Recent Comments

1. 4 days ago on Bad Machinery

   I believe we have already been given the answers to Lottie’s questions about “stirring” and “hard”.

2. 4 days ago on Brewster Rockit

   Shouldn’t that be the Riemann zeta function (the sum from 1 to infinity of 1 over n to the s power) instead of the harmonic series (the sum from 1 to infinity of 1 over n), which is divergent?

3. 4 days ago on Bad Machinery

   Go to uni in three years? Aren’t they younger than that?

4. 7 days ago on Bad Machinery

   I’d say the “missing piece” is Shauna’s learning her father’s identity. She now knows where half her genes came from. (The smart half.)

5. 9 days ago on Arlo and Janis

   Did Arlo maybe used to be just a little bit… tubby?

6. 15 days ago on Henry Payne

   There is no way whatsoever that anything that I wrote can be interpreted as pro-Russian. On the contrary, it was very much pro-Ukraine, as anyone can plainly tell. It was you who expressed sympathy towards Russia. But enough of this. I’ve said all I intend to say herein.

7. 15 days ago on Henry Payne

   I have listened to Putin’s rationalizations for the invasion (which he denied was going to happen right up until the moment that it did, and even then as the tanks rolled towards Kyiv he described it as a “military exercise”), and his statements about wanting a “buffer” between Russia and NATO are illogical. (1) Ever since the collapse of the USSR and the Soviet Block in eastern Europe, Russia and NATO have already bordered each other. NATO member Poland borders Kaliningrad Oblast, the conclave that is the westernmost member of the Russian Federation, and NATO members Estonia and Latvia border the Russian mainland. Norway, a founding member of NATO, shares a border with Russia in the Arctic. And as I pointed out in my post, Russia’s strategy of physically distancing itself from NATO has backfired, since new NATO member Finland has a very long border with Russia. (2) The sentence that you referenced shows that Putin’s explanation about creating a “buffer” between Russia and NATO falls apart if Russia does in fact annex Ukraine. If Ukraine does become part of Russia (and Putin has stressed that based on history, it should be), then the expanded Russia would border against NATO member Romania. Rather than create a “buffer”, the annexation of Ukraine would eliminate one. This has in fact already happened when Russia annexed Crimea, since that part of Ukraine borders NATO member Turkey.) Rather than making sure that NATO doesn’t increase its border with Russia, Putin’s “logic” is making sure that even more of NATO will border Russia. (3) As I pointed out in my post, Putin is further undermining his “buffer” argument by making threats to deploy nuclear weapons in combat against Ukraine. There are no buffers in a nuclear war, where one country can totally destroy another in hours, no matter the geographic separation (if any) between them.

8. 16 days ago on Henry Payne

   This is a very vague criticism. What specific thing did I write that you consider to be contrary to fact?

9. 17 days ago on Henry Payne

   I’m old, and I’ve seen a lot of changes in the world, but few have surprised me so much as the modern GOP’s embrace of Russian imperialism and of Putin’s tyranny. That rumbling from Simi Valley that I hear in response to your post is Ronald Reagan’s rolling over in his grave.

10. 17 days ago on Henry Payne

    Rather than the USA it was in fact the nations of the former Soviet Bloc that pushed the borders of NATO eastward, since after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact most of those countries eagerly joined NATO to insure that they would not again fall under Russian domination. Similarly, Ukraine sought NATO membership (but were never promised it) after they voted out of power the pro-Russian puppet government that had made Ukraine effectively a Russian satrapy like Belarus. Russia pushed its borders westward into Europe by occupying and then annexing territory of Ukraine and claiming that Ukraine was historically (and, in Putin’s mind, therefore still is) part of Russia. This is in explicit violation of the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances that Russia, the USA, and the UK signed in 1994.