Life takes us in many strange directions and wonderful discoveries. It never turns out the way we thought it would.
Friday, April 26, 2024
Thursday, April 25, 2024
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
Monday, April 22, 2024
Sunday, April 21, 2024
Long Ago The Human Race Almost Went Extinct
https://historyfacts.com/science-industry/fact/humans-almost-went-extinct/
Saturday, April 20, 2024
Iran Got An Ominous Message
Long ago in the U.S. Navy, I learned the value of using psychology in war. Sometimes, you can score a victory by frightening an enemy rather than killing him or her. If you were off the coast of North Vietnam riding a U.S. Navy jet or patrol boat, your worst nightmare was for a North Vietnamese radar to get "a radar lock" on you. What followed at lightning speed was a SAM missile or artillery shell coming at you with devastating results. You had a few precious seconds to take evasive action.
The military radar detectors provided did not work well. Every pilot and patrol boat driver used an illegal radar detector used by drivers in the US who loved to drive fast and evade law enforcement detection. Such devices have the nickname of "fuzz busters." They worked quite well.
We would sometimes play games with our radar. At moments when we did not intend to attack an enemy or were out of range to do it, we would turn on our radar. The North Vietnamese on the other end would rapidly know we had "a radar lock" on them. It scared them, to say the least.
More details have come out about the Israeli attack on Iran yesterday. The Israeli Air Force officers who planned this attack were ingenious and very creative. They used a home-produced stand-off missile called The Sparrow. It was launched from an aircraft far away from Iran. Pilots and expensive aircraft were never at risk. The missiles launched had small warheads. The potential for serious casualties was avoided. The missiles had precision guidance systems.
Iran has a weak and obsolete air defense system. The object of the attack was to knock out Iranian air defense radars. Once the radars are knocked out, Israel could launch massive air attacks with impunity. What Israel did was to scare Iran. The message was sent that Israel could launch massive air attacks after knocking out air defense radars. Israel accomplished its objective. Iran got an ominous message.
Friday, April 19, 2024
Ukraine Says That It Used 7 Exploding Drones To Destroy A Very Expensive Russian Radar System To Detect Nuclear Attacks
Business Insider
Ukraine says it used 7 exploding drones to take out a $100 million Russian radar system
By Matthew Loh,
2 days ago
A Russian radar installation during Vostok-2018 military drills at a training ground in Telemba, Russia, in September 2018.
MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP via Getty Images
Ukraine said on Tuesday that it used seven exploding drones to destroy a Russian radar system.
Ukrainian media reported that the system was a Nebo-U, which monitors hundreds of miles of airspace.
Ukraine assessed that the Nebo-U, downed by cheap drones, was worth $100 million.
Ukrainian media reported on Tuesday that Kyiv destroyed a sophisticated Russian radar complex using seven exploding drones, in another apparent sign of how the cheap unmanned devices are changing the face of modern combat.
Citing an unnamed source from the Security Service of Ukraine, or the SBU, The Kyiv Independent and Ukrainska Pravda reported that the Russian system was a Nebo-U radar complex stationed in Bryansk, a Russian region bordering northern Ukraine.
The Nebo-U system was monitoring Ukrainian airspace as deep as 434 miles past the border and was worth about $100 million, the outlets reported.
The exact price of this Nebo-U isn't immediately clear, but reports from Russian state media say it's a newer system that was rolled out to Russian forces about eight years ago.
The SBU source said that with the elimination of this Nebo-U, Russia now had "fewer opportunities to detect air targets along Ukraine's northern border."
Ukraine said this was the second Nebo-U it had destroyed, with the first taken out in Belgorod, a Russian region near the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
Multiple variations of the Nebo, which translates to "sky," are used by Russian air and ground forces. More modern versions, such as the Nebo-U and the Nebo-M, were listed at launch by Russian media as being able to detect aircraft, guided missiles, and ballistics up to a range of 372 miles.
In recent weeks, Ukraine has intensified drone strikes on Russian soil, attacking targets hundreds of miles from the front lines. On April 5, for example, it launched a large-scale drone attack on an airbase in the Russian region of Rostov.
Kyiv has also struck multiple Russian oil-processing facilities in border regions, including Russia's third-biggest refinery , which is some 800 miles from the front lines.
The Russian defense ministry and Ukraine's security services didn't immediately respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
The war in Ukraine has cast a spotlight on the combat deployment of first-person unmanned drones , which are inexpensive and often equipped with explosives that can be dropped on or flown into targets with precision.
The tactic has been used more widely in recent high-profile conflicts elsewhere, including by Hamas in its October 7 attacks on Israel and by Yemen's Houthi rebels harassing international ships in the Red Sea.
Read the original article on
Business Insider
Thursday, April 18, 2024
How They Filmed The End Of The Movie "Civil War."
How They Pulled Off the Ending to ‘Civil War’
The action thriller from Alex Garland concludes with an explosive sequence in the nation’s capital. A behind-the-scenes look at how it was done.
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Two women crouch outside wearing protective gear and helmets. One woman holds a camera.
Kirsten Dunst, left, and Cailee Spaeny in “Civil War.”Credit...Murray Close
By Esther Zuckerman
April 16, 2024
This article contains spoilers for the film “Civil War.”
When Alex Garland was writing the script for “Civil War,” he started with the ideas in the last moments. “In some ways the film was kind of reverse engineered from the ending,” he said during an interview in New York.
The path to that ending finds the rebel Western Forces reaching Washington, D.C., laying siege to the White House and cornering the president (Nick Offerman), all while the journalists at the center of the film capture it through their own lenses. It’s a relentless, loud 20 minutes of screen time, during which the Lincoln Memorial is blown up. Garland said he wanted the audience to feel “aversion to it and to feel dismayed.”
It also was an intricate production challenge, which involved digitally recreating Washington, shooting on sets throughout the Atlanta area, and executing detailed choreography that Garland likened to “football plays.” (Garland is British, but he noted that “football” could refer to soccer or American football. “It’s like little circles and triangles and arrows,” he added.)
From the start of “Civil War,” two journalists at the center of the story — Lee (Kirsten Dunst), a photographer, and Joel (Wagner Moura), a correspondent — want to get to the White House for an audience with the president. They reach it alongside Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a younger, novice photographer who idolizes Lee. In the end it’s Jessie who gets the most important shot.
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But before that, they have to navigate a treacherous military operation on Pennsylvania Avenue and the surrounding streets.
The process of designing the sequence began with a trip to Washington with crew members including Garland, the cinematographer Rob Hardy and the visual effects supervisor David Simpson. The team walked the route of the invasion, Simpson said, mapping out how the troops would move from the memorial to the White House.
Image
Three members of the press walk through a building, large chandeliers in the background behind them.
From left, Dunst, Wagner Moura and Spaeny in “Civil War.”Credit...Murray Close
At first, the idea was to find locations in Atlanta that could double as Washington, but that proved too tricky, according to Simpson. Instead, they built three sets in a parking lot in Stone Mountain, Ga., that were surrounded by thousands of feet of blue screen. The exterior of the president’s residence was played by a replica that exists at Tyler Perry Studios, but Garland used only some of Perry’s interiors. Instead, they built out their own corridor, with rooms to the side, leading to the Oval Office. The production designer Caty Maxey said that the Oval Office itself was rented, so they could more easily adjust it to their specifications.
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“We were very careful to get the right tone of the real White House,” Maxey said. “But because we didn’t want it to be tied to any political party or any president or any former president, we very deliberately stayed neutral.” The idea was to replicate the objectivity of the journalist protagonists.
The Making of ‘Civil War’
Alex Garland Answers the Question: Why Make a Film About Civil War Today?
April 11, 2024
Watch a Sniper Scene From ‘Civil War’
April 12, 2024
For all departments, the goal was to make the assault on Washington feel as real as possible. “We deliberately steered away from anything that felt too Hollywood or too cinematic,” Simpson said. “We wanted it to feel like you’ve seen a news report.”
Simpson’s responsibility was creating an entire digital version of Washington as a war zone — from the Lincoln Memorial to the working streetlights and interiors of offices. When it came time to demolish the memorial, Simpson and his team found multiple examples of what a javelin missile would do, selecting an explosion before “painstakingly” recreating it.
Beyond the digital specificity, the logistics of the assault were mapped out in multiple ways. Garland did not storyboard, but he pulled out his phone during the interview to show the diagrams he used to plot the movement of vehicles and characters. Maxey said they used models laid out on a conference table to make sure all the disparate parts would fit together.
Garland shot the film chronologically, meaning Washington came at the end. As the time approached, Hardy said the anticipation grew. “You could feel the tension becoming palpable in a way, in a good way,” he said, adding, “there was this real sense of, this is it.”
Hardy wanted to immerse the audience in the fighting. That also meant getting the pictures the journalist characters are capturing, which are shown throughout the action. While the actors were shooting with the cameras in their hands, Hardy’s team was using a high speed camera from which they could grab stills.
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Although the experience of watching the nation’s capital become a battlefield in “Civil War” is nightmarish, for Hardy it was more balletic.
“We prepped it so hard that by the time we got to shooting it, everybody knew where that Humvee was going to stop, everybody knew where the tank was coming, everybody knew when the Beast would break through the doors and where it would land. But then, my job is to then feel like it’s really happening then and there.”
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Wednesday, April 17, 2024
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Sunday, April 14, 2024
The Peace Of Sunday Was Shattered By Iran
This is normally a day of rest and reflection. Sadly, the peace was shattered by the Iranian attack on Israel in the form of some 300 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles on Israel. My readers, this was not "a shot across the bow" to deter Israel from further action. It was carefully planned and calculated to overwhelm the Israeli anti-aircraft and anti-missile capabilities to inflict some bad damage on Israel. There was a miscalculation on the part of the Iranian planners. They failed to consider that the U.S., French, and Jordanian anti-aircraft and anti-missile assets came to the defense of Israel. 99% of the projectiles were intercepted. 1% of the projectiles landed near an Israeli air base in Southern Israel where F-35s are based. Limited material damage was done. One seven-year-old child suffered a serious shrapnel wound. She is in critical condition. I hear reports that Iran is threatening to close the Straits of Hormuz. This would cause a devastating disruption of world trade, driving the world into a recession.
We are in a perilous moment now. Please be thankful that you are not anywhere near Israel, Iran, Yemen, Ukraine, or Russia now.
Saturday, April 13, 2024
The Economist Magazine Cover For 04/13/2024: THe Housing Market Is In Peril Due To Global Warming
The Economist
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APRIL 13TH 2024
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How we chose this week’s image
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Zanny Minton Beddoes
Editor-in-chief
We have two covers this week. In most of the world we warn that global warming is coming for your home and ask who will pay for the damage. In Britain we look at the case for assisted dying, which has a chance of soon becoming law.
About a tenth of the world’s residential property by value is under threat from global warming—including many houses that are nowhere near the coast. From tornadoes battering Midwestern American suburbs to tennis-ball-size hailstones smashing the roofs of Italian villas, the severe weather brought about by greenhouse-gas emissions is shaking the foundations of the world’s most important asset class.
Many of our covers are about world events, but this one is close up and personal.
In this, there is contrast between the words and the picture. Our leader depends for its effect on aggregating harms. By one estimate, climate change and the fight against it could wipe out 9% of the value of the world’s housing by 2050—which amounts to $25trn, not much less than America’s annual GDP. The combined exposure of state-backed “insurers of last resort” in wildfire-prone California and hurricane-prone Florida has exploded from $160bn in 2017 to $633bn today.
Our cover, however, depends on breaking down the aggregate and getting readers to feel that this issue is about the particular house they call their own.
We started with a plush, three-storey family home sinking into the ground–a fate awaiting some London houses that are built on clay which now swells and shrinks with the seasons like a subterranean squeezebox.
Or, better, how about putting the house under a towering stormcloud? It is an apt metaphor for the huge bill hanging over the global financial system. This bill has three parts: paying for repairs, investing in protection and modifying houses to limit climate change. There is sure to be an almighty fight over who should pay up.
To underline the theme of global warming, we could convert our house into a home for a lonesome polar bear. But we preferred this sketch of the house as a stranded asset. Today’s property markets do not seem to reflect the costs of global warming. In Miami, the subject of much worrying about rising sea levels, house prices have increased by four-fifths this decade, much more than the American average. The evidence shows that house prices react to climate risks only after disaster has struck, when it is too late for preventive investments. Inertia is therefore likely to lead to nasty surprises.
This is half-way there. Our designers have gone for a grainy style. Some of us thought that the low-slung horizon, however atmospheric, was a distraction, because the extra detail tended to make this house more like someone else’s. In the final cover, therefore, we washed away the peninsular backdrop to leave a seascape of wind and waves.
Housing is too important an asset to be mispriced across the economy—not least because it is so vital to the financial system. The $25trn bill will pose problems. But doing nothing today will only make tomorrow more painful.
Over two-thirds of Britons support changing the law to let someone help in the suicide of a person with a terminal illness. Assisted dying has a good chance of getting on the country’s statute book. Bills are already in progress on the Isle of Man, in Jersey and in Scotland. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, is sympathetic and has promised a free vote among MPs if his party wins the next general election.
The case for allowing assisted dying is, at its core, one of individual freedom. People should have the right to choose the manner and timing of their death. Our first ideas, accordingly, focused on control.
These black-and-white roughs have an off switch that features a patient in a bed. But the metaphor breaks down, because this is also an on switch and the one thing about assisted dying is that it is irreversible. The other image is of someone pulling at the knot that ties together the trace on an electrocardiogram. Some of us thought this was too cheerful, because it conjured up a bow on a present.
The argument for individual freedom is a natural position for a liberal newspaper like The Economist and we first used our cover to argue for it in 2015, the year that I became editor-in-chief. Back then, our design was a just-extinguished candle and we thought about bringing back that image, this time as a sort of visual pun.
The candle doubles up as a door that leads out of this life and into…Suddenly, we were flummoxed. Our argument does not turn on the existence of an afterlife. If anything, people of faith tend to see the choice to end your days as sinful.
We wanted a liminal image because the end of life really is the ultimate transition. But we could not have an image that featured a threshold to anywhere.
Here is where we came down. This woman gazing into the light says that, for some people, crossing from life to death is a calm and rational choice.
Critics retort that no regime of assisted death could ever fully protect the vulnerable from relatives looking to claim an inheritance, or indeed from a state seeking to cut health-care costs. Yet the evidence suggests that cases of coercion are extremely rare. The state should help people live well, but if it cannot, those who truly wish to die should not be obliged to suffer.
One fear is an overly lax law that creates a slippery slope. Just as much of a worry is a law drafted so tightly that adults enduring endless suffering are still prevented from choosing their own fate.
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Friday, April 12, 2024
Why Hasn't Iran Retaliated Aginst Israel for the April 2 Attack On The Iranian Embassy in Damascus?
When it comes to a possible Iranian retaliatory strike against Israel for the attack on the Iranian Embassy in Damascus that killed 7 senior military officers on April 2, the U.S. security services have issued dire warnings. We are 10 days after the attack and the retaliation has not materialized. What is going on?
I do not have access to classified documents or senior military and intelligence officers willing to talk on condition of confidentiality. I have been a serious student of Iran's military capabilities and actions for over a decade. Iran has the largest military in the Middle East. Here is a summary:
Iranian Armed Forces are the largest in the Middle East in terms of active troops. Iran's military forces are made up of approximately 587,000 active-duty personnel plus 200,000 reserve and trained personnel that can be mobilized when needed, bringing the country's military manpower to about 787,000 total personnel.
Israel has a formidable military machine:
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Israel has one of the world's most powerful militaries, according to Al Jazeera, with a large arsenal of equipment including:
• Land power: 2,200 tanks and 530 artillery
• Airpower: 339 combat capable aircraft, including 196 F-16 jets, 83 F-15 jets, 30 F-35 jets, 142 helicopters, and 43 Apache attack helicopters
• Naval power: 5 submarines and 49 patrol and coastal combatants
Al Jazeera
How big is Israel’s military and how much funding does it get from the US? | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera
Oct 11, 2023
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also has armored personnel carriers, missiles, drones, and warships. The IDF has an annual military budget of over $20 billion and access to some of the most advanced U.S. military hardware. The U.S. has provided about $130 billion in military aid to Israel since its founding.
Israel also has an estimated nuclear arsenal of 200 warheads hidden at sea. I would compare its nuclear weapons capabilities to those of Pakistan.
Why hasn't Iran made a move so far? My theory is that the first problem is the great political instability in Iran. The 80 million-plus Iranian people are unhappy about inflation, corruption, and the bad economic lives they suffer every day. A major new war might be "the tipping point" that leads to an uprising that topples the Mullahs and Iranian Revolutionary Guard from power.
The second problem that Iran has is its ally and major oil customer China. Disruptions of Iranian oil deliveries to China would drive the Chinese economy into a deep recession and create more great problems for the Chinese leadership.
The third problem that Iran faces now is Vladimir Putin. He is a man with great fondness for Jewish people. His personal fortune is in the hands of Jewish associates in Russia. Putin and President Netanyahu of Israel are close personal friends. It is alleged that after the October 7 attack, the first phone call Netanyahu made was not to President Biden. It was to Vladimir Putin.
How would Israel retaliate if Iran launched a major retaliatory attack? Conventional wisdom is that they would hit Iran's nuclear facilities. I doubt this. Israel would need tactical nuclear weapons to destroy these well-designed and well-defended facilities. Israel military planners would take note of the great success that Ukraine has had attacking Russian oil and gas processing facilities. They would attack the four Iranian oil refining facilities below:
New facilities
Refinery Location Estimated costs
Anahita refinery Kermanshah Province 1.3 billion euros
Hormoz refinery Bandar Abbas $4.3 billion
Caspian refinery Gorgan, Golestan Province $4 billion
Pars refinery Shiraz 800 million euros
The reasoning would be that Iran's economy would collapse with oil sales disrupted. Of course, such a move would take down the rest of the world economy.
We live in a world that is deeply interconnected, but dangerous.
Thursday, April 11, 2024
What Really Happened When Israel Attacked The Iranian Embassy In Dmascus?
Stuck in Celestial Hades
SYRIA
Residents of the upscale Mazzeh neighborhood in the Syrian capital of Damascus were stunned when an airstrike recently reduced the Iranian consulate to rubble. Thirteen people, including two generals and five others in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, perished in the attack.
Israeli forces who have been carrying out strikes against Iranian positions in Syria for years were widely believed to have conducted the bombing. These attacks have intensified, however, since Hamas staged its attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, eliciting a devastating response that has caused a humanitarian disaster for Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, wrote CNN.
As international observers ponder whether Iran might attack Israel in response, potentially widening the fighting that is now happening in the Gaza Strip and beyond, the air strike led many Syrians to recall the fighting that they have experienced in their country’s ongoing civil war.
“When I moved to Damascus in 2022, I thought the war was over,” Rasha Saleh, 33, an NGO worker who formerly lived in Aleppo, a northern Syrian city where extreme combat occurred between Syrian rebels and central government forces loyal to dictator President Bashar al-Assad, told Agence France-Presse. “But it seems that’s not the case.”
While the worst fighting ended some years ago, the Syrian civil war recently passed its 14th anniversary, noted Voice of America. As many as 500,000 people died and 13 million were displaced in the war that started in 2011 as civil unrest against Assad’s regime.
A major earthquake, the proliferation of disease, and the failure of the state to educate millions of children have also destabilized the country, according to Crux. Around 16.7 million people in Syria are in desperate need of humanitarian aid, the United Nations added recently.
Today, Syrian forces and their Russian and Iranian allies are still fighting the anti-government rebels in northwest Syria, where they and Turkish-backed forces still control ground. In northeastern Syria, US-supported Kurds control territory they won from the Islamic State.
A car bomb recently exploded in Azaz near Aleppo, for instance, killing at least seven people. A Turkish-backed militia that opposes Assad’s government runs the town. It’s not clear who carried out the attack, the BBC wrote.
Protests, meanwhile, still break out against the government occasionally. In August, demonstrators marched against the high inflation rate and deteriorating economic conditions, and demanded the government step down. In December, people commemorated the revolution and said it wasn’t over.
And in a twist, protesters have been taking to the streets over the past month across Syria’s rebel-held northwest against its jihadi rulers, demonstrations sparked after a rebel fighter died in rebel custody, VOA reported. About half of Idlib province and parts of Hama, Aleppo and Latakia are controlled by former al-Qaida affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, led by Abu Mohamed al-Jolani.
“Our demands are clear: Overthrow Jolani, free the prisoners, put an end to the security grip they have on us,” one protester told VOA. “Down with Jolani” is a common refrain, echoing the chants that were used against Assad, the Economist wrote.
As residents of rebel-held areas chafe under the harsh rule of their upstart leaders, Assad these days is no longer the pariah he once was in the Arab world. The Arab League reinstated Syria in 2023, for example, the Brookings Institution noted.
The world is waiting to see how the civil war will end, concluded World Politics Review. Will Assad, who is 58 years old, ever step down or face being ousted? Will the rebels finally cave for good? Who will finance the country’s reconstruction when the war ends? Will Iran, Russia, Turkey, or the US choose to cede their influence in Syria so that the country can reclaim its sovereignty?
Although analysts believe it might take years to receive answers to those questions, the country is trying to move forward in one respect: Tourism. Over the past two years, travel agencies in Turkey, the Gulf, Russia, Pakistan, Iran and China, have booked trips to the country that continues to struggle to rebuild from the war. Some Western visitors trickle in, too.
According to the Syrian state news agency, two million people visited last year.
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
Tuesday, April 9, 2024
Belgium Breweres Are Using A.I. To Improve The Flavor Of Their Beers
DISCOVERIES
Artificial Enhancers
Scientists recently employed artificial intelligence (AI) to refine the flavors of Belgian beers and enhance their quality, the Guardian reported, attempting to dissect the intricate relationships that motivate human aroma perception.
In their paper, lead researcher Kevin Verstrepen and his team analyzed the chemical composition of 250 Belgian beers spanning 22 styles, including lagers, fruit beers and non-alcoholic brews.
This analysis included properties, such as alcohol content, pH levels, sugar concentration, and more than 200 flavor compounds. A tasting panel of 16 participants then evaluated the brews for 50 attributes over a three-year period. At the same time, the team also collected 180,000 online consumer reviews of different beers.
Using machine learning, the researchers constructed models to predict beer taste and appreciation based on its composition. These models were then utilized to improve commercial beers by incorporating substances identified as key predictors of appreciation, such as lactic acid and glycerol.
Results from the tasting panel indicated an improvement in ratings across various metrics for both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beers, including sweetness, body, and overall appreciation.
Although the AI models have limitations and were based on datasets of high-quality commercial brews, the authors suggested that their application could significantly benefit non-alcoholic beers.
Meanwhile, Verstrepen emphasized that while AI can predict chemical changes to optimize beer, it would not threaten rich traditions in beer making, emphasizing that the expertise of brewers is essential.
“The AI models predict the chemical changes that could optimize a beer, but it is still up to brewers to make that happen, starting from the recipe and brewing methods,” he said.
Monday, April 8, 2024
Sunday, April 7, 2024
I Want The House Not My Spouse
I Want the House, Not My Spouse
Dividing the marital home in divorce can be a financially and emotionally fraught experience.
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CreditCredit...Mariaelena Caputi
Ronda Kaysen
By Ronda Kaysen
Ronda Kaysen corresponded with 88 people about how they divided the marital home in a divorce.
Published March 8, 2024
Updated April 4, 2024
As soon as she knew her husband wasn’t coming back, Terri Martin logged onto Facebook Marketplace and bought a 1949 General Electric refrigerator for $5. Her marriage might be over, she thought, but her relationship with her home certainly wasn’t.
“I started to realize that even without him, I still loved the house,” said Ms. Martin, 37, a knitwear designer in Cincinnati.
With her husband, Tim Larson, 37, out of the picture, Ms. Martin would no longer have to sell him on her vision of a retro kitchen that would embrace the historic character of the 1916 American Foursquare, a house the couple bought in 2021 for $180,000. She was now free to rip out the generic yellow oak cabinets and install open shelving, replace the vinyl floors with linoleum, and swap the run-of-the-mill stainless steel refrigerator for the vintage Facebook find. “It is exciting to think about doing the entire kitchen now and not having to compromise,” Ms. Martin said on Feb. 1, hours after filing for a dissolution of marriage.
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A woman standing in a kitchen looking out a window.
Ms. Martin decided she wanted to keep her house in Cincinnati and make it her own after her marriage ended.Credit...Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times
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A man in a cream colored sweater standing outside.
Mr. Larson sees the house as a “moot point” now that his marriage to Ms. Martin has ended.Credit...Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times
Mr. Larson, a prosthetic limb designer who has been rotating through Airbnbs since he moved out last spring, said he found renovating the fixer upper more of a chore than a joy. With the marriage over, he sees no reason to keep the house. “The house is just kind of a moot point to me,” he said. “She can have it.”
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The marriage was dissolved on March 6.
ImageA yellow brick house with a porch.
Ms. Martin and Mr. Larson bought the American Foursquare in 2021 with plans to renovate it.Credit...Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times
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A living room with a green sofa, pink chair and white coffee table.
The living room of the house Ms. Martin and Mr. Larson bought had charming details like original molding.Credit...Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times
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A kitchen with cabinets, a counter, a sink and a stovetop.
Ms. Martin plans to replace the cheap oak cabinets with open shelves and restore the historic character of the space.Credit...Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times
Few objects signify a marriage quite like the home a couple shares. It’s the place where life unfolds in scenes writ large and small, from lazy Sundays curled up on the sofa to formal Thanksgiving gatherings with extended family. It’s usually a couple’s most valuable asset, so dividing it can be financially and emotionally fraught — even if you don’t end up like Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, battling to the death in “The War of the Roses.”
In interviews and correspondence with 88 people who said they’d been through a divorce, the home was often described as another character in the relationship, taking on a life of its own as a marriage disintegrated. For some, holding onto the property became a point of pride — proof that they could make it on their own. For others, shedding the space where a life fell apart felt like a metamorphosis. Sometimes, the house became the center of a protracted dispute, a cudgel to exact revenge. Some blamed the house itself — maybe one that was too expensive or needed too much work — for the collapse of a fragile union.
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“It’s either a womb or a tomb,” said Katherine Woodward Thomas, a marriage and family therapist who coined the term “conscious uncoupling,” and later wrote a book about how to do it.
It’s also not cheap. If one person wants to hold onto the house, that usually means ponying up a significant amount of cash to buy their former partner out. Moving at a time when rents, interest rates and home prices are sky high is not an easy proposition, either, adding more tension to an already difficult situation.
An overwhelming majority — 82 percent in 2022 — of married couples own a home, according to the National Center for Family & Marriage Research, which found that in 2022 there were just shy of one million divorces. The center also found that, in 2020, the median length of first marriages that end in divorce was 13 years.
Increasingly, children are staying in the house while their estranged parents cycle in and out, an arrangement called nesting that can create its own complicated feelings about what a house means and who it’s for. However you slice it, the house is not an easy possession to parse.
“The thing that you lose most in a divorce is your sense of home,” said Lori Gottlieb, a psychotherapist and the author of the book, “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.”
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While clinging to the house can be a way to lessen the blow, many experts urge their clients to consider packing up and moving on. “There is something about the freshness of hanging pictures on the wall, getting new sheets, for God’s sake, getting rid of the marital bed,” said Jessica Ashley, a divorce coach in Chicago.
When her own marriage ended, Ms. Ashley took her then 3-year-old son through every room of their old home and wrote thank you notes in chalk on the walls for all that it had given them. Then they walked into their new apartment and thanked it for what was to come. “We had that ritual together and it prepared us for the next space,” she said.
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A woman in jeans and a beige sweater sitting on a sofa looking at a small white dog on the floor.
Sara Touijer, 47, in her two-bedroom apartment in Harrison, N.Y. Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
By the time her marriage was over, Sara Touijer, an interior designer, wanted nothing to do with the home she and her husband shared for nine years. She had decorated every corner of the five-bedroom house in Rye, N.Y., selecting the fabrics, art and furnishings to give the space a contemporary, Moroccan vibe. But the place where she’d poured her creative energy and raised her two children had become “so toxic,” she said, that by the time she left for good in December 2022, she had divorced herself from even the concept of a house as a home.
“A home is not a physical structure for me,” said Ms. Touijer, 47, who now lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Harrison, N.Y. “I’ve completely let go of things.”
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A two-story red brick apartment building with white banisters.
The apartment complex where Ms. Touijer now lives. Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
The divorce was finalized in July 2023 and the house is in contract for sale, expected to close in June.
Ms. Touijer still designs interiors for her clients, often helping married couples create their dream homes. Her advice is more nuanced than it once was. “I have this clarity and consciousness of being in the moment,” she said. “I lead with my heart now, and I didn’t before.”
She urges her clients to select items and styles they love, regardless of current trends or potential resale value. “I tell them, ‘don’t get tied to something,’” she said. “Know that life is always changing. Nothing is permanent.”
Ms. Touijer’s ex-husband declined to comment.
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A woman sitting on a sofa with a dog in a living room with a colorful painting behind her.
Ryder Sollmann Wyatt, 69, at her home in Bedminster, N.J.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
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But when Ryder Sollmann Wyatt’s 30-year marriage collapsed, she knew one thing for certain: she wanted to keep the home that had been in her family for generations. Ms. Wyatt’s grandfather, who owned a toy manufacturing company, bought the 18th-century farmhouse on 300 acres in Bedminster, N.J., in the early 1940s, moved there from Montclair with his family, and eventually sold off all but 30 acres. Five decades later, Ms. Wyatt and her husband were living in Manhattan with their young daughter when they bought the estate from Ms. Wyatt’s family for $850,000. They moved to the country to raise their daughter.
Image
A white house with black shutters and pillars with a green lawn in front of it.
Ms. Wyatt’s grandfather bought the 18th-century house on 300 acres about 80 years ago.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
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A dining room with a wooden table and chairs and a blue and white rug.
Ms. Wyatt could not imagine selling the estate that had been in her family for generations and was full of family heirlooms.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
By 2020, Ms. Wyatt’s husband wanted a divorce and suggested selling the estate to dissolve the marital assets. But Ms. Wyatt, who, as a child, had lived in a cottage on the property with her parents until she was 12, could not imagine a world without the family farm. “How do you put a price on that?” said Ms. Wyatt, 69, a writer.
The price, in fact, was appraised at around $2.25 million for a tract that includes 10 outbuildings, nearly all of it on preserved farmland. The house was filled with generations of family furniture and the grounds were full of flowers, shrubs, trees and vegetation Ms. Wyatt had spent years nurturing. “My plants are like my children,” she said.
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But Ms. Wyatt knew that her share of the couple’s divided assets would not provide her with enough cash to buy her husband out and properly maintain the estate. “A house, to me, is a living breathing thing and you have take care of it. You have to keep it going,” she said. “It’s like a person.”
Ms. Wyatt said her husband eventually conceded and let her keep the house and half of the remaining marital assets, keeping the dispute out of court. The divorce was finalized in 2021. Ms. Wyatt’s ex-husband declined to comment.
It wasn’t until about a year after her divorce that Ms. Wyatt realized that for the first time in her life the family homestead was hers, an heirloom she could one day pass on to her daughter, who is grown. “I was walking back from the pool one day, and I stood back and thought, ‘Oh my God, this is mine,’” she said.
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A correction was made on March 14, 2024: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described 2022 divorce data. There were nearly one million divorces in 2022, not nearly one million people that were divorced.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
Ronda Kaysen is a real estate reporter for The Times, covering the housing market and home design trends. More about Ronda Kaysen
A version of this article appears in print on March 10, 2024, Section RE, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: I Want The House, Not My Spouse. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Saturday, April 6, 2024
The Economist Magazine Cover FOr 04/06/2024
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APRIL 6TH 2024
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How we chose this week’s image
The Economist
Zanny Minton Beddoes
Editor-in-chief
This week we had one worldwide cover. China’s famously industrious workforce is shrinking, its property boom has ended and the system of free trade that helped it grow rich is disintegrating.
However, Xi Jinping, China’s president, has a master plan. Branded “new productive forces”, this sets out to boost advanced manufacturing, in order to create high-productivity jobs, make China self-sufficient and put it beyond reach of American sanctions. There’s just one problem. It won’t work.
Here we illustrate two sides to Mr Xi’s cunning plan. At its best it’s a high-tech vision of the future, full of robots, AI and advanced materials. That’s why we have a pair of android hands creating a viewfinder, as if they belonged to a fancy film director.
Less charitably, China’s president is pulling a rabbit out of a hat—and here the hats are being stacked to make a millinery pagoda.
In reality, Mr Xi’s thinking is both visionary and magical, so we combined them in a single image
Mr Xi’s plan is hardly short of ambition. Annual investment in new productive forces is $1.6trn—double what it was five years ago and equivalent to 43% of all business investment in America in 2023. Factory capacity in some industries could rise by more than 75% by 2030. Some of this will be made by world-class firms keen to create value, but much will be prompted by subsidies and state direction.
Many of us liked this design, but others worried about the cover’s unresolved contradiction. Are new productive forces a reality or a conjuring trick?
Anyway, our timing was out. We would be featuring a bunny in the week after Easter. We tried another tack.
A problem with the master plan is that much new Chinese production will have to be exported. However, China already accounts for 31% of global manufacturing. How much higher can that figure go? America will surely block advanced imports from China, or those made by Chinese firms elsewhere. Europe is already in a panic about fleets of Chinese vehicles wiping out its carmakers. Emerging countries will not want their own industrial development to be stymied by a new “China shock”. The world has moved on from the free-trading 2000s—partly because of China’s own mercantilism.
Those thoughts led us to containers and the ships that carry them. The Great Wall of containers summons up the idea that this strategy is not just about economic growth, but also about China’s security. Relations with America are steadier than they were a year ago, but they remain fragile. Chinese officials are convinced that America will restrict more Chinese imports and penalise more Chinese firms, whoever wins the White House in November. The ship, loaded up with gambling chips, takes us back to the riskiness of Mr Xi’s strategy. (Fortuitously, our drawing of the ship also conveys Mr Xi’s wishful thinking: physics says that its bow should be dipping into the waves.)
Again, here is a version that combines these two sketches. The container ships have become an armada; seen from above, they look like a fleet of ballistic missiles.
The aggression is apt. China’s lopsided growth model could wreck international trade, ratcheting geopolitical tensions even higher. If it failed, China could stagnate. That thought may comfort America and its allies, who fear an onrush of Chinese goods. It should not: discontented, China may be even more bellicose than if it were thriving.
Many of us liked this cover, but some felt that containers are an old-tech way of representing a high-tech revolution. What’s more, this design fails to get across how the new productive forces are Mr Xi’s creation.
Those thoughts led us to a third set of ideas.
Mr Xi’s master plan rejects the conventional cure for a slowdown—a big consumer stimulus to reflate the economy. Instead he is going for a 21st-century industrial revolution. Not only will China escape dependence on Western technology, but it will control much of the key intellectual property in new industries and charge rents accordingly. Multinationals will come to China to learn, not teach.
Accordingly, we have him pressing the reset-button—as if he were voting in the National People’s Congress. We also have him parading in front of a Communist Party logo adapted to look like a computer’s on-switch. And once again, we combined these two ideas, this time into what was to be our final cover design.
We wanted the focus on Mr Xi because the new productive forces are ideological as well as economic. In recent decades China’s technocrats have had a mandate to study global best practice. Today, by contrast, they have been marginalised. Feedback has turned into flattery. Instead, China has come under Mr Xi’s centralising rule.
China’s president rejects the idea of bailing out speculative property firms or giving handouts to citizens as the kind of ruse the decadent West resorts to. Young people should be less pampered and willing to “eat bitterness”, he said last year. Equally, national security now takes precedence over prosperity. China must be prepared for the struggle ahead with America, even if there is a price to pay. The ill effects will be felt in China and around the world.
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→ Xi Jinping’s misguided plan to escape economic stagnation (Leader)
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An Alert Microsoft Software Engineer Stopped A Major Cyber Attack
Kevin Roose
By Kevin Roose
Reporting from San Francisco
April 3, 2024
Leer en español
The internet, as anyone who works deep in its trenches will tell you, is not a smooth, well-oiled machine.
It’s a messy patchwork that has been assembled over decades, and is held together with the digital equivalent of Scotch tape and bubble gum. Much of it relies on open-source software that is thanklessly maintained by a small army of volunteer programmers who fix the bugs, patch the holes and ensure the whole rickety contraption, which is responsible for trillions of dollars in global G.D.P., keeps chugging along.
Last week, one of those programmers may have saved the internet from huge trouble.
His name is Andres Freund. He’s a 38-year-old software engineer who lives in San Francisco and works at Microsoft. His job involves developing a piece of open-source database software known as PostgreSQL, whose details would probably bore you to tears if I could explain them correctly, which I can’t.
Recently, while doing some routine maintenance, Mr. Freund inadvertently found a backdoor hidden in a piece of software that is part of the Linux operating system. The backdoor was a possible prelude to a major cyberattack that experts say could have caused enormous damage, if it had succeeded.
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Now, in a twist fit for Hollywood, tech leaders and cybersecurity researchers are hailing Mr. Freund as a hero. Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, praised his “curiosity and craftsmanship.” An admirer called him “the silverback gorilla of nerds.” Engineers have been circulating an old, famous-among-programmers web comic about how all modern digital infrastructure rests on a project maintained by some random guy in Nebraska. (In their telling, Mr. Freund is the random guy from Nebraska.)
In an interview this week, Mr. Freund — who is actually a soft-spoken, German-born coder who declined to have his photo taken for this story — said that becoming an internet folk hero had been disorienting.
Five U.S. Cases Targeting Big Tech
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For years, Apple, Google, Meta and other tech giants operated unfettered. Now, regulators around the world are taking steps to compel them to make major shifts to their products and businesses. In the United States, several cases could result in orders for the companies to change their practices. Here’s what to know.
Apple. The Justice Department joined 16 states and the District of Columbia in filing a lawsuit against Apple, arguing that it had violated antitrust laws with practices that were intended to keep customers reliant on their iPhones by preventing other companies from offering applications that compete with Apple products.
Amazon. The Federal Trade Commission and 17 states have sued the e-commerce giant, accusing it of protecting a monopoly over swaths of online retail by squeezing merchants and favoring its own services. The outcome could alter the way Americans shop online.
Meta. The Federal Trade Commission and more than 40 states have accused Facebook of buying up its rivals, particularly Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp two years later, to illegally squash competition that could have one day challenged the company’s dominance. They have called for the deals to be unwound.
Google. The Justice Department has targeted the tech giant with two separate lawsuits. In 2020, the agency accused Google of illegally protecting its monopoly over search and search advertising. In 2023, the Justice Department and a group of eight states accused it of illegally abusing a monopoly over the technology that powers online advertising.
“I find it very odd,” he said. “I’m a fairly private person who just sits in front of the computer and hacks on code.”
The saga began earlier this year, when Mr. Freund was flying back from a visit to his parents in Germany. While reviewing a log of automated tests, he noticed a few error messages he didn’t recognize. He was jet-lagged, and the messages didn’t seem urgent, so he filed them away in his memory.
But a few weeks later, while running some more tests at home, he noticed that an application called SSH, which is used to log into computers remotely, was using more processing power than normal. He traced the issue to a set of data compression tools called xz Utils, and wondered if it was related to the earlier errors he’d seen.
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(Don’t worry if these names are Greek to you. All you really need to know is that these are all small pieces of the Linux operating system, which is probably the most important piece of open-source software in the world. The vast majority of the world’s servers — including those used by banks, hospitals, governments and Fortune 500 companies — run on Linux, which makes its security a matter of global importance.)
Like other popular open-source software, Linux gets updated all the time, and most bugs are the result of innocent mistakes. But when Mr. Freund looked closely at the source code for xz Utils, he saw clues that it had been intentionally tampered with.
Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are the hosts of Hard Fork, a podcast that makes sense of the rapidly changing world of technology. Subscribe and listen.
In particular, he found that someone had planted malicious code in the latest versions of xz Utils. The code, known as a backdoor, would allow its creator to hijack a user’s SSH connection and secretly run their own code on that user’s machine.
In the cybersecurity world, a database engineer inadvertently finding a backdoor in a core Linux feature is a little like a bakery worker who smells a freshly baked loaf of bread, senses something is off and correctly deduces that someone has tampered with the entire global yeast supply. It’s the kind of intuition that requires years of experience and obsessive attention to detail, plus a healthy dose of luck.
At first, Mr. Freund doubted his own findings. Had he really discovered a backdoor in one of the world’s most heavily scrutinized open-source programs?
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“It felt surreal,” he said. “There were moments where I was like, I must have just had a bad night of sleep and had some fever dreams.”
But his digging kept turning up new evidence, and last week, Mr. Freund sent his findings to a group of open-source software developers. The news set the tech world on fire. Within hours, a fix was developed and some researchers were crediting him with preventing a potentially historic cyberattack.
“This could have been the most widespread and effective backdoor ever planted in any software product,” said Alex Stamos, the chief trust officer at SentinelOne, a cybersecurity research firm.
Inside the World of Tech
Stopping a Huge Cyberattack: A Microsoft engineer noticed something was off on a piece of software he worked on. He soon discovered someone was probably trying to gain access to computers all over the world.
‘Twitter Menace’ or True Believer?: The deep-pocketed tech investor Garry Tan says he wants to save San Francisco. But his pugnacious online habits are making him enemies.
E.U. Investigations: Alphabet, Apple and Meta are under investigation for a range of potential violations of the E.U.’s new competition law. The inquiries signal the bloc’s intention to tightly enforce the sweeping rules that recently took effect.
A New Antitrust Case: The Justice Department joined 16 states and the District of Columbia to file a significant challenge to the reach and influence of Apple, arguing in a new lawsuit that Apple had violated antitrust laws.
If it had gone undetected, Mr. Stamos said, the backdoor would have “given its creators a master key to any of the hundreds of millions of computers around the world that run SSH.” That key could have allowed them to steal private information, plant crippling malware, or cause major disruptions to infrastructure — all without being caught.
(The New York Times has sued Microsoft and its partner OpenAI on claims of copyright infringement involving artificial intelligence systems that generate text.)
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Nobody knows who planted the backdoor. But the plot appears to have been so elaborate that some researchers believe only a nation with formidable hacking chops, such as Russia or China, could have attempted it.
According to some researchers who have gone back and looked at the evidence, the attacker appears to have used a pseudonym, “Jia Tan,” to suggest changes to xz Utils as far back as 2022. (Many open-source software projects are governed via hierarchy; developers suggest changes to a program’s code, then more experienced developers known as “maintainers” have to review and approve the changes.)
The attacker, using the Jia Tan name, appears to have spent several years slowly gaining the trust of other xz Utils developers and getting more control over the project, eventually becoming a maintainer, and finally inserting the code with the hidden backdoor earlier this year. (The new, compromised version of the code had been released, but was not yet in widespread use.)
Mr. Freund declined to guess who might have been behind the attack. But he said that whoever it was had been sophisticated enough to try to cover their tracks, including by adding code that made the backdoor harder to spot.
“It was very mysterious,” he said. “They clearly spent a lot of effort trying to hide what they were doing.”
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Since his findings became public, Mr. Freund said, he had been helping the teams who are trying to reverse-engineer the attack and identify the culprit. But he’s been too busy to rest on his laurels. The next version of PostgreSQL, the database software he works on, is coming out later this year, and he’s trying to get some last-minute changes in before the deadline.
“I don’t really have time to go and have a celebratory drink,” he said.
Kevin Roose is a Times technology columnist and a host of the podcast "Hard Fork." More about Kevin Roose
A version of this article appears in print on April 4, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Spotting a Bug That May Have Been Meant to Cripple the Internet. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Friday, April 5, 2024
A Report On The Deadly Police Shooting In Pacifica
CBS San Francisco
Woman shot dead by Pacifica police after shooting son identified; body-cam video released
By Tim Fang,
9 hours ago
Pacifica community shocked by deadly shooting 02:30
PACIFICA – Police in Pacifica released additional details after officers fatally shot a woman suspected of shooting her son during a confrontation last week.
On Thursday, the department provided an update on the investigation, which included identifying the woman, the officers who shot the woman, along with releasing body-worn camera video of the incident. The video is graphic and viewer discretion is advised.
"It is always tragic when law enforcement intervenes with deadly force, regardless of the circumstances. It impacts the family involved in the incident, our community, and the members of our police department," Chief Maria Sarasua said in a statement. "As police chief, I am committed to ensuring that all involved are treated with care and compassion while ensuring a full and thorough investigation into what occurred."
The woman killed has been identified as 50-year-old Michelle Arrais. Police said Arrais shot her 23-year-old son inside their apartment on the 2500 block of Francisco Boulevard on the morning of March 27.
The victim told authorities that he was awakened by the sound of gunshots in the apartment. His mother then opened his bedroom door and shot him twice.
After police arrived at the scene, two officers saw Arrais driving away from the apartment complex.
Video from the officers' cameras shows the woman pointing a handgun at them as she attempted to leave in her SUV. The officers opened fire.
After the shooting, officers recovered a loaded 9mm semiautomatic handgun from the woman. Four boxes of ammunition were also recovered from her purse, which was found on the passenger seat.
Despite efforts from paramedics, Arrais died at the scene.
The officers who shot Arrais have been identified as Corporal Hayden Fry and Officer Kevin Contreras. Fry has been with the Pacifica Police Department for eight years, while Contreras was hired by the department last year with six years of prior law enforcement experience.
The son was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. During a search of the apartment, police said they also found the family's dog dead from gunshot wounds. Investigators believe that Arrais killed the dog before shooting her son.
Multiple investigations are underway in connection with the shooting, police said.
The San Mateo County District Attorney's Office is investigating if the shooting was in compliance with state law. Meanwhile, Pacifica Police are conducting an internal investigation to determine if procedures were followed, along with a criminal investigation into the initial incident.
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Allied Aid To The Sviet Union In World War II
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Robert Hansen
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Freelance Writer, Amateur Chess EnthusiastMar 8
If lend lease only started to arrive in significant amounts to USSR in late 1943, how does this account for its victories against Germany in battles like Moscow, Stalingrad & Kursk? These occured from late 1941-mid 1943.
An opinion on lend-lease that can be expressed in one sentence, whether it’s “Lend-lease saved Moscow by providing 40% of Soviet tanks” or “most lend-lease arrived after Kursk, when the war was already won,” can be dismissed out of hand as the product of an agenda. Lend-lease played a decisive role in the war, but nothing so clear-cut as winning this or that battle. Western guns were nice to have, but it was the butter that made the difference.
The significance of Lend-Lease did not begin in late 1943 — deliveries scaled dramatically in the second half of 1942 and played a critical role in the survival of the Soviet economy. The Battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk were won almost wholly by Soviet arms, but the Soviet Union could never have won the war without Western assistance.
Lend-Lease By Year
From June 1941 to June 1942, assistance to the Soviet Union was very improvisational under so-called “Pre-Lend Lease” aid and the First Lend Lease Protocol, which was manufactured and delivered by Britain via the hazardous and constricted Arctic supply route.
By the time the Battle of Moscow came to an end, barely more than 350,000 tons of supplies had been delivered. That may sound impressive, but it’s a drop in the bucket of an industrial war — in the abstract, fifty divisions will consume 350,000 tons of supplies in ten days of normal operations.
Bottom line — Lend-Lease in 1941 was in no world decisive, and only blatant creative accounting can argue otherwise. The most egregious example of this creative accounting is the myth that “40% of Soviet medium and heavy tanks at Moscow were British.”
Making Pro-Western Myths and Memes: “40% of Medium and Heavy Tanks”
The Battle of Moscow was a massive, complex affair that took place in four stages from October 1941 to January 1942, and over four million men, four thousand tanks, and around 10,000 artillery pieces served in the campaign at one stage or another. The stages of the battle were:
The Vyazma-Bryansk encirclement battles at the first month of the offensive; the Germans mustered two million men to attack, encircle, and then destroy the larger part of 1.2 million Soviet defenders guarding the distant approaches to Moscow.
The Penetration of the Mozhaisk Defensive Line by the German armored spearheads from October 13 to 31st, initially opposed by 90,000 Soviet soldiers gradually reinforced by reserves and troops from the Eastern districts of the Soviet Union.
The direct defense of the approaches to Moscow throughout November and early December, featuring more than a hundred thousand soldiers occupying strong defensive belts and 670 tanks, including 205 T-34s and KV-1s, as well as 90 British infantry tanks in frontline units that engaged the Germans.
The Soviet counteroffensive from December 5th onward — the Red Army mustered a 58-division reserve counting 1.1 million Soviet soldiers, together with an additional 1,700 tanks drawn from the Eastern districts, to mount a counteroffensive and repel Army Group Center.
Now, a slight segue.
Bent Larsen, the second-best Western chess player of the 1960s briefly served as the second of a young Bobby Fischer, the famously eccentric future world chess champion. Larsen wrote about this experience in his book, detailing an episode where Fischer, still a sheltered child, found himself in Yugoslavia for the first time. The young Fischer became sick, and refused to seek care because he was convinced that a communist country could not produce a decent doctor.
When Larsen convinced him to go to the doctor, Fischer was shocked to find that the man was competent and asked if he had studied in the West. No, the doctor said, but he and his wife had vacationed in Vienna — this was the proof Fischer needed, and he now decided that the doctor had learned everything he knew while vacationing in Vienna.
A few British military historians and amateurs seemingly took inspiration from Fischer’s innovative absurdist reasoning and applied it to history, and the results may shock you.
They discovered that lend-lease supplies from Britain had, in fact, won the Battle of Moscow.
The impetus for this groundbreaking revelation was to simply ignore the fact that lend-lease supplies from Britain obviously did not win the Battle of Moscow.
Just complete these five simple steps:
Only look at the period of November 26th to December 5th, when all Soviet forces engaged were at their nadir while the use of British tanks was at its relative peak — looking at the period before November 26th or after December 5th would be as absurd as believing a Yugoslavian doctor learned his trade at Yugoslavian medical school.
Take the Soviet forces that are already at their minimum count, not counting the rapidly growing Soviet strategic reserve that will soon go into action — insist that the infantry and artillery doing the bulk of the fighting count as zero, and the Soviet light tanks with decent winter mobility and a reasonable gun also count as zero.
Embrace the alternative facts that a ploddingly slow, 16-ton infantry tank with no mobility in snowy conditions and no HE round is a “medium tank,” one with combat value equal to a 30-ton tank with excellent anti-tank and anti-infantry performance as well as good winter mobility. The armored trifecta is armor protection, armor protection, and armor protection — armor protection is the only thing that counts, which is why WWII ended in a German victory with King Tigers rolling into Oak Ridge and stealing the nuclear weapon plans.
Take the 205+ T-34s and KV-1s and Britain’s 90 “medium and heavy tanks,” to find that Britain supplied 90 out of 295 Soviet “medium and heavy tanks,” or 32%.
Increase the 32% figure to 40%. Just because.
Voila! British lend-lease tanks now comprise 40% of Soviet combat power at the Battle of Moscow. You’ve proven that lend-lease won the Battle of Moscow, scored a point for British national pride and delivered a blow to the Russophiles, and all it took was being comprehensively wrong about everything on purpose.
Here’s a lifehack — when someone tries selling you a bizarrely specific statistic that invokes a mixture of percentages and poorly-defined categories, something like “40% of Soviet medium and heavy tanks engaged in the defense of Moscow” or “33% of new Soviet aircraft production between July 32nd 1942 and February 29th 1944,” they’re probably fooling you.
These are examples of bad, lazy arguments that ultimately undersell and discredit the war-winning role of lend-lease.
Lend-Lease in 1942
In the first half of 1942 and even more in the second half, lend-lease grew dramatically. Total deliveries were seven times greater than in 1941, for a total of nearly 2.5 million tons.
The first reason for this was that the Soviet Union completed its movement of soldiers from the Transbaikal, Siberia, and the Far East to European Russia. This opened up the Trans-Siberian Railway for shipments of non-military aid from the United States that arrived through Vladivostok, which is where just under 50% of all lend-lease arrived throughout the war.
Second was the implementation of the Second Lend-Lease Protocol in June 1942 — this had a much higher budget, a greater allotment of shipping for tonnage, and provisioned for the US to take over supplying most materiel to the USSR directly. This was also a relief to Britain, which didn’t have as much manufacturing to throw around as the US and made significant sacrifices in arming its forces for the sake of sending tanks and planes to the USSR.
Finally, the UK and USSR managed to complete the opening of the Persian Corridor. This route for lend-lease had greater capacity and was much safer than the old Arctic route. From late 1942 onward, it became the path for a great majority of Soviet military aid.
The Arctic arrow really ought to originate from the UK
By the end of 1942, a Soviet soldier was still overwhelmingly more likely to ride into battle on a horse than in a Studebaker. But an important share of the calories he and the Soviet worker consumed throughout that year would have come from American food shipments.
Making Pro-Soviet Myths and Memes: The Tonnage Fallacy
Tonnage is a useful tool when assessing the value of Lend-Lease to put the sheer scale of the Second World War into perspective. Sending “thousands of tanks” really does sound impressive on its face, but when you realize those deliveries took place over a four-year-long war that consumed tens of thousands of tanks and millions of men, you realize that it isn’t.
But sometimes, you need to interrogate your metrics. Tonnage on its own will give you a completely incorrect view of the value of food shipments.
The Heer had conquered the Soviet Union’s most food-rich regions in 1941, and Fall Blau in 1942 expanded this control of arable land in the Soviet Union to 40%. The Soviet Union experienced significant levels of hunger and even starvation throughout the year, but they also began receiving large food shipments that averaged 1.5 million tons per year throughout the remainder of the war.
In the conditions the Soviet Union faced, there’s no way to dismiss the value of 1.5 million tons of food per year. But Soviet leaders explicitly requested the most processed, value-added food types with the greatest macronutrient-to-weight ratio. A ton of egg powder, milk powder, SPAM, and other food concentrates had at least twice the caloric density of the ton of unprocessed agricultural products produced by the Soviet Union, and lend-lease made the difference between several million starvation deaths in 1942–1943.
Whether or not this would cause the collapse of the Soviet economy is hard to say, but it would be an enduring economic wound.
Lend Lease Beyond Kursk: The Double-Edged Myth of the Soviet Steamroller
Pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet observers both tend to indulge in the idea of the Soviet Union as an overwhelming industrial power with infinite human resources. This is either denigrative, that the Red Army overwhelmed the Heer through mass alone and shrugged off 8:1 losses in every battle, or as a miracle of Communist ingenuity throwing overwhelming numbers of tanks, planes, artillery, etc. into each new battle.
The Soviet Union’s tank manufacturing numbers are a beloved talking point, both by those who glorify the Soviet Union and by the borderline Nazi apologists who promote the idea that Operation Barbarossa was a preemptive strike against the greatest military power on Earth (just look at how many tanks and planes the Soviet Union had!).
Both of these perceptions have very little to do with reality. When it mattered most, the Soviet Union was smaller than Axis Europe.
The USSR never had double the population of Grossdeutschland and its minor allies, and the German advances of 1941 and 1942 reduced it to a more or less equal population. And while Soviet weapon counts were impressive on paper, they were really just a dysfunctional feature of the Soviet Union’s immature industry. The worst culprit is the mind-boggling number of artillery pieces the Soviet Union produced throughout the war, as Red Army units often had more guns than they had shells to fire that day.
The most expensive parts of industrial production for a land army are the ammunition, the spare parts, the trucks — all the boring bits that don’t get you promoted from lower middle manager to upper middle manager in the Soviet bureaucracy. Germany produced far more trucks, much greater quantities of artillery ammunition, and on balance was a slightly superior industrial power with far better-utilized capacity in comparison to the Soviet Union.
When the Red Army went to war in June 1941, they lost the majority of their tens of thousands of tanks due to breakdowns and abandonment unrelated to German action. One tank corps in the Battle of Brody lost more than 90% of its light tanks and over 80% of its T-34s without ever encountering German forces.
Back to 1943; the Red Army went into the Battle of Kursk with a terrific number of tanks, no doubt about that. But their mobile infantry still primarily consisted of cavalry groups and they were still being outshot badly by the German artillery. Recent studies have concluded that throughout the battle, the Germans fired 2.3 times the weight of shot in artillery ammunition as the Soviet Union did, which would have accounted for a large part of the disparity in casualties.
The Soviet Union did not have any miraculously deep well of manpower to tap into — its recruitment after Stalingrad relied heavily upon retaking ground that had been occupied, restoring it economically, and drawing new soldiers from those territories. The Red Army was a pyramid scheme, where this victory would find many of the men to achieve the next one.
However, this process of replenishment relied heavily on lend-lease. The Red Army and the Heer had both mounted scorched-Earth retreats across Ukraine and Belarus, and the Heer in particular had carried out a policy of brutal economic exploitation and the deliberate starvation of urban populations for two years.
They had slaughtered or stolen anywhere from 60% to 90% of farm animals like cows, horses, and pigs that had represented a large share of the pre-war agricultural value of farms in the occupied areas. Carrying out the war against Nazi Germany required pulling a total of 19.5 million men out of agriculture between 1941 and 1945.
Something far more important than the 7,000 tanks that the Soviet Union received through lend-lease is often forgotten — they received 8,000 tractors. The large food deliveries and shipments of agricultural equipment facilitated the Soviet Union having its cake and eating it too, to restore production in the occupied areas faster and also conscript a greater portion of the agrarian population into military service.
Note that they use percentages for aviation fuel and absolute numbers for aircraft and tanks — shipments of aviation fuel were small in absolute volumes, on account of the fact Soviet aircraft did not use it. Likewise, planes and tanks were not very impressive as a proportion of Soviet production. But worst of all, where are the tractors?
Conscripting so many soldiers without lend-lease would still have been possible, but it would have forced increasingly harsh sacrifices on the population and caused still more damage to the economy. Within a few years, the costs of continued offensive war would become impossible to bear and the Soviet Union would have to strike a negotiated peace with Nazi Germany.
Winning Battles vs Winning a War
This is doubly true because the lack of lend-lease deliveries in 1944 would have drastically reduced the ability of the Red Army to win decisive, crushing victories over the Heer.
The Battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk display more or less what the Red Army could do on its own means without extensive military aid in trucks, explosives, and other areas where Soviet industry was weak.
Most new Soviet trucks during the war came from lend-lease? Few of them had arrived yet, and they made do with horses.
The US provided a critical amount of Soviet gunpowder and explosive material? Most of it had yet to arrive, and they made do with appalling inferiority in artillery ammunition.
But what they had never done was attack, surround, and destroy large German formations in a battle where the Heer had not first overextended itself. Soviet skill and overall capabilities never reached the critical point of enabling them to win an offensive annihilation battle against reasonably prepared German troops. This changed with Operation Bagration, which annihilated the German Army Group Center in the summer of 1944.
Soviet tactics had improved considerably, and their planning and deception operations were masterful. The Germans had powerful mobile forces in the East, but STAVKA misled them into placing virtually all mobile reserves in the Southern sector, not in Belarus where the attack was imminent.
However, the value of Western aid was also far greater than ever. While Germany had suffered most of its bomber losses in the East, the US and UK had thoroughly wrecked the Luftwaffe’s fighter arm. STAVKA had tricked the Germans into deploying two-thirds of all their mobile divisions in Romania, yes…
But the missing third would have drastically reduced the success of Operation Bagration if not for the fact they were being steadily ground down by the British and Commonwealth troops in the Battle for Caen.
The whole operation couldn’t have been nearly as ambitious if not for the lend-lease trucks, as well. “Soviets in Studebakers” is a cliche, but by the summer of 1944 it had finally become a reality; lend-lease trucks had steadily grown to account for roughly half of Soviet motor capacity, improving Soviet mobility and logistics besides releasing horses to agricultural duty.
Lend-lease was a paltry 360,000 tons in 1941 — deliveries were more than 10 times greater in 1943, and almost 20 times greater in 1944. These deliveries and the additional fronts that opened from mid-1943 onward were the difference between the Soviet Union winning costly, plodding battles like Kursk or shattering German resistance as at Operation Bagration.
What Does Lend-Lease Account For?
Despite the German losses suffered on other fronts and the exhaustion of German offensive potential after the Battle of Stalingrad, German manpower reserves didn’t hit empty until the spring of 1944. Despite economic aid deepening the practical Soviet manpower pool, STAVKA’s own manpower reserves hit empty about a year later.
The Red Army could and did fight and win battles more or less within its own means in the most critical years of the war. But while the Red Army soldiers and their leaders did the essential work of saving themselves from Nazi Germany, they couldn’t have finished the job on their own.
Without economic or military assistance, the USSR could not have waged a mobile war capable of destroying the Wehrmacht faster than its own offensive potential would exhaust itself.
In the end, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would settle a border somewhere between the Vistula and the Dnieper River — until next time.
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Sunday, March 31, 2024
Saturday, March 30, 2024
The Economist Magazine Cover For 03/30/2024
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MARCH 30TH 2024
How we chose this week’s image
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Cover Story
How we chose this week’s image
Insert a clear and simple description of the image
Edward Carr
Deputy editor
On our cover in Europe this week we looked at three severe shocks, actual and potential, to the economy. Partly because of the jump in energy prices that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the European Union’s GDP has grown by only 4% this decade, compared with 8% in America. As if that were not bad enough, Europe faces a surge of cheap imports from China. And within a year Donald Trump could be back in the White House, slapping huge tariffs on Europe’s exports.
This rather lovely image focuses on the impending blight. Europe’s misfortune is particularly ill-timed. American support for Ukraine has dried up and the energy transition has much further to run. A fast-ageing population, overbearing regulators and inadequate market integration continue to hold back growth. Disillusioned European voters are increasingly liable to support hard-right parties such as the Alternative for Germany.
For all their charm, blue petals and a euro coin say that we are writing about the 20 countries in the single currency. In reality, the shocks threaten the entire continent—including Britain.
Somehow, this crumpled euro note is not so evocative of the currency union. Instead it hints at a fourth danger that we wanted to be a central part of our leader. Although the shocks facing Europe are outside its control, errors from Europe’s own policymakers could greatly aggravate the damage.
We thought about a classical allusion—because those errors stem partly from Europe’s understandable but backward-looking urge to preserve industries and jobs.
One error would be to fight the previous war against inflation by keeping economic policy too tight at a moment of vulnerability. It will be easier to cope with disruption from outside if central banks help avoid a slump that would stop displaced workers finding new jobs.
Another error would be to copy America’s and China’s protectionism by giving vast subsidies to favoured industries. China’s recent economic woes demonstrate the flaws, not the virtues, of excessive government planning.
This chap is wrestling an indicator. Unfortunately, it looks as if he is grappling with red tape. Classical imagery was good, but we wanted something more precise.
When we saw this, we knew we had what we were after. This Mona Lisa has not only received a nasty shock; she’s also gone punk. And that nods towards Europe’s need to junk the past and forge its own mould-breaking economic policy.
Even as America showers industry with public money, Europe should instead spend on infrastructure, education, and research and development. Rather than emulate China’s interventionism, Europe should note the benefit Chinese firms derive from a vast domestic market. Integrating Europe’s market for services, where trade remains difficult, would help firms grow, reward innovation and replace some lost manufacturing jobs.
This hair-raising cover was almost ready, but some of us wanted to tie in the triple shock with our modern Mona Lisa. So our designers came up with some firebolts over her left shoulder. They say lightning never strikes twice. It threatens to strike Europe three times.
Can artificial intelligence transform health care? That is the question at the heart of this week’s Technology Quarterly, written by our health editor, Natasha Loder, and which we featured on our cover in America and Asia.
This is how we illustrated the front of the TQ. As you can see, Leonardo da Vinci is all over this week’s paper: he was the hand behind not just the Mona Lisa, but also the Vitruvian man—which applies geometry and mathematics to the human form and is the inspiration for this image.
We thought that our cover should refer to the TQ. Artificial intelligence is generating excitement and hyperbole everywhere, but in health care it has the potential to be transformational. As the TQ describes, it promises better diagnoses, personalised support for patients, faster drug discovery and greater efficiency. In Europe analysts predict that it could save hundreds of thousands of lives each year.
There is already evidence that AI systems can enhance diagnostic accuracy and disease tracking, improve the prediction of patients’ outcomes and suggest better treatments. It can also boost efficiency in hospitals and surgeries by taking on tasks such as medical transcription and monitoring patients, and by streamlining administration.
Unfortunately, integration has been slow and the results have often been mediocre. Our editorial focused on why that is and what to do about it.
Our covers played on a stock medical phrase, “the doctor will see you now”. Putting “soon” as the last word was ambiguous—it’s later than now, but not very far off. To be clearer, we settled on “eventually”.
Health care desperately needs the AI treatment, but its introduction will not be painless. As the doctor says: “This is going to hurt.”
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View large image (“The triple shock facing Europe’s economy”)
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Backing stories
→ The triple shock facing Europe’s economy (Leader)
→ Europe’s economy is under attack from all sides (Finance and economics)
→ The AI doctor will see you…eventually (Leader)
→ Health and AI (Technology Quarterly)
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