Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧 @pieist@qoto.org

Meduza - On March 19, Vladimir Putin dismissed warnings from U.S. diplomats that there was an imminent risk of a terrorist attack at a crowded venue in Moscow. The Russian president called the warnings “outright blackmail” by the West and an attempt to “intimidate and destabilize our society.” https://meduza.io/en/live/2024/03/22/terrorist-attack-at-concert-hall-outside-moscow

Me, an idiot: “So, kids, by setting the thermostat a little lower and eating less meat, we’re doing our part to make the world more sustainable”

VCs, very smart: “We just raised $100 billion dollars from the sovereign wealth funds of three petrostates to build the world’s largest AI supercomputer. It uses as much power and water as Guatemala and the primary use case is for management consultants to autogenerate powerpoints for justifying mass layoffs.”

The cost of achieving a 90% clean grid using today’s technology is approximately zero.
And this excludes the external costs of fossil fuels: climate impacts, air pollution, geopolitical instability.
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/is-renewable-energy-cheaper-than?utm_source=cbnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2024-03-12&utm_campaign=Daily+Briefing+12+03+2024

One of the #Poland farmers protest leaders Hubert Ojdana claims he received a threatening letter with a bullet inside. Ojdana is a zealous pro-Russian activist as well, so he implied it was sent by Ukrainians. The problem is that his name is written in a Cyrillic alphabet no native user of either Ukrainian or Russian would use - these block letters look like visually copied from a computer font by a person who doesn’t know Cyrillic. Yet another reminder that these days are full of provocations.

What would the people who wrote, and ratified, the Fourteenth Amendment have thought about this Supreme Court decision?

Would they have thought, oops, our bad. We didn’t write that clearly enough.

They didn’t want anyone who had participated in an insurrection ever to hold public office, much less be allowed to run for President. They said that as clearly as they could.

They didn’t specify an enforcement mechanism—they trusted us future people to work out the details.

We’ve let them down.

Do you remember how the Russians won the war in #Chechnya? Well, for a start, they lost the first clash, which ended with the Khasavyurt agreement (1996).

It’s just that after that, “the Chechens sort of went mad”. - I write in quotes because that was the impression outside, as if in a screenplay. Kidnappings, banditry, human trafficking, corruption.

Then terrorism began, culminating in the blowing up of blocks of flats all over Russia…. all the way to Ryazan, where the attack was foiled and it later emerged that the ‘exercise’ had been prepared by the FSB. And Basayev completely out of the blue invaded Dagestan.

And that was the casus belli, Russia tore up all the 1996-1997 peace agreements and the ‘second Chechen’ began. Then it only got worse, after Beslan, Chechnya lost any remnants of international sympathy and the Russians were summarily given carte blanche to pacify it.

As we watch more and more fake stories about how “Ukrainians are doing something to Poles”, we should be aware that EQUALLY on Ukrainian channels there are identical stories about how “Poles are doing something to Ukrainians”. Sometimes these are mirror stories, as with the driver from Szczecin.

All these stories are part of a script written in Lubianka, and its next elements will be beatings of one by the other or even authentic terrorism with traces in the style of ‘Jarosz’s business card’.

Poland watched this in the 1930s and in the 1990s, it is a pity that these experiences have faded so quickly.

The role of individual players from Chechnya is interesting. There was a story behind Basayev’s possible collaboration with the GRU back in the days of the war in Abkhazia, when Chechen fighters with weapons crossed the Russian North Caucasus and entered Georgian territory from the republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia, almost as much as Girkin did to Ukraine.

The collaboration with the FSB of Arbi Barayev, one of the biggest thugs in the Republic of Ichkeria, was common knowledge. And yet both of them were not only unpunished but - especially Basayev - respected in Ichkeria. Basayev was even appointed a minister for his wartime merits.

And then he started an absolutely suicidal war for Iczkeria in Dagestan…. in partnership with Arbi Barayev. That’s more or less how some Ukrainian unit in the strength of 2,000 men on 20 February 2022 arrived from Ivano-Frankivsk and suddenly started storming Donetsk.

Iczkeria’s weakness was as much due to its geographical and political isolation as to its tribal culture, which resulted in various clans competing virtually non-stop for limited resources and influence.

Moscow’s hand is evident in all the above-mentioned actions, but after all, it would not have been possible if people of the likes of Basayev and Barayev had not been prepared to follow it.

Russia launches the pre-invasion playbook in Moldova. A "breakaway region" of the small state asks for Russian "protection" (against a peaceful, open, pro-European Moldovan government) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/world/europe/moldova-russia-transnistria.html

#Europe battles powder shortage to supply shells for #Ukraine

#Nitrocellulose, also known as guncotton, is a key ingredient in gunpowder manufacture.

"Would you know it, deliveries of this cotton from #China stopped as if by chance a few months ago"

#Nordic countries have found a substitute for the #Chinese cotton... innovation is at work, precisely to meet the need for powder, because... we have problems today with powder capacity".

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240302-europe-battles-powder-shortage-to-supply-shells-for-ukraine

#EU #Russia

Our paper on the values found in fairy tales from some European countries has been published. We studied how values are explicitly present in tales from Germany, Italy and Portugal using various NLP techniques, but most notably Word2Vec and Word Embedding with a Compass. We visualise synchronic semantic variation to show certain differences based on observations of the corpus, some of them already observed in previous literature. A discussed example in our findings is how motherhood in Germany is strongly related to generosity, whereas in Italy and Portugal it has stronger relationship to wisdom.

Fulltext available at: https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlp4dh-1.8/

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