....but, people tend to interpret their economic position in relative rather than absolute terms. i don't want to reduce this to behaviouralism v homo economicus yet again, but, yeah...

if you're used to being hungry, and food goes from being plentiful to being rationed then you might not react as badly as somebody that is used to having easy access to food and has seen shortages of specific items. the rich may riot over a shortage of toilet paper, while the poor learn how to live with a shortage of milk.

so, we've had a lot of distractions here, but who is delusional enough to think israel wants peace?

you don't have to distract me. i've been tuning it out. waste of time...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azoAj_oqOGA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LICOSiWqG4k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlZ9tn8t7KU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8HYBnSR74w

indeed. southern europe is being crucified on a cross of euros.

my understanding is that it has something to do with the province's debt/credit ratings. paying it out all at once in the trough of the last recession hit them pretty badly. of course, that's selective accounting. they could just as easily look at the decrease in corporate taxes and blame it on that. but, it was instead decided that it wasn't structurally sound to make a habit of paying out that kind of sum on a yearly basis, and the process was changed to pay it out monthly or wait until the following fiscal year.

so, where's the interest on the money? well, if the state is holding it, it should pay interest, should it not? but, in a way, that's exactly the point.

100nni
Why are these guys wearing our bundeswehr uniforms?

noprofitmaximierung
Why do the Ukrainian Nazis wear NATO uniforms? /watch?v=I5N5qnD7trg

Pickleman
Have any of you people ever been to a military surplus store? That is all surplus apparall, German jackets are very common at them, along with all nato member nations.

http://www.keepshooting.com/german-flecktarn-field-shirt.html

deathtokoalas
it's funny, that's what the russians say about the crimean self-defense forces.

there have been some rumours about special ops from poland and lithuania streaming over the western border. they're probably not entirely false.

Jan-Niklas Runge
There's a bit of a difference between thousands of troops in the same uniform out of nowhere and some dude with a German jacket.

deathtokoalas
well, that one dude is arguably evidence of a greater movement of people that has been talked about (where'd all these guns in kiev come from, anyways?). there's even been some rumours of an actual nato unit being stationed in lvov, that is to say a nato invasion of western ukraine. don't misunderstand me: this is sketchy info. i have no meaningful evidence to back it up. but these rumours of nato soldiers in the ukrainian uprising do exist and have existed the whole time, and if you understand the geopolitics underlying the actions of the major powers (if not the actions of the ukrainian people), it becomes too plausible to write off off-hand. it's far from crazy. so, the extent of the truth of these rumours is difficult to ascertain due to shitty western media coverage, but that there is some truth is hard to reasonably reject. whether he realizes it or not ostrovosky seems to have finally provided some evidence for it...

Pickleman
the only thing its evidence of is where they buy their clothes. there is nothing  suspicious about this. seriously look at my posts, clothes like this is very accessible to anyone, and again, does not evidence anything other then that they buy their clothers from military surplus stores

deathtokoalas
sounds exactly like a russian propagandist....

Pickleman
are you a troll?

deathtokoalas
i dunno. are you cia?

Pickleman
I am both a member of the Soviet Union and the USA. I am also the son of Idi Amin

instead of trying to blindly invalidate me with baseless claims that contradict even your own statements, how about you look at what i have posted. There is nothing strange about what they are wearing. I know this because military surplus stores always sell these types of apparall, the field jackets and blouses and such are all very popular, especially in eastern europe

Essentially nothing they had was military exclusive apparall, me and you could go buy all that stuff on the internet or at a store and that would not mean we are internationally backed. alot of the stuff they are wearing are out dated, and none of it has actual bullet proof properties, they are essentially casual military apparal for various weather conditions

deathtokoalas
all i'm pointing out is that that's precisely what the russians said when they were confronted with explaining why there were people that looked like russian troops walking through crimea. that's a matter of the historical record. you can look it up, if you'd like.

i mean, it could be that they're both telling the truth. it could also be that they're both lying. it's interesting how similar the responses are, though, isn't it?

Pickleman
Russians was not simply wearing jackets with flags on them, they were actually doong the opposite.

Russian special forces occupied Key isntalations and governement fascilities, while covert operations at night were carried out to sabotage Crimeas Telecomunications and intenernet access, essentially cutting Crimea off entirely from Ukraine.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2014/02/28/Telecom-services-sabotaged-in-Ukraines-Crimea-region/7611393621345

These were not people who were in Ukraine, every in Crimea knew that when they looked up over the Russian border and saw this

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=287_1393605865

Thats a little bit more incriminating than simply wearing a 15 dollar jacket from the military store, and to act as if they are equivelent is illogical

deathtokoalas
well, i think a bit more than that happened in ukraine over the last few weeks.

how's the coffee at the pentagon?

wait. are you senior enough to be allowed in the pentagon?

Pickleman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

deathtokoalas
that's actually not an ad hominem. it's more of a red herring. but it's justified, because you're clearly on the payroll.

so, it seems like they're shipping them out to military bases for retraining.

i think it's good news, in general, that they're gone. yet, what this means for the composition of the ukrainian army is another question.

you know, i don't know how they're managing to derp out of environmental causes. if there's strong evidence that it runs in a family, yet specific genes have all but been ruled out, is this not an argument for environment?

i don't want to argue against this directly. it makes sense in terms of it's core findings. i just have a hard time drawing a connection between mismatched androgen levels and orientation. it makes a little sense if the topic is transsexuality, but how does this propose to explain the gay butch or the lipstick lesbian? it seems starkly incomplete, at best - and borderline ridiculous at worst. i mean, confusing orientation with gender is a basic error. gay people exist across the gender spectrum...

try as you may, you won't find any conclusive science on the topic. my perspective is that this push for a genetic cause is ideologically driven. i think it's worthwhile to explore it as rigorously as possible - in order to rule it out! but i'm incredibly skeptical...

i just can't make sense of the idea that this could be innate. forget the evidence, it just strikes me as wholly irrational. the only way i can make sense of anybody even beginning to think this is if they're beginning with a creationist perspective. "born this way" only makes any sense at all if it means "god made me like this". now, supposing it were true, imagine a christian trying to argue against gay rights, based on that premise. it's not really possible. it would require rejecting the perfection of creation.

i don't think it's thought through, though. i mean, you're also asking that christian to reject the bible. a more likely result is eugenics policies. this is why i push back against this. the idea that we're genetic defects is actually a powerful argument in the hands of the far right.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668167

i'm not going to go so far as to argue it's necessarily a conscious choice. i think it very well can be. what's to stop a straight person from waking up and deciding to be gay? and who is to question their sincerity?

i'm more likely to lean towards subtle psychological causes. i think we're born bisexual and end up one way or the other based on extremely complicated psychological development, much of it at a subconscious level. freud is more useful here than mendel.

i mean, it's not hard to find some gay dudes that would laugh at the idea that they're low in testosterone...

i'm a little less hostile to the idea of genetics + environment, which is closer to the consensus than a lot of popular media will suggest. again, i don't know why there's this push in liberal media for the hard-wired argument. it's a creationist argument...a liberal argument is that people have the right to live the lives that they want to....

in general, though, i realize that the nurture v nature thing is mostly put aside as too restrictive. a little bit of both. that's the view for pretty much everything. and these dichotomies of all types are mostly rejected. complex phenomena generally have complex (and multiple) causes.

but i just can't fathom how anybody could honestly argue that genetics overpower environment in this case, because we're talking about *behaviour*. we're not robots. i see no reason why we couldn't choose to be gay, even if the genes are not there - and i see no reason why we couldn't choose to not be gay, even if the genes are there. so, even if they are there i can't think of them as absolute, defining things. in the case that such a genetic cause is eventually shown (and again i doubt one ever will be), that's still at best an incomplete answer that could only be applied in limited circumstances. in the end, there's a choice, whether some people like it or not.

i think an overlooked question is how much of it is sexual in the first place. i'm going to use my aunt as an example. she's been married twice in her life - first to a male, and then to a female. i haven't really prodded, but my perception is that the second marriage wasn't really about sex at all but about companionship. she seems to have grown into somebody that would prefer the company of another woman over the company of a male.

i can relate to that. i find myself more physically attracted to men, but more emotionally attracted to women. my emotional needs overpower my physical ones. so, how does that make sense in terms of androgens or genes? it's entirely a psychological issue.

there's far too much evidence that orientation is malleable with circumstance, experience and age to take this wiring idea seriously. at best, it's about "genetic predisposition", whatever that means, in context.

yeah. east ukraine is small potatoes. if the russians are going to flex, it's going to be further west.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/01/transnistria-putin-west-europe-dniester-river-moldova

well, the truth is that something like 30% of them actually are anti-semites. they happen to be right on this point, but you can see it in their body language and it's very disturbing to be around them. 30% of the nazi program was textbook socialism.

it sounds to me like netanyahu is using it to raise campaign funds.

deathtokoalas
i think she may be exaggerating the importance and reverberation of the civil disobedience, but this is otherwise worth watching.

Jovan Mitrić
So why USA didn't topple The Saudi Government already? Oh, that's right, oil!

9/11 Nuclear Demolition
Wouldn't that be a reason to invade Saudia Arabia? ;)

Jovan Mitrić
Why, the oil flows just fine.

9/11 Nuclear Demolition
and it flows just fine from Iran, Chile, Venezuela and Libya as well, but it's not about the 'oil' but rather who is in charge of profiting from the oil and therefore who controls it, no? Saudi Arabia (and therefore Israel) have the US by the balls and the cartel works just fine this way. Iran, Chile, Venezuela (and formerly Iraq but look what happened to them) don't sell through the cartels the way that oligarchs want them to, etc so. The oil still 'flows' from Iraq like it has the past 100 years. Only difference is cui bono?

John Doe
...which was the reason to invade Iraq.

Not so much to gain access to Iraqi oil but to make sure the Saudi oil keeps flowing which in turn keeps oil prices stable.

shirehorse91
Your comment makes no sense. Oil is the reason that countries are invaded and oil is the reason that countries aren't invaded.

Jovan Mitrić
Countries with oil that are friendly with USA are not invaded while "rogue" countries with oil are invaded.

deathtokoalas
SAUDI ARABIA WAS INVADED BY THE UNITED STATES IN 1991 AND REMAINS UNDER AMERICAN MILITARY OCCUPATION. THE SAUDI ROYAL FAMILY IS A FIEFDOM OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE. THEIR ACTIONS REFLECT AMERICAN POLICY IN THE REGION.

the reason they're not toppled is that they're obedient puppets that do what they're told.

should they become a problem, the american occupation will carry out it's raison d'etre and bomb the place to bits. that hasn't happened yet, and if that shocks you it's america that you don't understand properly.

9/11 Nuclear Demolition
thank you.

Jim Jones
Nope there are too many crazy Islamists there and if we bomb them that will free all the crazies onto the world!

deathtokoalas
oil is small beans compared to weapons. america is primarily a weapons manufacturer. it only requires oil insofar as it fuels the arms trade. the entire structure of american foreign policy (and domestic policy) exists to maximize profit from arms sales. it's the war economy, stupid. as such, america seeks disorder and chaos and abhors anything that threatens a future of structural peace.

letting those "crazies" out, who are mostly american allies and puppets anyways, is exactly what they want.

the saudis will eventually be bombed. understand this. right now, it's far more profitable to sell them weapons, and then help generate conflicts that generate further contracts.

Batman
no bud its not the muslims who are crazy its not them who are illegally invading nations and killing innocent people its zionist israel and its muppet usa who are doing that and by the way isis is mossad its zionist jews impersonating muslims they are the real terrorists

deathtokoalas
this is of course just a lot of nonsense. but it's easier to dredge up medieval scapegoating than it is to look at facts and evidence.

this doesn't happen unless the ruling party is admitting defeat.

i don't like the new liberal party, though. i'm hoping the vote splits enough to keep them in minority long enough that mulcair gets replaced by somebody further to his left.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/inside-dimitri-soudas-s-last-days-atop-the-conservative-party-1.2593195

deathtokoalas
or maybe we all need to pull our heads out of our asses and learn how to independently research candidates. if our populace was educated, this wouldn't matter.

step 1: turn your tv off. just turn it off. smash it with a sledgehammer. just get rid of it.

VoxynOfCeadus
Everyone you get to vote for is a winner of the contributions war. Pay attention all you want to who you vote for, it doesn't change the fact that one of them will win and the only reason you get to vote for them is because they got enough contributions to pay for their spot. So naive. Turn off the tv, burn the newspaper, don't use the internet. Who are you going to vote for? The people on the ballots. How did they get on the ballots? They paid to be on the ballots with contributions. John Doe could be the most brilliant person to ever live with plans to lead the country to utopia. But if he's not friends with the corporations and other major lobbyists, he will never be on the ballot. You don't get to vote on that.

deathtokoalas
you need to use the internet. it's not like those other types of media.

you're exaggerating. but, if you weren't, you could write candidates in. the situation you're describing is a consequence of voter ignorance and will not be solved by limiting campaign contributions. not only is it a non-problem, the non-solution will not be effective.

the only solution is a more engaged populace.

VoxynOfCeadus
It will level the playing field and allow for a more engaged populace. It will make this rigged system become so obvious that they have to give us real options. As it is, there are no options for real candidates.

deathtokoalas
these rulings are more about eliminating "market restrictions" in corporations competing with each other. we don't need a "level playing field". that's fascistic thinking, that reduces people to automatons that can be programmed by media.

"it's not fair! only the big corporations get to brainwash people!"

no. a free society is one where people act independently of media, not one where your preferred media brainwashing is dominant.

in canada, we have actually banned corporate donations entirely and it hasn't made any difference. people still vote for the petro-state. if anything, it's made things worse by facilitating the flow of money through back room channels. where we used to have two of three parties that supported nationalization of the oil industry, we now have three parties invested in the petrostate. the reason is people care more about low oil prices than they do about climate change. it's rooted in engagement...

you don't understand.

that cop was doing his job. you're just not clear on what his job is. these kinds of intimidation tactics are designed to control the herd into submission to authority by setting an example of brutality. it's a mafia tactic.

people need to see this, but they also need to understand that it's not a bad apple and it's not an accident. it's entirely by design, created by a system that sees the populace as a type of domesticated animal that needs to be controlled by brute force.

now, shut up and go buy something.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkJJXUI_Oq4

up until recently, canada's relations with cuba (especially during the trudeau and chretien years, but even under mulroney) haven't been well-characterized as being an american cheerleader. canada was actually trying to act as an intermediate, and no doubt did in ways we don't really know about. there was of course a lot of opposition to this from segments of the canadian right. there was a minor fiasco up here when castro flew in to act as a pallbearer for trudeau's funeral, with the then recently more aggressive canadian right using it as an opportunity to attack the then ruling liberals as being soft on communist dictators. relations between trudeau and reagan were famously strained due to this sort of thinking, not just with castro but with communism in general. there's a trudeau biography (i can't remember the name of it) that explains that reagan was convinced that trudeau was a communist sympathizer and didn't want to share intelligence with him. it's a sort of open secret that reagan pushed trudeau out of office for exactly this reason.

certainly, canada buckled to a lot of pressure. but, there was an active policy of internationalism and multipolarity in canadian foreign policy throughout the last quarter of the last century, to the point that it felt like it was a part of the canadian national identity. this certainly extended to cuba.

but things have changed here a whole over the last decade. it's not just the change of political leadership, but also the increasing power of canadian resource companies - both in africa and central america.

it's also widely understood in canada that our government is stuck supporting the drug war due to american pressure, not due to ideological agreement. chretien considered legalization of marijuana to be a legacy project. it's understood that it didn't happen because the americans wouldn't allow it. and it's an open secret that bush (or the reaganite bush advisers) pushed him out for similar reasons.

that's not to distract from the point. it's just not a fair characterization of canada between 1965 and 2005 to suggest that they were out to isolate cuba and support the drug war.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1GSLoP76a4

you mentioned you didn't get a browser. that's what would kill this.

i still run a pIII-500 with 640 mb of ram and a 17 gb hd (it was sold with windows 98 on it, in 1999) as a multimedia pc in my living room. all this thing has to do is

1) connect to an external drive with mp3s and send that signal out to a stereo.
2) connect to youtube so i can watch something as i eat.

it's running a stripped down n-lite version of xp with all the services off. the boot-up is slow, but if i was just to pop around the desktop like you are here it would be every bit as fast as that. anything beyond 500 mhz is far from a crappy machine. windows has historically just been awful with memory management.

a linux install on my or your machine would take better advantage of the hardware and i have little doubt that 8 would be just as snappy on my 500, if it would install without giving me an error. it can run word fine. it can play local videos without a hassle. etc. really, just about anything you'd need it for...

...except browsing with more than one tab, but that has more to do with bad design from browsers and web page admins that just throw memory out the window and expect people to run silly specs to compensate for it...

so, we've heard a lot about wolf-coyote hybrids, and how a new species is developing. this is interesting to me because i think it's an overlooked mechanism that describes rapid evolutionary change, as it is driven by habitat change, as it is driven by climate change - in a way that is substantial enough to resolve the gould-dawkins debate. if you don't know what i'm talking about it, don't worry about it. just realize that hybridization is more common than your grade 10 science teacher would have you know.

maybe you heard something about polar bears and grizzly bears, too.

it turns out that the felines in the area also hybridizing. see, there's an underlying theory hidden here that hasn't been written...

http://www.nrri.umn.edu/lynx/information/hybrid.html

one of the things that i like about this re-understanding of the evolution of species is that it suggests that when related species that had been speciated through allopatric means recombine they often react not by competing for similar resources but by co-operating, sharing resources and ultimately combining into new species.

i'm not a naturalist. i'm not tied to "natural behaviour", or see how understanding "how nature works" ought to provide any useful insight into building societies. however, that has interesting ramifications for those that do think in those terms.

"He's afraid of invasion eventually,'' Chretien said. "We discussed that, and I don't think the Americans have the intention of invading Cuba more than they have the intention of invading Canada.''

chretien has this strange way with words, that allows him to carefully state things that would otherwise be off limits. that's a shared interest, now, isn't it? but stated dismissively, to seem like it's crazy talk....when it of course isn't.

i've previously described him as an autistic yoda. enigmatic words of wisdom...

one deals with an existential threat by managing it. it's a subtle difference. regardless, if the american position is to "play ball" with whomever ends up in power, then it would have to apply equally to the results of saudi interests. it doesn't work out to a serious rift, either way.

i think what we saw a few months ago was the saudis throwing a temper tantrum for not getting what they wanted. the sanctions have not been eased. the united states has not asserted a more independent policy. the saudis have not been sent a message. the policy has not been altered. the differences do not constitute a rift; the saudis are merely being unreasonably demanding, and making a fuss about it.

the saudis do not need to blackmail the americans to stop them from being critical of their human rights abuses. rather, one would need to blackmail the americans in order for them to begin to talk like that! one only expects the americans to use that language to accomplish some military aim. rather, the united states has nothing to lose and everything to gain from an autocratic government in the region, and would recreate the status quo if it were to collapse.

it's been imperial british policy to install dictators in strategic areas for a very long time.

thought provoking. if valid, there's some boots on the ground...

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/374553/putin-ukraine-europe-and-right-andrew-stuttaford
http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03_31/Le-Pens-National-Front-to-run-at-least-11-French-towns-1659/

this might be the most awesome thing ever. i am not speaking lightly.

it's like 1% of the cost of the tools that recovery rip-offs use. it's actually cheaper to buy this little thing than it would be to hack together a homemade solution, and it's actually multipurpose - not only is it 1% of a pro device, it actually even pays for itself. it's even cheaper than a recovery evaluation would be...

but the assembled nature of it cuts out all the uncertainty of stringing together cannibalized cables to power sources. things get fried that way, but it's a last resort. not any more. it cuts out the need to use legacy hardware. should work direct from a laptop.

it's going to come with a learning curve, sure. but it could put the fucking vampires out of business. given what this could sell for, to manufacturer it like this and sell it for $30 is just shockingly decent.

http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Bus-Pirate-v36-universal-serial-interface-p-609.html

The Obama administration is underestimating Putin's ambitions

washington post, mar 31, 2014.

"this file was inadvertently published"

yeah. thanks, bezos.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/editors-note/2013/06/25/f45b75b4-d2fb-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html

then again, the russians may be able to work with this guy.

http://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/198414.html
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/ukraine/poroshenko.htm

mmhmm.

well, that's the value of democracy in a bourgeois state - it sets up a fall guy. when the situation gets out of hand, the fall guy takes the fall and a new one is put in the old place. then, people are told their will was upheld and much nonsense is blathered about how democracy was victorious. egypt? sure. how about every four years in the united states?

the russians have been planning around these pipelines through ukraine for a while. it was a huge issue a few years ago. now, not so much. the question is how much can be rerouted to the pipes that surround ukraine and how fast. but, obviously that's not the ideal from the russian standpoint.

i need to reiterate that a russian-backed candidate could very well win the next election - if it is a free election. let us not fool ourselves into thinking that ukraine is suddenly a bastion of free and fair elections, after an illegal seizure of power. the ukrainian media is mostly state owned. this a former soviet state. there's been talk of faked elections in the past.

i haven't seen any polling that attempts to measure the reaction of the conservatives palling around with extremists, but i still think it's highly unlikely to be positive. timoshenko is not a popular candidate and does not have a serious chance in a free election. that would be a clear sign the vote is rigged. rather, this klitschko character seems to be taking the vote *away* from timoshenko's party - or at least he was before he pulled out, as i see he just did. recent polling has poroshenko out in front, but none of it takes into account the most updated field, or the recently announced party of regions candidate (who is under house arrest for his role in pro-russia protests. yeah. free and fair, huh?). it doesn't seem to me like he would need to pick up an overwhelming amount of momentum in order to split the field of pro-eu candidates. if timoshenko doesn't pull out, that could actually be the difference.

that has to be the preferred russian action. at the least, i wouldn't expect to see them do anything rash until after the election.

more concerning to the russians has to be that missile shield, which they have made their displeasure of abundantly clear. i think it's more likely to see russian-instigated instability in poland or latvia than an actually invasion of kharkov...

how much effort would it take to organize a resistance to ICE?

has google figured out that truth != consensus? i admit i kind of miss my silly + number, but i would get over it quickly if they got rid of the whole idea of upvoting altogether.

this particular group is not signatory to any treaty at all. in fact, much of british columbia never signed any kind of treaty with any kind of european power. this puts them in a very different legal category that is presented here in a way that is somewhat confusing. the government cannot break a treaty that was never signed in the first place. further, it logically stands to reason that if no treaty was ever signed then the federal government ought to have no rights over the land at all. of course, this doesn't align with the logic of colonialism. however, the supreme court has ruled that areas that never signed a treaty have full aboriginal title, which is legally a type of land ownership that falls down somewhere higher than fee simple but still exists under crown control. this is a sort of legal compromise that aims to allow for a sort of "virtual sovereignty" in day-to-day matters without reversing the colonial land grab. that is to say that the supreme court has fabricated this legal fiction of the crown granting aboriginal title as a special fief that grants the owner more rights than fee simple but not full sovereignty.

what that means is that the harper government has a mechanism where it can legally appropriate land for specific purposes, so long as it "consults" with the inhabitants (which legally means "provide sufficient warning", rather than "carry out a significant conversation"). all of this stems from supreme court decisions designed to make the colonial appropriation process seem more liberal and friendly on the surface, while actually helping it along under the surface. none of it is by treaty. that is to say that none of it is consensual.

i would rather think there is a strong argument under international law that canada is carrying out a sort of colonization, accompanied by a military occupation of the region. except by the use of sheer force, it is difficult to ascertain how canada ought to have any rights over the area at all.

to put it simply, by what logic does the canadian government claim it has a right to build a pipeline through an area that never ceded it's sovereignty to it except the logic of sheer force overpowering legal and democratic legitimacy?

deathtokoalas
listen, it's not hard to see where ostrovsky's sympathies lie, but who else is sending back images from the ground? what i've seen from vice is neither in line with the russian media nor the western media. it's just reporting what is happening. the russians aren't talking, and that's what they get for not co-operating with media. what's shocking is that there isn't a single "normal" news outlet doing anything remotely resembling this kind of coverage.

what he's showing here is that the russians are storming a ukrainian base. because that's what they're doing. now, if you want to talk about what that means, how justified it is, how brutal it is in actuality (casualties seem to be virtually nil) etc, then these are more subtle questions - and the analysis is needed, certainly. but, first we have to establish the facts on the ground, and the conventional media on both sides has been utterly useless in doing this.

he should win an award. not due to any kind of above the standard journalism, but in contrast to the horrible journalism seen everywhere else.

Vlad K
"the russians aren't talking, and that's what they get for not co-operating with media." It is a laughable statement. Hundreds of journalists work in Crimea, and none of them was injured, as opposite to Kiev. Russian media have tons of interview with locals, Ukrainian officers, including those few of them who chose to serve junta. This propaganda is only for people who don't speak Russian.

deathtokoalas
i obviously meant that they're not speaking to the western media. i apologize, but my russian is currently a bit rusty.

regardless, i've been watching rt and they've been highly coy about the whole thing. the initial line from the russians was that crimea was part of ukraine and they would uphold the international boundaries. now, i happen to actually think that the russians handled this extremely well. i'm not interested in a discussion about saving russian speakers from nazis. people speak of the russians interchangeably with the soviets, while forgetting that the americans are the lineal descendant of the british empire (perhaps future historians will understand the american revolution as a civil war within the british empire that transferred control from london to washington. the roman empire spent more than half it's history centered in modern day istanbul. the real center of islam was baghdad. there are other parallels.). forget about the cold war. remember the crimean war? the english have been trying to cut off russian access to the mediterranean for centuries. the larger context of events over the last fifteen years has seen russia lose deep sea ports in yugoslavia, libya and possibly syria. to lose the black sea fleet would be inconceivable. THEN we would see a fullscale invasion of ukraine.

so, to take the base without any discernible casualties is actually quite impressive. i would not expect the americans to be as restrained, should a "revolution" in canada threaten their control of norad, or something.

but the communications - at least in english - have been incredibly controlled. not that i would expect otherwise. it's just as bad from cnn.

but there are lots of other media sources with budgets and audiences that could be out there reporting - in english, for an english audience.

Vlad K
The military role of Black Sea is not as important as it was before. Moreover, many Russians question the necessity of Black Sea fleet itself. After all, Black Sea is a puddle, and it can be covered by air forces in defense actions. it will be useless in any serious confrontations with NATO because it can be blocked easily at Bosporus. So, It is really hard to believe for the West that two millions Russians and their wellbeing is a serious issue for Russians in Russian Federation?  Why it is so difficult for western mass media to show social surveys related to Crimean crisis and give Russian point of view among others on this crisis. I always hear "Putin" "Pro-Putin" and never "Russians" in western media. The answer is you don't give a shit what people really think until they resist your politics.

deathtokoalas
i don't agree that the crimean fleet is less important than it was. it's not really about direct conflict, it's more about the ability to project power - what was once called "shipping interests" and is now more about controlling resources and networking bases together. ships remain much larger than planes; they can even carry planes. and it's not a coincidence that nato (and aligned forces) has targeted countries with russian naval bases. this is all explained in the project for the new american century document. a better question is why it took russia 15 years and the near loss of it's prized possession to actually react.

the whole bosporus thing is an aspect of it. the london straits convention did succeed in cutting off the russians for a long time, but this led to quite a bit of fighting (including both russian and western interference in the greek civil war) that carried on even after the montreux convention. trying to modify the terms of that convention would indeed be an act of war and would no doubt result in further russian aggression. nato wouldn't dare do this. well, not so long as the russians have access to the black sea, anyways.

i don't think that any government in the world cares about self-determination. i'm not interested in the propaganda from any source. but, the russians don't have a good track record in being trustworthy when it comes to polling or surveying. they probably didn't have to bullshit it in the first place, but 97%? c'mon. you couldn't get 97% of people in a given area to agree with docile statements about kittens. you'd might as well be telling me to trust colin powell...

ian setzer
Don't listen to him, he is a propagandist sent by the russian federation, here is a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades

deathtokoalas
it's not hard to believe. but i feel compelled to point out that it has been recently disclosed by the snowden leaks that the americans do exactly the same thing.

i remember first reading about this in relation to chinese attempts to control dissidents, although they take it to much further extremes. that model seems to have been adopted by other intelligence agencies.

sergei the bad
Not 97%. 83 percent came to a referendum. Those who were against just stayed home.

Антон Березин
83% choose theire future in Crimea. In Kiev only 1% choose future fore everyone in Ukraine...

Efrim Begotten
Based on the guys videos and what he likes, it's hard to say. For me the saddest part about  the Crimean affair is that the western world basically won't risk intervening. After all, we've let Syria burn for years now.

deathtokoalas
the western world is intervening in syria, it's just doing so in a way that most westerners would not approve of. the question a few months ago was not about intervention, it was about escalation. did the west want to escalate it's support for saudi fighters from weapons smuggling to air bombardment and possible invasion? if it weren't for western intervention, there would not be a conflict in the region.

thousands and thousands and thousands of people in syria have died in a fight between russia and america over a naval base. foreign-backed religious extremists roam the countryside, bombing towns to pillage the population while carrying out a genocide against shia and other non-sunnis they consider "polytheists". crimea switched from one authoritarian state to another, with no casualties, and with the majority support of it's citizenry (97% or not). this is the difference between a very controlled russian invasion designed to create order and an off-the-wall american one designed to preserve disorder. it's not a comparable situation, and suggestions that it is should make people angry.

was looking at a blu-ray writer for better storage. the price of media is still ridiculous. but finding one for under $30 is no longer infeasible (if still requiring a little luck). not a priority, though...

there may be a new format out in the next two years. that should help bring the blu-ray prices way down.

the flash made it give up faster, which is actually an improvement. cleaning the drive turned the fan noise down but didn't fix the read issues. it just spins. windows. dos. no os at all. same thing. so, i'm concluding that the drive is broken.

which means i haven't ruled out the ide on the board.

today, i need to get an external sata/ide-->usb thing and some other things. i'll be taking a run for old parts (ram for my secondary board is like $2/stick, might as well fill it up. it's also time to upgrade to usb 2.0, lol, given that usb 3.0 cards have pushed the price down. it's useless from a store's perspective. like, $5. and if i can find one for cheap enough ($10) i might even upgrade the chip from a pIII 500, although the max the board can take is pIII 950.) tomorrow and will grab an old ide then.

i mean, that board has maximum specs that are dirt cheap to attain. might as well...

alright, yamaha...

i know it's a little odd to go looking for a dos firmware installer for a cd-rom manufactured in 1999, but you really couldn't spare the 200 kb on your website? was it the bandwidth?

jerks.

there's legacy hardware sites, but they don't even support dos anymore, so i have to install windows to flash the drive. ugh...

i don't even think it's going to work, it's just a last chance before i trash it.

worse, people that flash things know it's not always so good to flash things from windows.

i could brick it trying to fix it. right now, i don't know if it's programming is corrupted, if it's physically broken or if it's just ridiculously dirty.

that little 200 kb (if that) file could prevent somebody from having to buy a new....

yeah. great system we've got going, here.

if you're curious, i'm trying to get the boot block on my motherboard to kick in. it's just simply not reading the floppy connector, but i think it's because the pin is damaged on it. the sata drives are spinning, but they're not reading. and i don't think i'm getting power to the usb ports. the ide connector seems to work, and the drive is spinning, but the drive isn't reading in my other pc at all, so i can't really conclude that that isn't working until i can verify that the drive is working. i have an ide dvd but i know it doesn't read cd-rs well. so i need the drive to work to rule out that the boot block isn't kicking in, before i go through the process of trying to serial in.

jessica amber murray
google killer: a search engine that removes stores.

so that when you type in "sata II" looking for information about how sata II works, you don't get 1000 links trying to sell you a sata II drive.

should the user wish to actually a purchase a product, they could use a specialized search engine designed to compare prices.

as we speak, the internet is becoming another entry in a long line of the casualties of religion & capitalism.

tommy d
You can also just add more search terms, like "SATA II reviews" or something along those lines.

jessica amber murray
so, i can read the product reviews at amazon? or the technical details at newegg? there's a few filters that, if you're lucky, might bring what you want to the top, but there's not anything that's going to strike them out altogether besides a blocklist.

tommy d
SATA II details, SATA II information, etc.

jessica amber murray
ok, go ahead and google that and tell me how many white papers and schematics show up.

(in comparison to how many product reviews and online stores)

tommy d
Okay, I see your point now lol

larry king.

on rt.

i'll never get over this...

known known, known unknown, unknown known, unknown unknown.

unknown known is a contradiction in terms. the rest is simple logic. work it out.

try kant for help.

there are things that you know that you know. 2+2 = 4.

there are things that you know you don't know. does pi terminate?

there cannot be things that you don't know you know. well, unless you want to get freudian.

there are thing you don't know you don't know. yet. hindsight is 20/20. newton's laws of motions needed some work.

capeche?

fwiw, it's clear now that the torture was designed to extract false confessions to justify further pre-determined policy. the debate is sort of not grounded.

this particular group is not signatory to any treaty at all. in fact, much of british columbia never signed any kind of treaty with any kind of european power. this puts them in a very different legal category that is presented here in a way that is somewhat confusing. the government cannot break a treaty that was never signed in the first place. further, it logically stands to reason that if no treaty was ever signed then the federal government ought to have no rights over the land at all. of course, this doesn't align with the logic of colonialism. however, the supreme court has ruled that areas that never signed a treaty have full aboriginal title, which is legally a type of land ownership that falls down somewhere higher than fee simple but still exists under crown control. this is a sort of legal compromise that aims to allow for a sort of "virtual sovereignty" in day-to-day matters without reversing the colonial land grab. that is to say that the supreme court has fabricated this legal fiction of the crown granting aboriginal title as a special fief that grants the owner more rights than fee simple but not full sovereignty.

what that means is that the harper government has a mechanism where it can legally appropriate land for specific purposes, so long as it "consults" with the inhabitants (which legally means "provide sufficient warning", rather than "carry out a significant conversation"). all of this stems from supreme court decisions designed to make the colonial appropriation process seem more liberal and friendly on the surface, while actually helping it along under the surface. none of it is by treaty.

i would rather think there is a strong argument under international law that canada is carrying out a sort of colonization, accompanied by a military occupation of the region. except by the use of sheer force, it is difficult to ascertain how canada ought to have any rights over the area at all.

i think everything i've seen suggests that the saudis actually interpret the iranians as a sort of lost, insolent province - as outlandish as that may seem, given that it's been a long time since the caliphs. but that's the mindset, as crazy as it is.

i think this gets it, though.

again, this is refreshing. we've seen footnotes in media that the protests continue against the coalition that took over, but nothing from the ground.

so, the guy upstairs wants to turn the air conditioning on when it's a high of two degrees. i'm an open-minded person, but that's really a signal that it's time to lose some weight for your own health. and i see no option but to turn the heat up to 25.

i get the feeling that the window is going to be open all summer.

i have no way to confirm or deny her claims, but this is precisely the same argument we heard about the humanitarian mission into afghanistan.

they're preparing us for a second invasion to get rid of the shia heretics. it's been building up for several years. it's hard to swallow, but deal with it.

i want to clarify: this might not be a boots-on-the-ground invasion, and if it is it will likely be an invasion of the whole region: both iraq and syria.

however, it's becoming clear that iraq is on the target list for regime change, however it happens to be done.

*the truth is that maliki has been on the list for a long time*

on the one hand, this is yet more evidence of how companies collude, rather than compete. and you know what? that's what my economics 100 text taught me, too.

in theory, it's in the interests of consumers for them to compete. but, it's simply not in the interests of companies to compete - not even in theory. so, why would they?

on the other hand, it opens up another question: is it in the interests of consumers to have workers compete for higher salaries? i mean, my empathy isn't particularly deep, here.

whole thing's a mess.

there's a bit of propaganda here, but i've been pushing this point: it's about saving face.

but i want to make something clear....

it's become apparent over the last few years that a prime function of these al qaeda groups (or at least some of them) is to stamp out secular and democratic movements. there is a pattern across the region over the last several years: whenever a secular uprising threatens the status quo, these groups appear to stamp it out and create an armed uprising for sharia law, instead. considering where the funding comes from, i can't consider that a coincidence...

so, what is al qaeda? it seems to be that a big part of what it is, right now, is a sort of saudi secret service (something part way between stazi and brownshirts) agency, that stamps out and co-opts threats to saudi hegemony in the region before they develop.

there's five parts to this. if you've been paying attention, it's a good summary. if you haven't, you actually might find it very surprising.

so, what we're seeing develop across the centre of the golden crescent is a fundamentalist islamic state backed by the saudis that is currently at war with both iraq and syria, along with the kurds and *also* militants backed by turkey and qatar, and is ultimately aligned against iran and any proxies (which would include hezbollah). by all appearances, this seems to be an attempt by the saudis to redraw the map of the area, and appears to be being resisted by just about everybody. in point form...

saudis: backing extreme al qaeda type groups that are fighting everybody to establish theocracy and eject iranian influence.

turks & qataris: support the same general goals as the saudis (and israelis) but reject that level of extremism, and back less fundamentalist groups to attempt to contain it. the qataris seem to be concerned about human rights, while the turks seem to be concerned about instability on their eastern border. they are currently in a proxy war with both the saudis and the iranians.

iran-syria-hezbollah-russia: form an alliance attempting to uphold the existing states in the region.

iraq: the saudis are targeting them as proxies for the iranians, while the americans seem to be less accusatory and interested in selling them arms. they're not yet in the russian alliance, but may end up in it if things continue.

egypt: conveniently preoccupied. current military leaders are saudi-backed. qataris (and perhaps turks) believe it to be tyrannical, and support muslim brotherhood.

israel: provided some air support. mostly quiet, though.

civilians, socialists and anarchists: fucked.

americans: nato-aligned with turkey. the turks are the most important military ally, not the israelis or saudis. large weapons supplier to both the saudis (and therefore the rebels) and the iraqis. the cynical way to look at it is that this is a designed policy to get them to kill each other. the americans seem to be arming several sides.

yet, the saudis seem to have greater ambitions than this. even if the americans succeed in containing them through arming iraq (if not syria), that itself is playing with fire. at some point, they're going to realize this, if they haven't already, and then the target once again becomes washington. as a short term strategy, it may work; as a long term strategy, it can only cement the certainty of a long war directed against north america. far from being brilliant, it's actually quite foolish. well, unless you only care about the next ten years...

this is the concern raised here, and it's a valid one.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/patrick-cockburn-alqaidas-second-act--the-full-fivepart-series-9208303.html

there's no doubt plenty of truth to this, but it plays into the same narrative that exists in syria and will - if the saudis have their way - be used as justification for a second round of regime change in iraq.

i mean, this is the first i've heard of these peaceful protestors. it's plausible that i just never heard of them. yet, the story a few months ago was saudi backed militants storming the region. these things hardly contradict themselves (given that the saudi militants' main aim is to stamp out local democratic uprisings by co-opting them into religious ones), but it all just seems very convenient.

look, i'm an anarchist, but it's *because* i recognize the state's right to defend itself. "if necessary"? sure. any state has that right. who could deny that, and defend the individual's same right? yet, this is why we should abolish states.

so long as states exist, i cannot condemn them for this behaviour. rather, i can condemn protestors for their naivete.

i hereby declare this weekend to be....

PASTA WEEKEND.

(preferably stated with some ominous dread)

interviewer: wow, what a great attitude.
frank: it's called rational thinking.
interviewer: so few people seem to be able to get a handle on it.
frank: yeah, it was phased out in the reagan administration.

this might resonate MORE now than it did then. in the end, i think his understanding of post-war culture will overpower the prevailing one, and people will look back and think it was defined by utter idiocy.

deathtokoalas
ok. but can you show us how to cook a potato in a chicken?

"don't egg him on"!

also, can you do a chicken in a watermelon?

of
having fun by yourself? =D 

deathtokoalas
other people are mostly figments of our own imagination, anyways.

reggie
How about an egg (or 2) inside a potato inside a chicken. That would offer a decent balanced meal for you and a friend, or an imaginary friend who's not that hungry and wants you to eat their food ;-) hehehe

deathtokoalas
indeed, that's what i really want, is that depth. ultimately, what i'm interested in is that age old question....

also, it's very true that other people mostly exist in our minds, subjectively. there is an object out there with physical qualities, but personalities are mostly interpreted by outside observers. so, the way i interpret a person is different than the way another person will interpret that same person, the difference being entirely perceptive and existing solely in our minds. i'm not sure if what i meant to say got across, there.

NorthSurvival
No, but a pizza in a potato.

deathtokoalas
now, how are you going to fit a pizza in a potato? unless, you mean a pizza pocket idea...

this is also done right, with a proper amount of key force.

i'm done with rachmaninov for the night....

actually, rachmaninov and angst go well together. under 15, and it's just notes on a screen. but a little older than that is probably the ideal age to get this right.

she's hitting the keys with sufficient force. that's the big thing. and it's a russian thing, consistently. her western counterparts want to over-intellectualize and turn it into some dainty prance, rather than the noisy protopunk classic that it is.

i'm mildly relieved. i suppose that if we end up on the other side of some curtain, we can still rely on the former soviet states (and satellites) to play the russian classics for us properly, without having to endure westerners butchering them.

i have a moderately recent american version and a modded russian version designed for smashing pumpkins fans (creamy dreamer) and what i've found is that the russian muff seems to be designed for better sound at lower volumes. the russian version does sound clearer and more usable here, but that's why. it has to do with the way a muff works. it's supposed to be plugged directly into a tube amp at high volume levels. this test is consequently largely useless.

deathtokoalas
the orchestra sounds good, but she's just not hitting the piano hard enough.

Eleanor Gay
Does she need to pound the keys to mke the music? Maybe for you to hear the music.

deathtokoalas
this particular piece needs to be pounded, yes. bourgeois westerners that want to focus on masturbatory techniques have consistently failed to understand that for close to a hundred years. the russians grasp it properly...

go find a russian recording to hear it bashed out the way it's supposed to be, then come back.

shantihealer
Your right, my friend, she not only underhits the piano but kind of smacks it.

SugarTomAppleRoger
You are joking of course. Few can play with such power as she does.

deathtokoalas
i've pointed out a few performances that have the proper level of aggression. she just doesn't sustain the smashing throughout.

Ricardo Macayo
y tú muerte a los koalas si que sabes de música!

deathtokoalas
i apologize if i've mistranslated, but i think you're asking me why i hate koalas.

the answer is that they're revoltingly cute.

valkhorn
I hear nothing wrong with it. The notes are clear enough, and she plays with finesse - which is very hard to do on this piece, esp. the last movement.

deathtokoalas
see, that's the problem - the finesse. this isn't a technical, subtle piece. it's a banger, meant to be played with all the bourgeois sophistication of "tutti frutti".

anyways, i'm repeating myself. thread closed.

ok, this sounds like a solid version. it's likely not coincidental that it's russian, but it does look like the whole concerto is up here.

so i was able to find a proper russian version on youtube, after all.

this is better, it seems to get the point better, but the playing is a little blurry (it sounds like he's using the sustain pedal to blur some of the notes he can't hit in the same way that electric guitarists use a distortion pedal), and the mix is pretty piano-heavy.

busted? lol...

no grit. and, look at 3:23: he's catching his breath? maybe his suit is too tight, and it's restricting his breathing. then he prances through the rest of it like it's some kind of gentle ballet...

this should be beaten down with every ounce of emotional and physical force that can be gathered, as though the police have shown up to steal your last ounce of vodka at 4:53 am and there's nothing you can do about it....

deathtokoalas
his is worse, he sounds bored through half of it. yeesh...

i have a version by the soviet symphony orchestra that owns everything i've seen online so far, but my discs are packed. i can't even find info online. fucking cold war, getting in the way of what really matters...

Concertos n°2 and n°3 (USSR Symphony Orchestra, feat. conductor: Gennady Provatorov, piano: Victor Eresko).

find that one if you want to hear somebody just bash this out.

XaverScharwenka
Or simply enjoy one of the best versions ever, by Earl Wild... but then again, we all like things differently.

deathtokoalas
earl wild does not sound like a very russian name.

perhaps, you'd like to suggest a wonderful slavic folk version of 'the entertainer' while you're at it? grigorii does gershwin? on balalaika?

fucking hipsters.

1231CarrieCheuk
your profile pic is so frightening

deathtokoalas
that's only because you can't see the muppets dancing around me.

South Texas Piano
Please tell them to save you

deathtokoalas
i believe that request ought to be formed in terms of a question, but you forget that the average muppet is a monster!

12x12surface
Can you post it on YT?? 

deathtokoalas
i don't have muppet copyright access.

deathtokoalas
i agree with those arguing that she's butchering this. i've always interacted with the piece as a blaring romp, written by an emotionally insecure male that is releasing all of his anger and frustration. she's playing it in a soft and sensuous manner that invites a sultry lounge singer.

the notes are flawless, but there's just no rage or sadness or frustration in it.

deathtokoalas
i mean, maybe she's trying to sex it up. fine.

...but this really needs to be played by 40 year old virgins (ok, i'm exaggerating) to get the maximum feel out of it.

Tim
your understanding of the composer's work is clearly limited if you think anything he wrote is devoid of lust or passion. also, wang's artistic conviction and integrity are what make her performance so remarkable. interpreting a piece in a way that deviates from the norm (or, in this case, your personal preference) is not indicative of poor musicianship.

deathtokoalas
did i not point out that she played the piece flawlessly? but if you understand where the piece is coming from, and all the self-doubt and insecurity attached to it, you'll realize she's completely missing the point.

i mean, if i want to listen to shmaltzy, upper class nonsense i'll go listen to mozart or shostakovich or something. what makes rachmaninov special is the social anxiety in the writing. you take that away, and it's just another delve into aristocratic masturbation. there's plenty of that for those that want it, without needing to ruin that which stands away from it.

i kind of held back a little bit initially, but does she look to you like somebody that has ever experienced the kind of shit rachmaninov went through? young, beautiful, rich. she'd need a brain transplant to get her mind around this. it would be remarkable if she did understand this emotionally, that is as something more than notes on a page - which she does clearly understand quite well.

Vlad
eugh...welcome to music, blessed art it is, where each comes with their own interpretation.

deathtokoalas
this is scored music, not jazz. personal contributions should be kept to an absolute minimum. the performer is a worthless intermediary between my ears and the composer's mind - a necessary evil. i don't care what she thinks.

Vlad
Scored music is still subject to interpretation (not talking about improvisation). Any two people will feel to play the same piece differently

deathtokoalas
completely wrong liberal bullshit. if i want to listen to yuja wang, i'll listen to one of her compositions. i'm here to listen to rachmaninov. the moment she brings her individuality into the process is the moment she completely fucks up. you need to get your head out of this relativistic gallow before it comes down. there are correct and incorrect ways to play a piece.

i don't want to continue this into perpetuity, so i'm just going to be clear about the non-relativistic reality of things before i close off further comments.

there are two ways to perform a scored piece of music:

1) the way it was written
2) incorrectly

this slutty performance is not capturing the piece the way it was written. it's a "modern interpretation" that replaces the tortured soul of the piece with vapid and gratuitous sexuality. therefore, it's wrong. there's no further worthwhile debate on the point, unless you want to resort to the idiocy of "it's just your opinion".

it's not. and that decadent attitude is destroying our culture and our civilization.

out.

benchmark disc.

benchmark disc.

benchmark disc.

i realize i'm interpreting something in translation, but what strikes me as more interesting is the way the dude is pandering to her. it wouldn't happen if she were running things? he won't argue with the idea of nuking russia? there's a few sections where it seems like he should insert "your highness". he knows he'd better not piss her off, and seems to be aware that she's temperamental.....

oil princess, indeed.

there's been some suggestions that this is so outlandish that it could only be something she leaked to boost her popularity with the crazies.

....but those that have been following things since the orange revolution know that this woman is the precise stereotype of the mentally unstable upper class daddy's girl, who will do whatever absurd thing is necessary to get her own way.

cray-cray.

that's why they jailed her.

that's right. it's about preventing democracy.

that's right. the conflict between qatar and the saudis is a consequence of saudi support for the egyptian military, rather than the cause of events in egypt (excluding the coup itself, of course). and with the ruling we see why emotions are so high.

you want to know why we can't have another cold war? because i can't find any decent recordings of rachmaninov. no, i don't want to listen to some asian child prodigy that can hit the notes but has no emotional investment because she lacks the maturity. i don't want to compete over who can do it better, either.

the best version i've heard of the second piano concerto (by far) is by the soviet orchestra, which i found as an import from france (you can keep your freedom fries) in a second hand store several years ago. it's nowhere to be found online. and, it's not hard to guess why. instead, we have versions by west germans, koreans, jews from chicago...WESTERN VERSIONS....

none of them compare to the soviet version.

what is important in life is not which set of bankers controls which oil rig. what is important is the ability to listen to high quality renditions of universally recognized russian classics. likewise, russians have an inalienable right to access american renditions of american jazz.

"we have bitches brew, too. dmitri play trumpet through superior delay system. better quality big muff for vladimir's guitar."

it's not the same, dammit.

we need to put this into perspective before we revert back to that fucking bullshit all over again.

i couldn't condemn the russians for moving into poland or the baltics to dismantle that offensive weapons system before it comes up. the world might not really understand, but that falls under the rubric of self-defense in my estimation. it could actually prevent a catastrophe.

nato has a mutual defense clause, though. so, any invasion would have to be engineered to appear to be a local revolution, so as to not invoke the clause. crimea may be something of a model. it was so fast and smooth that it seemed to be a contingency plan. so, that's something to keep an eye out for.

one of the reasons the neo-con propaganda in iraq was effective was that the idea of preemptive war is indeed justifiable as self-defense. the problem was that the rhetoric didn't meet the reality. saddam wasn't building weapons. he wasn't a threat to anybody. russia, on the other hand, is coming up against the possible necessity to truly move preemptively. the united states is building weapons, and is a threat to the existence of russia.

that being said, i'm having a hard time taking the reports of an imminent russian invasion of eastern ukraine seriously. i'm just having a hard time imagining it, after so many years of russian complicity.

but i was speaking before about a pandora's box. the base in crimea is so strategically imperative that it is tempting to think of it exceptionally. eastern ukraine? not at all. there's some factories, but factories can be built elsewhere. if they move into ukraine, it will dispel all questions as to whether this box has opened, and it will signal russia's intent to shift strategies and aggressively move deep into europe.

...and it *is* america's fault. all of this militarization has created a situation where seeming russian acts of aggression are entirely rational, as they are rooted not in aggression but in defense.

americans do understand this, even if they don't immediately realize it. it's the same logic as the cuban missile crisis. again, people don't know about turkey, so for the sake of the example let's forget about it. how many americans would argue that kennedy should have just shrugged off missiles in cuba? how many would condemn preemptive action against cuba? so, how can they expect putin to just ignore this provocation?

i'm not trying to draw attention to the double standard. that much is obvious. i'm pointing out that if the americans don't change their policy, they are going to be held responsible by history for provoking the russians into a major conflict. at this point, abandoning the missile shield may be the only way to prevent that conflict.

but that will be determined by the severity of russia's next move.

we've all been watching american presidents produce this speech for so long, that maybe it's easy to forget that beyond the rhetoric lies the basis of american foreign policy.

what he's doing is waving around the benefits of american empire and hitting them over the head with it like an anvil. never forget, indeed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVZWLqkBtf0

his history is largely propaganda, though. well, he's marketing the empire.

you don't believe the advertisements you see on tv, do you?

the doublethink is also impressive.

he talks like this, and then rejects a cold war immediately after. it's remarkable.

we should really rename "midlife crisis" to that period that exists between pretending you've outgrown yourself to realizing you haven't, because outgrowing one's self is an incoherent idea.

the clinton segment of this is worth rewatching a few times. pegged it...

this is how you do this. maduro doesn't have the same military status that chavez did. in the end, whomever gets military backing rules the country.

if i was running things, i'd invade saudi arabia and steal *their* oil.

rt needs to do a better job separating the three aspects (grassroots hippies, fascists, establishment conservatives) from each other.

ok. but, what factor did the authority in the right sector play, given their integration with the conservative party?

ok, but is it infighting, the authorities trying to stamp out a threat or a putsch?

“you'll be the first to go"

good.

a test of his popularity?

the country elected a socialist to reverse the disastrous policies of sarkozy, and got sarkozy 2.0 instead. kind of like bush/obama.

now, he's despised, and the country is practically boycotting them...

in the medium term, that means social unrest is a virtual certainty. the country has given up on the ability of the political system to accomplish anything.

sure. the socialists get elected and act like conservatives, leading to widespread voter apathy.

memo to the pseudo-left: if you want people to vote for you as an alternative to the fascist right, stop behaving like the fascist right.

wow.

these are all such meaningless changes. the program launcher gui as a selling point? well, they're an operating system, sure, but it's being a little literal. for years, now, it's like they've been making operating systems the same way they design xbox games.

and how many people are going to turn this all off and go back to a windows xp desktop within ten minutes of powering it up? and, who can blame these people, given the difference in performance?

what about driver support? take a flip through some forums. they broke things as simple as file operations moving to vista (ten hours to copy files?) and never really fixed it in 7 or 8. how about creating a version with an optimally compiled kernel, designed for speed rather than appearance? stripping xp to the core and calling it "windows lite" sounds like a waaaaaay better idea to me....

the share of xp users is actually around 30%. that's more than apple and linux combined. the reason they've stuck with xp is because it's fast and stable, and the "upgrades" are flashy and obtuse. that's a huge share of the market that's going to walk the other way if they don't get something concrete and without frills that they can actually use for terrestrial purposes.

the headline made me lol.

actually, i think we should open a national discussion on pragmatic uses of dead bodies. we waste so much good organic material by dumping it in boxes. it's madness, really.

incinerating isn't as good an idea as composting, granted. but, it's better than burying it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10717566/Aborted-babies-incinerated-to-heat-UK-hospitals.html

i'm mostly not a bentham advocate, definitely not a utilitarian, but he had a point on this topic. robert newman's pope example is not likely to happen, but it would be nice to see some prominent people stand up and advocate for recycling human tissue.

we understand now that a lot of the things we need to exist are finite. it's just good resource management.

the chechnya thing...

the primary reason the chechnya thing is a bad parallel is that it isn't really a populist movement. the fairness of elections is always suspect, but the official results of elections in chechnya have consistently been to stay in russia.

i don't want to present the fallacy that i'm an expert on this complicated conflict, i am not, but my understanding of the dynamics is that it's a conflict between what are basically local tyrants (mostly western-backed islamic extremists) and the centralized state in moscow, with an ethnic group that identifies as neither. that is to say that there really isn't a significant independence movement there, but rather that there are two equally oppressive forces fighting over control of the region. for moscow, it's a slippery slope problem - let one small area break away, and deal with western-backed insurgents at every crossing point. for the west, it's destabilization. for the local tyrants themselves, there may be some religious aspect but it's just mostly about control. and for the people that live there it's about trying to escape...

chechens are caucasians, which are thought by linguists to have existed in the region between the caspian and black seas for upwards of 20,000 years. geneticists may point out that there has been large amounts of migration from arabs (and other semitic groups, like assyrians), indo-europeans (alans, greeks, armenians, persians and plausibly hittites), turks (including contemporary azeris), mongols and others, making the area more of a cultural melting pot. but, one of the arguments for this being the urheimat of the caucasian languages is the diversity of languages in the region. these languages are thought to all be of the same family, but sometimes it's hard to draw the connection. there's no really serious understanding of how the caucasian languages, turkic languages, indo-european languages and basque are related, but one idea is that they all split off roughly the same time through geographic separation some time around the last ice age, but that indo-european and caucasian may share a closer derivation. that is to say that the chechens (along with the georgians and some of the other groups in the region) seem to be the descendants of the ice age humans that lived in the caucasus mountains. it's probably not a coincidence that these isolated language isolates are mostly in remote, mountainous areas that have been able to withstand or ignore colonization happening around them; the colonizers would always argue it was easier to let them be, so long as they didn't bother them. the area was still considered uncrossable, uninhabitable and controlled by savages (i.e. not part of the civilized world) deep into the roman period.

what i'm getting at is that a greater caucasian state is an impossibility. first, you've got iranians on both sides of the mountain. second, you've got turks all over the place. third, you've got armenians, assyrians and various other types of indo-europeans and semites to the south. then you've got the russians to the north. but worst of all is that every city in the region speaks it's own language and has it's own identity. these are very insular people, that *culturally* prefer the idea of withdrawing to isolation to the idea of fighting for independence.

that makes a real separatist movement almost impossible to develop organically. they're more likely to want to define themselves in opposition to the city 50 miles down the road than work together to build a common identity. it's tribalism to the extreme. but, mostly, it's isolationism to the core.

what the chechen people want is autonomy, in the sense of being left to live alone without being forced into any kind of national framework. that is cultural anarchism that is inherently opposed to nation-building types of independence movements and is likely to see a local warlord as a greater threat than a distant oligarch. the results of the referendum are constantly reasonable, in the context of that desire for autonomy. as an anarchist myself, i can completely understand the preference for russian tanks over islamic extremists; one is a more or less benign military occupation that ultimately doesn't care about how i choose to live, while the other wants to enforce laws and dictate it's conception of society.

so, again, election results anywhere are difficult to take at face value, and the context makes them particularly difficult. yet, the idea that chechen citizens would prefer autonomy within russia over independence in an islamic emirate is entirely believable, given all the things i just typed.

so, it's a bad comparison.

hardly commie propaganda:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1440823/Most-Chechens-want-to-remain-part-of-Russia.html