Jim: George Harrison, of Manson’s life-defining band, the Beatles, stopped by the Haight that summer and came away unimpressed: “The summer of love was just a bunch of spotty kids on drugs,” he said. The implications of this are more interesting than any other part by a country mile.
Isegoria: And if anyone’s wondering, Hayao Miyazaki’s (feature) directorial debut, The Castle of Cagliostro, has roughly nothing to do with the quack of quacks.
McChuck: “Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable.” — The Philosopher’s Song, M. Python
Michael van der Riet: If the enemy is in range, so are you. Ukraine came up with a brilliant new way of killing. Within twenty-four hours, the Russians were working on a copy. More Russians are getting killed, and so are more Ukrainians. This is a win how?
Handle: Cagliostro was Carlyle’s “Quack of Quacks”.
Isegoria: Lior Lefineder (@lefineder) found a source: Reported by Joseph Pelet de la Lozère, an administrator who served under Napoleon in his book: “Napoleon in Council, The Opinions Delivered by Bonaparte in the Council of State”
Isegoria: The smallpox vaccine was introduced to France in 1800, and Napoleon strongly endorsed it, so it seems plausible that he would refer to it.
Isegoria: I was delighted to see the quote footnoted — but it was not a citation, just an explanatory note: Joseph Balsamo, aka Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743–95), had been a famous occultist and fraud, unmasked during his lifetime, so it was strange for Napoleon to dismiss the great rationalist and one of the founders of German idealism, Immanuel Kant, alongside such a notorious mountebank.
Alex S.: “Scatter mining is inefficient because it distributes a few mines over a large area.” Scatter mining have never been what he says it is. Okay, I see that has been written by a journalist…
Alex S.: Interesting that the word vaccine appears to be very recent at that time. If Napoleon really used used it. Does the book in its notes have the original French?
T. Beholder: Hence solutions like cope-caging a whole road. Jim says: If drones shall be mines, why shouldn’t drones be miners? They could also be minesweepers. Even for something less noticeable than dropped mines. First pass is a flyby with non-linearity detector. All electronics that isn’t shielded up the yingyang shows. After that, classics. Just hang good old pulse minesweeper sensor on a cable from some cheap quad-copter (since sweeping is slow and payload is very modest, performance requirements...
Jim: Thanks, Franklin. Redan, I considered that possibility, but the text gives no hint of it: “Egypt…will remain in the news…as it struggles to…feed[] 84 million people a day…and guard[] the Suez Canal, through which passes 8 percent of the world’s entire trade every day.” “World’s entire trade” clearly suggests trade of oil and non-oil alike, and the later 2.5-percent figure of the world’s oil trade through the Suez Canal is given as a specific elaboration....
Redan: Transposition, perhaps? Would ’2.5% of world’s entire trade’ and ’8% of world’s oil’ fit?
Franklin: Great catch, Jim. The discrepancy calls into question the validity of the authors claims. I suppose in this climate, volatility is something that skews data in general, which is somewhat deflating given I thought the book was well constructed.
Jim: Per U.S. EIA’s Country Analysis Brief: World Oil Transit Chokepoints (June 25, 2024), about 8.6% of the world’s oil passed through the Suez Canal and SUMED pipeline in 2023, considerably more than the 2.5% claimed by the author. The book was published in 2015, and there is some fluctuation year-to-year, but even in 2018 the figure was about 8.2%.
M. Mack: “Does he think anyone with a brain did not know all this before the start? “Salients are dangerous.” Well, duh.” Why it’s almost as if another army had that lesson slammed in their face around Kursk. Obviously today is different than yesterday. “Also, he managed to omit the (fairly obvious) objective. What is the point of discussing an operation without its objectives? For “failure” or “success” to even make sense, you need to compare the results with the...
Michael van der Riet: Overwhelmingly the victims of mines are civilians. It looks as though Diana Spencer’s anti-mine activism was a complete failure, with even our host Isegoria appearing to approve of them.
Jim: If drones shall be mines, why shouldn’t drones be miners? P.S. Love them or hate them, it’s genuinely impressive how resilient the Ukrainian military command has been. Yes, it’s a proxy of the United State; nevertheless, most other proxies would’ve folded long, long ago.
Isegoria, may you have a rational yet funny Christmas! ;-)
Thank you kindly, Borepatch. In fact, I’ll try to keep things rational yet funny into the New Year.
..and that’s why I come here often.
Happy coming New Year!
Happy New Year to you, too, Tatyana. (S Novim godom!)