Random thoughts about whatever

Welcome to Wondercafe2!

A community where we discuss, share, and have some fun together. Join today and become a part of it!

Register Log in
Very appropriate with proper margins of safety that the rich will trim to serve profits ... thus we lose it!

The rich would sooner breed naivete ... and this breeding works ... albeit not pragmatic ...
 
Delightful Life said:
Wow you got to experience it?
For how long?
How hard was it to wash off things?
Click to expand...
I did indeed. It was a problem for several years and interfered with normal life. My mum once got lost when walking to the PO box two blocks away. Small children weren't released from school without a responsible older person. We wrapped a hankie or scarf around our faces - these acted like filters and got black. Sound seemed muffled, and traffic noise was almost stopped. In normal fog conditions I could hear the fog horns from the ships on the Thames. During a smog event I couldn't, even though they were sounding.

I have no idea how difficult it was to clean. I was just a kid and that wasn't part of my responsibilities.
 
Delightful Life said:
Go French People!!!
That takes a lot of Gall ;3

Click to expand...
Nuclear may have its own issues, but you can't beat it for eliminating CO2 emissions from your grid while ensuring a solid supply. Nuclear waste at least can be contained in a sealed vault or whatever. CO2 sequestration has been half-assed at best.

That said, conservation is still the best approach, beating even renewables. Reduce your consumption means you can reduce your capacity means less electricity needs to be generated means less waste being generated of any kind.
 
Mendalla said:
Nuclear may have its own issues, but you can't beat it for eliminating CO2 emissions from your grid while ensuring a solid supply. Nuclear waste at least can be contained in a sealed vault or whatever. CO2 sequestration has been half-assed at best.

That said, conservation is still the best approach, beating even renewables. Reduce your consumption means you can reduce your capacity means less electricity needs to be generated means less waste being generated of any kind.
Click to expand...
Or a new target for Russia?
 
Waterfall said:
Or a new target for Russia?
Click to expand...
I think the Russians would find France a tough pill to swallow. They can't even handle Ukraine it seems and France has its own nuclear arsenal and pretty decent arms industry cranking out good quality fighter jets and such. Not to mention getting to France would require taking Poland and Germany at minimum. I suspect the US would intervene long before things got to France, even with an isolationist in power.

It would also be quite out of character for the Russians. They have always tended to focus on controlling their immediate neighbourhood, not on long distance campaigns of conquest. They only marched out of Russia in WWII when Germany attacked them and did it mainly to build a buffer between them and the West. Ukraine is a different story because it was part of both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union so the Russians see invading it as recovering lost territory. Which is also the risk for some of the other former Soviet republics. They have no such motivation for attacking a country like France.
 
Mendalla said:
I think the Russians would find France a tough pill to swallow. They can't even handle Ukraine it seems and France has its own nuclear arsenal. Not to mention getting to France would require taking Poland and Germany at minimum. I suspect the US would intervene long before things got to France, even with an isolationist in power.

It would also be quite out of character for the Russians. They only moved out of Russia in WWII when Germany attacked them and then to build a buffer between them and the West. Ukraine is a different story because it was part of both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union so the Russians see invading it as recovering lost territory. They have no such motivation for attacking a country like France.
Click to expand...
Ukraine winning against Russia continues to amaze me....in my mind they could take out Ukraine swiftly.... if they wanted to.
 
Waterfall said:
Ukraine winning against Russia continues to amaze me....in my mind they could take out Ukraine swiftly.... if they wanted to.
Click to expand...
On paper, they could. Especially since they mainly just want Donetsk and could have just stopped there and dug in instead of going for places like Kiev. I think they've over-extended and that's causing morale problems in the ranks, much like the US had morale problems in the ranks in Vietnam. They likely also thought they could control Europe and NATO using the oil supply and pet politicians like Trump and that didn't work. The Ukraine is now wielding weapons that are equal or superior to what the Russians have.
 
Mendalla said:
On paper, they could. Especially since they mainly just want Donetsk and could have just stopped there and dug in instead of going for places like Kiev. I think they've over-extended and that's causing morale problems in the ranks, much like the US had morale problems in the ranks in Vietnam. They likely also thought they could control Europe and NATO using the oil supply and pet politicians like Trump and that didn't work. The Ukraine is now wielding weapons that are equal or superior to what the Russians have.
Click to expand...
This war is still newish. I try not to underestimate battle tactics. Russia soldiers losing morale? Only if they're allowed in my opinion. And those weapons being given to Ukraine are only giving Russia clear insight as to who to include as the enemy IMO.
This is a country that ended WW2.
 
Waterfall said:
This war is still newish. I try not to underestimate battle tactics. Russia soldiers losing morale? Only if they're allowed in my opinion. And those weapons being given to Ukraine are only giving Russia clear insight as to who to include as the enemy IMO.
This is a country that ended WW2.
Click to expand...
And pretty much went downhill after that. When the Wall came down, it became clear that the Soviet Union had turned into a paper tiger and Russia does not seem to have advanced much after that. Basically, their conventional forces were in such a state that they could not beat NATO without going nuclear. Which is my big worry here. If Putin can't win a conventional war, at what point does he go "f*** it" and push the red button. Take out Kiev or something. Would the US actually retaliate for that if he kept it limited? It might be a risk he would take. And the if the US did retaliate, well go watch The Day After.
 
KayTheCurler said:
I did indeed. It was a problem for several years and interfered with normal life. My mum once got lost when walking to the PO box two blocks away. Small children weren't released from school without a responsible older person. We wrapped a hankie or scarf around our faces - these acted like filters and got black. Sound seemed muffled, and traffic noise was almost stopped. In normal fog conditions I could hear the fog horns from the ships on the Thames. During a smog event I couldn't, even though they were sounding.

I have no idea how difficult it was to clean. I was just a kid and that wasn't part of my responsibilities.
Click to expand...
Oh, wow, I just made London fog my favourite drink at the bistro- this paints a very different picture…
 
Mendalla said:
And pretty much went downhill after that. When the Wall came down, it became clear that the Soviet Union had turned into a paper tiger and Russia does not seem to have advanced much after that. Basically, their conventional forces were in such a state that they could not beat NATO without going nuclear. Which is my big worry here. If Putin can't win a conventional war, at what point does he go "f*** it" and push the red button. Take out Kiev or something. Would the US actually retaliate for that if he kept it limited? It might be a risk he would take. And the if the US did retaliate, well go watch The Day After.
Click to expand...
Russia has won more wars than lost , post war.
The United States seems more like the paper tiger having only been successful with the gulf war and failed miserably with all others.
 
jimkenney12 said:
They did win the war in Grenada. Russia lost big in Afghanistan.
Click to expand...
To be fair, everyone loses wars in Afghanistan. The place has always been where imperial powers send their troops to die. It was quite amusing watching the first episode of Sherlock, the modernized Sherlock Holmes starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. In the original Holmes stories set in the late 19th century, Watson is an Army doctor who is discharged after being wounded in Afghanistan. Sherlock literally took that almost as written for the modernized version, which takes place during the post-911 Afghan campaign. And I am sure you could set it in Moscow in the 80s and use that same background again. The more things change ...
 
Waterfall said:
Along with a coalition of Caribbean countries.
Granada doesn't even have an army...just a police force.
So....wow?
Click to expand...
Panama.

Which Russian victories are you thinking of, by the way? I can't think of any. The occupation of Eastern Europe after WWII was largely a product of their defeat of the Nazis and the West's willingness to let them get away with it. A lot of Russia's "victories" after that were against hapless foes. I mean the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary were barely even military operations, just using the armed forces to suppress uprisings and protests more vigorously than usual after local authorities either failed or showed sympathy with the uprising.
 
I don’t want to shake up the music thread too much so I’ll put this here.

I keep thinking of “Did ‘my generation’ do anything to even try to help the world - or did we just behave with a spoiled sense of nihilistic self interest in rebellion of the materialistic self interest a lot of our parents had embraced?” And I’m referring to mostly white middle class Gen Xers from suburbia, not everybody of my age group.

I keep thinking of popular culture and music - that’s my frame of reference. There were a few bands, but one that stands out is Rage Against the Machine. I wasn’t as politically aware as I probably thought I was, then, and they were “too heavy metal, too rap” I thought at first. I liked that song that everybody liked “Killing in the Name” which is calling out white supremacy and protesting indoctrination into it. That was in the latter half of the 90s and they’d already been putting out albums for several years. I, like lots of young people, liked the “Fk you, I won’t do what you tell me” chorus that all the “youths” (lol) liked - giving the finger to the establishment seemed vindicating even if we didn’t understand why. It was a good song to stomp around to and get our angst out in a harmless way - I thought - but didn’t think much more about it.

Lately I’ve been listening to some of their other material and I realize they are gems of my generation. They appear to be geniuses to me now, in what they understood in their early 20s compared to most “kids” from suburbia. Two songs: Bulls on Parade, and Sleep Now in the Fire were ahead of their time in terms of political insight. Yes, they are loud, angry…but they are more than that…and I sort of wish I’d actually heard and really understood them sooner.

Zack de la Rocha, lead singer, got some flack in recent years (and maybe earlier but I don’t remember) for having worn dreadlocks at some point, when he’s not black. I read that he is mostly hispanic with white and some black heritage but he’s light skinned. Regardless, lots of white kids had dreadlocks in the 90’s. I think we thought “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” (Bob Marley had a popularity surge) combined with the grunge esthetic, and never thought about cultural appropriation.

Nevertheless, RATM knew what they were protesting about. For those brave enough to listen. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea. This one is about the military industrial complex, the NRA and their political relationship to “family values conservatives”. Much of it would’ve gone right over my head back then. I was busy having “fun”. But it’s impressive now. A little too late.


And this one is about similar. But gets into colonialism, and kind of ironically because I’m reflecting with hindsight about my lack of awareness, says you “reap what you sow” and this where it got us. And that was in ‘98.

Eerie footage/ foreshadowing from Trump’s first failed presidential bid (no it’s not some telepathic conspiracy theory stuff as has been proposed on the internet - he really did try to run then), and of Rudy Giuliani. It is unfortunate that RATM warnings were not heeded, is all. They were clearly not mindlessly angry “kids” just making noise.

“The Nina, The Pinta, the Santa Maria” - he was talking about colonialism and capitalism, via Christopher Columbus. I don’t think I would have fully registered that in 1998.

 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top