gehringer_2

Putin is too machismo to stop. The world can only wait and hope some mechanism remains inside Moscow capable of upholding KGB tradition and putting a bullet in the back of the neck of an asset that has outlived its usefulness to the Rodina.

That's 'moran' to you. We have standards around hear.

HaHa. I don't how anyone can still be so naive to pay attention to twit 'trends.' They are right up there with 'reality' TV when it comes to .....real.

Rats jumping off a sinking ship?

this has been curious. There was video of Russian helos buzzing around the first day, but not much else. The other thing that is a little off is there is a difference to your average Russian between Chechnya and/or Syria and Ukraine. They probably didn't give a fig about how what was left standing by the Russian army in either of those places but if they destroy Ukraine to take it, even Putin has to have a sense that becomes a Pyrrhic victory. At this point we are pretty much writing him off as irrational so we have sort of stopped talking about whether things make sense I guess.

Yeah - they are little behind the curve. BP and Shell out, Microsoft moved within hours to shut down a Russian hack a couple of days ago, Facebook closing the checkbook for Russian sites, Google controlling map data, Finland talking about NATO, Germans writing $100 billion checks, Switzerland (!) freezing assets. I'm sure in his wildest dreams Putin never anticipated the length and breadth of the opposition he was going to galvanize. How long can it be before Xi sees which way the commercial wind is blowing and throws him overboard as well?

and in his case, it most definitely doesn't mean we are not out to get him.

on the other hand, in comparison to other recent conflicts where the Russians stumbled and eventually reset, they were not facing an adversary with a $20 trillion economic resupply line (and that's just the EU, $40 trillion if you count the US). The Russians will not be able to wear down the Ukrainians resource wise if they maintain a will to fight and supply lines can be kept open - the latter being the big question of course. I wonder to what degree this understanding by the Russian General staff has argued against them fighting the more all out war that Putin may want and that is now predicted to be next. If they start killing a lot of civilians, political pressure in Europe will become untenable and it will draw that much more Euro military resource into the battle, whether official - or as Rob notes - possibly unofficial. If you 'sell' a blue and yellow Predator to Ukraine and fly it from inside the border, no-one will be able to prove it was a CIA team in Poland doing the piloting... and so on.

The internal logic was all about 'rescuing' the Ukrainians so why you would have to knock out utilities or bomb the cities? Putin is faced now with the reality that he can only conquer Ukraine, not bring it joyously into the Russian bosom. He is probably fine with upping the ante on the carnage, as was done in Georgia, but is the Russian army and populace? Russia may have a tightly controlled press, but even Putin can't keep a hot war in the middle of Europe under a bushel basket when there are millions of families with members on the other side.

The traditional 'conservative' interpretation is that unless there is a direct violation of US law, the state courts are the ultimate arbiters of state law (and thus also whatever restrictions a state's Constitution places on its own legislature), so another chance to observe if this court is actually conservative or just as blatantly political as it stands accused.

I'v seen no confirmation of Vindman's contention that Gerasimov has been removed, but if Putin starts removing General Staff he better have them shot because they would be the vector for a palace coup.

I noted that myself somewhere up thread and it can't be forgotten. But on the other hand, we weren't under serious time pressure of a growing international counter-response and were at least trying not to kill indiscriminately. No-one was resupplying Saddam, he was not going to get any stronger and nobody was crashing the US dollar on the folks at home. And at that point we were only fighting the Iraqi army, civilian resistance had not taken root that increased the need to get control and pacify --- so I would guess Putin doesn't have a month to get this over. Given all that, I could see Putin just blowing the whistle at some point when the cost is getting too high and playing for a permanent partition along whatever lines the Russians control. Then comes the 2nd test of Western solidarity.

I read a report that Ukraine is emailing the families of POWs to tell them their children are OK and go fight Putin if you want them to get back home.

From a statistical perspective, you can argue that once the virus made the large genetic leap that got it into the human population, that there was some distribution of viable mutations available to its new form and that with literally trillions of replications at this point, most of those combination have a high probability of already having been hit. OTOH, the counter example would be influenza, which never seems to run out of new variants. Best short answer is that probably that no-one really knows. One the plus side, Washtenaw county case count for the last 24 hrs just came in at 27. That's about 7/100K. 👏👏 (TBF, the counter point is that low level cases of Omicron are probably not being reported with much reliability anymore - but how much do we care about those cases?)

As far as I know (which isn't always very!), 'Last clear chance' doctrine applies in MI. That states that even if someone violated your right of way, or any other traffic rule for that matter, (or more technically was contributory negligent) you could still be found liable if you had a clear opportunity to avoid the accident and didn't.

yeah - this is the right way to do it. Too bad we start from a point of not having enough road in the city to begin with!

I have noticed a new thing - I don't know if this is a local thing only or catching on everywhere, but at corners with crossing signals, the signs now go to 'walk' during the dead time when the light is red in all four directions instead of when the corresponding light turns green. This puts the pedestrians into the crosswalk while traffic is clear in all directions and increases their visibility considerably - esp for right turning traffic. An idea that actually works - and it's only been maybe 80 yrs since we've had 'walk/don't walk' signs!

yeah - this one is just bad cyclist training - never *ever* pass a car on the right at a corner

indeed. There is a human factors engineering issue here that I think traffic designers in places like A^2 that try to be aggressively bike/pedestrian friendly ignore at the peril of those very pedestrians/riders they think they are helping. When when pedestrians and bikes appear in a driver's visual field in the company of other larger, faster moving vehicles, the human brain is simply *never* going to assign the same attention weight to the those smaller slower objects. That is just the reality of human perceptual hardware, and when traffic designers try to manufacture more *rights* for peds/bikes on the existing road system without actually creating structural spatial isolation, it's bound to increase the danger to the very people they are trying to prioritize.

There is view among some cyclists I have ridden with that you need to 'take the space' the law allows you. My take is the that law on paper can't trump the laws of physics, which say you are pretty much dead when the other guy doesn't know the rules you want to play by....🙄

And I'm sure he got a lot of pushback from the intelligence services about it, but in the end, the purpose of intelligence is to win, and when you get to a point where secrecy isn't helping you win you have to be able to zoom out and understand the bigger picture.

reports of a another huge convoy of Russian vehicles on the move toward Kyiv.

More or less the same issue with bus stops at corners, which is where they love to put them in A^2. Are you walking or waiting?

Not that it's in any way good, but the situation up there would be have been more critical before Space-X.

Gerasimov/Milley was also an established back channel communication link. If he is gone that link is lost as well.