Alaskaball

A BEAR BALLING!

https://archive.is/Wqcmr

The M10 Booker busted its requirements from the beginning. It’s a case study in how Army procurement wants to change.

By Meghann Myers

As the 101st Airborne Division prepared last year to receive their first M10 Bookers—armored combat vehicles designed specifically for infantry forces—staff planners realized something: eight of the 11 bridges on Fort Campbell would crack under the weight of the “light tank.”

Classic fucking Pentagon moment, make shit that you can't use outside of very specific environments.

It turns out that though the vehicle was initially conceptualized as relatively lightweight—airdroppable by C-130—the twists and turns of the Army requirements process had rendered the tank too heavy to roll across the infrastructure at the infantry-centric Kentucky post, and nobody had thought about that until it was too late.

When I initially heard about it, I agreed that it was a good idea to have an actual functioning armored vehicle that can be used out in the field instead of the shit behemoths known as Abrams tanks. Lo and behold, trying to make something functional is nigh impossible for the u.s military.

“This is not a story of acquisition gone awry,” Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer, told Defense One. “This is a story of the requirements process creating so much inertia that the Army couldn't get out of its own way, and it just kept rolling and rolling and rolling.”

Corporate translation: we can't help reenacting scenes out of Tom and Jerry like putting a fake on the ground then full sending the pole right into our faces when it comes to design philosophy.

It’s a twist on the classic Pentagon procurement snafu—a program that moves so slowly that it’s outdated by the time it reaches the field.

Pentagon Wars 2 baby!

In this case, the Army knew early on that it wasn’t going to be able to make the thing it had set out to make, but it was bound and determined to make something. So it made something it doesn’t actually need.

Keep throwing money at the problem until something happens. Might not solve the problem but at least there's something to show.

The Booker is a stark reminder of what can happen when the system is checking the boxes but doing no critical thinking. With the service under pressure to streamline the way it develops new technology, the Army has vowed to turn things around.

System designed to funnel the People's wealth into capitalists hands efficiently promises to sabotage shareholder profits to actually deliver a product of value. Article by the onion.

How did this happen?

Pretty soon after 82nd Airborne Division leaders told the Army in 2013 they’d like a new light tank, à la the retired M551 Sheridan, the team working on its requirements hit a snag. The 82nd had asked to be able to airdrop the new vehicle from a C-130 or C-17, but nothing even roughly the size and capability of a Sheridan was going to fit inside a C-130.

Here's the thing, the Sheridan fucking sucked. But at least if was a fieldable piece of shit. Asking for that as a bare minimum seems reasonable, right? WRONG! when it comes to the U.S military if it isn't a fucking tax dollar blackhole riddled with so many problems it takes decades after its fielded to address, then it's a complete fantasy concept.

“I can't give you a rationale why everything wasn’t backed off,” Miller said. “But the first time that the requirement was sent to the one-stars in September of ‘13, and it didn't look like the [operational needs statement] that came up in July of 2013, the Army should have gone, ‘Stop.’ “

Yeah, asking for an Infantry support vehicle is way too complex of a task for the Pentagon to handle.

Instead, they resolved to push ahead with what was then the Mobile Protected Firepower program.

Pockets to line and all that.

The Army Requirements Oversight Council took a look at the 2015 requirements submission and said, never mind, it doesn’t need to be loaded onto a C-130, and actually, don’t worry about airdropping it either. The Joint Requirements Oversight Council signed off.

Lol "They're asking for something practical? Fuck that's way to impractical! So anyways what happens if we give the tank an environmentally hyper sensitive liquid suspension system?"

“And that's where you start to see in the story, things starting to crumble,” Miller said. “As all of us know, as soon as you remove the requirement for airdropability, you're no longer actually helping infantry. You are just as maneuverable as a main battle tank at that point, which means you are less maneuverable.”

Seems kinda dumb at first but he's right. If you new fancy light tank moves as fast as your shit Brickhouse heavy fuckjng main battle tank, what was the fucking point?

Yeah the tank is literally as fast as an Abrams tank, at least according to their public info. Fucking lol

And it didn’t come up again until last year, when Fort Campbell prepared to take possession of the final product. Or if it did, perhaps, the amount of work it would take to go back and change the requirements felt insurmountable.

Pentagon Wars movie but there's no dudes that actually give a shit about the troops until it reaches the troops.

“There is a monster of inertia,” Miller said. “No one wants to stop anything at that point, or certainly go back and re-look, because if you make any edits to the requirement, you have to restart the process.”

God forbid you waste more money.

So the MPF rolled on, frozen in 2016—and saddled with requirements from far older eras. It was required to use the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System, or SINCGARS, first fielded in 1990.

What's fucking old about having a functional light tank that can actually go out in the field?

The Pentagon has tried to replace SINCGARS, famously spending 15 years and $15 billion only to cancel the Joint Tactical Radio System program. The Army is still working on it.

This is what Trump and Musk are gutting federal spending for. A bunch of large adult children playing with their little green army men trying to figure out how to make new shiny fantasy bullshit as real and impractical as possible.

The requirements also locked the Army into buying 504 vehicles, because a 10-percent increase in program cost would trigger a new review of the requirements. In 2022, Miller said, the requirements were updated—mystifyingly—to say that it doesn’t need to have optionally-manned or autonomous capability, despite the entire Defense Department’s march toward uncrewed technology.

Think they're talking about how the crew-manned machine gun on top of the turret are becoming remote-controlled on more modern variants or models of u.s vehicles. To be honest, that seems like a fairly reasonable thing to tack on, so obviously we can't have that.

“So now you have a vehicle that is the best idea of 2013, that has the best technology limitations of 2013—which are really technology limitations of 2000, because you're trying to be backwards-compatible,” he said. “You've added boundary conditions that say you can't expand. You can't expand the capabilities because you can't add autonomy. You can't actually add digital technologies. And the process continues to move.”

What a load of shit, it's still more modern than the Abrams tank which was initially designed in 1972. Sure the more modernized variants incorporate more relatively modern tech but whining about it being only 12 years out of date is incredible.

In 2018, the Army decided to station the M10s at Fort Bragg, N.C., with the 82nd; Fort Campbell with the 101st; Fort Carson, Colo., with the 4th Infantry Division; and Fort Johnson, La., at the Joint Readiness Training Center.

Let the grunts see how fucked up it is and how they can fuck it up.

But the doctrine, training, facilities and other considerations required to onboard a new system hadn’t been finished yet, Miller said. Nor had the National Environmental Policy reviews, “which normally take forever,” and the mobility reviews hadn’t been done either.

Posts like Fort Riley, Kansas, or Fort Cavazos, Texas, home armored brigades, are built to enable tanks to move around. But Fort Campbell is all about infantry and Special Forces.

Because the Bookers supposed to be an Infantry support vehicle. Fuck the armored and cav losers, give the boots the toy!

“So now you've got divisions who can't train on their systems. You've got systems that don't actually meet any current needs, because they're not airdroppable, and they require C-17s,” Miller said.

Just let the infantry take it to the field and try and see how high they can jump it. Let the boys be boys!

The sour cherry on top, he added, arrived when the Air Force changed its load restrictions so that the Army could only put one M10 on a C-17, rather than the two the service had counted on. The M10 weighs 42 tons—much lighter than the 70-ton M1 Abrams, but more than twice as much as the 16-ton Sheridan it was to replace.

Yeah God forbid the airforce insist on mitigating safety of flight risks.

Also fuckjng amazing, it's half plus seven tons the weight of an Abrams but goes just as fast and is a pain in the ass to airload and deploy.

Also you got to see how far the military tumbled in comparison the the Sheridan shitshow

So now what?

There are three M10s operating at Bragg, but the Army isn’t sure it’s going to see through the low-rate production contract it awarded to General Dynamics in 2022, to make up to 96 tanks. The plan was to get to full production in 2025, then 2027.

Oh no what about the shareholders profits!

“I know that everyone was trying to do the right thing, and I want to stress that everyone was trying to do the right thing for their piece of the process,” Miller told Defense One, paraphrasing what Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said when he heard the story of the M10. “But, what the secretary, the chief, have said is, ‘OK, ready, take a step back. The process does not exist to serve itself. The process exists for us.’ “

the process exists for the shareholders of private companies to pillage the People's wealth.

At the moment, the Army is working on a new Abrams variant that will look a lot like what the M10 probably should have been.

Reinvent the wheel to reinvent the wheel to reinvent the wheel to reinvent the wheel

“So we'll have a lighter main battle tank that has all the features that we want: things like autoloader, things like partial autonomy, active protection systems,” Miller said.

I'm already fucking skeptical of any claims of improving the shitheap Abrams tank and will be pleasantly surprised if they somehow make the new tank under 140 tons.

“What I think the secretary and the chief were holding in reserve is, can that actually satisfy the need?”

The shareholders need or...?

If they can get the M1A3 into production quickly, with all the new motivation the service has to procure more efficiently, they might be able to off-ramp the M10 without buying a bunch more of them.

Yeah fingers crossed you all don't keep screwing the pooch.

“So what we will end up doing, I think, is reviewing what that program looks like after the first three units that we bought, and figuring out what the next steps are,” Miller said. “Rather than resting on our laurels and just saying, ‘We're stuck in this process; we need to buy this for 20 or 30 years.’ Because that doesn't make sense.”

Give them to Ukraine and see how long they last. That'll probably be the most materially effective way of analyzing their combat performance beyond cranking your hogs to burning barrels of billions of bucks.

The process in 2025 is different enough, he stressed, that a mistake like the Booker wouldn’t happen again. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George has used his authority over the AROC to introduce what amounts to another step in the process, but is meant to validate those gold-plated requirements before they get fully locked in.

So nothings changed other than making it more bureaucratically longer and more expensive.

Cool!

“He goes, ‘I approve this requirement for 120 days. You need to come back and make sure that you can actually do all the things that you said you can do, and do it at the price point that provides the best value to the Army,’ “ Miller said.

See you in Pentagon Wars 3: The PhantAbrams Menace

If it can’t, it’s toast. And the Army wants to get better at “no.”

Lol getting better at burning money and lining shareholder pockets then pulling out with no physical product. Genius!

“On the kick of fixing the acquisition and procurement process in total, this is a case study on, ‘Wow, we really have got to fix this’,” Miller said. “We are just willing to go, ‘Hey, we're not doing this anymore.”

Hope this results in more meaningful stagnation of the u.s armed forces as the grift in the Pentagon intensifies!

https://youtu.be/9zvdMLfYFkM

https://apnews.com/article/student-loan-debt-default-collection-fa6498bf519e0d50f2cd80166faef32a

https://archive.is/76E4Z

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Education Department will begin collection next month on student loans that are in default, including the garnishing of wages for potentially millions of borrowers, officials said Monday.

Thanks, Biden.

Currently, roughly 5.3 million borrowers are in default on their federal student loans. The Trump administration ’s announcement marks an end to a period of leniency that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. No federal student loans have been referred for collection since March 2020, including those in default. Under President Joe Biden, the Education Department tried multiple times to give broad forgiveness of student loans, only to be stopped by courts.

“American taxpayers will no longer be forced to serve as collateral for irresponsible student loan policies,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said.

Jump up your own ass and choke on your own shit

Beginning May 5, the department will begin involuntary collection through the Treasury Department’s offset program, which withholds government payments — including tax refunds, federal salaries and other benefits — from people with past-due debts to the government. After a 30-day notice, the department also will begin garnishing wages for borrowers in default.

Thanks Biden.

The decision to send debt to collections drew criticism from advocates, who said borrowers had experienced whiplash and confusion with the changing student loan policies between the Biden and Trump administrations.

Thanks Biden.

This is cruel, unnecessary and will further fan the flames of economic chaos for working families across this country,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center.

Already, many borrowers have been bracing for obligations coming due.

Thanks, Biden.

In 2020, President Donald Trump paused federal student loan payments and interest accrual as a temporary relief measure for student borrowers. The pause in payments was extended multiple times by the Biden administration through 2023, and a final grace period for loan repayments ended in October 2024. That meant tens of millions of Americans had to start making payments again.

Thanks Biden.

Borrowers who don’t make payments for nine months go into default, which is reported on their credit scores and can go to collections.

-500 fico credit score, thanks Biden.

Along with the borrowers already in default, around another 4 million are 91 to 180 days late on their loan payments. Less than 40% of all borrowers are current on their student loans, department officials said.

Thanks biden

Layoffs at the Federal Student Aid office at the Education Department have made it harder for students to get their questions answered, even if they wanted to pay their loans, said Kristin McGuire, executive director for Young Invincibles, a group that focuses on economic security for younger adults. And questions are swirling about certain income-driven repayment programs after a February court ruling blocked some Biden-era payment plans, placing borrowers in the more lenient SAVE Plan in forbearance. The Education Department in February took down applications for income-driven repayment programs — which tie a monthly payment to a person’s income level — only to bring them back online a month later.

Thanks Biden and Elon

“Things are really difficult to understand right now. Things are changing every day,” McGuire said. “We can’t assume that people are in default because they don’t want to pay their loans. People are in default because they can’t pay their loans and because they don’t know how to pay their loans.”

Thanks Biden and Elon

For borrowers in default, one step to avoid wage garnishment is to get into loan rehabilitation, said Betsy Mayotte, president of The Institute for Student Loan Advisors. Borrowers must ask their loan servicer to be placed into such a program. Typically, servicers ask for proof of income and expenses to calculate a payment amount. Once a borrower has paid on time for nine months in a row, they are taken out of default, Mayotte said. A loan rehabilitation can only be done once.

That's pretty fucked up.

Biden oversaw the cancellation of student loans for more than 5 million borrowers. Despite the Supreme Court’s rejection of his signature proposal for broad relief, he waived more than $183.6 billion in student loans through expanded forgiveness programs.

Yeah that's why the student loan debt is higher than when Biden took office.

In her statement Monday, McMahon said Biden had gone too far.

Anything that isn't turning debt slaves into literal slaves is too communist for McMahon

“Going forward, the Department of Education, in conjunction with the Department of Treasury, will shepherd the student loan program responsibly and according to the law, which means helping borrowers return to repayment — both for the sake of their own financial health and our nation’s economic outlook,” she said

Translation: They're gonna abuse every possible avenue of legality, and if they don't have that federal authority, to turn the youth of the country into indentured workers akin to tenant farmers or literal slave labor depending on whether or not they can squeeze you for more of your blood money.

Also that money's gonna go directly into the military industrial complex and be used to murder more people around the globe, so don't worry about wondering if your stolen wealth is being used positively for the benefit of humanity.

One of the few times I'll ask do me a solid and give it a listen. It's a nice song.

https://archive.is/OeyxL

If chivalry isn't already dead, it's certainly circling the drain.

morality sophism. Obviously fucking not or else you wouldn't be writing this article.

OpenAI CEO and tech billionaire Sam Altman recently admitted that people politely saying "please" and "thank you" to their AI chatbots is costing him bigtime.

Lmfao

When one poster on X-formerly-Twitter wondered aloud "how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying 'please' and 'thank you' to their models," Altman chimed in, saying it's "tens of millions of dollars well spent."

Imagine finding out that a part of the fact that we're boiling the oceans, destroying ecologies, generally fucking over our fellow man, and so forth, is coming from people having manners when they're texting their chatbot. Incredibly funny that it's needlessly burning that fucker's money and it's passing him off, but also incredibly fucked up.

">You never know," he added.

While it may seem pointless to treat an AI chatbot with respect, some AI architects say it's an important move. Microsoft's design manager Kurtis Beavers, for example, says proper etiquette "helps generate respectful, collaborative outputs."

who gives a shit

"Using polite language sets a tone for the response," Beavers notes. The argument can certainly be made; what we consider "artificial intelligence" might more accurately be described as "prediction machines," like your phone's predictive text, but with more autonomy to spit out complete sentences in response to questions or instructions.

Yeah it's a fucking glorified tickle-me-elmo that boiling tons of precious fresh water to make it work

"When it clocks politeness, it’s more likely to be polite back," a Microsoft WorkLab memo notes. "Generative AI also mirrors the levels of professionalism, clarity, and detail in the prompts you provide."

A late 2024 survey found that 67 percent of US respondents reported being nice to their chatbots. Of those who practice courtesy, 55 percent of American AI users said they do it "because it's the right thing to do," while 12 percent did it to appease the algorithm in the case of an AI uprising.

That 12 percent should be forced to create AI chatbot versions of themselves and be told their digital selves are gonna be tortured for all eternity by a roko basilisk AI program.

That AI revolution is probably a long way off, if it happens at all — many AI researchers doubt we'll ever build a truly "intelligent" algorithm, at least based on the current tech of large language models (LLMs) — but the environmental consequences of present-day AI are all too real. Unfortunately, those "pleases" and "thank yous" are adding up, bigtime.

Yeah it's all a fucking scam, that in one tiny way is biting the capitalist beast in its ass

One Washington Post investigation, done in collaboration with researchers at the University of California, studied the impacts of generating a 100-word email. They found that just one email requires .14 kilowatt-hours worth of electricity, or enough to power 14 LED lights for an hour. If you were to send one AI email a week over the course of a year, you'd use an eye-watering 7.5kWh, roughly equal to an hour's worth of electricity consumed by 9 households in Washington DC.

Here's where we're doing the "boiling the oceans away math"

Now imagine the tens of thousands of lengthy prompts we're feeding chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT on the daily — not exactly low-impact.

While AI etiquette might sound trivial, it all underscores the rather grim reality that our queries have consequences, particularly on the environment. The data centers used to power these chatbots already suck up about 2 percent of the world's energy consumption, a number that's likely to skyrocket as AI floods every corner of daily life.

AND WHO'S FAULT IS IT THAT FUCKING SPEAK-AND-SPELL BOTS ARE IN EVERYTHING NOW? YOURE NOT GONNA SAY ITS OUR FAULT, ARE YOU?

So if you're mulling whether or not to thank Grok for its efforts, maybe the better move would be to ditch the chatbot and write the email yourself. The earth — and your brain — will thank you.

GET BENT GET BENT GET BENT GET BENT GET BENT GET BENT GET BENT GET BENT

https://archive.is/RsKZq

It may be set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but Tony Gilroy's Star Wars series takes a key plot from a real robbery masterminded by Stalin in an Imperial Russian city. And Andor has as much to do with our world as it has with Stalin's.

Do you think Stalin would've liked Star Wars? I think he'd probably be a bit boomerish with liking 4-5-6 over 1-2-3.

It has all the makings of the perfect heist. The scheme takes place far from the imperial seat of power, on the wild fringes of an empire almost too vast to comprehend. Fuelled with revolutionary zeal, the plotters are a rag-tag outfit of men and women that includes thieves, murderers and turncoats. Their prize? A treasure chest of cash that can fund ever-more-ambitious missions against the hated ruling elite.

Shame the modern era makes that kind of wild west bullshit obsolete

If you watched the first season of the Star Wars spin-off TV series Andor, you'll recognise this plot as one of the high points. Over three episodes, anti-hero Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and his band of accomplices hide out in mountain passes on the planet Aldhani, fine-tuning an audacious smash-and-grab from an Imperial garrison which is storing the wages of an entire sector.

The real-life theft that inspired it was also a long, long time ago, just not quite so far away.

I guess around a hundred years ago seems like a "long, long time ago" to some.

It took place in Yerevan Square in what was then the imperial Russian city of Tiflis, now the Georgian capital Tblisi, on 26 June 1907. A shipment of cash for the city's Russian state bank branch, amounting to some 300,000 roubles ($1m at the time), was stolen by a gang of robbers linked to the Bolshevik revolutionary movement. Using bombs and guns, the gang left a scene of utter devastation in their wake; some 40 people were killed and dozens more injured. The news of the brazen daylight attack made headlines across the world.

For a much more better examination of the 1907 robbery, Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov by james white, Stalin: Passage to Revolution by Ronald suny, or even kotkin's book would be infinitely better that whatever pigshit mintyfork writes.

"A young man from nowhere with a revolutionary ideology, and a fight against a huge empire. I did think there was something interesting about the secret life of someone in that situation" – Simon Sebag Montefiore

Remember how I mentioned that sumy guy earlier? Here's what he says about shitbag Simon

I met Simon Sebag Montefiore in a café in Kensington, in London, once. He said, “So what are you interested in, and why are you writing this book?” This was before his book came out. And I said, “Oh, I’m interested in the labor movement, Marxism, social democracy, revolution.” And he said to me, “Oh, good. I’m interested in his women.” So I thought, “Well, okay, we have a nice division of labor.”

Montefiore wrote a very readable book. There’s lots of good stuff in it. He didn’t himself go into the archives, he doesn’t know Georgian, and I’m not sure how good his Russian is, even. But he did work there, and he got a lot of material, some of it brand new. That was good for me. But his book is a popular book. It’s a little bit, in my taste, sensationalist. Stalin is a bandit, a gangster, a womanizer, even a pedophile in the book. In all of these ways, it’s a different kind of book, and it doesn’t deal with Stalin’s journalistic writings, his theory of nationalities (which is key to his success), the intricacies and nuances of Russian social democracy.

My book is basically a scholarly book, but I tried to write it in an accessible way. Any intelligent person can read the book and understand what’s going on. But it’s based on the conventions of historical scholarship, which is looking for anomalies and dealing with contradictions. Everything is evidence-based.

Key fucking words: everything is evidence based. Even bourgeois historians have standards unlike shitbag simon

The heist was the brainchild of a charismatic cobbler's son-turned-revolutionary called Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili. He was a gifted public speaker, an ex-seminary student, a romantic poet rumoured to have left a string of broken hearts in his rakish wake. He often went by the name "Soso" (which he had used when writing poems for local publications), though in years to come he would become far better-known – and feared – as Joseph Stalin.

He was more nerdy than the image of stalin shitbag simon sensationalized. Like he was literally booted from church school for bad grades because he was too busy reading banned books. That's nerd shit.

Yes, the troubled outlaw beloved by Star Wars fans everywhere is based in part on one of history’s most notorious mass murderers, as the series' creator, Tony Gilroy, has acknowledged. "If you look at a picture of young Stalin, isn’t he glamorous," Gilroy said in an interview in Rolling Stone in 2022. "He looks like Diego!"

The only thing Stalin is notorious for in my heart was that he was too soft.

And hot.

Diego does kinda look like him.

Hotly.

Stalin took Russia from its war-ravaged imperial decline to a nuclear-armed superpower in just three decades, but also presided over a reign of authoritarian terror that starved, executed or imprisoned millions of its own citizens. Countless books had been written on his cruel years in power, but very little on his early years. Writer Simon Sebag Montefiore saw a gap, and began rifling through archives in post-Soviet countries to try and separate the truth from myth, and tell the little-known story of Stalin's early life.

And theyre all material heaping garbage piles of lies on his grave. And shitbags among the worst bullshitters.

A gangster and a killer

labels and all that, here's something that isn't examined closely about stalins life, how about looking into his stint as a general during the Revolution.

In 2007 – a century after the infamous heist in Tiflis – Young Stalin was published. It delved into the early life of the Soviet Union's dictatorial leader. "Should the life of a black-hearted ogre, a mass murderer who was the wickedest of the 20th-Century's monsters, be quite so entertaining," asked a review in The Observer at the time.

Oh shitbag you fucker, I didn't know you waited to perfectly seize good PR for your shitrag by publishing in '07. What a fucking roach.

One person who read Young Stalin was Gilroy. The writer and producer, who had scripted the first four Bourne films and the Andor-precursor film, Rogue One, was planning a TV series that would explore Cassian Andor's journey from casual thief to rebellious figurehead. The true story of a revolutionary movement on the far fringes of a real empire gave Gilroy his source material. "Literally, I’m the classic old white guy who just can’t get enough history," Gilroy said in Rolling Stone. "The last 15 years, I’ve been reading all non-fiction." He added that Young Stalin was "an amazing book" and that its account of the Tiflis bank robbery was an "incredible movie sequence".

Okay if there's only one thing I will give positive credit to shitbag simon, it's being the wind from butterfly wings - being Stalin - that cascaded to us today having a positive representation of Stalin, albeit indirectly, in mass culture. Still, fuck you shitbag.

Did Sebag Montefiore ever think to himself, 'Here's the perfect setting for a Star Wars spin-off,' when he was researching his book? "No, I didn't ever think that when I was toiling in the archives in Moscow and Tbilisi," he tells the BBC. "But I did think that there was something pretty elemental about the life of Stalin, especially before 1917. It was a fascinating story, partly because no one knew about it."

Just a reminder he can't read Russian or Georgian.

The Tiflis heist was reported around the world and funded the revolutionaries' movement for years, says Sebag Montefiore. "Lenin and the whole Bolshevik Party lived off that money until the [1917] revolution."

That's more sensationalist bullshit because most of the money was marked and couldn't be cashed in. Hell, a lot of good communists were thrown in the clink because the Okhrana informed the internal security forces of the other European nations about the stolen cash and gave them the info to identify the marked rubles.

Sebag Montefiore says that the young Stalin and the troubled Andor bear striking similarities: "A young man from nowhere with a revolutionary ideology, and a fight against a huge empire," the writer says. "I did think there was something interesting about the secret life of someone in that situation. That's basically what Tony Gilroy has focused on in Andor."

More like Tony's focusing on what it takes to build a revolutionary movement and the people that make it. Shitbag simon drank the great man theory kool-aid hardcore.

Stalin was, of course, not the only figure fomenting turmoil in Tsarist Russia, and Andor fleshes out other characters with attributes from the young Georgian's contemporaries. Among Andor's co-conspirators in the Aldanhi heist is Karis Nemik (Alex Lawther), an idealist writing a high-minded manifesto for the emerging resistance, similar to Bolshevik Leon Trotsky's polemics amid the opulent decline of Romanov rule.

That's an insult to Nemik.

And if I'm being real, an insult to Trotsky's own history.

Stellan Skarsgård's character, Luthen Rael, is an analogue for Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader who was able to form a powerful movement from unlikely bedfellows. A wealthy art collector, Luthen's precise manners in front of his gilded customers hide an uncompromising hatred of the empire and a restless desire to fund a growing resistance. In Cassian's talented, taciturn thief he sees a useful tool; Lenin saw the same in Stalin. "In 1911, people said to Lenin, 'Why are you using this guy? He's a gangster. He's had people killed. He was involved in all these bank robberies,'" says Sebag Montefiore. "And Lenin replies, 'He's exactly the type we need.' Stalin could edit a paper. He could write and could read. And he was also someone who could arrange a hit on somebody and arrange a bank robbery. That was what Lenin talked about: some people were tea drinkers, and other people were thugs, Stalin could do both, and that's why Stalin won in the end."

That's all fucking sensationalist hearsay, shitbag. There's libraries worth of information on the Bolsheviks, and in no such was has anything you've done contributed to it. I could spend several posts going over every single load of shit lie you've been recorded saying in this article but that's not the point of this post.

The birth of an empire

The research into historical rebellions – Gilroy has said he studied other revolutions while writing Andor, as well – has no doubt helped create the show's oddly realistic feel. Andor feels more down to earth than anything the Star Wars universe has shown us before, if you'll excuse the occasional spaceship roaring overhead, or an alien or two sitting in the local bar. There are flashes of mundane detail rarely scene in big-budget sci-fi. People complain that Andor's mother Maarva's (Fiona Shaw) house is always too cold. Security officer Syril Karn's (Kyle Soller) petulant intensity even extends to tailoring his uniform to make him look smarter than his contemporaries. The Imperial Security Bureau hoping to root out the emerging rebellion is a nest of competing ambitions that feels as real as anything in a historical drama – or in everyday office politik. There are fewer blaster-toting Stormtroopers than there are in the Star Wars films, and more sadistic, trenchcoated officers who would have been right at home in the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, or its Soviet replacement, the Cheka.

Other than saying fuck off you British fop for that last minute jab at the Soviets, andor is indeed high quality slop. The best that's come from the Star Wars series.

"In the past, Star Wars movies drop us in at a very big moment," says Walter Marsh, an Australian writer who praised Andor's grown-up worldview in The Guardian in 2022. "There's the big climactic battle, or Luke Skywalker's heroic journey, and they're these big themes of good versus evil. But as any historian will tell you, wars and empires and revolutions don't start and end overnight, and there's always this bigger backstory. There's this sort of long tail. It takes years for that kind of colonial rot, those systems of control, to set in."

I mean yeah, it's cinema. Not real life. Shit takes time.

Andor shows the corruption and brutal entitlement found at every layer of autocratic regimes: the guards drinking in a brothel while they're supposed to be on duty (and prepared to shake down anyone they don't like the look of); the prison industrial system that requires constant additions even if the new prisoners have done nothing wrong; the subtle sabotage of ethnic pilgrimages to sacred land that is earmarked for imperial development. And with authoritarianism on the rise around the globe, Andor has as much to say about today's world as it does about Stalin's.

One could even say it's a critique of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.

"When the show came out I think I was pleasantly surprised to see a story in that universe that was familiar, but which also approached this question of empire that's been so central to the whole franchise, but was never actually tackled in a really nuanced and human character-driven way," Marsh tells the BBC. "It's all well and good to have a big, evil Sith Lord achieve global, universal domination. But how does power assert itself on the street level, from one human to another?

Yep more andor glazing, love to see it. Probably the closest we'll get in America to seeing socialist realism in cinematic form before any revolutionary transformation.

"The Empire is this huge grinding, unthinking machine, but it's also a very human thing," Marsh continues. "Who are the people that find a place and thrive in those systems?" He remarks that in the original films the Imperials were little more than blank-and-you-miss-them pantomime villains: "British guys in suits getting choked by Darth Vader at some point, who are just fiddling with buttons in the background." Andor's strength is its "three-episode arcs that showed us the kind of death by a thousand cuts that it takes to achieve this sort of social, political and economic dominance", says Marsh. "The converse of that is it shows all the ways in which that kind of oppression inspires pushback and resistance in all kinds of different ways." From hero to villain?

Almost as if the empire takes inspiration from the United States of America. But who could really know what the authors intent was when he was creating the Empire. Certainly doesn't have anything to do with the fact that it was made during the Nixon Era when the Vietnam War was raging.

The new season, which begins on Tuesday 22 April, will develop the rebellion's story as it rushes towards the events seen in Rogue One: the scenes of brutal Imperial reactions to a demonstration shown in the trailer evoke the Tsarist crackdown on a St Petersburg march in 1905, which was a slow-burning contributor to the Bolshevik revolution.

Spread the word. Star Wars is marxist-leninist cinema.

"The scavenger who becomes a passionate revolutionary leader is kind of fascinating," says Sebag Montefiore of the troubled Cassian Andor. "That's a great trajectory, because that's exactly what Stalin did. And it'll be interesting to see how deep Gilroy uses that – how far he goes to create a character with both heroic and villainous features."

Fuck off shitbag

George Lucas's original film trilogy rooted the rebellion in the classic good-guys-versus-bad-guys dynamic of countless Saturday matinee cliffhangers, the resistance modelled after anti-Nazi opposition in occupied Europe.

The Rebel Alliance is modelled off of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front and the People's Army of Vietnam. Who are communists. Also the majority of the anti-fascist resistance in nazi-occupied europe were the communists. The original trilogy of 4-5-6 is communist in all but name

The rebels of Andor inhabit a much more compromised reality; like real-life revolutionary movements, they are much more complicated than the ones we usually see on screen. Luthen, Andor's Lenin proxy, considers it with chilling deliberation in one of the first season's standout scenes: "I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else's future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see."

Not chilling, determined. We all fight against the wretched darkness of ages long-past their expiration date for a red sunrise of a new world we may not see.

To quote a 1951 book, The life we prize, by the American novelist Elton Trueblood:

"A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit."

As Sebag Montefiore notes, the revolutionaries themselves knew deep down that if they took power, they themselves would have to use repression as a tool; they would become what they once despised. "Lenin himself said: 'A revolution without firing squads is meaningless.'"

Fuck you shitbag, he didn't say that. Also it's class war.

Fuck this writer sucks, he doesn't know how to finish an article in an actually meaningful manner.

For me its a song by Demircan Demir, singing Bir Yol Senden Açık while banging away on a santoor.

Don't know a lick of what he's saying but I feel it for the few minutes I empty my mind and simply exist.

Either that or the soundtrack for mushi-shi. Really great for zoning in and out of concious existence while staring at the paint on the wall.

Share your mood music!

Edit: if anyone's curious, no I don't imbibe substances when I go through my quarterly cycle, with surprise visits, of inflicting ego death on an Alaskaball.