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The Ukrainians are defending the legal order established after the Second World War. They have performed the entire NATO mission of absorbing and reversing an attack by Russia with a tiny percentage of NATO military budgets and zero losses from NATO members. Ukrainians are making a war in the Pacific much less likely by demonstrating to China that offensive operations are harder than they seem. They have made nuclear war less likely by demonstrating that nuclear blackmail need not work. Ukraine is also fighting to restore its grain exports to Africa and Asia, where millions of people have been put at risk by Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian economy. Last but not least, Ukrainians are demonstrating that a democracy can defend itself. ~Timothy Snyder

The Trump plans for USPS handling of mail-in ballots will leave millions of ballots in limbo for weeks or years after the elections. “Election experts are examining the new U.S. Postal Service rules for mailed ballots, and finding that under them, getting ballots in the mail could take weeks — or even years — rendering the program unworkable for an actual election.   “If it took one minute to verify each piece in the mailing, it would take about 4.9 years of continuous scanning to verify the whole mailing,” wrote Tammy Patrick, Chief Programs Officer of the National Association of Election Officials and a former elections official for Maricopa County, in   a declaration   as part of one of the legal challenges to the rule.   “If it only took only a second to scan each mailpiece, it would take 30 days,” she continued. “Even if it took only one tenth of a second to scan each mailpiece, it would take a little over 72 hours.”   *snip* “ . . .  a single error — ...

I'm no expert on fascism or Ukraine, but based on everything I've read so far, the claim the Ukraine is a fascist state is pure Putin propaganda.   On the other hand, Prof. Timothy Snyder *is* an expert on fascism and Ukraine. And he is a big supporter of Ukraine in its defense against Russia.   https://snyder.substack.com/p/why-i-like-mark-hamill?r=2133ns&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Next Thursday is the first anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s death. I don’t know that I ever encountered any Charlie Kirk videos. His reputation was so repugnant, I had no more curiosity to see him as I have to read Mein Kampf. “In   one 2023 tweet , Kirk managed to simultaneously defend South Africa’s apartheid regime, the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, and even the internet code for “Heil Hitler.”    “Multiculturalism is un-American,” Kirk wrote in another screed, adding, “If you don’t assimilate you are disgracing this country and you can kindly leave.”   “Another lowlight was this bit of   anti-trans paranoia   that feels like a bigoted fever dream take on the “Ghost In The Shell” anime franchise.     “The Trans Agenda is being used to condition people to eventually merge with machine and abandon their humanity,” Kirk wrote.”   My reaction to Kirk’s death called to mind Clarance Darrow: “I have never killed any one, but I ...

In the 1990s, I traveled on three separate occasions to Halle Germany, which is in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt in the former East Germany. My MD/PhD student at the time spent two months in a research lab in Halle. At that time, Halle was experiencing the flush of new money that flooded in after reunification. There were cranes all over the city, signifying new buildings. People were replacing their Trabants with BMWs (although I photographed over a dozen Trabbies around town during a three-week visit. But now the picture in Saxony-Anhalt looks different. “ The man leading the charge to make Germany proud again won’t say he wants his fellow Germans to “forget” the Nazi past, but that is where his ideas invariably lead.   “Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a 48-year-old lawmaker for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, was until recently little known beyond his largely rural constituency. But he may soon be in a position to help real...

Is modern life really so complicated? What most Americans do is get themselves into lots of credit-card debt. Which if you understood what cumulative interest means, that is, if you had just the most elementary calculus or even just really understood your multiplication tables, maybe you would be able to avoid. The best defense of the working class in general is arithmetic. And that therefore social policy, just looking at it this way, has to include making sure that people can do their own math.   ~Timothy Snyder