…short measure [DOT 4/11/21]

…in a world where I were better organized this could have been a whole thing where I continued to bang on about how infuriating I find it that there are things that people say while intending a meaning that’s pretty much at odds with the words they use

After an unexpectedly strong showing on Tuesday night, Republicans are heading into the 2022 midterm elections with what they believe will be a highly effective political strategy capitalizing on the frustrations of suburban parents still reeling from the devastating fallout of pandemic-era schooling.

Seizing on education as a newly potent wedge issue, Republicans have moved to galvanize crucial groups of voters around what the party calls “parental rights” issues in public schools, a hodgepodge of conservative causes ranging from eradicating mask mandates to demanding changes to the way children are taught about racism.
[…]
Across the country, Democrats lost significant ground in crucial suburban and exurban areas — the kinds of communities that are sought out for their well-funded public schools — that helped give the party control of Congress and the White House. In Virginia, where Republicans made schools central to their pitch, education rocketed to the top of voter concerns in the final weeks of the race, narrowly edging out the economy.
[…]
While the conservative news media and Republican candidates stirred the stew of anxieties and racial resentments that animate the party’s base — thundering about equity initiatives, books with sexual content and transgender students on sports teams — they largely avoided offering specific plans to tackle thornier issues like budget cuts and deepening educational inequalities.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/us/politics/school-republican-campaign-issue.html

In the span of six months the moral panic around CRT has become the core issue in statewide elections. Coverage of tonight needs to explicitly state that the CRT craze was an intentionally manufactured political strategy because the people who did it are outright admitting it. pic.twitter.com/oy2ZTDv5vL

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) November 3, 2021

Developed by the former Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell and other scholars in the 1970s and 80s, critical race theory, or CRT, examines the ways in which racism was embedded into American law and other modern institutions, maintaining the dominance of white people.

CRT argues that racism is not a matter of individual bigotry but a systemic issue that creates an uneven playing field for people of colour.
[…]
A year or so ago few people had heard of it, yet Republicans have whipped up a moral panic that CRT is being rammed down the throats of schoolchildren. They caricature it as teaching Black children to internalise victimhood and white children to self-identify as oppressors.

No, it is not a part of the secondary school curriculum. The National School Boards Association and other education leaders are adamant that CRT is not being taught in K-12 schools, which teach students from five to 18 years old.

But Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and other rightwing media have turned it into a catch-all buzzword for any teaching in schools about race and American history. They loosely apply it to concepts such as equity and anti-bias training for teachers.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/03/republicans-critical-race-theory-winning-electoral-issue

At least seven people who attended the pro-Trump rally on Jan. 6 in Washington that preceded the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol were elected to public office Tuesday.
[…]
In February, HuffPost identified at least 57 Republicans in local or state office who traveled to the pro-Trump rally on Jan. 6. A handful have resigned or faced consequences.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/03/least-seven-jan-6-rallygoers-won-public-office-election-day/

…but I’m not…& there’s more that I’d like to get to than I’m going to have time for

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/03/senate-republicans-voting-rights-bill-john-lewis

Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked legislation to restore parts of the landmark Voting Rights Act weakened by Supreme Court rulings, making it the second major voting bill to be derailed by a G.O.P. filibuster in the past two weeks.

Despite receiving majority support, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named for the civil rights activist and congressman who died last year, fell nine votes short of the 60 required to advance over Republican opposition.
[…]
The measure blocked on Wednesday is aimed at reinvigorating voting protections against discrimination at the ballot box that have been struck down by the Supreme Court.
[…]
A major goal of the bill is to again require jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to win prior approval — or “preclearance” — from the Justice Department or federal courts in Washington before changing their voting rules. The Supreme Court invalidated that requirement in its 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder. The bill also seeks to bolster safeguards against discriminatory election practices that were limited this year by the court’s ruling in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee.
[…]
The John Lewis measure is distinct from an earlier voting rights measure, the Freedom to Vote Act, which Republicans have thrice thwarted through filibusters, most recently in October. That measure set new voting standards meant to counter Republican-led efforts around the country to impose voting restrictions that Democrats regard as efforts to limit voting in minority communities. No Republican supported bringing that measure to the floor.
[…]
Top Republicans, though, portray both measures as unnecessary and say they represent an effort by Democrats in Washington to set election parameters to their advantage. They argue that the Supreme Court eliminated only the parts of the Voting Rights Act that it considered outdated.
[…]
Democrats were well aware that they were likely to again hit a Republican wall on voting rights. But part of their calculation has been to demonstrate to Mr. Manchin, who has been deeply involved in crafting both measures, that Republicans are determined to obstruct the bills, making a change in filibuster rules the only route to enacting the measures. Mr. Manchin has expressed deep reservations about tinkering with the filibuster, which he says fosters bipartisanship.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/us/politics/senate-republicans-voting-rights-act.html

The Supreme Court has come under increasing scrutiny for its so-called shadow docket: rulings issued on an expedited basis without the full briefing, argumentation and written opinions that cases on its main docket receive. These rulings are often divided along partisan lines, as seen in a recent, and controversial, example: the conservative majority’s rejection of a request in September to pause a Texas abortion law until it could be more fully reviewed.

But an even more problematic aspect of the court’s shadow docket has received scant attention. These are opinions being issued by justices when the Supreme Court rejects an appeal of a case from a lower court — what are called “cert denials,” or denial of petitions for certiorari.
[…]
Cert-denial opinions offer insights into the thinking of individual justices, but the practice of issuing them is rife with problems and should be largely abandoned.

First, they have no legal effect and are mainly issued by justices today to promote their personal ideological agendas. Conservative justices frequently issue them to complain about how the law was applied in hot-button cases to either disfavor free speech, free religion or gun rights or to improperly favor abortion or L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Liberal justices just as frequently issue them to complain about how death penalty or other criminal justice matters were handled.
[…]
At a time when the public is losing confidence in the Supreme Court as an apolitical dispenser of equal justice — and indeed when increases in violence against federal judges are being attributed to perceptions that they rule on the basis of their politics — unnecessarily issuing these opinions just stokes partisan divisions.

Perhaps more important, the practice of issuing cert-denial opinions is legally objectionable. The Constitution authorizes judges to exercise power as necessary only to resolve live cases or controversies. The original idea was that Congress and the president — political branches answerable to the people — should do most of the governing. Conversely, judges given life tenure and salary guarantees in order to referee legal disputes in a politically impartial manner should be limited to performing that role.

But when a justice issues an opinion in connection with a dispute that the court has expressly declined to decide, the justice is acting outside this narrow constitutional mandate and using his or her position to influence social issues in just the way the framers thought should be left to the people and their elected representatives to resolve.

[…]Later that year, Justice Brett Kavanaugh strongly signaled that with his appointment to the court, there were a majority of conservative justices receptive to overturning old rulings giving Congress wide latitude to delegate lawmaking powers to administrative agencies. Far from acting as the dispassionate umpire of legal disputes the framers envisioned, Justice Kavanaugh was basically suggesting that new lawsuits seeking profound changes to our current system of government would be favorably received.
[…]
In cert-denial opinions, however, justices frequently prejudge legal questions in ways that create serious impartiality problems in cases the court later accepts for review. A stark example of this is the challenge to New York’s requirement that people demonstrate a special self-defense need for carrying concealed firearms in public that the court is hearing on Wednesday. In a cert-denial opinion issued by Justice Thomas last year, when the court denied review of a ruling upholding a New Jersey concealed-carry requirement similar to New York’s, he made a lengthy historical argument concluding that the Second Amendment protects some form of public carrying of firearms.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this is the argument now being made by the gun rights’ plaintiffs in the New York case. Just as troubling, in a portion of Justice Thomas’s opinion that Justice Kavanaugh joined, they criticized the main lower court ruling upholding New York’s concealed-carry requirement. How can anyone seriously contend that the impartiality of these justices cannot “reasonably be questioned” in the New York case?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/opinion/supreme-court-shadow-docket.html

The homicide trial of Kyle Rittenhouse — the teenager who killed two people and injured a third last year amid the unrest that followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis. — is set to begin Monday, the culmination of a polarizing case that rallied far-right groups and came to symbolize the country’s bitterly entrenched divisions.

Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time of the shootings, faces two homicide charges and an attempted homicide charge along with a misdemeanor for possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18. He has pleaded not guilty on all counts. If convicted guilty of first-degree intentional homicide, Rittenhouse faces a sentence of life in prison.
[…]
Despite the case’s broader notoriety, experts said the legal issues involved are not complicated. The trial, they said, boils down to a relatively simple question: Will jurors accept Rittenhouse’s self-defense claims?
[…]
In Wisconsin, a defendant claiming self-defense in a homicide must show that they believed force was necessary to stop or prevent “interference” with themselves and that they faced death or great bodily harm when using deadly force, said Christopher Zachar, a criminal defense lawyer and former assistant state public defender.

Self-defense in those circumstances requires showing that you “used the force that was necessary,” Zachar said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/10/31/kyle-rittenhouse-trial-kenosha/

Black said he purchased the gun for Rittenhouse because the teenager was too young to buy it, and Black kept the weapon locked up in his Kenosha home. But when Kenosha was rocked by riots in August 2020, Black testified, his stepfather removed that gun and others from of the safe, and Rittenhouse retrieved it from their home on the day of the shootings.
[…]
This case “isn’t a whodunit, when did it happen or anything like that,” said Mark Richards, one of Rittenhouse’s attorneys. Instead, “the central issue in this case is going to be self-defense,” said Thomas C. Binger, one of the prosecutors.
[…]
Later on Tuesday, prosecutors called Koerri Washington, a Kenosha resident who live-streamed local social justice protests on Facebook that summer. Much of the video footage from the night of the shootings came from Washington’s Facebook streams, some of which Binger showed the jury.

The main video, which ran about 10 minutes, showed Rittenhouse mingling among other young armed men at a gas station, three blocks from where he shot Rosenbaum. It was there that arguments broke out between protesters and the armed men who had flocked to Kenosha.

Binger asked Washington whether any of the armed men, despite the aggression directed at them from demonstrators, had fired shots at the gas station. Washington said no.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/11/02/kyle-rittenhouses-homicide-trial-gets-underway-with-dueling-narratives-shootings/

A New York law that imposes strict limits on carrying guns outside the home seemed unlikely to survive its encounter with the Supreme Court, based on questioning from the justices on Wednesday.

The law requires people seeking a license to carry a handgun in public to show a “proper cause,” and a majority of the justices seemed prepared to say that it imposes an intolerable burden on the rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment. But several justices seemed open to allowing the state to exclude guns from crowded public settings or other sensitive places.
[…]
The question of how the Second Amendment applies to carrying guns in public is an open one. When the Supreme Court established an individual right to own guns in 2008 by a 5-to-4 vote in District of Columbia v. Heller, it addressed only the right to keep firearms in the home for self-defense.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/us/politics/supreme-court-guns-second-amendment.html

The case, which comes after a spate of mass shootings and a rise in gun violence, has been brought by two private citizens and the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, an affiliate of the National Rifle Association. The NRA is a gun rights lobbying group that has received tens of millions of dollars in donations from the gun manufacturers.
[…]
Kavanaugh wrote a dissent in favor of relaxing gun control laws in 2011, when he was a circuit judge in a federal appeals court in Washington DC.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/03/supreme-court-gun-rights-case-new-york-law

A gun-control nonprofit founded by former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D) filed a federal lawsuit against the National Rifle Association on Tuesday, alleging the group orchestrated an illegal, secret donation scheme involving millions of dollars that violated campaign finance laws and benefited then-candidate Donald Trump and other Republicans.

The lawsuit was filed by campaign finance watchdog Campaign Legal Center on behalf of Giffords in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It accuses the NRA of using a network of shell companies to skirt campaign finance laws and give money to Trump and GOP candidates.

The complaint came after a federal judge granted Giffords’s nonprofit the right to sue the NRA when the Federal Election Commission failed to act on previous complaints. It calls for the court to prevent the NRA from “violating the law in future elections” and for the gun rights group to pay a fine to the Treasury Department equal to the alleged total in the donation scheme.

The lawsuit alleges as much as $35 million in “unlawful” and “unreported in-kind campaign contributions” went toward a scheme that goes back as early as 2014, with $25 million allegedly going toward Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Republican campaigns for Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Rep. Matthew M. Rosendale (Mont.) are named as defendants in the lawsuit, and GOP Sens. Thom Tillis (N.C.), Tom Cotton (Ark.), Ron Johnson (Wis.) and former senator Cory Gardner of Colorado are also mentioned.
[…]
The Giffords lawsuit comes as the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear a significant gun-rights case Wednesday brought by an NRA affiliate in New York. The New York State Rifle and Pistol Association argues that a state law prohibiting people from carrying a concealed gun in public unless they can demonstrate a need to carry the weapon is too restrictive. If the court rules in the NRA affiliate’s favor, the number of people eligible to carry concealed firearms in public could increase drastically.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/03/nra-lawsuit-giffords-trump-republicans/

…I’m sure the common threads between those things are entirely coincidental & only a fool would suggest otherwise

A Georgia judge has acknowledged there appeared to be “intentional discrimination” after a nearly all-white jury was selected for the trial of three white men accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery, but has seated the jury nonetheless.

A jury comprising 11 white members and one Black member was seated on Wednesday after defense attorneys struck almost all Black jurors from the pool. Opening arguments in the high-profile case are set to begin on Friday.
[…]
Prosecutors had urged Judge Timothy Walmsley, who is overseeing the trial in south Georgia, to reverse the strikes of eight Black potential jurors, whom they said had been intentionally targeted over race. A landmark 1986 US supreme court decision in Batson vs Kentucky ruled it unconstitutional for potential jurors to be struck solely based on race or ethnicity.

But Walmsley, while acknowledging the apparent “intentional discrimination”, cited limitations spelled out in the supreme court precedent and pointed to defense lawyers’ justifications, which did not mention race or ethnicity.
[…]
Arbery was shot dead in February 2020 when the three men pursued him while he was out on a run, claiming they suspected his involvement in a series of burglaries in the neighborhood. Arbery had been recorded on surveillance footage entering and leaving a semi-constructed house in the town that day, but no evidence has linked him to any offense.

The McMichaels, both carrying firearms, attempted to corner Arbery in a roadway using their pickup truck. Travis McMichael then fired three times with a shotgun.

All three men have pleaded not guilty to murder and will argue they were acting in self-defense and were legally justified in pursuing Arbery due to a now defunct citizen’s arrest law.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/03/ahmaud-arbery-judge-seats-nearly-all-white-jury-in-georgia-trial

…because the supreme court continues to assure anyone who’ll listen that they are a fair & impartial bunch of justices who aren’t in it for a bunch of entirely partisan results

President Joe Biden exhorted other world leaders to treat climate change as an “existential threat to human existence” at the Cop26 global climate summit on Monday. Yet his administration may soon have its hands tied as it seeks to address that threat at home. That’s because just three days earlier, the US supreme court agreed to hear a set of cases challenging the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to impose carbon emissions limits on existing power plants.

Court watchers expect the court’s conservative majority, consistent with a string of rulings in favor of big business and against regulation, to side against the EPA. If so, the decision will highlight how the court could stand in the way of meaningful efforts to address the climate crisis for decades to come. More generally, that outcome would underscore how the supreme court and broader features of the US constitutional system pose a significant obstacle to addressing catastrophic threats.
[…]
There’s every reason to think the conservative-dominated court will again rule for the challengers. Indeed, the biggest question is not so much how the case will come out, but how boldly the court will rule. Lurking behind the statutory issues in the case is a deeper question: how much rule-making authority does the constitution even permit Congress to delegate to administrative agencies? Implementing a broad “non-delegation doctrine” and thereby dramatically undercutting the regulatory power of administrative agencies like the EPA has been a conservative fantasy for decades.
[…]
The challengers claim that a ruling against the EPA will merely put the ball back in Congress’s court. But any meaningful climate reforms that managed to make their way through Congress would similarly face their own legal challenges and a hostile judicial audience.

The suspense over the EPA cases may illustrate a stark fact: the American constitutional structure may be ill suited for dealing with catastrophic threats like climate change. The supreme court, with its life-tenured justices second-guessing the work of the political branches, is only one feature of a system that makes bold governmental action difficult.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/03/how-the-us-supreme-court-could-be-a-threat-to-climate-action-in-the-us

Global greenhouse gas emissions have almost completely rebounded after slumping during the coronavirus pandemic, leaving the world with just 11 years of burning carbon at the current rate if humanity hopes to avoid catastrophic warming.

The latest Global Carbon Budget report comes in the middle of a high-stakes U.N. climate summit in Glasgow. Its findings, which draw upon atmospheric measurements, energy statistics and deforestation models, among other data, underscore just how far humanity must go to shift course on global warming.

The annual report is a joint project of researchers from 70 institutions on five continents. Since 2015, the project has tracked the dwindling amount of carbon dioxide humanity can afford to emit if it hopes to meet the Paris agreement’s aim of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.

Back then the quota was 903 gigatons — about 20 years worth of emissions. But annual production of greenhouse gases continued to increase, despite the global agreement to take action. In just six years, humanity burned through more than half of its remaining carbon allotment.
[…]
To have even a 50 percent chance of hitting that ambitious target, the world must immediately start cutting carbon dioxide emissions by about 1.4 gigatons per year, the equivalent of planting about 21 billion trees annually.
[…]
A separate report from Energy Policy Tracker, a consortium of nonprofit and academic researchers, found that the world’s 20 biggest economies have directed at least $318 billion toward the fossil fuel industry as part of their pandemic response. By contrast, those same countries have dedicated about $279 billion in support of clean energy.

The United States is among the worst offenders, according to the report: Since January 2020, more than 70 percent of public finance for the energy industry has gone to fossil fuels.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/11/03/global-carbon-budget-cop26/

An international coalition of private financial institutions announced Wednesday that its membership has collectively pledged $130 trillion to convert the global economy to clean energy, as private capital mobilizes to confront the threat of climate change.

Despite the eye-popping pledge by many of the world’s biggest banks, climate experts say the commitment leaves unclear whether and how the trillions of dollars will be effectively marshaled into transitioning the world’s energy production away from fossil fuels.
[…]
Still, dozens of climate groups have criticized the Glasgow “financial alliance” as a publicity stunt — particularly because the commitment avoids calling for a cessation of financing for the production of carbon-intensive fossil fuels.

Many of the same banks behind the pledge continue to finance the construction or expansion of coal plants, for instance. Environmental groups are adamant that new production of coal, oil and gas must be stopped to avoid the consequences of catastrophic warming. Since the Paris climate accord, large banks have financed more than $4 trillion in fees from the oil, gas, and coal industries, according to Bloomberg News.

“These commitments live and die on how they treat fossil fuels. It’s the elephant in the room that they seem to conveniently ignore,” said Justin Guay, a climate expert formerly at the Sierra Club. “Dealing with fossil fuels is not optional; it’s mandatory.”

Also unclear is exactly how the trillions in private capital will be effectively turned into clean energy projects, particularly for the developing world. Even if the banks set aside assets to be used for clean energy investments, that capital needs specific initiatives to finance.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/11/03/climate-glasgow-bloomberg-carney/

On Tuesday, more than 100 countries signed on to an ambitious plan to halt deforestation by 2030 and pledged billions of dollars to the effort. Although world leaders lauded the move, climate activists say they’ve heard that promise before and that past efforts have come up short — the world is still losing massive numbers of trees each year.
[…]
According to Global Forest Watch, the world lost 411 million hectares of forest between 2001 and 2020. That’s roughly half the size of the United States and equivalent to 10 percent of global tree cover. In 2020, the world lost a near-record 25.8 million hectares — almost double the amount in 2001.
[…]
There have been global endeavors to combat deforestation in the past. In 2014, for instance, more than 200 governments, companies and civil society organizations signed the New York Declaration of Forests, which called for halving the rate deforestation by 2020 and halting it by 2030. But, Davis said, the world fell far short — “we blew through the 2020 targets that we set.”

“It’s a mixture of lack of enforcement, lack of political will and the private sector not stepping up,” said Nathalie Walker, the director of tropical forest and agriculture at the National Wildlife Federation. “There has not been enough follow-through.”
[…]
Russia is another area of concern. About half the country is covered in forests, and it has topped Global Forest Watch’s list of tree-cover loss since 2001 — with some 69.5 million hectares gone. “A lot of that tends to be for timber,” Walker said. While much of that may be managed timber practices, at least a portion of the logging is probably illegal, she said. And with such a large area “it’s difficult to police effectively.”

China is a primary consumer of Russian timber. Walker said that points to China’s broader role as a purchaser of commodities linked to deforestation — whether it’s Brazilian cattle hides or palm oil from Southeast Asia.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/11/03/world-has-pledged-stop-deforestation-before-trees-are-still-disappearing-an-untenable-rate/

…which I’m sure is fine, too…it’s not like russia or china are showing signs of being averse to the idea that anyone gets to tell them anything

China is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, with likely intentions of possessing at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, according to a new Pentagon report prepared for Congress.

The Defense Department’s annual China military power report states that the “accelerating pace” of Beijing’s nuclear expansion may enable the communist nation to have “up to 700 deliverable nuclear warheads by 2027,” with aspirations for at least 1,000 by 2030. The finding exceeds the Defense Department’s projections in the same report a year ago, when the Pentagon said that China’s stockpile was “in the low-200s” and likely to “at least double in size.”

“They appear to have decided to go in kind of a different direction in terms of expanding their nuclear force in terms of size,” said a senior U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preview the report under terms set by the Pentagon. “Whereas before I would have said that they were gradually increasing the size … now they seem to be trying to take that up to a different level.”

The official said that the increase alone will leave China short of parity with the United States, which has about 3,750 nuclear warheads. Coupled with other Chinese actions, however, it is still a cause for concern, he added.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2021/11/03/china-nuclear-weapons-pentagon-report/

A new idea is gaining currency among some politicians and policymakers in Washington: The United States is in a Cold War with China. It’s a bad idea — bad on history, bad on politics, bad for our future.
[…]
While neither the conflict with the Soviet Union nor the current competition with China has led to all-out combat, the games are very different. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was a direct military and ideological threat to the United States. We had almost no economic or social connections: Containment was a feasible objective.

Because the game was based on a simple two-dimensional premise — that the only fight was between their respective militaries — each side depended on the other not to pull the trigger. But with China, the three-dimensional game features a distribution of power at each level — military, economic and social — not just one.

That is why the Cold War metaphor, although convenient, is lazy and potentially dangerous. It obscures and misleads us by underestimating the real challenge we face — and offering ineffective strategies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/opinion/biden-china-cold-war.html

A study of weapons and ammunition used in the war in Ukraine shows that Russia has been systematically fanning the conflict with arms shipments, according to a new report funded by the European Union and the German government.

The study is hardly the first to reach this conclusion: the United States and European countries have sanctioned Russia for years for arms transfers to separatist forces they say Moscow is supporting in Ukraine.

But the study is one of the most comprehensive to date on the issue. While unlikely to change the overall picture, it offered a fine-grained view of illicit weapons transfers in Ukraine and illustrated the scope of the arms trade that is fueling Europe’s only active war.
[…]
Titled “Weapons of War in Ukraine,” the report said that the separatist forces “are more than militias armed with weapons inherited from the former Soviet Union; rather, they mimic modern armies and follow established military doctrine.”

The war, fought along an about 280-mile-long trench line that cuts through the flatlands of eastern Ukraine, began after street protesters deposed a pro-Russian Ukrainian president in 2014. Russia responded with a military intervention it has never acknowledged.

The Kremlin has consistently denied transferring arms to Ukraine, even after Western governments documented major weaponry crossing the border. This included a tracked vehicle-mounted antiaircraft missile system that shot down a civilian airliner in 2014, killing all 298 people aboard. Russian officials have blamed Western governments for fomenting the conflict with military support for the Ukrainian government, including the United States’ provision of anti-tank Javelin missiles and Turkey’s supply of Bayraktar armed drones, used for the first time in conflict just last month.

The conflict has again raised alarms this fall. Commercial satellite photographs and videos posted on social media have shown Russian tanks and other armored vehicles close to the Ukrainian border, raising fears of a direct invasion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/world/weapons-ukraine-russia.html

…so…yeah…that just about scratches the surface of what I might be inclined to pay attention to today…but for now I’m off to find more coffee & think about some tunes to drop in here