blogjou
It seems like at least the European CORONA crisis is coming to an end, so I need another socially accepted excuse for never being around anywhere. A blog!The Wozniaks and the Segways
After about five and a half hours of watching magic shows with the Wozniaksm we headed out of the club toward the valet. We handed our stub to the attendantm but the Wozniaks just kept walking toward the dark parking lot.
How could this happen?
People were asking, “How could this happen?” And unfortunately, the answer is obvious. First, it’s real easy to get your hands on a high-powered assault rifle in America. Combine that with a president who de-stigmatized outward hatred in social-media platforms that allow people to stoke flames of hatred to the point of combustion.
Are you Jew...ish?
It’s not like other religions in that way. Even if you don’t believe in Judaism, you, my friend, are still a Jew. You can’t really opt out of it.
Acorn review: The persistent mystery of declining growth in older forests
Abstract
Forests are very diverse all over the world, but they all share the decline in diameter growth rather after an early plateau (moment of full canopy development). Growth of trees and forests may be determined by other factors than carbon supply.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait...
Scaling up, when Iraq invaded Kuwait and neighbours such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE feared they might be next, they were happy to see the US-led multinational coalition deal with the problem. Doubly so, as many of these countries either lacked the forces to make substantial contribution or - as in Saudi Arabia’s case - the desire to do any fighting. So instead the stumped up direct payments of $84 billion to the US, Britain and France, who did the lion’s share of the fighting, and extra support to cover bases and logistics. No one would suggest that the combatant countries actually made a profit on the war, or that they were motivated by the payments. Nonetheless, the way that rich but militarily weak of self-indulgent nations could simply outsource the violence - and the dying - to foreigners is a pattern that Macchiavelli would have recognised from the days when mercenary captains fought Italian city-states’ wars for them.
The UN pays a flat fee of around $1,500 per soldier per month...
The UN pays a flat fee of around $1,500 per soldier per month, but to the state providing the force, not the individual grund on the ground. That would not cover the basic pay and provisions of a British Army private but compares very favourably with an Ethiopian average salary of $275 per month, and the government can pocket the difference between what the UN provides and what it pays its men.
Soldiers can be drafted into all kinds of other roles in the name of security...
Soldiers can be drafted into all kinds of other roles in the name of security - and for the same reason, all kinds of other institutions and individuals can be deployed to ‘do security’.
Once, generals could accept the deaths...
Once, generals could accept the deaths of thousands in a single day’s carnage with, if not equuanimity, a conviction that this was what war mean. (While, as Lord Wellington is meant to have said when one of his artillery men had sight of Napoleon at Waterloo, ‘it is not the business of commanders to be firing upon one another’.) Now, things are different.
Offensives can as easily be launched...
Offensives can as easily be launched from a newsromm or a boardroom as a cabinet warroom. Your ‘soldiers’ may not carry your passport; they may not even know they are in a war, or on whose side they are fighting.
In the shadow of the Nazi concentration camps...
In the shadow of the Nazi concentration camps, of 75 million dead and of the atomic mushroom clud, the United Nations was conceived, in the words of Dag Hammarsköld, its second secretary general, ‘not to lead mankind into heaven but to save humanity from hell’.