Gerard Vila (aka @[email protected])

Born in England, raised in France, married to a Russian, trilingual. Retired software engineer. Amateur musician. Dog lover.

[Clément Molin @clement_molin]

Les frappes ukrainiennes 🇺🇦 sur Moscou nous disent plusieurs choses :

🔹️Les ukrainiens ont largement rattrapé leur retard sur les drones à longue portée
🔹️La défense aérienne russe est défaillante, on parle de 120 systèmes de DA modernes et bien fournis en munitions tout autour de la ville en 4 couches, dont l'action est souvent sans résultat ou dangereuse.
🔹️L'aviation russe est globalement absente, la chasse russe est suffisamment nombreuse pour surveiller l'espace aérien, notamment Moscou mais aussi les autres villes et est pourtant invisible.
🔹️La raffinerie de Moscou était l'une des plus défendue du pays, depuis le début d'année, une raffinerie/un dépôt pétrolier est touché tous les 3 jours en moyenne.
🔹️La Russie a plus à perdre qu'à gagner dans la guerre. Les frappes sur l'Ukraine ne peuvent pas vraiment détruire plus l'économie ukrainienne qui est déjà largement en difficulté et soutenue par l'UE, mais les frappes sur la Russie ont une capacité presque infinie.
🔹️Le 24 février 2022, personne n'aurait imaginé que le 18 juin 2026, Moscou serait en feu après une 3ème nuit de frappes ukrainiennes consécutive avec des drones fabriqués en Ukraine.

↪️ En France, plusieurs personnalités s'opposent voire dénoncent ces frappes. Rappelons que les Ukrainiens sont frappés chaque nuit sur l'ensemble de leur territoire, ils ont donc pleinement le droit de riposter. Rappelons également que ces frappes ne constituent aucunement une escalade, puisque toutes les soit-disant escalades n'ont jamais rien donné. Rappelons enfin que Moscou est et reste l'unique responsable de la poursuite de la guerre, que toutes les négociations ont échoué à cause de la Russie et donc ces frappes sont un retour de bâton logique pour l'état agresseur.

[Olena Tregub @OTregub]

People ask: “What will happen to Ukraine now that Ukraine is bombing Moscow?”

Let’s think.

Will Russia invade us?
Bomb our cities with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles drones?
Destroy our civilian critical infrastructure?
Occupy our towns?
Rape and kill civilians, kids, women?
Kidnap Ukrainian children and train them as soldiers ?
Set up filtration camps?
Torture and starve POWs?
Use chemical weapons on the front line?

Wait.

Russia has already done all of this.

[penguins_against_trump @FlippersUpNow]

Myth-Destroying Machine #3

❌ Myth: Modern Russia is somehow a continuation of a progressive left-wing project.

✅ Reality:

The Soviet Union abandoned many ideals associated with the modern left long ago.

It crushed independent labor movements, persecuted dissenting socialists, deported entire ethnic groups, and suppressed minority cultures and languages.

Millions of Ukrainian peasants died during forced collectivization and famine while grain was confiscated and exported to finance rapid industrialization.

In effect, human lives were converted into foreign currency.

Much of the industrial infrastructure built during that period relied on Western technology, Western equipment, and Western engineers.

By Stalin's era, the USSR looked less like a workers' utopia and more like an empire wrapped in red flags.

Modern Russia inherited the empire, not the utopia.

[Joni Askola @joni_askola]

The most catastrophic error the Kremlin made was escalating its aggression into a genocidal war, a move that is both a moral abomination and a fatal strategic mistake.

This choice stripped Ukrainians of any alternative but total, unyielding resistance, ensuring that Russia is now trapped in a war it cannot win.

For Russia, this campaign is a war of choice, but for Ukraine, it is an inescapable reality. The genocidal rhetoric and behavior combined with the sheer violence unleashed against civilians eliminated any possibility of a negotiated ”compromise.”

People will occasionally capitulate to a standard political occupation, but no one willingly submits to their own destruction. The Kremlin's cruelty completely backfired by cementing a permanent, deep-seated hatred toward the occupiers.

This pathetic behavior also completely destroyed Moscow's diplomatic standing. The pretense of defending against Western encirclement was revealed as a transparent lie, completely alienating anyone on the global stage with a basic sense of morality or a brain.

By forcing an entire nation into a corner, Russia guaranteed its own long-term failure. The resulting defeat is not just inevitable, but a fully deserved consequence of their own actions.

Russia needs to be and will be defeated

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Columbia psychologist proved that the moment your brain knows it can Google something, it quietly refuses to remember it.

She ran four experiments to be sure. It happened every time.

Her name is Betsy Sparrow.

She runs a research lab in the Department of Psychology at Columbia, and the paper that closed the argument was published in the journal Science in July 2011, with two co-authors, Jenny Liu at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Daniel Wegner at Harvard.

The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed how we think about the internet itself.

The first experiment was simple. She asked participants to answer a series of difficult trivia questions, then immediately gave them a modified Stroop task where they had to name the color of a word on a screen as quickly as possible.

The words were a mix of everyday objects and technology terms like Google and screen. Every participant slowed down measurably when the tech words appeared, but only after they had been struggling with the trivia. The harder the question they had just failed, the slower they were to read past the word Google.

Their brains had quietly reached for the search bar before the question was even finished.

The second experiment is the one that should genuinely change how you live. She gave participants 40 trivia statements to type into a computer, things like "an ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain."

Half the participants were told the computer would save their work and they could come back to it later. The other half were told the computer would erase everything the moment they finished. Then she tested both groups on how much they remembered.

The group that believed the information had been saved remembered significantly less than the group that believed it had been erased. Same statements, same typing task, same amount of time spent reading each fact, and one group simply forgot more of it because they knew they would not need it later. The brain had quietly decided that storage was someone else's job.

The third experiment pushed the finding even further. Participants were told their typed statements would be saved into specific folders on the computer, with names like Facts or Data.

When tested afterwards, the participants remembered the folder locations significantly better than they remembered the actual statements themselves. They could not tell you that an ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain, but they could tell you exactly which folder you would find that fact in if you went looking for it.

Their memory had reorganized itself in real time around where to find the information, not what the information was.

The fourth experiment confirmed the entire pattern with 34 Columbia undergraduates and a recognition test designed to rule out every other explanation. The result held. People remembered where to find the answer better than they remembered the answer.

Sparrow called this transactive memory, which is a concept her co-author Daniel Wegner had introduced decades earlier to describe how married couples and close colleagues quietly outsource parts of their memory to each other.

You do not need to remember your spouse's mother's birthday if your spouse remembers it. You do not need to remember a complicated client's preferences if your colleague does. The brain treats trusted external sources as extensions of its own memory and reallocates effort accordingly.

What Sparrow showed was that the human brain has done the same thing with the internet now. Google is not the tool you go to when your memory fails. It’s been upgraded to a permanent member of your cognitive team. Your brain just stopped doing the work silently when that happened.

The implication is what should scare anyone who has grown up with a search engine in their pocket. Every fact you’ve looked up in the last 15 years that seemed easy to look up again was processed by your brain at a shallower level than it would have been processed before search engines.

You didn't learn it the way your parents learned stuff. You discover where it lives. The address was written into long-term storage. The stuff went into some sort of cognitive holding area that gets emptied the instant your brain confirms the address is still working.

This is not a moral failing, Brains have always done that with reliable external memory.

The same mechanism that allows you to forget your spouse's phone number because you have it saved in your phone is the same mechanism that allows you to forget almost everything you read on the internet.

Your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do . Save effort where effort can safely be saved .

The thing is, the more you outsource, the less you have inside. The more a brain has learned where to find information , not what the information is , over 15 years , the more it becomes dependent on the external system that contains the actual content .

The moment the system goes down, the moment you can't search, the moment you have to reason out a problem from raw memory alone, the gap between what you know and what you can access becomes painfully apparent.

The answer is uncomfortable and it’s the same answer that worked before search engines existed. You have to deliberately learn things you could easily look up, but which you don't, not because looking up is hard, but because the looking up is what builds the part of you that can actually think without a phone in your hand.

Your brain is not worse than your parents brain.

it simply stopped storing the things it used to store because someone else volunteered to do it for free.

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

And for those suffering from very selective amnesia, let me remind you once again that Russia has been carrying out regular and systematic mass missile and drone strikes against Ukraine — including power plants and heating infrastructure, hospitals, schools, apartment buildings, supermarkets, as well as historical landmarks and national heritage sites — since 4 a.m. on February 24, the very first day of its full-scale invasion.

At that point Ukraine could not even dream of striking any targets inside Russia, let alone Moscow, and remained practically powerless to do so for many months, if not years, of the war.

So you can go to hell with your “now Russia will strike back.”

[Gerard Vila (aka @[email protected]) @_vila30]

@fwmarqix The sun was shining on the sea,
      Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
      The billows smooth and bright
And this was odd, because it was
      The middle of the night.

Lewis Carroll, Walrus & Carpenter

(Me after flying from Paris to Los Angeles)

[Oorlog-monitor 🇳🇱❤️🇺🇦 @oorlog_monitor]

Dankzij Dictator #Trump heeft Oekraïne het initiatief in de oorlog tegen Rusland over genomen en ik ga precies uitleggen hoe dat komt. Trump heeft anderhalf jaar geleden alle militaire steun aan Oekraïne stopgezet. Hoewel Russische propagandisten beweerden dat de oorlog daarmee binnen twee weken beslist zou worden, is dat niet gebeurd. Oekraïne werd gedwongen om zelf alternatieven te bedenken voor de Amerikaanse steun en dat hebben ze als volgt gedaan:
- Shells & artilleriesystemen --> Oekraïne produceert nu zelf 2.4 miljoen shells en zo'n 500 moderne artilleriesystemen per jaar. Dat is het dubbele van heel Europa.
- In plaats van artillerie is Oekraïne over gegaan op fpv drones, waarvan ze er dit jaar naar schatting 7 miljoen gaan produceren.
- HIMARS --> Die zijn vervangen door Oekraïense mid strike drones waarvan ze er 100.000en produceren per jaar. Vooral de FP 1 en 2 drones zijn zeer succesvol.
- ATACMS --> Oekraïne produceert nu zelf op grote schaal kruisraketten, de FP-5 Flamingo, die een veel groter bereik hebben, een veel grotere lading aan explosieven dragen en veel goedkoper zijn in productie. Ook werkt Oekraïne aan twee verschillende ballistische raketten, de FP-7 en de FP-9.
- Short range Luchtverdedigingssystemen --> Oekraïne is het eerste land dat succesvol interceptiedrones heeft ontwikkeld en op schaal kan produceren en deze kennis inmiddels doorverkoopt aan andere landen. Andere landen die niet langer de VS vragen om hulp, maar Oekraïne.
- Long range Luchtverdedigingssystemen --> Dit is voor Oekraïne het lastigste, maar ook daar zijn ze mee bezig. Oekraïne is bezig met een goedkoop alternatief van de Patriot raket en deze zouden in Augustus in productie moeten gaan.

Oekraïne werd verweten door Trump dat ze geen kaarten hadden. Daardoor moest Oekraïne al al deze technologische ontwikkelen. Dat is ze gelukt en ook nog binnen zeer korte tijd. Dat is zeer indrukwekkend. Dit bewijst nog maar eens dat wij als Europa Oekraïne nodig hebben. Voor hun kennis, hun ervaring, hun productie en voor de veiligheid tegen Rusland. Die oranje dictator in het gouden huis gaat ons namelijk niet helpen.

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

Trust in science is not restored by treating every paper as equally credible.

A scientific paper is not a sacred text. It is a claim.

Claims are accepted, challenged, corrected, and sometimes retracted when the evidence doesn’t hold up.

The mistake many people make is assuming that removing a flawed paper is censorship.

It isn’t.

If a bridge engineer discovers a calculation error, we don’t demand the bridge remain standing in the name of transparency.

We fix the error.

Science works the same way.

Transparency matters. Journals should explain why papers are corrected or retracted.

But transparency does not mean every claim deserves permanent legitimacy.

The real threat to public trust isn’t that flawed papers get removed.

It’s the growing belief that scientific rigor is optional as long as a conclusion is politically useful.

Science advances by correcting mistakes.

Not by preserving them.

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Four minutes after one Russian missile hit near her home in Kyiv, Veronika Chuyan saw the building opposite in flames and knew another was coming.

She grabbed her sons, Jacob and Jasim, and ran. When the second missile struck, she covered them with her body. 1/

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

A plumber knows more about plumbing than you.

A pilot knows more about flying than you.

A scientist usually knows more about science than you.

That doesn’t make them automatically right.

But it does mean the burden of proof is on the person claiming thousands of experts got it wrong.

Science isn’t a democracy.

It’s not decided by likes, vibes, or confidence.

It’s decided by evidence.

And evidence doesn’t care who wins the argument.

[Joni Askola @joni_askola]

If you want to measure the impact of a European leader, look at how much energy foreign adversaries spend trying to destroy their reputation.

The constant stream of pro-Russian and pro-China propaganda aimed at @kajakallas proves she is a formidable opponent to them, and while the exact powers of the EU High Representative position can potentially be reformed, Kallas has the ideal mindset to confront hostile autocrats.

European capitals have every right to analyze and potentially adjust the bureaucratic mandate of the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Rethinking how the bloc coordinates its external actions is a standard part of institutional evolution, but any systemic flaws in the office cannot be blamed on Kallas.

The concentrated hostility directed at her from state media ecosystems in Russia and China (and some other enemies too) is an involuntary admission that her strategic clarity poses a major problem for them. Their fixation on Kallas confirms her status as a high-stakes obstacle.

She has a profound understanding of the psychological games autocrats play, and she refuses to grant them the passive diplomatic concessions they crave. Her clear, unyielding communication style helps insulate the European Union from the gaslighting tactics that hostile regimes use to manipulate Western policy.

The narrative attacks against her should therefore be viewed as validation of her approach. Discussions about reforming European diplomacy are healthy, but Kallas herself is not the issue, as her defiant attitude is exactly what is needed to face down modern authoritarian threats

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

Polio vaccine is safer than polio
Diphtheria vaccine is safer than diphtheria
Measles vaccine is safer than measles
Tetanus vaccine is safer than Tetanus
And yes Covid vaccine is safer than Covid

That's

The

Whole

Point

Of

Vaccines

[Gerard Vila (aka @[email protected]) @_vila30]

@slantchev In the USSR I saw women construction workers carrying heavy loads. Never saw that anywhere else.

[Joni Askola @joni_askola]

MAGA and pro-Russian influencers love to claim that Europe has become a dangerous wasteland while their own countries are perfectly safe.

The actual data completely exposes this narrative as a ridiculous lie.

Data proves that Europe is significantly safer than both the United States and Russia. While Western European nations maintain an average intentional homicide rate of around 1 per 100,000 people, the United States and Russia suffer from violent crime rates that are five to seven times higher (!!!). The claim that Europe is an unsafe warzone is completely detached from statistical reality.

Xenophobic influencers push this false narrative primarily as an excuse to attack immigration and Islam. However, their arguments fall apart under basic scrutiny because their own domestic demographics completely contradict their talking points.

For instance, pro-Kremlin accounts completely ignore the fact that Russia houses the largest Muslim population in Europe by far, numbering up to twenty million citizens. Similarly, MAGA commentators attack immigration despite the United States being a nation entirely built by immigrants and their descendants. The idea that Europe is uniquely dangerous is a stupid deception, as the numbers show it remains the safest of the three by a massive margin

[Masoumeh Naseri @mimnoon]

مرجان ساتراپی و داستان ما و دیگران
از دیروز چند نقد درباره مرجان ساتراپی و آثارش خواندم که این نوشته واکنش به آن است.
قبل از هر چیز بگویم که من ماشین تبلیغاتی جمهوری اسلامی را در فضای خارج از ایران بسیار موفق می‌دانم. اتفاقا برخلاف تصور ناقدان یکی از دشواری‌های کسانی مثل مرجان ساتراپی در جهان بیرون از ایران، همیشه این بوده است که با این انگاره بجنگند که آنچه «ما» می‌خواهیم چیزی است که «ما» می‌خواهیم، نه چیزی که «غرب لیبرالیست امپریالیست» به ما حقنه کرده است.
در جبهه مقابل ساتراپی‌ها، لشکر عظیمی از آکادمیسین‌ها و فعالان مدنی ضدامپریالیسم چنان صف کشیده‌اند که حتی کلاه جمهوری اسلامی هم از آن پشت پیدا نیست!
یکی از مهم‌ترین مشکلات این نقدها این است که چرا داستان آن دیگران را نگفتی.
پرسپولیس تاریخ‌نگاری و پژوهش مردم‌شناسی و جامعه‌شناسی انقلاب نیست. این اثر یک اتوبیوگرافی مصور است. روایت زندگی دختری از یک خانواده مشخص در یک موقعیت تاریخی مشخص. وظیفه خودزندگینامه، روایت پیچیدگی‌های جامعه ایران نیست.
ایران برای اغلب مخاطبان غیرایرانی هم یک جعبه دربسته است. این مخاطب فقط انسان سفیدپوست غربی نیست، روزنامه‌نگار ترک، نویسنده عرب، کاسب آفریقایی، دانشجوی پاکستانی و بقیه و بقیه هم هستند. از درون این جعبه صداهای مختلفی به بیرون درز می‌کند، یکی از این صداها ویدئوهای لگویی است، یکی پرسپولیس، یکی لولیتاخوانی، یکی مقالات آکادمیسین‌های ایرانی‌تبار در رسانه‌های غربی و صداهای دیگر. اشکال از جایی آغاز می‌شود که فکر کنیم هر کدام از این صداها «تنها روایت ایران»‌اند.
اگر با سلاح ایده‌های ادوارد سعید بالای سر راویان جوامع شرقی بایستیم و فکر کنیم هر ایرانی که تجربه سرکوب، تبعید یا اجبار حجاب را روایت کرده یا هر سوری که تجربه استبداد اسد را روایت کرده یا هر فعال مدنی که برای حقی ساده مثل رانندگی در عربستان تلاش کرده است به «مخبر بومی» غرب تبدیل شده، عملاً امکان روایت انتقادی از درون جوامع غیرغربی از بین می‌رود.
به جز این درست است که تصویرگری‌های ساتراپی در پرسپولیس سیاه و سفیدند ولی او واقعیت را سیاه (ایران) و سفید (غرب) روایت نکرده است. اتفاقا در روایت مهاجرتش اصلا و ابدا غرب را بهشت تصویر نمی‌کند. بنابراین تصویر «ایران تاریک در برابر غرب روشن» نقد درستی به کارهای او نیست.
در یکی از نقدها خواندم که دهه شصت فقط زندان، جنگ و سرکوب نبوده و ما در این دهه شاهد ایثار، ایمان، همبستگی و امید هم بوده‌ایم. اول اینکه درباره آن ایثار و مقاومت، میلیون‌ها نسخه اثر منتشر شده است. ادبیات، گزارش روزنامه‌نگارانه نیست که نویسنده آن موظف باشد محتوایی متوازن بسازد. دوم اینکه آیا در آن هزاران اثری که با فرم‌های مختلف در جمهوری اسلامی منتشر شده هرگز رنج این بخش جامعه، حتی در حد اشاره، به رسمیت شناخته شده است چه برسد به روایت بلند و عمیق؟ در کدام آثار منتشرشده در جمهوری اسلامی رنج خانواده‌های قربانی زندان، سرکوب سیاسی یا محدودیت‌های اجتماعی روایت شده است؟
یکی از نقدها ادعا می‌کند که ساتراپی مانند یک «توریست اروپایی» در ایران زندگی می‌کرد. این نقد از این جهت جالب است که نویسنده وجود آن «دیگری» را که ساتراپی یک نمونه آن است چنان بیگانه می‌بیند که حتی در «ایرانی» بودنش هم تردید می‌کند.
ساتراپی در تهران متولد شده، سال‌های کودکی و نوجوانی‌اش را در ایران گذرانده، انقلاب و جنگ را تجربه کرده و آن طور که خودش می‌گوید به‌شدت از آنها تاثیر گرفته و بخش مهمی از هویت آثارش دقیقاً حول همین تعلق شکل گرفته است اما بخشی از جامعه، از جمله نقدنویسان، چنان به حوزه زندگی و رنج‌های او نزدیک نشده و آن را نشناخته‌اند که آن جهان به اندازه جهان یک «توریست اروپایی» برایشان بیگانه است.
طرح انسان ایرانی را از روی یک شابلون نزده‌اند که بگوییم هر کس به این تصور ما نزدیک نبود اصلا ایرانی نیست و توریست اروپایی است! بین اختلاف طبقاتی با تفاوت هویتی فرق است.
حرف آخر هم این‌که مرجان ساتراپی‌ها در همه دهه‌های حاکمیت جمهوری اسلامی، حتی اگر نمی‌خواستند هم ناچار بودند روایت آن بخش دیگر جامعه را بخوانند، ببینند و حتی در مدرسه درباره‌اش سخنرانی کنند و امتحان بدهند. آن بخش دیگر جامعه برای درک رنج جهان ساتراپی چه کرده است؟

[Josey @joseyseven]

@nsamimi9 The whole thing is making me queasy. Elon’s twitter has become a scream box for lunatics who are more or less blaming her for the current war. The idea that can’t relay your personal experience as a woman who’s country turned into an islamic theocracy overnight is mind boggling

[Camille @Camille69007]

Ce tweet est fascinant à plusieurs titres.

D'abord parce qu'il faut une certaine pauvreté morale pour se réjouir de la mort d'une femme dont le principal tort était de penser différemment de vous.

Ensuite parce qu'il révèle une confusion intellectuelle devenue fréquente : l'incapacité à distinguer la critique d'une religion de la haine de ses fidèles.

Marjane Satrapi n'a jamais construit son œuvre contre les musulmans. Elle a raconté son expérience d'une révolution islamique, d'un régime théocratique et des conséquences concrètes de l'imbrication entre pouvoir politique et pouvoir religieux. Vous pensez pouvoir lui refuser son propre vécu parce que ça déplaît à votre imagination malade ?

Dans Persepolis, elle parle du voile obligatoire, de la police des mœurs, de la surveillance des femmes, de la répression politique, de la guerre, de l'exil et de la perte des libertés individuelles. C'est un fait, ou c'est faux ? Si c'est vrai, et c'est le cas, on de fiche de vos pleurnicheries.

Si cela est de l'islamophobie, alors il faudrait considérer que dénoncer l'Inquisition est de la christianophobie, que critiquer les rabbins ultra-orthodoxes est de la judéophobie, ou que condamner les crimes de l'État islamique est de la haine des musulmans.

À un moment, les mots ont un sens.

L'islamophobie désigne la haine ou la discrimination envers des personnes musulmanes. Il est mauvais, mal choisi, parce qu'il fait exprès de mélanger la saine critique d'une religion et la discrimination systématique d'une croyance. L'islamophobie est légale et nécessaire, la musulmanophobie est un délit. Soyons clairs.

Critiquer une religion, ses dogmes, ses institutions ou certaines de ses conséquences historiques relève de la liberté de conscience la plus élémentaire.

Le plus ironique dans cette histoire est que Satrapi est précisément issue du monde musulman que vous prétendez défendre. Elle connaît probablement mieux l'Iran révolutionnaire, le voile imposé et la théocratie islamique que la majorité des militants occidentaux qui la traitent aujourd'hui d'islamophobe.

On assiste à une situation pitoyable : une femme iranienne ayant vécu la révolution islamique, l'exil et les contraintes imposées aux femmes se voit expliquer, depuis le confort des réseaux sociaux occidentaux, qu'elle n'aurait pas compris sa propre histoire ?!

Il faut beaucoup d'arrogance pour en arriver là. Quant à votre jouissance sur le fait qu'elle soit morte par amour prouve une chose : vous, vous êtes incapable d'aimer. C'est sans doute cela le plus triste.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

One man in California has spent 57 years recording the sounds of natural places. Much of what he's recorded no longer exists.

His name is Bernie Krause. He started as a folk musician and an early pioneer of the Moog synthesizer. In 1968, he began carrying recording equipment into rainforests, deserts, coral reefs, African savannas, and research sites associated with scientists like Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey.

The Wild Sanctuary archive now contains more than 5,000 hours of recordings and over 15,000 identified species. Krause coined the term "biophony" to describe the collective sound of living organisms in a habitat and helped establish the field of soundscape ecology.

Through thousands of recordings, he observed that healthy ecosystems often partition acoustic space, with different species occupying different frequencies and times of day. On a spectrogram, an intact habitat can resemble a densely layered musical score.

When Krause revisited many of the places he had recorded decades earlier, he found that over half had become silent, severely degraded, or so altered by human activity that their original biophonies could no longer be heard. His archive preserves sounds from ecosystems that have been transformed or lost.

[Joni Askola @joni_askola]

The proxy war narrative is finally dead.

The US cut off military aid 18 months ago and demanded a soft surrender, but Ukraine is still fighting.

Trump's pathetic second term has proven that Ukraine answers to no one but themselves.

Ever since the full-scale invasion began, anti-Ukraine voices have claimed that Kyiv is just a proxy for Western interests. The actions of the US government over the last year and a half have completely disproven this theory.

Calling this a proxy war oversimplifies the entire war and robs both Russia and Ukraine of their agency. Russia started this unprovoked war for its own purposes (imperialism), not on behalf of anyone else. Ukraine is fighting an existential defensive war to avoid becoming a demilitarized and russified puppet state, not to do a favor for the West.

The history of Western support also refutes the proxy label. The West was completely unprepared for this type of warfare, and our aid has always been hesitant and insufficient. If the West were running a real proxy campaign, we would have supplied the necessary tools for victory and been at least somewhat ready from the very beginning.

For 18 months, Washington has cut off all military aid and pushed Ukraine toward a non-existant and bad forced peace deal. In a textbook proxy setup, the principal agent decides when the war stops. The US cannot force a stop because Ukraine has its own independent will and continues to resist the genocide it faces.

Ukraine is not a proxy. Calling this unprovoked war and genocide a proxy war is just intellectually lazy