4 of a kind :)

A few days ago, I had a wonderful conversation with a good friend of mine whereupon we discussed often overlooked similarities among musicians of stature with the first talk revolving around the ability to play in ways unable to be copied. For both of us, Eric Dolphy and Jeff Beck were the two whose sound and unique approach to their craft shows why this take rings true. With Dolphy, atonality and extensive use of extended chords sonically relates to works by Schoenberg, Berg and Varese IMHO. As for Beck, outlier applies as no one plays like him. Going beyond the Yardbirds, he just did his own thing whether it be hard blues or acid tinged jazz fusion melded with rock as seen by Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, Charles Mingus's homage given to the great Lester Young back in 1959.

On the composing side, Steve Winwood and Wayne Shorter come to mind as their works are nuanced and idiosyncratic to the nth degree. In the case of Winwood, forays into jazz, blues, folk and rock were key along with legendary collaborations with Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker.  For Shorter, work with Miles and Steely Dan were just starters for a musician considered to be one of the finest composers in jazz as per Oliver Nelson and Duke Ellington.

Extended Chords the playground of Eric Dolphy and significant others. :)

A thirteenth chord (E13) "collapsed" into one octave results in a dissonant,
seemingly secundal[1] tone cluster. 

Dominant thirteenth extended chord: C–E–G–B♭–D–F–A 
The upper structure or extensions, i.e. notes beyond the seventh, in red.

7 Steps ...

The course of Empire destruction / Cole Thomas

7 Steps to the end of empire appears to be universal whether it be Alexander

the Great's, the Mongols, the Roman or the British and now, it may be America's turn as the nation moves further into the 21st century. 

One such observer was Sir John Bagot Glubb (AKA Glubb Pasha). Army General and historian, he studied eleven empires starting with the Assyrians in 859 B.C. and ending with the British in 1950 A.D. Sir John determined that each followed a remarkably similar pattern from birth to demise. Spanning a period of about ten generations, each went through 7 Stages of Empire:

The Age of Pioneers (Outburst)

The Age of Conquests

The Age of Commerce

The Age of Affluence

The Age of Intellect

The Age of Decadence

The Age of Decline & Collapse

And what marked the penultimate age? Defensiveness, pessimism, materialism, frivolity, an influx of foreigners, the Welfare State, and a weakening of religion. To what did he attribute this decadence? Too long a period of wealth and power, selfishness, love of money, and the loss of a sense of duty.

The religion part is questionable but the rest of Glubb's take is pretty spot on but a few other entries should be included in order to complete the picture of a once great nation beginning to lose its place in the world as a viable super power for the ages.

To whit.

• Incompetent governance
• Corrupt politicians
• Rampant inequality
• Climate change
• Resource depletion
• Environmental degradation
• Excess militarism
• Education collapse
• Infrastructure decay
• Lack of vision

Follow the yellow brick road

Stupidity ...

Yours truly has written copiously about stupidity as it's never ending, something Einstein alluded to in his famous quote ... "There are two things that are infinite. The universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." When writing about stupidity, one finds it matters not where it comes from whether it be US foreign policy or how people cling to nonsensical beliefs contrary to their self interest (Trump) because accepting ridiculous ideas according to one's take on the world is far easier than questioning as questioning invokes the possibility of doubt when trying to cope with something as truly mysterious as existence .

One person who addresses this all too prevalent condition with eloquence and grace is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a courageous German theologian who challenged Hitler and lost his life because of it. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

‘Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil;

it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself

the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of

unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish

anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need

not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts

are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the

stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily

irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called

for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with

reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

The corollary to this is ... "Stay away from negative people. They have a problem, for every solution. - Einstein

Truer words never spoken.

Bookends ...

First edition cover

Yours truly reads a lot as you, my loyal readers know, but one book, it seems, everybody's read, but not me, is Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, a 1st person viewpoint from a preppy dealing with adolescence and angst to the nth degree. Well, in 2024, I finally have and Catcher brings back memories as a preppy who did the deed for four years in the early 60's in an environment identical to the one Holden Caufield dealt with in the 50's as my school, which will remain nameless and forever locked in time akin to the 50's, was a rather perverse monastery filled with the exact same characters described in the book. Like Holden, complaining as art form by me was the genre of the day, bemoaning how tough it was even though, in both our cases, being coddled and insulated from the real world, insured it was an absurd rant to the nth degree. 

Bringing back memories is not a bad thing as long as one's not obsessed by them. Robert E.

“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. ”

“I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice.”

“I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”

“When you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.”

Theatrical release poster by Richard Amsel

A few days ago, I again watched The Last Picture Show, a haunting and powerful film depicting the coming of age of adolescents not insulated from the world, presents, in exquisite detail, the vagaries and tragedies of life experienced by teens living in a dying town in rural Texas during the 50s, circumstances totally opposite the plush lives of characters residing in Catcher. The thing most captivating is how director Peter Bogdanovich weaves together the complex story lines from Larry McMurtry's book and give them heart rendering life through a cast for the ages, something most rare in this age of frivolous self aggrandizement issuing forth from sources like X and Facebook. 

To this rube, The Last Picture Show is one of the truly great films without question. 

“Is growin' up always miserable?" Sonny asked. "Nobody seems to enjoy it much."

"Oh, it ain't necessarily misearble," Sam replied. "About eighty percent of the time, I guess."

They were silent again, Sam the Lion thinking of the lovely, spritely girl he had once led into the water, right there, where they were sitting.

"We ought to go to a real fishin' tank next year," Sam said finally. "It don't do to think about things like that too much. If she were here now I'd probably be crazy again in about five minutes. Ain't that ridiculous?"

A half-hour later, when they had gathered up the gear and were on the way to town, he answered his own question. "It ain't really, " he said. "Being crazy about a woman like her's always the right thing to do. Being a decrepit old bag of bones is what's ridiculous.”

“Why hell yes, Joe Bob! A cripple can always get himself a wooden leg, or a glass eye, or a metal hook for a hand, or any of that mess -- but there ain't no known substitute for a big dick. I guess you is out of luck!”

“Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it usually came on him in the mornings early, when the streets were completely empty, the way they were one Saturday morning in late November.”

“He had just begun to realize how hard it was to get from day to day if one felt hopeless.”

If ain't broke ...

Maria Mavropoulou

If it' ain't broke ... applies to Google as yours truly, on a daily basis, depends on Android running a smart phone and Chrome for browsing and searching the web because Google's environment works without question. Is it perfect? Not a chance as Google seems to not understand interface design like Apple but that's not the issue, legal types not knowing how tech operates at deep level is because Google's a company comprised of a vast array of integrated software code sets able to work seamlessly together due to the billions of man hours and dollars spent in developing a system able the meet the needs of a significant portion of the human race presiding on planet earth. With this said, recommendations made by Herbert Hovenkamp, a prof at the Wharton School, makes a lot of sense regarding on how to properly deal with a company as important at this one.

Remember, DOD created the F35 and we all know how that's working out so ... do we want to create another boondoggle like the F35? I thought so.

A U.S. Air Force F-35A Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter from the 58th Fighter Squadron, 33rd Fighter Wing, Eglin AFB, Fla. performs an aerial refueling mission with a KC-135 Stratotanker from the 336th Air Refueling Squadron from March ARB, Calif., May 14th, 2013 off the coast of Northwest Florida. The 33rd Fighter Wing is a joint graduate flying and maintenance training wing that trains Air Force, Marine, Navy and international partner operators and maintainers of the F-35 Lightning II.

Backgrounder ...

A recent Defense Department decision to approve full rate production of the troubled F-35 raises questions about whether Congress has the required access to the information they need to effectively oversee major defense acquisition programs and to challenge those that aren’t ready for production. A highly classified report issued by the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation to assess the initial operational capabilities of the F-35 was made available only briefly to the Senate and House Armed Services Committees. Despite many deficiencies revealed in the report, DOD approved full rate production about a month after its release. The deficiencies are apparent in even the heavily redacted version of the report obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Project On Government Oversight. These deficiencies include the following: 

Failure to meet key availability and reliability requirements

Continued inaccuracy of the gun

Excessive logistics footprint, especially for the Marine Corps variant

Delays on promised improvements

The rapid approval despite serious unresolved issues highlights the need for more effective congressional oversight. Laws such as the Nunn-McCurdy Act and the Operational Test and Evaluation of Defense Acquisition Programs law are designed to guarantee Congress access to critical information about DOD acquisition programs so they can effectively oversee those programs. Unfortunately, congressional staff seem to have had limited access to and very little time with the report in which to understand the state of the F-35 program. Further, the statutes don’t explicitly provide Congress with a mechanism to object to a Pentagon decision to approve full rate production other than its power of the purse to decide how many to buy, and when.

Regarding Google ...

There’s no question that Google dominates the world of internet search. But in attempting to open up this critical industry to more competition, the government is pursuing a cure worse than the disease. If the government is successful at breaking up Google, history tells us that consumers and many enterprises tied to our vast and flourishing internet may ultimately pay a price.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of the D.C. Federal District Court ruled earlier this year that Google, which the Justice Department claims controls over 90 percent of online search, illegally maintained a monopoly by paying manufacturers such as Apple to make Google the default search engine on their products. Last week, the Justice Department and a group of states presented the judge with a plethora of proposed remedies. Not only should Google be required to stop paying others for default status, it must also sell Chrome, its popular web browser. It would also be barred from making itself the default search engine on its own products and disallowed from preferring its own products in search results.

The entire point of antitrust law is to promote competitive markets. Antitrust remedies are not designed to punish a wrongdoer but rather to correct the effects of a monopoly. The test for a successful remedy is whether the market becomes more competitive, with higher output or a better experience for consumers.

At this point, the Justice Department has not sufficiently explained why its proposed actions are an appropriate remedy. Some of the proposals were not addressed at any length in the judge’s opinion in the Google trial at all. Others would split up complementary products, which often leads to poorer quality outcomes and higher coordination costs, both of which would be passed on to consumers. If the government gets everything it wants, the result could remove some of the features that have made Google products so successful and result in a fractured system that requires greater user effort to get inferior results.

If it ain't broke ...

Woolsey Hall/Great Organ Music at Yale 11/24/24

Woolsey Hall

Great Organ Music at Yale 11/24/24 ... without question. :)

The Hall 

A ceiling for the ages

The Instrument

Waiting for Godot :)

Woolsey Hall rear entrance

Team Trump

President-elect Donald Trump arrives for a roundtable

accompanied by Howard Lutnick in Auburn Hills, Michigan, on Oct. 18. | Evan Vucci/AP

Ready, Fire, Aim comes to mind as Team Trump's having trouble doing due diligence to enable incoming cabinet heads to communicate with the various agencies they are supposed to run thanks to Agent Orange refusing the sign the standard set of ethics and transparency agreements every president has done since the beginning of time. 

To whit

Advisers to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reached out to the Health and Human Services Department multiple times after Donald Trump tapped him to lead the massive agency, hoping to jumpstart coordination before his takeover in late January. They were rebuffed.

Kennedy’s inability to communicate with the agency he may soon manage, confirmed by an administration official with knowledge of the episodes granted anonymity to describe internal deliberations, is just one consequence of the president-elect’s continued foot-dragging on signing the standard trio of ethics and transparency agreements with the federal government — something his team pledged to do shortly after the election.

The Trump transition’s unprecedented delay in signing the agreements has so far prevented the incoming administration from having any formal contact with federal agencies, including sending in groups of policy advisers known as “landing teams.” It also means they can’t access cybersecurity support or secure email servers for transition-related work, or request FBI background checks for their nominees.

As someone fairly well versed in designing communications systems for clients back in the day, the actions taken by Trump, thus far, are not only short sighted but also puts the country at risk because the aforementioned cabinet heads will not have a clue in running their departments because they haven't been given the time needed to learn what makes said environments tick in any way shape or fashion. 

Do you think Apple Computer, Bloomberg or Space X operate like this? 

Without the agreements in place, Trump’s team can’t access any non-public government data — depriving it of a full view of efforts the White House and federal agencies are taking to safeguard against a range of threats. That includes classified elements of the administration’s involvement in conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, and details of high-level conversations with allies. The stalemate has also left the Trump transition largely in the dark on threats closer to home that could quickly mushroom into crises, like the continued spread of avian flu.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s inability to communicate with the HHS is just one consequence of the president-elect’s continued foot-dragging on signing the standard trio of ethics and transparency agreements with the federal government. | Rebecca Noble/Getty Images

Addendum, they finally signed one document but not the whole set.

After a significant delay, the Trump transition team has signed a key agreement with the Biden White House to ease the transfer of power.

"This engagement allows our intended cabinet nominees to begin critical preparations, including the deployment of landing teams to every department and agency, and complete the orderly transition of power," Susie Wiles, chief of staff to President-elect Donald Trump, said in a statement on Tuesday.

The memorandum of understanding was supposed to have been signed by Oct. 1 — along with a second MOU with the General Services Administration (GSA) that would provide funding, office space and technology. The deadline and process is set out in a law called the Presidential Transition Act.

The transition team said it has ruled out signing the GSA agreement, saying it would use "an existing ethics plan" for its team, and would post it on the GSA website.

"The transition already has existing security and information protections built in, which means we will not require additional government and bureaucratic oversight," the Trump transition team said in a statement, noting it would disclose its donors publicly.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said the announcement did not address her concerns about the transition -- including the Trump team's use of private donors to pay for it. "There appear to be serious gaps between the Trump transition's ethics agreement and the letter of the law," Warren said in a statement.

As stated before, a dumpster fire in the making looms.

Fixit Girl redux ...

Did a redo of Fixit Girl as yours truly was a fixit guy back in the day with clients voicing angst similar to the ones expressed in Chris Davis' wonderful song whenever tech decided to do a vapor lock at precisely the wrong time. Brings back rather interesting memories without question. :)

Fixit Girl/Chris Davis, Drums/Brian Pruitt, Bass/Alison Prestwood, Guitar & Vocal/Chris Davis, Background Vocal/Emma Kiara, Video/Robert Moran, Girl in woods/Clark Tibbs, Software Code Art/Freepik

Random shots

Ice Lines

Waiting ...

Allum

Daisies

Aperture

Snow field

Belief + Doubt redux ...

10 years ago, yours truly took this pix @ the Hirshhorn in DC depicting, at that time, the tumultuous relationship humanity has with reality, something we all share as living entities on a tiny planet called earth. Now, it seems this image is more relevant than ever given the rise of corporate controlled AI and its increasing role in how information is packaged and delivered to us rubes 24/7. 

Same as it ever was. | Talking Heads

Resolution 242

Territories occupied by Israel during the Six-Day War, including the Sinai

All that's needed to end this ongoing disaster, something the US and Israel refuse to acknowledge, is to agree to the long standing Arab Peace Initiative and create the two state solution before it's too late.

As per Washington and company ... Entangled alliances are dangerous to a fault.

George Washington used a passage in his farewell address to defend his foreign policy toward France.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 (S/RES/242) was adopted unanimously by the UN Security Council on November 22, 1967, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. It was adopted under Chapter VI of the UN Charter.[1] The resolution was sponsored by British ambassador Lord Caradon and was one of five drafts under consideration.[2]

The preamble refers to the "inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East in which every State in the area can live in security".[3]

(i) Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict;

(ii) Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force."[4]

Arab Peace Initiative

The Arab Peace Initiative (Arabic: مبادرة السلام العربية; Hebrew: יוזמת השלום הערבית), also known as the Saudi Initiative (Arabic: مبادرة السعودية; Hebrew: היוזמה הסעודית), is a 10 sentence proposal for an end to the Arab–Israeli conflict that was endorsed by the Arab League in 2002 at the Beirut Summit and re-endorsed at the 2007 and at the 2017 Arab League summits.[1] The initiative offers normalisation of relations by the Arab world with Israel, in return for a full withdrawal by Israel from the occupied territories (including the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Lebanon), with the possibility of comparable and mutual agreed minor swaps of the land between Israel and Palestine, a "just settlement" of the Palestinian refugee problem based on UN Resolution 194, and the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.[2] A Palestinian attack called the Passover massacre took place on 27 March 2002, the day before the Initiative was published, which initially overshadowed it.[3]

“It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required.”
― Winston S. Churchill

Any questions?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, right, and Yoav Gallant, left, then the country’s defense minister, at an army base last month.Credit...Amir Cohen/Reuters

Live Updates: I.C.C. Issues Arrest Warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant

The International Criminal Court on Thursday issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, dealing an extraordinary blow to Israel’s global standing as it presses on with wars on multiple fronts.

The court on Thursday also issued a warrant for the arrest of Muhammad Deif, Hamas’s military chief, for crimes against humanity, including murder, hostage taking and sexual violence. Israel has said  that it killed Mr. Deif in an airstrike, but the court said it could not determine whether he was dead.

Any questions?

Backing the wrong horse as art form sums up US foreign policy does it not?

The real reason ...

Excellent video on why China's getting up close and personal with Russia and it's not just about oil. In hindsight, this clip indirectly relates to a "wonderful" BRT blurb titled The World Island, where historian Alford McKoy details not only the decline of US power in the 21st century but also about the visionary view regarding Eurasia and how it applies to The Great Game by Sir Halford Mackinder in 1905. 

 Halford John Mackinder

To whit.

On a cold London evening in January 1904, Sir Halford Mackinder, the director of the London School of Economics, “entranced” an audience at the Royal Geographical Society on Savile Row with a paper boldly titled “The Geographical Pivot of History.” This presentation evinced, said the society’s president, “a brilliancy of description... we have seldom had equaled in this room.”

Mackinder argued that the future of global power lay not, as most British then imagined, in controlling the global sea lanes, but in controlling a vast land mass he called “Euro-Asia.”  By turning the globe away from America to place central Asia at the planet’s epicenter, and then tilting the Earth’s axis northward just a bit beyond Mercator’s equatorial projection, Mackinder redrew and thus reconceptualized the world map.

His new map showed Africa, Asia, and Europe not as three separate continents, but as a unitary land mass, a veritable “world island.”  Its broad, deep “heartland” -- 4,000 miles from the Persian Gulf to the Siberian Sea -- was so enormous that it could only be controlled from its “rimlands” in Eastern Europe or what he called its maritime “marginal” in the surrounding seas.

Yet the “heartland” of this vast landmass, a “pivot area” stretching from the Persian Gulf to China’s Yangtze River, remained nothing less than the Archimedean fulcrum for future world power. “Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island,” went Mackinder’s later summary of the situation. “Who rules the World-Island commands the world.” Beyond the vast mass of that world island, which made up nearly 60% of the Earth’s land area, lay a less consequential hemisphere covered with broad oceans and a few outlying “smaller islands.”  He meant, of course, Australia and the Americas.

The World Island

Now let's think about this. Starting in 1953 with the house arrest of Iran's democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh by the CIA in order for England to gain access to Iran's oil, US foreign policy has been a disaster, first culminating with the fubars of Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Israel and Ukraine as Washington, thinking it's the center of the world and owned by the MIC, looks short term and financial gain at the expense of long term and world power. Will China succeed in taking over Siberia, well, not so fast as innate Russian distrust of China looms large while climate change promises to alter how the world functions without question.

The Great Game

1885 British map of Western Asia during the Great Game, with the Russian and Turkish Empires, Qajar Persia, the southern fringes of Russian Turkestan, Afghanistan and western British India

Pose for your picture

 

Here is the shape of the photon that comes out of the calculations. Image credit: Benjamin Yuen

From analog to digital depending on whether the photon is moving in space as a wave or interacting with an electron as a particle, the ability to see what this boson actually looks like remained but a dream until now.

Researchers from the University of Birmingham, UK, have developed an intriguing computer model to understand how light and matter interact. As tasks go, it is exceptionally hard, but the team was able to develop a strategy to simplify the problem. In doing so, they were also able to create something peculiar: an image representing the precise shape of a single photon.

A photon is a particle of light. Light (and matter) exists both as a particle and as a wave. This duality discovery was the solution to millennia of debate, when it became obvious from experiments that light does propagate as a wave but can also be described by distinct packets of energy, which is what we call photons.

The team took this continuous range of possibilities and simplified it by creating a discrete set. They were able to model in this way the interaction between an emitter and a photon, as well as how the photon travels into a distant “far-field”. The calculations were also able to provide a graphical understanding of the shape of a photon.

“Our calculations enabled us to convert a seemingly insolvable problem into something that can be computed. And, almost as a bi-product of the model, we were able to produce this image of a photon, something that hasn’t been seen before in physics,” first author Dr Benjamin Yuen said in a statement.

Light as a wave. | analog 

Thomas Young's double-slit experiment in 1801 showed that light can act as a wave, helping to invalidate early particle theories of light.[26]: 964 

In 1900, Maxwell's theoretical model of light as oscillating electric and magnetic fields seemed complete. However, several observations could not be explained by any wave model of electromagnetic radiation, leading to the idea that light-energy was packaged into quanta described by E = hν. Later experiments showed that these light-quanta also carry momentum and, thus, can be considered particles: The photon concept was born, leading to a deeper understanding of the electric and magnetic fields themselves.

Light as a particle. | digital

Photoemission of electrons from a metal plate accompanied by the absorption of light quanta – photons

Light is indeed weird but so is reality. :)

And so it goes. - K. Vonnegut

ATACMS (pronounced “attack ’ems”).

The ballistic missiles are known as the Army Tactical Missile Systems,
or ATACMS (pronounced “attack ’ems”).

Ukraine’s military used American-made ATACMS missiles to strike into Russia for the first time on Tuesday, according to senior U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

Two days earlier, the Biden administration had authorized Ukraine to use the U.S.-supplied ballistic missiles for attacks inside Russia for the first time, in a major policy shift.

The ballistic missiles are known as the Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS (pronounced “attack ’ems”).

Where the six went ...

Ukraine deployed ATACMS missiles to strike a military facility in the western Bryansk region, Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement on Telegram. It was the first known attack following the decision by President Joe Biden’s administration to approve Kyiv’s limited use of the weapons to hit targets inside Russia, two months before Donald Trump takes over promising to quickly end the war.

The inevitable blowback on Biden's decision to possibly invoke war with Russia.

Meanwhile, Putin signed a decree allowing Russia to fire nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack on its soil that threatens its sovereignty, including by drones. Russia will view aggression against itself or its allies by a non-nuclear state backed by a nuclear power as a joint attack, the document posted online said. That follows a pledge Putin made in September to revise the doctrine.

The revised doctrine ...

“Aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state, is proposed to be considered as a joint attack on the Russian Federation,” Putin said in televised comments to Russia’s Security Council on Wednesday.

Let's think about this. Question, Is Ukraine under the Russian Sphere of influence as the last time I checked, Ukraine's not part of Queens. As much as yours truly detests Putin, the start point for this ongoing disaster centeres on the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO, a red line issue Putin considers to be sacrosanct due to the proximity of Ukraine to Moscow, something recognized by the US to be a valid concern back in the 80's and 90's. 

Factoid one ...

Kissinger confirms US verbal promise to Gorbachev not to expand NATO eastward

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger admitted that the US promised the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand NATO to the East, but only verbally.

 

According to the politician, there were no official commitments stipulated in the written agreements, it was a personal promise of the then head of the State Department, James Baker.

 

“I know it's true, but it's never been written down. So we are right in saying that there was no official commitment," Kissinger said.

Earlier, the former US Secretary of State stated that European countries are against Ukraine joining NATO. The politician added that the opponents of Ukraine's entry into the alliance explained that this "issue requires careful study".

Factoid two ...

Among Cold War presidents, from Truman to Bush I, there was an unwritten rule: Do not challenge Moscow in its Central and Eastern Europe sphere of influence.

In crises over Berlin in 1948 and 1961, the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague in 1968, U.S. forces in Europe stayed in their barracks.

We saw the Elbe as Moscow’s red line, and they saw it as ours.

While Reagan sent weapons to anti-Communist rebels in Angola, Nicaragua and Afghanistan, to the heroic Poles of Gdansk he sent only mimeograph machines.

That Cold War caution and prudence may be at an end.

It is.

Does Biden & company have a clue about what they have done?
Seems not after reading quotes from people who obviously do.

Carl Von Clausewitz

“No one starts a war--or rather, no one in his sense ought to do so--without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by the war and how he intends to conduct it.”

“Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult”

“War is merely the continuation of politics by other means”

“...the side that feels the lesser urge for peace will naturally get the better bargain.”

Sun Tzu

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

“To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.”

“Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.”

“One mark of a great soldier is that he fight on his own terms or fights not at all.”

Musashi

“You can only fight the way you practice”

“If you do not control the enemy, the enemy will control you”

“Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things.”

“To become the enemy, see yourself as the enemy of the enemy”

Lastly ...

Orwell

“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. 

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred,
comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well,
others will do their thinking for them.”

Lest we forget ...

In the end, as per Orwell's first quote, the  MIC rules because the Ukraine tragedy, like Vietnam, like Iraq and like Afghanistan, is all about the money. Always has been, always will be.