Published at 20:42 on 25 July 2023
First, the assigned reading:
The extra content is a little discussion.
First, will this foot dragging result in any action being too little, too late? It might. Had the lawbreaking by the most powerful been treated more seriously sooner, Trump might already be seriously damaged to the point that the GOP would finally throw him under a bus. (His base of cult followers would never do so, but the party leadership might, if they realize that the sooner they do so, the sooner they can move on from a candidate who is doomed to lose. They don’t care about democracy, but they do care about remaining politically viable.)
Second, it really all goes to show what a bunch of pure unadulterated bullshit the “they are picking on Trump” line of the Right continues to be. Trump has gotten nothing but free rides and special treatment from the entire system, basically since the very first day of his life as the heir of a multimillionaire. If Trump wasn’t getting special treatment, he would already be in prison.
Published at 06:56 on 12 July 2023
Too bad. As mentioned earlier, Ukraine does not belong in NATO. Not yet at least. Moreover, the process of getting to where Ukraine’s membership in NATO makes sense is likely to be long and complex enough that any sort of strict timeline is foolish to promise.
Biden was wrong to give Ukraine cluster bombs but he is dead right when it comes to NATO membership for Ukraine.
Ukraine is not getting an express ticket to NATO membership and Zelensky can like it or lump it. (Who else is he going to get to shovel mass quantities of military aid at his country in its time of need? Beggars can’t be choosers.)
Published at 21:05 on 11 July 2023
Now it has come out that Putin has actually met personally with Prigozhin in the wake of the Wagner mutiny. This just screams weakness. A strong authoritarian would have had the leader of a mutiny against him disappeared within a matter of days.
To reiterate: I can’t see Putin lasting much longer than a year.
Published at 19:07 on 6 July 2023
Cluster bombs? NATO membership (not eventually, right away)? It seems like no bad idea is bad enough not to get serious consideration these days.
Cluster bombs first: the problem with cluster bombs is that the bomblets in them don’t all explode. Most of them do, but not all of them. The remaining unexploded ones lie in wait for some unfortunate individual, often a civilian, sometimes a child. Then, tragedy. They are as bad as land mines (which are banned by international treaty for a reason).
Fast-tracked NATO membership: no, no, no.
First and most important, Ukraine is actively fighting Russia. Membership while that state of affairs exists violates the unwritten rule that two superpowers don’t directly fight each other. (The NATO treaty requires an attack against one nation to be interpreted as an attack against all. This means that the next bullet fired by a Russian soldier brings the USA into a direct war against Russia.) The argument being proffered for this is that since there hasn’t been a nuclear exchange with Russia yet, what the hey, it’s worth a roll of the dice, let’s push our luck and go for broke. This is so reckless that it frankly boggles the imagination.
Second, Ukraine is not a functioning, first-world democracy. Yes, Ukraine is definitely better at the whole democracy and civil rights thing than Russia has been in recent decades, no disagreement there. But it’s still best understood as a democratizing country, not a democratized one. Ukraine still has huge problems with corruption. There are right now headaches at times caused by the likes of Turkey, Poland, and Hungary voting contrary to Western norms. Why compound them by giving another less-than-fully-compatible nation an express ticket to full membership?
Look, I get it. Putin is a piece of fascist, imperialist shit who started this war. Nothing wrong with helping Ukraine defend itself against Putin’s aggression. But please, be prudent about it. The above two ideas are disasters.
Published at 18:07 on 26 June 2023
Putin made an unscheduled speech today in which yet again he thanked Wagner for standing down and not going into Moscow. Total weak guy stuff (a strong leader would have promised punishment and retribution).
That one year time frame I gave a few posts ago was my upper bound for how much longer Putin can last in office. His actual remaining time in office might be quite a bit less.
Remember, revolutions in Russia seldom happen in one fell swoop. In 1917, the February Revolution preceded the October Revolution. The attempted coup against Gorbachev in 1991 was followed some months later by the breakup of the USSR, and that was followed in 1993 by Yeltsin’s coup against parliament. The Wagner mutiny is probably just the beginning.
Published at 16:23 on 25 June 2023
The putsch helps Ukraine. A lot.
Russian soldiers occupying Ukraine now know that their leader is weak and vulnerable. They know that prominent, influential people on the Russian side are saying that the whole pretext for the war was a pack of lies: Ukraine was of no threat to Russia and did not need to be de-Nazified.
Ask yourself: Would you feel motivated to fight for a weak and vulnerable leader in a war based on a pack of lies?
As such, expect low morale, desertions, surrenders, mutinies, etc. to really ramp up on the Russian side.
Moreover, Putin now is fighting two wars. One in Ukraine where he had already bitten off way, way more than he could chew. And now another one at home, trying to cling to power. He is now vastly more overextended than he was before.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure any of this out. You can be sure the Ukrainians already have. They were already beginning an offensive to retake territory. Expect the offensive to get ramped up: when the enemy is weak, you hit him harder.
Published at 20:11 on 24 June 2023
It looks like Putin has survived it… for now.
And that latter phrase is crucial. Before yesterday, Putin’s power was unquestioned. Nobody dared cross him. Not if they wanted to keep on living, that is.
Now, somebody has crossed him… and Putin was compelled to cut a deal to resolve the situation. Putin is no longer the undisputed master of events in Russia. He has been shown to be weak, shown to be vulnerable.
As such, I would be surprised if Putin lasts much longer than another year.
Published at 17:25 on 24 June 2023
Last year, I decided to treat myself to a new automotive GPS system for my truck. You see, I sometimes like to explore forest service roads in backcountry areas that lack cell coverage, making smartphone maps mostly useless. I decided to buy a Garmin unit, since that is a name brand, and I have one of their hiking GPS units and it works just fine. So I assumed that Garmin’s automotive GPS units would also be well-designed. Boy, was I wrong! To reiterate the subject of this post: the thing is pure crap. It cannot honestly be described any other way.
Let me enumerate the ways in which it is crap:
- Crap software design. If you pair the GPS with your smartphone (which you must, if you want to receive real-time traffic updates for driving in the city), it turns on this cheesy key-click feature, in which the GPS speaker will make a loud click for each keystroke you enter on the smart phone. The rub is, the click will be randomly delayed due to the use of Bluetooth pairing by anywhere from 100 ms to a full second. Just try typing with such a misfeature, I dare you. It is extremely disorienting, and makes accurate typing virtually impossible. And there is no way to disable this crap misfeature. I spent several hours trying to, reading the manual, exploring all the settings, doing web searches. There is no escape. The only way to turn it off seems to be to unpair your phone.
- Crap real-time traffic information. Speaking of the real-time traffic updates, they are crap. In my experience they report less than half of significant delays. Because the device is unaware of so many instances of traffic congestion, its navigation advice in the city is also crap. Plus the chosen way Garmin indicates traffic congestion on its map is subtle and easy to miss.
- Crap software quality. The GPS often hangs or crashes at random times. When this happens, it takes about five minutes to recover. Typically this happens when I am running late and most need everything to work properly.
- Crap backup camera. I decided to spring for the optional backup camera, because my truck is old enough not to have one from the factory. About as much of a mistake as buying the GPS itself. It’s crap, too. The camera takes up to a full minute to turn on when requested. Video is frequently laggy and erratic. My old cheapo analog wired backup camera was vastly better.
- Crap maps. First, the maps are a good two years or more out of date from the moment you download them. A new road opened two years ago near my property in Bellingham. Its presence changed the optimal way to get there from I-5. Two years on, and the new stretch of road is still not in the latest update from Garmin. Second, the maps are woefully incomplete. The device is essentially useless for its intended purpose of navigating on remote forest service roads; most of them are not in its database.
- Crap hardware design. The Drivesmart 66 spews radio noise like mad on the lower radio frequencies. Use it while listening to an AM radio station? Forget it! This is extremely annoying, as the same remote areas without cell coverage (i.e. the areas that prompted me to get this unit) also tend to lack FM radio coverage, while stronger AM stations still manage to cover such areas, due to how the longer radio waves used in the AM broadcast band propagate. So even if it was useful in the backwoods (and it is not) I would still have to choose between being able to listen to the radio and having GPS guidance.
My assumption is that these misfeatures are also present in most or all newer Garmin automotive models. Because why wouldn’t they be? It’s only logical to use a common software base in all products, and a manufacturer inclined to cut corners when it comes to RF noise shielding in one device is probably going to cut them in all their devices.
Bottom line is that I cannot recommend any currently-manufactured Garmin automotive GPS units. Avoid them all.
Published at 17:33 on 22 June 2023
I am somewhere on the autism spectrum, and one thing I find difficult about neurotypicals is how they so often experience extreme difficulty using language to communicate, via words and their assigned meanings.
Like with my toothache recently. It was bad enough that I was reasonably sure that it was abscessed to the point of no return and that the f*cker needed to be extracted. But noooooo, the endodontist couldn’t say that. Instead, he has to write up a report to send to my regular dentist, who then can’t say it either. No, I have to schedule an appointment, face to face of course, so she can break it to me. And she spends about fifteen minutes doing so. Most of those fifteen minutes are filled with statistics about root canals that don’t apply to my particular situation. Eventually she gets to the point: the endodontist’s report said that options were not good for any restoration procedure.
End result: I learn what I had already expected some time ago.
What was I supposed to do? Cry over it? It’s dead, it’s infected, we need to do what one always does with dead infected things in one’s body: remove them. Just tell me it needs to be removed, so I can get it removed sooner rather than later. Is that so hard?
Oh well, at least I know now. And thankfully the really hurty phase of it ended three weeks ago, so it is not as if I was in any undue pain from the experience. But it sure would have been nice to know the truth sooner and with less fuss.
Published at 07:21 on 20 June 2023
That is my question: Was the current right-wing Hindu nationalist (read Hindu supremacist) government in India in any way involved in this and other similar crimes in Canada? I am not saying they definitively were, mind you, just that they might have been (such things are entirely in character for such a regime), and the possibility needs to be seriously investigated.
