perestroika

I was going to say that. Mexico is to the United States approximately what Ukraine is to Russia - weaker, but capable of sustaining a long conflict.

Whom the rest of the continent would support and equip, I leave for everyone to guess. Europe can be checked for reference.

Sadly, they've just done it again.

The IRBM hit an underground gas storage facility near Lviv and during very cold weather, reduced heating gas pressure to a very low level. Unless engineers and technicians find a way to re-route gas, this can result in widespread infrastructure damage (water pipes freezing).

Russia also drone-swarmed Kyiv and knocked out half of the heating - the mayor, Vitaly Klychko, recommended that people who happen to have an alternative place of living should leave town. This will likely result in the same kind of damage.

Ukraine responded and knocked out electricity in the Belgorod oblast of Russia. It may be guessed that people in Belgorod aren't enjoying the moment either.

War against heating infrastructure in winter is war against civilians.

Fortunately, this type of IRBM is scarce, Russia currently produces 2..3 of them per year (it's a new product, no stockpiles), so it can be used for signaling and high priority strikes, but not constant bombardment.

To me, this somewhat old debate has always sounded a bit insufficiently nuanced.

Face masks which don't follow facial contours are for low-risk stuff. If a dentist is hovering above a healthy patient's mouth, fixing their teeth, and doesn't want large droplets to be communicated either way, it helps.

If however, someone has Ebola and a doctor goes to see them, well... in cases like that, doctors have always preferred to look like a cosmonaut - wear the highest grade of protective equipment they can.

Guidelines try to adress typical situations. If the context is an infectious disease of the respiratory tract, the ordinary masks, leaking from sides and near the nose, don't offer a comfortable level of protection, even if their filtering capability is theoretically good enough. They just leak.

The positive thing in this mess seems to be: the crown prince has never ruled as a shah. His father ruled, did the crimes (suppressed opposition) and fled the revoltion with his family.

Outwardly, the crown prince appears to be a liberal democrat by persuasion. He is also not a fool (studied political science and definitely knows the basic stuff of public administration).

Game theoretically, he is currently in the "strongest challenger to the tyrant" role, and even those who don't want a kingdom, are likely OK with him for a little while.

About the general situation in Iran - it is now close to a revolution.

Since a revolution generally must grow exponentially to overcome established power, the next few days are critical to success or failure.

If a revolution won't succeed, a prolonged civil war may come as a result, and that's no good for anyone.

Let's disagree then about whether verbal acrobatics occurred. I can't convince myself that they did not occur.

Regarding Iran... I was about to mention that country. Their strongest challenger to the tyrant(s) appears to be the shah's son. A tyrant's son. People shout "yavid shah" (long live the king) in the god damn 21st century. But their choice is game theoretically sound: he looks like a liberal democrat, at least from far away. He also has the education of a politologist - he has studied for the job he hopes to get.

I can't tell them "no, it's stupid, please shout something else". Well, the Kurds probably won't shout his name anyway - to them, he's as useful as a bicycle to fish. They help rock the boat, but want to swim away.

The problem with revolutions is that people need hope of it passing quickly, and someone re-establishing order. I'm an anarchist, but I'm painfully aware that people's ability to create a functioning anarchy is paper-thin. So they want someone to say soothing words, tell them that everything is well planned, trouble will be over soon, etc (sadly a sweet lie will also work).

So, I ignored all the discussion about who Navalny truly was. I checked: he's a lawyer. The other guy is KGB. I can't blame people for liking a lawyer more than a KGB officer, especially if the latter does KGB stuff.

Your question is a good one. Whom should a reasonable person recommend to Russians? Currently, I would advise them to consider either Ilya Yashin or Garri Kasparov. Both are alive, abroad (Yashin was imprisoned but exchanged) and look moderately capable of organizing things, if given a chance. I personally liked Ilya Leshii (Dmitry Petrov) but he got himself killed under Bakhmut. And he wasn't a politician, but an anarchist.

To my understanding, there are multiple republican congress critters against leaving NATO - so, despite nominal MAGA control, no majority.

I hope it won't be necessary, but some additional proposals:

• learn to fly FPV and build stuff that flies, it's fun, I hope it will be a peaceful hobby
• learn about fiber optic networking, it's fast and cannot be jammed, especially learn the peaceful applications of single mode bare fiber (e.g. instantly winding out data lines across landscape to restore connectivity after natural disasters)

I hope you will never have to study the other applications, but if you must, already knowing how to fly and transmit signals over fiber will be handy.

I wonder, what would a submarine do to prevent boarding by helicopter?

In case of the usual Kilo class, a submarine might threaten to fire an antiaircraft missile. They don't have air surveillance radar, but can fire heat seekers.

Quoting from the end, which might or might not be paywalled for you.

The last paragraph is perhaps the most relevant for large masses of people. If a government is trying to make economic concessions, but accidentally raises the price of eggs 3 times, it's not a concession, it's a motivation to protest harder.

In Tehran, shops in the traditional bazaar, where the recent wave of protests began, remained shuttered for an 11th day. Inside its labyrinth of passages, security forces deployed tear gas and beat some in the crowd of shopkeepers and workers gathered there, according to interviews with two shop owners who asked that their names not be published because they feared retribution.

The two shopkeepers, who are members of trade unions, said in telephone interviews that the government’s efforts to mediate with trade representatives so far had failed. One of the shopkeepers said that despite fears of financial losses, solidarity had prevailed to keep shops closed and pressure on. It was unclear how long this could last.

Tehran’s municipal officials announced that the metro stop for the bazaar, a major transportation hub, would be shut down indefinitely. On Tuesday, security forces threw tear gas inside the enclosed underground station, causing commuters and people coming to join protests to scatter, according to the two shopkeepers.

Anti-riot police officers have taken to the streets of Tehran and other cities on motorcycles, chasing crowds and beating demonstrators, according to videos on BBC Persian and social media. Some videos show security forces firing shots at the crowd; in other videos, gunshots can be heard. In Shiraz, military roadblocks were set up on a tree-lined boulevard with military vehicles patrolling.

Yet the government of President Masoud Pezeshkian struck a conciliatory tone, with Fatemeh Mohajeran, a spokeswoman, saying on social media on Wednesday that “all protesters are our children and every blood spilled pains us.”

By contrast, the head of the judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, and the country’s chief of security forces, Gen. Ahmad Reza Radan, told Iranian media that stern measures would be taken against protesters.

“We promise the Iranian nation that these people will be identified at any time and in any place, and will be prosecuted and punished until the last person is arrested,” said General Radan, according to Iranian state media.

Videos from multiple cities taken by protesters and passers-by showed crowds chanting “Death to the dictator,” and “Freedom, freedom, freedom,” and “Don’t be afraid, we are all together.” In many places protesters demanding the end of the nearly five-decade rule of the Islamic Republic targeted the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, shouting, “Khamenei is a murderer, his rule is void.”

Human Rights Activists News Agency, a Washington-based group that documents human rights abuses in Iran, said at least 36 people had been killed, including four minors, and two security agents and over 2,000 people had been arrested.

Sadegh Parvizzadeh, a wildlife photographer, posted a video of himself on social media with his face riddled with pellet-gun wounds. With one eye closed and blood oozing from his head and face, he recounted how security forces had attacked him on Tuesday.

“How can you fire at your own countrymen? Killing a person is like a game for them; they think we are prey and they are hunters. I swear to God, we are also citizens of this country, we are not rioters, not separatists, not spies for the enemy. We have pain,” Mr. Parvizzadeh said in the video, which has gone viral.

The Tasnim news agency, which is affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, described protests in several western provinces with populations of Kurd and Lur minorities as organized mob riots, saying the crowd was armed with guns, knives and homemade hand grenades. Tasnim said about 600 security officers, including plainclothes Basij militia, had been injured in clashes with protesters. The Times could not independently confirm these accounts.

Measures announced by the government in recent days to avert economic collapse and portray a sense of control have backfired. The Central Bank announced it would no longer offer an official exchange rate on the U.S. dollar to manufacturers and importers that was more than half the black market rate, which is the real marker for inflation and currency value. That had contributed to corruption — but prices of basic goods quickly tripled because industries that rely on the cheaper rate to import raw materials now have to buy a dollar at a free market rate three times as expensive.

“They have lost control, and it’s clear the government has no plan and we are being played,” said Simin, a 34-year-old who runs a catering business, in a telephone interview from Tehran who asked that her last name not be used out of fear of retribution. She said she had dashed to the supermarket in her neighborhood to stock up on cooking gas and eggs, finding that prices had more than tripled in 48 hours.

Please note: he can't leave NATO by decree, the keys got taken to the Congress during Biden's time. It's among the few treaties a US president currently cannot leave.

I'm not Russian either, despite my username pointing there in language space. I'm actually Estonian, and have been watching this train wreck from one click away. I speak Russian a bit more fluently than Ukrainian, but both skills are rusty.

I think a victimhood / injustice narrative must be acknowledged if the goal is to understand how things got to the current point. One doesn't have to agree with it, and victims don't get automatic pardon if they become criminals.

As for Navalny - at the point when many people who were against Putin kind of supported him, he was the only guy still kicking who could have made a difference. He also kept kicking long enough that he managed to change during his journey. I should note that he had no fear, to the point of being suicidal in the end game. :o He went back home to become a martyr. His friends should have knocked him out instead of letting him onto a plane headed for Moscow (which got diverted anyway to arrest him more privately).

He was rational in some sense. He focused on corruption and living standards, and if one asked around, corruption and living standards were issues that people cared about. In a poll, rule of law, human rights and democracy were bottom tier topics, but corruption was the visible and ugly face of state going illegitimate. Navalny knew that everyone hasn't studied political science and made his goals simple enough for a tractor driver to understand. At one point, he received 1/3 of the votes in the municipal elections in Moscow, so his approach (before further clamp-downs) worked for a moment - he was one inch away from being mayor of Moscow. Later he was charged, prevented from running, demolished, imprisoned and probably killed.

He was a tragic figure in one particular way. Being half-Ukrainian (his relatives were from the Chornobyl region and as teen, he briefly managed to forget Russian and speak Ukrainian for one summer) - he held on to the idea of Russians and Ukrainians being brothers when others had already let it go. And he was a hostage of Putin's popularity, and made ridiculous compromises and verbal acrobatic tricks on the subject of Crimea (writing this, I recall the "Crimea is not a sandwich" comment).

But the point of people choosing him - and he later (when barred from running) advising voters to choose the strongest non-Edinaya-Rossiya candidate in each district - was tactical: "choose the strongest challenger to the tyrant and hope to sort it out later".

As for people being politically illiterate... despair is appropriate in several countries, but Russia gets a special mention. I wonder if there exists a country where voters are universally mindful of their actual needs, see through political tricks, have empathy towards out-groups and foreign countries, and don't create a clusterf**k eventually. I'm not sure if one exists currently, but I believe such a country might be possible to create. Not in the borders of present-day Russia, however. Recently I've been looking at the US, and I'm seeing similar tendencies, fortunately at a lower level. Many of them can't figure out international policy. Caring about what happens abroad has never been very popular, there is too much US around to care about. Just as others, they don't see through tricks, their electoral system isn't under severe influence yet, but can be gamed with money and is very polarizing...

...and the same, at an even lower level (possibly because over here, it's impossible to ignore international politics) happens in the country where I live too. People can be tricked with unfulfillable promises, distracted with a topic largely irrelevant to their well being, can be whipped into moral panic over a low-priority issue... just the country is microscopic and has no potential of hegemonizing.

This ship is an interesting case - I hope to read more about it in the coming days.

• the ship was named Bella 1 and flew the flag of Guyana
• if MarineTraffic is correct, it headed from Iran to Venezuela, empty
• but you can take oil onboard a ship in Iran, why go to Venezuela?
• the US coast guard wanted to board the ship, the tanker refused and changed course towards Europe
• the US coast guard left a vessel to trail it
• the tanker appeared in the Russian ship registry, named itself Marinera, and lacking a Russian flag, painted one on the hull
• the US started fying special forces to the UK in an apparent interception bid
• today morning, it was rumoured that Russia had sent (was sending?) a submarine and some surface vessel to escort the ship
• today midday (UTC), US special forces landed a mini-helicopter on the tanker
• they must have come from another ship, since one doesn't operate minicopters far above ocean
• I conclude they were in hurry
• the tanker's crew did not offer resistance
• the tanker has since changed course southwards
• evidence of a Russian escort has not been published at this time
• however, the ship's operator obviously had connections in Russia, to get the ship registered and the story published in "Russia Today"

...and I'm puzzled. At some point I thought it might carry sensitive cargo. But a tiny force (4 men were visible, Little Bird can carry up to 6 men besides pilots) boarded without resistance, and a ship carrying sensitive cargo has far more guys defending it. As far as I can gather from public sources, the rumoured submarine never surfaced and never took steps to forbid the takeover.