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Discussion: German Lab Leak

A German joke is no laughing matter.

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Discussion: Inconsequential Chat

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Discussion: The NYT Spelling Bee Thread

alha said:

jimmurphy said:

Partita?

Early QB today.

yep, "partita" ... another obscure word. Nicely done on the early QB...I'm stuck at QB -2 yet again

I have failed miserably in the last week or so, but just got QB! Congrats, jim, as usual.

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Discussion: The Rose Garden and White House happenings: Listening to voters’ concerns

mtierney said:

from RCL.

Votes for Biden: 926,633

Votes for Trump: 788,833

Democratic votes not Biden: 123,921

Republican votes not Trump: 163,748

Were you trying to tell us something?

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Discussion: What does Putin want (and whatabout it)

Diplomat: Why the Minsk Agreements Failed in Ukraine (jacobin.com)

Wolfgang Sporrer is former head of the Human Dimension Department of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine.

"There were three main reasons for the failure of the Minsk agreements. First, the Minsk agreements did not address the root cause of the conflict. It was stipulated, so to speak, that there was or had been some kind of ethnic conflict between Russians and Ukrainians in Ukraine, and that this was the reason for the outbreak of violence. And by settling this alleged ethnic conflict, the conflict could be pacified.

This was pure fiction. The ethnic conflicts that existed in Ukraine were no more serious than ethnic tensions in many other countries.

Moreover, the dividing lines in this conflict, if one insists on understanding them in ethnic terms, are incredibly blurred. This is not about the Russian versus the Ukrainian language or Ukrainian versus Russian national identity. Nor is it about religion, not even in the slightest. At most, one could find something like an eastern Ukrainian Donbas identity. But this regional identity of the Donbas is not much stronger than strong regional identities in other countries.

What this conflict is fundamentally about is Russia wanting to exert influence over the domestic and foreign policy orientation of the government in Kyiv. In the Minsk agreement, however, this fiction of an ethnic conflict was constructed instead, although Russia actually had no particular interest in obtaining any autonomy rights for eastern Ukraine, for Russian-speaking or ethnically Russian Ukrainian citizens.

A Ukraine that is neutral between Russia and the West is no longer a realistic option, simply because this would no longer be accepted by a large majority of the population in Ukraine.
Russia was not really interested in these issues, but Ukraine was not at all eager to grant such rights either, for fear of a supposed fifth column. However, Moscow was not only concerned with what was happening in the Donbas, but above all with what was happening in Kyiv. The Ukraine conflict is about the orientation of Ukraine, pure and simple. But the Minsk agreement addresses completely different issues. That’s why the process didn’t work.

The second reason for their failure was the low technical quality of the Minsk agreements. There were far too many provisions for their verification, and the sequencing of various measures also remained controversial to the end, as the agreement itself didn’t specify any.

The third reason for the failure — and this may sound banal now, but it is true — is that it has not been possible to meet in person since the end of 2019 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As little as the Minsk agreements were actually implemented in practice, they did help to build trust.

The very fact that the parties were sitting around a table had a de-escalating effect. You don’t get the same sort of benefit online. For that, you need coffee breaks, shared meals, unofficial contacts and the like. If you lose the seemingly ancillary aspects of diplomatic talks, such a process is doomed to failure. With the Minsk process, therefore, an early-warning instrument pointing to a possible escalation of the conflict was also lost."

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Discussion: The Rose Garden and White House happenings: Listening to voters’ concerns

If the Supreme Court decides that the POTUS is immune from prosecution then Biden should just roll up to Mar-A-Lago and shoot Trump right in the face and run against Nikki Haley instead.

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Discussion: The NYT Spelling Bee Thread

Partita?

Early QB today.

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Discussion: The Rose Garden and White House happenings: Listening to voters’ concerns

This trial has given late night hosts a bounty of material to work with. 

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Discussion: Roundup Alternative: Weed Torch?

You can get agricultural vinegar from Home Depot, Lowe’s or Walmart. It’s 20%, 4 times stronger than the stuff in the supermarket. Works like a charm. Use it in dry weather on a Sunny day. Do NOT get it in your eyes because it’s very caustic stuff. Do NOT use it on windy days.

mrmaplewood said:

Also, as a low-tech answer to your problem, try plain vinegar with a dash of dish detergent in a spray bottle.  Not as strong as Roundup, but environmentally friendly.  (Don't shake, bubbles make spraying impossible.)

P.S.  "Do I need a permit to use even though it’s fairly basic?"  That's the kind of question I have learned the hard way to avoid around here.

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Discussion: German Lab Leak

I barely made it past Bolden Elementary alive just now. The schoolyard was full of kids having lunch, and I heard one of them tell her friends: “Two peanuts were walking down the street. And one peanut was …”

The joke’s potency may have weakened over the last 80 years, but an abundance of caution requires me to end it there.

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