"Last year, by some estimates, Ukraine’s factories turned out more than three million drones...."

"The drones that I examined were remarkably simple: a lightweight square frame, four propellers, a video camera, a battery-powered motor, and room for a bomb. The attack drones, known as F.P.V.s, for 'first-person view,' are guided by an operator watching a video screen that shows what the drone is seeing; other members of the unit monitor feeds from reconnaissance drones.... The Russians are terrorizing the Ukrainians with drone attacks of their own. Towns and hamlets have been largely pulverized along the front lines and for miles beyond; even American air defenses are mostly useless, because setting them up invites an immediate Russian attack. Iranian-made Shahed drones, capable of carrying large warheads long distances, have pummelled Kyiv and other cities with hundreds of strikes. Under the constant threat of attack, the Ukrainians have found it difficult to supply their front lines, and evacuation is sometimes impossible. The prevalence of drones appears to have given the advantage to the defense. Along the seven-hundred-mile front, soldiers on both sides are huddled in fortified trenches, separated by a no man’s land known as the 'gray zone.' With drones circling day and night, surprise attack is impossible, movement suicidal. If soldiers venture out, they are attacked immediately by drones or artillery...."

Writes Dexter Filkins, in "Is the U.S. Ready for the Next War With global conflicts increasingly shaped by drones and A.I., the American military risks losing its dominance" (The New Yorker).

"Nearly everyone I talked to who knew DeSantis commented on his affect: his lack of curiosity about others, his indifferent table manners, his aversion to the political rituals of dispensing handshakes and questions about the kids."

"One former associate told me that his demeanor stems from a conviction that others have advantages that were denied to him. 'The anger comes more easily to him because he has a chip on his shoulder,' she said. 'He is a serious guy. Driven.'"

Writes Dexter Filkins, in "Can Ron DeSantis Displace Donald Trump as the G.O.P.’s Combatant-in-Chief? A fervent opponent of mask mandates and 'woke' ideology, the Florida governor channels the same rage as the former President, but with greater discipline" (The New Yorker).

Kittens.

"For the first time since 1973, panther kittens were spotted north of the Caloosahatchee River, which had formed the northern boundary of the panther’s habitat. In March, a pair of panther kittens tripped an automatic wildlife camera in the Babcock Ranch Preserve, a forested expanse thirty-five miles west of Lake Okeechobee. That means that a female panther swam across the Caloosahatchee and recently mated with a male panther on the other side. (Male panthers, which are larger and have a bigger range than females, have been spotted north of the Caloosahatchee River for many years.) The news cheered scientists and state environmental officials, who have been trying to coax a female panther across the Caloosahatchee for more than two decades."

From "The Return of the Florida Panther," by Dexter Filkins (in The New Yorker).

"If the dam ruptured, it would likely cause a catastrophe of Biblical proportions, loosing a wave as high as a hundred feet that would roll down the Tigris..."

"... swallowing everything in its path for more than a hundred miles. Large parts of Mosul would be submerged in less than three hours. Along the riverbanks, towns and cities containing the heart of Iraq’s population would be flooded; in four days, a wave as high as sixteen feet would crash into Baghdad, a city of six million people. 'If there is a breach in the dam, there will be no warning,' Alwash said. 'It’s a nuclear bomb with an unpredictable fuse.'"

From "A Bigger Problem Than ISIS?/The Mosul Dam is failing. A breach would cause a colossal wave that could kill as many as a million and a half people," by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker. The dam "sits on a foundation of soluble rock" and requires "hundreds of employees... to work around the clock, pumping a cement mixture into the earth below."

ADDED: "Today, a stone memorial on top of the dam commemorates nineteen Chinese nationals who died during its construction; the memorial, inscribed in English and Chinese but not in Arabic, does not give the cause of their deaths. Alwash, the Iraqi-American hydrological engineer, told me that, in Iraq, when laborers fell into wet cement during large infrastructure projects, it was common for the work to carry on. 'When you’re laying that much cement on a dam, you can’t stop,' Alwash said."

Continued fallout from the "Quick, change that headline!" post.

On Sunday, I posted about the NYT changing a headline on an article about the voting in Iraq. Its original headline had been "Amid Attacks, a Party Atmosphere on Baghdad's Closed Streets," which took us to an article by Dexter Filkins and John F. Burns that began:

After a slow start, voters turned out in very large numbers in Baghdad today, packing polling places and creating a party atmosphere in the streets as Iraqis here and nationwide turned out to cast ballots in the country's first free elections in 50 years.

American officials were showing confidence that today was going to be a big success, despite attacks in Baghdad and other parts of the country that took at least two dozen lives. The Interior Ministry said 36 people had been killed in attacks, Agence France-Presse reported.

But the violence did not seem to have deterred most Iraqis. In Baghdad, Basra in the South, the holy Shiite city of Najaf and even the restive Northern city of Mosul, Iraqi civilians crowded the polling sites, navigating their way through tight security and sometimes proudly displaying the deep blue ink stain on their fingers that confirmed they had voted.

That original headline represented the article fairly. I praised the Times's headlines earlier that day as "a subtle mix of positive and negative," giving us "a sense of the importance of what is happening [without allowing] the bad to overshadow the good." A number of prominent bloggers, linking to the Filkins-Burns article, drew special attention to the "party atmosphere" language in the headline. Later in the day, I noticed that the headline had been changed to "Insurgent Attacks in Baghdad and Elsewhere Kill at Least 24," which completely failed to convey the gist of the article, the text of which had not changed. (The headline became even more negative later: "Attacks in Baghdad and Elsewhere Reportedly Kill Several Dozen.") I thought the headline change was worth blogging, along with my observation that it was "pathetic" -- pathetic to pick out the negative from an article full of positive.

Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly somehow saw fit to launch into an attack, calling me a "wingnut" and delivering an irrelevant lecture about how newspaper headlines are written and websites updated. You certainly can't tell from reading his garbled post that I was writing about changing the headline on the same article and changing it to something that did not fit the article. I've exchanged some emails with Drum, who has an elaborate justification for putting an inappropriate headline on one article so that the whole mix of headlines on the main page that day would not be excessively positive. There was violence in Iraq, the theory goes, so one of the headlines needed to refer to violence, and since there was some reference to violence in the Filkins-Burns article, that was a good place to put the negative headline. I think that may be the best thing that might be said in defense of the Times, though I still have a problem with it. But I have much more of a problem with Drum, who -- despite his lecture about how websites can be frequently updated -- has not seen fit to update his post and make it clear that he misrepresented my post. Frankly, he owes me a public apology, on his website, for calling me a wingnut and for ridiculing me based on his own misreading (or deliberate misrepresentation).

Now, I see that Howard Kurtz at The Washington Post has reprinted Drum's post, nearly in its entirety, without any criticism of it, passing along Drum's insult and distortion. I know it's in quotes, but I'd really prefer not to see myself referred to as a "wingnut" in The Washington Post!

UPDATE: Poliblogger writes that Drum should apologize.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Howard Kurtz quotes part of this response in his Wednesday column. He also quotes this post, which says something I really do care very deeply about.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: One of the comments over at the Washington Monthly link abuses me for not allowing comments on my blog, which is just rich: I was forced to cancel the comments function over here because I had no way to block the commenters who were resorting to abusive, ugly forms of expression that I did not want on my blog. You can go over there and see the kind of comments that are being made about me, which would be smeared all over my blog if I had comments. Here, I explain why I cancelled the comments. It's a little funny to me to reread that post today, where I summarized the nasty things that commenters were saying about me, becuase some of the comments over there at Washington Monthly fit the categories I came up with last spring, especially: "I claim to be a moderate, but I'm only posing as a moderate for some nefarious reason."

Some people who haunt comments pages are parasites: Why don't they have their own blogs and just link? Because they aren't good enough on their own to attract visitors. Some of them are so bad it's almost funny, like the one today who is saying:

Professor Ann Althouse is a faux moderate in the style of Jeff Jarvis and Michael Totten. She has discovered that the Right pays a hell of a lot better than the Left, and is promoting her own fortunes as fast as she can by sucking up. Like Totten. And like Jarvis. And like them, she has absolutely nothing good to say ever about liberals or liberalism, while making googly eyes at those big strong conservatives, while expressing dismay at the criticism she gets from the left. It's a transparent pose. She completely lacks integrity. Winnable? Anyone who can look at the bunch of criminals in the White House currently and remain neutral is stupid. Someone who just pretends they are in order to line their pockets is beneath contempt.

I hope Jarvis and Totten know this character is on to our little game of sucking up to right wingers for those big cash payouts.