Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Peter Beinart
It sounds bizarre today but in the late 1990s, when the Clinton
administration was considering expanding NATO to include merely
Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic-barely anyone at that
time was proposing admitting Ukraine-titans of American foreign
policy cried out in opposition. George Kennan, the living legend
who had fathered America's policy of containment against the
Soviet Union, called NATO expansion "a strategic blunder of
potentially epic proportions." Thomas Friedman, America's
most prominent foreign policy columnist, declared it the "most
ill-conceived project of the post-Cold War era." Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, widely considered the most erudite member of the US
Senate, warned, "We have no idea what we're getting into."
John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of America's Cold War historians,
noted that, "historians-normally so contentious-are in
uncharacteristic agreement: with remarkably few exceptions, they
see NATO enlargement as ill-conceived, ill-timed, and above all
ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world."
...
In 2014, Henry Kissinger, the personification of the American
foreign policy establishment, argued, "The West must understand
that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country."
If "Ukraine is to survive and thrive," he insisted, "it must
not be either side's outpost against the other - it should
function as a bridge between them." Instead of joining NATO,
Ukraine "should pursue a posture comparable to that of Finland"
in which it "cooperates with the West in most fields but carefully
avoids institutional hostility toward Russia."
Glenn Greenwald, Jan 6
That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or "coup" was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic - three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress - posed anything approaching a serious threat to "overthrow" the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face.
Putting the events of January 6 into their proper perspective is not
to dismiss the fact that it was a lamentable event - any more than
opposing the exploitation of 9/11 and exaggeration of the domestic
threat of Muslim extremism, which I spent a full decade doing,
meant that one was denying the heinousness of that attack. The day
after the 1/6 riot, I wrote in this space that "the introduction
of physical force into political protest is always lamentable,
usually dangerous, and, except in the rarest of circumstances that
are plainly inapplicable here, unjustifiable." I still believe
that to be the case. There was nothing virtuous about the 1/6 riot.
...
The Democratic Party, eager to cling to their majoritarian control
of the White House and both houses of Congress, knows it has no political
program that is appealing and thus hopes that this concocted drama will
help them win - just as they foolishly believed about Russiagate.
We believe that the shift away from backing transformational technologies and toward more cynical, incrementalist investments broke venture capital.
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Ted Gioia
Just consider these facts: the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams. It was twice that rate just three years ago. And the mix of songs actually purchased by consumers is even more tilted to older music-the current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century, such as Creedence Clearwater and The Police.
But maybe it's just that More and more musicians are releasing their own music on sites like TikTok.
Create original songs using AI Software.
Between 2009 and 2018, the proportion of adolescents reporting no sexual activity, either alone or with partners, rose from 28.8 percent to 44.2 percent among young men and from 49.5 percent in 2009 to 74 percent among young women. The researchers obtained the self-reported information from the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior and used responses from 4,155 people in 2009 and 4,547 people in 2018. These respondents to the confidential survey ranged in age from 14 to 49 years.