyone with half a brain can see that the Russians would have had every reason to prefer Hillary Clinton over Orange Man Bad.

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Throughout the pandemic, Miami was framed by liberal pundits and Democratic operatives as a city of heathens and deplorables resistant to science. But the resistance, especially in the early days of the pandemic, had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the Hispanic spirit that animates the city. Working-class Hispanics, unlike the laptop class that has taken to deriding them, are rooted in physical reality and desire face-to-face contact with their friends and family. To Hispanics, the conviviality that arises from engaging with one’s crew is the stuff of life. The Zoom “happy hours” favored by the urbane upper crust were never going to fly. Touch, banter, and hijinks are the necessary ingredients that constitute working-class Hispanic interaction. Communication that deviates from that mode is considered abnormal.

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The story goes like this: there are problems in the world that make the future a scary prospect. Fortunately, though, there are solutions to each of these problems, and the solutions have been formulated by extremely smart, tech-adjacent people. For their ideas to become realities, they merely need to be articulated and spread as widely as possible. And the best way to spread ideas is through stories — hence Gates’s opening anecdote about the barrel. In other words, in the TED episteme, the function of a story isn’t to transform via metaphor or indirection, but to actually manifest a new world. Stories about the future create the future. Or as Chris Anderson, TED’s longtime curator, puts it, “We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world… may be simply to stand up and say something.” And yet, TED’s archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future — the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human — that never materialized. By this measure alone, TED, and its attendant ways of thinking, should have been abandoned.

I have always looked on TED Talks as entertainment, an actualization of the progressive fetish for talk over action. “If we all just wish really really hard, unicorns will exist and everybody will sing Kumbaya and live in peace.”

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Products confirmed not to be produced in China.

I use CUTCO knives, and recommend them.

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To refresh your memory, it was a day that turned out be the narrow window between the moment when the evolving “science” suddenly allowed Democratic governors to start lifting their states’ mask mandates, and Vladimir Putin launching his special mission to “protect the people” in eastern Ukraine.

I hope you enjoyed it, because given the way the mainstream media portray the news these days, it may be a while before we’re all allowed our next respite from the seemingly permanent existential crisis that runs as a through-line to our human condition.

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While the media’s obsession with the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been front-and-center in our minds, the rest of the world is essentially being ignored. It’s not unusual to see this kind of pre-occupation with dangerous world events. But the media and the U.S. are demonstrating, once again, that we are unable to walk and chew gum at the same time, or more likely, choose not to. And the situation could actually escalate in unexpected ways, putting the entire world at risk, if we don’t wake up.

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Google is being sued by a Florida restaurant group alleging that the tech company has been setting up unauthorized pages to capture food orders rather than directing them to the restaurant’s own site.

Google uses “bait-and-switch” tactics to get customers to place takeout or pickup orders through “new, unauthorized, and deceptively branded webpages,” according to the lawsuit, filed on behalf of Left Field Holdings, a restaurant company that runs Lime Fresh Mexican Grill franchises. On those pages, customers are prompted with large buttons to order with food delivery companies like GrubHub, DoorDash, or Seamless.

“Google never bothered to obtain permission from the restaurants to sell their products online,” the lawsuit says. “Google purposefully designed its websites to appear to the user to be offered, sponsored, and approved by the restaurant, when they are not—a tactic, no doubt, employed by Google to increase orders and clicks.”

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I’m in Buenos Aires at the moment, with extremely limited Spanish, and it’s incredible to me that I can point my iPhone camera at any Spanish text and have it instantly translated into English. But there is one big limitation that requires an extremely clunky workaround …

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The name Rafaela Vasquez may not immediately be recogniseable, but the accident that ties her to the first-ever fatal self-driving car crash accident will be.

Vasquez was the driver when one of Uber’s autonomous test cars crashed into a woman walking her bike across the road at night in March 2018. Now nearly three years later, she is due to go on trial for negligent homicide and has spoken out for the first time.

“I feel betrayed in a way,” she told Wired. “At first everybody was all on my side, even the chief of police. Now it’s the opposite. It was literally, one day I’m fine and next day I’m the villain. It’s very – it’s isolating.”

Meanwhile Uber has escaped any criminal liability, whilst Vasquez is being sued by prosecutors in Arizona. The blame has been pinned squarely on the driver when videos of her showed she was distracted before the collision. Her defense team will argue she was checking Slack messages from Uber in her work phone at the time, whilst prosecutors will say she was watching an episode of reality show The Voice on her personal handset.

Whatever the outcome of the case, Vasquez’s side of the story is a tragic, personal tale of some of the risks in pursuing a high-tech, automated future.

Zman ponders the first casualty in any war.

Early in the Ukraine war, there were reports about the death of Vladimir Zhoga, a Russian commander in the Donbass. Later they reported that Ukrainian defense forces killed Russian Maj. Gen. Andrei Sukhovetsky in combat. In both cases, it was widely reported that these men led units called “Spartan” divisions. Another high profile Russian commander was killed later in the week and he was also linked to the mysterious “Spartan” division.

Typical of the American media, the reports were mostly copy supplied by the State Department, filled in with fantasy from the media. Zhoga was a separatist leader, not a member of the Russian military. His unit was called the Sparta battalion. The others were Russian military, but they were not Spartans. What is interesting about this is the fact that the State Department focused on the word “Sparta” in their copy. Oddly, Sparta looms large in the imagination of the foreign policy elite.

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As I reflect on the profound impact masking has had on social life over the past two years, I can’t help but wonder how our national unmasking may prove to be more transformative than we expect. What features of our masked world are likely to carry over into the future and which will fade?