Lack of Maintenance Like the Rest of their Equipment
6 min read
An unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile launches during an operational test at 1:13 a.m. Pacific Time, Oct. 2, 2019, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The test demonstrates the United States’ nuclear deterrent is robust, flexible, ready, and approximately tailored to deter twenty-first century threats and reassure our allies. (U.S. Air Force Photo by Staff Sgt. J.T. Armstrong) Public domain
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, a curious thing happened: Putin’s modern, lethal fighting force turned out to be a broken-down, two-bit shadow of its former self.
There are many reasons for this, but the biggest seems to be unbridled corruption at a level that shook even the most hardened analysts in Western defense intelligence.
Particularly egregious was the poor maintenance on display with most, if not all, of Russia’s war machines.
Looking back now, with the benefit of time (and watching Russia flounder around in Eastern Ukraine for over a year), it’s easy to see how funds intended for operations and maintenance might have been diverted.
Hell, this story of a Russian army commander stealing engines from Putin’s prized T-90 tanks is a perfect example.
Russia is often portrayed as the invincible military power. And yet, this reputation is based on two wars – Napoleonic and WWII. In both cases Russia won only thanks to the alliance allied with the leading economic powerhouse of that era.
In the 1880s it was high style to dress like a centaur. “Ladies if you want a suitor to find you attractive you absolutely must make it look like you have four legs and a horse butt under your dress”
The creator of the popular cartoon Shrek, William Steig, drew his character from the professional wrestler Maurice Tiye. The real prototype knew 14 languages, played chess brilliantly, and despite his frightening face and great strength at first glance, he was a very modest and friendly man. He was born in 1903 in Russia, in the Urals, into a French family, which in 1917 returned to France in connection with the revolution.
It seems the younger generation has rediscovered Steely Dan.
Just in time for my good friend, Jon Zeeman, to release an original song in their style, with his Steely Dan Tribute band – The Expanding Man.
Now there is a whole book about Steely Dan’s rediscovery by a new generation that is covered in this Atlantic review.
In hindsight, Steely Dan’s Zelig-like presence in sample-based hip-hop looks like a harbinger of the band’s current renaissance: A duo that was one of the most polarizing acts in rock even at its peak, in the 1970s, has lately acquired an army of new fans, many of them remarkably young.
Pappademas tries out several theories to explain the Danaissance’s timing. The most compelling of them is the idea that their songs, full of gallows humor and wry disillusionment, resonate with a generation raised on crashing economies and a climate crisis. “Donald and Walter’s songs of monied decadence, druggy disconnection, slow-motion apocalypse, and self-destructive escapism seemed satirically extreme way back when; now they seem prophetic,” he writes. “We are all Steely Dan characters now.”
For those weary of the “rockism”-versus-“poptimism” debates of the past couple of decades—and who isn’t?—Steely Dan offers a welcome escape from the reductive opposition between rock as Promethean self-expression and pop as a big-tent pleasure center. The band didn’t mind being dismissed by the most doctrinaire rock partisans: “soulless, and by its calculated nature antithetical to what rock should be,” as a Rolling Stone review of Aja summed up the brief against them. At the same time, Steely Dan’s music is unapologetically snobbish, flouting the “everything is great” ethos of extreme poptimism.
A band that charts an idiosyncratic path ends up acquiring an eclectic audience, this one united by a tenacious devotion to the work of a pair of artists who were themselves nothing if not devoted.
This is the map that Chinese children are taught should be the borders that rightfully belong to China are in purple and the current borders are in red.
Russia is the last colonial power. Just before Putin’s recent invasion of Ukraine, some of his retired generals warned him that Ukraine wasn’t their enemy. It was China.
Every #Chinese schoolchild and adult citizen knows how Tsarist Russia exploited Chinese weakness and seized Chinese territory in the 1858 Treaty of Aigun and the 1860 Treaty of Peking, two “Unequal Treaties” that Tsarist Russia imposed on the decrepit Qing Dynasty.
China will now wait for NATO to bleed Russia so that they end up a vassal state of China. Previous Chinese Dynasties have not invaded their neighbors , but forced them to become vassal states that paid tribute to the emperor. Xi is trying this with his Belt and Road initiative. China prints 4 to 5 times the amount of money in relation to the the US Fed. That pays for the initiative and ghost cities. Is it sustainable?
Across multiple national surveys sampling more than 12,000 people, we have found that a majority of Americans, more than 60 percent, consider false acquittals and false convictions to be equally bad outcomes. Most people are not Blackstonians. They are unwilling to err on the side of letting the guilty go free to avoid convicting the innocent. Indeed, a sizeable minority viewed false acquittals as worse than false convictions; this group is willing to convict multiple innocent persons to avoid letting one guilty person go free. You would not want those people on your jury if you were charged with a crime.
Measles is wildly contagious, can linger in air for hours, and kills 1/1000 it infects. It also kinda resets your immune system so you can get sick from everything you’ve been sick from again, like you are a toddler in preschool
Interestingly, in a 1990 SC case that denied religious freedoms to Native Americans and privileged the rights of the gov’t, *Scalia,* the darling of conservatives, says religious beliefs don’t give ppl the right to reject “compulsory vaccination laws.”
Putin’s Long War Against American Science by William J. Broad
A decade of health disinformation promoted by President Vladimir Putin of Russia has sown wide confusion, hurt major institutions and encouraged the spread of deadly illnesses.
