Making territory uninhabitable

My Sunday night viewing was two episodes of Cosmos, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. The set of 13 episodes on 4 DVDs was a Christmas gift, probably in 2014 (when the series was released). Kind of my speed to get around to actually watching it almost eight years later. This is an update of the series Carl Sagan produced for television in 1980. Since one of the fleeting credits of this series was for Sagan and Ann Druyan, both authors of the original series, I wonder how much of it is Tyson speaking Sagan’s lines with better visuals. There was a moment that was definitely not Sagan – Tyson, as a youth, visited Sagan, which inspired Tyson’s career in science and explaining science. Yes, the visuals are stunning. A great deal of effort – and a long list of companies – went into creating them. I did see at least part of the original series and, from what I remember, some of the visuals were primitive, such as Sagan pushing pieces of paper around a table. So the visuals are a big improvement. The one exception is the sequences showing animated people. They’re definitely not state of the art, even for 2014 – if they could create such stunning visuals on computers they could generate better animation. In the two episodes I’ve watched, each about 45 minutes, I did learn a few things, though a lot I already knew. There was a mass extinction event at the end of the Permian era (the first of five, but he didn’t get into three of them, the fifth was the meteor that ended the dinosaurs). He explained how humans guided the evolution of wolves into dogs. This is a case where adorableness was a factor in which dogs were allowed to breed. He also explained the evolution of the eye. Yeah, these two episodes were enjoyable. However, I’ve got another 7:45 in viewing to go. In a Ukraine update Mark Sumner of Daily Kos quoted the story of the battle between Abimelech and Shechem from Judges 9:42-45 in the bible as an example of war combatants going as far as making territory uninhabitable. This biblical passage is about 3000 years old. The story of Anitta doing something similar to Hattusa is from 3700 years ago. Yeah, we’ve been doing this a long time. The modern equivalent of that is mines, things that go boom when pressure is put on them, such as stepping on or driving a tank over. “There are an estimated 80 million landmines from past wars still buried in battlefields around the world.” And there are hundreds of thousands now on either side of the front lines. And since a lot of the battlefield was fields and soon will be again farmers will have to deal with mines.

Why are some areas along the front line so incredibly stable? Mines. Why are most advances by either Ukraine or Russia so slow even when it seems like they have an opportunity to break into the enemy backfield and run for the end zone? Mines. Why are some villages not just “in dispute” but essentially unoccupied after they were fought over for weeks? Mines. They don’t get much talked about. They’re not at all “sexy” when compared to tanks, or drones, or missiles, or long range artillery. But mines are doing a lot to shape the battlefield in Ukraine. Because they are almost always there, and anyone who forgets this for too long, will get a reminder. Russia is salting the earth in Ukraine, and getting that land back is one helluva a dangerous job.

Removing mines from areas no longer under immediate threat will be full time employment for a large number of Ukrainians. Kos of Kos started with the military definition of culmination, the point at which a military force is no longer able to perform its operations, the time an attacking force can no longer continue its advance. Kos suspects Russia has reach that point. For example, in Donbas there has been no Russian advance in weeks and two months since the last significant victory. Kos reviewed each area of the war Kharkiv, Izyum, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. In each one the story is Russia doing very little attacking and not advancing with Ukraine making gains in each region. This includes raising the Ukrainian flag over Visokopillya, which used to be a Russian stronghold and command center. Kos related the tale of Ozerne in the Luhansk region. Russia had spent a long time taking all the territory on one side of the Siversky Donetsk River. Ukraine sent a raiding party across the river and into Ozerne. They found the place empty. They visited the nearby villages of Brisivka and Yampil – also empty. The villages were unguarded. They took selfies and left. Kos cautions that we can’t quite call them liberated yet. If Ukraine can, they would have kept the incident quiet and launched a bigger operation. They still might. In the meantime this is a big propaganda win. David Neiwert of Kos discussed a report by Mackenzie Ryan of The Guardian. It says the Patriot Front, one of the far right gangs ready to do violence for their cause, is more like a pyramid scheme that is doing quite well at enriching its young leader at the expense of its recruits. Of course, its operations are quite authoritarian. Underlings must buy the propaganda literature, which has a premium price. Mid level leaders keep a lot of data on their underlings, such as eating habits and fitness. And – the scary part – they are required to participate in a certain number of “actions” – including public vandalism. But, hey, they get to own the libs. Aysha Qamar of Kos wrote about the flooding in Pakistan. It was a difficult article to write because she has Pakistani roots. Floods cover about a third of the country. The resulting lake is visible from space. In addition to the 1,100 dead (I’ve heard it is now over 1,300) and a half million in displacement camps, there are 4 million acres of destroyed crops, 800 thousand dead livestock, a million homes lost, and 2,200 miles of roads destroyed. Because of poor sanitation illness and malnutrition are rising. About 73,000 women will give birth in the next month and the women and their newborns are at risk. Damage is estimated to be $10 billion. It isn’t just the rain. Pakistan’s mountains have over 7,200 glaciers, more than any other country. This year the glacier melt season, stronger due to climate change, coincided with the early monsoons.

The most heartbreaking aspect of this situation is that while climate change impacts the entire world, Pakistan currently faces a crisis bigger than any other country despite having contributed very little to global carbon emissions.

Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Fair Vote discussing the recent election in Alaska, which Sarah Palin lost. A couple days ago I had written that since ranked choice voting was used in that election Republicans will try to say RCV was how the election was rigged, and voters consider it enough of a mystery that conspiracy theories can thrive. Fair Vote showed voters understand RCV just fine, they got ample instruction, they report it is simple, and nearly two thirds of them want to keep using it. Dworkin quoted Greg Sargent of the Washington Post who discussed Biden’s speech last week in which he called MAGA Republicans wanting to tear down Democracy. Republicans said Biden was angry, divisive, political, hateful, and depicted the Republican party as the enemy. What they are not saying, and they should be asked about, is that Biden was wrong. Dworkin also included a tweet by Jennifer Rubin:

Alas, the mainstream media cannot seem to process the notion that defense of democracy is not “partisan.” By adopting that frame (and rending garments over Biden’s defense of democracy), they implicitly make Biden’s point.