A Canadian Cat

they didn't have a receipt so had to make a direct visit to the store.... too bad they didn't order through Amazon 🤪

US design for maintainability is generally pretty excellent. It makes for expensive procurement and high maintenance budgets (ie, swap the entire Abrams power pack rather than fix the fault lòcally) but it does that in order to increase availability rates at the pointy end.
Given that general approach, I'd be surprised if the Patriot was an exception. Given *that* I'd assume there is more internal damage that both can't be seen in a photo and can't be fixed in Ukraine.
Or, alternately, the priority to date has been on pushing end-user equipment into Ukraine, and not on the support systems that keep them operational and in users hands. Edit: So what would be a simple field repair for a US unit has to go back to the States when its operated by Ukraine.
But weighing against that second conclusion is the existence of USAREUR; if it was conceivably fixable forward at Grafenwohr or Kaiserlauten (or by any of the European operators of Patriot) then they would. That it wasn't suggests significant but non-obvious damage.
I think.

So for once the Russians would be right if they said it was all the CIA‘s doing 😂

Yet you do!!! Time again you do!
What has it to do with Ukraine?
🙄

Removed. Pointless responding to MAGA brainworm infections.

There is broad support in both the Senate and the House for the aid. The Senate passed it ages ago. The party that controls the house (small h) of Congress has the ability to determine what will or won't be voted on, regardless of (as you can see) how popular it is and how easily it will pass. So the House Speaker decided he wouldn't bring it for a vote? Why? 1) Because Trump told him not to, and 2) Because the small minority of 2-10 Russian propaganda mouthpieces in the House say they will throw him out if he does, and 3) A large number of Republican House members demand US border control legislation along with it (ignoring the fact they ALSO refused to vote on a Senate passed bill, which was negotiated by both parties - why? because it would make Biden look good - really, that's the reason). He (Speaker Johnson) just now summoned up the guts to go ahead and do it. We'll see if he still has a job Monday.
There is a way to get a vote done by going around the Speaker. It takes a petition of the majority of House members. Republicans wouldn't go that far even though many want it. They are afraid of Trump/MAGA. Democrats are the minority, so they can't do it without help from Republicans, who won't. 
Also, I know it's confusing. Congress is made of two houses, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. It's confusing for those outside the US because we commonly refer to "The House" being the House of Representatives, while both are "houses" (small h) of Congress. They each have their own rules of conducting business, which they themselves make up (and can change or waive). I'm not sure I made that any clearer, but there it is. Don't worry. It's all confusing to many Americans as well. The rules for advancing a bill are complicated and arcane, with many opportunities for it to be derailed along the way.

Dave

The Final Mission - This was one tough pussy. .. 
 

🙂

🙂

"Today, only amateurs steal elections on election-day."
Free and fair elections are impossible when the ruling party (ab)uses government power to fund political campaigning, banning the opposition from campaigning, and imprisoning or outlawing oppositions politicians from running in elections... or just straight up murdering them.

This really speaks to a political leader who simply does not understand how the modern world works. Of the US wants roughly the same economic footing it had pre-WW2, back when its population was about 125M, then decoupling globalization makes perfect sense.  How many jobs in the US will have to go back to manufacturing and resources?  Entire generations of Americans will have to go back to the coal mines and steel mills.  Costs for everything will go through the roof, unless of course Vance’s plan is all JP Morgan and plans to pay future US workers next to nothing to do all the work that has been outsourced.  And then there is the uncomfortable realities of the money markets and foreign investment.
The US does not get to be large, powerful and rich without the global order that it built, fought for and now needs to keep fighting for.  It baffles me that the average voter in the US does not really understand this let alone a senator.

Alright, I had to restart my browser in order to open these links for some reason. I'm not seeing the downward lines you're referring to. In fact these all look pretty darn upwards to me. We are in the middle of a dip starting ~15 years ago. But dips and rises are pretty normal on any graph, and I don't think there's any reason to think that this one is any more significant than the dips in democratization at the end of the 19th century, in the 20s-40s, or in the 60s and 70s (anyone living in the 20s-40s with access to a similar graph really would have had good reason to be pessimistic about the future of democracy). My guess is that it'll continue going down for another decade or two and then either level off or start rising again, just like the last three dips. Let's check back on this in 20 years.

I'm not disconnecting physiological and psychological evolution. We aren't changing biologically on politically relevant timescales. The biological changes that can be traced to within the last 10,000 years are minor and have no way of effecting which political systems would work (I don't think the ability to digest milk as an adult has much effect on the efficacy of democracy). Where did you hear that our brains have gotten smaller within the last 10,000 years? I have heard that homo-sapien brains are probably smaller than homo-neanderthalensis brains. But Neandertals died out 30,000 years ago. Homo-sapiens haven't visibly changed in the last 100,000 years.
As to social evolution, that's the same as technological development. We are developing better methods of organizing ourselves socially just as we develop better tools for any other task. It has nothing to do with biological evolution. I'll admit that social evolution does behave a bit like biological evolution. Ideas go through a similar natural selection process as genes. This is actually why the word "meme" was coined. A meme is an idea that undergoes a natural selection process similar to a gene. An important difference is that memes evolve far more rapidly than genes.

I'm always a bit concerned whenever I see any of my friends online advocating "tearing it all down". They never have any suggestions about what to replace it with. And anything you could replace it with would either be worse, or mostly the same but for a few modifications. The system as it is actually has the framework of a pretty good system. It just needs some tweaking. Rather that screaming into the void about tearing it all down, I think we'd do ourselves a lot more good by having constructive arguments over which tweaks would improve the system.
I'd avoid using terms like "evolution" and "species". There is evidence that our species has evolved measurably in the recent past (as in "within the last 10,000 years"). The most notable sign of recent evolution being the evolution of lactase persistence in European populations (clearly a post-agriculture development, probably as a reaction to dairy farming). But there is no evidence at all that our psychology has evolved since the rise of the first civilizations (about 6,000 years ago) in a way that would have any influence on which political systems would be most effective. It's our systems that are changing to better suite the brains we have. It isn't our brains changing to allow us to use better systems. We are certainly still evolving. But the timescales involved are so long compared to the timescales on which we refine our political systems that it just isn't relevant.
I actually think the jury is in. Loads of countries other than the US are democracies. It's obvious at this point that there are much better implementations of democracy than the US system (downsides of being first). But almost universally, people living in democracies (including the US) are better off than people living in autocracies. Democracies do collapse and revert to autocracies (and it feels like the US is currently skirting the danger zone on that). But autocracies also collapse and become democracies. And so far it appears that autocracies collapse at a higher rate than democracies. The overall trend so far appears to be towards greater democratization. 

well, one solution for 'house has rats' is to burn the house down.  Easy and mindless.  But a smarter, less lazy person might actually choose to do the work of actually removing the f-ing rats.

It is potentially worse than that.  This sort of dysfunction does nothing but feed anti-democracy sentiment.  Democracies die due to abandonment, history demonstrates this quite well.  If the system is seen as "unworkable" democracies often choose suicide.  This is the threat to the US and global stability.  Trump and Greene are symptoms of something far deeper and dangerous....apathy that leads to despair.

The crazies are loud and get the most play on social media. MTG is a vile, stupid woman but what is worse is that the members of her party that actually understand the Russian threat are afraid of her and her supporters.

The study was done in the Netherlands, and another in Germany, so this criterium applied. I don't know if they extrapolated anything to another latitude.
But the panels were bi-facial and adjusted to face towards east and west, not south (and north).
The idea is that they have their output maxima in the morning and the evening. The idea is to augment, not to supplant traditional solar farms, and reduce the need for batteries.
That means it would work in the equatorial region as well, where the sun also rises and settles in east and west. But bi-facial panels are more expensive. 
https://undecidedmf.com/have-we-been-doing-solar-wrong-all-along/
(@admins my apologies for the distraction I brought in - I will respond via DMs if anything else is to be said about solar panels)

I mean ... I think that's a joke? But with MT "Empty" Greene (proud veteran of the Bowling Green Massacre) it's really really hard to be sure. That is bat**** enough to have actually leaked out of her ears.
 
Edit: oh FFS. Those really were among the proposals she submitted 🥸

Sweet bloody Jesus if true (if not, it's good at least to laugh through tears). But seriously, perhaps this aid will indeed come soon, crazies in US politics are getting even more crazy lately. Maybe it's good sign, you know- like fever or diarrhea under certain conditions?

And CNN's Erin Burnett is calling her out for being the talk of Russian State TV:
Here's what Russian media is saying about Marjorie Taylor Greene's push to end Ukraine aid

'The Gipper' has to be rolling in his grave to know there are GOP members, like MTG, who are opposing the very type of bills he would've support - and being congratulated by our  enemies for it.

A portion of the Ukrainian aid package is earmarked for expanding and modernizing US muntions production:

"The Biden Administration has proposed that $3.1 billion of a much larger Ukraine aid bill be spent on munition production and modernization. "
https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2024/02/army-aims-double-155mm-shell-production-october/393943/
 

Remember when Tucker Carlson was interviewing Putin who recited his boilerplate spiel about invading Ukraine to 'de-nazify' it, and Tucker looked personally offended by the remark.

Vertically oriented solar panels are a thing, I just saw a whole video about it (w manufacturers/installers/users being interviewed).  They are not installed as fences, but can double as fences.  Installing solar panels as fences would be really stupid & expensive, unless these are old, worn out ones that don't work anymore.
edit: By the way, california generated enough renewable energy to provide 100% of grid demand for for 30 of last 38 days.  That's california, the 6th largest economy on earth.  

Not to dispute the general direction of this post, but I have to set some things right:
- no one is using solar panels instead of fences in Germany. But some people have installed solar panel as(!) fences. That did occur, but is very rare
- Germany has willingly killed her own solar industry herself about 10 years ago. Mostly by ****ing up subventions which went to China instead of European manufacturers. Germany basically paid for the creation of the solar industry in China, and we lost 5-figure jobs here. Thanks to the ignorance on the side of the Merkel government which believed that solar (and wind) had no future
Now China owns the market and the US is paying immense subventions for solar factories so that companies relocate there. Currently, it is pointless for Germany (and Europe in general) to push money in that direction because that would only end in an economic fight with the US & China.
OTOH if China would embargo solar panels that would be annoying but would mostly hurt China itself. The biggest market is the West.

I do think the Battle of Bure is worth covering if any scenario designers are up to it. The British had a relatively small part to play in the Battle of the Bulge. But some of the fighting they were involved in, such as Bure, was pretty interesting. It doesn't strictly speaking fall into the Downfall timeframe. But it does fall into the wider CMFB timeframe, and requires assets that only became available in CMFB with the addition of the Downfall module. Here's The Operations Room's video on the battle: