After a dip in December, consumer spending is now back on track:
There's nothing much to say about this. It just adds to the mountain of evidence that the US economy has recovered from the pandemic and is now back on its pre-pandemic growth path. This is all thanks to the massive amounts of stimulus spending we engaged in, which is also responsible for our current bout of high inflation. I'd say the price was worth it, but I suppose reasonable minds may disagree.
Anyway, the real reason for posting this is to let you know that I'm alive and well. There's just not much to write about since the news is all Ukraine all the time. On that score, I've read several pieces that suggest the Russian army is having more trouble than it counted on, though it's still likely to overwhelm Ukraine by sheer force of numbers. After that, either Ukraine gives up or else Russia finds itself in a grinding forever war against insurgents who never quit. Time will tell.
Time is not on Putin's side. The longer this takes, the more Russian bodies in bags, the bigger the drain on the Russian economy and the deeper the bite of economic sanctions. Putin needed this to be quick and surgical, and it won't be. And with each passing day of frustration, the incentive for Russian atrocity grows. Recall what happened when the Red Army crossed the German border.
It’s a game of Chicken. Between Putin’s patience, and that of western consumers.
Not ‘insurgents’, Resistance Movement
Yes. Unironically, "patriots" and "freedom fighters" also work.
+1
Wolverinskyys!
There's one report saying the staff at Chernobyl were evacuated, one saying they're being held hostage and one saying radiation levels have spiked,
https://www.rawstory.com/ukraine-sees-radiation-spike-in-chernobyl-after-russia/
The first casualty of war is truth.
What I read is that the radiation spike is likely to do with all the radioactive dust in the soil being kicked up by vehicles.
Makes sense. 👍👍
The sequel on HBOmax will be great.
Russia had a recent lesson in overreaching, courtesy of Afghanistan.
Putin is not stupid, but he is massively egotistical. So I guess he figures, "Yeah, but that could never happen to me. I'm too (smart/tough/tricky/patient...) Take your pick.
He also allegedly has Parkinson's*, & is generally deteriorating physically & mentally.
*In the way that every GQP taunt is a confession, makes sense if he does, since Hillary being dead within six months of the 2016 election due to Parkinson's was a leadpipe cinch.
I take it then you do not expect sanctions to force/convince the Russians to leave.
They won’t force Putin to leave, IMHO, but his successor could declare a victory and withdraw. And that could happen sooner than Putin thinks …. Does he have a bug-out bag packed?
Props to Gov./Sen. George Aiken for the ‘declare victory and leave’ solution to forever-war.
Did mere brief proximity to Donald Trump pervert Putin's mind?
I'm wondering if he's hearing the voices in his head, his own version of Qanon.
The meeting with his Security Council was strangely reminiscent of TFG’s first Cabinet meeting. Though the scripts weren’t as well rehearsed.
About half of Russia's GDP comes from foreign trade. By comparison, only about a tenth of US GDP comes from foreign trade. These sanctions are steep and will be painful. Post-2014 Crimea invasion sanctions slashed Russian GDP by nearly half and it hasn't yet recovered to 3/4 of 2014 numbers.
Who will lend to Russia (buy its bonds) -- China? Doing so would raise the prices they pay for Russian goods, making that Russian wheat even more expensive than the current surge due to Russia's war. India? India's goals are to maintain cheap fertilizer access via Russia, so buying up Russian bonds will also raise the price they pay. Russian Central Bank? Sure. But, their other policies are creating a distortion field for their commercial banks. One tiny oops and the whole system collapses and their sovereign debt is worthless.
It won't be a forever war. Their collapsing economy will encourage Russia to disentangle itself from the Putin era, one way or another.
D_Ohrk_E1, how did you get the blockquote? Do HTML tags work here?
yup. most html tags work.
I'm not sure. The holes we've left in the sanctions are just huge. And people in the U.S. just won't tolerate gas prices being up (why we'd better get adapting to climate change).
After Russia's invasion of Crimea, the relatively smaller sanctions on Russia nearly halved its GDP. They've never fully recovered. These new sanctions are significantly stronger. It'll take a few months for the sanctions to really bite, but they will kill Russia's economy.
I think high gas prices are timed well to welcome those truckers driving their rigs across the country to participate in a meaningless protest that won't affect anyone but the protesters whose rigs may end up being impounded.
The higher prices will eventually encourage more production domestically and elsewhere, while pushing faster adoption of BEVs. There's a backlog of orders for BEVs, even for the Nissan Leaf.
At it's most foundational democracy is about variety, and that leaves some people confused, particularly when there is a lot to choose from and the answer is, that when there is a lot to choose from, almost all aren't that bad. But still there will be the nagging suspicion that you've missed something, which means, at some point, you'll choose something else and this will further bother some people because they won't be able to remember clearly what their first choice was like and they are filled with self doubt, and that provokes their anxiety, which offends them, so they act to limit and restrict choice as much as they can.
But it's the anxiety that's the harm and the limitation that we have to focus on because it's a distraction from the variety which is obviously the superior state because without it, when you lose the variety, you lose the chance of something, and how many fewer chances do want?
"or else Russia finds itself in a grinding forever war against insurgents who never quit"
That would be nice for us, but terrible for the Ukrainians. They may have started out corrupt -- hey, they were an "SSR" which meant being enrolled in a master class in corruption -- but seem determined to leave that behind it and to retain a perhaps unrealistic faith in humankind.
Being occupied by Putin’s forces is going to be terrible with or without resistance. Sending a dead and wounded Russians home in a constant stream could shorten the occupation.
Being occupied by Putin’s forces is going to be terrible with or without resistance. Sending wounded and dead Russians home in a constant stream could shorten the occupation.
Yes, it would be terrible for the Ukrainians. No way I'm going to wish for them put their lives on the line from my comfortable chair far away from the consequences.
Still, they are going to do what they are going to do. If they choose resistance, I believe the aggressor will be at a disadvantage. I think in military circles it is recognized that paid conscripts are less willing to risk their lives in an invasion that at least some some recognize is wrong. Defenders who see their way of life under severe threat, not so much.
Veering to the topic of inflation, it was in the news today. I heard again the erroneous statement that "last month prices rose faster than they have in nearly forty years." No, they didn't. They rose faster between January 2021 and January 2022 than they did in any 12-month span between 1984 and 2020, but if you're looking for the worst single month ever, January 2022 wasn't it.
The biggest change in the PCE ex-food-and-energy index during the past twelve months was for April 2021, when it rose by 0.63%. In January 2022, it rose by 0.52%.
How can that be? I thought consumer spending was way above normal for the last year. Oh well... I did see that gas in my area jumped 25-30 cents a gallon these last couple of days. That'll slow things down. Here comes the oil price shock recession?
As for the poor folks in Ukraine. I wish them well. Their lives are going to suck for a long time. On the one hand, this is something we might have tried to prevent by dropping the 82 and 101st Airborne into Kiev and Kharkov. I generally oppose war and have, in principle, opposed all recent US wars of aggression in the middle east / Africa / Afghanistan. But as a defensive action, I would have tolerated this. Even if Ukraine is a fairly backward / corrupt country, they at least had a decent shot at becoming a relatively stable democracy. It would have been worth the risk.
On the other hand, this again illustrates that the awful "leader of the free world" rhetoric is just so much BS.
George Bush would rally an international coalition to liberate Ukraine. That's a joke today. Kuwait was worth saving... but not Ukraine. I guess. That was a long time ago.
So here is my wild prediction... The US is exposed: "absolute impotence" when it comes to foreign policy". Republicans and independents buy that line and give control of congress to the despicable republican party. Biden is impeached 3 or 4 times and the rest of his term is consumed by investigations. Putin breaks the will of NATO and all sanctions fade away by 2023. Trump wins election in 2024 (for real or by theft) and dissolves NATO completely in a triumphant summit with Putin in Moscow in March 2025.
Ha! Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
I'm kidding around of course. It all just awful. What else can you do?
Meanwhile...
WASHINGTON — The United States conducted a drone strike against Al Shabab militants in Somalia this week, the first such military action against the Qaeda affiliate in East Africa since August, the military’s Africa Command said on Thursday. The MQ-9 Reaper strike on Tuesday followed a Shabab attack on allied Somali forces in Duduble, about 40 miles northwest of Mogadishu, the capital, the command said in a statement.
I mean... if we can kill people in Somalia... Poor Ukraine must be even lower than them! Ouch.
We've spent the last 20 years building a military optimized for counter-insurgency ops. I suspect that our capabilities to wage a conventional war like the one we're seeing in Ukraine have atrophied.
Yesterday, Lt Gen Alfons Mais, Chief of the German Army, released a statement on the situation in Ukraine. He said:
"When, if not now, is the time to leave the Afghanistan mission behind us structurally and materially and to reposition ourselves, otherwise we will not be able to implement our constitutional mandate and our alliance obligations with any prospect of success."
"We've spent the last 20 years building a military optimized for counter-insurgency ops..."
I kinda disagree. I think we've spent the last 40+ years just drunkenly throwing away money. I don't think our military is optimized for anything other than moving taxpayer money into private pockets.
This deserves a few thousand words to do it properly, but this isn't the place for that. I'm tempted to cite some examples, but will refrain. Let's just look a a big picture. We are spending about the same in constant dollars as we were in 1968.
In 1968 we were up to our necks in a hot war in Vietnam with 1/2 million men deployed. We also maintained large forces in S. Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Europe as part of our goal to be able to fight 2.5 wars at the same time. Vietnam counted as a 1/2 war. I think US forces in Europe numbered about 300,000. Total uniformed servicemen were around 2.5 times what we have now. The Navy had about 3X as many ships. (And none of them were as dysfunctional as Ford carriers or Zumwalt destroyers.) We had vastly more combat aircraft and about 10 times as many nuclear warheads.
I'm not arguing that we were making good buying decisions in 1968. Vietnam was not a good buy. Who in God's name should want 30 or 40 thousand nukes? Most of the aircraft buys were stupid (that hasn't changed). But we sure bought a lot more for the buck. I think most of our defense dollars now just go into making rich people richer and assorted graft.
We ought to be able to buy 4 times the defense we have now for half the money.
However, there has to be some careful risk/benefit analysis going on here. In Kuwait we were not going toe-to-toe with the Russkies. Here we would be with all the apocalyptic possibilities that entails. Since nobody wants WWIII our options are constrained.
The presence of US troops might have been a deterrent. I mean… that’s the whole point. Now, of course, that ship has sailed. It’s really not even worth a debate. I do think, though, that perhaps it is time to put up or shut up… regardless of the strength of one’s opponent. The silly Islamic terrorists are a trivial threat compared to this. It’s not even close. The contrast in our response to some incident in Somalia and the Russian invasion is striking to me. The timing of it seems to expose the reality of US impotence even more clearly. It’s astonishing to me that the Biden administration would waste effort on Somalia given the stakes.
Things are happening…. Climate change, Chinese and Russian aggression, the disintegration of the US as a coherent political force. I wonder if, in the future, we’ll look back on this week in history and conclude that it was an inflection point. And not a good one.
Things could veer out of control if an intact Ukrainian army retreats to its eastern or southern border. Do NATO countries allow them entry? Or attempt to stop them? Lots of potential for excited Russians to claim "hot pursuit" and get engaged in hostilities with Polish or Romanian troops on the border. I imagine the Poles in particular would not need much of an excuse to kill Russians.
Remember Katyn Forrest!!!
BTW western border of course, not eastern.
‘Hot pursuit’ in international law has never applied to state actors such as armed forces, and is controversial even as applied to non-state actors. Russian military pursuing Ukrainians across a border would be invaders, period. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lKOoazT71dV02dXtoMRr4QKbgAfqMcx8/view
If the border was that of a NATO member, Article Five applies.
Yes, but both the US military effort to coax Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican Embassy & the song "Panama" by Van Halen offer rebuttal that running a little bit hot tonite is the cost of doing business on the battlefield.
(Sorry Kevin. Ukraine is all we want to talk about right now.)
I think repliers are also forgetting about the incredible fickleness of the American public when it comes to war:
I. Why is America so weak? Why aren't we sending troops in?
II. Our troops are being killed! I'm only voting for a president who will get our troops home.
III. The stupid president brought our troops home but now we look weak! I hate president. Vote for other party.
Too true. Phase III in particular is enabled by the mainstream press in the US. Not just Fox "news".