Two Grim Truths
There are rumors that North Korea is going to be sending an engineering battalion to back up Russian forces in done yet within the next month. If this holds out to be true, it exposes two grim realities for Russia in the United States. For Putin, it shows that his war is not going well and that he is unable to make progress without calling upon help from his allies. It's the second army in the world, indeed. So much for his multipolar world — the only multipolar countries turn out to be China and India, neither of which is including Russia in their polarity.
The darker reality is the abject failure of Jake Sullivan’s policy of avoiding escalation. There have been at least a dozen events that have shown that his policy doesn’t work, but this should be the nail in the coffin with another country joining Russia’s unprovoked imperialist invasion. I have a suspicion that when North Korea says “engineering battalion,” they mean a bunch of guys walking side by side across a field to find mines. In any case, the North Korean troops won’t make any difference beyond offering up more targets. Cluster munitions are nice that way. Poor bastards. I actually feel for the North Koreans — they never had a chance to know better. Russians did.
Jake Sullivan, three months ago. "My job is to worry about other threats too, like N. Korea. Through a combination of steady deterrence and steadfast diplomacy, I’m very optimistic we will stop the spread of conflict and create the conditions for de-escalation.”
Can we fire him already?
Sanctions? What sanctions?
Russia’s central bank says that the sanctions recently passed by the United States and EU might actually be working. The Bank of China is refusing transactions in the yuan, cutting Russia off from yet more sources of imported goods. The representative of the Russian Central Bank highlighted that this is causing problems because Russia’s economy is dependent upon exports and imports. It’s almost like the Western Nations understood how dependent Russia is on exports and imports and planned at this way. I only wish they could have enacted these sanctions from day one, but that might have caused a shock to prices in the West, and we have to keep the voters happy with their short-term attention spans. It’s all well and good to defend freedom and democracy around the world as long as it doesn’t cause gas to go up 50 cents, right? What are we, the Greatest Generation, planting victory gardens and rationing fuel to defeat fascism?
Videos I Won’t Share
I’m not even going to describe this one, but it’s pretty obvious that Russia is making their uniforms out of plastic because cotton just doesn’t burn like that, nor does it stick to the skin that way.
Train Derailments
There was a train derailment near the historically Ukrainian town of Sochi, where the Olympics were held in Russia some years ago. Seventy injured. Judging by the video, it looks like the roller bearings may have failed, according to some people who may or may not be experts on social media. Roller bearings are like cylindrical ball bearings and much harder to manufacture to spec than one would initially assume. Russia cannot manufacture high-quality bearings due to a lack of precision engineering equipment, and this has caused problems for the aviation and rail industries. Manufacturing tolerances for bearings are fractions of a fraction of a millimeter because many of them have to spin around in the same groove at exactly the same speed, or else they rub against each other.
Multipolarity Bad?
Rebuking Putin’s inane calls for a multipolar world, Li Qiang, China’s second-ranking leader who President Xi Jinping has tasked with managing economic affairs, called for working together and abolishing tribal thinking at the World Economic Forum Conference in China, known as “Summer Davos.”
There are two approaches to creating a multipolar world: the Chinese approach and the Russian approach. The Chinese approach involves massive investments in infrastructure, research, technology, and industry and forming diverse and mutually beneficial trade alliances with as many countries as possible.
The Russian approach involves complaining a lot and invading your neighbors.
I guess the only way we’ll ever know which approach works better is to wait for history to show us. Early signs seem to favor China.
News in Brief
A Russian man complained on social media that he was refused residency in Lithuania when he couldn’t answer the question, “Who does Crimea belong to?” at an interview with immigration officials. Lithuania is based. (I’m pretty sure I’m using that slang correctly. I think it means that Lithuania is awesome.)
The United States Supreme Court has released a judgment that Twitter is still called Twitter and not X. Elon Musk would not return my tweets for comment.
Russian military bloggers report that Ukraine has mined the entrance to the Bay of Sevastopol. This was done with sea drones. Ukraine has disabled the Russian Navy with some fancy remote control speedboats.
Well, I’m on the road today in Lviv and riding all of this on my phone, so I apologize for any spelling errors. I wish you the very best of whatever day of the week this is. God, I love being retired. Saturday? Is it Saturday?