Don't fall in love with Ukraine

The people of America support Ukraine and want to see Russia punished.

With limits. Am not eager to see our boys drawn into a war of any kind.

From time to time:

“The Tree of Liberty Must Be Refreshed ‘With the Blood of Patriots and Tyrants’!

– Thomas Jefferson

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With limits. Am not eager to see our boys drawn into a war of any kind.

From time to time:

“The Tree of Liberty Must Be Refreshed ‘With the Blood of Patriots and Tyrants’!”

Decision makers should have their own blood in the game if they are going to offer up the blood of others.

IP

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freedom is not for free

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
– Thomas Jefferson

However, nowadays we can stand off a few hundred (thousand?) miles and defend freedom with cruise missiles
– Desert Dave

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cruise_missiles#:~:tex…

“The Tree of Liberty Must Be Refreshed ‘With the Blood of Patriots and Tyrants’!”

Decision makers should have their own blood in the game if they are going to offer up the blood of others.

Tru dat!

Let’s put Putin up against Biden both of them armed with a 2 foot long dead fish and see who’s the fishwife.

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I expect China, in particular, to go to war with its neighbors, starting with Taiwan.

I agree at some point Taiwan will come under Chinese rule. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they started moving north, first. There are parts of Siberia that China believes belong to them.

Low population, lots of natural resources, and a weakened Russia makes this all the more tempting.

China may be supporting Russia verbally, but their actions are designed to help China, not Russia.

Don’t listen to what China says, watch what they do.

AW

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captain denny:

Russia will need some kind of Marshal Plan, not Reparations it cannot possibly fund.

Forget Revenge. Plan on Peace!

I was writing to post the same and you got there first and better written.

Macroeconomically as well as global-politically this is the most important point. Russia has long been a brilliant, creative, rich endowed, and horribly ruled place and people. From the Mongolian conquest on Russia has been in deep post traumatic and repetitively traumatic stress neuroses. They need help.

david fb

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I was writing to post the same and you got there first and better written.

Thank you very much!

Russia has long been a brilliant, creative, rich endowed, and horribly ruled place and people.

Unfortunately it’s the common people who pay the price of horrible governance.

The Captain

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You all seem to underestimate Putin.

Who will never give up.

And who has the power to send his missiles to Ohio or Alaska or NY.

My heart goes to all the Ukrainians who lost everything they had, put all their wealth in a plastic bag and crossed the borders to save their lives.

By the way, what about the second booster?

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AlphaWolf

China may be supporting Russia verbally, but their actions are designed to help China, not Russia.

Don’t listen to what China says, watch what they do.

In an attempt to bring this back to macro economics, I think watching China is very, very important right now.

China:

  1. Has a debt crisis, that isn’t just a debt crisis. Collecting fees from developers is how it “got things done”, it was a fairly painless alternative to taxing the populace directly. With the developers effectively bankrupt, China is not just facing not only the equivalent of a “mortgage crisis” but a simultaneous shattering of the system for funding local government. Given the quirks of Chinese wealth and economy. I just don’t know where the money will come from.

  2. Has a virus crisis. The Shanghai lockdown is a bigger deal that people realize. Grossly oversimplifying, the virus, and especially the virus in big Chinese cities, is affecting the upper middle class in ways they thought they were excluded from. China now finds itself with the choice of either massive economic impact, a decimation of its (large) elderly population, or changing virus strategy. (Or, more likely, picking two of the three: massive economic impact AND high deaths.) Changing virus strategy would almost certainly involve non-local versions of the vaccine, which would be a huge loss of face.

  3. Speaking of which, China has an economic crisis. China was already suffering a bit of growing pains. Its economy was based around cheap manufacturing, but economic growth results in growing labor costs. It was managing this, in part because it was so central to the world’s manufacturing. But the challenges of the pandemic, especially the supply chain, has the world looking for “second sources”. China will still be a manufacturing powerhouse, but any shift away from China based manufacturing is magnified in impact because of China’s reliance on continual growth.

  4. China has political obstacles. I won’t call it as big as a crisis, but it has several challenges happening at once. It has a special relationship with Russia, and Russia is obviously in trouble. It has inherited the economic powerhouse that is Hong Kong, but it is struggling to integrate Hong Kong with mainland China. It has gotten used to getting what it wants from the world (because of how critical it is), but the world is seemingly losing patience. I have this least confidence on this fourth point, but I think the days when the world just turns a blind eye to the politics and human rights in China may be waning.

As AlphaWolf points out, you have to watch what China does, not what it says. But I think you also have to watch what is happening not just what is being talked about. I sense major earthquakes coming in the Chinese economy. I’ve been shifting out of emerging market ETFs just because they are so exposed to China. And I’m looking into EMXC because I would still like some emerging market investment, although I’m still concerned about getting hit in the blast radius, I might just pick and choose some major stocks (e.g. VALE) instead.

–CH

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You all seem to underestimate Putin.

Who will never give up.

And who has the power to send his missiles to Ohio or Alaska or NY.

Every single one of us is keenly aware of this. If you want to definitely see those missiles hit the US going easy on Putin is all it takes. Just will happen eventually…and not too far off…there is no negotiation or compromise that would ever work. We are all keenly aware of that as well.

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I sense major earthquakes coming in the Chinese economy.

CH,

The swaps market it and it will be global. I think our institutions are selling off hard.

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Ukraine politics is famously corrupt and fractious. Zelensky turned this common knowledge into the TV comedy, “Servant of the People” (currently on Netflix) which boosted him into the presidency in real life. The U.S. should not pump billions of dollars into a corrupt nation the way we did in Afghanistan.

Russia invaded Ukraine 10 weeks ago, which is the blink of an eye in the long, blood-soaked history of Russia. Russia has the deep resources of a large population that can be drafted and re-directed toward war.

A key difference is the Afghans didn’t want us there, and their opinion didn’t change no matter how much we bombed them.

There are no counterfactuals is history, but I suspect most people would agree that the Allies should have acted sooner to stop Hitler. At a minimum, those who argued to delay wound up on the wrong side of history.

Putin has been working to undermine the national security interests of the United States almost from the day he took power, including interfering with the 2016 elections–which is almost an act of war by itself. Elsewhere Russia has committed verifiable atrocities in Chechnya and Syria, as well as previously invading parts of Georgia and Ukraine. Putin regularly murders his political opponents and has made himself wealthy on the backs of the Russian people. In Ukraine, Russian troops have been committing murder, looting, and rape on a massive scale. It is hard to imagine a worse villain. If we don’t take a stand now, then when?

The Russian army is a mile wide and an inch deep. Yes, they have a massive army, but by all accounts the troops are bumbling and incompetent. And these are their professional soldiers. Rushing in poorly trained conscripts are unlikely to change the calculus. Russian equipment is clearly inferior to Western weapons. Russia has lost about 25,000 KIA in less than three months, which is about half the US KIA in the entire Vietnam War. Russian clearly cannot sustain this rate of attrition. I’ve seen some concerns that our stocks of Javelins and Stingers might become depleted. Those weapons were built to destroy Russian equipment, so let’s use them for their intended purpose and deplete the stocks. They do no good sitting in a warehouse. IMO, we should triple down on our support for Ukraine.

Finally, it is a logical fallacy to assume that because someone was wrong once they are wrong this time too, but Thomas Friedman (who wrote the op-ed) was a big cheerleader for the war in Iraq, and when it all went south he argued that the Iraqis didn’t like being occupied because we didn’t bomb them enough. I don’t think he learned the correct lesson from that.

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The Russian army is a mile wide and an inch deep. Yes, they have a massive army, but by all accounts the troops are bumbling and incompetent. And these are their professional soldiers. Rushing in poorly trained conscripts are unlikely to change the calculus. Russian equipment is clearly inferior to Western weapons. Russia has lost about 25,000 KIA in less than three months, which is about half the US KIA in the entire Vietnam War. Russian clearly cannot sustain this rate of attrition.

https://twitter.com/peregreine/status/1523815027937009664

552) #StandWithUkraine #DefeatPutin

Russian troops in Ukraine who refuse to fight as reported on by Newsweek.

https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-russia-troops-morale-armed-…

Ukraine has said that disillusioned Russian troops are refusing to fight in the war.

The claim by the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces comes amid numerous reports of low morale among Russian troops over the six weeks since the start of the conflict.

Ukraine’s military said on Thursday that some Russian units had been placed in tent towns on Russian territory bordering Ukraine and that “soldiers are refusing to participate in further combat in Ukraine.”

I’ve seen some concerns that our stocks of Javelins and Stingers might become depleted. Those weapons were built to destroy Russian equipment, so let’s use them for their intended purpose and deplete the stocks. They do no good sitting in a warehouse. IMO, we should triple down on our support for Ukraine.

-syke6

  1. #StandWithUkraine #DefeatPutin

Biden signed the Lend Lease Program into law not even an hour ago:

https://archive.ph/8ZQ2i

WaPoHeadline: Biden to sign Ukraine lend-lease act into law, expediting military aid
Image without a caption

By Amy B Wang
Today at 1:10 p.m. EDT

President Biden is scheduled to sign into law Monday afternoon a bill that would expedite the process of sending military aid to Ukraine, as the Eastern European country presses into its third month of fighting off a Russian invasion.

The House passed the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022 last month on a 417-to-10 vote. Only a few weeks before, the Senate had passed it unanimously, a rare and overwhelming show of bipartisanship in today’s bitterly divided Congress.

The measure, introduced by a bipartisan group of senators, would update a 1941 law the United States used to help its allies during World War II. Once the bill is signed into law, the United States will be able to more quickly provide equipment and other supplies to Ukraine during the ongoing Russian invasion, as the bill enhances Biden’s authority to expedite agreements with Ukraine and other Eastern European countries.

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The people of America support Ukraine and want to see Russia punished.

With limits. Am not eager to see our boys drawn into a war of any kind.

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Well there were plenty of people like you who did not want our boys going over to fight Nazi Germany to save England and the rest of Europe. But I am sure you will agree that was the right thing to do.

Jaak

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Decision makers should have their own blood in the game if they are going to offer up the blood of others.

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Decision makers would not make good soldiers because they are too old. The best soldiers are unmarried and under 20. Mothers all over the world worry about their sons going off to war.

Jaak

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Decision makers should have their own blood in the game if they are going to offer up the blood of others.

It often is their sons and daughter, their grandchildren, their extended family.

You are looking for good reasons for cynicism towards war but this is necessary and not of cynicism in my opinion.

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Well there were plenty of people like you who did not want our boys going over to fight Nazi Germany to save England and the rest of Europe. But I am sure you will agree that was the right thing to do.

You mean the war to end all wars? Or are you talking about the second war to end all wars? Either way, pretty clear those wars didn’t accomplish that goal.

IP

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You mean the war to end all wars? Or are you talking about the second war to end all wars? Either way, pretty clear those wars didn’t accomplish that goal.

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Well there are wars that must be won so that people don’t live under a cruel viscous corrupt dictators. Many brave people around the world have joined wars for freedom.

I do not think you would have liked liked to live in Nazi Germany, USSR, Mao’s China, or Putin’s Russia.

Jaak

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Well there are wars that must be won so that people don’t live under a cruel viscous corrupt dictators.

And they get there from allowing early actions to continue unchecked. Like previous wars, the aggressors should have been put down early and hard. Waiting only compounds the problem.

IP,
believing that we should ALWAYS be reluctant to send our loved one’s into war, as stated in the OP, which doesn’t mean we should NEVER send them

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believing that we should ALWAYS be reluctant to send our loved one’s into war, as stated in the OP, which doesn’t mean we should NEVER send them

Two things about dithering

One it has nothing to do with making a better decision.

Two if that was what you recommend for our leadership as much as dithering we have lost before we begin.

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