tal

https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Winter

Even using the most conservative numbers here, an all-out exchange between the US and Russia would produce a nuclear winter that would at most resemble the one that Robock and Toon predict for a regional nuclear conflict, although it would likely end much sooner given empirical data about stratospheric soot lifetimes. Some of the errors are long-running, most notably assumptions about the amount of soot that will persist in the atmosphere, while others seem to have crept in more recently, contributing to a strange stability of their soot estimates in the face of cuts to the nuclear arsenal. All of this suggests that their work is driven more by an anti-nuclear agenda than the highest standards of science. While a large nuclear war would undoubtedly have some climatic impact, all available data suggests it would be dwarfed by the direct (and very bad) impacts of the nuclear war itself.

They're claiming that the people are being let go for poor performance in their termination letters, presumably for legal reasons, so I guess that they technically qualify as firings.

But, I mean, that's not what's actually driving this -- they're just getting rid of people who they can get rid of without regard for performance -- so I'd use the term "layoffs" myself.

If we wind up in a situation where the EU mandates a form of censorship that the US bans, I assume that the platforms in question would have to separate their EU and US users and sites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet

just want to browse what is out there.

If you don't specifically want Facebook Marketplace, there's stuff like Craigslist and eBay.

EDIT: It looks like if you go directly to the Facebook Marketplace page rather than the main page at Facebook, it'll let you search and browse Facebook Marketplace (or it let me do so, at any rate):

https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/

I did get a popup asking me to log in, but I closed that and was able to do searches.

That makes me wonder about Amtrak.

Hmm.

• The Project 2025 stuff seems to mostly align with what's on the Heritage Foundation website. Looking at said website, they are not happy about Amtrak.

• Apparently Trump tried eliminating federal subsidies for long-distance Amtrak routes at the start of his first term and failed.

I mean, you can probably stick whatever you want in there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mail

In 1959 the U.S. Navy submarine USS Barbero assisted the Post Office Department, predecessor to the United States Postal Service (USPS), in its search for faster mail transportation, with the only delivery of "Missile Mail". On 8 June 1959, Barbero fired a Regulus cruise missile – its nuclear warhead having earlier been replaced by two Post Office Department mail containers – targeted at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station at Naval Station Mayport in Florida. The Regulus cruise missile was launched with a pair of Aerojet-General 3KS-33,000 solid-rocket boosters. A turbojet engine sustained the long-range cruise flight after the boosters were dropped. Twenty-two minutes after launch, the missile struck its target.

The USPS had officially established a branch post office on Barbero and delivered some 3000 pieces of mail to it before Barbero left Norfolk, Virginia. The mail consisted entirely of commemorative postal covers addressed to President of the United States Dwight Eisenhower, other government officials, the Postmasters General of all members of the Universal Postal Union, and so on, from United States Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield. Their postage (four cents domestic, eight cents international) had been cancelled "USS Barbero Jun 8 9.30am 1959" before the submarine put to sea. At Mayport, the Regulus missile was opened and the mail forwarded to the post office in Jacksonville, Florida, for sorting and routing.

I suspect that the LA Times is not going to get as many clicks your way, and I bet that the article authors get evaluated on the clicks they generate.

Russia can't defeat the US in conventional warfare, but is much-more-comparable from a nuclear aspect. So Russia has a significant incentive to use nuclear weapons.

I'd guess that the US probably has a shot at actually getting a first strike off versus Russia. So the US has a significant incentive to use nuclear weapons.

Anyone intending to make serious use of nuclear weapons has very little reason to hold back if they expect a high likelihood of the other side responding massively. So they've got a significant incentive to go all-in.

I think that there's a pretty good probability that a major war between Russia and the US of the "only one of us is walking away from this" sort goes very nuclear very quickly.

It's true that China is run by a party that uses Communist branding, but it's just...of all things to go after China on, it's a weird criticism. I can think of lots of criticisms that I can make, but "they have branding that's mostly a relic from decades back" is kinda weird.

I've only really had one guess that I'd call reasonably-solid.

During the Cold War, there were a number of disparate groups that stayed under the Republican banner. They didn't agree all that much about some things, but they all had some issue with communism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Leg_Stool_(GOP)

Ronald Reagan coined the term as a way to describe the Republican party as a three part coalition based on the social conservatives (consisting of the Christian right and paleo-conservatives), war hawks (consisting of interventionists and neoconservatives), and fiscal conservatives (consisting of right-libertarians and free-market capitalists), with overlap between the sides.

So, those groups had things that they didn't agree on, but one thing that united them was anti-communism.

• The social conservatives had an issue with state atheism.

• The hawks had a major military opponent.

• The fiscal conservatives didn't like the economic aspect of communism (well, and specifically the libertarians had it in for the authoritarian aspect).

But, after the Cold War ended, communism wasn't really a thing any more, and so the things that united those groups kind of went away. Kind of kicked the legs out from under the major groups in the Republican coalition.

So...maybe the idea would be to try to reunite them. I mean, I can see, from a purely-political level, wanting to recreate that coalition. The Project 2025 documents do mention aiming to reinspire a sense of patriotism, so they're thinking something about political movements.

The problem is, I just don't see how there's a very viable way to do this.

• The hawks are gonna be onboard. Probably more than before -- China is, militarily, quite powerful and building out its military.

• You can maybe still get the social conservatives onboard. Today, China isn't banning most religion so much as it is aiming to integrate it with state control so that it can't form any kind of political threat. The changes made might be an issue to them, though I think that it's probably less-objectionable than an outright ban. At the least, that approach is gonna clash pretty hard with US freedom-of-religion traditions. I have not personally seen a major attempt to go after that "state control of religion" aspect, but then I probably don't read most of the material that social conservatives get. I think that this one is going to be a lot harder than it was during the Cold War.

• And then there are the fiscal conservatives. I don't see them getting back in. China's got a larger state role in the economy than the US, sure, has SOEs, has the state influence a number of companies...but so do lots of countries. They don't have this hard, concrete, explicitly-clashing ideology, and there isn't the aim to export the political/economic model.

Like, I can imagine someone putting together some kind of domestic political coalition centered around opposition to China. That's not impossible. But I have a hard time seeing someone doing it centered explicitly around communism. Maybe the one-party state aspect, authoritarianism, something like that. But anti-Communism? In 2025? I mean, the Cold War ended 35 years ago.

There's also the a thing that I don't really get on some of the right, involves associating everything with Marxism.

If you figure that the Project 2025 stuff is a Heritage Foundation product, probably on their website.

googles

Yeah, accusations of "Marxism" are all over their stuff. That'd be kind of in-line with hunting for an anti-communist coalition. I just...have a pretty hard time seeing someone successfully building a lasting political coalition around anti-Communism in 2025, though.

EDIT:

"Putin the Marxist-Leninist"

An educated Marxist-Leninist such as Putin accepted that there had been more than 100 million victims of communism, an acceptable price to pay to remodel the world.

Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best explanation. You cannot understand Vladimir Putin and his war against Ukraine unless you understand that he is a Marxist-Leninist.

Wow. That's amazing.

political explosion

I mean, they had to know this was coming.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/sen-mitch-mcconnell-appears-freeze-kentucky-event-rcna102583

The guy is elderly and was having medical issues.

I was skeptical, but the New York Times agrees.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/27/world/asia/china-fight-club-ending.html

Now I'm kind of wondering how many anti-authoritarian movies out there have altered Chinese versions.

don’t use nothing.

I think you wanted "don't use anything"?