This week’s Open Thread.
Links:
- spandrell: We don’t have to tweet like this. urbit is probably the future of social media just like #DeFi will replace TradFi.
- Scott Alexander: Shilling For Big Mitochondria. Fat loss pill that actually works – and invented (and banned) during the 1930s to boot. Minor problem? 0.01% mortality rate. Seems fine tradeoff if alternative is 40% obesity rate.
- Niccolo Soldo interviews Glenn Greenwald
- Paul Robinson: Watching the Disinformation Watchers
- [twitter] Old Richard Hanania thread on Stalin
- [comment] Bashibazuk on Arkona
- Киреев: Электоральный сценарий “Наталья Поклонская – президент России”. Exotic but not altogether implausible scenario how world-famous waifu Natalia Poklonskaya can become Russian President. [in Russian obv]
I’ll probably start doing these links posts again in Open Threads, but will only post a few unlike in the old days. It used to take up far too much time. But selecting the best/most notable and only doing short commentaries on them if that only takes a few minutes.
This is the current Open Thread, where anything goes – within reason.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Commenting rules. Please note that anonymous comments are not allowed.
The likely scary coronavirus variant of the next months will be emerging, from Brazil.
A variant emerging in an obscure city of the Amazon rainforest, is at least matching better to a scenario of Hollywood disaster film stories, than the notexotic sounding “British variant”.
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1367148840596475920
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1367149988153851905
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1367150246254555137
Is that Poklonskaya? She looks like a girl who would always worry about government good name. (And I like her.)
Kiev has an arrest warrant on Natasha, if she takes over Kremlin it could be interesting. (I would personally arrest her on the spot.) But we are heading there anyway, enemies will be put on notice by all sides making lives of the elite unpleasant, they will have to find new amusements. Some old favourites could come back: hunting, gluttony and wars, even more serial mating and cousin liaisons, and of course dwarf tossing. Watch out Macron.
as part of my efforts to Lasch-pill the public. Here is a little known seminar given by Lasch about the future of self. He begins with the question of what is man and various answers given and then reviews various self-society paradigms(how the individual/self relates to society): the liberal, the conservative and the eco-hippie then gives his own answer.
https://digitalcollections.lib.rochester.edu/ur/future-self-march-1987
Snowden met his wife by using HotorNot.com.
Though, so far, I find the rest of his book boring.
All you need in life is KPV.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KPV_heavy_machine_gun
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/47/17/4f/47174fbbe5006213bb37fc3decbe2ca1.jpg
Hope you haven’t got rid of all gasmasks&filters yet? 😉
btw, vaguely remembered AK retweeting last summer(?) some calculations or study about quite high chance (~30% IIRC ) of SARS 2.0 mutating into way higher virulent and mortal virus than it was, just way lazy atm to search it.
May be that those possibilities are coming into life now after hundred millions of infections over last year.
I too think about the possibility of highly transmissible and lethal mutations, or simply what they call the next pandemic. One trillion dollars should be invested in this right now. That is a nice round number. If the man from outer space landed and donated the trillion dollars, that is what the US would do. Ironically, the Fed printing press is exactly that —- free money (at least for now).
Admiral Nimitz said after the Halsey hurricane: It is dangerous to be grudging about safety precautions for fear that they might turn out to have been unnecessary.
No, not rifles. She looks like the girl from the cartoon who objects to ‘conspiracies’…
But come to think of it, Natashka with a rifle could make the Western media go totally wobbly…I have never understood why Russia doesn’t go full barbarian on the western a.s. What do they have to lose? Respect is only for people who are allowed in, Russia will never be allowed in. They can do anything they please and their standing in the West would be about the same. Actually going ape-sh..t occasionally would make West respect them more. I would put Natasha in a bomber-suit and let her threaten Poland with annihilation. What exactly would be different? How much worse can West be?
If you have a reputation as a Neanderthal, you might as well be one. The worst thing is to have the reputation and always act appropriately, afraid of what ‘people might say’.
nyash myash, destroyer of worlds
https://globalvoices.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/42344079-1-632×600.png
One toxic dude:
https://twitter.com/SlavaMalamud?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Eembeddedtimeline%7Ctwterm%5Eprofile%3ASlavaMalamud&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.unz.com%2Fakarlin%2Fopen-thread-143%2F
Finnish media claims that the population of Russia decreased by more than 100,000 people in January of 2021 alone. If this pace continues the Russian population would decrease by more than 1,2 million this year. How is this possible??? Russia’s population was growing annually just two years ago.
Poll of how Ukrainians view Lukashenko, Biden and Putin:
http://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=1016&page=1
30.3% of Ukrainians trust Lukashenko, 56.8% distrust him, 10.3% neutral.
29.4% of Ukrainians trust Joe Biden, 25.5% distrust him, 23.9% neutral.
10.8% of Ukrainians trust Putin, 82.4% distrust him, 6.2% neutral.
Also, looks like we have achieved a rare point when attitudes in Russia towards Ukraine are more positive than attitudes in Ukraine towards Russia:
http://www.kiis.com.ua/materials/pr/20210203_ukr-rus/1ukr.jpg
About 55% of Russians view Ukraine positively but only 41% of Ukrainian view Russia positively (note that this is different from viewing the Russian government positively).
The Ukrainian negative turn towards Russia began back in September, so it was not manufactured by Zelensky’s much more recent banning of pro-Russian media in Ukraine; rather, the recent banning of Russian media by Zelensky is an act of populism to try to improve his ratings. Although it may have had an impact – support for the pro-Russian Opposition declined from 24% to 18% from January.
Ever heard of some pandemic going on? 😉
Slava Ukraini! Malamudam slava!;
There has been no such spike in mortality and decrease of population in other countries.
?
https://twitter.com/rkfg_me/status/1367799173614034946
Since most of internet is amerifags, blade law compilations mostly deal with “knives”.
Is there a handy place where you can find regulations or genuine ease of carrying Sabre?
I would be doing for religious reason, Sikh.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/781981619073318943/817537933459849236/unknown.png?width=666&height=665
This is my sword: 38oz with 29″ blade & 34″ overall.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/781981619073318943/817061921860616202/unknown.png
This is the knife I carry as well: 11oz with 7″ blade & 12″ overall.
I know many places have an informal rule of 4″ blade so I have this one:
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/755583883918966885/816875092860469278/IMG_20210303_214730.jpg?width=332&height=665
7oz with 4″ blade & 8.5″ overall, have to re-do handle (hockey tape + paracord)
Thanks,
Anti-Russian and nasty. Understand that he’s a Jew from Moldova – not that the two (Moldova and being Jewish) are necessarily anti-Russian and/or nasty..
I just got on Urbit a day ago, but so far there is only the Spandrell blog there that looks interesting, and it’s not as good as this blog (after a 1 day sampling) of a few of the channels. There is this: https://thestack.link/urbit-groups/
but so far I haven’t found any other links for groups. The other problem is that I don’t really have much free time to get into it. Messages I can write while I’m working or looking after a kid in the afternoon, but I can’t learn Hoon or whatever unless I’m back in my early 20s. Then I could do that instead of drinking and playing video games. The one free hour I have per day I’m usually tired anyways. And Urbit doesn’t have a search function to look for channels like Telegram. Plus planets are seriously expensive and they cost money Per Month!? to maintain?
Does anybody have a link to where there are good Urbit groups or a guide on how to install apps to Landscape? Again, I might be missing something since I literally had only one lucid hour to install and play around with it.
Since you seem to be an expert on the topic, could you alert us to what exactly is the toxic combination, so we know whom to avoid? 🙂
There has: US 2020 had 300k fewer births, mortality is up across the West.
The way it works is that e.g. Spain or Italy can have a TFR of 1.3 per woman, or Finland 1.5, and Germany and Japan are in demographic tailspin, but your free Finnish media will ignore it, or spin it as ‘progress for women‘. But in Russia, no: endless headlines will scream “THEY ARE DYING OUT”, they will be gone in 50 years, blabla…
It is called wishful thinking: stories that make you feel good. That has been the purpose of all stories throughout history. That’s fine, but it is a bit retarded to take it seriously.
Please don’t turn this into conversation about the West. I’m interested in Russia here.
If it is really correct that Russia lost over 100,000 people in January alone then it needs to be analysed what caused it because it is such a drastic turn for the worse. As I said Russian population was GROWING as recently as in 2018, but now it seems to be in a free fall. Russia could lose more than a million people this year (if the pace of January continues for the whole year) which would be like a return to the 1990s when Russia was losing about a million people annually.
I sincerely hope this is not true. Anatoly Karlin used to write a lot about Russian demographics so maybe he has some input on this?
Precious. They should appoint her as the uniform-in-charge constantly making menacing statements toward the West. Let’s see if the media could demonise her. Although the demographic in-charge of the West – elderly women of both genders – would be easy to convince: they always hate younger, prettier women with a passion.
But let’s put the cards on the table and see who is who. Russia’s reticence at this point is self-defeating.
Ok, let’s drop the context, maybe I misunderstood you. If Russia loses over 1 million people in 2021 it would be about 0.7% of the population. If they are mostly elderly it probably doesn’t mean much, they are dying a few years or months earlier than they would normally. It will balance out.
If it is young and natality it should be a wake-up call for somnolent Mr. Putin: start beefing up the economy, create good conditions for the young families in jobs-housing-incomes and it will work. Incentives always work – e.g. Orban in Hungary has been quite successful.
There is the Trump syndrome: a guy who talks big, even has right instincts, but does nothing about things that people actually elected him for. Instead he does what rich, fat guys always do: gives more money to other rich, fat guys. Putin should avoid the same fate – he needs to stop worrying about the ‘economy’ (meaning oligarchs’ assets) and go populist. It is his choice.
Take Jesus: nobody knows what he looked like, but we know that he wasn’t fat. That is the message, once you see guys in belly-over-the-belt stage nothing good is coming.
Correct, but it is very funny that you make this observation about Finns with regards to Russia when you have fallen victim to the same phenomenon about Ukraine.
There’s really nothing.
There’s an inactive bodybuilding group, wall street bets & Spandrell.
Problem with Spandrell is signal-noise ratio.
You have a bunch of autists screaming random copes in most channels, a few smart ppl & then rules like no insulting retards meant to keep membership up.
I fkd up my urbit by opening up 2 instances & have to delete some folder to reset it (the comet).
I’ll do it in a few months since IMO, I’m not missing much.
I didn’t pay a penny,
“If Russia loses over 1 million people in 2021 it would be about 0.7% of the population. If they are mostly elderly it probably doesn’t mean much”
I’m sorry but this sounds a little silly. Doesn’t mean much? I think it means a lot if it is true.
One of the great achievements of the Putin era was that Russia was able to stop the decline of population of the nation. Russia was losing like a “million people a year” in the 1990s. The decline slowed down a lot in the early and mid 2000s and stopped in 2009. From 2009 to 2018 Russian population grew each year.
If the claim of Russian population declining for more than 100,000 in January of 2021 alone is true it would mean that all these achievements that Russia made in the last 20 years or so would be wasted and Russia would return to where it was in the 1990s, especially if the bad trend carries for the whole year and from then on.
I’m still having a hard time believing this is true because the change for the worse was so sudden and so big. But at least the Finnish source claims that the info come directly from Rosstat.
Nov-Dec saw the peak of second wave Corona mortality, so obviously the elevated mortality seen in January will not continue indefinitely.
January is also nine months since the March-May lockdowns, so fertility is now being hit as well. But that is not unique to Russia and obviously very temporary.
Combined, it obviously a bad situation, but obviously an artificial and temporary one. It’s also not very difficult to figure out for oneself.
Hopefully Russia will avoid a third wave next fall thanks to Sputnik V, there’s certainly a lot of time, but I’m not fully confident about that on account of the anti-vaxxer vermin.
Yep, it is funny. But what is this thing about Ukraine and its stories? At this point there are not even any stories coming out of Ukraine – devastation of the society, drop in population, the oligarchic economy cul-de-sac – all of it is too dark, so silence reigns.
Based on today’s trends, in 5-10 years Ukraine will have 30 million people with economy about 1/20 the size of Russia’s, most land owned by foreign investors, women too. How do you make a story about that? Other than constant ‘because Putin‘, ‘because Yanuk‘, or ‘because corona‘ alibism. If you can turn it around, more power to you, but it is more likely that the collapse will accelerate. (Except Lvov, of course, with its call centers and cobblestone streets personally laid down by Habsburg royals. Not enough.)
Western Ukraine should declare independence.
Maybe Hungary and Russia could assist.
You’re mentioned here:
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/avoiding-war-with-russia/
Lol not at all, although I used them for wearing when soldering. Those draeger filters are probably going to save my long term health, as I used to stupidly breath smoke while soldering (which includes often to breath smoke from melted plastic).
–
One of the things which should be known by now in terms of stopping coronavirus spread, was the importance of ventilating indoor spaces. In Japan, they seem to have understood this concept, while in the West it is still not often followed.
If you look in shopping streets in Japan, they just keep doors and windows open in all shops. There have been no real serious lockdown in Japan, not the strongest travel restrictions, the world’s oldest population, and yet they had negative excess deaths over 2020.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoe7nI29e8U
Just tautologically, considering the excess deaths, it’s possible that more than 50% of the population in Russia has already been infected, which is sufficient for the population to develop “herd immunity” up to a reproduction number of the virus above 2 even without accounting for the effect of the vaccines.
There has been some speculation that the Brazilian variant could evade previous immunity, after Manaus was hit with a second wave in January 2021, while the city should have had herd immunity from the first wave in 2020. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00183-5/fulltext But it’s also reported that vaccines will likely result in a better immune response, than previous infections.
Malamudakam slava!
Here, fixed for you.
Now that I am thinking of it, Maly mudé would mean that our Twitter hero might have a testicular atrophy problem…
It might happen when Western Ukrainians finally understand that they are getting nothing positive at all from being amalgamated with the South-eastern Ukraine.
Either independence or a Canadian-type confederation, which would be a better solution.
But to get there, all Ukrainians should finally start working in their national self-interest, instead of being a geopolitical tool.
Test yourself. The task from the math textbook (№64) for the second grade of school (since we are adults, solve it in 1 minute)
https://cs12.pikabu.ru/post_img/2021/02/28/9/1614523234126814148.png
A task for the third grade of the school. Each letter is one of the digits from 0 to 9. Identify them. The combination of the form AB is a two digit number. Solve it in 5 minutes
https://cs5.pikabu.ru/post_img/big/2019/01/14/9/154747738017984533.jpg
Russian posters against the coronavirus (connoisseurs of the art of agitation even translated these posters into English). Unfortunately there are no such posters on vaccination yet
https://b.radikal.ru/b28/2103/f1/61371a73b1e9.png
https://a.radikal.ru/a16/2103/21/05896547c9f8.png
Given the rate of vaccination, it is unlikely. While vaccination is available to most people without any restrictions, people do not want to be vaccinated.
I’m sold on Urbit. I had exited Facebook about a decade ago and stopped posting on Twitter after it became increasingly blatant about it being a neoliberal/US deep state enterprise.
As with most separations the big issue is where to draw the boundaries. There is also the uncomfortable reality that Western Ukraine by itself is landlocked, poor, lacks resources, and has no geo-strategic value. It would be an appendage of Poland.
They would probably get into EU and Nato. In EU they would be like Bulgaria, too poor to do anything but people free to leave and move. Not bad. In Nato they would provide troops, buy junk, and die a lot. Given who we are talking about, I would say, also not bad.
But it won’t happen: no clear boundary, it would be a loss for the West, and there is no process that would allow for it to happen. The poor Galicians are in a no-win situation: they can’t win, they can’t leave, and they can’t lose without a catastrophe. They are stuck…
How do you know that most Ukrainians favor a ‘Canadian” solution to reconfigure their country?
Ukrainian soldiers may number a few hundred around the world, so I don’t think that they’re much of a geopolitical tool. It was Russian aggression that first created a situation where outside alliances were sought. Before the 2014 aggression, Ukrainians had no strong desires to become a part of NATO. Today?…
Was clear that washing hands doesn’t do anything 9 months ago, but gloves requirements remain by inertia. No shortage of idiocy here.
The anti-vaxxers are literal maskcucks. They want us to remain in masks forever while projecting the same fetish onto others.
I didn’t write that most Ukrainians favour a confédération, but that it would be the best solution for them. Canada and Switzerland are the example to follow, but it will take a long time for Ukraine to get to this level of social organization, if they will ever get there at all. I personally think it won’t happen.
Mr Hack, I know that you are a highly intelligent man. I would not insult either your intelligence or your legitimate affection for the land of your ancestors by debatung evident things. We both know what is happening there, and we both know it is not good now and it will not be good in the future for anyone involved. The best solution is the one I wrote above, sadly it will probably not be chosen by those who really control Ukraine.
Well yeah, I didn’t pay since comets are free. Thanks for the tip on not messing with urbit too much if I want to access Landscape.
I imagine a planet is good if you want to set up a blog or put some material there. Something that gets banned on a regular platform or gets denied hosting for example. There are just not enough people getting banned from regular platforms to make it popular. I imagine it may be useful for criminals, but the censorship level in general society is not big enough yet for people to actively seek to use it. Normal people are not really excited about having their own ‘personal computer on the cloud that is theirs forever and does not depend on big corporations’ or whatever. There has to be a negative incentive as well.
The good thing (or different thing) about the spandrell channel is that it’s more like a chat, unlike this blog. It’s more of a real time thing. Which admittedly doesn’t mean much if I can’t check it that often and it’s a pain to check messages from long ago and find out that the conversation has moved on. On the other hand, it’s pretty slow for now. But it’s not conducive to long comments.
This latest twitter ban wave really went “in depth”. Even I with a tiny follower count of about 200 got banned. Funnily enough, right after I retweeted some pretty nasty reddit confession about how disgusting it is to have sex with trannies. No surprise.
Funnily enough, the day after I got banned from discord too. Pure coincidence goy!
If u lift weights & know how to shoot straight, wtf do politics matter to you?
Currently Ukraine’s GDP is about 1/10 that of Russia’s. Until this year, Ukraine’s GDP has grown faster than has Russia’s starting in 2016, and Ukraine was not hit as hard by Covid as “wishful thinkers” had predicted. Ukraine’s GDP is expected to rebound in 2021:
https://www.focus-economics.com/country-indicator/ukraine/gdp
You are being a “Finn” again.
Remember when you insisted Ukraine’s economy would not grow for many years? Right before 5 years of solid growth?
Land reform allowed consolidation by local landowners, not foreign ownership.
Mostly an eastern Ukrainian thing.
Do you also think the Kurils and Sakhalin should join Japan, if given autonomy? They’d be a lot richer? How about Kaliningrad leaving Russia and joining the EU in exchange for massive investment? The reality is that most peoples want to be part of the nation to which they belong.
Reasonable boundaries have already been drawn when the Ukrainian state temporarily de facto ceased to exist. The parts of Ukraine that don’t belong in Ukraine, were able to leave and aren’t any more. There may be tweaks involving a few 10,000s of people but it’s over.
Current Ukrainian regional differences are not much greater than between, say, former Hapsburg and former Russian and Prussian parts of Poland.
Western Ukraine has the human capital of your Slovakia and with investment would eventually achieve its wealth. It was wealthier than Slovakia prior to 1918, after all.
As for resources, Western Ukraine is probably self-sufficient in gas and oil. It does not produce nearly enough to feed the inefficient and massive heavy industries in Ukraine’s East but has enough for its own consumption, or close to it. It might even be able to export a little:
https://gdb.rferl.org/88AEF614-E507-4C78-AD13-81BAEF1391C7_w650_r0_s.jpg
The issue is that most people do not want to split up their country, and Galicia has a solid Ukrainian identity. The Russians in Sakhalin would be a lot richer as an autonomous part of Japan, but I suspect almost none of them would want to leave Russia. Why would Galicians be any different?
They would lack gypsies that Bulgaria has and would be much much closer to European supply lines, so there would be greater investment, factories, etc. In addition to IT. It has fallen far behind but the eventual end game for an independent Galicia in the EU would be convergence to something like Slovakia or Lithuania (which is richer than Slovakia in nominal GDP), not Bulgaria way out in the Balkans.
You are being a “Finn” again.
But again, Galicians don’t want independence from Ukraine so it won’t happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jmIJ0xApyE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFTDxYiw1R0
Egypt’s new capital. Will it be a success?
What is wrong with Cairo or Alexandria, they have historicity.
What is wrong with having heavy industry? Are you all going to get your trucks and planes from China?
I was writing about Waetern Ukraine independence, not about it joining any other country. I have also written that a confederation and decentralization would be a better outcome.
Russia is already a federation and has been for a hundred years now. It might be indeed better for Russia to increase decentralization of distant regions. Some policies should be taken care of on the local level.
Nations are abstract political constructs, real people and their well-being are what is more important to me. When I talk about Russian Nationalism, it means for me Russians having a higher standard of living, better economy and demographics. That’s real nationalism. I wish to Ukrainians to get to this point of realization one day.
Nothing at all wrong with it, indeed it is a good thing. I was just pointing out that Western Ukraine produces gas but doesn’t have much heavy industry, and is therefore self-sufficient with gas.
Well, in that case how do yo feel about Kaliningrad becoming independent and joining EU? If it makes its people a lot richer and with better standard of living would you support that?
No need to act nasty. At this point, you can basically sit down by the river bank, play some guitar, chase the women around a bit, have a swig of vodka, and wait for the corpse of your enemy to float by.
Lifting weights is dumb when you can quickly eat less, do some pushups and situps, supplemented by stretches, to stay in shape for a week until the wife stops saying that you look like you gained weight. Like I have any time to go to the gym anyways…
Politics is like the ultimate video game though. Way cooler than EUIV since it’s more involved and there are so many permutations. You just don’t get to control it that much but it’s more like a stream where you comment on the strategy of a player or see where they went wrong.
You see it’s like… wait, aren’t you like, commenting here on a politics blog, right now?
You mean, besides giving a boost to the economy be generating construction and administrative jobs, is it going to turn Egypt into a developed country with homegrown industry that can compete in foreign markets, make the bureaucracy more efficient, slowly develop the universities into centers of knowledge that can compete on a global level, lead to a reform in the army in order to create an effective fighting force that is capable of defeating ISIS in the Sinai, reform the government to get rid of torture, bribes and mukhabarat goons that hold back the potential of the high achievers, combat religious extremism, cousin marriage, and clan warfare that results from population backwardness?
Hmmm….
….
doubt
Difficult to highlight this retarded garbage ahead of the other retarded garbage, but Ukropia will still take more than 5 years, perhaps even 10 just to go into growth from 2013 you dumb idiot. They have had a severe double digit recession since 2014, achieving those levels of GDP before 2014 will pathetically take several years…….several years after mass depopulation , more failure and deindustrialisation and even more failure. That is obviously what Beckow was referring to you cretin
LOLOLOL.
Because you are a fantasist loser who posts immensely self-discrediting videos like the infamous “typical western Ukrainian Galician culture video” ( which BTW will you do us a favour and repost just to further reinforce there is something seriously wrong with you – must be easy for you seeing as you are some weirdo nutjob who seems to know people’s posts intimately from 5 or 6 years before, ready-to-link LOL) ……you therefore have zero knowledge of the (non) Ukrainian, healthcare, contruction, political, road etc. system.
Because of this , you are making clueless, idiotic statements, instantaneous BS, that is not matching the experience or knowledge of anybody in or connected to Ukraine….where not even the most demented Khokhol is claiming they have performed well during coronavirus you idiot. Hospital system has collapsed, effectively stopped counting how many coronavirus cases they are having ( with of course zero western media pressure) and there is serious unhappiness around the place.
Should I go though the rest of your BS post? – too tiring
BTW – still LMAO at the “turkish holiday” BS….which is almost as funny as you talking of Poland in WW2 with Beckow. Look at the facts, you are some maniac who copies and pastes obsessively from Wikipedia….but still don’t even know basic facts like the 2 week capitulation of Poland in WW2 ( 1 week if you consider the Soviet dance through Poland)…..this is bizarre.
If the rest of Russia is pulling down Kaliningrad’s prospects then it would be normal for Kaliningrad to contemplate independence. I don’t think that this is the case nowadays.
Besides, I think you understand that I clearly believe a confederation would be a better option for Ukraine and even Russia.
In the future the best outcome would be a confederation of Eastern Slav territories, if they want to have the capital to be in Kiev, let it be.
Is there anything wrong with the Swiss and Canadian model of governance?
https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11820154
A story about a “whistleblower” from Ruptly.
One of her first complaints is that Ruptly called the Charlottesville protestors far-right instead of neo-nazis. LOL.
Most of the text is just some “researcher who has specialised in Russian influence and information warfare” explaining how RT/Sputnik is BAD DISINFORMATION. She repeatedly complains about how Ruptly is often the only ones filming protests in Western countries. That’s just unacceptable because if Western media companies doesn’t film it then it shouldn’t be filmed. Pure hybrid warfare.
Okay.
Because Assange is actively ignored by Western media companies.
This really sucked. No whistleblowing at all.
It is impossible to trace washed hands or not (while wearing gloves can be traced). Another thing is that since no one is watching the wearing of gloves anyway, this measure only harms other anti-ovid measures (since it teaches people to ignore the prescriptions)
Some damning pieces on the self styled Twitter’s official Russian sports writer:
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/425119-hockey-twitter-evil-russia/
https://www.rt.com/sport/428294-ovechkin-malamud-death-wish/
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/431933-russia-squad-racism-world-cup/
Pathetic and in line with a good number of his more recent Tweets.
Regarding Malamud’s heroes:
https://thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com/2021/02/21/doctor-politico-reliable-journatard/comment-page-2/#comment-55719
Isn’t a cuck necessarily a male?
Are not the anti-vaxxers approximately one-half female?
https://mazo4f.com/fotos/1615046504587237199g.jpg
Maduro has taken Sputnik V before Putin.
I was brought up in a country and at a time that favored the idea of democracy within a nation state as the ideal sort of state apparatus, especially for countries in the West and in Europe. After leaving college and living a few years into the present, I can see that one static model, a one size fits all, doesn’t always reflect the optimum situation for all countries. We all have our own favorite style of governance that we think would best fit Ukraine’s situation – you favor a “Canadian” variant and I actually favor a Findlandic one, others that regularly read this blog intelligently favor a V-4 type of variant. But the thing is, it should be the people of Ukraine, the ones that live there, that should have the greatest priority in choosing the manner in which they self govern themselves. The #1 problem facing all of Ukrainian society, no matter what regional part you live in is corruption. It’s been the #1 problem from the first inception of its independent statehood all the way till today. If only this problem could really be curtailed, the country would really begin to make great strides in its abilities to prosper. Agree?
Just as an experiment, they should try to fill it with Greeks.
IMO, Switzerland has too many large-scale international organizations and foreign capital located there. They could clear up a lot of real estate for Swiss families by Lake Geneva by getting rid of it.
What’s being experienced in Manaus suggests this P.1 Brazilian variant is an “antigenic escape,” but those can be partial in which case they stay a “variant” like the better understood South African one, or total in which case they’re a strain and you go through the natural + vaccine immunity dance again. And if not now, we should not be surprised if this happens sooner or later as the virus comes under ever stronger selection pressure due to immunity to “classic COVID-19.”
Except maybe for the second Russian vaccine, and the inactivated whole virus ones if any of them turn out to be seriously effective, the vaccines that are anywhere far along now all target the spike protein, while natural immunity is known to also target the nucleocapsid protein. Which is hidden under the virus’ envelope, a bit of membrane stolen as it buds off a host cell, so antibodies and other adaptive immune system responses to it can only happen after a cell gets hijacked. Which results in bits of the virus’ proteins, “epitopes,” being presented on the surface of these cell, which then get killed by the immune system.
So nearly all vaccines can at best provide a better response to the spike protein, but that or natural immunity could result in a better response if there’s enough of a delay before another exposure, because for months after exposure to an antigen the immune system fine tunes its memory B cells, in for example anticipation of getting hit with new mutations some time in the future.
One final quibble, protein plus adjuvant vaccines don’t provide a full spectrum immune system response, there are systems in addition to antibody mediated ones that come into play when immunity arises from cells getting hijacked. In the long term, a number of people are guessing that we’ll end up with another attenuated live virus vaccine, which takes advantage of both of these mechanisms since it’ll have all the wild type viruses’ proteins, minus whatever was done to remove its fangs.
https://twitter.com/MJ_Cruickshank/status/1368167111206518787
The “red line” feels very arbitrary but something to keep in mind. Countries which have had stagnant growth and depend on large food import might need to worry.
“double digit recession since 2014”.. LOL.
Think you for illustrating the effect of primitive propaganda on primitive Sovok minds.
Meanwhile in the real world:
Ukraine per capita GDP in constant 2010 dollars:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?locations=UA
https://i.imgur.com/uoWtmAZ.png
As a Sovok “civil engineer” (the same profession that produced Chernobyl) you don’t know math, so I will explain.
In 2013 Ukraine’s per capita GDP in constant 2010 US dollars was $3,160. In 2019 it was $3,225.
GDP per capita PPP in constant 2017 dollars:
https://i.imgur.com/qfotkGI.png
In 2013 Ukraine’s per capita GDP PPP in constant 2017 US dollars was was $12,552. In 2019 it was $12,810.
Projection. We see above who writes BS. Tell us more about taking decades to achieve 2013 lol.
While we are at it, here are Ukrainian wages again. They are the highest they have ever been, in 2020. They now exceed wages in Belarus, Armenia, and Georgia:
https://i.imgur.com/xAPEovu.png
So there has been clear and significant improvement.
How cute, the stalker pays attention to my posts.
Germany invaded Poland September 1st. Soviets invaded September 17th. Warsaw held out against German forces until September 28th. The final battle between German and Polish forces was the Battle of Kock. Do not get excited by the name, even though you are an LGBT. This battle ended October 5th, with a formal surrender October 6th
So Poland held out for a little more than a month against Germany aided by the USSR.
In contrast, France + Belgium + Netherlands (with British support) fighting only Germany not the USSR lasted about 6 weeks, from May 10th until June 25th.
Germany lost 27,000 troops invading France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Germany lost 17,000 troops in the invasion of Poland.
France + Belgium + Netherlands (not including colonies) had about 60 million people in 1939.
Poland had 34 million in 1939. Less than 30 million if you exclude angry Ukrainians and Germans.
So per population Poland fought better than France + Belgium + Netherlands against the Germans, despite being more poorly equipped, having less time to prepare for the invasion and despite being attacked from the East by the Soviets at the same time.
This is good for agriculture producers.
This makes Russians laughing at Ukrainians refusing the Russian vaccine rather funny. So many Russians refuse to use their own country’s vaccine. So Ukraine refuses the vaccine produced by a state that is not its friend. Which is more ridiculous?
80% of covid patients were found to have Vitamin D deficiencies. I think I saw somewhere that taking supplements could reduce your chance of getting infected by 60%. Also melatonin usage was associated with a 30% reduced chance of testing positive.
Of course anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers will reject supplements anyway. This is a very negative ideology being exported from the United States.
Тhe residents of Russia have a choice – if they want they are vaccinated , and if they do not want they are not vaccinated. While the residents of Ukraine do not have such a choice at the moment (some of them made their way to Russia to get vaccinated https://strana.ua/news/318414-vaktsinatsija-ot-koronavirusa-v-rossii-dlja-ukraintsev-punkty-v-moskve-spisok-dokumentov.html). Ukraine had the opportunity to produce the Sputnik vaccine in Kharkiv, but the Ukrainian authorities decided that the population would live without the vaccine. Probably in Kharkiv it was possible to start producing Astroseneca or Covidence or some other adenovirus vaccine, but the Ukrainian authorities did nothing. Instead, they boasted loudly (in spring and summer) that in “European” Ukraine there will be the most modern vaccines, while in “Asian” Russia there will be no vaccines.
I have little interest in Ukraine, but in the history of vaccination, the authorities of this country have once again shown themselves to be extremely corrupt and incompetent. So I think the answer to your question is obvious
Slow down. The regional difference within Ukraine are very significant, although not unique. What is unique are external sponsors willing to draw blood using these differences. That is what is driving the conflict.
In other words, not really much :). But there are three fundamental, unchangeable facts:
Slovakia manufactures 1 million cars each year, your VW, Porsche, Jaguar, Renault, etc…It is because of very good logistics, close to 200 million market. All car manufacturing and parts are in Western Slovakia. This matters, Ukraine is just a few hundred kms too far and logistics costs are much higher.
Slovakia, Hungary or Czechia have not stupidly picked a pointless fight with Russia. Russia is the largest market for industrial goods in the region. Being cut off from that market is in the long-run devastating. Western companies avoid trouble and having to deal with Russphobic Kiev is too much trouble, so they will stay away.
There is not enough gas in Galicia and the cost is too high. IT is great until it’s not – it is a very competitive market with relatively small employment (tens of thousands) and easy switching costs.
Ukrainians envy their immediate western neighbours and that is at the heart of this dilemma. There isn’t that much to envy, some do well, most don’t and there is a deep dissatisfaction in V4 and the Baltics. Everybody is waiting for the next miracle and it may not come. In any case, Ukraine is 15-20 years behind the curve and that is not fixable.
Ukraine had a golden opportunity to use its location and former industry to be an economic powerhouse trading with both EU and Russia, connecting them in a profitable way. That was undermined by the western-controlled oligarchs and ambitious people dreaming of ‘living in EU‘ (the V4 envy again). They were not willing to be patient and build up something so EU would be eager to make a better deal. The haste – both Orange and Maidan – has destroyed that.
Now the options are not good: Ukraine can’t move forward, EU doesn’t want it and will not subsidize it; they can’t go backward, too much blood and bad will. And staying as they are, slowly recovering to the 2014 level (big fu…ing deal) and being basically the gastarbeiters, janitors and even whores for EU is a miserable prospect. But those are just consequences of bad choices.
These are different categories, svidomism at the state level vs. surly morons at the everyday one.
Also, it’s not like Ukraine doesn’t have many anti-vaxxers itself, it’s no difference from Russia (or France) in that respect.
Not with coronavirus, but possibly increased hand hygiene behaviour (to the limited extent it has been followed) has contributed to preventing the spread of influenza.
In Russia, the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic spread easily through the population until more than half of the total population has been infected (so there is “herd immunity” sufficient to reproduction of the virus over 2 even before a start of the mass vaccination in February).
But, in Russia, there has been a reduction of influenza compared to normal years, so excess deaths in the country can underestimate the number of deaths from coronavirus.
In Japan, as the population followed more carefully the anti-epidemic guidelines, there has been both quite relative lack of spread of coronavirus and of influenza despite lack of lockdowns, and as a result there was negative excess deaths in the country in 2020.
It’s not really about the Russian vaccine. Russians are just anti-vaccine in general. But Ukrainians are actually even more anti-vaccine. But luckily for Ukrainians they don’t have access to any vaccine so they won’t even need to refuse…
https://assets.weforum.org/editor/fZC-OHBvTL9NbqEJmKd8yoSNp_WG118Yk0iim66CGP8.png
Do we know that? Last time I checked months ago, we’re pretty sure breathing in virus laden respiratory droplets is the primary means of transmission by far, but that doesn’t mean it can’t spread by touching your eyes, nose, and maybe mouth with contaminated hands. It would certainly be unwise to assume that’s impossible, and the first public “challenge” tests are only starting just now in the U.K. With an initial goal of figuring out the details of transmission in volunteers who are naive to the virus, no prior natural infection or vaccine.
Chinese city residents often wear dust masks in the streets when there is no pandemic, in order to breath less particulate pollution, that is created by their country’s relying on coal-fuelled power stations.
That’s nothing terrible about wearing dust masks, and the resistance to them outside East Asia seems partly caused by unstated irrational cultural superstitions.
Probably some of these Chinese cities where resident wear dust mask all year, that have lower air pollution levels than certain hardworking cities in Russia. But chemical pollution in Russian cities would be more difficult to avoid. When the air above your city is flooded with benzene, then a dust mask is not going to help you.
As far as I know, hand washing helps against the coronavirus, there are even more unambiguous statistics on this than for masks.
The US Right is caught in a similar bind, though it hasn’t been exploited as much as I thought it would be.
Trump got the production of the US vaccines sped up, only for Pfizer to cover up the news of a successful trial until after the election. Arguably treasonous.
But the hard-right is also convinced that Bill Gates is behind a depopulation agenda, so they won’t have any reason to take the shot as a post-facto endorsement of Trump.
We were discussing a hypothetical independent Western Ukraine (10 million people), or only Galicia (5 million people).
The latter conclusion is iffy when Pfizer made a big point about not accepting a penny from Operation Warp Speed for R&D, just a contract for a 100 million doses contingent on getting a FDA Emergency Use Authorization.
Massive raving TDS and virtue signaling because Pfizer has been plagued by production shortfalls starting in mid-December when they announced out of the blue they were going to miss their early promises by one half. And they eventually accepted OWS help, and that’s credited with moving up the second 100 million dose tranche from them from the third to second quarter this year.
Evidence supports that hand washing reduces spread of influenza and common cold, but there is not evidence that it has reduced the spread of Covid-19, and latter’s main transmission route has likely been airborne.
Obviously, during Covid-19 pandemic, reducing the spread of influenza has been important, as it implies that hospitals were less overloaded.
In Japan, the reduction of the seasonal influenza is likely the cause (in combination with a relatively minimized coronavirus pandemic) of the negative excess deaths for 2020.
–
People should have understood by the summer to reduce this pandemic, as they did in Japan – the importance of indoor ventilation. The seasonality of the virus in Europe was related to the population’s change of behaviour in relation to relative time indoors/outdoors, and the question of ventilation (people opening windows in summer).
In Japan, there is no real lockdown, but the shops keep the windows and doors open. Many shops in Japan have removed the whole front window or front door, and they operated like an outdoor space without a front window. I believe in Japan public buildings also commonly circulate indoor air through HEPA filtration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o39eDRYF4I
Interesting how this graph has almost zero relation to IQ scores.
Doctors working with scientific literature told me that there is clear evidence about the benefits of hand washing in the conditions of the coronavirus. I tend to believe them. Understand yourself in the ocean of scientific articles on this topic https://scholar.google.ru/scholar?hl=ru&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=hand+washing+coronavirus++statistical+data&btnG= is not real (the same with articles about wearing masks, ventilation, etc.)
With respect to the former USSR, there would be a small negative correlation between belief in vaccines and IQ scores. Russia’s average IQ is higher than Ukraine’s but central Asia would tilt the overall correlation negative.
Should Kaliningrad have gone for independence for Russia in the 90s, and sought integration with the EU? And would most Russians there have gone for it? I suspect that they would not have, they would have stuck with Russia even if given the choice to become a lot wealthier. It’s human nature.
Those two may be different from each other. In Canada French is in essence the only language allowed in Quebec*, whereas both are official nationally and many people speak both languages outside Quebec. I don’t think Ukraine should tolerate having Russian-only oblasts in Ukraine. I can see how Crimea deserved it, but thankfully it is gone.
Canada might have been a model for an all-Rus Union, with Little Russia being like Quebec. But the Great Russians decided an another approach, it backfired, and it’s too late now.
*I know, there are nuances. If one has English-speaking parents but only in that case (immigrants from Russia have to send their kids to French-only schools, as do mixed couples where one person is French), one is allowed to go to a bilingual primarily English school in Quebec. There are a couple of English-language national universities on Quebec territory.
I think décentralisation would help to find the best language and cultural balance. Unifirmizing everything is a lengthy, painful and costly process. It is pulling whole Ukraine down. And what will they gain if it becomes unilingual Ukrainian anyway? What’s the upside?
First rotating space hotel by the end of the decade?
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/voyager-station-space-hotel-scn/index.html
No. Just a startup releasing ugly CGI pictures.
Gateway Foundation is a joke. They remind of those people who thought that they could create an expedition to Mars by selling the TV rights.
The sentence sounds like gullible nonsense. How do you know what is the “average IQ” of a country, using what samples? And by IQ, it would be better to write “test score results from IQ tests” (specifying what the test applied was), as a significant proportion people are too stupid not reify things which you use numbers to describe.
It’s roughly inferred from standardized test scores and from various studies.
I couldn’t see evidence on the link you posted. I found that talking to experts can often make you feel more confused than you were before, especially when they have professional self-confidence telling you sometimes subjective views (in causal discussion, often mixing objective and subjective views without clarifying between what is their opinion and what is a professional consensus view).
I’ve been told by a scientist last year that said I shouldn’t wear a mask to prevent coronavirus, as the transmission was not airborne.
Funnily I know someone who works as a scientist in a important pharmaceutical company, who told me that we should try to avoid being vaccinated for coronavirus, because there is not long-term safety information available for the vaccines. (“Anti-vaxxers”, are also coming from the employees of multinational pharmaceutical companies that develop vaccines).
Really? I have no intention of getting any COVID-19 vaccination at all. However, I bought lots of Zinc, Vitamin D, Vitamin C, melatonin, and a bunch of other stuff early on last year. I had the “Rona twice last year and took lots of these supplements to get through it both time.
You will find many of “anti-vaxers” actually use quite a few supplements.
“In the long term, a number of people are guessing that we’ll end up with another attenuated live virus vaccine, which takes advantage of both of these mechanisms since it’ll have all the wild type viruses’ proteins, minus whatever was done to remove its fangs.”
I happen to know a molecular biologist on the faculty of an elite university. A year ago he told me it bothered him that “everyone is working on the spike vaccine.” Your comment brought to mind what he said, way back then.
From the beginning, I have been writing that medical science should have been ASKED…”How much money do you ideally need? Ideally!” Instead of asking science what was ideally needed, politicians TOLD them what they will get. This is called “Getting hold of the wrong end of the stick,” if anyone uses that expression anymore.
“People should have understood by the summer to reduce this pandemic, as they did in Japan – the importance of indoor ventilation”
My oral-surgeon dentist had an air exchanger installed a long time ago. $1,000. (plus, the air you paid to heat or cool gets exchanged-out, so you need to start all over again with new outside air. This is a very small expense here in Southern California, but I can see where it would cost more elsewhere.)
You mentioned Japan, and by coincidence(?) this dentist gal is Asian-American.
Asteroid Apophis flew by last night.
https://www.space.com/asteroid-apophis-2021-flyby-webcasts
Next approach will be in 2029 at 31,000 km. I hope it doesn’t knock out any satellites.
In 2068, odds of impact are at 1 in 380,000. Those will probably increase as we refine the exact orbital trajectory.
Not an existential risk, but still rather unpleasant if it lands on a city.
Smaller asteroids will immunize us to the bigger ones. At least, that’s what probability would lead one to predict, if it wasn’t for dysgenics.
Here the situation is the same as with masks. There are a huge number of articles on this topic with different results. (i.e. hand washing / masks do not help, help but weakly, help strongly, etc.) so that links to such articles can prove anything you want. For ordinary people, these articles are completely useless.
Therefore, we have to solve the problem differently. In the Russian Internet there are notes of Eugene https://vk.com/eugenes_notes where information is collected from English-language scientific articles-conclusion wash your hands. Alexey Vodvozov (a doctor who knows English-language scientific articles well) also said that hand washing is even more important than masks. Simple common sense-drops of saliva when coughing will easily fall on objects from where the hands will carry them to the mouth and nose. Ie, wash your hands
I have mentioned before there is wisdom in launching Calibrs at West Ukraine arms warehouses, and i will mention it again.
https://twitter.com/leonidragozin/status/1368118720367796226
This made me think of the coronavirus death rate vs economy downfall caused by the lockdowns. Still not sure it was worth it. Swedes and Belarusian have probably done the right thing. Although hindsight is 20/20.
The US policy objective is to prevent a deeper economic integration between EU and RusFed and weakening both. Ukraine is just a geopolitical tool and its supposedly Nazi Banderite nationalists are just one of the components of this tool.
Some amusing conspiracy theories from Dmitry Ponomaryov (RedDVL) Telegram :
(A slightly edited Google Translate version from Russian)
“supposedly’? who exactly are these Nazi Banderites leading Ukraine into the clutches of Nazi Germany (Nazism is after all a German political ideology)? Am I to believe that Zelensky, Kolomijsky and other Jewish oligarghs are in on this Nazi plot too? How about the richest oligarch in Ukraine, Akhmetov, is he a “Nazi” too? Is the US supposedly a Nazi power?
What I’m trying to get at is that using the term “Nazi” when discussing modern Ukrainian politic is useless and ridiculous. I’m actually surpirse that you’re using it, somebody who usually has a deeper more realistic view of things? This meme “Ukrainian Nazis” a used currently is an outdated meme that needs to be reshufled into the dustbin of history.
https://twitter.com/thommx/status/1358291643670138880
LOL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion
An example above. We have discussed these folks already Mr Hack. But I am sure you have understood that the most important part of my comment is that Ukraine is just a tool in a tripartite geopolitical game between Anglo-Saxon/Atlanticist faction of the globalized Western elite , their more Eurocentric EU counterparts and the RusFed cleptocratic post-Soviet elite clans (who themselves do not have a unified position in regard of the whole Ukrainian situation). This is of course normal for all borderland/march territories that are always contested and depopulated due to conflicts between their more powerful neighbors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Brezhnev
An outstanding and lasting contribution of Ukrainian brains to the Moskal development…
The “independent and unbiased” façade of Bellingcat falls down really quickly if you just look through Eliot Higgins tweets. Wouldn’t it be more effective if he didn’t constantly tweet pro-NATO opinions?
https://twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/1368569920775151617
But to try and subsume the true identity of political Ukraine today under the banner of a far right group that was most politically active seven years ago is at best disingenuous, at worst false propaganda. How many seats do these sorts of far right groups control within the Ukrainian parliament today? Even Mr. Tiahnybok seems to have lost any political currency as a rightist these days and seems so milktoast compared to these far right kooks. Leave these antiquated terms for the likes of Gerard. I get more real meaningful information out of you, like what you uncovered about a month ago exposing who and what the current crop of rightists in Ukraine really represent.
But your cited entry clearly indicates:
Don’t try and pawn him off as another garden variety Ukrainian, please. 🙂
Any thoughts on Orban leaving the EPP?
How large do you think is the anti-vaccine segment of the russian population?
It is the way that Russian nationalists or weirdos like Saker use it, but OTOH there is a strong Nazi element to significant political entities like the Azov group.
It’s kind of funny how Russians try to pawn off Brezhnev as a Ukrainian. He is about as Ukrainian as Yanukovich. It had been a problem for Ukraine, that much of it was the deracinated Sovokland that produced creatures like Brezhnev, Yanukovich, etc.
https://twitter.com/bademjanbitch/status/1368598437843726342
Everyone can be seen as a tool of someone else. Was Stalin, who bled Russia dry due to his incompetence, a tool of the Atlanticists? Perhaps Hitler also? Their joint efforts resulted in America achieving global supremacy. Was George Washington a tool of the French, who supported his anti-French cause much more extensively than the West supported Maidan? Were Polish freedom-fighters tools of Napoleon? Vietnamese anti-imperialists tools of the Soviets? Vietnamese anti-Communists tools of the Americans?
Various groups have interests, they coincide, and they help one another as they see fit. References to them all being tools is rather reductionistic.
Brezhnev was probably the least bad of all the Soviet rulers (not a high bar, but nonetheless).
Half of those headlines denigrating Sputnik-V are legitimate based on their dates, for Russia scored an incredible own goal by boasting it was the world’s first “registered,” vaccine. That’s not a word the rest of the West uses, and it’s ludicrous to have done all this a month before its Phase III started. That is, they had nothing besides some surrogate endpoints from their Phase I and II trials, with no real idea on safety, especially if Gamaleya’s vaccine platform had never gotten to a Phase III trial before (if so, they didn’t register it on ClinicalTrials.gov, unlike many COVID-19 vaccine trials).
I’ll let people who know more about Russia comment on whether we should trust this solid in theory vaccine and its clever in design and looks legit to me Phase III trial, but is it axiomatically illegitimate to question if regulation by “authoritarian” regimes can be trusted? Look to see if the US FDA approves Janssen’s vaccine being manufactured by Emergent BioSolutions (EBS), a thoroughly untrustworthy company which has also scored contracts to make AZ/Oxford’s and Novavax’s vaccines in the US. I’ve been wondering why US productions hasn’t played a role in the EU vaccine debacle that got overly focused on AZ/Oxford, and EBS being the US manufacturing subcontractor could explain why.
And what is wrong here? The vaccine was registered in August
Phase I and II trials are just figuring out safety. Phase III is required to determine the effectiveness
In Russia, doctors started using the vaccine before Phase III quite correctly. In America, the authorities could have done the same thing-allow the use of the vaccine (laws allow it in an emergency) and save tens of thousands of Americans. But this was not done, for the sake of Trump’s defeat in the election.
Registered is kind of arbitrary. The Russian vaccine wasn’t as far into the testing as some other ones so it wasn’t really “the first” vaccine (but still among the first).
I wholeheartedly agree. Attaching her to a piece of furniture (like a bed) with handcuffs seems like a good way to prevent her escape, so I’d do that, too.
In my office, the built-in HVAC system is not powerful. And the building is quite sealed for insulation; most windows cannot be opened. On basis of coronavirus, we made them add HEPA air purifiers to the rooms last May (but everyone should have those in the office already, to remove the particulate emissions from people using printers and photocopiers).
This solution unfortunately doesn’t improve the oxygen to carbon dioxide ratio in the rooms (as an air-exchanger would), but it also don’t add to buildings’ heating cost, as there is no exchange with the outside.
These ready-built air purifier machines look like a photocopier and aside from HEPA, they also have boxes of carbon and purafil in the bottom of the machine to remove gases. They cost around $1500 each for a medium size room of a few employees, so it’s not very expensive for businesses to protect its employees from airborne infections (the expensive is less than a thousand dollars for each employee).
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As a hobby project last year I made a chemisorbant scrubber for $200 of materials (which removes gases that can be released from melting plastics during soldering iron use when you are disassembling electronics – not relevant to coronavirus, but good for your health). There was bit of a problem that the high pressure fan is annoyingly loud, and to quieten its sound I had connect to a variable toroidal transformer which was originally $150. And I don’t have any scientific knowledge or equipment to test if it works, although logically it should be working well to.
Navalny’s wife? German citizen?
There is a nuance here – registration in Russia by law is carried out after the I-II phase, for the full-scale III phase. It was so long ago before 2020 (and did not cause hysteria in the West).
But! In August, not only phase III was allowed, but the use of the vaccine for the vaccination of civilian was also allowed. Russia was indeed the first to do this in the world, and the Russian authorities can record this action as a positive achievement. The fact that the US authorities did not act in this way (although they could by law) is a huge minus for American politicians
But the quantity of the virus that is transmitted by touch is not necessarily sufficient to create new infections in many cases
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30561-2/fulltext
And there is also speculated that there could possible inactivation by the living skin, so the glove regime might have been even less logical.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15459624.2020.1845343#
In the case of airborne transmission, the amount of the virus is also insufficient in many cases, etc. So it’s better to wash your hands, just like it’s better to wear masks
It’s not just Sweden and Belarus, but also the Russian Federation. In the second wave in Russia, there has been almost as much of a laissez faire approach as in Sweden. The result has been more than 50% of the population have likely been infected, and there is therefore herd immunity now in Russia, before mass vaccination had begun in February. But there will also be estimated 500000 excess deaths from coronavirus.
I would say the laissez faire approach would have been sensible only if it was in combination with people wearing an adequate PPE at all times, following anti-epidemic guidelines, and the ventilation of indoor spaces during the winter – as in Japan. But certainly in Russia, Sweden and Belarus, this was not how the pandemic was managed, and it would have been better a quarantine like in China.
Japan has had a laissez faire approach to lockdowns from the government, in combination with people following anti-epidemic guidelines, and ventilation of indoor spaces during the winter. Japan don’t have herd immunity now, but will likely vaccinate the population over this summer, and attain a similar kind of herd immunity as in Sweden, Russia, Belarus, without the similar level of excess deaths.
There is already a third wave in Hungary and Slovakia. Also I believe Czechia, too. So it’s pretty optimistic to expect that only next fall…
In St. Petersburg, since October, almost everyone wore masks, but this did not stop the coronavirus. At the same time, wearing masks was not profanation – it was the first year when the flu and measles were completely suppressed. So don’t overestimate the masks
In Russia, this is technically impossible in most cases
Andropov was the best (because he didn’t rule for long).
A bit of postmodern wisdom which is slowly being absorbed by the
societies around the world: Every new discovery in science and
every new invention in technology brings us closer to self-annihilation
(thus helping to solve the Fermi paradox). Hence scientists, engineers,
and tech people no longer get as much respect as they expected to
when they were students, killing their social life in order to turn in
their homework sets on time. So called “expert knowledge” is now
viewed with suspicion, as the Covid-19 fiasco has shown. China, India,
and Russia are resisting this insight because they are still playing catchup
with the West. Obviously, the military-industrial complexes around the
world are resisting this insight as well. What else would you expect
them to do? But the trend is inevitable and unstoppable – in the West,
unless you’re a genius, leave science and technology to losers
(e.g., people who have fewer choices in life, like immigrants)
https://www.youtube.com/c/RenaissancePeriodization/playlists
see the hyper & strength simple series.
I’m not sure these are appropriate comparisons, since they adopted the idiot’s limbo of getting inundated by thew wave and locking down, before opening up and the wave resuming (which seems to be consistently the worst of all possible worlds).
What’s wrong is literally no one else in the West that I’ve come across has this concept of “registering” a vaccine before any real safety studies have been done. While all phases of a drug or biologic’s trials are of course concerned with safety, Phase I is all about dosing, and for vaccines enrolls tens of people. Phase II can be a lot of things, but it too has a primary concern with dosing, and enrolls hundreds of people. Phase III is primarily about real world efficacy, because without knowing that you can’t make risk/benefit tradeoffs, especially if you can’t demonstrate efficacy.
The reason for the early focus on dosing is that Phase III trails are very expensive because they enroll thousands of people, 22,714 people for Sputnik V and are “high touch” (although cheaper now thanks to smartphones). With a 3:1 ratio of vaccine to placebo subjects, the study appears to be FDA strength in efficacy and safety, the latter ultimately being a numbers game. I know Moderna’s Phase I and II numbers off the top of my head, so their 45 subjects in Phase I would be ill suited to finding a 1 in 100 side effect. With 600 for Phase II, iffy for 1 in 1,000.
Gamaleya’s Phase III where 17,032 people got the vaccine? Now we’re talking, but even then, you won’t likely find 1 in 100,000 side effects, let alone the 1 in a million which is where as a general principle you start to expect any drug or biologic to main or kill people, that’s just how this works out in practice. Also note vaccines are given to ostensibly healthy people, and COVID-19 is not super lethal, so safety is really important, much more than for a treatment for someone who already has a serious case of the disease where you’re willing to take much greater risks, like per the US NIH prescribing a steroid for anyone who needs supplemental oxygen or worse.
For a real world example of how these safety numbers played out, neither of Pfizer/BioNTech’s or Moderna’s clinical testing discovered their higher rate of anaphylaxis that you’d generically expect, so monitoring in Phase IV, the “post-marketing” phase that lasts as long as a drug or biologic is on the market is critical. It allows people to better weigh risks, be extra prepared for severe but treatable side effects like anaphylaxis, and if necessary withdraw it from the market if it turns out to be too dangerous, like Vioxx for was general use.
If you’ve got 50% of your population covered by natural immunity, you’re going see it, but it’s far from “herd immunity” for such a transmissible disease, probably in the group that’s below measles which has an insane R0 of 12. Here herd immunity is defined as a level of general population immunity from whichever means that protects those who can’t get immunized. Perhaps they have bad immune systems, or their adaptive immune system rolls snake eyes when trying to mount a response on the pathogen in question, that system is a very random, crazy mostly in a good way thing.
I sure hope you do better than 500,000 deaths, that might proportionately exceed the US toll. It’s also possible we’ll all have to go through another cycle or three of this if variants develop that completely escape current vaccines and natural immunity. We’ll be better prepared, be able to field reformulated vaccines perhaps as quickly as we do for the flu, but the first reformulation will almost certainly require serious safety testing, and a lot of the most vulnerable will have already died, but ugh….
Good points. Claiming Antonov is quite ridiculous. Sikorsky was a Russian nationalist but at least a native of Kiev and of Little Russian background. I have late 19th and early 20th century Galician relatives who were the same.
Chernenko was half-Ukrainian. IIRC his father was the Siberian-born son of Ukrainian settlers.
FFS Mr Hack aka, close friend of Jabba the Hut ( alias Peter Ostroushko Nazi diaspora scum, but talented musician with war criminal father)
How dumb are you? Ukraine is an evil,failed Nazi state. It doesn’t contradict the fact that its more Jewish than Israel.
A fake “Ukrainian” identity is being imposed by even faker Bandera-scum western “Ukrainian” diaspora (using the cover of Soros filth and lemming-like, mostly inept, Galician apparatus trash) ….. but the problem is there is nothing real or coherant for them to trace and claim as “Ukrainian”, because absolutely everything, every word, place, fabric, food, music, poem, fairytale, dance.. everything, can only be traced and described as what it is – as part of Russian culture and Russian world.
Try and go away from that and the only figure of ukrop cultural and intellectual achievement is the “scientist” who put the “masochism” in sado-masochism that is named after him ( LOL – ironic and no surprise because of the evil sadistic acts done by UPA/OUN human garbage)
So in this vacuum of braincells and culture we have the union of some powerful pogrom-descended losers who are Jews, in US and Canada, in evil alliance with Banderetard Nazi-fugitives, with many of them heavily embedded in US security apparatus/ deep state.
Because of the abscense of modern-day brain and of sane, coherant historical intellectualism from Galicia there is just a blackhole of non-existant people from this area to make as modern-day “elite” of Ukraine….. and this is where anti-russian pogrom-descended Jews help out in assisting their own. Its a perfect situation for them – there is a willing prostitute-state of the US, giving away all authority… and from these cretinous, evil, heavily self-destructive policies enacted by Khokhols, these Jews get to enact both anti-russianism and get historical revenge on “Ukrainian” Cossacks….. of whom they blame for many murders of Jews over several centuries.
This state is pure Nazism – in laws, to arrests and violence and the semi-paganistic imagery deliberately bypassing a millenium ( because no thing as “Ukraine”) and torture and state ideology….. all enabled by this true devils pact
It’s a very low bar, but Ukraine now has the highest wages in its history and prior to Covid the highest per capita GDP since 2008. Ukrainians can also travel and work freely in Europe. Many of those jobs are normal ones. My cousin, who works in Ukraineas a skilled electrician (he graduated from a medical institute but running a small construction company pays better), did the same at a very high wage in western Europe on some construction projects. A friend in Poland even came across some Ukrainian police officers.
But even a menial well-paying job in Europe is far better than a menial, poor paying job in Ukraine under Yanukovich. Most of the country is better off now than it was under Yanukovich. The parts that are worse off (in the East, mostly) are parts that didn’t support Maidan in the first place.
Most Ukrainians don’t want to go back to pre-2013. If they did, the Opposition Party would be more popular than it is.
Goals of Maidan, from a poll in February 2014, according to its participants (people from central and western Ukraine) were:
http://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=231&page=1&y=2014&m=2
1) Achieved
2) Partially achieved. Ukraine has had normal elections, the ruling party even lost. Communists are banned, but in Europe Nazis are banned. Etc. etc. But corruption remains at high non-European levels.
3) Subjective. Yanukovich was an embarrassment. Ukraine has a better army. Kievans don’t have to put up with tracksuit wearing thugs from Donetsk shaking down their businesses at least.
4) Achieved, certainly for Maidan supporters.
5) Achieved. Free travel and work in Europe. European factories in the western parts of the country. More trade with Europe, and less than with Russia, than before.
Note than on the poll, people who didn’t support Maidan (from the south and east) had a very different opinion of what Maidan’s goals were than did those who participated and supported it. For them, Maidan was mostly about being a Western part and about nationalism.
https://twitter.com/anders_aslund/status/1367997395406123015
Yes but they’ve almost always been like that, with small honeymoon period such as when Zelensky just came to power. If Ukrainians really thought they were better off under Yanukovich they would be voting for and supporting the Opposition Party. They aren’t.
Here is 2018, for example:
https://www.capital.ua/ru/news/120817-78-ukraintsev-schitayut-chto-strana-dvizhetsya-v-nepravilnom-napravlenii
78% украинцев считают, что страна движется в неправильном направлении
The support for OP rose to around 28% a couple of months ago. This might be the reason why Zelensky censored the TV channels and osed internet access to hundreds of Russian sites. The other reason might be preparation for resuming war.
LOL- your instantaneous BS meets your plagiarising of premedidated western media disinfo BS.
Russia has had 7.5 million vaccinations you fantasist imbecile, Ukraine has had……. near-zero.
Even by the demented scum “standards” of yourself, this is an embarrassingly moronic piece of false argumentation you are trying to use to occupy your worthless POS life.
This is as dumb as a hypothetical dispute between Swiss ( “the west”) and Austria (Russia) over who has the higher quality of life….. in which Eritrea ( Ukraine, although don’t need to be hypothetical here, ukrop is white Eritrea in many things) , having a dispute with Austria on something like immigtation…. decides to interrupt in this dispute by saying nonsensicaly that Austria is “decrepit”
In reality 2.5 million people (5M doses) have been fully vaccinated in Russia you idiot. It could very probably be that medical workers teachers and military are not included in these numbers, so could easily be 1-3 million more vaccinated already, in addition to the 7.5M doses officially done.
These are excellent numbers, and perfectly aligned or even above many EU states with either the pure number or rate of vaccine use.
Different to all all of them, we introduced mass vaccination in period of falling infection rates AND significantly minimal social and business restrictions than all of them.
Removal of social and business restrictions in most of west has been made to officially depend on urgent, high rate of take up of vaccinations you idiot – a direct motivation to their citizens. In Russia we have required near zero of that ( I’m not sure if free Moscow metro travel card for pensioners gets unblocked after vaccination or only unilateral decision by Mayor to unblock for all of them).
Also the reality is that thanks to beautiful Soviet heritage that left very successful vaccine system and sophisticated culture on these things and, of course, revival after Putin leadership…. we have much incomparably higher vaccination rates and lower disease rates on Measles, Polio, TV etc than all or near-all the the rest of the entire former post-soviet space. Nowhere is is this more perfectly shown than in backwards, epidemic-centre, non-vaccination, non-good hospital sh*thole, Galicia.
We also had 80 million flu vaccinations in the last year – making your entire recycled premise, retarded by a ridiculous level.
If there isn’t another wave, Russia will be probably somewhere like 500000 excess deaths by the end of the pandemic (while in Japan they had negative excess deaths up to the end of 2020).
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1362006269545095174
The question is what is the difference in the pandemic Russia, in comparison to Japan, as Japan has had no serious lockdown?
There is difference populations’ following to anti-epidemic guidelines, but I have noticed from watching a lot videos from the Japan the situation with indoor ventilation is also very different.
This winter, Japan has everywhere windows open, and front of shops’ windows have been removed. Japan has warm winters, where it was above 0°C in January, and someone will say you cannot do this in Russia because of cold air – but that is just nonsense. With the heating on, the temperature can be -20°C outside you can open the window, and indoor temperature can be above 5°C, which is tolerable if you wear adequate clothes.
Shops can have operated for a few hours a day as an interior cold space, with the windows removed – just like going to an outdoor market. While offices and schools could have afforded to install HEPA filtration with a high number of air changes per hour, so that the rate of infection could have been reduced even while windows would not have to be open.
Russia is supposed to have like 400k excess deaths as of the end of January 2021. I think the person in the tweet extrapolates December 2020 death rates.
There could be genetic differences as for why Japan and South Korea has so few deaths. Latin America for example has more deaths than they reasonably should have considering the median age in most countries is just over 30.
It peaked at 24% and is down to 18%:
http://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=1016&page=1
Russia’s popularity has declined first:
http://www.kiis.com.ua/materials/pr/20210203_ukr-rus/1ukr.jpg
A lot of Ukrainians felt about these pro-Russian channels, like a lot of rightwing Americans feel about CNN (or leftists about Foxnews). Zelensky has been losing support to Poroshenko, whose ratings have improved. Banning the Russian stations, something even Poroshenko failed to do, is likely a populist move designed to stop some of Poroshenko’s steam.
Ukraine still with far fewer Covid deaths per capita than Russia though (as of February 16):
https://i.imgur.com/nx18B38.jpg
Ukraine’s rate about 1/3 that of Russia.
Does it hurt, gerard?
It is not difficult technically, and a government can easily subsidize the cost (it would cost less to cover all office workers, than building a few football stadiums).
https://i.imgur.com/NORnjFG.jpg
Such machines simply recycle air after HEPA filtration, into the same room. There is no addition to heating cost.
This example has 440 m³ of clean air per hour. For an 44 m³ room, the machine can produce 10 changes of air per hour.
I know these machines as we installed them in my employer’s offices last year – it is smaller than a photocopy machine, and is sufficient to filter the air in a room containing 2-3 employees.
So if 2 employees are 1 hour in the office with machine, they will have equivalent of exposure to airborne transmission that would be experienced of 6 minutes of contact without the machine on.
If employees also wear a dust mask, then they will have a low risk of being infected by airborne viruses if they work together for 3 hours.
Calculate what the airflow requirement is, have a high enough pressure fan, and attach with ducting reducer to the top of a large HEPA drum filter that has a sufficiently high airflow rating.
https://i.imgur.com/B2VOYdg.jpg
The input of the fan can be attached to the top of the HEPA drum with a reducer plate.
https://i.imgur.com/9nDDAcu.png
It will be noisy though.
The kind of medical mask that can increase the contact time required before likely infection between people. People were sharing indoor spaces in the offices and schools, where they were breathing the same air for amounts of time where infection was going to be very likely with or without that kind of mask.
I think it was close to 30% “pro-Russian” parties when also counting Shariy’s party.
Ukraine doesn’t even know what the population of the country is so it’s doubtful that the bureaucracy is capable of properly counting annual deaths. Considering they just have a rough estimation of the population the same is probably true for the number of annual deaths.
Deaths and births are not hard to count. Corpses aren’t being secretly buried, women aren’t giving birth off the grid.
Population is harder to count, given that some number may be travelling abroad.
True. But the Ukrainian numbers does feel suspicious considering all surrounding countries have higher death rate.
I haven’t any evidence of a genetic difference in the susceptibility to the virus, while we have seen very different cultural responses to the pandemic between East Asia and Europe. For example, there is a tendency to believe in the existence of airborne transmission in East Asia, while in Europe there has been a cultural resistance to the concept of airborne transmission.
The main feature of the pandemic in Europe has been its seasonality, in response to the seasonable changes in the climate, where the virus transmits in the winter, but fades in the summer.
This is because of the change of indoor/outdoor behaviour of European populations – either/and because of lower indoor ventilation during the winter (people close the window), and the greater time Europeans are indoors during the winter, compared to the summer.
On the other hand, in Japan, the pandemic has not much more severe during the winter, than it was during the summer in Europe.
So I’ve been watching a lot videos in Japan, and noticed that they remove the windows on the front of shops (converting them almost into outdoor spaces, in terms of the ventilation). Similarly, in the schools, all windows are open.
An early indication of the airborne indoor transmission of the virus, was the case study of the bus in January Wuhan: https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article-pdf/7/10/ofaa430/34006085/ofaa430.pdf
So a question might be asked how the 8 million daily passengers in Tokyo metro train rides, or over 17 million daily passengers in JR East, are not causing massive spread of the virus across Japan?
But trains in Japan are not like buses in Wuhan, and they have quite a high rates of air changes per hour.
Shinkensen has 8,6 air changes per hour. (While in the regulation for AIIR rooms in hospitals in the USA is 6 air changes per hour – so Japanese trains might transmit less airborne disease than AIIR rooms in US hospitals)
At 0:40 in the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHkwEr-mOn4
Japanese buildings also seem to have more modernized HVAC systems because of the need for air conditioning, and they write about the “24‐hour ventilation system” in houses as if this is was a normality.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2475-8876.12183
Perhaps it could be possible that the average ventilation in Japanese buildings in the winter, is not less than European buildings during the summer.
https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1367033280151781379
LOL
https://tass.com/economy/1263597
Him and Psaki were my favorite entertainers. I am so glad Psaki came back, I am expecting many funny moments.
The number of childbirths has dropped significantly in Europe in 2020. Coronavirus pandemics caused a baby bust. Women have massively postponed pregnancy.
Given the purported impact of the coronavirus infection on the male testicular function, I am not sure whether we will be back to “normal” any time soon. Especially that this “normal” is itself rather low.
How did you come up with this conclusion? Give the Ukrainian people more credit. Poll after poll shows results showing that Ukrainians feel that corruption is the greatest problem facing their country. Even you recently agreed with me that this is so. I can’t think of a better poster boy representing all things wrong in Ukraine, especially corruption. From beating up a woman during a robbery to gold encrusted toilets in his palace, return to what?
https://www.toonpool.com/user/15371/files/yanukovych_2185815.jpg
Transparency International names Yanukovych world’s most corrupt
https://www.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/transparency-international-names-yanukovych-worlds-most-corrupt-407875.html?cn-reloaded=1
The laws allow this to be done in an emergency. When it was clear that the vaccine had no serious side effects and produced antibodies, it had to be used in parallel with the third phase. In Russia and in China, they did so and were right. In America, even after the third phase, the results were not published for two months in order to use the vaccine after the election. In my opinion it was a crime against the population of the America
When a vaccine fights such a deadly disease as Covid-19, the side effects of the type 1/100000 do not matter, since the benefits of the vaccine will certainly be more than the harm
That’s exactly what I expected to see. I was vastly amazed last year when certain UR commenters were confidently predicting a baby boom.
Given the continuing atmosphere of uncertainty, the continuing ‘rona waves and the fact that nobody knows how effective vaccination will actually be (mostly because nobody knows exactly how many people will take the vaccine) I’d expect the baby bust to last another year at least.
And how much does such a device cost? I think your proposal is akin to a proposal to create universal central heating in Texas.
In the real world in St. Petersburg, ultraviolet air recirculators were installed everywhere, but this did not stop the epidemic. Air purifiers with filters would be even less effective, and the widespread installation of systems that pumped street air through the premises (heating it) is clearly a utopian proposal
Up to January 2021, we know that virus has not spread through the Japanese population. So there is something very successful happening in Japan, that was a failure in Europe despite more lockdowns in the latter.
For ventilation, Japan introduced in April 2020, up to 10 million yen subsidy ($92000) to businesses to install ventilation systems.
I think we can see this impact on the stock price of Japanese HVAC manufacturers, as there was a mass installation of ventilation last year in Japan:
https://i.imgur.com/mqqlxnP.jpg
Daikin produces air filtration and ventilation systems – and from what I read the stock climb is likely response to the increased installation during the coronavirus pandemic.
Components to build a primitive air purifier that has 5 air changes per hour through a HEPA would not be expensive
But it is too late now to stop the coronavirus spread, and there is now significant immunity in the population. If you could reverse to a year ago, then it should have been focused on, as they did in Japan.
–
In Europe, in Spain, they have followed this topic for schools, but it seems to be in an irrational way.
For example, this report showed Spanish schools are installing air purifiers that are suitable for a small room, into large classrooms. That machine has 250m³/h, so 1 of these machines might only achieve 2 air changes per hour for a room of the size shown in the video. (But if they had added 3-4 of them to the classroom, then the students studying in the school really would be reducing a risk of airborne transmission)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqjpDOqSyAs
It looks like a third wave can be entering now in the Visegrad countries. https://i.imgur.com/u05T84H.jpg
At the same time, the virus spread in the southern states of the United States, Mexico, etc. where it is very hot and all rooms are ventilated. That is, your explanation (airing the premises – a magic weapon against the coronovirus) is an incorrect hyptoesis
I agree that corruption is a serious problem in both Russia and Ukraine. The Hunter Biden/Burisma affair that happened after the Maidan proves it beyond doubt. Did Transparency International write anything about it?
Transparency International never names (pro) Western politicians. Just like Amnesty International never worries about those dissidents that the West has put in jail. These organizations are inherently biased.
https://twitter.com/BurgerKingUK/status/1368849338596745223
Maybe the Japanese just all wear masks since they feel like doing it is being a good member of society, and they don’t shake hands anyways and keep distance, so it hasn’t been that bad. But it does seem the virus doesn’t spread as well in hotter months anyways. The big Japanese Corona-chan casualties have been a famous perfumer I believe, Abe-san’s political career, and the Olympics.
Amnesty does criticize Western governments. They’re just pro-West biased. Transparency International on the other hand is just a straight up Western government funded propaganda organisation.
The globalists are really going all out to destroy the UK. They’re really upping the ante on “Celtic” independence, and now labelling the royal family as anti-black “racists”. That will destroy any last remaining white middle class support for the RF left I suspect.
The end game is the balkanisation of the former UK and transformation of it into Airstrip One I believe. The RF are past their use by date, they are now more of a hindrance than a benefit to the globalist NWO and need to be got rid of. All this has undertones of 1917-1918 Russia I think.
I could find another 100 articles printed in different outlets highlighting Yanukovych’s crooked career. Would that make you realize that nobody in Ukraine is lamenting his style of governance?
What about Burisma?
Burisma was corruption involving Biden Inc., nothing to do with Yanukovych as far as I know, you’ve probably uncovered a connection to Yanukovych too. 🙂
No, I was just wondering how does it fit with the Maidan ideals. IMHO replacing one corrupt president with another corrupt president was not worth having a revolution and a civil war. Do you think otherwise Mr Hack?
https://youtu.be/jXz3VHIRruY?t=92
https://youtu.be/y4IBnvJza-k
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSlSVSAi5_ig0GQb4vowWmLQXTNCYyLJdb-cQ&usqp.jpg
https://i.redd.it/9cnzd5b2r8b21.jpg
ሰለሞናዊው ሥርወ መንግሥት
Quite the opposite, I have found that the popularity of Kate and Will has gone up massively ever since Harry married Markle, the UK tabloids have been very cunning in using Markle to get the English middle class to “simp” for the blue-blooded Royals, as people are shown the contrast between the traditional Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the more cosmopolitan Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
With a reversed seasonality compared to Europe – in the Middle East, infections increased in the warmest months (Saudi Arabi and UAE had the worst months of infections in June/July), especially when the UV was above 10, because people are indoors more under air conditioning in the hottest months.
“UV has a robust U-shaped effect on the reproduction number, with a minimum around 6.3 (Figure 1-D). At a low/moderate UV of 3, a unit higher UV decreased R0 by 3.5% (0.4-6.4%). At a high UV of 10, a unit higher UV increased R0 by 4% (1.8-6.3%). ” https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.05.20092627v3.full.pdf
There are different concepts between air conditioning, and/or HEPA filtration, or indoor air changes with the outside air.
In countries like Israel, Saudi Arabia and Philippines, shopping malls were believed one of the major sources of coronavirus spread, because the air conditioning commonly recycles air, so that customers are breathing the same air over and over .
In hot countries, it is more energy efficient to recycle the cooled air within the building, than to exhaust it, and then take hot air from outside, and cool it again. (Whereas in Europe people open the window, which increases the rate of indoor air exchange with the outside air).
The important ventilation for preventing airborne viruses, is to either exchange with the outside air (which is expensive in terms of energy cost for temperature control), or to pass the air through HEPA filters.
If the air is being recycled (as commonly in air conditioning during hot months), then there is not necessarily a benefit, and it could even increase the infectivity of the building.
I don’t understand Japanese, but you can see the clock for the ventilation experiment at 1:20 in the video (the cabin is cleared within 8 minutes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPgUY7Gojn8
Happy women’s day.
https://twitter.com/sputnikvaccine/status/1368903181422493698
Are eunuchs like yourself counted in this figure or listed separately?
Sorry, not a key member of the Sputnik V development team.
I really doubt Ukraine’s figure is significantly lower than both Poland’s and Russia’s.
Yes, that is hard to believe. Ukraine had the strictest lockdown early on, perhaps that made a difference for the total? The chart was through February 16th.
However in the last 7 days Ukraine is doing worse than Russia per capita (though not as bad as Poland):
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/
These statistics are unreliable, what is the point of comparing them?
Official Corona death statistics need to be treated in caution, especially in the Balkans and ex-USSR.
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/kobak/1474765/48026/48026_original.png
Ukraine did indeed have very low mortality in the first wave in March-May last year thanks to hard lockdown, but like the rest of Eastern Europe didn’t have the state capacity to suppress it over the summer, so it will and is rolling over it just as thoroughly as it did over Russia or Poland. The half-assed lockdowns and barely enforced mask regimes won’t and aren’t preventing it, to the extent they’re modestly more or less stringent than in Russia, they’ll just shift the timing slightly.
Ukraine I suppose could have avoided it by getting vaccines quick, but looks like just as in Russia, coronavirus itself will end up doing most of the “hard work” of getting to herd immunity. (This is more of a Russian failure, relatively speaking, because Russia actually had a working vaccine and very early so, whereas Ukraine is last in line for them).
Well, it was worth it in the sense that “two steps forward and one step back”. I agree that substituting one corrupt president for another doesn’t seem like a good deal, but what else are the people supposed to do? I don’t think that Zelensky is stupid enough to mess around with the voting mechanisms too much in the next elections? Quite honestly, I’m beginning to lose hope in politics altogether. I have no political heroes anywhere, and feel that they’re all a bunch of scheming crooked fraudsters, everywhere. How about you? Do you put a lot of stock in any politicians? Will the world ever have any real altruistic politicians that really care about improving the lot of their fellow man?
The problem is the mass production of the vaccine. If take into account the modest development of the Russian pharmaceutical industry, the production of even a modest 15 million doses of vaccine is a great success and not a failure
https://elevatorist.com/novosti/12148-proizvodstvo-muki-v-ukraine-za-yanvar-snizilos-do-22-letnego-minimuma
I was much interested in both history and politics when I was younger. I could even say that I was passionate about it. Not anymore: I have come to the conclusion that history is easily falsified, while political class is mainly a self-serving corporation that manipulates the masses to ensure its own survival and power/wealth maximization.
Human populations should be wary of anything politicians promess, best case scenario it will only be partially fulfilled, worse case scenario it will turn into some crazy bloodshed and/or end up in a corrupt morass.
This is also why I do not believe in liberal democracy anymore. It is piling lies upon lies and betrays the voters at every election. I hope that one day we will be able to have some direct democracy, where anyone would be able to vote on the aspects of social organization that one finds the most important. Perhaps some form of smart contract/blockchain might be used to allow a real-time feedback between the social mechanisms (government and administrative personnel) and the members of society.
But we are not there yet.
They probably find it more lucrative to just export the grain with minimal processing.
Tesla stock up 20% right now. Almost back to where it was a week ago. It’s comically volatile for a company with such a huge market cap.
Japan has very low rates of lung cancer despite ubiquitous availability of cigarettes (They even hand these out in their old age homes).
Perhaps the Japanese have genetically more resilient lungs.Maybe this applies to other East Asians too which may be a significant factor in the low disease spread and fatalities observed in such regions.
It seems that vote manipulation is still a useful tool for our “government and administrative personnel”. “Real time feedback” is kind of like cost accounting vs accrual accounting. It sounds great in practice, but how do you implement it?
Once we all have a digital identity assigned to us, our decisions (such as electronic vote) and their real-time consequences can be monitored through smart-contract / blockchain protocols. The outcome of a vote would become transparent. The identity of the voters would also become transparent, which might either help make people feel more responsible for their political choices, or ensure that no one dares challenging the majority consensus and/or government. It is a two edged sword, but if the laws protect individual freedoms and guarantee political neutrality of the administrative machine, then it could be great for collective decision making. Basically we would all know who voted what and how it was implemented. That would be real direct democracy.
Your ideas certainly have some merit. I don’t know about having to share my voting preferences with anybody else though? Only if the vote was a close one and one needed to double check the results do I think that anybody should have access to that information. Even with property taxes that are paid, only those who have your social security number or parcel ID have access to that kind of information.
It is actually not my ideas, this is something already under development. We are probably moving towards a society where nothing of importance will be kept secret from the social organism. A kind of Panopticon where anything we do will be known by those who need to know. Secrets that you have described will probably become obsolete.
https://youtu.be/fXgkgTa0y6Y
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2020.00026/full
We will need to learn to be more responsible for anything we do. But we might become increasingly able to trace the impact of our choices and actions. It’s a trade in we will probably need to make to increase the social organism decision taking accountability.
Gamestop stock back to $250 again. Almost $15B market cap. I don’t get it. It’s “only” shorted 30-40% now (as opposed to over 100% like it was before). Feels like a pyramid scheme.
Five people given life sentence in Turkey for the 2016 assassination of Russian ambassador Andrei Karlov. Pretty weird. The shooter is already dead and I don’t see why more than one person was necessary for the job. What did these supposed accomplices do?
I have never understood the appeal Eurovision has in Russia. It is quite a dull and boring contest with a concept right from the 50ies.
But this year the person representing Russia will probably make the whole thing memorable for the Russian (mostly female) Eurovision audience.
https://youtu.be/pzALEv4bEyM
The ethnic Tadjik singer Manizha with her song, which lyrics ridicule the ethnic Russian women, will probably not pass unnoticed.
Egor Kholmogorov, the professional Russian patriot, has already written an angry blog post about it.
https://rusdozor.ru/2021/03/09/egor-xolmogorov-eto-soznatelnyj-plevok-v-lico/
I find all this rather amusing: Manizha from Moskvabad representing Russia in a “boomer song contest”.
Russians are POC!
The song just really sucks. What percent of listeners will like it? But maybe the jury will give it a lot of points because of its “brave message” similar to how the Ukraine was given the win in 2016 when it was actually Russia that won the popular vote…
https://ludwitt.wordpress.com/2016/06/03/how-eurovision-voting-correlates-to-geopolitics-case-of-poland-and-israel/
The song is absolutely awful. I am sure it will trigger resentment in a lot of people in Russia, especially women.
I doubt it will be a result special Japanese lungs, but rather the fact that Japanese does not spread the virus in unventilated indoor spaces, and the resulting effect is similar to what happened in the summer in Europe.
Japan’s public transport has 8 air changes per hour, and shops and restaurants have windows removed or ventilation installed.
Coronavirus pandemic in summer 2020, faded in the European summer, as was predicted, because in the summer European people are spending less time indoors and opening the windows.
So there is a sense in which the spread of the pandemic in the European winter, can be a result of seasonal change behaviour, unventilated building designs (and of course the lack of public understanding about airborne infection has contributed).
While Australia and New Zealand, used quarantines and travel restrictions to stop the spread of the virus through their population, Japan was able to rely on hygiene measures, indoor building design/ventilation.
I was posting on the forum in December about China financing extra ports in Israel. From what I read, they will operate two parallel ports that will be competing with the existing ports in Ashdod and Haifa,. https://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-131/#comment-4342689
Now it is reported from the Israeli government Haifa, will bean envisaged terminal to a cargo train connecting to Jordan, Iraq and the Indian ocean via Saudi Arabia. This probably matches one of China’s long-term plans to expand its trade routes into Europe.
At the same time, China’s position in the plans for Middle East trade routes is quiet, so it’s not clear to what extent China are the architect of the projects.
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-israel-moves-ahead-with-haifa-bay-persian-gulf-railway-1001363311
There is some mystery about the story of China operating ports in Israel, as they will operate separately and in competition to the country’s two main ports at Haifa and Ashdod.
America was worried because its military ships regularly visit the old Haifa port. However, the new port China will operate outside Haifa and Ashdod, are physically very separate from the cities’ old ports, with the new port outside Haifa also being built on an artificial island.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHsxM_JVUDo
Well you are not a teenage girl, might have some musical tastes, and you have visited Europe and speak English at a high level.
But if not for coronavirus, Russia was going to be the champion the cancelled 2020 Eurovision, with the song “UNO” that has the most views of any Eurovision song in YouTube’s history. It’s seems that Channel One was told that Moscow can’t afford to host the Eurovision competition in 2022, so they were ordered to sabotage Russia’s probability of winning, by not sending the too popular song from 2020.
This was going to win Eurovision:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzeynKQiEE4
Is this meant to be a joke? Hosting Eurovision is not very expensive.
Outside Russia, it costs $30 million, but for Moscow it would likely double the cost compared to other countries. In 2009, it was already the most expensive competition at $42 million. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eurovision-spending-sb-idUSTRE54E3UH20090516
Of course, Moscow can afford that (the city that has spent billions of dollars to bury overhead lines). But Eurovision is also popular with LGBT communities, and probably a lot of the LGBT groups would “boycott” the Moscow competition. There could be bad publicity as a result of the LGBT geopolitics and its connection to Eurovision.
Those the only explanations (budget or potential bad publicity) I can think for why the First Channel seems to intentionally have sabotaged what was a very high probability to win the competition, by selecting the most unpopular possible song, instead of the song with already the most views in the Eurovision YouTube channel history.
Is there nothing better in the Russian pop music today because this song doesn’t seem so exceptional to me.
I am not really following Russian music anymore, except for a few underground bands.
I agree that it looks like a self-defeating choice.
Also it was (symbolically ?) announced on the March 8th, which is an important holiday for Russian women. Given the lyrics it really looks like it was done to trigger them as much as possible. Possibly to avoid them giving it any votes at the Eurovision.
It would actually be rather funny if this idiotic song would get more votes outside Russia than inside it.
To win Eurovision you need either a song to be popular, or just to have memes and sense of humour.
This song “uno” was likely to going to win Eurovision for Russia, because of the sense of humour – it’s a parody of European pop, with Spanish lyrics, and 1970s West European/Abba clothes.
–
It can be recalled that in 2018 Israel won Eurovision with a chicken song. Afterwards the Israeli government said that it didn’t have money to pay for the hosting of the competition, and the politicians were asking how to cancel it.
In the end, Tel Aviv municipality had to pay for the cost, and they justified it by saying that it would increase tourism.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/eurovision-crisis-likely-averted-564819
Eurovision is popular with the LGBT communities in Western Europe. From Tel Aviv’s perspective, Eurovision was logical to waste money hosting, as the city has been trying to publicize itself to LGBT tourism for several years already.
But for Moscow hosting the event could create negative publicity, due to the geopolitization of the LGBT topic, and I wonder if this is the reason for the self-sabotage of the competition. Obviously Moscow is one of the world’s more gay friendly cities, but the Western media would focus on the opposite, and probably there would be scandals during the competition (with people holding signs criticizing the authorities, LGBT flags, etc).
But the words are in Russian, so 90% of the Europe won’t understand it. The “song” will not even be able to enter the final show, but will be lost in the qualifying stages.
That’s why it seems to be intentional self-sabotage by the first channel, to throw out “Uno”, for an automatically losing alternative. Look at the viewcounter on “Uno” on YouTube – it was likely to win the Eurovision competition, and therefore the competition would be hosted in Moscow in 2022 (with probably a lot of scandals and controversy from the LGBT communities in Western Europe).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_dWvTCdDQ4.
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1369286855720509443
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1369279302697545730
I feel like money used like this has an easy way of getting into the wrong hands and being unproductive.
Direct democracy could be even worse. Firstly, the only people who would bother to vote on most issues would be those who are very very highly motivated – in other words the crazies and the extremists and the cranks on both sides. Secondly, it would require people to vote on issues about which they know nothing at all. They would inevitably and invariably vote stupidly.
The sad truth is that any form of democracy will inevitably produce bad governments and bad decision-making.
Yes I thought about it. That is why the first and most important aspect any denocratic society should give a priority to is education. Second is acess to accurate information and third is a legally protected right to debate and discuss. It is obvious that today we do nothing of this, we actually do the opposite.
https://www.fr.de/bilder/2021/03/10/90236845/25187448-donald-trump-buddha-statue-2ASWKfslkaec.jpg
Sold by a Chinese company.
Direct democracy has only ever been a success in one Very High IQ country.Everywhere else it has been an absolute failure California etc.
You can judge the average IQ (The practical sort besides what is measured in standardized tests) of the Swiss by their referendum outcomes.
Universal basic income:Rejected
Phasing out nuclear power(referendum conducted shortly after Fukushima):Rejected
Single Payer Healthcare system:Rejected(They opted for facilitating universal access to private insurance instead)
Ban on minarets on mosques:Passed
Ban on burqas:Passed
In addition to their impressive record of consistently going against the high tax to fund a social market economy trend despite being surrounded by countries which had adopted such a model.
The most populous American state is set to vote on whether to teach their children to worship demon gods:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/aztec-human-sacrifice-the-re-barbarization-of-california/
https://christopherrufo.com/revenge-of-the-gods/
The sad thing is that in a decade this will most likely be tame compared to what else comes. Forcing people to do Wakanda salutes is humiliating and ridiculous (“fake and gay”), but not directly morbid like this.
Some more information on the original rites of worship for these Lovecraftian demon gods:
So if you are from the tribe that got sacrificed to an Aztec god, can you file a grievance with California public schools?
I would imagine it be pretty upsetting if your great great great uncle got sacrificed to Xipe Totec and now you have to sing the chants.
In the last months Tesla is starting to sell in China at possibly rates up to around 200,000 per year.
It looks like an impressive increase for Tesla, but still much less sales than the large manufacturers that Tesla strangely overvalues in the stock market. (Toyota sells around 1,8 million automobiles in China per year; VW sells 1,6 million in China per year)
https://i.imgur.com/nBNSarM.png
https://twitter.com/SidPolitics/status/1369951337207713794
This owns. One step closer to massive futuristic space pyramids.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/59/83/6e/59836e0480d3f4d60cf5338a81ca7f44.jpg
Corporate raid American style.
https://spacenews.com/momentus-founders-to-divest-shares-after-defense-department-concerns/
So this guy, Mikhail Kokorich, founded the first private Russian space satellite company, Dauria, using Russian government grant via Skolkovo. He then expanded his company into Europe and US and blew up a couple of Roscosmos satellites, which got him sued into bankruptcy. I have a feeling his satellite mishaps were an excuse (new company, mistakes happen), but having US office while dealing with Russian government contracts is a big no no as far as Russian export control goes).
So the guy spent a lot of time whining how much he hates Evil Mordor and Putin and corporate raids and he will get a new start in Glorious Noble and Honest West. And he started a new company in US called Momentus.
… And Department of Defense promptly got him fired because he’s Russian. And they gave his dream, his company, to a Strong Powerful Woman who also happens to be a Boeing Executive. Haha.
But of course, in Evil Mordor, it’s corporate raid by Putin cronies. But in noble US, it’s “share divestment after defense department concerns”.
Lesson for smart Russian liberals – if you are doing anything high tech and important, there is no such thing as free market. And security services in US and Russia will treat you the same, so plan your game accordingly. You can hate Russia all you want, but don’t think you’ll get to be Elon Musk without some heavy Pentagon legwork.
Even with a better educated population democracy will still be a problem and direct democracy will still be impractical because people would need a lot of specialised knowledge in order to cast an informed vote. For example, let’s say you have a vote on whether or not to withdraw completely from Afghanistan. To cast an informed vote on that issue you need a reasonably deep knowledge of the history of that part of the world, a reasonably deep knowledge of the culture and a good understanding of foreign policy in general.
To cast an informed vote on climate change policy people would need a very deep knowledge of the actual state of climate science in order to know whether it is even necessary to have a climate change policy.
Let’s say it’s a vote on introducing a UBI. You’d need a profound understanding of economic policy.
I don’t think it would ever be possible for even a better educated population to have the necessary specialised knowledge.
Yes, I agree. But on many issues there is no accurate information – there’s nothing but competing opinions. Let’s say that voters need to decide if marijuana should be legalised. There’s no objective right or wrong answer, just opinions which are mostly based on emotion.
Yes, I agree.
Again I agree.
On the whole I doubt if any form of democracy will ever deliver good honest government and sound decision-making. Politics is all about emotion.
Should we dispense with politics entirely and have a technocratic meritocracy instead?
https://www.litmir.me/br/?b=19880&p=1
I could watch the new documentary film from Vice about Lebanon. It’s not great, but has some interesting comments, like the situation of their train service at 22:00.
It’s also surprising to see how “woke” some of the younger Arab political activists are, which reflects that Lebanon has had a far higher income level than Syria and Egypt, and the country has a layer of secular middle class youth that can be interested in feminism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnTE5ASqQME
But what is the future for young non-elites in Lebanon? Even when your country is incompetent, had corrupt elites, etc, there are significant differences of degree of corruption and incompetence, and Lebanon’s political situation makes Ukraine and Armenia look functional by comparison.
The elite in Lebanon has supposedly become wealthy from a kind of banking Ponzi scheme, and unlike “normally corrupt” elites in a middle income countries like Russia (even in the 1990s), Turkey or Brazil, where elites’ wealth is at least cut from a real source of income in natural resources or manufacturing industries. In Lebanon, presumably the source of income of the elite is by impoverishing the middle and working class through use of import cartels and stealing the money from their taxes and savings.
Lebanon doesn’t produce much. The country is (or perhaps was) a local center for services and banking. Almost all goods need to be imported. Far from food self-sufficient so a lot of food needs to be imported. It’s hard for such a country to sustain itself.
With the food prices rising globally Lebanon will be one of the worst affected countries.
Israel suffers from similar issues but has higher human capital and massive foreign support to make up for it.
Maybe. I can’t say I’m thrilled by the idea but eventually there may not be a choice.
Liberal democracy is moving steadily towards soft totalitarianism anyway, and in the West is becoming steadily more incompetent and more overtly corrupt.
I have a feeling that we’re not going to have any good options, so it will be a matter of choosing the least worst options.
It’s a bit depressing.
One of the worst Lebanese problems is that like Armenia and Ukraine their country is in a wrong place at a wrong time in history.
A Lebanese acquaintance of mine once told me a Lebanese joke: when G-d created different countries He gave Lebanon the sun, the sea, the mountain, the nature and the culture of a hard working and nice people. The angels asked the Almighty : Lord are you partial to the place? To that G-d answered : I am always impartial, wait ’till you see the neighbors that I have decided to give them. This would balance everything else.
And in all fairness, if not for the French, Lebanon would just be part of Syria. Although Lebanese themselves and their Israeli neighbors would of course dislike this thought. There is also the problem of these Mediterranean gas deposits that the Israeli are hell-bent on keeping to themselves.
Poor Lebanese, a people of bankers, merchants, intellectuals and poets – how can they thrive in such geopolitical neighborhood?
Thanks goodness they have the Hizballah to look for their survival.
One thing we need to do is to recognise that democracy and freedom are two different and unrelated concepts.
Freedom to a large degree depends on the rule of law and on a series of crucial legal rights (such as the right to trial by jury, habeas corpus, double jeopardy, etc). It’s worth noting that in Britain in particular but also in the rest of the Anglosphere these freedoms and rights have been systematically undermined by democratically elected governments.
It’s also worth noting that as western governments became progressively more democratic in the 19th and early 20th century governments also became increasingly intrusive. Our personal lives became more and more subject to government control. Increasingly democratic government coincided with the rise of the idea that the government should act as a moral policeman and that the government should manage our personal lives for us. The Nanny State and the Government as Moral Policeman are essentially the results of democracy.
Democracy has the result of making everything a political issue, including our private behaviour.
BTW, Saint Petersburg averaging 7k-8000 vaccinations per day, Moscow 15000.
As a comparison ( though it seems the US is now in the “lead” in both quantity and rate of vaccination), UK with the highest rate in Europe seems to be averaging 300000 vaccinations per day since their mass vaccination started .
Divide that by 13 to get the rate in comparison to Saint Petersburg and that is 23000 per day for SP to be at same rate as UK. As UK high vaccine takeup is heavily first-dose centred ( encourage as many people to take 1st dose in 12 week period, different to us where it is both doses in 3 weeks) and UK/Europe is significantly more closed in everything like shops, bars etc compared to Russia, and their hospitals more saturated
AND…consider the fact that our mass vaccination was launched when rates were going significantly down ( again different to Europe)…AND that in UK and other places this rush to get mass vaccinated is 80% virtue signalling…….then I think you can say that Russia is doing very well on vaccinations……..the best!!
I calculate our daily vaccine rate as 150000 per day. This is a great rate and their is no rush , because this same vaccination is going to be cyclical.
IIRC Plato described democracy as an imperfect system that evolves towards first oligarchy and then tyranny. Perhaps he was right and what we are witnessing is the process he had described.
https://gogov.ru/articles/covid-v-stats
Vaccination statistics in Russia that is update daily. They give an estimation on the total number of vaccinations based on regional statistics.
During the last month about 100k has been vaccinated with the first dose per day.
https://twitter.com/LGBTIintergroup/status/1370037425267994626
EU is now officially a ‘‘LGBTIQ Freedom Zone’’
But what does it mean?
LGBTIQ get to hunt Afghan migrants from helicopters?
I think I would prefer not knowing what an “LGBTIQ Freedom Zone” is, unless knowing this becomes absolutely required for my survival. And even then I am not sure I really want to know.
(BTW what does the I stand for in this funky acronym ? They add new letters so often that I a have started loosing track on them…)
I believe it stands for ‘intersex’.
A movement has started to add yet another new identity, SS or ‘superstraight’. This is for heterosexuals who are only attracted to cis-gender people of the opposite sex.
The Q letter is an anomaly in some ways, as queer seems to deny the existence of all the categories other than queer.
Also I heard about a survey indicating that over 10% of US 18-24 year olds now identify as gay, up from about 2.5% in other age groups.
Whatever floats their boat…
Israel is actually opposite as Lebanon in many ways, as Israel has de facto import substitution, and it’s the strangest situation of a small country where there are locally produced versions of most every product. Israel is like a miniature Soviet Union, producing a wide variety of local substitutes for any import.
This is subsidized by the consumers by the higher prices that you pay in Israeli shops. Israel’s import cartel families raise the price of imports, and make expensive local substitutes competitive.
So, I was shocked that things I was buying in Israel like phone charging cables, sore throat lozenges, plastic clips for hanging laundry, etc, are saying on the “made in Israel”.
I have now an iphone charger and socks which says “made in Israel”, as I bought them last time I visited there.
Similarly, all the food products have local equivalents. For some products like chocolate, this is quite sensible, as Israeli chocolate has chemicals to stop it melting.
This had some strategic value, as for example there were local factories producing respirators during coronavirus.
Israel has a powerful agriculture lobby, and always large food surplus, with even its own caviar and pork industry. (Lebanon is in the opposite problem, with 80% of the food imported).
The dark side of Israel’s import substitution is that prices for the food and consumer products is extremely high, and this resulted in the famous “Cottage cheese protests” of 2011. Essentially the local consumers are subsidizing the import substitution policy and miniature Soviet Union, through higher prices.
In addition, Israel has a two-tier economy, where a proportion of workers are a real proletariat, working in factories to produce these products which are mostly only sold in the local market. Israel creates a lot of pollution problems by its manufacturing sector, which includes a lot of plastics factories.
Israel, doesn’t have a proportionally large banking sector. The exciting “investment banks” in Israel, are BNP, HSBC, Citibank, Barclays. Whereas Lebanon was trying to be he Switzerland or Singapore of the Middle East, with a powerful banking sector. (But clearly they were not like Switzerland or Singapore).
Israel’s hi-tech industry is integrated with the global economy, but a lot of rest of the economy is trying to be like a self-sufficient Soviet Union, where garden furniture or tooth brushes will be made in local factories.
If you ignore the people, it’s a pleasant, romantic and fertile neighbourhood, where you can plant an olive tree and some grape vines, and a normal population could be living in luxury just from things like tourism (like the Italians, who must generate a fortune from renting you beach chairs).
With Syria, part of the collapse of society could have been overpopulation, as the fertility rate was above 3, while already before 2010 Syria was the poorest country in the Arab world per capita, except for Yemen. https://i.imgur.com/aPSAxHa.jpg
But Lebanon has had a significantly higher income in the 2000s, more similar to Georgia today. But what is the industry of Lebanon that is generating this higher income? Possibly due to the banking industry (which was Ponzi scheme), tourism (from the richer Arab countries) and luxury real estate sector (the latter was introducing wealth from the Lebanese emigrants and Gulf Arabs).
From the tourism or real estate point of view, Lebanon was considered as a kind romantic, relatively liberal destination for Gulf Arabs.
Here is Al Jazeera’s documentary on the topic yesterday. I’m listening to it now, it’s maybe better or more objective seeming than the Vice documentary from the same day. (You notice at 6:40 all the Mercedes and Porsche Cayenne in the streets in Beirut and then the second largest city of Tripoli at 10:00 is like Africa).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0eG5j7a0fo
The Lebanese diaspora is very widely represented around the World and its members are often rich and successful.
Regarding your other comment, that region is indeed very fertile and beautiful. It was not named the fertile crescent in vain. That’s why it was so easy to start a complex civilization there, unlike let’s say northern Russia. Indeed, if the Semites finally did their best to live in peace with each other, then they would have a very nice region for their future generations.
BTW, Israelis are right to be as self-sufficient as possible. This is something Arabs will also need to learn doing sooner than later.
Israel is a net food importer. They’re probably self-sufficient in terms of producing enough to not be able to starve but there’s no large food surplus. Israel is doing good with their irrigation but the issue is that there isn’t enough arable land.
What I meant is that Israel and Lebanon has similar geography which means they have similar problems in terms of achieving sustainability. Obviously Israel is doing better at trying to create solutions.
FFS Karlin, stop with this Black Live Matter style BS virtue signalling ,with the non-stop implied shaming of Russians not taking the vaccine and supposedly not taking them at the rate as high as you would like
The facts are we are taking too many Sputnik-V vaccinations at too high a rate and need to SLOW it immediately. Zero use in taking it for virtue signalling reasons – if people have antibodies there is no reasons to take this vaccine for several months. If this is going to be a cyclical vaccination like flu, then there is absolutely no need to immediately vaccinate – just preferably before autumn.
We had 80+ million flu vaccinations last year and we have a noncomparably high rate, acceptance and availability of vaccinations compared to all the post-soviet space. We are nearer in pro-vaccinaton sentiment, probably equal or more, to the average pro-vaccination in EU or the west. All these facts mean it is impossible to call us “vaccine reluctant” to SputnikV.
As I have also said before, effectively 3 slow weeks at the immediate beginning of the year with most people resting , bad weather in many regions incomparably worse to other well-populated areas in Europe, antibodies, that gayropans have to take it as an incentive to remove restrictions and of course that Russians are not into weird virtue signalling – make all these “low vaccination rate” claims total BS. We have an extremely high number in at least 7.5 million doses given.
All you are doing is falling for the disgusting propaganda of the western and liberast subhumans who had to think of some BS to coverup permanently discrediting themselves by rushing to take our vaccine – despite these scum working against the Russian state. It was always easy disinformation for these lowlifes to do to try and deflect
And Israel will import the raw materials like sugar and cocoa, but then the local factory is making it into a local chocolate.
I don’t think Israel is following an economically textbook correct model, as understood since the law of comparative advantage, and there is a negative effect of their import substitute model in high prices for Israeli consumers.
Until recently, the country had almost Lenin’s NEP development mentality, and they covered the country with factories, which are often only producing for the local market, and the result is that Israel’s countryside became quite industrialized and polluted.
Typical Israeli periphery industries cities, are a mix of small factories and workers’ housing: https://www.google.ru/maps/@32.7028083,35.3151755,3a,75y,158.84h,103.18t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sc6ha3H4okiBTDgMb4oyvVg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
It has benefits that the economy is geopolitically insulated, and that there is employment for the working class people.
Israel can also import thousands of Russian speaking and Ethiopian immigrants, and they try to move them to periphery, where a lot will end up working in the biscuit factory, or the tampon factory.
A famous Israeli industrialization, was to turn a Kibbutz into a tampon factory (Albaad), while normal countries of that size would import tampons rather than producing local tampons.
Israel’s local industries themselves are uncompetitive, as they require paying workers a higher salary, than if you offshored the jobs to a lower income country. So the jobs can only remain by making consumers pay higher prices (and using importers’ fees so the local products stay competitive).
One of the results of the idealistic/socialist influenced founding culture of Israel, unlike Jews are supposed to be, is that Israelis are stereotypically impulsive naive consumers, and they pay the high prices from the high street, without comparing between different shops. He describes it at 10:30 in the video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tjM2-sOG78
^ Although he doesn’t notice the strange thing about Israel’s import substitution policies, and that is the reason why the Milkie yogurt’s price is allowed to be increased 4,5 times compared to Germany when it is imported into Israel.
There is also a similarity between Lebanon and Israel in terms of dysfunctional internal “Balkanization”, or multi-religious and ethnicity groups living in the same country.
That survey is a good example of why social surveys are so misleading. In fact those brainless 18-24 year olds don’t identify as gay, they identify as LGBTwhatever. Which means that in fact most of them are heterosexuals who identify as gender non-binary or genderfluid or similar nonsense.
In other words they’re pretending to be LGBTwhatever for fashion reasons or for political reasons. Mostly they’re just LARPing.
The huge advantage of identifying as one of the 117 weird and wonderful genders that are available today is that you can gain all the advantages of being LGBTwhatever but you can still have sex exclusively with the opposite sex.
I suspect that the actual numbers of people in all age groups who are genuinely homosexual remains about what it always was – maybe 2% for men and closer to 1% for women.
What the survey does indicate is that Zoomers desperately want to associate themselves with the LGBTwhatever thing. And that is almost entirely a result of social media pressure.
All these economic textbook models are only good for Goyim…
I think it is an especially romantic and beautiful part of the world. But isn’t there also something “strange” in the air in that part of the Mediterranean. I don’t know if anyone else feels this?
To me, when you are in East Mediterranean, there often seems like an unusual emotional intensity in the air (like “magnetic” forces), especially in the summer. Perhaps it is just my superstition.
There is the “Jerusalem syndrome”, where the city triggers madness in tourists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_syndrome
That the emergence of the weirdest religious cults (Judaism, Christianity, parts of Islam, Gnosticism) all from that small part of the Middle East, and also much of birth of philosophy in Ionia, and there are still today some of the most unsolvable battles and dysfunctional countries, might not be unconnected.
Although we must remember that other Axial Age religions appeared in India and Central Asia. I think Semites in general produce a lot of those who Gumilyov called “passionarii”.
Speaking of Lebanon, one of the most talented poets worldwide was Gibran Khalil Gibran. If you have never read his “The Prophet” yet, I strongly recommend it. A beautiful book. He was a talented painter too:
https://lebanonpostcard.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/divine-world.jpg
https://covenantcompanion.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/kahlil-feat-img.jpg
Aamin Maalouf is also Lebanese:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amin_Maalouf
Reminder that Christianity has no problem with mass immigration or race mixing.
There seems to be quite a cultural difference between Lebanon and Israel, in the regimentation level of cities. .
Lebanese cities have a strongly individualistic appearance, where middle class people are building whatever they want.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiMNlKXYKbg
While the post-1950s built Israeli cities, are often very regimented, collectivist structures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-P2pScTiPo
And even post 1970s cities like Ashdod, have the very collectivist Israeli style.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_TLaWUM114
This is where Israel can seem halfway to North Korea. (Arab cities in Israel are much individualistic by comparison.)
Thanks for recommending.
Previously I have seen Gibran books, in the bookshops, but the “New Age” way they are packaged has dissuaded me from wanting to read them.
It sounds superstitious and subjective , but in my memory there is a sense of intense atmosphere is in the air of the region, rather than just being a property of the hotheaded nationality of the people (which are different races nowadays).
I felt a “magnetic” intensity all over the region, although I don’t remember feeling this as far West as Corfu. As East as, Cyprus and Israel I have felt some “intense” atmosphere even while looking at the empty sea at sunset. I haven’t read anyone else saying this though so maybe it is my imagination.
You’re not the only one having felt that. I have never been to Israel, although I have been invited a couple of times by my Jewish Russian friends who now live in Israel and have also spoken about some special energy in that place. My mother went there a couple of years ago and she told something similar. Then she is a devout Christian, so there’s that.
You write this as if politicians made any sort of informed decisions on this issue. Actually even the totalitarian USSR’s leaders made supremely idiotic decisions.
Technocrats have lots of idiotic biases and ideas. The German generals’ ideas on waging the war proved a disaster in Imperial Germany. Finance professionals were idiots in 1930 and prolonged the Depression. Economists proposed Gorbachev the reforms which led to a deep economic crisis in the USSR. Then economists proposed rapid privatization and shock therapy in 1990s Russia (some, but not all, of them got rich in the process), but also in other countries.
To me it is obvious that a technocratic meritocracy wouldn’t work either.
Of course. All political systems produce bad results. That’s because of human nature. People are largely driven by emotion. Many people are largely driven by greed or by a lust for power. People who want to be political leaders (in any political system) are unlikely to be the best and the brightest – they are more likely to be the most ruthless and the most power-hungry.
Which means that regardless of your political system you’re going to have people reaching leadership positions who are corrupt or greedy or foolish or sociopathic. It’s futile to think you’e ever going to have a good political system – all you can do is hope to find the least bad system.
I’m no longer entirely confident that representative democracy is the least bad system. And I’m a long way from being convinced that direct democracy would be an improvement.
Even if you’re a fan of representative democracy I think you’d have to admit that it’s a system that has gradually become more intrusive, more oppressive and in practice more totalitarian. And it has grown steadily more corrupt. And more inefficient.
It’s possible that this is simply the way that representative democracy naturally evolves. As another commenter suggested, maybe democracy naturally evolves towards tyranny.
That really only leaves monarchy.
Or we do nothing and continue to drift towards democratic totalitarianism.
Futarchy. Government by superforecasters based on bets made on the blockchain.
Basically technocracy but without the cliques, credentialism, groupthink, etc. that are endemic to them.
I’d say some kind of monarchy informed by science..? The issue is that the monarchs tried to marry other monarchs’ daughters, which is a sound idea, but the marriage pool was too small and thus you ended up with inbred degenerate kings who eventually couldn’t even produce progeny. Also it’s difficult to strike a balance between heredity (which is necessary if you want stationary bandits) and meritocracy (all hereditary aristocracies had meritocratic elements).
I’d say there’s no perfect system, and democracy had a long enough good run to accept it as one possible form of government. Altogether I agree about democracy descending into tyranny. This leaves us with no viable option, since monarchies turned into communist or nationalist tyrannies or liberal democracies.
You have to be careful to judge monarchy as a system based on the decadent European monarchies of recent times, and you have to be very careful not to dismiss monarchy because of the degenerate Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family (a tragic family that has been afflicted by hereditary madness for centuries).
To some extent monarchies have failed because they’ve been undermined by external forces. Certainly the United States has played a sinister role in imposing liberal democracies on other countries.
Without the disaster of the First World War it’s possible that the old European empires (The Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian Empires and perhaps the Ottoman Empire) might have found a better way forward.
Philosophy was also born in Ionia, on the border of North Eastern Mediterranean, and not just as the birth of reason, but also various mystical cults that was associated with some of these philosophers.
Here is an Israeli map I found which shows the native cities of the presocratics. https://i.imgur.com/n9hiIce.jpg
Heraclitus might be amused, that the changing river of time has brought his native region to become a centre of the lowcost Turkish holiday industry. .
There are certain unproved beliefs that magnetic forces of a fullmoon can trigger mental instability, or spirituality, i.e. “Transylvanian effect”.
I find it easy to believe there is some “magnetic” geographical equivalent, as we cross from gentle Europe, into wilder, mystical, if not crazier coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean.
If there is a psychic force that is not pure pseudoscience, then it would be logical that its focal point would be the Eastern Mediterranean. After all, that is where the bulk of the psychic projections of billions of humans have been projected to over the past two millennia.
Wouldn’t that mean placing entirely the future of humankind in the hands of the Technosphere?
https://newsociety.com/products/9780865718388
I am not sure whether we would still be able to take any decision without being manipulated by information providing algorithms.
If we look where the earliest sedentary civilization arised and the earliest known building was constructed (Gobekli tepe temple complex) we will find that we are roughly in the same area. The populations that built Gobekli tepe or Çatalhöyük and those whose ancestors were the ancient (proto)agriculturalists of the Natifian Culture are still there, they form nowadays around 60% of the Israeli population.
When we look at the genetic make up of the modern Jewish people, we find that it is basically the mix of these Anatolian and Afro-asiatic populations, which built neolithic Jericho and other early fertile crescent cultural centers, who got conquered by desert-dwelling Semitic priestly clans from Northern Arabia.
When we look at Ionian Greeks, the same mix of Anatolians and Afro-Asiatic who built ancient Troy were conquered by the Indo-European Greeks.
The Anatolian populations descended from Çatalhöyük went on creating the wonderful Minoan Crete.
The Afro-Asiatic Natufians mixed up with the Nilotic Africans and probably some Yamnaya descended migrants created ancient Egypt.
The taste of the pudding depends on the ingredients.
An important typo: Natufian Culture, not Natifian.
A possible sign of presence of malevolent powers, when I visit holy places in India and Tibet, I often feel a sense of clarity and serenity, which is totally different from (demonic?) “magnetic intensity.”
Yeah, you’d need a monarchy that would differ in some respects from traditional monarchies. A kind of updated version of monarchy. But monarchy has been a reasonably flexible system so I don’t think it would be impossible.
Russia losing 100k people in 2020 is less of a disaster than Russia losing close to 1m in the 1990s yearly. Not only is the decline less in absolute terms, but Russia is also more aged.
Punjab brings both the light of the Vedas & Sword of the Khalsa||
Classical Greeks were almost all descended from the same people as the Mycenaeans and Minoans. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/greeks-really-do-have-near-mythical-origins-ancient-dna-reveals
There has been the 19th century German mythology, that the genius of the Greeks was imported with the Dorian invasion (which they claimed was from Germany).
However, even with a basic knowledge, you can also see how many of the miraculous parts of their culture was generated locally, because it wasn’t present in the same cities just a century earlier.
For example , in Kritios in the 5th century, is born the first kind of truly modern and realistic seeming sculpture, but in the 6th century the Athenians were creating Egyptian style sculpture, simply on Greek themes.
So the Greek theme is the naked young man, but in the 6th century the style and technology is not different from Egyptian.
A specifically Greek component is the subject of the sculpture (naked young man), but not the form which was not distinct from Egyptian sculpture.
https://i.imgur.com/xXjKyEm.jpg
Only in the 5th century Athens, there was an artistic breakthrough, and from then on the beautiful and realistic sculpture which we associated with a distinctive Greek achievement (but really it is distinctive only after Kritios).
https://i.imgur.com/juLnuWr.jpg
With Greek literature, you see there is similarly local, not imported, breakthroughs in the classical age. If you read earlier Greek writers like Hesiod, you can see in earlier centuries the Greeks was not mentally very distinctive from their neighbours and contemporaries. .
Hesiod is not more sophisticated than any other writers of his time. It’s like reading Vedic hymns or the Bible. But of course, by 5th Athens, there are texts which are at the same sophistication level as anything non-scientific written in the 19th century, and that there has been a miracle in the advancement of intelligence or consciousness.
There might be a more natural, if still speculative and superstitious sounding explanations, for some of the bizarre history of the region, and its crazy ideas and religions.
For one example of a co-incidence, what was the real home of Jesus, where he started his ideas? It is the Sea of Galilee, which is the geographically almost lowest elevation in planet earth, following the Dead Sea.
So Jesus was at one of the areas of highest atmospheric pressure, and his ideas were copied mainly from the Essenes.
What the home of the Essenes, from which much of Jesus’ teachings were derived? According to Pliny, Dead Sea – the lowest altitude place in the world. High altitude is supposed to be good for mentally ill people. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6763955/ So perhaps we could speculate provisionally about whether low altitude could have an inverse effect, and have had an influence on the otherwise strange co-incidence that the location of certain religious phenomenon like the Essenes was at point of the planet’s lowest altitude.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/815453549462421574/821157729850097674/unknown.png
https://live.staticflickr.com/7895/46462785931_586e11d6a6_b.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesgarh_Qila#:~:text=Kesgarh%20Qila%20is%20the%20name,the%20defense%20of%20the%20Sikhs.
https://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/Anandpur
when you realize the Guru himself fired off those battlements||
I was writing about the genetic components of the population. You are right that the Greek have probably attained the best possible balance (for a time). The Greek haplogroups correspond to the Afro-Asiatic modal Mediterranean haplogroup E, the Anatolian and Eastern Mediterranean haplogroup J2 (the one that was also prevalent in the Minoan Crete) and the Yamnaya R1b in the right proportions, they also had some Y haplogroup G (neolithic European Farmers) and I (European Hunters gatherers).
Today Israel: E, J2 and J1, (around a third each) but also some minor R1a (among the Ashkenazim) and the African haplogroup A (for the Falasha). Not surprisingly both populations mainly look Mediterranean and Levantine (except for some Ashkenazim and Falasha).
The ancestors of Mycenian Greek and Minoan Cretan people were related, but the first got conquered by a Yamnaya derived Indo-European population and also admixed and assimilated some Afro-Asiatic Mediterranean early farmers (proto-Pelasgian perhaps). Both Mycenians and Minoans were typical Levantine people, typical Mediterranean, both were highly artistic and sophisticated, but Minoans were somewhat more advanced.
Below a Minoan artefact found in a warrior tomb:
https://www.archaeology.org/slideshow/7911-greece-pylos-slideshow
And the portrait of a young Minoan lady.
https://i.pinimg.com/236x/23/e1/4c/23e14c7c08530a23717b260374e6bcaa–akrotiri-santorini-santorini-island.jpg
From a poetic view, there was never anything written afterwards that is as beautiful as Homer, or parts of Old Testament, or Rig Veda.
Think about phrases like Homer’s “sailing over the wine-dark sea to men of strange speech”, or Old Testament when God asks Job “”Where were you when I laid foundations of the earth?”.
But even if they are the most beautiful things ever, they does sound like ancient texts, and that people who wrote them was still living in a childhood of the world.
However, there are texts of 5th century Athens, like Thucydides’ “History of Peloponnesian War”, that seem already like a modern text, or even more sophisticated and intelligent than the texts published by 21st century historians.
In classical epoch of Greece, there must have been an almost miraculous seeming “modernization of thinking” among some of the elite, to allow them to be writing almost scientific books just like we would read published by universities in developed countries today.
Whereas with older Greek writers like Hesiod, who was writing in the 8th century, you feel like you are reading something similar to Bible, Homer, or Rig Vega – i.e. beautiful, but ancient poetic texts.
But since, after the 1950s-1960s, I’m not sure Israel can be viewed as a racially coherent country. It reminds me more of America or Canada, i.e. of a nationality created artificially by immigration.
For example, even in the religious nationalist sector, which doesn’t allow entry without being an Orthodox Jews, has such a multinational looking mix of different races:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaZBLruSVXo
Israel uses the exploit of “Jews”, for nation building, but that immigration stream has provided a surprisingly random mix of peoples, partly because Israel only received mass immigration from poorer countries than itself, and it means they are flooded with immigrants from Georgia or Uzbekistan.
But whether such a random mix of people will be successful or not is another question?
In the 21st century, we know the opposite – i.e. ethnically homogenous countries – are not a guarantee of success, e.g. 21st century Armenia. Perhaps having a mixed ethnically somewhat incoherent population, is not a guarantee of failure either, although no doubt increases the dangers of internal conflict.
I agree with everything you wrote. Whether a population is successful depends heavily on the selection process for its elites. If it manages to put smart fractions into the positions of authority, then it will be successful even if it is a tiny semi-desertic stripe of land in a volatile and aggressive environment. If it puts crooks and thieves in power it will fail even if it inherits high technology and considerable territory full of ressources from its predecessor state. As Comrade Trotsky supposedly liked to say with his Odessa accent : “A fish starts rotting from its head”…
There is no better glue to keep different people together than an ethno-religious faith. Even French Huguenot refugees could successfully integrate to society of England or Prussia of the 18th century.
What else is truly keeping India together than the common Dharmic faith? Tamils and Punjabis don’t even speak related languages, but both are loyal to same state.
Without Communists breaking Russians and Ukrainians connection with their past, Ukrainian Orthodox would feel stronger bond towards Orthodox Russians than they would towards half-Lyakh Uniate heretics.