farss

The "rules-based international order" was a fiction popularized by US policy makers who wanted to quietly substitute it for international law, so they could violate said laws, while still vaguely gesturing at moral authority.

I'm not sure that per capita is a very useful rubric to measure over time. Like I'm not saying there's no relation to population size, if you compare a tiny country to a large one, but it's not clear to me that there's a strong relationship - why a government would be expected to lock up 5% more journalists if the population grew by 5%. Or why if a country of 30 million jailed 100 journalists it should be necessarily be considered less repressive than if a country of 40 million jailed 100.

Some benefited handsomely. Most others, not so much.

The military jet was just a stunt, to reinforce the false pretext that there was a bomb aboard. There was no reported military aggression against the plane, and IIRC, the RyanAir pilot said he didn't see it as a threat, but as a form of routine emergency assistance. The plane may have already started to turn toward Minsk simply because ATC asked them to.

And keep in mind, the U.S. believed Morales may have granted Snowden asylum at that time, and was absolutely willing to flout international law and norms on asylum, on top of the norm for safe unimpeded transit for sovereign leaders. And all that based on mere rumor.

You can say in clarity of retrospect that Morales was free to return to Moscow, but that is a bit of a long flight back, and they had no idea what was happening at the time, or if other countries would also mysteriously deny them transit.

None of this is to take away from an absolutely outrageous incident, but I don't see how the two are so categorically different. Both are shocking abuses of international law and norms to shut down dissent and free and adversarial press. It's important to condemn Belarus without letting Western/American governments play so innocent.

I haven't seen evidence that it was merely a stunt. But in any case, the sovereign head of state was effectively detained for 12 hours, based on lies and coercion. That itself is outrageous. Belarus used a fighter jet pilot to deliver the lie about a bomb threat and convince the pilot to land, while U.S. lied to Western European governments through diplomatic channels about who was on the Bolivian plane. Both cases are a serious breach of international norms and rules in order to conduct rendition of a political criminal.

The methods used are somewhat apples to oranges, but they're comparable in that both the United States and Belarus used pretty brazen measures to go after the political crime of unwanted journalism. Faking a bomb threat and intercepting a civilian plane is more serious in a way; blocking off a sovereign leader's path en route & then boarding his plane is arguably more serious in another.

The Morales incident wasn't simply one country choosing to deny airspace. It was a hegemonic superpower using it's leverage to create a wall of un-passable countries, and then having the plane boarded and searched before it was allowed to take off again. Belarus's version is a weapon of the weak to the same or very similar end.

For the historically curious, state-sponsored skyjacking is not without precedent. Israel appears to have pioneered it:

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1954/12/13/archives/syrian-airliner-... [2] https://www.wrmea.org/1994-november-december/israel-was-firs... [3] https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/essays/rokach.html

Trouser cuffs do have a function. The extra weight helps the cloth drape better.

All I really want is Fireworks. Never found a true replacement for it.

True, but I've been using GIMP a long time - more than a decade. Used it for years longer and years before I used Adobe CS. Taken a number of tutorials on it. Will always be super clunky.

I want to like it, but GIMP is almost unusable for me. Really hard to do even basics, and have to spend a lot of time googling how to do what I want to do.

Here's a similar script I wrote. Would be glad for feedback.

https://github.com/wneuheisel/Kindle-Notes-Backup

I believe they might go after the publisher in this case, and that Snowden already got a good advance they presumably can't get to while he's in Russia.

> "(and safe)"

Want to make sure this part of the comment is also highlighted because big homeless shelters can be really difficult, scary, and even dangerous places, even when there are beds available, and so unhoused people have to wrestle with whether it's safer/more desirable to sleep outside rather than deal with all that. And that's not to mention all the cumbersome rules and religious proselytizing they might have to deal with in shelters. Warehousing people is not a good option.

Arguably the judgement against the book by the Navy Seal in the Bin Laden raid was a non-politicized example. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/24/matt-bissonnet...

It doesn't really matter, they can still use pre-publication review to jack you up by redacting even what is otherwise publicly available information and delay publication until the news cycle has moved on. The process is arbitrary and politicized, and widely considered to have become a First Amendment issue, which is not surprising, since the modern review process emerged in the 70s when the CIA was trying to mute public criticism by former employees of the lies, abuse, and failures of the Vietnam War.

[1] https://www.lawfareblog.com/path-dependence-and-pre-publicat...

[2] https://shadowproof.com/2019/12/18/us-government-censorship-...

It's not just the free fare - it's the abysmal lack of shelter options and the attempts by cities to criminalize encampments and force people to find somewhere indoors to avoid arrest.

My understanding is that one of the main hurdles is the physical limits of actually catching the carbon to sequester it. Even though it is historically high, it is still relatively dispersed (a few hundred parts per million). Plants are extremely efficient at utilizing carbon, but their main limitation to growth is catching enough of it from the atmosphere.

Not dumb at all. I'm doing this on a $5 droplet and it's faster than any of the commercial VPN's I'm currently paying for. It's a little less privacy protective than many VPN providers however - Digital Ocean will for example forward DMCA violation nastygrams they receive from content owners.

Does that work for imported documents also, or only Amazon-purchased books?

Sure! I barely know what I'm doing, but this worked for me: https://github.com/wneuheisel/Kindle-Notes-Backup

Suggestions welcome!

Yes, but only for the books you purchase through Amazon. If you import DRM free books (or presumably re-import DRM free versions of Amazon purchases) or personal docs, the notes on those won't be saved.

Don't forget to backup your marks and highlights also. I made that mistake once, and then lost my Kindle. Lost years worth of highlights and notes, so now I set up a bash script to automatically sync them to a Git repo when my Kindle is plugged into my laptop.

"(Corollary: pissing off someone important is a good way to find out whether you have broken the law)."

^this^

They may have meant the word 'hit' as a noun.

This drives me nuts. Why is it so difficult to maintain?

I was at one of the baths in Budapest recently where I saw another solution to this problem. The locker room is mixed gender, and the changing stalls have two doors that open to opposite sides of the aisle. But the doors open inward, and the bench inside folds down to block them while occupied. Then you have to lift the bench to get out.