I can see your comment from lemmy.today and on lemmy.ml and on kbin.social.

I can see a response to you from @dandroid on lemmy.today and on lemmy.ml. I cannot see that response from kbin.social.

Posting from a kbin.social account to avoid the lemmy.today issues – on lemmy.today, the current behavior looks like the messages in the queue go out when the instance is restarted, but not until then. It’s running 0.19.1.

I am not the admin there, but wanted to make that available in case other instances are affected and trying to diagnose similar behavior; federation problems themselves can cause communication problems in trying to understand the issue.

republic candidate

Republican candidate

So, first, that text is from the Declaration of Independence, not the US Constitution, which defines legal rights.

But, secondly, the right to “pursuit of happiness” needs to be understood in the (somewhat euphemistic) language of the time. It is generally understood as referring to a right to property; this right was a core dispute in the American Revolution, and mirrors a nearly-identical “life, liberty” phrase from John Locke where the term used is explicitly “property”. That is, the right is not to never feel unhappy or depressed, but rather to not have one’s property taken away by non-elected parties.

https://www.crf-usa.org/foundations-of-our-constitution/natural-rights.html

The Tea Act, which imposed taxes on American colonists, was a critical dispute in the American Revolution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act

The Tea Act 1773 (13 Geo. 3. c. 44) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. The principal objective was to reduce the massive amount of tea held by the financially troubled British East India Company in its London warehouses and to help the struggling company survive.[1] A related objective was to undercut the price of illegal tea, smuggled into Britain’s North American colonies. This was supposed to convince the colonists to purchase Company tea on which the Townshend duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to accept Parliament’s right of taxation. Smuggled tea was a large issue for Britain and the East India Company, since approximately 86% of all the tea in America at the time was smuggled Dutch tea.

At the time, it was generally accepted that in England, only elected officials had the power to tax; this is one of the rights of Englishmen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_Englishmen

The “rights of Englishmen” are the traditional rights of English subjects and later English-speaking subjects of the British Crown. In the 18th century, some of the colonists who objected to British rule in the thirteen British North American colonies that would become the first United States argued that their traditional[1] rights as Englishmen were being violated. The colonists wanted and expected the rights that they (or their forebears) had previously enjoyed in England: a local, representative government, with regards to judicial matters (some colonists were being sent back to England for trials) and particularly with regards to taxation.[2] Belief in these rights subsequently became a widely accepted justification for the American Revolution.[3][4]

However, American colonists had no elected MPs in Parliament. Parliament was willing neither to grant them elected MPs, nor to refrain from taxation and have locally-elected legislatures perform taxation. Parliament’s counterargument was that Americans had “virtual representation”, in that MPs elected by people in the UK – though not elected by American colonists – had their best interests at heart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_representation

Virtual representation was the idea that the members of Parliament, including the Lords and the Crown-in-Parliament, reserved the right to speak for the interests of all British subjects, rather than for the interests of only the district that elected them or for the regions in which they held peerages and spiritual sway.[1] Virtual representation was the British response to the First Continental Congress in the American colonies. The Second Continental Congress asked for representation in Parliament in the Suffolk Resolves, also known as the first Olive Branch Petition. Parliament claimed that their members had the well being of the colonists in mind. The Colonies rejected this premise.

Quote: “What is happening is that Ukraine has been prepared, for many years, in order to use its bodies to fight for the strategic defeat of Russia,” Lavrov added.

The Russian Foreign Ministry had been under growing suspicions for years that Ukraine had been maliciously plotting to have its borders aggress against the unsuspecting Russian military.

Man, that guy looks young to be a minister.

googles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykhailo_Fedorov

32 years old.

I already remember thinking that the head of military intelligence was pretty young too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrylo_Budanov

Guy is 37.

My assumption is that that’s gonna get thrown out because they don’t have standing. Probably some kind of case law along those lines already, since I figure someone’s probably tried that before.

googles

Looks like it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliana_v._United_States

Juliana, et al. v. United States of America, et al. is a climate-related lawsuit filed in 2015 by 21 youth plaintiffs against the United States and several executive branch officials. Filing their case in the United States District Court for the District of Oregon, the plaintiffs, represented by the non-profit organization Our Children’s Trust, include Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, the members of Martinez’s organization Earth Guardians, and climatologist James Hansen as a “guardian for future generations”.

They call for the government to offer “both declaratory and injunctive relief for their claim—specifically, a declaration of the federal government’s fiduciary role in preserving the atmosphere and an injunction of its actions which contravene that role.”

In January 2020, a Ninth Circuit panel dismissed the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue for an injunction.

Legal actions to affect climate change by federal and state-level governments have been attempted since the 1990s; one of the first known cases was led by Antonio Oposa, a Philippine lawyer that represented a class-action suit of 43 students against the Philippine government to protect a forest surrounding their village.

Since 2011, Our Children’s Trust has been filing various state and federal lawsuits on behalf of youth, though most of these have been dismissed by courts, as courts generally have not ruled that access to a clean environment is a right that can be litigated against.[8][5][6] Such cases are also generally dismissed as lawsuits cannot be initiated by “generalized grievances”, and require plaintiffs with standing to sue and can demonstrate concrete harm that the government has done, and that the courts can at least partially redress the harm by order of the court.[9] Further, cases cannot be brought to court if they deal with a “political question” which cannot be resolved by actions of Congress and the President.[9]

The “political question” bit should be inapplicable, since this is a company, but the lack of standing to sue for climate change probably does apply.

I assume that this is a crowd-pleaser by the California executive, that they expect it to get tossed out but want the political points.

Interesting point regardless, though – the article doesn’t actually say that the 7 missiles that didn’t strike their target were Storm Shadows, so they could have been another type of cruise missiles, at least based on the text in this article.

I’m actually not sure that an S-400 – a long-range system, where you probably don’t have a lot of warning with Storm Shadows – is what one would use for that. I’d think that it’d be a point-defense system, like a Pantsir or something.

He compared the significance of the operation to last year’s sinking of Moskva cruiser in the Black Sea: “I would say this is an even bigger success.”

The destruction of the ships themselves aside, I would guess that Russia’s going to have to pull their warships out of Sevastopol as being too risky to use after this. If so, that has benefits to Ukraine in that it provides more warning if the Russian Navy intends to use its ships against Ukraine.

The article said that of ten Storm Shadows fired, three hit their target. If Russian air defenses shot down the seven that did not hit their targets – the article does not elaborate – it means that Russia has the ability to stop at least some low-observability cruise missiles.

Last week, Kneissl’s two ponies were flown to St Petersburg on a military aircraft from the Russian air base at Hmeimim in Syria after it was diverted from carrying troops, according to a report by Russian investigative website The Insider.

• Bails out of EU due to many people angry over corrupt actions.

• Moves to Russia, doesn’t even finish move before Russian journalists are complaining about corrupt action taken during move to Russia.

That’s kind of impressive.

I remember sitting on /r/europe before Brexit and reading people talking about how once the UK was out, then the EU would be able to do what it wanted to do, how the UK was obstructing further political integration.

I think that there will always likely be some party or parties that one disagrees with on points. If it weren’t Hungary, I suspect that there would be someone else that one would disagree with on a new set of issues.

Go back to when the EU and Canada were negotiating the CETA FTA, and I remember frustration with Belgium (well, Wallonia) over taking issue with some provision of it and blocking ratification. To this day, Belgium (and some other members, ultimately) still haven’t ratified it, and it’s applied only in part.

Sometimes one of them

I would imagine that this was going to say something about the UK and Brexit.

I think that you might have misread the article.

He had promised not to arrest Putin. Now he’s saying that it’s up to the courts, not him.

Arguably it would have been a better idea to ship people over to the US – we’ve got plenty of lightly-populated areas – or if Canada wanted, there. Or at least rural Scotland or something, if you’re going to do it in the UK.

googles

It looks like the UK already has a training area in Canada:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Army_Training_Unit_Suffield

The British Army Training Unit Suffield (BATUS) is a British Army unit located at the vast training area of Canadian Forces Base Suffield near Suffield, Alberta, Canada. BATUS is the British Army’s largest armoured training facility, and it can accommodate live-firing and tactical effect simulation (TES) exercises up to battle group level. CFB Suffield is seven times the size of Salisbury Plain Training Area and 19% the size of Northern Ireland, offering the British Army the ability to conduct large exercises that UK military bases cannot accommodate.

It does look like the UK has other training areas in the British Isles, so they may have just moved some of their training activity there. It maybe makes sense to train near London if you’re training British forces who might live there, but Ukrainians won’t have pre-existing residences in southeastern England.

That’s significant for the people who need to eat it, the customers. And I have no doubt that it is internally-disruptive to Ukraine’s economy.

But as economic warfare against Ukraine as an aggregate, I don’t believe that it’s very impactful.

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/russian-wheat-export-prices-dip-deal-reported-below-agmin-floor

The price of 12.5%-protein Russian wheat scheduled for free-on-board (FOB) delivery in October was $240 per metric ton last week, down from $245 a ton week earlier, the IKAR agriculture consultancy reported.

If we assume that that grain is wheat (it’s not all wheat, but I don’t have a breakdown of what was destroyed), at that price, that’s about $67 million in damage.

As economic damage goes, that’s pretty minimal, especially when the weapons Russia is using are not cheap. There’s also damage to the grain silos, but as structures go, they aren’t terribly-costly-to-rebuild either; the structures are mostly corrugated sheet metal. If Russia is going to be shooting at something, aside from open ocean, this probably is fairly high on the list of what it’d be preferable for Russia to be shooting at.

There might be disruption of the grain trade in subsequent years from infrastructure damage, but:

• Russia has already disrupted grain production via things like blowing the dam at Nova Kakhovka, mining a bunch of farmland, and such, so some of that capacity was already in excess.

• Some of this is already being taken up by shipments through the EU.

Even if Russia managed to entirely cut off all Ukrainian wheat and corn exports, the principal grain exports, it’s something like pre-war $11 billion/year. Compared to the amounts sent as aid in the war, that’s not nothing, but it’s not especially large, either. And Russia cannot halt economic aid with a naval blockade; as long as the West provides sufficient economic aid, firing missiles at grain seems pretty unlikely to me to be an effective economic warfare strategy.

I’ve seen various publications say that the aim is to try to create pressure from countries whose food supply is being cut off to end the war sooner (and presumably on terms favorable to Russia), but that seems like a very risky tactic: it seems like a pretty good way for those countries to wind up upset with Russia instead.

There is a shorter line well south that covers some distance on the land bridge, just north of Melitopol, from Semenivka to Domuzly, but that isn’t new: it is a year old.

I don’t know what the purpose of that line is – maybe it’s to buy time for other forces to retreat before the M14 is cut by Ukrainian infantry, but it’s 23 km from the water at the west end and 28 km from the water at the east end. And only 15 km from the M14. If Ukranian artillery can get anywhere near that point, the M14 highway, the southernmost east-west link on the land bridge, will already be within artillery range, as will land stretching up to the Sea of Azov. I doubt that it’ll be realistic for Russia to hold the land bridge as a supply route in that event.

That’s good in that it means that they expect that the line likely won’t hold, but not good in that it means that this is going to be a slog rather than in the open after the existing three lines are penetrated; I’d been wondering whether Russia had been expecting to try additional defenses before Crimea, and it looks like the answer is likely “yes”.

EDIT: Wait, no. Man, the title is seriously misleading. It sounds like they are strengthening the existing lines, not creating a new line, from the tweet that the article is based on.

The occupiers claim that the counteroffensive in Zaporizhzhia Oblast has already failed, but they have begun to strengthen the ‘deep rear’ and reinforce the defence on the ‘third line’

That’s just reinforcing the third line, which makes sense.

They are digging new trenches and reinforcing defences near the front in Polohy district;

Polohny is in the first line, unless there are multiple Polohny places. Digging new trenches doesn’t entail a new line. A line doesn’t consist of a single trench, and existing trenches weren’t always contiguous. I recall someone – I think Michael Kofman – recently pointing out that the third line was intended more for command and staging, so it wasn’t always contiguous. If Russia intends to defend that line directly, they’re probably going to want to dig more trench out.

https://deepstatemap.live/

Click on the little fort button to show fortifications.

They are occupying houses and deploying new equipment in villages near Tokmak, and setting up checkpoints and anti-tank hedgehogs in the city of Tokmak itself;

Tokmak was already surrounded by fortifications, part of the existing third line.

They are seizing new recreation centres on the Azov coast, and setting up a helicopter base at the airfield in Berdiansk;

That’s far south, but not a line.

They are bringing in former convicts to defend Robotyne and hold the front."

Ukraine holds Robotyne, based on the current maps showing control I see. It definitely isn’t a new line of defense to the south, at any rate.

So the only thing here that actually refers to defenses further south, that I can see, is the helicopter base and seizing the recreation centers on the coast. The latter could be for any number of things, maybe a barracks out of current range of Ukrainian artillery, but probably won’t be a defensive line, since if Ukrainian forces were fighting there, they’d have already cut the Russian east-west supply lines.

The article title should probably say something like “Russia strengthens existing rearward lines after Ukrainian forces penetrate forward lines”.

https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#m:tsd;d:today;@33.5,44.6,14.0z

NASA FIRMS picks up a fire in Sevastopol first visible at about that time.

[continued from parent]

• Things to look at, ways to help Ukrainian forces maintain pressure
  on Russian forces going into winter. Possible that Ukrainian
  military will become exhausted, like last fall. Probably what
  Russian military anticipates, don’t want to let Russia comfortably
  spend time digging in, reconstituting forces. Russia probably going
  to conduct another critical infrastructure strike campaign against
  Ukrainian cities, trying to make them uninhabitable, destroy viability as
  state. That means that air defense is going to become a priority
  again. Russia’s strategic campaign did not succeed last year, but
  situation in December was somewhat-precarious. Ukrainian air
  defenses have gotten much better, gotten more equipment from West.
  Not clear whether this is going to be a cold or warm winter.
  Russian offensive potential remains weak in Kofman’s view; without
  significant mobilization, have hard time to regenerate much
  offensive power. Should not discount possibility of additional
  Russian mobilization. Conversations on next year’s offensive needs
  to start now; even if this offensive is successful, likely not to
  liberate extent of territory that Ukraine and western countries had
  hoped. Don’t want to have a last-minute approach next year the way
  we did this year. Need to have commitments for equipment, etc, in
  September, not January. Training efforts are scaling up. Artillery
  ammunition probably going to be biggest constraint. One of biggest
  issues going to be coming up with enough both to let Ukraine sustain
  defenses and also to set aside enough to allow for offensives.
  Russia also increasing production, Russia trying to buy from North
  Korea, Iran. West needs to accept that this is going to be a long
  war and be willing to tolerate that; the opportunities for this to
  be a short war have passed. Russian forces could have collapsed
  last fall or Prighozin’s mutinty have caused a coup or collapse, but
  those didn’t happen. Can’t know yet, but increasingly likely that
  Ukraine will not be able to decisively drive all the way to the
  coast in this offensive. Need to focus conversation on long-term
  outcome of war, long-term investments.

• On Prighozin’s death: Sounds like Prighozin’s final mistake was
  coming back to challenge breakup of Wagner; not clear that he was
  always going to be killed, though Kofman would never have bet much
  on Putin’s deal with Prighozin holding. Happy to see end of
  Prighozin; Western media tended to uncritically quote Prighozin,
  though he is not a reliable source. Wagner as an organization will
  probably continue in some form. Experienced fighters will stay
  around. Probably will be hard to fully replace Wagner, but we will
  see. Wagner may be back. Russian Ministry of Defense is requiring
  that people who want to fight in Ukraine need to take an oath. How
  important was Wagner? Was mostly fighting for Bakhmut, which wasn’t
  really decisive in the conflict. Perhaps Wagner’s main impact was
  in December or January last winter, when Russian military was very
  vulnerable and desperate to stabilize lines.