You can tell Putin is far more scared of us than we are of him because of how much he talks about how he isn't scared of us and the regular threats that are made. It is the small dog putting up the big front, which is why so many small dogs tend to be yappy and "aggressive."
Given Russian performance so far, it is no wonder that we aren't that scared.... and he is.
I'd say it's the other way around given how squeamish the Biden admin has been about sending weapons into Ukraine in a timely manner, and how lackluster the international community's response has been to things like Syria using chemical weapons on its own people or Russia taking Crimea the year after. Western weakness--Syria, Crimea, Afghan withdrawal, etc.--signals to Russia that we're willing to allow him to get away with more than what he would have been able to pre-9/11 because we're increasingly isolationist and even squeamish about arming allies in a timely manner. "When you have nukes, they let you do it" is what Putin sees right now.
And I wouldn't sleep on the Russian military just yet. They're learning every month how to fight modern state-on-state conflicts in a way that we haven't had real experience in. What they're showing us is that they're able to mobilize a whole lot of people during high-attrition conflict at a time when our contract force isn't keeping up with the numbers it needs to recruit. How many Americans do you think are heading to the recruiting office if we get into a shooting war with Russia? Now compare that to the number of MOBICs they can drum up. Putin can stomp his feet and 5 months later 135,000 new conscripts come out of the ground. Can't do that here.
The administration is more fearful of domestic political outcomes than they are the Russians. Most (actually democratic) leadership groups are almost always more afraid of the domestic political blowback than the enemy.
The enemy can only kill you. ;) The domesstic politics can get you out of office/graft/influence/power.
The US lets people get away with shit because there is no domestic political will for action (and they know it) barring direct attacks on the US homeland. When a good quarter of your population is on the side of the enemy (for various domestic political reasons), you tread carefully. I think it is less "if you have nukes they let you do it," and more, crap doing something could cost us the next election.
There is a narrow path to tread there, and so far Putin has done a pretty good job treading it (and fostering domestic political problems in the US).
The Russian military is probably better now than it was at the start, simply because of experience gained and the various revelations of incompetence and corruption. It doesn't mean that it is great.
Russians have always been mass-oriented. It has been their go-to "strategy for basically forever--while the US (post industrial revolution) has been about machines fighting.. and the developments we have been seeing are kind of in our sweet spot, once you get past the traditional reluctance for military leadership to embrace change (especially when that leadership love being pilots and pilots are going to be among the first replaced).
"The US lets people get away with shit because there is no domestic political will for action (and they know it) barring direct attacks on the US homeland."
This is exactly what Russia knows, and it's exactly why they've been doing what they're doing since 2013 (helping Syria first and then the rest in Ukraine). They understand that after 20 years of GWoT failures, the American public's political reservoir for foreign conflicts is tapped out barring a fresh attack on the homeland or on our forces abroad or on NATO partners (And even that is iffy at this point), so all they have to do is commit harder than the American people are willing to in the conflicts they start with others and they can outlast us in terms of political will.
"The Russian military is probably better now than it was at the start, simply because of experience gained and the various revelations of incompetence and corruption. It doesn't mean that it is great."
They don't have to be great, they just have to inflict high enough casualties against the US in a US v Russia war and then wait for our recruiting structure to collapse. If we don't replenish the bodies they kill/wound then our military depletes itself via attrition. If we don't have a draft on the books and nobody is joining after the current contract force bites a real hard bullet then their task gets easier and easier with time--even if they have to conscript more MOBICs along the way due to what we attrite from them.
Being mass-oriented works if your enemy has to do an expeditionary campaign to the other side of the world that it can't continuously replenish because it doesn't have a conscription system. The same goes for other NATO members.
Obama's red line in Syria wasn't. I really, really wish I knew what was said between people who weren't officially at some bar in a European city that made the line go away while the casks of ammonia kept on dropping.
The U.K. openly authorized Ukraine to use maximum-range Storm Shadows to strike targets in Russia.
Russia threatened to retaliate by striking targets in the U.K. if this happens, but the U.K. is not afraid, nor should they be.
Russia is just not going to launch a first strike against NATO no matter what we give Ukraine or what Ukraine does with it (nuclear weapons excepted). The Brits know this, and we should know it after long-range ATACMS strikes were an escalation nothingburger. We should start acting like we know it.
It should be noted that Russia has repeatedly attacked the UK in the last two decades, including the assassination of a Russian dissident with a radioisotope in 2006 and a nerve agent attack on British soil in 2018 which killed a British woman. Britain has shown remarkable forbearance in dealing with Putin, and his existing record of brutal murders in the UK renders his threats somewhat meaningless - he's already been doing in peacetime what he is now threatening to do in a time of war.
I will say, this current batch of House Republicans did mandate the delivery of maximum-range ATACMs. If we can somehow get the Republican Party back on the train of "Biden is weak on Ukraine! A real President would kick ass and take names!", we'd be in great shape.
That isn’t happening. The majority of republicans don’t support it. The majority of republican voters don’t support it.
Atacms will have a limited impact on this war. Sure it will help for a bit but then Russia will adjust and it will go back to the grind we have been seeing for the last year.
Football's rise as the country's pasttime coincided with the rise of TV. Its a sport that translates very well to television, with the top and bottom of the screen largely correlating to the sidelines. It also works well with Basketball and Hockey, and why those sports are also larger and growing in audiences as well.
Baseball does not. It requires lots of cuts and coordination between cameras, with the ball outside of the shot quite often, and a difficulty in focusing on two things at once--the ball and the baserunner(s).
Racing has that problem as well, but an additional one-- you have to context of the speeds involved. On the screen, its hard to tell the difference between a car going 200 MPH and one going 150; the only context is how fast other cars are going, but factor in various track shapes from track to track and its hard for casual fans to get into it. Of course, considering NASCAR gets high TV ratings, (shows how much I know!) and has some of the largest in-person attendance of any sport, it could be argued that that is the actual current National Pasttime.
Lastly, considering you mentioned the intersection of baseball and public service, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my favorite ballplayer of all time, Moe Berg. If you've never heard of him, you wouldn't be the only one, but he lived one of the most interesting lives of any American ballplayer. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom which he declined, saying what he did for country was his duty as an American. When he died, his family accepted it posthumously and the medal is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. If it sounds interesting to you or the teeming millions on Bulwark, I recommend looking him up on Google to find out what he did.
I think Putin is, in fact, incredibly fearful of the West. Ukraine doesn't get invaded if the Putin regime is confident in their demographic and economic future.
I'm still a bit puzzled on the *why* though. Prestige? Russia seemed to have a pretty nice future set up as a 'managed' democracy that would do business with the democratic nation states of the former 'first' world. What changed?
Maybe nothing. In university I had a (Estonian) professor who said that the intersection of criminal organizations, ex-KGB, and the oligarchs was a very bad thing for the future of Russia and Europe. He didn't believe any of these guys would be interested in a society governed by rule of law or equitable relations with their neighbours. The love of money and power motivated these guys, and now that they'd taken over the country, it was just a matter of time before things got bad again.
And things got bad again. I wish I remembered that when I was in my 'Amcon' reading phase, and believed that 'nATo eXPansION' was behind all of Europe's problems on the eastern frontier.
I might be way off base here but, imo, the reason is relatively simple. The ex-KGB lieutenant colonel has recurring wet dreams of returning *all* of the previous Soviet Union countries back into Russian hegemony. Putin is craving "the good old days."
I agree this is part of the motivation, but Putin also wants to prevent successful democratic/westernized ex-Soviet republics next door which might invite questions or risk to his regime.
I think this is a big part of it, along with all those ex-soviet republics and non-Russian citizens of Russia. I have to think there's a bit of, "expand or die" in the Russian thinking. Their heartland is open to invasion from many sides, so expansion to defensible borders is something I see cited from time to time.
Beyond that, if they don't look strong and vibrant, how long are they going to keep Siberia from China? I heard that China is already doing a soft invasion of sorts. A weak Russia is going to lose and lose and lose on front after front.
I don't see how Formula 1 racing becomes America's sport. first, on TV it is more boring than golf. Also, there won't be too many kids driving up and down the streets in mini-formulas 1s at 10 years-old. Football is it for the south and mid-west. But in more educated areas, parents don't want their kids brains beaten in before they get to college. Around here, the hardest high school teams to make are basketball and soccer, both boys and girls. They don't need much equipment and the risk of injury is lower. It makes me sad to see how commercialized playing the sport has become, but more than baseball, I still see lots of kids organizing their own games of soccer and basketball.
This is my take as well, with the added point that baseball season runs through the hottest part of the year. I don't think it's an accident that the most popular baseball teams are in NYC, Chicago, Boston and Cleveland, and places where it's just pleasant to be outside on a summer evening. (I think Tampa and Miami and the TX teams have retractable roofs.) This at least partially accounts for why baseball isn't as popular a pastime down south.
International treaties are only as strong as their enforcement mechanisms, just as domestic laws are only as strong as the institutions that have men with guns on the payroll who uphold them. Putin understands that international treaties don't have much teeth to them, that the UN's military is dwarfed by his own, and that western nations in Europe and North America are not willing to enforce international treaties. What he's doing is taking a realistic view of a dead letter via the west's lack of commitment to enforce it. This has been evident since at least the 2013 Syrian civil war when Bashar Al Assad used chemical weapons on his own people and didn't face any military consequences for it. The writing was on the wall, and Putin was reading it. It's no wonder he took Crimea the very next year. If the west isn't willing to enforce international law and the UN has a weak military, then nothing is going to stand in the way of the military desires of the eastern powers. Period. The only international piece of paper that might have any teeth left to it is NATO's Article V, and even that is starting to look potentially weakened via what Trump and MAGA's isolationism have said about it--the US being the only real show in town via NATO when it comes to projectable and readied military strength.
Why is Russia on the UN Security Council when it was the USSR that signed the charter? Because they have nukes? That can’t be the only reason. They must be called to account for ignoring agreements. Putin is already a wanted criminal with a warrant for his arrest. Is Russia’s seat on the Security Council legitimate considering their hostility to international law? Is there no mechanism to change membership of that body? Does it all depend on the Russians dealing with Putin on their own terms?
Who is going to call them to account? Who is going to send the men over there to arrest him? Even if you kick them off of the UNSC, the UN isn't going to send the blue helmets over there to detain him by force now are they? That is what a toothless authority looks like.
Don't miss George Conway's podcast. This experienced lawyer can inform you and make you laugh. I am not a fan of podcasts at all, but I make an exception for George.
Except that I love podcasts. I garden and listen to podcasts at this time of year and have learned to keep the wires of my earbuds inside my shirt by now.
Thanks for the rec. I, too, am not a fan of podcasts (can't sit still, and if I try to listen while doing anything else, my monkey-brain gets distracted) but I have thought a few times that I might give Mr. Conway's a listen...
"No wonder it’s booming in the United States. In 2018, about 554,000 Americans watched each grand prix. By 2022, it was more than 1.2 million."
Booming? Growing fast, maybe, but booming? Just by way of comparison, 7.2 million people watched "Young Sheldon" last week. If you don't know what that is, thank you for helping me make my point.
I haven't stopped letting out my sigh of relief that we finally have authorized aid for Ukraine. It's the best thing that happened to me this year and I suspect it will still be the best thing on the December 31.
Just think how many times Putin has rattled the nuclear saber and not pulled the trigger. Since winds prevail from west to east, all the excess radiation will land on southern Russia—where Putin doesn't give a damn about the inhabitants.
However, Putin's use of nuclear weapons will give us the best possible excuse to get rid of him. I suggest 100 cruise missiles landing on the Kremlin.
Yes, add my sigh of relief to yours, and I share your fear that November might not bring an even better thing to happen.
Re Putin's use of nuclear weapons, I recommend a more subtle but tried and true method. In Russia, isn't falling off a balcony the most unassuming method of all of retiring someone? And it wouldn't require any collateral damage the way 100 cruise missiles might.
Putin's power and quite possibly his life is on the line here, so yes, he's scared. But as anyone knows, that the time when an animal is most dangerous.
For me, the most critical aspect of all this is that Donald Trump is not the president dealing with this. Because either he'd have long since ended any American aid, even assuming that he'd initially okayed, it, or he'd have done something really foolish and stirred Putin to something even worse.
I think your analysis of Russia and their next possible moves (as well as ours) misses one big item -- Putin puts no value whatsoever on a human life (except his and possibly that of his mistress).
I know I am in the minority here but I think American football is one of the most boring spectator sports imaginable. Most spectators are unable to see most of the action, they only see the results. Baseball in contrast requires athleticism, concentration and intellectual discipline. A third baseman may go an entire game without touching the ball or make an amazing play on a line drive down the line. Aussie Football is a much better spectator sport than its American cousin.
I once attended a NFL game in the 1980s -- Bears v Giants in soldiers field/Chicago. The temperature was around 20 below zero. The bears won 9 to 3 (all field goals) and I dont think either team got the ball much past the 40 yard line
I agree re football. I can't handle it. There's so little action, and the action that occurs guarantees brain damage for at least a handful of players. It's a stupid, stupid sport.
I think baseball's popularity suffered (in part) because of the 3TO problem and things like the shift. Homers are great for results but not great viewing. Same with watching elite-elite-elite fielders gobble up every ground ball. That stuff isn't what makes baseball a fun sport to watch and play.
As a long term baseball fan I think the problem is too many home runs and strike outs. Pitching has gotten really tough. I would like to see things changed. Some ideas -- shorten the distance between the bases by 5 feet. This means that runners could be out ground balls more frequently. Secondly reduce the number of pitchers. One idea would be restrict a team to no more than 3 pitchers per game or perhaps prohibit pitching changes in the middle of an inning.
I agree about football, but I also feel the same about baseball. (I know, very unamerican.). Not being at all athletic, the sports I do kind of like to watch are soccer and basketball, because there’s always movement happening, and not all this time with the players just standing around for Pete’s sake.
This whole thing is fascinating. Well done, Ben. But honestly for the life of me I don't understand car racing of any kind. And I don't even want to try to understand.
If you've never seen it, google "George Carlin on the difference between football and baseball." It is a funny and spot-on take by the master comedian.
You can tell Putin is far more scared of us than we are of him because of how much he talks about how he isn't scared of us and the regular threats that are made. It is the small dog putting up the big front, which is why so many small dogs tend to be yappy and "aggressive."
Given Russian performance so far, it is no wonder that we aren't that scared.... and he is.
I'd say it's the other way around given how squeamish the Biden admin has been about sending weapons into Ukraine in a timely manner, and how lackluster the international community's response has been to things like Syria using chemical weapons on its own people or Russia taking Crimea the year after. Western weakness--Syria, Crimea, Afghan withdrawal, etc.--signals to Russia that we're willing to allow him to get away with more than what he would have been able to pre-9/11 because we're increasingly isolationist and even squeamish about arming allies in a timely manner. "When you have nukes, they let you do it" is what Putin sees right now.
And I wouldn't sleep on the Russian military just yet. They're learning every month how to fight modern state-on-state conflicts in a way that we haven't had real experience in. What they're showing us is that they're able to mobilize a whole lot of people during high-attrition conflict at a time when our contract force isn't keeping up with the numbers it needs to recruit. How many Americans do you think are heading to the recruiting office if we get into a shooting war with Russia? Now compare that to the number of MOBICs they can drum up. Putin can stomp his feet and 5 months later 135,000 new conscripts come out of the ground. Can't do that here.
The administration is more fearful of domestic political outcomes than they are the Russians. Most (actually democratic) leadership groups are almost always more afraid of the domestic political blowback than the enemy.
The enemy can only kill you. ;) The domesstic politics can get you out of office/graft/influence/power.
The US lets people get away with shit because there is no domestic political will for action (and they know it) barring direct attacks on the US homeland. When a good quarter of your population is on the side of the enemy (for various domestic political reasons), you tread carefully. I think it is less "if you have nukes they let you do it," and more, crap doing something could cost us the next election.
There is a narrow path to tread there, and so far Putin has done a pretty good job treading it (and fostering domestic political problems in the US).
The Russian military is probably better now than it was at the start, simply because of experience gained and the various revelations of incompetence and corruption. It doesn't mean that it is great.
Russians have always been mass-oriented. It has been their go-to "strategy for basically forever--while the US (post industrial revolution) has been about machines fighting.. and the developments we have been seeing are kind of in our sweet spot, once you get past the traditional reluctance for military leadership to embrace change (especially when that leadership love being pilots and pilots are going to be among the first replaced).
"The US lets people get away with shit because there is no domestic political will for action (and they know it) barring direct attacks on the US homeland."
This is exactly what Russia knows, and it's exactly why they've been doing what they're doing since 2013 (helping Syria first and then the rest in Ukraine). They understand that after 20 years of GWoT failures, the American public's political reservoir for foreign conflicts is tapped out barring a fresh attack on the homeland or on our forces abroad or on NATO partners (And even that is iffy at this point), so all they have to do is commit harder than the American people are willing to in the conflicts they start with others and they can outlast us in terms of political will.
"The Russian military is probably better now than it was at the start, simply because of experience gained and the various revelations of incompetence and corruption. It doesn't mean that it is great."
They don't have to be great, they just have to inflict high enough casualties against the US in a US v Russia war and then wait for our recruiting structure to collapse. If we don't replenish the bodies they kill/wound then our military depletes itself via attrition. If we don't have a draft on the books and nobody is joining after the current contract force bites a real hard bullet then their task gets easier and easier with time--even if they have to conscript more MOBICs along the way due to what we attrite from them.
Being mass-oriented works if your enemy has to do an expeditionary campaign to the other side of the world that it can't continuously replenish because it doesn't have a conscription system. The same goes for other NATO members.
See Korea in the 50s and the stalemate the Chinese forced. And we and our allies had ongoing drafts, not to mention reservists.
Yup. The Chinese had us surrounded something like 9-to-1 at the Chosen Reservoir.
Obama's red line in Syria wasn't. I really, really wish I knew what was said between people who weren't officially at some bar in a European city that made the line go away while the casks of ammonia kept on dropping.
The U.K. openly authorized Ukraine to use maximum-range Storm Shadows to strike targets in Russia.
Russia threatened to retaliate by striking targets in the U.K. if this happens, but the U.K. is not afraid, nor should they be.
Russia is just not going to launch a first strike against NATO no matter what we give Ukraine or what Ukraine does with it (nuclear weapons excepted). The Brits know this, and we should know it after long-range ATACMS strikes were an escalation nothingburger. We should start acting like we know it.
It should be noted that Russia has repeatedly attacked the UK in the last two decades, including the assassination of a Russian dissident with a radioisotope in 2006 and a nerve agent attack on British soil in 2018 which killed a British woman. Britain has shown remarkable forbearance in dealing with Putin, and his existing record of brutal murders in the UK renders his threats somewhat meaningless - he's already been doing in peacetime what he is now threatening to do in a time of war.
Hard to do with this current batch of house republicans
I will say, this current batch of House Republicans did mandate the delivery of maximum-range ATACMs. If we can somehow get the Republican Party back on the train of "Biden is weak on Ukraine! A real President would kick ass and take names!", we'd be in great shape.
That isn’t happening. The majority of republicans don’t support it. The majority of republican voters don’t support it.
Atacms will have a limited impact on this war. Sure it will help for a bit but then Russia will adjust and it will go back to the grind we have been seeing for the last year.
Ukraine needs a draft asap.
Football's rise as the country's pasttime coincided with the rise of TV. Its a sport that translates very well to television, with the top and bottom of the screen largely correlating to the sidelines. It also works well with Basketball and Hockey, and why those sports are also larger and growing in audiences as well.
Baseball does not. It requires lots of cuts and coordination between cameras, with the ball outside of the shot quite often, and a difficulty in focusing on two things at once--the ball and the baserunner(s).
Racing has that problem as well, but an additional one-- you have to context of the speeds involved. On the screen, its hard to tell the difference between a car going 200 MPH and one going 150; the only context is how fast other cars are going, but factor in various track shapes from track to track and its hard for casual fans to get into it. Of course, considering NASCAR gets high TV ratings, (shows how much I know!) and has some of the largest in-person attendance of any sport, it could be argued that that is the actual current National Pasttime.
Lastly, considering you mentioned the intersection of baseball and public service, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my favorite ballplayer of all time, Moe Berg. If you've never heard of him, you wouldn't be the only one, but he lived one of the most interesting lives of any American ballplayer. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom which he declined, saying what he did for country was his duty as an American. When he died, his family accepted it posthumously and the medal is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. If it sounds interesting to you or the teeming millions on Bulwark, I recommend looking him up on Google to find out what he did.
I took your advice and looked him up. Wow! What an incredible story.
After reading your comment I also looked up Moe Berg. Fascinating story!
I know, right?!?
I also like this little tidbit... "His is the only baseball card on display at the CIA Headquarters."
We saw an excellent movie about him; I think it might have been on CNN
I think Putin is, in fact, incredibly fearful of the West. Ukraine doesn't get invaded if the Putin regime is confident in their demographic and economic future.
I'm still a bit puzzled on the *why* though. Prestige? Russia seemed to have a pretty nice future set up as a 'managed' democracy that would do business with the democratic nation states of the former 'first' world. What changed?
Maybe nothing. In university I had a (Estonian) professor who said that the intersection of criminal organizations, ex-KGB, and the oligarchs was a very bad thing for the future of Russia and Europe. He didn't believe any of these guys would be interested in a society governed by rule of law or equitable relations with their neighbours. The love of money and power motivated these guys, and now that they'd taken over the country, it was just a matter of time before things got bad again.
And things got bad again. I wish I remembered that when I was in my 'Amcon' reading phase, and believed that 'nATo eXPansION' was behind all of Europe's problems on the eastern frontier.
@CEO:
"I'm still a bit puzzled on the *why* though."
I might be way off base here but, imo, the reason is relatively simple. The ex-KGB lieutenant colonel has recurring wet dreams of returning *all* of the previous Soviet Union countries back into Russian hegemony. Putin is craving "the good old days."
fnord
A.k.a. "Make Russia/CCCP Great Again".
I agree this is part of the motivation, but Putin also wants to prevent successful democratic/westernized ex-Soviet republics next door which might invite questions or risk to his regime.
I think this is a big part of it, along with all those ex-soviet republics and non-Russian citizens of Russia. I have to think there's a bit of, "expand or die" in the Russian thinking. Their heartland is open to invasion from many sides, so expansion to defensible borders is something I see cited from time to time.
Beyond that, if they don't look strong and vibrant, how long are they going to keep Siberia from China? I heard that China is already doing a soft invasion of sorts. A weak Russia is going to lose and lose and lose on front after front.
Sounds like the MAGA folks here
I don't see how Formula 1 racing becomes America's sport. first, on TV it is more boring than golf. Also, there won't be too many kids driving up and down the streets in mini-formulas 1s at 10 years-old. Football is it for the south and mid-west. But in more educated areas, parents don't want their kids brains beaten in before they get to college. Around here, the hardest high school teams to make are basketball and soccer, both boys and girls. They don't need much equipment and the risk of injury is lower. It makes me sad to see how commercialized playing the sport has become, but more than baseball, I still see lots of kids organizing their own games of soccer and basketball.
This is my take as well, with the added point that baseball season runs through the hottest part of the year. I don't think it's an accident that the most popular baseball teams are in NYC, Chicago, Boston and Cleveland, and places where it's just pleasant to be outside on a summer evening. (I think Tampa and Miami and the TX teams have retractable roofs.) This at least partially accounts for why baseball isn't as popular a pastime down south.
International treaties are only as strong as their enforcement mechanisms, just as domestic laws are only as strong as the institutions that have men with guns on the payroll who uphold them. Putin understands that international treaties don't have much teeth to them, that the UN's military is dwarfed by his own, and that western nations in Europe and North America are not willing to enforce international treaties. What he's doing is taking a realistic view of a dead letter via the west's lack of commitment to enforce it. This has been evident since at least the 2013 Syrian civil war when Bashar Al Assad used chemical weapons on his own people and didn't face any military consequences for it. The writing was on the wall, and Putin was reading it. It's no wonder he took Crimea the very next year. If the west isn't willing to enforce international law and the UN has a weak military, then nothing is going to stand in the way of the military desires of the eastern powers. Period. The only international piece of paper that might have any teeth left to it is NATO's Article V, and even that is starting to look potentially weakened via what Trump and MAGA's isolationism have said about it--the US being the only real show in town via NATO when it comes to projectable and readied military strength.
Why is Russia on the UN Security Council when it was the USSR that signed the charter? Because they have nukes? That can’t be the only reason. They must be called to account for ignoring agreements. Putin is already a wanted criminal with a warrant for his arrest. Is Russia’s seat on the Security Council legitimate considering their hostility to international law? Is there no mechanism to change membership of that body? Does it all depend on the Russians dealing with Putin on their own terms?
Who is going to call them to account? Who is going to send the men over there to arrest him? Even if you kick them off of the UNSC, the UN isn't going to send the blue helmets over there to detain him by force now are they? That is what a toothless authority looks like.
The Russians will have to do it.
Good luck getting them to do it. It ain't exactly 1917 or 1989 vibes over there right now.
Happy birthday to JVL! Enjoy your time off.
Unsolicited advice to Bulwark subscribers:
Don't miss George Conway's podcast. This experienced lawyer can inform you and make you laugh. I am not a fan of podcasts at all, but I make an exception for George.
Yup, George is good. Sarah too!
Except that I love podcasts. I garden and listen to podcasts at this time of year and have learned to keep the wires of my earbuds inside my shirt by now.
Thanks for the rec. I, too, am not a fan of podcasts (can't sit still, and if I try to listen while doing anything else, my monkey-brain gets distracted) but I have thought a few times that I might give Mr. Conway's a listen...
I have same problem. Listen while walking or running. You get some exercise and concentrate on what is being said instead of what you are doing
Fun fact about tear gas: it's legal to use against your own civilians. (Well, not fun, but a true fact.)
"No wonder it’s booming in the United States. In 2018, about 554,000 Americans watched each grand prix. By 2022, it was more than 1.2 million."
Booming? Growing fast, maybe, but booming? Just by way of comparison, 7.2 million people watched "Young Sheldon" last week. If you don't know what that is, thank you for helping me make my point.
I haven't stopped letting out my sigh of relief that we finally have authorized aid for Ukraine. It's the best thing that happened to me this year and I suspect it will still be the best thing on the December 31.
Just think how many times Putin has rattled the nuclear saber and not pulled the trigger. Since winds prevail from west to east, all the excess radiation will land on southern Russia—where Putin doesn't give a damn about the inhabitants.
However, Putin's use of nuclear weapons will give us the best possible excuse to get rid of him. I suggest 100 cruise missiles landing on the Kremlin.
Or maybe something not so obvious -- like falling off a balcony.
Yes, add my sigh of relief to yours, and I share your fear that November might not bring an even better thing to happen.
Re Putin's use of nuclear weapons, I recommend a more subtle but tried and true method. In Russia, isn't falling off a balcony the most unassuming method of all of retiring someone? And it wouldn't require any collateral damage the way 100 cruise missiles might.
Putin's power and quite possibly his life is on the line here, so yes, he's scared. But as anyone knows, that the time when an animal is most dangerous.
For me, the most critical aspect of all this is that Donald Trump is not the president dealing with this. Because either he'd have long since ended any American aid, even assuming that he'd initially okayed, it, or he'd have done something really foolish and stirred Putin to something even worse.
TFG's foolishness is exceeded only by his selfishness.
I think your analysis of Russia and their next possible moves (as well as ours) misses one big item -- Putin puts no value whatsoever on a human life (except his and possibly that of his mistress).
I know I am in the minority here but I think American football is one of the most boring spectator sports imaginable. Most spectators are unable to see most of the action, they only see the results. Baseball in contrast requires athleticism, concentration and intellectual discipline. A third baseman may go an entire game without touching the ball or make an amazing play on a line drive down the line. Aussie Football is a much better spectator sport than its American cousin.
I once attended a NFL game in the 1980s -- Bears v Giants in soldiers field/Chicago. The temperature was around 20 below zero. The bears won 9 to 3 (all field goals) and I dont think either team got the ball much past the 40 yard line
I agree re football. I can't handle it. There's so little action, and the action that occurs guarantees brain damage for at least a handful of players. It's a stupid, stupid sport.
I think baseball's popularity suffered (in part) because of the 3TO problem and things like the shift. Homers are great for results but not great viewing. Same with watching elite-elite-elite fielders gobble up every ground ball. That stuff isn't what makes baseball a fun sport to watch and play.
As a long term baseball fan I think the problem is too many home runs and strike outs. Pitching has gotten really tough. I would like to see things changed. Some ideas -- shorten the distance between the bases by 5 feet. This means that runners could be out ground balls more frequently. Secondly reduce the number of pitchers. One idea would be restrict a team to no more than 3 pitchers per game or perhaps prohibit pitching changes in the middle of an inning.
I agree about football, but I also feel the same about baseball. (I know, very unamerican.). Not being at all athletic, the sports I do kind of like to watch are soccer and basketball, because there’s always movement happening, and not all this time with the players just standing around for Pete’s sake.
The incessant-seeming reviews make football hard for me to watch.
This whole thing is fascinating. Well done, Ben. But honestly for the life of me I don't understand car racing of any kind. And I don't even want to try to understand.
If you've never seen it, google "George Carlin on the difference between football and baseball." It is a funny and spot-on take by the master comedian.