OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH EURASIA: For the first two years of World War II, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were allies; Hitler and Stalin secretly planned and jointly began the war that inflicted such horror and destruction.
There is no denying that a vast number of Soviet citizens lost their lives in World War II. Without the Russian people’s appalling suffering and sacrifice, the Allies might not have triumphed in the end.
But there is also no denying that Moscow was Nazi Germany’s partner in unleashing the war, the deadliest in human history, in the first place. Victory Day is a good opportunity to review the record of Russian culpability in plunging the world into war — a record the Kremlin’s propagandists have been trying to obscure for decades.
World War II is commonly said to have started on Sept. 1, 1939 , when German forces invaded Poland. But it would perhaps be more accurate to date the start of the war nine days earlier. On Aug. 23, 1939, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed a treaty of non-aggression, whereby their governments agreed to conquer and divide Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. It was under the terms of this pact that the Nazi Wehrmacht moved into western Poland on Sept. 1 and Josef Stalin’s Red Army invaded Poland from the east 16 days later.
We saw the mass grave at the Moscow Zoo.
SECRECY IS THE KEYSTONE TO ALL TYRANNY: Secrecy and Tyranny
Neutral bots probe political bias on social media
Chen, W., Pacheco, D., Yang, KC. et al. Neutral bots probe political bias on social media. Nat Commun 12, 5580 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25738-6 [Open Access]
“Social media platforms attempting to curb abuse and misinformation have been accused of political bias. We deploy neutral social bots who start following different news sources on Twitter, and track them to probe distinct biases emerging from platform mechanisms versus user interactions. We find no strong or consistent evidence of political bias in the news feed. Despite this, the news and information to which U.S. Twitter users are exposed depend strongly on the political leaning of their early connections. The interactions of conservative accounts are skewed toward the right, whereas liberal accounts are exposed to moderate content shifting their experience toward the political center. Partisan accounts, especially conservative ones, tend to receive more followers and follow more automated accounts. Conservative accounts also find themselves in denser communities and are exposed to more low-credibility content.”
Is the story the Supreme Court draft or the leak? Depends on who’s talking.
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Why Aren’t Rich People Happier? A Wealth of Commonsense. “Well, money is money. I mean you can’t buy happiness, sir, but it sure takes the sting out of being unhappy.” –John D. MacDonald, Darker than Amber.
Bonds of Inequality w/ Destin Jenkins (podcast) The Dig. “Destin Jenkins on his book The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City, which makes a powerful argument about how the ubiquitous and in many ways invisible dependence of American cities on municipal debt to fund basic infrastructure has devastating consequences for democracy and entrenches spatial, racial, and wealth disparities.”
Is it possible to describe the complexity and absurdity of motherhood? The Conversation
