As the Republican Party’s blockade of aid to Ukraine drags into its fourth month, the U.S. government under Pres. Joe Biden has found a clever new way to give Ukraine’s forces the weapons and ammunition they need to defend their country.
It is, in essence, an American version of Germany’s circular weapons trade—the so-called Ringtausch. The United States is gifting older surplus weapons to Greece with the understanding that Greece donates to Ukraine some of its own surplus weapons.
Greek media broke the news last week. According to the newspaper Kathimerini and other media, the Biden administration offered the Greek government three 87-foot Protector-class patrol boats, two Lockheed Martin C-130H airlifters, 10 Allison T56 turboprop engines for Lockheed P-3 patrol planes plus 60 M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles and a consignment of transport trucks.
All this hardware is U.S. military surplus—and is available to Greece, free of charge, under a U.S. legal authority called “excess defense articles.” Federal law allows an American president to declare military systems surplus to need, assign them a value—potentially zero dollars—and give them away on the condition that the recipient transport them.
Calling it a schitzo-post may have been a bit off, but I legit have no other words in my vocabulary to describe how weirdly off kilter their comment is. They went from some type of criticism of elected officials working with other countries only to skip over to an entirely different thing about sister city agreements. It just kinda is bizzare overall.
Though I sometimes pull the same shit, sleep deprivation and autism are a terrible combination when it comes to coherence.
Schizo stuff tends to be coherent, it’s just that it’s coherent in a frame of reference that exactly one person in the world gets. On the far end of the spectrum people just don’t have enough computation capacity to take your frame of reference into account – not because of lower capacity, but because there’s too much shit on their plate at the same time: Effort is focussed on keeping one’s own thoughts at least half-way straight while the external world is secondary. Whereas on the functioning (yes I’m going to use that word) end of the spectrum you probably learn somewhere in school age that you need to slow your mind down and sprinkle in a couple of useful metaphors so the normies can understand. Dunno if my subconscious is less bubbly than that of full-on schizophrenics, or I have natural talent processing things better, or a knack acquired by sheer luck, or just better at not giving a fuck about some things, but it’s definitely also a skill that can and absolutely should be honed.
For the curious, the EASE scale should give a good impression of how it looks from the inside.