Would someone mind giving me the super TLDR on why Euromaiden was a coup and not a political event. I haven't followed that closely. Thanks.

Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Kim Family Patriarch

KIM JONG UN

On the Ukrainian front, nothing new.

Biden's proposed US-led Belt and Road seems to be his attempt at accomplishing what China has been doing. Does it have any potential or will this end up like similar initiatives that had a lot of hype but ultimately went nowhere?

In Denmark the so-called "robustness commission" has announced its recommendations for "a more robust healthcare system".

Denmark's universal healthcare system is widely popular, doctors and nurses are among the most trusted professions and very few people would dream of moving towards the wasteful nightmare that is the American model. There are however challenges. An aging population means more demand for care and greater workers to carry out the care, recruiting enough healthcare workers is a challenge and those in the system experience having too many tasks. In addition significant regional and social inequalities in healthcare exists and the increasing cost of new treatments is straining the healthcare system.

Of course the recommendations doesn't address price gouging by the medical-industrial complex. Instead, the chairman of the commission used today's press event to fingerwag and blaming the public for having too much "hygge", for drinking, smoking and eating too much.

The recommendations themselves are a mixed bag. Stove of it is reasonable enough but it has some huge red lights in it. Austerity dog whistles like "core services" is being blown and although part of the stated goal is to reduce inequalities, one of the principles introduced is that "everyone should not get the the same". On the face of it this means that "resourceful" patients will have to do more stuff themselves without actually seeing doctors or nurses who will them have more time for the less resourceful patients. It sounds nice but it has the potential of pushing a development towards a more stratified system where the middle class has private health insurance while the service for the poor ends up becoming a poor service.

Another potentially concerning suggestion is that of reducing the amount of care given. Palliative care should start sooner for terminal patients than is the case today, patients should be "more included in their health care decisions" with the started goal of talking them out of the more invasive and expensive options. This can have it's good sides, patients should give informed consent and there is little sense in stressing dying people with invasive treatments but again, in the hands of the neoliberal state it can easily become a reduction in service.

The worst suggestion is the formation of a so-called "prioritising commission" who will be takes with finding ways to cut care. The commission will be enabled to tighten criteria for receiving treatments dented too expensive for their effectiveness and will potentially be enabled to introduce copayments or to reduce today's full coverage with a mere subsidy. This has the potential to be a significant blow to today's principle of free and equal access to healthcare.

The government has already signals it's willingness to form the "prioritisation commission". The government has also decided to increase military expenditure to two percent of GDP and to replace every ship in the Danish navy.

https://archive.ph/9qagX

NEW YORK TIMES DOESN’T WANT ITS STORIES ARCHIVED The Times blocked a bot that had given the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine huge troves of websites.

By 2017, however, the Internet Archive announced its intention to stop abiding by the dictates of a site’s robots.txt. While the Internet Archive had already been disregarding the robots.txt for military and government sites, the new update expanded the move to disregard robots.txt for all sites. Instead, website owners could make manual exclusion requests by email.

Reputation management firms, for one, are keenly aware of the change. The New York Times, too, appears to have mobilized the more selective manual exclusion process, as certain Times stories are not available via the Wayback Machine.

The example they use for "certain Times stories" is the one about Russian soldiers' phone calls from Ukraine.

Just realized that about this time one year ago, Kharkov was being overtaken by Ukrainian troops. How time fucking flies

The second article Mercouris mentions is also a banger its amazing it went under the radar for so long.

West must focus on preparing Ukraine’s troops – or we will all pay the price

A couple of months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I was lying on a hilltop watching a US mechanised battalion thundering down a valley, tasked with breaching a set of obstacles. The obstacles were less formidable than those in Ukraine, and the enemy in the exercise comprised a single company backed by limited artillery. Nevertheless, the US troops made a mess of things. Their reconnaissance troops failed to screen their vehicles, they went static in sight of the enemy and they were severely punished.

The fact that well-trained US troops struggle to conduct combined-arms obstacle breaching under more favourable circumstances underscores how difficult it is. Moreover, the US troops I was observing may have performed poorly, but they did so in training. If ever they have to do it for real, they will have had repeated opportunities to learn and improve. Ukrainian troops have not had that luxury.

This is a brilliant moment where once again these analyst douches are so deep inside their own ass they don't understand saying this shit(remember everything must be sacrificed in order to make content for the mighty google algo) in public just makes you western NATO look bad.

Yeah turns out all that NATO training literaly proved to be shit by US own failures.

But if you combine the two articles you see that at least some people had a reasonable grounded view of reality while the propaganda machine goes full hype and they clearly contradict each other.

I have been really busy and work lately, so I've been holding off on listening to the new season of Blowback because it's not a podcast you can casually listen to and it will make me mad, which will interrupt my work. That being said, how is it that I just now learning that Benazir Bhutto and her admin were instrumental in the creation of the Taliban? Honestly, it makes her assassination very funny.

Did a popular streamer/pod start talking about the war? I’ve seen a ton of people asking for a tldr on how it was provoked lately (in places that were relatively nato-brained compared to the news mega).

in less serious news:

so a couple years ago there was a legendary thread on the lying flat tieba that had a guy livestreaming drinking a bottle of homebrewed spirulina algae. the user got banned, presumably for evangelizing about potentially unsafe 'nutritional independence' (drink nutritionally complete and calorically sufficient spirulina errday instead of getting a job to buy food) and the tieba itself got banned a while later for having negative vibes i guess? dude got a few police visits for his trouble as well

after getting banned from tieba, he apparently spent his off time making a bilibili account and posting about his continuing efforts on spirulina research, including attempting to grow it in a literal piss ditch he built next to a river. as of recently the guy has gone viral again, by making a video purportedly cleaning up a small pond in his local park by dumping batches of bacterial supplements, spirulina and fish into it over the course of two months (which is around the amount of time a new body of water needs to cycle itself regardless). dude's gonna get another police visit soon i bet lol

anyway, reflection on these events has caused me to wonder if perhaps the 70:30 ratio applies to most instances of dudes rock as well. as further food for thought, i note that the golden ratio is closer to 60:40

In another day of having a normal one, the Baltic states decided to ban entry of cars registered with Russian license plates. Finland also has decided to join this ban.

New discovery in sanctions science to add more pressure to Russian citizens living in Kaliningrad.

Highly informative for anyone interested in the China vs US semiconductor war

China's 7nm Semiconductor Breakthrough - Asianometry - [14:10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KrdcTsScKk

(The channel owner is a lib, but worth a watch regardless)