Category Archives: Around the World

“That Republican Party, frankly, no longer exists.”

The Atlantic: Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the Triumph of Donald Trump. “He said Republican politicians would be easy to break. He was right.” By Mark Leibovich.

“Biden’s defeat of Trump in 2020 had seemed certain to weaken Trump’s grip on the Republican Party, if not end his political career. No relevant precedent existed for any one-term president to become his party’s default front-runner in the next election. Especially not an extremely unpopular one-term president who lost by 7 million votes, refused to concede, incited a lethal insurrection in an attempt to overturn the result, was impeached for a second time, defied long-honored tradition by skipping the swearing-in of his successor, left behind a traumatized nation (with 25,000 National Guard troops defending the capital against his own supporters), became the first former president to be indicted … and the rest of the whole loser litany.

Yet the speed with which Trump has settled back into easy dominance of his party has been both remarkable and entirely foreseeable—foreseen, in fact, by Trump himself. Because if there’s been one recurring lesson of the Trump-era GOP, it’s this: Never underestimate the durability of a demagogue with a captive base, a desperate will to keep going, and—perhaps most of all—a feeble and terrified opposition of spineless ciphers (“weak like a baby”).”

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Photographing the Solar Eclipse 2024

Smarter Every Day: I Accidentally Photographed Something Unknown During the Eclipse. (YouTube, 23:40min)

I’m already looking forward to finding out if someone is able to identify the satellites.

Here’s the earlier video which he did in preparation for the eclipse: April 8, 2024 Total Solar Eclipse: Here’s what you need to know. (YouTube, 22:55min) It includes a lot of information about things you can observe during the partial phases, like how shadows change or why small clouds will disappear.

There’s more information and a link to the eclipse app at Destin’s website: Smarter Every Day – Eclipse.

I haven’t experienced a total solar eclipse, only a few partial ones, but I hope to be able to see one in the future.

The Ships that Repair Undersea Cables

The Verge: The Cloud under the Sea by Josh Dzieza.

“The internet is carried around the world by hundreds of thousands of miles of slender cables that sit at the bottom of the ocean. These fragile wires are constantly breaking – a precarious system on which everything from banks to governments to TikTok depends. But thanks to a secretive global network of ships on standby, every broken cable is quickly fixed. This is the story of the people who repair the world’s most important infrastructure.”

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“Aber es ist natürlich schon kein freies Leben mehr, wenn überall nur Polizeischutz freies Leben ermöglicht”

Markus Lanz vom 1. November 2023: Jüdin kritisiert mangelnden Schutz in Deutschland. (YouTube, 30:46min)

Die gesamte Sendung kann man hier anschauen: Nahost-Debatte bei “Lanz” : Habeck warnt vor “Weltbrand” und “Armageddon” (75min)

“Die in Berlin lebende jüdische Schriftstellerin Deborah Feldman entgegnete mit Blick auf die Angriffe vom 7. Oktober: “Es wurde immer wieder wiederholt: ‘Es gibt keinen Kontext, keine Rechtfertigung, keine Erklärung für diese Gewalt.’ Im selben Atemzug sagen wir: ‘Es gibt einen Kontext für die Gewalt gegen Palästinenser.'”

Wir können nicht auf beiden Hochzeiten tanzen.

Die aus ihrer Sicht “einzige legitime Lehre des Holocausts” sei “die absolute, bedingungslose Verteidigung der Menschenrechte für alle”. Das gelte aber im Moment nicht in gleichem Maße für Palästinenser im Gazastreifen.

Feldman kritisierte darüber hinaus die Debatte in Deutschland, bei der Jüdinnen wie sie nicht gehört würden, die sich für ein Ende der Gewalt einsetzten. “Ich bin entsetzt darüber, wie Juden im Prinzip hier nur als Juden gelten können, wenn sie das rechtskonservative Vorhaben der israelischen Regierung darstellen. Ich bin entsetzt, wie wir behandelt werden dürfen”, sagte sie und fügte an die Adresse von Habeck und der Bundesregierung an:

Sie schützen Juden in diesem Land selektiv.”

Zu dem Thema hat der Vizekanzler ein Statement abgegeben: Robert Habeck zu Israel und Antisemitismus. Vice chancellor Habeck’s speech is also available with English, Hebrew and Arabic subtitles. (YouTube, 9:40min)
Video and text in these four languages are also available here.

Dutch = German = English = Danish = Norwegian = Swedish?

King Ming Lam: Dutch & German dialogue that sounds like English. (YouTube, 20:37min)

“Germanic languages share a common ancestor and are closely related. Normally, most of them are different enough that they’re not mutually intelligible. But is it possible to construct “universal” dialogues of Germanic languages that can be mutually understood by various Germanic languages? In this video I constructed an example. You will hear what it sounds like in various Germanic languages, not just in mainstream Germanic languages, but also in lesser known languages like Frisian and Low German. And what would it sound like in their common ancestor language Proto-Germanic? I shall answer that question and also provide a brief historical and linguistic overview of Germanic languages.”

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I speak German, English and Plattdeutsch (version of Low German), and this was fascinating to listen to. I’ve been thinking about the similarities between the languages for a long time, but I didn’t think it was possible to construct sentences that were intelligible in all three languages.