Now, the US Commerce Department is set to enact a de facto ban on most Chinese vehicles, by prohibiting Chinese connected car software and hardware from operating on US roads, according to Reuters.
The rationale? National security concerns. "When foreign adversaries build software to make a vehicle [connected], that means it can be used for surveillance, can be remotely controlled, which threatens the privacy and safety of Americans on the road," said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
"In an extreme situation, a foreign adversary could shut down or take control of all their vehicles operating in the United States all at the same time, causing crashes, blocking roads," said Secretary Raimondo, a scenario we saw depicted in Fate of the Furious (where it caused me a headache), as well as more recently (and to better effect) in Leave the World Behind.
Yup.
Now I expect there's a whole lot more behind this and the security risks are just nice window dressing, but it's pretty hard to argue with this.
It's Labor Day, which means "It's the end of summer". It used to mean a lot more than that - a celebration of labor in general and the working man in particular. Just in my lifetime, this has been stood on it's head - literally, politics of labor is upside down from when I was a kid.
It used to be that the Democrats stood for the working guy, and the Republicans were the party of Wall Street and the Country Club. Man is that different now. I wrote almost a decade ago about the rise of Donald Trump is basically explicit Class terms.
Which seems weird, because it was the Democrats and their buddies the Socialists and Communists (and the University professors, but I repeat myself) who were always bringing up Marx' class theory about politics. You don't hear that anymore, either, which is really interesting - it's the Dog who Didn't Bark. An old post from Eric Raymond explains this completely:
Marx believed, and taught, that increasing exploitation of the proletariat would immiserate it, building up a counterpressure of rage that would bring on socialist revolution in a process as automatic as a steam engine.
Inconveniently, the only place this ever actually happened was in a Communist country – Poland – in 1981. I’m not going to get into the complicated historiography of how the Soviet Revolution itself failed to fit the causal sequence Marx expected; consult any decent history. What’s interesting for our purposes is that capitalism accidentally solved the immiseration problem well before then, by abolishing Marx’s proletariat through rising standards of living – reverse immiseration.
I wrote about that here. Even in the 19thm Century - maybe even during Marx' own lifetime - this was a realy problem for Marxist theorists.
The most forward-thinking Marxists had already figured out this was going to be a problem by around 1910. This began a century-long struggle to find a theoretical basis for socialism decoupled from Marxian class analysis.
Early, on, Lenin developed the theory of the revolutionary vanguard. In this telling, the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously respond to immiseration with socialist revolution but needed to be led to it by a vanguard of intellectuals and men of action which would, naturally, take a leading role in crafting the post-revolutionary paradise.
Hey Vladimir, maybe the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously responding to their immiseration because they were undergoing the most remarkable increase in their standard of living that the world had ever seen? No? Better to kill 10 million of them? Oooooh kaaay.
Only a few years later came one of the most virulent discoveries in this quest – Fascism. It is not simplifying much to say that Communists invented Fascism as an escape from the failure of class-warfare theory, then had to both fight their malignant offspring to death and gaslight everyone else into thinking that the second word in “National Socialism” meant anything but what it said.
And the walls of the US House of Representatives are adorned with fasces.
During its short lifetime, Fascism did exert quite a fascination on the emerging managerial-statist elite. Before WWII much of that elite viewed Mussolini and Hitler as super-managers who Got Things Done, models to be emulated rather than blood-soaked tyrants. But Fascism’s appeal did not long survive its defeat.
Hey, none of OUR Representatives are fascists! Don't look at the wall decorations! I mean, fascism is for losers - HEY, stop looking at the wall decorations!
Marxists had more success through replacing the Marxian economic class hierarchy with other ontologies of power in which some new victim group could be substituted for the vanished proletariat and plugged into the same drama of immiseration leading to inevitable revolution.
So the working class stiffs that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats all used to stand for were doing decently well, and might just start voting for the other guys. What to do, what to do?
Outsource all the good high paying hourly jobs. Use Environmentalism to justify this - I mean, you don't want your kid to drink dirty water or breathe dirty air, right? Better for them to grow up to be methheads because there's no jobs and no hope for the future.
Meanwhile, the government and associated white collar employment exploded, pretty much at the public's expense. These people voted in great numbers - and always for the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats, and big business found that they could really enhance their profits by getting in bed with the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats. Some new regulations to kill new upstart competitors is just what the doctor ordered.
And now people are mystified about the rise of Brexit/Donald Trump/Les gilots jaunes/Alternative fur Deutschland. And remember how the UK Labour party got wiped out five years ago? How voters in their heartland of formerly industrial Britain voted for Tory politicians for the first time in a century? Sure, Labour just won (in a very low turn out election); does anyone think that their voters from Sheffield will ever be back in the way they used to be?
Raymond discusses at length this inversion of politics around Labor, using the UK as an example:
This is the Great Inversion – in Great Britain, Marxist-derived Left politics has become the signature of the overclass even as the working class has abandoned it. Indeed, an increasingly important feature of Left politics in Britain is a visceral and loudly expressed loathing of the working class.
To today’s British leftist, the worst thing you can be is a “gammon”. The word literally means “ham”, but is metaphorically an older white male with a choleric complexion. A working-class white male, vulgar and uneducated – the term is never used to refer to men in upper socio-economic strata. And, of course, all gammons are presumed to be reactionary bigots; that’s the payload of the insult.
Catch any Labor talking head on video in the first days after the election and what you’d see is either tearful, disbelieving shock or a venomous rant about gammons and how racist, sexist, homophobic, and fascist they are. They haven’t recovered yet as I write, eleven days later.
Observe what has occurred: the working class are now reactionaries. New Labor is entirely composed of what an old Leninist would have called “the revolutionary vanguard” and their immigrant clients. Is it any wonder that some Laborites now speak openly of demographic replacement, of swamping the gammons with brown immigrants?
Is it any wonder that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats are bleeding support and desperately trying to import a whole new voting class of unassimilated immigrants? Interestingly, Donald Trump is doing very well here among Latino Americans - and so Biden/Harris opened the border and Nancy Pelosi is pushing amnesty. Parliament is dissolving the People and electing another one.
This is all very weird for me, because this has all happened in my lifetime. I used to be a Democrat - a real one, a strong supporter of the party - because they stood for the Little Guy against Wall Street. Now Wall Street is the party of Bill Clinton and Hunter Biden, not of Youngstown or Akron or Toledo or Fitchburg. Those places are all going to vote for Donald Trump (yes, even Fitchburg in deep blue Massachusetts).
It's all upside down. And it's upside down all over the Western World, for exactly the same reason. On this Labor Day, ponder what it would take to get a bunch of political parties to sell out their strongest supporters - to stab them in the back, really. They sure must have had some powerful motivation.
I do so wonder what that motivation might have been.
So some self-important English Plod said he was going to criminally charge and extradite US citizens for exercising their first amendment rights on US soil. Interesting.
Quite frankly, this seems like a golden opportunity for political candidates here to get a "gimmie" issue. Sticking up for the first amendment seems like a layup. And if as I suspect the Democrats are institutionally incapable of sticking up for free speech, then this is a gold plated opportunity to paint them as the party of censorship - not to mention being weak on foreign policy.
Like I said, this issue looks like it's 100% upside.
It looks like just about all of their corporate execs (other than CEO Eugene Kaspersky) have been sanctioned by the US Fed.Gov. Oh, yeah, the software is banned in the USA after July 20:
The US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) cited national security threats in designating the 12 individuals as under sanction. In making the announcement, it also noted: "OFAC has not designated Kaspersky Lab, its parent or subsidiary companies, or its CEO."
The Treasury did, however, designate just about every other exec who reports directly to the Moscow-based firm's chief exec "for operating in the technology sector of the Russian Federation economy," which under EO 14024 is a no-no.
It follows Thursday's actions by the Commerce Department that prohibit Kaspersky Lab Inc from providing its software and other security services in America from July 20 — plus years of directives and mandates to kick Kaspersky products out of US government networks.
This seems weird - maybe it's just more escalation of Great Power Politics between the US and Russia by the neocons in our government. Kaspersky has made good products, and a scan of the Borepatch archives shows only references to what has been a quality security company.
If you use their antivirus, it looks like you need to go shopping.
Let’s be honest: it’s a US war against Russia... to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons, oft-stated, of regime change for Vladimir Putin and exhausting the Russian military so that they can’t fight anywhere else in the world. President Biden has said that was his intention — to get rid of Vladimir Putin. His Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, in April 2022, said that our purpose here is to exhaust the Russian army. What does that mean, 'exhaust'? It means throwing Ukrainians at them. My son fought over there, side-by-side with the Ukrainians and we’ve sacrificed 300,000 Ukrainians.
It's a long interview but I find very little to argue with him about. Which means that the Deep State will prevent him from ever becoming President.
Big Country muses on the war in Ukraine and how Russia is refurbishing mothballed tanks. Quantity, he says, has a quality of its own, and it seems that it's surprisingly easy to refurbish old armor.
That got me pondering. Last light Dopey Joe gave his State Of The Union address and called for an Assault Weapons ban. Vlad seems to be thinking that the future is now, and an old tank tomorrow is worth much more than a bunch of new stuff next year. In this very same vein, doesn't that suggest that anyone who hasn't already bought an AR-15 should go out right now and get one?
And ammunition should be bought by the hundreds (or thousands) of rounds. Remember, a US Army combat load of ammo is around 200 rounds per soldier, and they get resupplied. A thousand rounds today is better than more next year.
For the life of me, I can't see what compelling interest the USA has in war with Russia. I can see what the US Military Industrial Complex has with a war like that. And as they say, "War is the health of the State".
So Finland and Sweden have applied for NATO membership, which would make them the first NATO partners to share a border with Russia. Well, ignoring Kalingrad aka Konigsburg which is basically occupied and ethnicly cleansed East Prussia and not contiguous with Mother Russia herself. So NATO would be literally on Russia's doorstep.
This strikes me as exceptionally unwise. It's hard to see how international relations will be more stable after this. On the contrary.
But politics ain't beanbag, and neither are international politics. Turkey has had a rocky relationship for some time with the USA, NATO, and the EU. But they are a full member of NATO, and so have veto power over any expansion. It looks like they're exercising that option.
Maybe it's just to work a better deal with the US, NATO, and EU. Me, I hope they hold out and make it ridiculously painful for Sweden and Finland to join.
I would ask full EU membership for Turkey in return of Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership if I were Erdogan.
Here's what I would do if I were Xi. I'd invade Taiwan.
Consider: America is weaker and more divided that it has been for 50 years. A weak, divided America is likely what Xi will see as being in China's best interests.
Consider also: NATO will find itself strained in any response, because it has sent so much equipment to Ukraine that it might not have a lot left to send to Taiwan. NATO seems to want to keep the pressure on Russia, to bleed Putin and get regime change. NATO will either be distracted from Taiwan, or will have to give up their dreams of different rulers in the Kremlin. It may take NATO long enough to figure out what to do that the Taiwan invasion becomes a fait accompli. Advantage: China.
Consider also [2]: A June or July invasion will likely wrap up before the elections in November. Losing Taiwan (after a pretty disastrous response to Ukraine and a completely disastrous pullout from Afghanistan) will likely contribute to a rout of the Democrats in the election. Big GOP Congressional majorities will further weaken Biden. A weakened Biden is likely what Xi will see as being in China's best interests.
Consider also [3]: Even if a strong Republican gets elected to the White House in 2024, that will be 2 years after the fact, allowing China to consolidate/reintegrate Taiwan. It will be hard to put that toothpaste back in the bottle.
The downside is looking like an aggressor in public. Perhaps the biggest fallout from Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the prospect of Finland and Sweden joining NATO out of a sense of needing help against the Russian bear. You could see something similar with India, Indonesia, Philippines, Korea, and Japan joining together in an anti-China bloc. My take is that Xi doesn't care - China has never been expansionist outside of China (and they absolutely see Taiwan as part of China). The domination they seek is economic, not military, and since the hypothetical Asian bloc would never be able to invade the homeland, this is likely not much of a consideration. Also, if America and NATO are weakened then there may not be a credible alternative to China in Asia.
So the downsides are low, the benefits to China are likely high, and both of these could very well change in the next two (or even one) year. The iron is hot, right now. Timing will probably never be more in China's favor than now.
This is maybe a good time to short Taiwanese stocks.
He has his suggestions from North of the Border, so go read. So here is my answer to Inna's excellent question. Vladimir Putin is welcome to:
California, Oregon, and Washington. Sorry, we keep Alaska (and Canada keeps Yukon, per Glen). Note to Vlad - there's a real crime problem in Seattle and Portland, and San Francisco has a problem with the homeless crapping on the street. Maybe the Russian Mob can fix all this.
New England, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania east of Harrisburg. Sorry for northern Maine and New Hampshire but y'all know that you're screwed with all the Boston refugees. Not to mention Glen giving away Quebec.
Chicago, Denver, and Albuquerque. Giving these "City-States" away will being sanity to Illinois, Colorado, and New Mexico. Well, some sanity. For a bonus, we'll throw in Austin if Vlad promises to keep it weird.
There is a *ton* of propaganda about what's happening in Ukraine right now, maybe 80% of it from the Ukranian side. This makes it hard to know what is actually, you know, happening there. This is a very long and very interesting analysis of (a) current situation, (b) Ukraine.Gov motives, (c) Russia.Gov motives, and (d) US.Gov/NATO motives.
In my analysis, the Ukrainians are mass mobilizing their civilian population to use them as human shields, and then parade their bodies on Western media. These forces will be poorly armed and trained, and have little military usefulness. They will make it more costly for Russian forces to enter Ukrainian cities, but as I mentioned previously, the Russian solution to this problem is the simply level the city. In the end, all of these armed civilians will die, their cities destroyed, with nothing gained. I believe this is in fact the goal of the Ukrainian leadership, who are being cheered on towards this end either consciously or not by Americans and other Westerners. I think Ukrainian leadership is hoping for Russia to flattened cities and inflict mass deaths among the civilian population for PR purposes. With their mass mobilization of urban populations, the Ukrainian leadership is putting the Russian forces in a similar position that Hamas puts Israel’s IDF in. What Hamas does, is hide their forces in dense urban centers from where they stage attacks on Israel. The Israelis are faced with a dilemma, either they tolerate Hamas’s attacks, or they shoot back which will inevitably inflict civilian casualties. The Palestinians in turn show dead civilians and destroyed building on Western news media with the intention of ruining Israel’s international reputation. Both Hamas and Ukraine are using their civilians as human shields. Civilians throwing Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks will achieve nothing, other than getting themselves killed. This should be obvious. As America is weaponizing its “cancel culture” for foreign policy objectives, Russia will be endless maligned in Western media if the Ukrainian strategy succeeds. Personally I find it quite sick that Westerners are cheering the Ukrainians on with this strategy. What they are doing, whether consciously or not, is to sacrifice endless Ukrainian lives all for a narrative to be built of Ukrainian martyrdom.
Take a half hour to read the whole thing which is best described as (ahem) Borepatchian in length. Or maybe even longer. But there's a ton of food for thought, at least for folks who don't appreciate being manipulated by increasingly transparent propaganda.
And when I say "increasingly transparent propaganda" I really, really mean increasingly transparent propaganda. For example, the "New York Times" journalist who was just killed. The headline?
Except, not so fast. Here's the interesting graf from that very article:
Daily Mailreports – Initially, he was thought to have been on assignment for The New York Times because he was carrying a press badge that listed the newspaper as his publication but it has since emerged he was working on a global film about refugees.
So was he or wasn't he covering things for the NYT? Like I said, increasingly transparent propaganda that is increasingly disconnected from facts. Certainly this is a tragedy for him and his family - actually the whole damn war is a tragedy for millions and their families - but wartime journalism is known to be a dangerous profession. Remember the 15 journalists killed in the opening weeks of the Iraq war?
Like I said, I would love a higher caliber of news reporting from Ukraine. It feels like the original link to Alexander's Cartographer is providing what used to be provided by regular journalists. Is it, or is it a more subtle and less obvious propaganda? Who can say?
But it seems that most of what you read is clearly drivel. I'd like a higher caliber drivel, please. Go read the whole thing which does not feel to me like drivel, but rather reasoned discussion.
Poseidon is an ‘Intercontinental Nuclear-Powered Nuclear-Armed Autonomous Torpedo’. It is a giant torpedo which can hit coastal cities with devastating results. Compared to an intercontinental ballistic missile it is very slow, but possibly unstoppable.
Russia maintains that it can also be used as a tactical nuclear weapon against warships. High-value targets would include aircraft carriers. This is harder to rationalize than the second-strike nuclear deterrence role, but it is a constant theme. Ever since it was first revealed in November 2015, then known as Status-6. it has been described as a multirole system.
The weapon’s expected speed, around 70 knots, is fast enough to make it realistically uncatchable to existing torpedoes. And its operating depths, perhaps as deep as 1,000 meters (3,300 feet) puts it beyond reach. Western planners will have to develop new weapons to intercept it. And that will take considerable time and investment.
It uses a mini nuclear reactor for power, and can deliver a small nuclear warhead.
A fish doesn't notice the water it swims in. The Western populations swim in a sea of State sponsored propaganda. Perceptions are carefully shaped so that only Approved® preferences emerge. Unfortunately for the "Elites" they have pushed the envelope so far from most people's perceived reality that propaganda collapses. It seems that the American public remains sane:
The Economist/You Gov poll showed that despite a barrage of pro-war media coverage only 19% of Americans support "sending soldiers to Ukraine to fight Russian soldiers."
54% oppose.
You have to dig very deep in its poll story to find this gem. It is almost as if they were trying to manipulate the public.
So you have to dig to find out that Americans oppose World War III. The "Elites" trying to shape public opinion have a long way to go still. Good.
Rule by moral midgets is the rule now. The posturing Trump could not contain his feverish wish to bomb Syria in 2017 and Clinton before him inexplicably took it upon himself to bomb Serbia relentlessly for over 70 days. Obama chose groveling on the international stage as his signature gesture and his Secretary of State wet herself with glee at the death of Gaddafi. The entire political class of the United States has chosen to chase will-o’-the-wisps fueled by arrogance and delusions. Denial of fundamental biological reality is now an integral part of the mental processes of said class, superbly “educated” to a man but ignorant of life’s most precious truths.
It’s not only an American phenomenon. All but a few European leaders desire anything but national suicide by immigration to vindicate the most vaporous and sappy sentiments of compassion, fairness, and historical retribution. A mere 104 years after the massive slaughter of The Great War and not a one of that lot could summon the courage let alone vision to lift a finger to derail the asinine U.S. encroachment on Russia or question its inherent assumption of some unique Russian depravity or willful nonobservance of civilized norms. Slavic brutes!! Lessons learned from the reckless slide into the massive slaughter of modern industrial warfare? None.
Top. Men. Good thing the People still retain some common sense.
The Romans were hated by a lot of people in the ancient world. This bothered the Romans not a bit. Their attitude was spelled out in the post title, although the original latin has a certain je ne sais quois: Oderint, dum metuant.
The Powers That Be in these United States seem to have forgotten that this is a dynamic, and that things done to instill fear can lead to hate. Big Country hits this nail on the head looking at all the sanctions that the US PTB are piling on Russia:
Two is that #ourguys are purely fucking up by the numbers. Initially, the Russian Population was starting to protest against the war. Lots of Grannies, regular civvies, and yeah, Vlad had a crackdown on it, as he is wont to be. However, all this 'other stuff'... the cutting off of Paypal, Applepay, Goolagpay, services and well, just about any and all economic 'stuff' in Russia by OUR Oligarchs?
Yeah, that's not helping us... in fact it just goes to prove the point to the Russian People that Putin IS right and that they, the Russian People as a whole have been targeted by the dissolute and decadent west for elimination. Hell, it ain't a hard argument to make, and we're proving it by putting the hurt on the Russian People as a whole. The Russians as history has shown rally around The Rodina when shit like this happens. A nearly singlemindedness and even bloodthirsty willingness to protect The Motherland
No matter what the cost.
So this makes me nervous, 'cos instead of them blaming Putin, they're realizing, from their POV, he might be right and it's time to make US hurt as badly as we're making them hurt. And as far as I can tell, that'd be the Giant Flashbulb Option, as they really don't have a way of fucking up or fucking with the general Untied Staaz population.
So if our beef is with Vlad and the Oligarchs (their Oligarchs, not our Oligarchs) then why do the sanctions seem to be targeted at the Russian People? Oh, and I still don't have a good explanation as to why Ukraine absolutely positively has to be a member of NATO. Still waiting on that one.
Ya know, what comes to mind is the ancient Greek saying that those who the Gods would destroy first are turned mad. About sums up the US PTB, right there.
And an anonymous commenter leaves a really concerning comment over at Big Country's place:
More or less right on the money. Couple that with the administration coming up with shit like sanctions on India because they won't sanction Russia. Now India are looking at what they can trade without using the USD. Good work retards. Lot of Arab countries now talking about investing more in/with China too. Worth watching what the BRICS countries do, once the move away from trade in USD kicks in...
"Good work, retards" looks like it's fixin' the be an excellent epitaph for the US PTB once they destroy the dollar as the world's reserve currency and the US standard of living drops by 70%.
Ah, brings to mind the old days, working at Three Letter Security Agency back in the '80s. We all agreed that if the balloon went up we'd just go out and sunbathe in the parking lot and wait for that last big flash bulb to go off. Been a long time since I thought of that. And so, a musical tribute to the last tanning session (stolen from Western Rifle Shooters):
Damn, I wish we had a smarter and less reckless Ruling Class.
There's a lot of news coming from Ukraine right now. I'm not sure what is fact and what is propaganda. It looks like Ukraine is winning the propaganda war so far, for whatever that's worth. I guess we'll know when the smoke clears.
In the meantime, this post gives you a grounding in Ukraine-Russia politics.
The Ukrainian government is issuing rifles to the population. There's a song for that, from the 1950 musical Annie Get Your Gun which won the Best Musical Score Oscar.
Why on earth are we talking about getting into a war in Russiain the winter?
I mean, you could ask Napoleon how that turned out, or the German 6th Army. Heck, you could ask the Afghani allies we just left behind how good an idea this is. Since our military has such a good track record this century.
Peter's take is that the Powers That Be are getting desperate as the economy is mired in stagflation, the vaxx mandate is increasingly unpopular, and Biden's approval rating drops lower than any President in my lifetime. A foreign adventure is often the prescription for what ails them - politics ends at the water's edge, right?
Except no - firstly, this is nothing but madness. Bill Clinton at least had the good sense to bomb a Somali aspirin factory rather than Sevastapol. Secondly, we've heard from Democrats for 20 years that politics does NOT end at the water's edge.
Quite frankly, it's time for Congress to step up as the Adult Supervision* and pass a resolution saying that we do not have a compelling national interest in NATO expansion into Ukraine, and we sure as heck don't have a compelling interest in Americans getting killed over that. It sure would be something to see the Democrats filibuster that.
It's been a long time since I've tagged a post "Atomic War" ...
* This just goes to illustrate how weird things are.
I would expand on this, with several additional arguments:
The Biden Administration has done terrible damage to our armed forces, which quite frankly may not have the capacity to respond meaningfully in a peer-to-peer shooting war.
There is quite a good chance that if we do engage with Russia that the Chinese will think that this is the best opportunity they will ever see to take Taiwan back. The ability of our armed forces to simultaneously engage with two peer-to-peer conflicts is roughly between slim and none. And Slim just left town. (UPDATE 24 FEBRUARY 2022 12:01: Aesop has some Pertinent thoughts on this topic, and is more pessimistic than I am.)
An actual shooting war involving the US and NATO will show that Donald Trump was right: NATO members have not been living up to their agreements on funding troop levels and readiness. Quite frankly we all think that NATO is a paper tiger but a hot war will prove the point.
A corollary to #3 is that the EU will come under big pressure to do something - anything - about the conflict and any refugees. The EU will be paralyzed (because it's always paralyzed) and will be exposed as not the "United States of Europe" but rather a paper tiger just like NATO.
Germans will begin to freeze in the dark. They shut down a whole bunch of base load power (Energiewende) and now the Russians have them over a barrel. Fuel Poverty is a real thing.
I'd like to digress in particular on #5. We are seeing a fair amount of the usual jingoistic banging of the War Drum, with people not sufficiently enthusiastic about World War III being called "stooges" (or worse). Quite frankly, I'd be more impressed with these attacks if they were also leveled at the greenie Watermelon crowd (Green on the outside, Red on the inside) who are hamstringing our fossil fuel industries (both here and in Europe). Nothing gives Vladimir Putin more leverage over the West than this. No war for European oil, and all that.
This post is tagged "idiots" because, well, you know.
UPDATE 24 FEBRUARY 2022 12:01: Stephen Green at Instapundit muses about why Putin pulled the trigger and invaded. I think it's quite simple: he thinks he will get away with it. Quite frankly, I expect he's right.
One thing that I have not been able to figure out is who would benefit from the US sending 8,500 (or 50,000 - the number keeps changing) US troops to Stalingrad in winter. We've seen this movie before and we all know how it comes out. There are pretty much no good arguments to do this - nothing but huffing and puffing about "deterring aggression" and "stopping Putin's land grab" and "country borders are sacred". Let's quickly dispense with these arguments and move on to who really wins.
Deterring Aggression. It's not 1939, and the US Establishment isn't Neville Chamberland. A quick review of the first two decades of this century will establish the wars we've fought: Afghanistan (2001-2021), Iraq (2003 - present), Libya (2011), Syria (2013). The problem isn't an American meekness; on the contrary. Vladimir Putin knows this, and doesn't have to read between the lines to understand what NATO expansion plans for Ukraine would mean to a Russia that shares a border with it.
Putin's "Land Grab". So Russia has demanded guarantees from NATO that (a) Ukraine will not be admitted to the coalition (as this would compel NATO to defend Ukraine in the future, by treaty), and also guarantees that NATO offensive weapons will not be stationed in Ukraine. The NATO General Secretary has explicitly rejected both demands, as has the US State Department (at least according to the Russian foreign ministry; while this is not proof, it does concur with the NATO General Secretary's public statements from two days ago). So what options does Putin have? More importantly, what options are we giving him?
"National Borders are sacrosanct". Well, except for the US-Mexico border, I guess. This doesn't pass the "red face" test - the fact that people can say this without shame only shows that our elites are, well, shameless.
So who wins in this showdown? We know who is facing the risks - you know, that whole Stalingrad in winter thing, but Russia is facing substantial risks as well from sanctions, a military with some good units but many not so good ones, potential guerrilla war, etc. NATO appears to be splintering before our eyes as Germany, France, and others refuse to do any heavy lifting (Germany's offer a a few thousand mil surplus helmets to Ukraine speaks volumes on how tight this "alliance" is).
Oh yeah - Russia has a bunch of nuclear missiles aimed at us. That would never go sideways, right? So there are lots of potential losers here.
Who wins?
China. This is long, but clearly and plainly laid out. I highly recommend you spend the time to watch it:
Other winners: The Military Industrial Complex (Defense suppliers and retired 4 stars who get cushy and well paid gigs on their boards of directors). The Biden Administration which gets to keep the Hunter Biden Ukrainian payoffs swept under the carpet. The Democratic Party which is desperately looking for something - anything - to change the electorate's focus from the disastrous Afghanistan bug out, or inflation, or the increasingly unpopular Covid lockdowns, or the Teacher's Unions destroying public education, or the weakening economy.
I guess that the Democrats aren't smart enough to figure out what adding that whole "Stalingrad in winter" thing to that list will do in the run up to the elections.
Tucker Carlson quite rightly asks: how does any of this make America stronger? Clearly it doesn't - to the contrary. But if you don't pound the jingoistic War Drum with the idiots in the media you're Putin's Stooge or Neville Chamberlin or unpatriotic. Or something.
I'm so old that I remember Democrats shouting that they were tired of their patriotism being questioned. Times sure have changed.
But remember: these people are all so much smarter (and nicer!) than you are. You stooge, you.
The other things the BBC were moaning about were the winter famine wiping out the children of the Taliban and the poor pitiful Ukrainians who are ill-equipped to fight the Red Army. I see a confluence of benefits here. The Taliban have $89 billion dollars in high tech weaponry they manifestly don't need and the Ukraine produces most of Europes wheat. They could trade weaponry to the breadbasket of Europe for food. Win win!
Helpful. That's me.
Maybe $89 B of food would give them enough weapons to get to Stalingrad, amirite? Who says that Atomic War can't be hilarious?
UPDATE 27 January 2022 19:01: Yeah, yeah, I can stop anytime. Kurt Schlicter (LTC USA, Ret) has an informative post about the difference between the Cold War NATO of his service days and today's NATO. He echos and amplifies what Divemedic highlights, from an Army (vs. a Navy) perspective. He is even more pessimistic (and sarcastically so) than Divemedic is. But he gets deadly serious in his key point:
It seems like we might have trouble achieving our objectives. And one of the biggest reasons is that it’s not clear what our objectives would even be. Since none of the usual hawks can be bothered to articulate a vital American interest involved in defending Ukraine’s borders, that makes it hard to come up with objectives for the military. “Stop Putin” is not really a military objective; it’s sort of an amorphous goal.
So what does victory look like? Putin held off to the outskirts of Kiev? Putin tossed back over the Belarus and Russian borders? What’s our desired end state? Or are we not going to articulate that either? Maybe we can just sort of exist in a tense status quo over some sort of demilitarized zone for seven decades or so. Gee, sound familiar?
Now all these questions deserve answers, but don’t look for any since none of the answers are good. And bad answers would slow the rush to war, so we can’t have them come out. Instead, the establishment is going back to the classics. If you ask what America’s vital interest is, you love Putin. If you ask what our military objectives would be, much less how we can rev up the combat power way over there to attain them, you love Putin. Yeah, it’s always a delight to be a vet of the Cold War being who is told he digs the Russians by a bunch of DC saps whose experience with the Bear is trying a Moscow Mule once, deciding it was icky, and asking for a white wine spritzer instead.
The Ukrainians are getting a raw deal, and I hope they drown their invaders in a river of blood. But it’s not our fight. And, if we did fight, there’s a significant chance we would lose. Then every two-bit tyrant on Earth will be coming for a piece of the helpless giant. We’re weak right now, folks, and the worst thing we can do is get up in front of everyone and prove it.
This. This exactly. The Administration looks like it is trying to draw into an inside straight. With the potential death, destruction, and risk to America's international position, I'd sure like answers - any answers - to the question what do we get out of any of this?
When people are taken out of their depth they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up.
