My meta level read of the propaganda situation is that Russia is trying to conceal the actual cost from its people for as long as possible, and Ukraine is wall-spaghetti-ing memes designed entirely for a western audience who they wish to provide them with unlimited support.
I'm concerned that the "Ukrainian" propaganda arm appears to be increasingly dominated by western spooks with an interest in escalation, unlimited access to western media time, and apparently wide bipartisan support in the US public.
In that context I interpret Russian statements about their "strategic forces" being put on high alert (characterized by BBC etc as delusional unprovoked threats) as being directed at western elite elements contemplating "no fly zones" or increasingly direct intervention.
Essentially I read Russia as reiterating "what part of NATO Ukraine is an *existential* threat do you not understand".
This is unfortunate because Americans in general have no actual idea what an "existential threat" is or how it is dealt with, after decades of dilution by their state media. "Oh, you mean like racism and climate change?"
For Americans, WWII was a Spielbergian happy warm fuzzy that formalized their state's entire raison d'etre as spreading Democracy and Freedom and fighting Racism. That is how Americans view "existential threat" - something to be triumphed over in Act III.
In Russian terms, an "existential threat" is something you summon a monster to do monstrous things in order to forestall. You put Stalin in charge, and have 4M dead Ukrainians, amongst other things, because it's the only way you develop fast enough to kill Hitler.
When Putin calls the US and NATO an "evil empire", says that their expansion into Ukraine is an existential threat, says Ukraine must be "denazified", and says he has plenty of nukes with which to do it in extremis, he is telling a *consistent* story.
You might not like it, agree with his characterization of the Ukrainian regime, etc etc, but you need to be able to explain why you believe he is lying about very specific and explanatory motivations before you risk actual global conflict.
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The problem is that "making money" is littered with principal/agent problems, which are exacerbated when "Hollywood accounting" is a shorthand for "ha ha yeah we've been structuring fraud and money laundering thru film production for >100 years"
It is notoriously possible to make back a film's budget thru local tax rebates and grants. Distribution as a separate service makes it extremely possible that the one-off production co is "losing money", the distributor "making money", and everyone nonetheless getting paid
Generally whenever someone says "well all they care about is making money" they are being an idiot and ignoring market microstructure in favor of just-so "the corporation is a unitary rational actor" fantasies
In the city, one can build or buy an apartment block containing hundreds of units, destroying neighborhood demography at a stroke. In neighborhoods of single family housing, 99% of units aren't even on the market, making neighborhood takeover a process that takes minimally months
Preventing the construction of units that Change The Character of the Neighborhood, ie disrupt the pricing distribution or demography, is of course the primary goal of suburban zoning and development boards.
It's farcical to claim that they cannot get an injunction against wish et al to clean up their listings, or get the apps delisted. So I conclude they want this situation to continue and escalate.
Deshtwaun in Chicago does not have A Guy in Shenzhen he's siphoning monero to, afaict all this is thru commerical channels with huge identifiable chokepoints
One interesting thing about the ATF is that they generally respond to letters even if the response is uninformative, not a bad idea for a congressman who wants to make some hay to inquire about what licensing a platform for third party international d2c mg sales might require
The idea that the constitution requires a state to be prevented from responding to a British invasion in 1812 or a Mexican invasion in 1845 is farcical.
You're not talking about states closing federal ports of entry, which would be unconstitutional - they're responding to an illegal infiltration by amongst other things armed foreign paramilitary forces
The contention is that a company strength formation busts across the border and? That literally happened repeatedly over a hundred years ago and absolutely no one had a problem with an armed state response.
Just in time for Halloween, All Quiet is basically shot as a horror movie. It's a little bit of a shame that it leans into all the "charging into machine gun nests" tropes, which gives an inaccurate view of the real horror and pointlessness of the war.
I'm not a big FACT CHECK guy if the aesthetics pan out and the thematic elements line up, but in this case the "charging into mg nests" trope leans into the "war is pointless, man, why don't they just, like, stop" memeplex. The actual horror is you *can't* stop.
It was, relatively speaking, straightforward to take a trench with variations on "shell the hell out of it first". The problem was that it's trench 1 of 5 or so, you can't easily bring up supplies, and they can. You can trade trenches all day, but not break through.
There's a temptation, bc US losses in WWII were relatively low, to diminish the impact of the war on American psyche as merely the effects of propaganda. This is not accurate.
Firstly, US overall losses were low bc US civilian areas were not targeted and US was not involved in heavy ground combat until late in the game. Where US was involved in combat (not just post Normandy but merchant marine, air force etc), losses were horrific.
Merchant marines for instance (civilian sailors responsible for military supply) lost about 4% of their total numbers over the course of the war. But that's heavily skewed, bc more served at the end, when German and Japanese navies were nonfunctional.