Most people on Earth stem from the expansion of the bottlenecked group in the Middle East that mixed with Neanderthals and then spread - and so have fairly recent ( ~50 k years ago) common ancestry. So you might have argued that at least _most_ of the human race was mentally almost exactly the same - say, Scots and Australian Aborigines. Even though they're obviously quite different.

"Based on actual disbursed funds through October 2024, the United States had delivered approximately $61-68 billion in aid to Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion began.
This disbursed aid breaks down approximately as: Military assistance: ~$44-47 billion in equipment, ammunition, training, and related support that was physically delivered or services rendered
Economic support: ~$13-15 billion in direct budgetary assistance and other economic aid that was transferred
Humanitarian assistance: ~$4-6 billion in delivered humanitarian supplies and services

Deaths 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 Covid
Grok: " misclassifications don’t change the raw count of bodies. The total number of deaths is what it is, whether we label them COVID, heart disease, or something else. That’s why excess deaths are such a useful yardstick here: they sidestep the whole “what’s on the certificate” debate and just show how many more people died than we’d expect based on pre-pandemic norms. So, if the total’s fixed, the question becomes what drove that excess. Misclassification might shuffle the deck—say, tagging a death as COVID when it was really a stroke—but it can’t explain why the deck got so much bigger in the first place. During 2020-2021, the U.S. saw excess deaths climb by roughly 20% over baseline, sometimes more in peak months. That’s not a rounding error; it’s a signal something systemic was hitting hard.

It gets better.

I see headlines saying that "Trump wants half of Ukraine’s estimated $11.5 trillion in rare earth minerals."

For comparison: China has large reserves of rare earths (34% of world) , much more than Ukraine, and produces 60-70% of world output.

China got about $488 million - half a billion bucks - for that. Like I said, China got $488 Million. Not all profit, but let's assume that it is. How long would it take for China to earn 11.5 _trillion_ from their rare earths at that rate?

Elemental, my Dear Watson

Every now and then (over many years) I find myself hearing someone talk about how mineral deposits in some place are strategically vital, and if the Commies, or the Avars, or the Mazdakites get hold of them, we're all fucked.

How often is this true? Perspective: there isn't all that much money in minerals other than fossil fuels. US mines produce about $80 billon worth of minerals a year: that's not a very large fraction of a $30 trillion economy.

Like everything else in politics, US aid to the Brits in WWII and their later mediocre economic record have generated an enormous amount of stupid prose.

One of my favorites, which I often think of, in the same way one compulsively peels the bandage back to look at the gangrene, is the argument that Germany benefited from having to rebuild everything from scratch, which supposedly allowed modernization, while Britain was stuck with older factories. Just as y'all would be better off if I burned your house down.

Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision

Robera Wohlstetter's book argues , in part, that surprise was explained by the difficulty of identifying true signal from extraneous background facts.

You know, I don't think she was right. The point was not to figure out if Japan was going to attack the US: but what to do to be maximally ready, just in case they did.

So, what were the tempting feasible targets for Japan, whose destruction would make a real difference in a war?

Beto O'Rourke, running for Governor of Texas, has been hospitalized with a 'bacterial infection'. Normally, they'd announce what it was. There's nothing embarrassing about bacterial pneumonia or whooping cough.
This infection, however, must be in some way embarrassing. They say 'bacterial' to rule out monkeypox, but which bacterium?

It could be something subject to misunderstanding by the hoi polloi: chlamydia pneumoniae can cause pneumonia, but is not a venereal disease. It just sounds like one.

@propornot @BTDiaz @EvanMcMullin There are several examples in that article of some horse sense on the part of INR ( or DOE) - but INR isn't the CIA.

Here's an interesting quote from the guy heading INR back then (Carl Ford) - in answer to the question " Did Tenet know the intelligence was crap?" : @propornot @BTDiaz @EvanMcMullin "Best as I could tell, it wasn't that [he was] trying to give the president what he wanted to hear - not in George's case, not in teh senior intelligence group that I dealt with... They were honestly and sincerely trying to give them their best sense of what the intelligence