billbindc

In all seriousness, I'm actually in business but I also interact quite a bit with the 'technocracy' (if we can call that a thing). I find that business people are far more driven by impression and group think than bureaucrats or even pols. Why? Because most of them work in big organizations where outre opinions are likely to mark you out...especially if those opinions don't add to or might detract from the main functioning of the organization (to make money) while people on the government or political side of things who are really ambitious spend their time trying to suss out that edge case that makes them look smarter than anyone else. I've spent too many years listening to contractors telling me about the inevitability of self driving cars, or the unstoppable rise of China or how Y2K was going to be a big deal to take them very seriously. The vox populi of the business class is generally just the vox populi of a class talking to itself. Think about how many times you've heard someone say that Google/Apple/Tesla/RandoSiliconVCFund have spent X billion on a thing so that means it's inevitable and it hasn't actually happened and then decide whether that's who you want to take your cues from.

Weird. That's when I find technocrats to be their most honest.

Really? From my experience, nobody is as full of **** as a room full of drunk Chinese businessmen...or really any room of businessmen.

As Michael Kofman likes to drone on about...things are contingent. But if it makes you feel any better, polling this early generally does a dismal job of predicting the chances for an incumbent and there a many, many people working hard to avoid that outcome. Nobody dismisses the chances of the 'vermin' spewing fascist this time.

China is in a win-win in a very narrow sense. It gets more of a resource hinterland in Siberia but it also has to take on security that will add to its already huge domestic concerns in that arena. Also, China loses in any situation in which the US concentrates on the problem China presents to American hegemony. While the world mostly talks about Ukraine, there are tectonic changes happening in NE Asia that amount to a NATO just-for-China driven by the Biden administration and well placed concerns about Chinese aggression in front line states. Japan and South Korean don't sign on to defend each other in a world that's not taking the direction Xi has indicated seriously. That's an unmitigatedly bad outcome for a regime that may have imagined it could have translated domestic unrest into revanchist expansion. Add in the fact that China isn't just not going to overtake the US economically but is already losing ground and it starts to look more like Beijing is making the best of it rather than forging ahead to domination.

Meh. China resolved its strategic problem with migratory Asia itself through conquest, infrastructure and diplomacy before the Russians swept in. Ironically, that set it up for a period of inattention to defense just as Europe came calling from the opposite direction.

The very definition of a "major strategic victory" seems to have morphed into only three quarters f*cking up an invasion it never should have made in the first place. Yeah...no.

Also, in the US housing is much more expensive because we live in far more square footage than we used to per capita. The 'good ole days'....weren't.

Yet another illustration of how Russia continues to be juked out of its shoes on the military intelligence front in this war. The Biden administration signaled strenuously that ATACMS were being delayed. It then sent them, the Ukrainians trained on them, set up a large scale attack and the Russians apparently missed it all completely. Now begins the scramble to pull Russian assets back out of range. All quite well executed.

Not a link. I mean...if you were Hamas looking at reporting since 2/22 that makes it clear the US is literally reading over Putin's shoulder are you going to coordinate a highly secrecy dependent attack on Israel with Moscow? Categorically no.

Exit polls show a 5 point margin and a 248 seat majority for the (small d) democrats. But *exit polls* so hang in there.

The motte was a bad argument. The bailey here is just redefining the motte.

Two operations highly dependent on operational security. Both against opponents with strong skills in intelligence, ISR, sigint. Both from regimes notorious for their implacable cultures of control and suspicion of outsiders. No. Categorically.

This. While we are all watching (with disappointment so far) the Zaporizhzhia offensive, the Russian army has already wound down the offensive at Avdiivka and removed the majority of it's fleet out of an untenable situation in Sevastopol. In other words, Russia has essentially given up on the possibility of a strategic offensive by land and has lost their most important naval asset in the Black Sea besides the fleet itself. A big deal.

Obvious thing is obvious (German press notwithstanding):

And another:

Putin's proxies seem dead set on giving Israel reasons to help Ukraine:

Fascinating to watch various Russian figures (MPS, GRU fonts, Dugin) jump in with statements that Russia is on Iran/Hamas' side. Strategic idiocy but the demands of the ethnonationalist impulse will out.

If pressed, I would say that any significant effect on Iranian aid to Russia will only come if Hezbollah jumps in with both feet and there's a full bore war in Lebanon. Other than that, the effects are going to be quite limited. I am getting the feeling that there's a not small chance that this changes Israeli attitudes towards the war in Ukraine. When the Gaza incursions are somewhat sorted out, we may see some interesting things.

I will be legitimately surprised if there was any significant Russian help given Hamas in setting up this operation. Visibility maybe to what was coming but the Russian state is struggling to hold onto Verbove and I seriously doubt they have the bandwidth for much more. That said, never underestimate the GRU's ability to grab a hot stove with both hands:

Exact timing? Who knows. But in the larger picture, KSA and Israel are normalizing relations and that process is happening in a milieu where the importance of the Palestine issue is declining. Hamas is attempting to regain the leverage lost.

I assume you've read Watling's new book? Amazing. He'll be at Wilson Center on Wednesday for any DC area grogs: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/arms-future-book-launch-dr-jack-watling

It's important to remember when looking at the timing that Putin had decided to take this step sometime before April of 2021...which is when the Biden administration began telling allies it was coming. They weren't saying 'if' at that point, they were saying 'when' and they had it down almost to the date (they were talking about the effect of the Olympics on Putin's process already). What had happened by April of that year? Merkel and the Christian Democrats were out, Navalny had been arrested in concert with increased repression in Russia, the US had announced it was going to go ahead with the Afghanistan pullout and of course there had just been an attempted coup in the United States. The why of the invasion was obviously an revanchist political obsession. The what went wrong of the invasion was obviously the result of a world class intelligence and military miscalculation. The when? Pretty clearly Putin looked at what he was seeing and imagined that there wasn't going to be a better time to take the chance.

Neither Sinema, Adams or Bloomberg is ever likely to win another Democratic primary in their lives. Middle of the caucus Democrats are also far to the left of Bush/Reagan era conservatives...and most Bush/Reagan era Democrats on trade, unions, gay marriage, abortion, etc. You are correct that The Left is not the Democratic base but by pretty much every measure Democrats have become more liberal over the last decades. https://news.gallup.com/poll/246806/understanding-shifts-democratic-party-ideology.aspx

Jim (or as we like to call him around here "Gym") Jordan is the least likely of candidates. About a third of the GOP caucus hates him and that's not a great way to win the spot.