Rajeev Ramachandran @waltzingmonkey

[5 hours into completely deadlocked negotiation] iranian diplomat: a midsummer night's dream? the merchant of venice? surely you've at least seen Lawrence of Arabia? 22 yr old "based fascist" yale graduate raised on 4chan and youtube (chief US negotiator): not ringing any bells

Will anyone in Europe grow a spine over one of its citizens in high standing being treated like this for doing his job? No? Alright.

Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده @RamAbdu

a day ago

French judge Nicolas Gouyou, who issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu at the ICC, says Visa and Mastercard blocked all his cards, leaving him unable to make purchases. He says judges, lawyers, & politicians are being intimidated & treated as criminals.

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this is what ppl are bugging out over? be thankful for tropical fruit in a fridge and the glory of the washing machine? who are we pitching here, Betty Draper? annual real wages are flat, fellas--i think it's understandable folks don't want a moment of silence & awe 4 NewTech

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Mike Pesca @pescami

3 days ago

Ordinary Abundance. This is the greatest thing I've read in weeks. No kidding. This should win a Pulitzer in a category not yet invented. ordinaryabundance.com

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No one thinks their ancestors were the ones shoveling the horse shit from the royal stable

. @Fimiye

a day ago

“I’m too scared to talk to this girl.” What your ancestors were doing on a random Wednesday:

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What separates me from many Chinese and Western scholars who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s is not ideology, but memory. They grew up when China was clearly poorer and weaker than Japan, America and Europe. That experience left many Chinese with an instinctive awe of the West, and many Westerners with the assumption that China was somehow meant to remain behind. I have no lived memory of the Deng or Jiang years. For as long as I can remember, China has mostly been getting better. My mother is an ordinary railway worker in a small fifth-tier city. Her monthly salary rose from RMB 3000 to tens of thousands, while the children of her siblings went on to good universities. This was not some isolated family miracle. It was the China my generation grew up in. Meanwhile, we watched the 2008 financial crisis, Japan’s economic stagnation and political drift, and America’s growing disorder and dysfunction. Japan and America were powerful. So what? Power deserves recognition, not worship. My generation may sometimes be overconfident. But we carry little inherited inferiority. When older commentators describe China seeking a place equal to its strength as a “threat,” they are really asking China to keep looking up to a West that no longer exists. To a new generation of Chinese, that whole narrative sounds hopelessly dated—and frankly absurd.

Chen Zhuo | Katrina @SouthernM46171

16 hours ago

Turning Zhu Rongji’s passing into an occasion for another “China in decline” column is a cheap trick. Smith misses the China whose future still seemed to follow an American script. At a White House lunch in 1999, Zhu told Clinton that China wanted American mainframes and

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The dumbest Israeli propaganda 🤝 NY Times

jasper nathaniel @infinite_jaz

18 hours ago

This headline is making me insane

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As of now, there are no more US aircraft carriers in Asia apnews.com/article/aircra…

at this point, you’re acting either too naive or ignorant or your entire leadership lives in its La La Land. do you not know what happens to a Muslim in India under a Modi regime? why the fuck would you hire Muslims to do these tasks when you know they’re the first target in the line of attack? who will bring back Abdul’s father? this is just ridiculous.

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57 years ago

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For most of history, surgery was done without anasthesia. Fruit was a luxury: people used to rent pineapples to show them off at parties. The sewing machine meant people no longer owned only 2-3 articles of clothing. Hand stitching clothing used to take 14 hours. Ordinary abundance lives all around us. My favorite quotes from people’s first reaction to these hidden marvels. Highly recommend checking out ordinaryabundance.org to see mundaneness in a new light.

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Mike Pesca @pescami

3 days ago

Ordinary Abundance. This is the greatest thing I've read in weeks. No kidding. This should win a Pulitzer in a category not yet invented. ordinaryabundance.com

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Between June 2024 and January 2025, a full 62% of commercial honey bee colonies in the United States died, according to an extensive survey.⁠ ⁠ As soon as scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) caught wind of the die-offs, they sprang into action—but their efforts were slowed by a series of federal funding cuts and layoffs. 6 months later, USDA scientists finally identified a culprit.⁠ ⁠ According to a preprint posted last June, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal.⁠ ⁠ Tracking the rise of miticide resistance is critical, experts say. Honey bees pollinate more than 90 commercial crops in the U.S., generate between $20 billion and $30 billion in agricultural revenue, and play a key role in keeping the U.S. food supply stable.⁠ Learn more on #NationalHoneyBeeDay: scim.ag/3TW8UmR

I need to say something about rust. Specifically, why rusting warships matter far more in Hormuz than anyone realizes. First, I don’t know when this video was taken. Ships have been looking better lately. This may date to the low point of the Biden administration. IDK but it did show up on my YoyTube feed today so it’s probably being seen by potential recruits too. But the underlying issue needs addressing. Every time I post photos of rusting Navy ships, my phone blows up with the same reply: “But John, it doesn’t affect operational performance.” Look at the rust on the radars, the brackets, the ventilation. There is no way that equipment is performing at 100 percent. Maybe the radar is at 98 percent. I don’t know. But will every louver seal completely when the tanker you’re escorting takes a hit and the DDG has to steam through burning bunker fuel? What about a CBRN attack? Nobody is going to convince me those closures are all quick and tight. The second reply comes from captains and admirals: “They had a brutal deployment.” “The crew is already strained.” Agreed. My criticism was never aimed at the crew. It lands on Navy leadership for running these platforms past the point of recovery. But when it gets this bad, ship’s leadership owns a share too. Long deployments are miserable. What’s more miserable is walking out to watch the sunrise every morning and seeing filth. We clean our houses and our offices for a reason. Morale dies in ugly surroundings. Here’s something else I’ve noticed lately. Crews will pour effort into one side of the ship and neglect the other. That alone cuts your docking options in half, and docking is the most dangerous evolution after combat. But the deeper cost showed up in a lunch I once had with a very senior @Maersk executive. Maersk. The company with the beautiful ships painted bright blue. What he told me was fascinating. They spend millions every year not just on paint chemistry, but on ensuring every hull in the fleet is the exact same shade of blue with the exact same reflectivity. Why? Container shipping is a commodity. Even if you insist your box moves on a Maersk ship, they may hand it to a competitor. That’s why you never see Maersk billboards or television ads. The ship is the billboard. And almost nobody sees it, because container terminals sit in industrial wastelands far from any city center. So why spend a fortune polishing a billboard no customer will ever look at? Because the people who do see it are the ones who matter. Sailors. When a sailor on a rusty ship passes a Maersk vessel at night, he registers that ship’s judgment. When he gets home, he applies for a job there. To be the best, Maersk has to hire the best. And the best want to sail beautiful, well maintained ships. I’m writing all this because the real problem in the strait right now is the hundreds of ships still trapped in the Gulf. Not all of them, but the Navy has offered protection to some, and the companies and crews have declined. They would rather sit and earn nothing than risk the hull. Any American naval officer knows that even an ugly destroyer is the most lethal platform on the ocean. The merchant captains who have to trust that destroyer know nothing about Aegis, weapons doctrine, or Navy combat procedure. They just DO NOT TRUST rusty ships. What they know is the oldest rule in the trade: your reputation is your paintwork. We give a rusted, neglected ship a wide berth, because a crew that ignores small things like corrosion probably ignores large things like sleeping or drinking on watch. A US Navy bridge team would never do either. But the foreign master watching from two miles off has no way to know that. And almost every merchant captain out there today is foreign. So I don’t care how long or hard the deployment was, and I don’t blame the crew. I blame the admirals and SES that have made the only real solution, building and maintaining more ships, nearly impossible.

What he said. During Vietnam, the USN kept carriers on Yankee Station for 6-8 months BUT every month or so they went to a safe port in the AOR for a week+ for replenishment, refit, and, critically, shore liberty. What the USN is doing in our Iran War is just madness and explains why morale is cracking.

Sal Mercogliano (WGOW Shipping) 🚢⚓🐪🚒🏴‍☠️ @mercoglianos

2 days ago

🚢What is the issue with USS Abraham Lincoln?🚢 Everyone should have heard about the issues on board USS Abraham Lincoln ▶️Poor food quality on board ▶️Crew members who have jumped or attempted to jump overboard ▶️Extended deployment in a combat zone The question is why is this

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📍Takht-e Jamshid (Persepolis), Pars, Iran Carved over 2.5 thousand years ago, the monumental Griffins of Persepolis guarded the Achaemenid Empire. These stunning lion-eagle column capitals still stand as a masterclass in ancient Persian craftsmanship and royal power.

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Brilliant analysis. One important perspective to add, the story did not end with the vulture collapse. A great deal of science-led conservation is now underway nationally, and some states are showing encouraging results. India banned veterinary diclofenac and MoEFCC’s Action Plan for Vulture Conservation targets toxic NSAIDs, Vulture Safe Zones, breeding, rescue and systematic monitoring. Tamil Nadu has gone further, establishing a State Vulture Conservation Committee and, through @Aiwcrteofficial a Vulture Conservation Vision 2025–30, combining drug surveillance, safe carcass management, habitat protection and scientific monitoring. And there are measurable signs of progress: Tamil Nadu’s 2025 synchronised survey recorded 157 vultures, up from about 100 in 2022–23, with 60 active nests in the Mudumalai landscape. The State has also established the Tamil Nadu Raptor Research Foundation, while its first State-wide raptor assessment documented 51 raptor species. Vultures breed slowly, so recovery from a >95% collapse will take time. But the science is encouraging: the national free fall has largely been arrested, and places like Tamil Nadu are demonstrating that sustained, evidence-based conservation can help vultures recover.

Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta

2 days ago

When India accidentally wiped out its vultures, half a million people died in five years. The bird doing zoomies in this video runs the most extreme digestive system in the animal kingdom. Vulture stomach acid sits near pH 1, strong enough to destroy anthrax, rabies, and

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Marco Rubio 2 days ago: “Imagine if Iran funded the well-being of its people, rather than its military Trump today: “We can’t fund daycare or Medicaid, we need more money for our military” Sometimes the jokes write themselves.

Part 2: Key figures at Stalingrad: Lend-Lease share of total Red Army armoured vehicles by Stalingrad: 4% Red Army aircraft at Stalingrad that were domestically produced: 90%+ Year Soviet tank output first matched and then exceeded Germany's: 1942 Factories relocated east of the Urals, 1941-42: 1,500+ What Lend-Lease did contribute by late 1942 was in logistics and communications: telephone wire, explosives, and early deliveries of trucks that helped Red Army supply lines. These were real contributions at the operational margins. But margins do not decide the battle of annihilation that Stalingrad was. Sheer weight of men, materiel, and the extraordinary planning of Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky decided it. Kursk: By July 1943, Lend-Lease was flowing more substantially, and here the Western case is somewhat stronger. American-supplied communications equipment had improved Red Army command and control, and Studebaker trucks were enhancing operational mobility. Yet even at Kursk, the largest armoured engagement in history, the fundamental balance of forces was determined by Soviet industrial output. The Red Army deployed over 5,000 tanks and self-propelled guns; Lend-Lease had contributed perhaps a few hundred vehicles to that total. The great majority were T-34/76s, SU-122s, and SU-152s rolling off Soviet assembly lines at a rate Germany could not match or meaningfully disrupt. After Kursk, the strategic initiative passed permanently to the Soviet side. From that point on, the Red Army conducted an almost unbroken series of offensive operations that carried it from the Dnieper to the Elbe. Lend-Lease aid intensified during this period, but intensifying aid delivered to an army that is already winning is a very different thing from aid that turns the tide of a losing war. Key Production Figures: - Soviet factories produced approximately 57,000 tanks and self-propelled guns in 1943-44 alone, more than Germany, Italy, and occupied Europe combined during the entire war. - Aircraft output reached roughly 40,000 units per year by 1944, almost entirely from domestic plants. - Artillery production was so vast that the Red Army maintained a material superiority in guns of nearly 3:1 along most active fronts by mid-1943. The heart of the anti-Lend-Lease argument lies in Soviet industrial capacity, and it is here that the numbers are most striking. Western observers, then and now, have systematically underestimated the economic transformation the Soviet state had been executing since the First Five-Year Plan of 1928. By 1941, the USSR had already become the world's third-largest industrial power. The wartime evacuation and reconstitution of that industrial base east of the Urals, accomplished under conditions of active military crisis, produced an economy capable of outfitting and sustaining the largest land army in human history. The Factory Relocation: An Unsung Miracle Between June and December 1941, Soviet authorities oversaw the physical dismantling and rail transport of over 1,500 industrial enterprises, including entire tank factories, steel mills, and munitions plants, from the western USSR to the Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia. Workers followed their machines, often living in improvised shelters during the brutal Russian winter while resuming production within weeks of arrival. This was not planned in advance by any algorithm or central committee directive; it was improvised under conditions of catastrophic military pressure by engineers, factory directors, and ordinary workers operating at the absolute limits of human endurance. By mid-1942, this relocated industry was producing weapons at a rate that stunned German military intelligence, which consistently underestimated Soviet output throughout the war.

I wrote a new piece about the Lend-Lease program to fully cover the subject and answer challenges and questions. In the eight decades since that final victory, a persistent Western narrative has emerged: one that credits American Lend-Lease material with tipping the balance in the Soviet Union's favour. This article challenges that claim directly. Lend-Lease was a genuine contribution, and to dismiss it as irrelevant would be dishonest. But the assertion that the Soviet Union could not have prevailed without it, a claim still echoed in Western popular histories, does not survive rigorous scrutiny. What follows is a four-part examination of Soviet industrial capacity, the chronological mismatch between aid delivery and the war's decisive moments, the internal transformation of the Red Army, and the broader strategic balance that made Soviet victory structurally inevitable long before American goods crossed the North Atlantic in meaningful quantities. PART 1 : Any serious engagement with the Lend-Lease debate must begin with chronology, because the chronology is damning to the maximalist case. The United States formally extended the Lend-Lease Act to the Soviet Union in November 1941, but the logistical reality meant that supplies in militarily significant quantities did not begin arriving until the latter half of 1942, and the programme did not reach its peak deliveries until 1943 and 1944. This timing is critical. The three battles that decided the war on the Eastern Front, Moscow (autumn-winter 1941), Stalingrad (autumn 1942 through February 1943), and the Kursk salient (summer 1943), were fought overwhelmingly with Soviet-produced weapons, Soviet-grown food, Soviet-mined fuel, and the blood of Soviet soldiers. To credit Lend-Lease with these victories is to confuse a supporting actor for the lead. The crisis that Lend-Lease was meant to address had already passed by the time the pipeline reached its stride. The Red Army that smashed Army Group Centre in 1944 was built on four years of catastrophic sacrifice and accelerating domestic production, not on American trucks and tinned beef. In the autumn of 1941, the Wehrmacht drove to within striking distance of Moscow. The Stavka's response, drawing on Siberian reserves, improvised fortifications, and the desperate resolve of a nation fighting on its own soil, produced the first major German strategic defeat of the Second World War. At this moment, total Lend-Lease deliveries to the Soviet Union amounted to less than 1% of what would eventually arrive. The Sherman tanks, the Studebaker trucks, the canned rations: none of this existed in meaningful quantities at the front when Georgy Zhukov launched his December counteroffensive. The first Arctic convoys had barely begun running. The Persian corridor was not yet operational. The Alaskan-Siberian air route (ALSIB) would not become functional until late 1942. Moscow was saved by Soviet soldiers with Soviet guns manufactured in factories relocated, in an astonishing feat of wartime logistics, east of the Urals. That relocation alone, arguably the greatest industrial migration in human history, is a more significant factor in Soviet survival than anything that crossed the North Atlantic in 1941 or early 1942. Stalingrad: The encirclement and destruction of Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus's Sixth Army at Stalingrad is universally acknowledged as the strategic turning point of the European war. By February 1943, when the last German survivors surrendered in the ruins of the city, Lend-Lease deliveries were accelerating but still represented a modest fraction of Red Army frontline strength. The T-34s that formed the walls of Operation Uranus's encirclement came from Chelyabinsk and Nizhny Tagil, not from Detroit. The aircraft flying close support were overwhelmingly Soviet-designed and Soviet-built Ilyushin Il-2s.

@JayStrickland6 @AiPutyt @skubthegub1488 @yffehjkktefds @ABlastforever @FORTRESSMAXXING x.com/shoahukraine/s…

WW2 The Eastern Front @ShoahUkraine

3 months ago

I wrote a new piece about the Lend-Lease program to fully cover the subject and answer challenges and questions. In the eight decades since that final victory, a persistent Western narrative has emerged: one that credits American Lend-Lease material with tipping the balance in

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paraphrasing but Yanis Varoufakis once said something about how the reason Western politicians seem to be rapidly degrading in quality is that they don't have to make a lot of political decisions anyway, capital makes it for them

Matt Spence @matthewswspence

3 days ago

This is the whole ballgame folks. Our nation is run by 20 something staffers making less than a manager at Denny’s. They are smart and driven, but also naive, inexperienced, and idealistic (I would know, I was one!) Until we change that things will continue to enshittify.

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