How corruption has turned into an unstoppable beast threatening to swallow the Russian military whole - August 5th Letter from the Wind of Change inside the FSB

 

https://www.igorsushko.com/2022/08/how-corruption-has-turned-into.html

The statistics sent up the chain are already distorted, and at every management level more “adjustments” get made, of which both the higher and the lower levels are unaware.

There is no big picture, everywhere is "whatever happens" and "as was negotiated," for now it’s still big know-how for everyone. It’s a startup. (I laughed out loud translating this comparison to a startup company.)

But it is almost impossible to untangle this yarn: No one is interested in exposing the truth, one lie layered on top of another, and the hotter the zone, the more there are such cases. You have to sort it out on the ground, and that is exactly the unsolvable task.

Nate Silver's Finest Hour (Part 1 of 2)

https://goodreason.substack.com/p/nate-silvers-finest-hour-part-1-of

And then there’s 538, which gives Trump a 29% chance of winning. This is actually down from his peak a day or two earlier, when they gave him a 35% chance.

Silver gives some thoughtful explanations for why they’re way more bullish on Trump than others, most clearly laid out here. I don’t want to jump the gun, but I also feel obligated to draw attention to one reason he gives for 538’s relative bullishness on Trump. So, pre-election Nate, why might Trump have a chance?

State outcomes are highly correlated with one another, so polling errors in one state are likely to be replicated in other, similar states.

… Basically, this means that you shouldn’t count on states to behave independently of one another, especially if they’re demographically similar. If Clinton loses Pennsylvania despite having a big lead in the polls there, for instance, she might also have problems in Michigan, North Carolina and other swing states. What seems like an impregnable firewall in the Electoral College may begin to collapse.

Silver wrote this 2 weeks before the election, and - spoilers for the election outcome - it is so spot-on I had to double-check that it wasn’t written after the election. Clinton lost almost entirely because a polling error with one demographic group - non-college-educated white people - meant that she lost at least three states with a lot of them.

Whatever Silver’s reasons, the Twitterati are, at best, uncomfortable with his conclusions. The pundit response is to gently cast doubt on 538’s model.

The Day No One Would Say the Nazis Were Bad

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/community/education/the-day-no-one-would-say-the-nazis-were-bad

I couldn’t get anyone to agree that the Nazis were bad. In fact the students completed the argument quite elegantly for me: we each have our own perspective; the Nazis aren’t strictly speaking “bad” because after all, from their perspective they thought they were good; there is no way we can ourselves claim to truthfully state from our perspective that they are bad; Q.E.D. there’s nothing bad about the Nazis.

I was unprepared for this; I walked around in a daze for at least a week. I went to high school in the late 1990s, where the last of the slow-drip of congealed, apparent prosperity before September 11, 2001 meant that, on the surface of the local newsprint at least, the biggest thing in politics going was whether or not Bill Clinton could be caught out in an embarrassing if fairly trivial lie. It was the sort of time where someone could argue that history was over, that Western liberal democracy had won conclusively, and you’d believe him. By tenth grade we had studied The Diary of Anne Frank (1947) no fewer than three times. In my youthful memories the Nazis were so bad, they had attained the boring kind of evil. When cast as villains of a piece, they couldn’t make a splash, they were so obviously over and done with; there could be no dramatic tension in their defeat.

Something had apparently shifted for my students. They clearly expected me to praise them for getting what I must see was the right answer: even the Nazis aren’t bad. The uniformity of this particular class’s reaction was singular and uncanny. I’m used to the attempt to subvert more or less hollow moral outrage; but what do you do when there’s none at all? 

On military conflicts

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/inside-the-war-between-trump-and-his-generals

The subject came up again during an Oval Office briefing that included Trump, Kelly, and Paul Selva, an Air Force general and the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kelly joked in his deadpan way about the parade. “Well, you know, General Selva is going to be in charge of organizing the Fourth of July parade,” he told the President. Trump did not understand that Kelly was being sarcastic. “So, what do you think of the parade?” Trump asked Selva. Instead of telling Trump what he wanted to hear, Selva was forthright.

“I didn’t grow up in the United States, I actually grew up in Portugal,” Selva said. “Portugal was a dictatorship—and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. And in this country, we don’t do that.” He added, “It’s not who we are.”

Even after this impassioned speech, Trump still did not get it. “So, you don’t like the idea?” he said, incredulous.

“No,” Selva said. “It’s what dictators do.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/youre-gonna-have-a-fucking-war-mark-milleys-fight-to-stop-trump-from-striking-iran

As the crisis with Trump unfolded, and the chairman’s worst-case fears about the President not accepting defeat seemed to come true, Milley repeatedly met in private with the Joint Chiefs. He told them to make sure there were no unlawful orders from Trump and not to carry out any such orders without calling him first—almost a conscious echo of the final days of Richard Nixon, when Nixon’s Defense Secretary, James Schlesinger, reportedly warned the military not to act on any orders from the White House to launch a nuclear strike without first checking with him or with the national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger. At one meeting with the Joint Chiefs, in Milley’s Pentagon office, the chairman invoked Benjamin Franklin’s famous line, saying they should all hang together. To concerned members of Congress—including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—and also emissaries from the incoming Biden Administration, Milley also put out the word: Trump might attempt a coup, but he would fail because he would never succeed in co-opting the American military. “Our loyalty is to the U.S. Constitution,” Milley told them, and “we are not going to be involved in politics.”

u/TrollTollTony On the Special Counsel's findings

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalHumor/comments/wjnbk0/raise_your_hand/ijj7yzi/

The Special Counsel investigation uncovered extensive criminal activity The investigation produced 37 indictments; seven guilty pleas or convictions; and compelling evidence that the president obstructed justice on multiple occasions. Mueller also uncovered and referred 14 criminal matters to other components of the Department of Justice. Trump associates repeatedly lied to investigators about their contacts with Russians, and President Trump refused to answer questions about his efforts to impede federal proceedings and influence the testimony of witnesses. A statement signed by over 1,000 former federal prosecutors concluded that if any other American engaged in the same efforts to impede federal proceedings the way Trump did, they would likely be indicted for multiple charges of obstruction of justice.

Russia engaged in extensive attacks on the U.S. election system in 2016 Russian interference in the 2016 election was “sweeping and systemic.”[1] Major attack avenues included a social media “information warfare” campaign that “favored” candidate Trump[2] and the hacking of Clinton campaign-related databases and release of stolen materials through Russian-created entities and Wikileaks.[3] Russia also targeted databases in many states related to administering elections gaining access to information for millions of registered voters.[4]

The investigation “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign” and established that the Trump Campaign “showed interest in WikiLeaks's releases of documents and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Clinton” 

Please, God, Help Me Stop Missing Her

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/style/modern-love-orthodox-jewish-gay.html

As an ultra-Orthodox Jew, I tried to ‘pray my gay away.’ It didn’t work.

I was scrolling through psychotherapy memes on Instagram a few years ago when Hannah popped up in my friend requests. We each had new last names and new looks. I had decided that since I had to wear wigs anyway (as an ultra-Orthodox Jew), they may as well be blonde instead of my natural dull brown. She wore a mixture of wigs and other creative head coverings.

We “hearted” each other’s posts, not daring to break our silence with actual words.

“She seems happy,” I told myself, my fingers hovering over her photos. “Don’t start anything.”