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There's a meme out there on FB about some Ukrainian soldiers who were killed on Snake Island after using some salty language against their attackers. Looks like the announcement of their deaths was premature: "The defenders of Snake Island in the Black Sea, who were initially feared dead, are “alive and well,” according to the Ukrainian Navy. On Monday, a statement from the Navy said that the soldiers on the island, also known as Zmiinyi Island, repelled two attacks by Russian forces but in the end were forced to surrender “due to the lack of ammunition.”" https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/ukraine-russia-news-02-28-22/h_ae9f942eb344a579e66f0679b3f68c29?fbclid=IwAR0m7KJpnsiF4baqtFEOMozhwiDngx49ysoeidi7d_J1Ncxajw381dSvBrA

The way John Snow (later Sir John Snow) determined that the Broad Street pump was the source of a London cholera epidemic was epidemiology. He found, using a map, that the highest concentration of cases mapped to the houses closest to the pump. Inferring that correlation likely pointed to causation, he had the pump handle removed, and the epidemic ended. There has been much speculation, much of it politically driven, that COVID-19 originated from a virus that escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Extensive sequencing data don't support that inference, but now there's epidemiological evidence that also points away from that model and towards the original inference--that COVID-19 originated at the Wuhan wet market. https://jabberwocking.com/new-studies-confirm-that-covid-19-virus-occurred-naturally/?fbclid=IwAR10127J8wMVM24SNGAOqDOnJglLMLo-lLOmUyUPTAMvIGFqzPt_xrhbAr0

  I think Biden is handling the Ukraine situation well so far. In particular, imposing financial sanctions and rallying our allies to do the same, while ignoring the frothing ammosexuals shows maturity and understanding. Here's a good think piece about what is wrong with the warmongering discourse and why those demanding US military intervention in Ukraine are wrong, crazy and dangerous. "Trying to pull the U.S. and NATO into a wider European war because you have World War II or Cold War fantasies (or whatever it is that drives these sorts of responses) is the opposite of virtuous, or serious. It is reckless in the extreme. It doesn’t show that you care more than anyone about human life. It shows that you are willing to play with the most incendiary kind of material, and risk an untold amount of suffering. There will surely be more of this stuff spreading through the discourse in the next few days. Everyone has to resist it with all of their might." https://discoursebl...

  It's easy to be seduced by the idea that the trends of today will continue indefinitely. I remember growing up in a world in which the USSR seemed permanent. Currently, Putin is polling well with his invasion of Ukraine, just like GW Bush polled well after his invasion and military occupation of Iraq. That didn't last for Bush, and I don't look for it to last for Putin. Time isn't on Putin's side. "Historical data shows that diversionary wars — fighting abroad to draw attention away from problems at home — have rarely worked for Putin. "Daring and expensive military adventures will, over time, decrease the Kremlin’s popularity, history also tells us. "As a scholar of Russia and public opinion, I know that war ultimately requires an enormous amount of public goodwill and support for a political leader — far more than a brief spike in popularity can ensure." As the kids say, read the rest: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/putins-public-approva...

  (from a comment thread at jabberwocking.com ) "Technically, the troops have been "invited" by the "leaders" of the breakaway regions. Once he recognized the regions, he elevated the "leaders" to International status; they became people who could "speak for" their "citizens". And those "citizens" apparently desire Russian troops to "protect" them from the "Nazi's" living in the Rest of Ukraine. Allied leaders understand this nuance and certainly expected it. The rubber hits the road when he moves beyond the Line of Control into the parts of Donetsk Oblast and Luhansk Oblast still controlled by Ukraine. If the Allies don't trigger the sanctions at that event they have been bluffing."

I’ve come to believe that Trump will never spend a day in jail and that he’ll never have to pay what he owes to lenders and the IRS. That’s just me being cynical, but someone calling themselves “Mitch Guthman” on a comment thread at jabberwocking.com explains why this is likely to be true: “ . . . lenders have no real desire to call his loans. With [Deutsche Bank], there’s undoubtedly pressure from the German government to avoid an embarrassing situation and, apparently, the bank may not be able to call his loans even if he defaults because what seems to be massive irregularities (even illegalities) in the granting of the loans. “The other lenders probably won’t want to be in the middle of a MAGA firestorm or suffer reprisals from Republicans in Congress and probably from Trump loyalists in the executive branch whom Biden has failed to purge. “Similarly, even though the democrats in congress have written a letter to the GSA, there’s strong institutional pressures to let Trump [sell] t...

  I long ago became convinced by the argument that WWII was really a continuation of WWI, in the sense that the seeds of WWII were sown in 1918-19. What I hadn’t appreciated until I read this book is how much of the violence of WWI continued in various forms long after the Versailles treaty. I’ve read “The Guns of August” and “The Zimmerman Telegram” (Barbara Tuchman), “The Russian Revolution” (both the book by Richard Pipes and the one with the same title by Alan Moorehead), and recently read “Paris 1919” (Margret MacMillan). I’ve read “Balkan Ghosts” and “The Balkans” by Mischa Glenny, in order to better understand the history and nationalist divisions leading to the fall of Yugoslavia, a state that was created in 1918 under the name of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. After I posted my review of “The Fall of the Ottomans” (Eugene Rogan), Edmund Neill recommended “The Vanquished” by Robert Gerwarth. I’d read it before, but I decided to re-read it. Prior to WWI, empires ...

Greenhouse gas isn't the only problem with burning coal. From the devastation of mining and water pollution from mine tailings to the toxic stack emissions and the storage of toxic coal ash, the negative externalities of coal have never been priced into the cost of coal power. Here's another ongoing problem: mercury. Organomercury is a neurotoxin. Mercury concentrates as it moves up the food chain. Are you eating river fish as a healthy replacement for red meat? Well, you may be trading heart disease and cancer risk for neurological damage. One more reason to abandon carbon for renewables. https://www.juancole.com/2022/02/poisonous-mercury-plants.html

  Think Putin is playing 11 dimensional chess in Ukraine? Think again. Lifted from a comment thread over at jabberwocking.com: "Think of what an ideal structure would be to ensure that somebody running a vast organization has access to the information, perspectives, projections, modeling, and feedback to make proper decisions. It would need independent consultants, institutional structures to quality check information, relevant metrics, public feedback, ways to identify and elevate new ideas, trustworthy and longitudinal data collection systems, and accountability for mistakes. Does that look anything like Russia? "Putin suffers from all the problems of an out-of-touch CEO--he's surrounded by cronies whose advancement is tethered to how much they praise their leader--without any of the institutional safeguards. He has no board of directors, no stock price to let him know how his company is doing, no accountants or external benchmarks. Worse, he has to deal with the fact t...

I have to keep reminding myself that I only lived in Tennessee for about 19 years, including college. I knew it was a pretty backwards state at the time, but was insulated from a lot of it by having grown up in Oak Ridge. These hucksters have always been fleecing the evangelicals, but in the age of the internet, you'd link that Elmer Gantry would have evolved. Apparently not. https://religionnews.com/2022/02/15/tennessee-preacher-greg-locke-says-demons-told-him-names-of-witches-in-his-church/

  I've spent most of my life around scientists. Both of my parents were PhD scientists (albeit not until I was in high school) and I've been married to a PhD scientist for nearly 40 years (we've been married for nearly 45 years, but she was a graduate student for the first five). Additionally, I was trained by PhD scientists in college, grad school and as a postdoc, and my colleagues in the department are either PhD or MD scientists. I've learned that even scientists get it wrong. Another grad student in the lab when I was in grad school insisted that water can never exist at a temperature below 0°C. When I pointed out that this violated the second law of thermodynamics, he just said that the 2nd law didn't apply. Finally, I grabbed a beaker of water and a thermometer and put them in a -20°C freezer. The next day, the thermometer, now imbedded in ice, read (unsurprisingly) -20°C. My graduate school mentor says that if the speaker has a British accent, s/he only has ...

Taxpayer-funded anti-semitism. "Elizabeth and Gabriel Rutan-Ram, a Tennessee couple, were denied access to a state-sponsored foster parent certification program because they are Jewish. The rationale? The foster agency they applied to claims that they should be allowed to turn away Jewish people because they are a Christian adoption agency." *snip* Their lawsuit comes two years after Tennessee's Republican governor, Bill Lee, signed a bill giving legal protection to taxpayer-funded foster care and adoption agencies that deny services based on religion or sexual orientation. The lawsuit argues this law violates the Tennessee Constitution's religious-freedom and equal-protection guarantees." https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/15/opinions/tennessee-adoption-struggle-religious-freedom-graves-fitzsimmons-siddiqi/index.html

When I posted my review of “The Fall of the Ottomans,” Bruce Cochrane recommended “Churchill’s Shadow” by Geoffrey Wheatcroft. I just finished it, and I would say it ranks among the top 10 history/biography books I’ve ever read (out of 150). Truly outstanding book! Prior to reading this, I’d read “Winston’s War” (Max Knopf), “Churchill’s Folly” (Chrisopher Catherwood) and “Churchill & Orwell” (Thomas E. Ricks), as well as several histories of WWII in which Churchill is extensively featured. Churchill was a prolific writer and an assiduous curator of his brand. The sheer mass of Churchill haigiography in the English language would require several lifetimes to read. Wheatcroft offers an antidote to the Churchill mythmaking. The writing is lively and erudite. No Churchill balloon goes unpunctured and no Churchill parade is unrained-upon. Wheatcroft makes effective use of letters from, to and about Churchill to color out the dates and places. Churchill courted, but did not like, FDR. H...

The problem with using historical analogies is that the situations have to be analogous, not just rhyme. I'm reading some pretty embarrassing and specious posts on the Canadian truckers protests and on the Russian threat to Ukraine, and how western democracy is imperiled if the governments of Canada and the US don't resort to threats of violence and then violence. No, what Canada did is not appeasement and this isn't Munich. And what's happening in Ukraine isn't a prelude to a Russian invasion of Poland. I don't say this to make light of either situation. I have zero sympathy for the truckers and I'm glad the protesters mostly dispersed on their own and the rest were arrested. But it was accomplished without choke holds, tasers or firearms (pace Sean Hannity). As for Ukraine, NATO added nine eastern European nations to its membership after promising Russia it wouldn't expand after German unification. I have zero sympathy for Putin, but I understand that ...

I posted earlier today about the (so far) peaceful collapse of the truckers protest at the Canadian border. Later today, Kevin Drum posted a take-down of an NYT editorial claiming that the truck protests are a threat to democracy. I stopped reading the Times years ago because it didn't repay the effort, and this was editorial hyperventilating. But I thought this comment on Kevin's comment thread was astute: "At the end of the day, if the protesters do not convince people to join them, they haven’t made progress. Take the short term pain in the knowledge that brutal action is exactly what they want the government to do. "Sure they can do their best to delegitimize the government and their democracy, but if these right wing groups are the disrupters themselves, how does that help them? If I’m a normal Canadian who doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other, then I’m put through a huge protest by a bunch of a-holes, their stock immediately drops in my mind. What they NEE...

"Or send in the troops and arrest the truckers. It's a peaceful protest. You know it's going to happen -- all hell will break loose. That will be the government starting a fight. People may die." ~Sean Hannity Why anyone listens to Sean Hannity is beyond me. That gasbag is always wrong, which is why he's on Fox. Meanwhile, back here in reality: "Windsor police said about 12 people were peacefully arrested and seven vehicles were towed just after dawn near the Ambassador Bridge." https://www.huffpost.com/entry/canada-windsor-ontario-bridge-police-arrest-protesters_n_62090b59e4b0ccfb3e568e08

While I'm totally unsympathetic to the truckers blocking the US-Canadian border at several points because they object to COVID vaccination requirements, I understand the place that public demonstrations, including those that break laws, has in Democracies. I'm old enough to recall the end of apartheid in America and the demonstrations by civil rights supporters. Martin Luther King and many others were arrested and jailed for their protests (which I was sympathetic to, if a bit too young to participate in). The point here is that even Gandhi and MLK knew that civil disobedience has consequences. Now, some of the truckers have been arrested and their vehicles may be impounded and confiscated. Perhaps these anti-vax protesters see themselves as modern-day Gandhis and MLKs, who both favored non-violent protest and accepted the unjust punishment they endured for their causes. If so, they need to be sure that they and their followers remain non-violent, or their protests, like those ...

When I first joined the department, it had its own library, located just across the hall from my office. The current issues of about 20 biomedical journals were displayed on racks against one wall. Only a few journals published their table of contents on the cover, and the New England Journal of Medicine was one. Occasionally, a title would catch my eye. This was one. The title is "Higgledy, Piggledy." Here's the entire text: "When referring to the hand, the names digitus pollicis, indicis, medius, annularis, and minimus specify the five fingers. In situations of clinical relevance the use of such names can preclude anatomical ambiguity. These time-tested terms have honored the fingers, but the toes have been labeled only by number, except of course the great toe, or hallux. Is it not time for the medical community to have the toes no longer stand up and merely be counted? I submit for consideration the following nomenclature to refer to the pedal digits: for the hal...

Today, I learned that two of my favorite Churchill quotes aren’t. One was “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else,” which apparently was never said in that form by Churchill or anyone else. The other was “The Balkans have always produced more history than they can consume locally.” A version of that was said about Crete, but not by Churchill: "It was during the debate on the Foreign Office vote that Stringham made his great remark that "the people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally." https://quotepark.com/quotes/1944356-winston-s-churchill-the-balkans-produce-more-history-than-they-can-con/?fbclid=IwAR0wfvsi6j-PYUuGhzAWuvjZsdzfapezveIV5LqC1BBHvIx6AjQa36yLmYE

This makes sense I've always been puzzled by the idea of stolen cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency ransom. Supposedly, the great strength of cryptocurrency is the blockchain, which is a permanent log of every currency transaction. If that's the case, it must be possible to identify illicitly obtained cryptocurrency by a look-back in blockchain. This is why bank robbers want unmarked bills. ""This shows that even when sophisticated money laundering techniques are used, the indelible blockchain records usually allow law enforcement to link criminal activity to individuals," Tom Robinson, co-founder of cryptocurrency analysis firm Elliptic, told CNN." https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/08/investing/cryptocurrency-laundering/index.html?fbclid=IwAR1vE1wQkXJZlrlZ-YCh4jDWDOu4G8Z-d1z3wkRLiycaVEddI6WwkhgI_c4

Over the decades, I gained a basic outline of World War I, beginning with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that created a pretense for a war of conquest by Austria-Hungary and her ally Germany, the grinding trench warfare in France with poison gas, the transformative entry of the US on the side of France and England, the ultimate defeat of the Central Powers and the imposition of draconian war reparations in the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler and the Nazis exploited the view that Germany didn’t lose the war, but were stabbed in the back (“Dolchstoßlegende”) by revolutionary socialists and Jews. Many historians consider that World War II was a continuation of World War I. For that reason, I wanted a better understanding of WWI. The other major player among the Central Powers in WWI was the Ottoman Empire, which by then was known as “the sick man of Europe.” I chose Eugene Rogan’s “The Fall of the Ottomans” because it is a dimension of WWI history I was less familiar with, sin...

A flood of clickbait has appeared with speculations on Putin's intentions in Ukraine. I've stopped reading the MSM stuff because nothing has changed in the last several months. While a Russian invasion might still happen, I see no evidence that Putin wants to incorporate Ukraine into the Russian Federation like he did Crimea. Russia has a third world economy and is ruled by an oligarchy, not a military dictatorship. Here's a good think piece about the current state of play. I shuddered when I read that the UK and Poland had formed a mutual defense pact with Ukraine, since I recall that the defense pact between Poland and the UK is what launched WWII. Anyway, as the kids say, read the whole thing: https://www.juancole.com/2022/02/imminent-invasion-ukraine.html

Recently, the American right has added critical race theory to their lexicon of political invective. That lexicon has long included “socialist” and “communist,” and is used in ways unmoored from the actual meanings—as synonyms for “stuff I don’t like.” In the case of critical race theory, the right wing has morphed a school of American historical analysis into a political trope in order to sow division. This New Yorker article unpacks the actual origins of CRT. The criticism is not just of American racism but of the well-intentioned but failed effort to address racial inequities in the absence of a fully realized theory of cultural racism that is our nation’s original sin. “Another irony is that C.R.T. has become a fixation of conservatives despite the fact that some of its sharpest critiques were directed at the ultimate failings of liberalism, beginning with Bell’s own early involvement with one of its most heralded achievements.” *snip* “He wrote that the mission of groups engaged i...

Lives were lost, people were injured, property was destroyed, a federal building was defiled. What's next? Was the Civil War also "legitimate political discourse?" "The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it “legitimate political discourse" . . ." https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/02/04/nation/republican-party-declares-jan-6-attack-legitimate-political-discourse/?fbclid=IwAR3_dnFWzP6XlQCAYUVdIpvagONBf3L_Kpirl62NfQVZ0d6CToXWA8nCZdo

Having grown up in East Tennessee, I’m not the least surprised that the McMinn county school board is offended by a book that teaches the horror of the holocaust and misdirects by pretending they object to a couple of naughty words and a drawing of a nude mouse. If there’s anything worse than avoidable ignorance, it’s prideful ignorance. One critic quoted as an example of vulgarity in the curriculum the lyrics to a 1921 Eubie Blake song that Harry Truman used in his 1948 campaign. Another admitted he hadn’t actually read Maus, and was opposed to it based on hearsay. The pretzel logic and bafflegab is a threadbare disguise for what is self-evidently fear that McMinn County children will be told the truth about the atrocities committed by racist whites in the 20th century. I derive some solace from the knowledge that copies of Maus are selling like hotcakes and being read. “In any event, Shamblin suggested, this wouldn’t do: “It’s more offensive than that.” He added this kicker: “I have ...

In the USA of Trump, this seems positively quaint: “In Britain today, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the country’s Conservative Party faced a serious challenge to his government when a report revealed “failures of leadership and judgment” by Johnson in attending 12 parties that ignored the country’s strict lockdown rules. Johnson had downplayed the events and now that they are confirmed, even much of his own party appears ready to abandon him, appalled that he apparently considered himself above the law. In a leader, one member of Parliament said, “honesty and decency matters.”” https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-31-2022?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyMzU4NDQ3NSwicG9zdF9pZCI6NDgwMjU3NTEsIl8iOiJ6ajhqTiIsImlhdCI6MTY0MzczMTg0OCwiZXhwIjoxNjQzNzM1NDQ4LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMjA1MzMiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.psb3Eb0mYguwrZx1eEI-7xbGXjlrYimx4_PcrQIB18s&fbclid=IwAR3BFXUFYfYHOXXlyI4zZdklG85iiUIVX0v8W54tPlR3mvJbCyshzE_aoRs