Proud to have my latest in @DissentMag’s Spring issue, going live today. I go over the causes and consequences of the current crisis in Cuba

Still really early in this Kennan bio but already had two surprises. 1) while Kennan is associated with containment doctrine, he would spend the rest of his career pushing diplomacy and detente . 2) he was a massive Russophile, speaking of his own “Russian soul”

Relatedly; I am currently struggling to slim my library down to what I’ll use for dissertation and podcast and it’s still way too much.

Not posting much because I’m packing as much as I can ahead of end of month move to Germany. Still feels so surreal that I get to live in Europe when I had been wondering for years when or if I’d get a chance to even so much as visit.

In Hasan’s defense though, he did say he was victim of bait and switch re: how this was pitched vs who they stacked it with.

I think this kind of stuff can have a silver lining at least if you expose a public figure as having fascist views, but the whole debate a bunch of bad faith nobodies for entertainment shtick seems outright counterproductive. It’s giving fringe cranks a bigger platform.

RT @GonzalezSilen: Interesante artículo sobre los comerciantes británicos que financiaron a Bolívar entre 1817 y 1819. Financing a Revolu….

RT @PunishedAriele: oh yeah? the citizens of the world’s sole hyperpower started to struggle against the absence of struggle itself? like,….

RT @caesararum: in all the posts about best tweet, i kept forgetting to toss this one out. so here it is: my favorite .

Personal favorite fun fact about Manchukuo is that the first government to recognize its existence was El Salvador for some reason.

Solar panels are going to help but until some point in the future when enough solar panel plants are up and running that people don’t have to live under 20+ hour a day blackouts, they’re a distant hope.

The core issue behind Cuba’s energy crisis right now isn’t fuel (if only it were that simple) but the obsolescence of the power plants and electrical grid that has been kept going with grit and duct tape for decades but need total replacement at this point.

The main Cuban powerplant, the Guiteras, was just taken out of service for a couple of days this past week for emergency repairs. In the middle of the night it had a leak on one of its boilers and will be again out of service (3rd time this month?) for 72 hours.

RT @LegoRacers2: Reconstruction of the city of Uruk in the late 3rd millennium BC. Imagine being an Indo-European mercenary from the swamps….

RT @LuluGNavarro: Yes, he’s a citizen. Yes he’s a veteran. Yes he just happened to be driving to work. ICE detained him anyway. https://t.c….

The party has the ability to intervene in various companies as it sees fit, so actual running of company is quite capitalist but without being able to count on true board independence or legal protections of an independent legal system.

So depending on who you ask, their motivations, and criteria, you can either judge the Chinese economy to be mostly private, mostly state, or anywhere in between. One cited expert said % was unknowable. This definitely makes a lot of sense re: figures people use on here.

This bit from McGregor’s book on the Chinese communist party clarifies a lot of the divergent debates on how capitalist China is to me:. Basically, many de facto private companies are counted as “collectives” and private companies often take on gov officials on their boards, etc

The whole episode was classic Twitter. I find out Mussolini has a granddaughter, that she thought Jim Carrey was American (he’s Canadian) and spent days shitting in the U.S. in response, that she was huge as a pop idol Japan in the 80s, and she’s an Italian MP.

RT @dennismhogan: Over the past 150 years, the US built a university system that was the envy of the world. It made us a leader in research….