‘Something Was Badly Wrong’: When Washington Realized Russia Was Actually Invading Ukraine

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/02/24/russia-ukraine-war-oral-history-00083757

GEN. MARK MILLEY: People don’t think about war — even today. When I say to people, “There have been 35,000 or 40,000 innocent Ukrainians killed in this war, a third of their economy has been destroyed, an estimated 7 million internally-displaced persons, and another 7 million refugees out of a pre-war population of 45 million — you’re looking at 30 to 40 percent of that country displaced out of houses.” People sit there and go: “Oh?”

Tip O’Neill — I’m from Boston, he was a Boston guy — and he said all politics are local. If it’s not happening to you, or in and around you, there’s a sense of remoteness. It doesn’t strike through the same way it does if it happens to you and your family. But for some of us, who have a lot of combat experience, who have seen a lot of war, it’s very real. For many people — good people, smart people — it’s very difficult to get your head around this stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s human nature. Just the other day, there were 1,100 Russians killed in a single day — more than that, closer to 1,200 — down around Bakhmut. That’s Iwo Jima, that’s Shiloh. 

One Year Inside a Radical New Approach to America’s Overdose Crisis

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/22/opinion/drug-crisis-addiction-harm-reduction.html

The streets are a terrifying and deeply uncomfortable place to live. Ms. Corso found that poor personal hygiene was often strategic — a woman who smelled disgusting was far less likely to be raped — and that sleep deprivation and sleep psychosis were at least as common as serious mental illness. She and Mr. Webb knew people who used heroin to sleep or meth to stay awake when they were too afraid to close their eyes.

She also found that a snack, a cigarette, a drink of water and a nap could solve 90 percent of a client’s immediate distress and that providing those things was the fastest way to build rapport. She liked to joke that her experience as a cocktail waitress was at least as useful as any coursework or prior counseling jobs she had done. “It’s not like people are summoned to our office for sit-down therapy,” she said. “It’s more like I walk the intake room striking up conversations and trying to upsell people on services. I am basically a cocktail waitress who serves mental health.”

It was tricky work, she said. Most of the people she sees have survived severe traumas — rape, molestation, physical abuse — that they had never discussed with another human or even grappled with themselves. For many of them, conversations in her office or around OnPoint are their first meaningful human interactions after something horrific.

They Were Married. They Shared a Trench. They Died in It Together.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/20/world/asia/ukraine-russia-war-death.html

Taras and Olha Melster signed up to help the war effort. Like many other urban professionals in Ukraine, they never expected to be sent to the front line. 

The Impact of Russian Missile Strikes on Ukraine’s Power Grid

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-impact-of-russian-missile-strikes-on-ukraines-power-grid

Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, its attacks had periodically damaged energy infrastructure near the front lines. “That we were used to,” Dmytro Sakharuk, the executive director of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, said. “But then they changed strategy.” Starting last fall, the Russian military began targeting coal-fuelled power plants, substations, and transformers across the whole of Ukraine. Russian officials wagered that by depriving Ukrainians of electricity—and, as a result, heat and water—during wintertime, they would sap the country’s resolve. “They wanted to initiate a long-term blackout and to freeze our big cities,” Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, the C.E.O. of Ukrenergo, told me. “The idea was to force us to negotiate not through emerging victorious on the battlefield but by terrorizing the population.”

Russian journalist Maria Ponomarenko jailed for highlighting Mariupol killings

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64647267

Russian journalist Maria Ponomarenko has been jailed for six years for posting on social media about a deadly attack by Russian warplanes on a theatre in Ukraine.

The court in Barnaul in Siberia found her guilty of spreading "fake news", under laws introduced aimed at stifling dissent about the invasion of Ukraine.

She was also barred from activities as a journalist for five years.

Hundreds of civilians died when the Mariupol theatre was bombed last March.

Ponomarenko was detained last April, weeks after the bombing, for posting that Russian warplanes had carried out the attack even though the Russian defence ministry had denied it.

She is one of a growing number of Russian dissidents jailed for criticising the war in Ukraine.

Why Christians Have a Hard Time Believing it’s Actually Wrong to Sexually Abuse a Child, as Long as Another Christian Does It.

https://twitter.com/LauraRbnsn/status/1624780476605923331

🧵Why Christians Have a Hard Time Believing it’s Actually Wrong to Sexually Abuse a Child, as Long as Another Christian Does It.

Okay, this is a hyperbolic title. I will be told this is a straw man. Fair! I do try to avoid extreme statements about religion because I do think

— Laura Robinson (@LauraRbnsn) February 12, 2023

The Death of the Smart Shopper

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/02/online-amazon-shopping-informed-consumer-quality-control/673017/

Last week, the journalist John Herrman published a theory on why, exactly, Amazon seems so uninterested in the faltering quality of its shopping experience: The company would rather leave the complicated, labor-intensive business of selling things to people to someone else. To do that, it has opened its doors to roughly 2 million third-party sellers, whether they are foreign manufacturers looking for more direct access to customers or the disciples of “grindset” influencers who want to use SEO hacks to fund the purchase of rental properties. In the process, Amazon has cultivated a decentralized, disorienting mess with little in the way of discernible quality control or organization. According to Herrman, that’s mainly because Amazon’s primary goal is selling the infrastructure of online shopping to other businesses—things like checkout, payment processing, and order fulfillment, which even large retailers can struggle to handle efficiently. Why be Amazon when you can instead make everyone else be Amazon and take a cut?

A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell

https://compactmag.com/article/a-black-professor-trapped-in-anti-racist-hell

This might be just another lament about “woke” campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues. But the seminar topic was “Race and the Limits of Law in America.” Four of the 6 weeks were focused on anti-black racism (the other two were on anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous racism). I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.

Like others on the left, I had been dismissive of criticisms of the current discourse on race in the United States. But now my thoughts turned to that moment in the 1970s when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one’s comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion. How did this happen to a group of bright-eyed high school students?

Pluralistic: Tiktok's ens***tification

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this ens***tification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.

Revealed: secret cross-party summit held to confront failings of Brexit

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/11/revealed-secret-cross-party-summit-held-to-confront-failings-of-brexit

The highly unusual cross-party nature of the gathering of Brexit opponents – and the seniority of those who agreed to attend – reflects a growing acceptance among politicians in the two main parties, as well as business leaders and civil servants, that Brexit in its current form is damaging the UK economy and reducing its strategic influence in the world.

Concern is growing at the top of the Labour party that it poses a real threat to the success of any future Labour government unless problems such as increased trade friction can be addressed.

The Office for Budget Responsibility has predicted that, over the 15 years from 2016, Brexit will reduce the UK’s GDP per capita by 4%. 

What the New York Times Got Wrong About ‘Rural Rage’

https://dailyyonder.com/what-the-new-york-times-got-wrong-rural-rage/2023/02/02/

Krugman uses a tweet from J.D. Vance to prove that rural politicians can spit vitriol at urban people but urban politicians could never reply in kind. If that’s the case, how do you explain the deluge of degrading tweets from Democrats about Appalachia when it was hit by deadly floods in July of 2022? Is it ever excusable for someone to say, after seeing the devastation of such a disaster, that “these people got what they voted for”? 

The problem with using J.D. Vance as an example of what’s wrong with rural America is that he shows exactly why the rural stereotypes Krugman shrugs off as a non-issue are so dangerous. 

Just because Vance dissed New York City does not mean that all rural people hate cities, nor should it give a pass for urban politicians to disparage rural America. Perhaps – perhaps! – politicians (and the public) shouldn’t disparage either place. 

It’s Not Just What Manchester City Won. It’s What Others Lost.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/07/sports/soccer/manchester-city-premier-league-rules.html

Manchester City deserved to win all of those games, of course. On each occasion, it was much the better team. Its opponents accepted their fates with good grace. They did not quibble with the result. “We know how far ahead of us they are,” Gray said, even as his teammates were coming to terms with their humiliation in the sanctuary of the changing room.

That City was better is not in question. What is at stake, instead, is whether it was in a position to reach all of those finals, to win all of those trophies, while operating under the same rules and restrictions as everyone else. If it was not, then there is no punishment, no matter how harsh, that restores what has been lost.

The Founding Fathers Favored a Liberal Immigration System

https://www.cato.org/blog/founding-fathers-favored-liberal-immigration-system

Alexander Hamilton argued that the “advantage of encouraging foreigners was obvious and admitted,” asserting that “persons in Europe of moderate fortunes will be fond of coming here where they will be on a level with the first Citizens.”

Father of the Constitution James Madison “was not averse to some restrictions on this subject, but could never agree to the proposed amendment” in part “because it will discourage the most desirable class of people from emigrating to the U.S.” In other words, not only were the Founders opposed to restricting the free movement of people into the United States, but they opposed restrictions on citizenship that they felt would discourage immigrants from using that freedom. Madison spoke of “great numbers” who would wish to come to the United States.

 

Coming Of Age | Bryan Cantrill | Monktoberfest 2022

Ravi Zacharias’ sins of sexual abuse went undetected for years. Here are the lessons the Church needs to learn

https://www.premierchristianity.com/features/ravi-zacharias-sins-of-sexual-abuse-went-undetected-for-years-here-are-the-lessons-the-church-needs-to-learn/14737.article

“One of the things that we identify around culture is that if we’re not sufficiently attentive on an ongoing basis, then what we call ‘shadow cultures’ emerge – those things which become custom and practice by mistake, because we weren’t alive to them and didn’t challenge them when they first arrived.”

According to Humphreys, shadow cultures run in parallel to an organisation’s existing culture, but largely go unacknowledged or unopposed. They are the behaviours displayed by colleagues, or the privileges conferred on particular members of staff, which demonstrate “an alternative set of rules are being used”. 

In the case of RZIM, this might include Zacharias’ use of a personal phone and email address instead of official work ones, or the encrypted BlackBerry he owned, from which messages were not retrievable once deleted. These kinds of “low level” concerns can be a subtle indicator of deeper organisational health issues, warns Humphreys. They should be called out in an appropriate way and “without fear of retribution or penalty”. 

UnitedHealthcare Tried to Deny Coverage to a Chronically Ill Patient. He Fought Back, Exposing the Insurer’s Inner Workings.

https://www.propublica.org/article/unitedhealth-healthcare-insurance-denial-ulcerative-colitis

After a college student finally found a treatment that worked, the insurance giant decided it wouldn’t pay for the costly drugs. His fight to get coverage exposed the insurer’s hidden procedures for rejecting claims.

Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's "FTX Pre-Mortem Overview"

https://www.mollywhite.net/annotations/sbf-ftx-pre-mortem-overview

Sam Bankman-Fried has apparently decided to fill his time spent confined to his parents' Palo Alto home with blogging, perhaps in the hopes that he can just blog his way out of the massive criminal and civil penalties he's facing.

Although many of his statements here repeat things he's said elsewhere, I think it is useful to be able to analyze some of the story he's trying to spin all in one place, rather than cobbling his narrative together from multiple sources.

It's remarkable the extent to which SBF outright lies, or at the very least twists his version of events to distort reality in his favor. I don't intend to annotate further posts from him—which I suspect will be many—but instead hope that this will be sufficient to give some idea of just how thoroughly misleading his statements are.

Eight Women Say the Same Man Raped or Assaulted Them. Now They’re Out for Justice

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/women-rape-assault-abuse-justice-social-media-avengers-1234660588/

When the system failed to help them, these survivors banded together and took matters into their own hands

A Small Boat, a Vast Sea and a Desperate Escape From Russia

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/29/us/russian-asylum-boat-alaska.html

In September, two men set out from Russia, hoping a boat could carry them to asylum on U.S. soil. Their quest for freedom did not go as planned.

The Unwritten Laws of Physics for Black Women

https://www.wired.com/story/the-unwritten-laws-of-physics/

I rode high on those words when, in 2016, I arrived at UChicago, one of the top physics departments in the country. I was one of two Black women in a department of about 200 grad students. It quickly became clear that she and I were novelties. “I’ve dated a mulatto like you before,” a peer told me in an attempt to make conversation. When I showed up at a weekly meeting that discussed articles in scientific journals, a professor handed me an abandoned backpack near his seat—as if the only reason I could be in that room was to collect a forgotten bag. (He blushed when I shook my head and sat down.) Another time, my adviser asked me to pose for a picture for his grant application. “Of course, I have other photos,” he said as he tossed me a wrench. “But it looks better if it’s a woman.”

One day, worn out by always feeling like an alien, I opened my laptop and poked around the department website. I was searching for signs of Black women who had come before me—to reassure myself that someone had once done what I was trying to do. No luck. So I turned to Google, where I stumbled on a database simply titled The Physicists, maintained by an organization called African American Women in Physics.

I sorted the catalog by graduation year. A few rows down the first page, I saw the name of a UChicago physicist: Willetta Greene-Johnson, who defended her dissertation in 1987. I scrolled through the next page, and the next, and kept scrolling until I finally reached another UChicago entry in 2015. Her name was Cacey Stevens Bester.

That can’t be it, I thought. That meant I was on track to be number three.

Wrestling with an Approach to Karl Barth, and some Advice from D Stephen Long

https://growrag.wordpress.com/2017/10/08/wrestling-with-an-approach-to-karl-barth-and-some-advice-from-theologian-x/

I also think that no single, individual theologian [WLS: and I would say this applies to anyone speaking on morals] is responsible for his or her theology. Each one lives from and depends on the communion of saints, on those who come before us and those who receive our work. An individual theologian’s work should not be discarded because of her or his failures because it is never solely their work. I do think we must raise questions as to the connection between theology and ethics that could lead a Barth or Yoder to their self-deception, especially when they themselves refused a sharp distinction between theology and ethics. Is there something in their theology that contributed to it?

So I have come to terms with these failures by thinking: 1. their theology cannot be wholly discarded because their theology was never their’s. They do not own it, and theologians are not individual heroes. 2. Theologians’ failures cannot be overlooked but must be considered as part and parcel of their theology. Many of us were attracted to Barth because he saw the failures of theology to resist the Nazis. If we easily overlook ethical and political failures, then we would have to say that theology makes little difference in the world and that would be devastating to the theological task.

An obituary for the man who saved North Carolina from nuclear disaster

https://www.ncrabbithole.com/p/jack-revelle-goldsboro-nc-broken-arrow-obituary

Dr. Jack ReVelle disarmed two hydrogen bombs that accidentally fell near Goldsboro during the Cold War. But a military career of cleaning up nuclear accidents may have cut his life short.