Hi there, !
Tue 07/15/2025 Mon 07/14/2025 Sun 07/13/2025 Sat 07/12/2025 Archives
Rantburg
559643 articles and 1929528 comments are archived on Rantburg.

Today: 54 articles and 38 comments as of 9:13.
Post a news link    Post your own article   
Area: WoT Operations    WoT Background    Non-WoT    Local News    Politix   
At least 30 people killed in armed clashes in Syria's Sweida, says interior ministry
Today's Headlines
Headline Comments [Views]
Page 4: Opinion
1 07:48 Procopius2k [55] 
0 [24] 
2 09:06 49 Pan [38] 
0 [24] 
2 07:54 Procopius2k [46] 
Page 1: WoT Operations
0 [24]
0 [28]
1 06:14 Grom the Affective [36]
2 08:58 Mercutio [55]
0 [39]
0 [45]
1 05:55 Whiskey Mike [41]
2 06:37 MikeKozlowski [77]
0 [29]
0 [50]
0 [38]
0 [41]
0 [32]
0 [30]
1 00:24 SteveS [46]
0 [50]
0 [32]
Page 2: WoT Background
0 [29]
0 [20]
0 [23]
3 05:54 Whiskey Mike [70]
0 [35]
1 09:00 Mercutio [21]
0 [22]
0 [41]
Page 3: Non-WoT
2 06:00 Whiskey Mike [42]
1 00:55 Skidmark [41]
0 [21]
1 05:45 NN2N1 [49]
1 07:40 Procopius2k [52]
3 07:42 Procopius2k [52]
2 05:53 NN2N1 [54]
0 [20]
0 [17]
0 [20]
Page 5: Russia-Former Soviet Union
0 [23]
0 [23]
0 [19]
0 [20]
0 [24]
1 00:11 Skidmark [33]
0 [16]
2 02:43 Jairong+Scourge+of+the+Gepids2435 [67]
Page 6: Politix
0 [22]
2 04:38 Elmerert Hupens2660 [64]
1 09:07 49 Pan [33]
0 [31]
1 08:46 Chicago Lurker [28]
5 08:25 NN2N1 [68]
-Short Attention Span Theater-
Atlanta got its MLB All-Star Game back. But controversial laws 'haven't changed'
[USAtoday] The 2021 All-Star Game was yanked after Georgia passed controversial voting laws. Why did MLB give it back?

ATLANTA — The All-Star Game is back on in Georgia. But the conditions that caused its removal in 2021 have not changed.

In fact, voting rights experts say, conditions have only worsened for potentially disenfranchised voters.

The eyes of the baseball world will be on Truist Park in suburban Cobb County July 15, when Major League Baseball’s 95th All-Star Game is played, four years after the league moved the game in the wake of Georgia passing the Election Integrity Act. State Bill 202 rolled back voting by mail and other absentee ballot options and prohibited distribution of food and water to those standing in line to vote — actions that historically would have greatest impact on Black voters.

"I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB Draft," commissioner Rob Manfred said then. "Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box."

Manfred’s action came three days after President Joe Biden said he’d support moving the game out of Atlanta. Given MLB’s actions to remove the term "diversity" from a careers page earlier this year in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order against such efforts, a charitable interpretation would suggest Manfred, as he’s stated, is most concerned with complying with federal law and the whims of the current chief executive.

Yet the game was returned to Atlanta in November 2023, two years after the Braves — who’d go on to win the 2021 World Series — and Georgia politicians blistered MLB’s decision, with Gov. Brian Kemp declaring that "cancel culture and woke political activists are coming for every aspect of your life, sports included."

Kemp struck a tone of appeasement when the game was returned, noting in a statement that "Georgia’s voting laws haven’t changed, but it’s good to see the MLB’s misguided understanding of them has."

In returning the game to Georgia, Manfred leaned into the host team’s chops, if you will, while striking an apolitical tone.

"I've said it before, we wanted to bring an All-Star Game back to Atlanta," Manfred said at the owners’ meetings in Arlington, Texas. "I made a decision in 2021 to move the event and I understand, believe me, that people had then and probably still have different views as to the merits of that decision.

"What's most important is that the Atlanta Braves are a great organization. Truist Park and The Battery are gems in terms of the facilities, and Atlanta and Georgia have been great markets for us for a very, very long time. Atlanta deserves an All-Star Game, and we're really looking forward to being there in 2025."


Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Beavis || 07/15/2025 00:00 || Comments || Link || [38 views] Top|| File under:

#1  And yet the voter turn out increased after the law was passed, thus destroying the argument that it disenfranchised anyone.
Posted by: Procopius2k || 07/15/2025 7:50 Comments || Top||

#2  The MLB needs to stay the f$%k out of woke identity politics and just play ball...
Posted by: 49 Pan || 07/15/2025 9:06 Comments || Top||


-Land of the Free
Navy's next-generation submarine program faces alarming delay to 2040

Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Skidmark || 07/15/2025 00:24 || Comments || Link || [24 views] Top|| File under:


Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
Japanese Salmon in a Russian River: How Kurosawa Rubbed Soldiers' Belts
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Vasily Avchenko

[REGNUM] In July 1975, Akira Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala premiered at the Moscow International Film Festival, soon winning an Oscar and a bunch of other awards. What is interesting about this Soviet-Japanese film, shot half a century ago, today?

Its literary basis is the books "Along the Ussuri Region" and "Dersu Uzala" by the Far East researcher, scientist, and writer Vladimir Arsenyev (1872-1930). In them, according to Gorky's formulation, he managed to unite Brehm and Fenimore Cooper.

HIS EXCELLENCY'S ADJUTANT IN THE USSURI TAIGA
The works describing the expeditions to Primorye and other events of 1902–1910 are linked by a common hero, the Gold (Nanai) Dersu Uzala. His prototype is the Ussuri taiga hunter Derchu Odzhal, who lost his family due to a smallpox epidemic.

In 1906 and 1907 he was a guide for Arsenyev's detachment. A year later, Derchu was killed near Khabarovsk, at Korfovskaya station.

Akira Kurosawa knew and loved Russian classics. He made The Idiot based on Dostoevsky and The Lower Depths based on Gorky, used motifs from Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich in To Live, and thought about adapting Taras Bulba and Notes from the House of the Dead.

Kurosawa became interested in Arsenyev's works back in the late 1940s and even looked for locations on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. However, he later said: "In Hokkaido, such a film... could not have been made. The scale of nature there is different, not like the Ussuri taiga. A person like Dersu Uzala could not have lived there."

In the early 1970s, the Japanese classic was going through a crisis. His film "Under the Knock of Tram Wheels" was a flop, the director was thinking about suicide... And suddenly - as a sign of warming between Japan and the USSR and a life preserver - an invitation to Mosfilm.

The script was written by Kurosawa himself and writer Yuri Nagibin. The director approved Yuri Solomin for the role of Arsenyev, having highly praised the actor's work in Yevgeny Tashkov's "Adjutant of His Excellency".

It was more difficult with the lead actor. If in the Soviet film by Agassi Babayan "Dersu Uzala" (1961) the "foreigner" was played by the actor from Kazakhstan Kasym Zhakibayev, then Kurosawa initially saw his "talisman" Toshiro Mifune in this role.

Among others, they tried out Dersu and the Nanai Kola Beldy, who sang on stage on behalf of all the northern peoples at once (“I’ll take you to the tundra,” “And the deer are better,” “The Chukchi in the tent,” etc.).

In the end, however, Arsenyev’s companion was played by Tuvan actor Maxim Munzuk.

PAINTED BOARS AND GILDED LEAVES
The filming took place in Primorye, the expedition was based in the city of Arsenyev. Not only people were involved, but also animals - tiger Artyom, bear Rita, red deer Katya. Wild boars were played by black-painted state farm boars.

Translating Arsenyev’s semi-documentary prose, a hybrid of “Western” and scientific report, into the language of cinema is not easy: lengthy descriptions of landscapes, a mass of Latin terms… Kurosawa, who was maniacally demanding of every frame, insisted that the straps on Dersu’s knapsack be made of rawhide, and that the actors’ moustaches and beards be real.

He personally aged soldiers’ belts with sandpaper, straightened stones in a stream, and tinted leaves to prolong the golden autumn… In his memoirs, Kurosawa called these filmings in the USSR “the spawning of Japanese salmon in a Russian river.”

The Eastern-style meditative philosophical film almost turned into a scandal.

Relations between China and the USSR in those years, after the 1969 battles on Damansky Island, left much to be desired. Beijing perceived the film adaptation by Arsenyev (who was indeed a real hawk in matters concerning Russia's national interests) as an element of an "anti-Chinese international conspiracy."

The Chinese media wrote: this is propaganda of "expansionist policy" by "the renegade clique of Soviet revisionists." In particular, criticism was raised about the scene where an old Chinese man bows to Arsenyev: "This was done on strict orders from the leaders of the Soviet revisionist empire, who want modern China to bow to the USSR in the same way."

The head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, even reported to the Central Committee of the CPSU that the case could turn into a “rather burning political problem”…

Kurosawa, however, wisely noted: “I… am against including politics in this film.”

THE ENCHANTED WANDERER
Today, hardly anyone would see a political subtext in it. But in Arsenyev's books and Kurosawa's film, something else remains - the main and timeless: man, his place in the world, responsibility for everything that happens on the planet.

Arsenyev called Dersu a "primitive communist", alien to the "vices that... urban civilization brings". His Dersu is a person living in harmony with himself and the world, critical of technical progress in the absence of moral progress. He is a bearer of ecological consciousness and tolerance (in the highest sense of the word), a stalker-guide not only to the "temple of the taiga", but also to the hidden dimensions of another, subtle world.

No less important is Arsenyev himself, the author and hero, an enchanted wanderer, a city dweller who became a taiga dweller. This metropolitan native settled forever in a distant Far Eastern province, making his own personal "turn to the East." The infantry officer became a scientist of the broadest profile, a defender of indigenous peoples and nature.

His books, written at the same time as Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, contain not only descriptions of the taiga, rivers and mountains of the Ussuri region, but also criticism of modern civilization.

Finally, Arsenyev is a consistent patriot who at all times (including dark and troubled ones) defended the interests of his Fatherland, no matter what it was called at one or another historical moment.

Soon we will be able to see Dmitry Kiselev's series "Arsenyev". The main role is played by Yevgeny Mironov, Dersu is played by Kazakh actor Ondasyn Besikbasov.

The journey through the wilds of the Ussuri region, which began more than a century ago, continues.


Continued on Page 47
Posted by: badanov || 07/15/2025 00:00 || Comments || Link || [24 views] Top|| File under:


Europe
Europe will cease to exist soon. We need to bring back having HUGE families
[X]
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Fred || 07/15/2025 00:00 || Comments || Link || [46 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Translated from the original European:
"Gimme gimme gimmme free stuff!"

Why should we fight and die for a continent that won't defend itself against even an unarmed invasion?
At least with nuclear-armed Israel we get an ally that actually fights.
Contrast this to nuclear-armed France whose weapons will be in the hands of Muslims in another generation.
Posted by: Jairong+Scourge+of+the+Gepids2435 || 07/15/2025 2:49 Comments || Top||

#2  Europe will cease to exist soon. We need to bring back having HUGE families.

A hundred years ago you had large families because 1) high infant mortality and 2) the family was the social net for their elderly in their old age[see - honor thy mother and father]. Modern medicine took care of number 1. The state took over number 2. File under the unexpected consequences of trying to doing good.
Posted by: Procopius2k || 07/15/2025 7:54 Comments || Top||


Government Corruption
No matter how bad you think Covid policies were, they were intended to be worse.
In the end, they lost. We won.
[Brownstone] Consider the vaccine passports alone. Six cities were locked down to include only the vaccinated in public indoor places. They were New York City, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. The plan was to enforce this with a vaccine passport. It broke. Once the news leaked that the shot didn’t stop infection or transmission, the planners lost public support and the scheme collapsed.

It was undoubtedly planned to be permanent and nationwide if not worldwide. Instead, the scheme had to be dialed back.

Features of the CDC’s edicts did incredible damage. It imposed the rent moratorium. It decreed the ridiculous "six feet of distance" and mask mandates. It forced Plexiglas as the interface for commercial transactions. It implied that mail-in balloting must be the norm, which probably flipped the election. It delayed the reopening as long as possible. It was sadistic.

Even with all that, worse was planned. On July 26, 2020, with the George Floyd riots having finally settled down, the CDC issued a plan for establishing nationwide quarantine camps. People were to be isolated, given only food and some cleaning supplies. They would be banned from participating in any religious services. The plan included contingencies for preventing suicide. There were no provisions made for any legal appeals or even the right to legal counsel.

The plan’s authors were unnamed but included 26 footnotes. It was completely official. The document was only removed on about March 26, 2023. During the entire intervening time, the plan survived on the CDC’s public site with little to no public notice or controversy.

It was called "Interim Operational Considerations for Implementing the Shielding Approach to Prevent COVID-19 Infections in Humanitarian Settings."

Continued on Page 47
Posted by: The Walking Unvaxed || 07/15/2025 00:48 || Comments || Link || [55 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Fauci got a pardon. However, the members of the board that precipitously move the 'jab' from experimental to non-experimental were not. It was that act that allowed various politicians and bureaucrats to dictate mandatory application. Those need to face the charges of crimes against humanity.
Posted by: Procopius2k || 07/15/2025 7:48 Comments || Top||



Who's in the News
28[untagged]
4Hamas
2Govt of Syria/HTS
2Narcos
2al-Shabaab (AQ)
2Moslem Colonists
1Houthis
1Islamic State
1Lawfare
1Migrants/Illegal Immigrants
1MS13
1Muslim Brotherhood
1Nut Jobs
1Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
1[untagged]
1Boko Haram (ISIS)
1Govt of Iran
1Govt of Iran Proxies
1Govt of Pakistan
1Govt of Sudan

Bookmark
E-Mail Me

The Classics
The O Club
Rantburg Store
The Bloids
The Never-ending Story
Thugburg
Gulf War I
The Way We Were
Bio

Merry-Go-Blog











On Sale now!


A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.

Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.

Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has dominated Mexico for six years.
Click here for more information

Meet the Mods
In no particular order...
Steve White
Seafarious
tu3031
badanov
sherry
ryuge
GolfBravoUSMC
Bright Pebbles
trailing wife
Gloria
Fred
Besoeker
Glenmore
Frank G
3dc
Skidmark

Two weeks of WOT
Tue 2025-07-15
  At least 30 people killed in armed clashes in Syria's Sweida, says interior ministry
Mon 2025-07-14
  IDF seizes 3 tons of arms from ex-Assad regime sites
Sun 2025-07-13
  
Sun 2025-07-13
  ISIS-aligned rebels kill 66 civilians in eastern Congo
Sat 2025-07-12
  US appeals court cancels plea deal for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Fri 2025-07-11
  Iranian media reports that Iran’s Army Chief of Staff, General Abdulrahim Mousavi, has been assassinated... False a;arm
Thu 2025-07-10
  Lebanon strike that killed 3 targeted senior Hamas commander: Israel
Wed 2025-07-09
  Gunmen Hijack 33 Tons of Gold, Silver Concentrate in Truck on Mexican Highway
Tue 2025-07-08
  Leb: 10 hurt in Israeli strikes on South and Bekaa Sunday, 2 airstruck Monday
Mon 2025-07-07
  IDF reports Hamas’s north Gaza naval commander killed in strike on cafe last week as 130 targets hit in 24 hours
Sun 2025-07-06
  Supporters of Palestine Action, banned under UK terror laws, arrested at London protest
Sat 2025-07-05
  210 Boko Haram Members, Families Surrender as Military Tightens Grip in Lake Chad - BarristerNG.com
Fri 2025-07-04
  Hezbollah has agreed to hand over its heavy weapons in Beirut and other areas to the Lebanese government
Thu 2025-07-03
  Another massive Hamas underground terror tunnel in Gaza has been found and destroyed by the IDF, connecting Rafah and Khan Yunis
Wed 2025-07-02
  LA officials charge over 40 anti-ICE protesters who allegedly assaulted officers, horses and threatened child
Tue 2025-07-01
  Fierce Clashes Erupt as U.S.-Trained Special Forces Target Militant Stronghold in Somalia


Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
216.73.216.54
Help keep the Burg running! Paypal:
WoT Operations (17)    WoT Background (8)    Non-WoT (10)    Local News (8)    Politix (6)