Clickbait title. It means arty can’t be spent on groups of 2 or 3 troops, not that Ukraine’s artillery is “Forced to stop shelling Russians”.

This will be spun in Russia to give Russians the sense that they are winning, and that will make like politically that much easier on Putin.

Moral of the story: when you invade a sovereign country, make sure you have political influence over its allies, enough that if they win political control in their election you can prevail on them to cut funding to support those allies.

Also moral of the story: don’t vote for Republicans, they’re the modern version of Nazi sympathizers in the run-up to WWII that “didn’t want the US to prolong the war in Europe” and that really just meant they wanted to live in a world run by fascists like them

Y’know, if you don’t bother writing the history after bothering to win the war and then letting the enemy go home and be governors, judges, congressmen and senators and presidents anyhow, you’ll end up how the United States did after its civil war.

I got tired of seeing my teflon-coated pans wear out like that or lose their non-stickiness, it bothered me to realize that the ‘premium cookware’ I was buying was temporary trash I’d need to replace every couple of years.

I retired my teflon cookware and now have just steel and cast iron (and ceramic-coated cast iron) and I don’t miss teflon-coated cookware at all.

Sure, sometimes I end up with stuff stuck to my pans, but realistically that was true with my ‘non-stick’ pans as well. The nice thing about cast iron and steel is that with use, they seem to get better, whereas the teflon pans start out nice but deteriorate in the way they work. When I do end up with stuff stuck to the pan, I can scrub that clean in a few seconds with a steel scrubber or scraper, whereas stuck-on stuff with teflon (the stuff the dishwasher didn’t get, anyhow), seemed to demand the extra-soft scrubber (and lots of time, because the soft scrubber doesn’t work as well).

Someone should remind the German police that if they’re busting on antisemitic hate speech online, they’ve got a great big backlog of people posting that stuff on Xitter and there’s that one billionaire that bought it recently that’s a prominent participant in that stuff

At this point I think we can safely conclude that Hamas doesn’t care if Israel collectively punishes Palestinian civilians any more than Israel cares when Hamas lobs rockets at Israeli civilians - that is, they don’t like it when it happens, but it happening will in no way persuade them to stop.

Logically, it’s an impasse, the consequence of which will be the eventual extermination of the Palestinians- an outcome that Bibi seems not to be bothered by at all

US Cops shout “stop resisting” as they beat their victims, then later ‘deplore’ that they ‘brought it on themselves’ “Hamas should stop resisting” oh the humanity

won’t somebody think of the warmongers?

Of course he doesn’t want to de-escalate the situation.

If he did that, things might calm down and fewer people will vote based on his promises of being strong on security. Also if he did that, his hard-right backers (who need a hot conflict to keep taking Palestinian land politically acceptable) will attack him for being ‘soft’ on security.

The logic of it all is genocide of course, but Bibi wants that if the alternative is him being out of office and back in court defending himself against corruption charges.

At this point, pouring on the bombs (shortly after gloating that the new speaker in congress suits Russia) seems likely to be as much about shifting morale (getting Ukraine to worry that its support from the west will dry up with Kremlin toadies in control of Washington’s purse strings) as it is about on-the-ground strategy or tactics.

It’s not like new Israeli atrocities detracts significantly from the world’s ability to pay attention to the atrocities in Ukraine, but anything that gives Moscow something else to gesture at gives it something to whatabout over, and getting the rest of the world (including nato members and US politicians) to fight amongst themselves (over whether it’s better to back a genocidal ethnostate or the terrorists resisting it) is always a win when the alternative might be for them to unify against your invasion of Ukraine.

Well yeah, everything gets complicated when ‘laws’ come with unwritten provisos such that they don’t have enforcement except when major powers want to enforce them so they effectively only apply to certain countries

Unfortunately, ‘complicated’ seems to provide unwarranted respectability when ‘toothless’ and ‘dysfunctional’ would suffice

Well gosh what with Russia throwing white phosphorous at Ukraine and no consequence then with Israel also appearing to do so it’s as if international law only applies to countries that aren’t nuclear states

This is true and very welcome, but TBH that’s a very low bar to clear and a long time coming. Up until the Biden admin started taking action, union protections have been steadily eroded since the Reagan admin. and with that, union membership went on a decades-long collapsing trend (and with it, so did labor’s buying power).

The point to my above post was that it had to get very dark for a candidate like Trump to get any oxygen whatsoever, and if there’s one way to drive despair in democracy, it’s to make people that grew up expecting to live middle-class lives into poor people.

This is probably as good a place and time as any to reflect on how everything went as terribly wrong as it had to get in order for clowns like Trump to not be laughed out of politics.

Politics had to fall very far, very hard, to get to the point where enough people felt like voting at all was a waste of time- and probably the biggest single factor I can point out is when the Neoliberals took over the Democrats, American Labor lost its only champion, Antitrust law lost its only advocate, and both major parties in the USA essentially became handmaidens to corporate power. While this was happening, the GOP, long since a dark-money puppet organization, abandoned any pretense of doing anything in the public interest and became a full-throated howl of corruption and voter suppression and gerrymandering.

When both major parties in a duopoly system take turns tag-teaming the working class for their donors’ profit margins, you can expect that working class to radicalize, leftwards and rightwards, it’s what happens every time when a working class realizes it’s being objectively fucked. There was a reason Weimar Germany was so full of left-socialists and right-fascists, the middle had thoroughly failed and it turns out that when given the choice, liberals will always choose fascism over socialism.

Iranian teen injured on Tehran Metro while not wearing a headscarf has died, state media says was murdered for not wearing headscarf but AP can’t quite bring itself to call it murder

Fixed it

Time for India to get hungry and eat its billionaires

In the 1880s the phenomenon of the Robber Baron became a thing- industrial capitalism and corporate power vaulted private citizens into spheres of power and influence to rival that of royalty.

Sure enough, allowing the Robber Barons to become influential led to the collapse in prior regulatory regimes that had once balanced the interests of workers vs. their employers and the resulting abuses (and poverty) led to a crisis of confidence in fledgling democracies, in which socialists would argue for democratizing the workplaces and fascists would argue to reject democracy altogether and revert to a stronger-strong-man model of government that wouldn’t fail the way monarchs had in the face of the democratic revolutions of the 1840s.

It was a messy process, but by the 1930s much of the world had figured out it would be much better off with its billionaires on short leashes, its monopolists tightly constrained, its fascists shamed into hiding (or pushing up daisies). The resulting economic boom is still remembered as a high point of the middle class, and it lasted until the 1970s because until then the PR efforts of the industrial barons were laughed off as being transparent and self-serving. Eventually enough of the folks that remembered life under the Robber Barons passed on and by the time the Boomers came of political age they stopped protecting unions and enforcing antitrust law and defending the New Deal.

Since then, the corporate-power/pro-billionaire lobby has re-asserted corporate power to a state of affairs that has concentrated wealth and power much more than it was even in the deepest throes of the Great Depression or the decades leading up to it.

Of course the Billionaires are feeling ascendant. Also, at this point people are generally becoming as eat-the-rich as they were in times when it took literal violence to re-establish labor protections and re-assert democratic authority over public affairs. This is the second big-cycle of declining/crisis- democracy -> fascism -> resurgent democracy since the wave of democratic revolutions swept Europe in the 1840s and 50s. We’re in the dark part of it now, the forces of fascism are ascendent and extremely powerful but don’t forget they are and will always be a small minority

Isn’t that in the Torah?

Exodus. Exodus is part of the Old Testament, along with Leviticus.

Leviticus (11:9-12) is where shellfish are banned, mixed seed or fabrics (19:19) It is where modern Christians cherry-pick their justifications on being anti-LGBTQ. (Lev. 18:22, 20:13)

Point is, they cherry-pick from the Old Testament when it suits them, and if you look at the rest of the rules in the books they reference that they ignore (e.g. tattoos, touching pig skin, eating pork, shellfish, etc. etc. ) it’s totally fair game to point out the rules they ignore in the same books as the ones they cite.

It has always never worked.

I try to help

Living in the North, my grandparents never discussed beating the shit out of civil rights protesters. Nor did they spout overtly racist things.

TBH when I hear someone say that about their parents (they didn’t say racist shit out loud) I take that to mean: they didn’t say that sort of stuff out loud.

I just think about that as a sort of Schrodinger’s Racism- there’s an unknown distribution of super-shitty racists out there in Yankeedom too, but they’re neither racist nor non-racist until they open their mouths about it in un-coded ways. That it’s more covert there than it is in other places doesn’t really tell us if it’s more or less prevalent, it could just be telling us that in Yankeedom the racists feel ever-so-slightly more inhibited about being out loud about it.

Those sunrays had it coming