Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Obi-Jon]

Mike, It would be great fun to run A-10s up and down that road with its 30mm autocannon blazing depleted uranium rounds. What a turkey shoot it'd be. <sigh>

Bulgaria only has 12 Su-25Ks plus a pair of 2 seat trainers. Jane's reports half have been upgraded and rebuilt. That's not a lot to get to Ukraine but it would be better than nothing. Come on you guys, chop chop.

[crashcourse]

saw one of the russian diplomats--pestov put this out

The Kremlin has announced its demands for ending the war in Ukraine: -Ukraine must change its constitution to guarantee it won't join any "blocs", i.e. NATO + EU. -Must recognise Crimea as part of Russia. -Must recognise the eastern separatist regions as independent.

Pretty much what putin wanted before the war started

[Mike]

You can have my answer now, Pestov.

[Mike]

Mike, It would be great fun to run A-10s up and down that road with its 30mm autocannon blazing depleted uranium rounds. What a turkey shoot it'd be. <sigh>

Bulgaria only has 12 Su-25Ks plus a pair of 2 seat trainers. Jane's reports half have been upgraded and rebuilt. That's not a lot to get to Ukraine but it would be better than nothing. Come on you guys, chop chop.

As a former FO, seeing all that exposed Russian materiel makes the short hair on my neck stand up. Such a wasted opportunity.

[iam416]

It's briefly noted in the Geraghty column but he said something I mentioned last week. Every day this drags on Putin has to be aware that China could be "reevaluating" their future relationship.

Yeah, exactly. Xi and China are going to have their own resource-based problems in the relatively near future. They don't necessarily need to hitch their wagon to Putin's nonsense, especially if that leads to issues for them. Plus, I suspect Xi likes a winner. And this isn't gonna come off as anything like some sort of grand win. At best, Putin is gonna have to Tresselball his way to a win, and those are the ugliest wins imagineable.

[Mike]

Or to put it more politely, this should be Ukraine's terms.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Morgan Stanley says Russia could default on its debt as early as mid-April

Morgan Stanley Says Russia’s Set for Venezuela-Style Default (yahoo.com)

[Da Geezer]

Jeff:

Your post concerning the horrors of this war (p. 5129) has been bothering me.

It is estimated that Hitler caused the death of around 40M people. Stalin starved 30M mostly Ukrainians. Pol Pot killed 2M in the killing fields. Your question was basically how does this happen and what can we do to stop it.

Jordan Peterson did a forward to Alexander Solsyneitzen's The Gulag Archipelago. Solsyneitzen asks the same questions regarding the rage that it must take to willfully murder on a large scale. He writes:

Here’s some thoughts—no, some facts. Every social system produces inequality, at present, and every social system has done so, since the beginning of time. The poor have been with us—and will be with us—always. Analysis of the content of individual Paleolithic gravesites provides evidence for the existence of substantive variance in the distribution of ability, privilege, and wealth, even in our distant past. The more illustrious of our ancestors were buried with great possessions, hoards of precious metals, weaponry, jewelry, and costuming. The majority, however, struggled through their lives, and were buried with nothing. Inequality is the iron rule, even among animals, with their intense competition for quality living space and reproductive opportunity—even among plants, and cities—even among the stellar lights that dot the cosmos themselves, where a minority of privileged and oppressive heavenly bodies contain the mass of thousands, millions or even billions of average, dispossessed planets. Inequality is the deepest of problems, built into the structure of reality itself, and will not be solved by the presumptuous, ideology-inspired retooling of the rare free, stable and productive democracies of the world. The only systems that have produced some modicum of wealth, along with the inevitable inequality and its attendant suffering, are those that evolved in the West, with their roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition; precisely those systems that emphasize above all the essential dignity, divinity and ultimate responsibility of the individual. In consequence, any attempt to attribute the existence of inequality to the functioning of the productive institutions we have managed to create and protect so recently in what is still accurately regarded as the Free World will hurt those who are weakest and most vulnerable first. The radicals who conflate the activities of the West with the oppression of the downtrodden therefore do nothing to aid those whom they purport to prize and plenty to harm them. The claims they make to act under the inspiration of pure compassion must therefore come to be regarded with the deepest suspicion—not least by those who dare to make such claims themselves.

Foreword to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, by Jordan B. Peterson | extrafilespace

This is a short read and well worth the effort. Why does inequality lead to the rage we see on display in Ukraine today

[Mike]

I don’t like this version of “Too big to fail” when it comes to tyrants. “Too crazy to bitch slap” doesn’t work for me.

[Obi-Jon]

A debt default by Russia will mean very few will be willing to invest in their sovereign debt. So what? Sanctions are going to reduce that investment anyway. With the ChiComs providing economic support, Russia can weather the default, short term anyway. Putin is thought to have $100B untouchably stashed - he can use 3/4 of that to keep himself in power, keep a teetering Russia propped, and still be stupidly wealthy.

China is the wild card Russia counts on. Those bastards will continue just to eff with us anyway. Ignoring China like we’re doing now is stupid.

[Mike]

That’s one of the reasons we need to smack Putin down. Let China know their biggest ally is a punk bitch.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Sounds like this has been verified. I think it may be the 3rd Russian general killed in Ukraine in about a week. This guy was supposedly the field commander for the entire Kharkiv operation too.

Worth reading the whole thread here too to see how Russian field communications sound like a total clusterfuck.

[froot loops]

Yeah, exactly. Xi and China are going to have their own resource-based problems in the relatively near future. They don't necessarily need to hitch their wagon to Putin's nonsense, especially if that leads to issues for them. Plus, I suspect Xi likes a winner. And this isn't gonna come off as anything like some sort of grand win. At best, Putin is gonna have to Tresselball his way to a win, and those are the ugliest wins imagineable.

I think you are selling Tresselball short, he went into a lot of those games expecting a small margin of victory. This is more like a football team expecting a total blowout and finds itself in a rock fight after the first quarter and that they would be thankful fo scrape by with a win.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Jeff:

Your post concerning the horrors of this war (p. 5129) has been bothering me.

It is estimated that Hitler caused the death of around 40M people. Stalin starved 30M mostly Ukrainians. Pol Pot killed 2M in the killing fields. Your question was basically how does this happen and what can we do to stop it.

Foreword to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, by Jordan B. Peterson | extrafilespace

This is a short read and well worth the effort. Why does inequality lead to the rage we see on display in Ukraine today.

Great read. I'm trying to distance myself from the inhumanity of all this. It's hard. I write analytically to try to deal with it but I am simply overcome by sadness. Solzhenitsyn, the quintessential dissident of the repressive nature of Communist Russia should be restudied in light of what Putin is doing to Russia and its citizens. In the matter of a week of thoughtless destruction of Ukrainian cities and inhuman terror attacks on innocent Ukrainians he has singlehandedly destroyed decades of work to build a rules based order of human decency and respect for sovereignty. His invasion of Ukraine and the tactics employed there places him among history's most despicable tyrants.

[Obi-Jon]

Sounds like this has been verified. I think it may be the 3rd Russian general killed in Ukraine in about a week. This guy was supposedly the field commander for the entire Kharkiv operation too.

Worth reading the whole thread here too to see how Russian field communications sound like a total clusterfuck.

Given the performance of the Russian High Command, maybe the Ukrainians should refrain from killing Russian generals. Just sayin...