"Vodka Politics" is a very good read - basically makes a strong argument for autocracy and vodka being deeply linked. Mediaeval Russians didn't drink vodka - they drank mead and kvas, and the wealthier ones drank wine. But the early tsars brought in vodka as a state monopoly that ended up being responsible for a) a centuries-long public health disaster and b) about a third of total government income.
I just don't drink clear liquor very often.
I don't think I've ever seen a Moldavian wine in the store and at one time I drank a lot of middle quality red wine.
Anyway, the number of wealthy people with terminal butthurt over the poor getting any help is one of the things that bothers me most about our new fascist overlords if you can leave aside the fascism.
I don't think I've ever seen a Moldavian wine in the store and at one time I drank a lot of middle quality red wine.
From the linked post:
[I]t went from exporting around 80% of its wine to Russia, to around 15%. Most Moldovan wine (around 60%) now goes to the EU, with an increasing share going to Turkey and the Middle East.
That doesn't sound like much is going to the US.
Yeah. But we get lots of wine from ridiculous places like New York state and Oregon, so I figured I might see it once or twice.
The ex-Soviet liquor I'd like to try is Armenian "cognac."
6: If you try one I'd be curious to know how they are: https://wineofmoldovausa.com/
It comes from the "cognac" region of Armenia.
This review of a Moldovan brandy is amusing: https://www.reddit.com/r/Brandy/comments/a2v0u7/review_divin_kvint_doina_9yearold/?rdt=52786
USAID hearing thread happening now https://bsky.app/profile/kyledcheney.bsky.social/post/3lizdmgtk7c2i
This is just flat out evil https://bsky.app/profile/brandonwolf.bsky.social/post/3lizceodhdk22
They've agreed to stop calling it Cognac, but for a long time the story was that they'd won the right to call it Cognac fair and square by winning some French brandy competition way back when.
My experience of Georgian wine wasn't very good but maybe I was drinking the wrong ones.
My cousin married into an Armenian wine family but their vineyard is in Oregon, not Armenia.
Yeah, 6 was a joke. Lots of very good Oregon wines now. Usually white wine though. Or that's what I see.
My parents were USAID contractors, on and off, for about a decade, and my dad was a direct hire for a year or so. They have a number of interesting takes about the organization, and its quirks, that are overall positive.
Oregon was once a whites-only state after all.
All the Armenian wine I had in Armenia was terrible but I didn't have very much. Because it was terrible.
12: I only hope that their manually checking boxes means that they can be personally prosecuted. "It's only money" isn't a good defense when you've been forewarned of the consequences to blocking the transfer.
10: My better half went to Kvint with a person who was then a Moscow-based correspondent for the FAZ. They got to see the whole place, including the many miles of storage tunnels, and were plied with plenty of cognac by the director. She brought back a bunch of cognac too, including one that I think was called Victory. It was aged either 25 or 40 years (I forget) and those were not wasted years.
I'm sure I've had Ararat cognac, but none of it stands out in memory.
14: When did you try Georgian wine? It's gotten a lot more varied and better in the last 15 years or so. When we lived there, we were sometimes obliged to drink someone's homemade wine, and some of that was impressively awful.
My dad and uncle made wine. It was really bad.
My ex- Aunt worked for US Aid as an agronomist. My cousins got to live in Malawi and Indonesia. One went to boarding school for a while until she could get a placement in a country with a high school.
I believe that she and my uncle got their start with Catholic charities.
Plenty of good Georgian wine around! In fact, this month my monthly wine club from the fancy wine-and-fresh pasta shop down the street was entirely focused on Georgia, so I have four bottles right now.
There's a Georgian restaurant here that's allowed to import wine (and chacha) from their own vineyard back in Georgia, it's excellent.
*unusual because it's not part of a hotel like all the other licensed establishments.
There is a place here that sells New Hampshire wine and the reviews have not been good.
Georgian orange wine is weird and fun. I've seen more standard stuff popping up at wine shops but I don't think we've tried it. Would be fun to have a party with gozinaki and put on Legend of Suram Fortress.
My sister was working on a USAID project writing grant proposals for a farming coop in Honduras, and she just recently went down there and spent some time meeting with people figure out their needs and building trust and representing that she could help them bring resources into their community.
But now the rug has been pulled. There will be no grants, the Honduran coop has had their time wasted, and my sister is looking for work.
Is she interested in upholstering the luxury accommodation portions of the coming dystopia?
I'm interested in anything that keeps her from moving to New Hampshire.
27 I finally caught that at a Parajanov retro last summer
22: Oh yeah, total turnaround in quality and production since then. Georgian production was a lot like Moldovan production as other-Doug describes it pre-assistance. Same thing with Russia inventing spurious reasons to choke off trade. Now I'd imagine the lion's share of exports goes to EU countries.
27: Agreed on weird and fun! I have to go to the Georgian specialist to get any, but I like it.
Every now and then I wonder what happened to "sueandnotu"[?]*, who commented here almost 20 years ago and had a beautifully-written blog with lots of posts about Georgia for a while.
*I don't remember the exact username spelling.
Susan was too good for this place. Looks like she's doing renewable energy work overseas.
I keep trying to elevate this place.
35. This thread made me think of her too. I loved her blog.
I found Georgia in 2002 moderately frightening but I'd be very enthusiastic about going back and trying the wine again.
I tagged along (from Armenia) on a super weird weekend trip with the Yerevan Hash House Harriers, including a bunch of marines, one of whom would not put his camera away at the Georgia border and got a bunch of scary guns drawn on us all. Then I went to a nightclub in Tblisi and had a very interesting drunken conversation with a couple of Georgians while all the Marines danced to American 80s pop.
I don't really know if it was actually a scary place or if all the American and British expats were just being weird about me.
We have Hash House Harriers. Sometimes they spread little dots of flour around the streets.
Good news! Measles case at Heebie U! Way over in the theater dept though, other side of campus.
And in alignment with new federal priorities, you've replaced the campus health center and the Diversity office with a "You can lick the water fountain if it's the one for your race" campaign.
Trump: What's in it for me?
Musk: What's in it for me?
RFK, Jr.: What's in it for measles?
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Party line vote on the budget in the House. Looks like one Republican abstained. Not sure how you would Reverse this in 2 years. Even if we flipped both Houses it would not be enough to overrule a Presidential veto.
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When I worked in insurance hell I trawled public hospitals. IIRC USAID stickers on a whole MRI suite.
39: Yeah, I can imagine that Georgia in 2002 was kinda scary. It was the waning days of Sheverdnadze, and lots of stuff was nearing a boil under the surface. Plus sporadic blackouts even in the capital, crappy infrastructure everywhere, paramilitaries left over from the civil war barely 10 years before, endemic crime and corruption. The Rose Revolution was a genuinely positive development and brought Georgia massively forward.
Other-Doug from the OP is also a Hasher, but I don't think he was in Armenia back in 2002. He and his family were in Yerevan a few years and left in 2008, just weeks before I moved to Tbilisi. We almost worked on a project together there; the contractor whose team we were listed on got to the final round but didn't win the bid. It would have been nice to stay a couple more years in Georgia; it would have been even nicer not to lose €50,000 or so thanks to my better half working for Oxfam in Moscow. Ah well.
I have had Georgian wine, but it was years ago and don't remember much about it.
OTOH, my wife is from the main wine growing region in Bohemia -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%9Bln%C3%ADk#Viticulture -- and I find the wine pretty much always horrible. On the other hand, we have been on a wine/cycling holiday in southern Moravia and the wine was almost always excellent.
I have a bottle of a Bohemian liqueur. It is produced by a retired Czech cardiologist as a hobby. It consists of grain alcohol flavoured with a secret collection of herbs. It is colourless and delivered in a colourless bottle, with a plain white label bearing, in Times New Roman, the name "DISTILLATE 22".
It's not actually that bad.
You can't buy it in shops. You have to be a former colleague of a retired Czech cardiologist, or be friends with a former colleague of a retired Czech cardiologist.
An Italian colleague of the opinionated academic's invited us to help him with a bottle of home limoncello his mother had sent from (I think) Emilia Romagna. The bottle literally had a label with the big black X on orange background HARMFUL sign and the words NON FUMARE.
I managed to obtain some Georgian champagne when I was in Moscow shortly before the August coup, and I mostly remember it as being incredibly fizzy. Cork came out the bottle like a baton round and almost broke a window.
I remember reading about the NKVD hauling around prisoners in trucks with "Drink Soviet Champagne" painted on the side. Darkness at Noon? Solzhenitsyn? Something else?
Actually it's only champagne if it comes from the Champagne region of France. Otherwise it's just sparkling wine.
Wait.
re: 50
Heh. The common one that you see everywhere is Becherovka--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becherovka--which I quite like with a bit of tonic.
Oh, Lord, I know. One of the things I like most about DISTILLATE 22 is that now my friends bring me bottles of that when they come to visit, not bottles of Becherovka.
And then there's Unicum, also herbal but not colorless. Its bottles are shaped like old-timey anarchists' bombs, the reasons for which will be left as an exercise for the readers.
The first dead child from the measles outbreak was reported.
Interesting that now, in Texas only, a bunch of people signed up to get their kids the MMR vaccine.
Someone should tell Trump that America makes the best champagne and have him roll back that stupid trade agreement where only France gets to use the name.
He would probably do it, too, unless he figures out it will benefit California.
49. We have some Georgian wine in at the moment, on the recommendation of Russian expat/draft dodging friends, who say it's highly regarded in Russia, as is Georgian food. The wine is OK- not a Chateau bottled Bordeau, but well worth what we paid for it. There's no Georgian takeaway in Sheffield as yet, so I don't know about the food, but apparently in Sankt Peterburg it's the equivalent of going for a curry in Britain or a non-chain Mexican in California.
Half a lifetime ago, just after the USSR broke up, I bought a bottle of Moldovan wine. It was unspeakably nasty. We didn't even cook with it. But if they're exporting to the EU now they must have got their act together. Good luck to them. We'll try it every 40 years to see how they're doing. Romanian reds are both cheap and cheerful so Moldovan should be too.
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Trump's AI video post on Gaza is batshit crazy par for the course.
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63 and 64: Yes. Tim watched it and said"why is there a gold balloon of Trump's head?"
The gold symbolizes the urine found in the pee tape.
apparently in Sankt Peterburg it's the equivalent of going for a curry in Britain or a non-chain Mexican in California
Accurate from my time living in Moscow, and absolutely lovely from my time living in Tbilisi. Also, the last 10 years or so have opened up Georgian to more experimentation, which can only be to the good. Georgian food is great, but there also used to be a certain amount of sameness because people were relentlessly traditional.
The problem, apart from pronouncing the consonant clusters (pkhali, tkemali, adjaruli khachapuri, washed down with things like rkatsiteli and mtsvane), is that after a Georgian feast you have to eat again two or three days later. The bounty of the country means that there are also lots of vegetarian options.
Looking at the two USAID stories (Moldovan wine and hospital beds in very poor country) one can ask the pretty unfair* question of how would voters view them respectively. I think very few would see value in the wine stuff even for most when you explained the removing from the dependence on Russia. The hospital bed would get more support. Not the pure evil Nazi MAGAs or even many standard "conservatives" who would either say that US communities need hospital beds, or if they were inclined to think there was some responsibility think that it was best done via religious or other private organizations. Which is why Mike Allen of Politco (Axios?) can go on Morning joe and chortle with the host about how DOGE is doing "popular" stuff and not be completely wrong.. although one might vainly hope for a media that would provide the broader context...
*In large systems it is not very sensical to look at any individual part without context. (Also see all the DOGE BS, and 3 bullet points for your week etc.. but also 5 bullet points for a week, but alas.)
Whoa to the Gaza video. And we elected this numbnutts?
This is the first of these things that has affected me personally. We had just been awarded technical assistance by one of these contractors, for highly technical work on one of the HUD reporting systems. We had a kickoff meeting yesterday that went very well, then I got an email today announcing that the TA was terminated. We'll be okay, but it's very frustrating.
What if you write 5 bullet points about what you did yesterday in the kickoff meeting?
What if you say that your contract will combat Opus DEI?
The penguin is black and white, together.
Strange and terrible dreams assail me.
Also apparently we're invading Afghanistan again, because China.
Go back to sleep, Mossy. Set your alarm for 2029.
I did not have "Trump makes Gretsky a hatred figure in Canada" on my New Year predictions list.
The FDA cancelled the meeting of the advisory committee (VRBPAC) where they select the flu strains for the next year's flu shot. It takes the companies awhile to get the shots made. Not sure how that's going to work.
Tim's job is working on vaccines (not flu, but his company makes a bunch of flu vaccines). Are they only going to make money off of Europe? My hospital seems to be in denial about the Medicaid cuts. I hope we both don't lose our jobs. This is much more personally stressful than it was last time, and that was really bad too.
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NMM to Gene Hackman*. Flawless actor, one of the greatest ever.
* And his wife**
**And his dog***
***no info yet but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to have been CO poisoning.
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82: Are you sure he's not just in Nebraska?
The Brutalist is intermitting. Turns out it's Pennsylvania-relevant.
And lady liberty is inverted for a reason. Though when exactly they chose that still will have to be probed.
86: intermitting --- are you referring to the intermission? That was one of my favorite parts of the movie -- all 3-hour plus movies should have intermissions. My other favorite part was when Adrien Brody whispered to his cousin while point at his cousin's wife, "Shiksa?"
The Brutalist is both brutally long and brutally unsubtle. The intermission is not a bad idea, but a still less bad idea is cutting your feature-length story down to feature length. Shameless award-bait. The performances are competent, not good.
That said, it is also brutally timely and brutally good-looking. I hated it a lot less than the above indicates.
I'll probably never see it. I might hear it in the background while I play Civ.
all 3-hour plus movies should have intermissions.
This I totally agree with. I just think this movie didn't need three hours.
I also think it should be easier to close tags on this phone.
The PA relevance is concentrated in the first half, anyway.
I agree that it could have been shorter. One of the odder choices was the audio of David Ben Gurion announcing the creation of the State of Israel. Was this subliminal Zionist messaging? I guess it can't be that subliminal if there are subtitles.
Speaking of Zionists, I just learned that Bari Weiss is from my neighborhood.
96: In that growing niche of Zionists with a soft spot for neo-Nazis.
96: Ah. and that made me think that she was the Allderdice grad who had a fit about not getting into Ivies a few years back, but turns out it was her younger sister. It was a whole big thing with a WSJ OpEd which I believe we discussed here.
Shit. Is this the furniture people?
I think I knocked on that door for Harris but no one was home. Or no one who would answer the door to a guy in a Harris hat.
And really, how many Ivorians were there in the US Army in WWII? I mean, if you absolutely, positively, have to have a Magic Negro in your script, could you not at least cast someone who won't shatter everyone's suspension of disbelief?
100: Here's an article specifically on their politics.
"I'm a bleeding heart conservative," Lou offered. His wife Amy describes herself as a "very moderate liberal Democrat." (from 2020)
I should stop getting to know my neighbors. It's not helping.
Mr Harris, plutocrat, likes to give my cheeks a pat
But
If a Harris pat means a Paris hat then...[can-can sting from the band]
Which, tbc, is not a knock on the Ivorian in question. Like I said, the performances are competent.
(Unless he really ballsed up his dialect training. In which case, why didn't the producers fix his accent in post like they did with the Hungarian?)
The whole story was kind of preposterous. When you consider some of the real-life architects that Laszlo Toth is based on, you do see that they sometimes had troubles because their clients weren't in tune with their"less is more" aesthetic. But they still were all working as architects, and were mostly very successful. They weren't working as construction workers.
Very preposterous.
I wonder how much changed, script-shooting script-final cut, on the Zionism and the American Nightmare especially. It was supposed to start filming in 2020, actually started in 2023, finished early 2024, released September 2024.
This is the first of these things that has affected me personally.
We're very likely going to lose the grant that provides most of our funding because it includes health and safety training for <<shudder>> immigrant workers.
And the organization that I volunteer with for ACA enrollments already lost its ACA Navigator grant which paid for seasonal staff, community outreach, etc.
71 and 108: My organization is going through a bunch of layoffs, and I don't think my job will be affected. (Unless Medicaid and Medicare completely stop paying their bills and there are no vaccines at all.). But, I see no opportunity for growth, everyone is demoralized while the C suite gets bonuses, and we're not well paid. So I was thinking, what else could I do - because health policy, population health, and public health type stuff all seem like they're going to be in the doldrums - I mean, my dream job would have been working for Medicare on payment policy, but that's shot for the foreseeable future. If I just wanted to sell out, (even if the work is incredibly boring) what industry is not going to be affected by this administration's mismanagement. I'm genuinely stumped.
109: Some kind of import/export business with Russia? Crypto? Petroluem engineer?
Very much more careful than the last guy penile implant tech for billionaires.
109:
Tech companies are still printing money. I don't know how long this will last, but AI startups that aren't making money are having an easy time fundraising. Well funded AI + random field startups are everywhere. Standard seed round for a team that's appealing to VCs is $10M+ at a $50M valuation. That's for a company with no product and no revenue, just an idea. You could try joining one of those companies or, better yet, co-found an AI health startup with the right tech bros.
This reminds of the 90s, except with less sex and more existential horror plus joint pain.
The joints in the 90s didn't hurt, it's true.
The general feeling among entry-level/recent grads in CS programs seems to be fairly negative re: hiring at tech companies. With AI/ML positions as an exception, except it seems like even there a grad degree (if you don't have previous experience in the field) makes a big difference.
This is all based on my impressions of people taking the same CS classes I'm taking.* I'm not personally looking for tech company jobs right now. The mood does seem to be better than it was in fall 2023/early 2024 when I started taking classes.
*Not grad level, yet. Also, my sample is skewed towards older students, often career changers. Maybe traditional undergrads have a different experience on the job market.
It's not like 2020/2021, when anyone with a pulse could get a job and anyone with experience could job hop for a six figure raise. But I've seen a lot of companies with 2-4 co-founders and a mixed team with some experience in the industry and some in tech raise for an AI + industry startup.
You do need a team that you can sell to VCs and you couldn't do it with anyone off the street, but it's easier to raise than a lot of people realize. There's a lot of VC money sloshing around looking for a home.
You know, I am beginning to suspect, now that we're one month in, that Trump may not in fact have had a huge number of Heritage Foundation bureaucratic ninjas who know how everything works ready to swoop in and railroad his policies through.
117: NYTimes out with a multi-author* deep dive into the genesis of DOGE . I could not stomach a close read of the whole thing yet, but it does seem to be very relevant background for what was planned and has happened. Gift link. from the article and what I've seen elseqwhere it seems that Russel Vought is the main direct linkage.
So not many bureaucratic ninjas but I think an unholy mix of DOGE coming in via US Digital services and some more standard bureaucratic-knowledgeable assholes (plus pure MAGA assholes) who have been coming in slower via the actual confirmed department heads. There have been some conflicts like the contretemps over the 5 bullet point emails. Expect the latter group to increasingly gain control and semi pickup pieces. (For instance some departments are trying to differentially stop the firings of veterans (or rehire them)).
But it is chaotic, and chaos is a winner for a lot of MAGA goals.
*It includes Trump-access favs Haberman and Swann.
And the main focus of this WaPo article is different, but it includes more details on actual DOGE planning and timing. "Trump officials start gutting civil rights offices, as part of DOGE's secret plan". (also a gift link)
per 118:
The Office of Personnel Management told the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to reinstate veterans, disabled veterans, and military spouses who were fired, according to an email sent to CFPB employees who saw their terminations per Bloomberg.
I see this as the political arm weighing in.
"The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own."
Was amused listening to my wife and daughter in the next room watching the end of The Return of the King which they had stumbled on while channel surfing. My wife who has almost no knowledge of the lore and "rules" of Middle-earth had a lot of questions.
The Two Towers pissed me off with extra-textual elves, so I never saw the third movie.
Brendan Carr--FCC dude, ias another Project 2025 tapped in person.
117, 118: For me, the main takeaway from the NYT story re: pre-planning and knowing how to navigate bureaucracy:
Mr. Musk and his allies did not want to create a commission, as past budget hawks had done; they wanted direct, insider access to government systems. His team seized on a little-known unit with reach across the government, the U.S. Digital Service, which President Barack Obama created in 2014 after the botched rollout of healthcare.gov.
The Musk team realized it could use the digital office, whose staff had been focused on helping agencies fix technology problems, to quickly penetrate the federal government -- and then decipher how to break it apart.