davel

It turns out yesterday’s mass strikes on Moscow which were meant to coincide with the Euro Council meeting were pure Hollywood spectacle: the drones themselves were stuffed full of kerosene mixtures in the way Hollywood stages car explosions to look more “dramatic” by producing thick plumes of oily smoke.

In the video below, a shot-down drone can be seen jettisoning its special FX package.

It now makes perfect sense how Ukraine was able to fabricate such an eye-catching mise-en-scene, as each downed drone managed to pockmark the horizon with its own PR-ready plume:

The actual damage to the refinery itself turned out to be disappointing, as only a few oil storage tanks were actually destroyed.

In fact, much of Ukraine’s recent narratives have been rapidly falling apart. The Crimean “isolation” turned out to be a total bust, as even top Ukrainian accounts have outlined the steps Russia swiftly took to reverse any issues Ukrainian drone attacks have managed to temporarily cause.

tubeup uses yt-dlp to download a Youtube video (or any other provider supported by yt-dlp), and then uploads it with all metadata to the Internet Archive using the python module internetarchive. It was designed by the Bibliotheca Anonoma to archive single videos, playlists (see warning below about more than video uploads) or accounts to the Internet Archive.

Prerequisites

This script strongly recommends Linux or some sort of POSIX system (such as macOS), preferably from a rented VPS and not your personal machine or phone.

• https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup
• https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/main/Formula/t/tubeup.rb
• https://archive.org/
• https://wiki.bibanon.org/

For nearly four decades, the events surrounding Tiananmen Square have remained one of the most controversial and misunderstood episodes in modern Chinese history.

In this episode, Carl Zha joins Jamarl Thomas to provide a firsthand Chinese perspective on the 1989 protest movement, drawing on his own experience as a teenager living on a university campus during the events.

The discussion explores the economic turmoil of China's reform era, the inflation crisis of the late 1980s, official corruption, the evolution of the student movement, and the political divisions inside China's leadership that culminated in the June 4 crackdown.

They also examine the famous Tank Man footage, the role of student leaders, allegations of foreign involvement, and how the events are remembered differently inside and outside China.

Rather than repeating familiar narratives, this conversation focuses on historical context, competing interpretations, and the complexities often missing from mainstream discussions.

Topics Covered

• China's transition from a planned economy to market reforms
• Inflation and corruption in the late 1980s
• The Hukou system and urban-rural inequality
• Why the protests initially gained widespread public support
• The shift from reform demands to political confrontation
• Internal divisions within China's leadership
• The military intervention of June 3–4, 1989
• What happened outside Tiananmen Square
• The famous Tank Man footage and its full context
• Student leadership and controversial statements by Chai Ling
• Operation Yellowbird and the evacuation of protest leaders
• Deng Xiaoping's interpretation of the crisis
• Competing narratives about Tiananmen today

Key Takeaways

• The protests began amid widespread public frustration over inflation and official corruption.
• Economic reforms dramatically improved agricultural productivity but also created major social tensions.
• The movement evolved significantly between April and June 1989.
• Much of the violence occurred on routes leading into central Beijing rather than inside the square itself.
• Historical interpretations of Tiananmen remain deeply contested both within China and internationally.
• Understanding the events requires examining economic, political, and social factors rather than relying on simplistic narratives.

Memorable Moments

• "The demands started with inflation and corruption. By late May, the rhetoric had changed dramatically."
• "The Tank Man footage most people know is only part of the story."
• "History becomes much more complicated when you look beyond slogans."

Elon Musk wants a SpaceX IPO valuing the company at upwards of $1.75 trillion.

To get there, he got the rules changed so that index funds, with millions of Americans' retirement savings, are forced to buy in.

Retirees could take huge losses, while insiders cash out.

I nearly failed out of grad school, defending Chomsky's theory of syntax. Half a decade later, I'm done pretending it was worth it.

Chomskyan generative grammar — X-bar theory, Government and Binding, the Minimalist Program — was taught to me at the University of Pennsylvania as the only legitimate science of language. It was the gatekeeper, the screener, the thing students were washed out of linguistics PhD programs over. As I've come to discover, decades of work in dependency grammar and construction grammar — frameworks I was told didn't exist, didn't matter, or had been "subsumed" — were doing better empirical work the whole time.

In this video:

• What Chomsky actually got right (the cognitive revolution, generative grammar as discrete infinity, the takedown of Skinner's Verbal Behavior)
• Where transformational grammar, deep structure, movement, empty categories, and Universal Grammar go wrong
• The "poverty of the stimulus" argument and why Pullum & Scholz's critique matters
• How construction grammar (Adele Goldberg) handles the active/passive, the dative alternation, "the more the merrier," and coercion — without movement
• How dependency grammar (Lucien Tesnière) handles headedness, raising vs. control, and cross-linguistic data — without phrase structure trees
• Why long-distance reflexives in Mandarin, Icelandic, and Japanese broke Binding Theory
• Why Minimalism's proliferation of functional projections (TP, vP, FocP, ForceP) looks an awful lot like Ptolemaic epicycles
• Usage-based linguistics (Tomasello, Bybee), psycholinguistics (Levelt, Ferreira), and what kids actually do when they learn language