Political Posts

[Spekulatius]

1 hour ago, changegonnacome said:

Havent been following the situation in Ukraine closely for the last couple of months.

 

As we head for winter in Europe - what is the general take on the Ukrainian counter-offensive.....broadly it seems clear there has been very very little territorial advancement around recapturing lands that Russia has annexed.

 

Article below however talks about a more subtle take which is underlying strategic victoires that bode well for the future:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/20/ukraine-crimea-black-sea-counteroffensive-russia-fleet-navy-drones-war/

 

My only quibble with the above article which makes me think things arent going quite so well is when the author leans on the victories against the black sea fleet as signs of Ukraine's progress.......this is not a naval war.....its very much a land war.....Ukraine can do what it wishes to the black sea fleet it will have little to no bearing on taking back the Donbas for example.

The black see is a side theater. Russia tries to choke off Ukraine from sea access, so it is important in a sense that they don't succeed.

 

On the counteroffensive, it seems like Ukraine does very little lately and Russia is burning tremendous amount of material and manpower to take the Avdiivka salient. The videos that come from there are really something to check out (most NSFW).

 

I think at some point things on the Ukrainian attack are going to pick up again, but right now, it seems relatively quiet.

[John Hjorth]

Yeah, I've been puzzled lately there is so little information in MSM about what's going on. The most logical explanation : Not much is going on.

[changegonnacome]

1 hour ago, Spekulatius said:

On the counteroffensive, it seems like Ukraine does very little lately and Russia is burning tremendous amount of material and manpower to take the Avdiivka salient. The videos that come from there are really something to check out (most NSFW).

 

Got it thanks for the broad update - yep both sides seem to be spinning their wheels while they destroy huge amounts of resources....which is to say nothing off the human death and casualities....

 

The Ukrainians from what I can see continue to outperform expectations.....especially expectations around casualty exchange ratios for an offensive party versus a defensive one....as well the same metric for equipment.

 

It seems the Russian army is /was in a poorer state than anybody could have imagined.......all the more reason to double efforts now to support Ukraine.......the Russian army is a shambles......but the reality of any standing army is that battle experience (assuming the resources to continue to support them) improves over time....Congress needs to stop dilly dallying on support.....there will be dimishing returns to aid provided in 2024/2025 as the Red Army gets its act together.

 

https://www.csis.org/analysis/seizing-initiative-ukraine-waging-war-defense-dominant-world

[UK]

https://time.com/6329188/ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-interview/

 

Amid all the pressure to root out corruption, I assumed, perhaps naively, that officials in Ukraine would think twice before taking a bribe or pocketing state funds. But when I made this point to a top presidential adviser in early October, he asked me to turn off my audio recorder so he could speak more freely. “Simon, you’re mistaken,” he says. “People are stealing like there’s no tomorrow.” 

 

Edited November 1, 2023 by UK

[UK]

On 10/30/2023 at 7:16 PM, formthirteen said:

 

 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/chinas-age-of-malaise

 

The Party explained that it was targeting inequality, monopoly, and excessive financial risks, but some of the arrests seemed personal. Ren Zhiqiang, a real-estate tycoon, received an unusually harsh sentence of eighteen years on corruption charges, after someone leaked an essay in which he mocked Xi as a “clown stripped naked who still insisted on being emperor.”

 

None of the targets showed any organized political intentions. The only visible pattern is that Xi and his loyalists appeared intent on snuffing out rival sources of authority. One after another, he got rid of anyone with power, the entrepreneur said: “If you have influence, you have power. If you have capital, you have power.” Xi is said to have spoken bitterly of watching Boris Yeltsin contend with Russian tycoons in the nineteen-nineties. Joerg Wuttke told me, “When Putin entered the Kremlin in 2000, he assembled the oligarchs and said, basically, You can keep your money, but if you go into politics you’re done.” He went on, “In China, the big names should have learned from that meeting, because in this sense Putin and Xi Jinping are soul mates.”

...

Local governments, short of cash, have adopted a subtle extortion method that lawyers call “taxation by investigation.” A factory owner in Shanghai told me that Party officials used bank records to identify residents with liquid assets of at least thirty million yuan—about four million dollars—and then offered them a choice: hand over twenty per cent or “risk a full tax audit.”

 

Recently, the Party has signalled that the purge of the private sector is over, but many have grown wary. A former telecom executive cited an ancient expression—“shi, nong, gong, shang”—which describes a hierarchy of social classes: scholar-officials, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants. “For two thousand years, the merchants were the lowest,” he said. “What Xi is doing is just a reversion to the imperial Chinese mean.” The big winners, in the current era, are officials with deep personal ties to Xi; he has stocked the Politburo with trusted aides, and has cultivated the military by boosting investment and replacing top leaders with loyalists. 

...

In the Xi era, that principle has become, in effect: It doesn’t matter if the cat catches mice, as long as it’s red.

 

 

Edited November 1, 2023 by UK

[Gamecock-YT]

14 hours ago, John Hjorth said:

Yeah, I've been puzzled lately there is so little information in MSM about what's going on. The most logical explanation : Not much is going on.

only so much blood you can put on the front page

[Spekulatius]

3 hours ago, Gamecock-YT said:

only so much blood you can put on the front page

The Palestine conflict stole the eyeballs.

 

FWIW, there are probably more Russians dying each day than Palestinians right now.

[shhughes1116]

On 10/27/2023 at 8:44 PM, Xerxes said:

Either that, or Chuck Norris was the captain of USS Ranger. And he refused to fight easy enemies. 

USS Ranger, as well as the USS Wasp (modeled after the Yorktown class carriers but “value engineered” to avoid exceeding the remaining treaty tons) were both slower than the Yorktown class carriers so they were kept in the Atlantic, or at least that was the plan prior to the Battle of Coral Sea and subsequently Battle of Midway.  After those battles, the US was desperate for another Pacific carrier and the Wasp was the least-bad choice.  Her value-engineering likely played a part in her demise during the Guadalcanal campaign. 
 

sorry for the deviation from the regularly scheduled programming on Ukraine…

[UK]

https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/11/01/ukraines-top-general-on-the-breakthrough-he-needs-to-beat-russia

 

The course of the counter-offensive has undermined Western hopes that Ukraine could use it to demonstrate that the war is unwinnable, forcing Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, to negotiate. It has also undercut General Zaluzhny’s assumption that he could stop Russia by bleeding its troops. “That was my mistake. Russia has lost at least 150,000 dead. In any other country such casualties would have stopped the war.” But not in Russia, where life is cheap and where Mr Putin’s reference points are the first and second world wars, in which Russia lost tens of millions.

...

“First I thought there was something wrong with our commanders, so I changed some of them. Then I thought maybe our soldiers are not fit for purpose, so I moved soldiers in some brigades,” says General Zaluzhny. When those changes failed to make a difference, the general told his staff to dig out a book he once saw as a student. Its title was “Breaching Fortified Defence Lines”. It was published in 1941 by a Soviet major-general, P.S. Smirnov, who analysed the battles of the first world war. “And before I got even halfway through it, I realised that is exactly where we are because just like then, the level of our technological development today has put both us and our enemies in a stupor.”

...

Mr Putin is counting on a collapse in Ukrainian morale and Western support. There is no question in General Zaluzhny’s mind that a long war favours Russia, which has a population three times and an economy ten times the size of Ukraine. “Let’s be honest, it’s a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life. And for us…the most expensive thing we have is our people,” he says.  For now he has enough soldiers. But the longer the war goes on, the harder it will be to sustain. “We need to look for this solution, we need to find this gunpowder, quickly master it and use it for a speedy victory. Because sooner or later we are going to find that we simply don’t have enough people to fight.”

 

Edited November 3, 2023 by UK

[Pelagic]

This is one of the best discussions on the current state of the war in Ukraine that I've heard. Both the interviewer and guest are very knowledgeable, and it leads to a high level discussion that's hard to find elsewhere.

 

 

[UK]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-08/china-s-innovators-are-lying-flat-primavera-s-hu-says?srnd=premium-europe

 

Hu pointed to China’s daunting challenges, particularly from the ongoing property crisis — a saga he said “is still unfolding.” “I don’t see the end anytime soon,” Hu said, adding that China’s real estate woes are “quite different” from what the US experienced in the run-up to the global financial crisis. “I think it’s a multi-year process — it’s more like in Japan, the real estate crisis in Japan in the 1990s. A slow-motion crisis. So China will have to deal with this problem for at least a few more years to come.”

...

“This sense of insecurity, in my observation, in the Chinese entrepreneur community, really I have not seen it like this since 1978,” Hu said, referring to the years just after the death of leader Mao Zedong and before China embarked on a series of broad economic reforms. If China “really commits to rule of law and market reforms, I do think the confidence will slowly but surely come back, then the animal spirit will be rekindled.”

[UK]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-08/china-is-having-a-hard-time-wooing-foreign-investors-back

 

[Spooky]

3 hours ago, UK said:

If China “really commits to rule of law and market reforms, I do think the confidence will slowly but surely come back, then the animal spirit will be rekindled.”

 

I wish this were the case but it seems to me like they have been moving in the opposite direction. We might need to wait until new leadership emerges.

[Xerxes]

Reading a book that covers the last chapter of the Romanov dynasty. I am half way through the book about when the first war starts. There are some eerily similarities to 2022 and the way it was conducted. 

 

 

^^^^

…. on the Russian side “the Supreme Command ordered, but the railroads decided” …. 
 

 

^^^^
the jealousy between the minister of war and C-in-C who was a Grand Duke. The then minister of war in 1914 sound very similar to today’ minister of defense: Shoigu  

 

 

 

 

^^^^
The minister of war holding up ammunitions and artillery shells to undermine the Grand Duke … lol

 

^^^^^
The Kaiser summarizing von Moltke battle plan: “Lunch in Paris, dinner in St Petersburg” 

 

[UK]

6 hours ago, Xerxes said:

Reading a book that covers the last chapter of the Romanov dynasty. I am half way through the book about when the first war starts. There are some eerily similarities to 2022 and the way it was conducted. 

 

. Not holding my breath...but, I wish the end this time would be also similar:)

 

Edited November 9, 2023 by UK

[John Hjorth]

Politico [November 3^rd 2023] : Ukraine faces economic crisis without quick EU aid, finance minister warns.

 

'The country needs Western help from the start of 2024 to fill an estimated $ 29 billion budget gap, Serhiy Marchenko says.'

 

Well, Switzerland recently got away with screwing [at least, so far] CS AT1  bond holders for USD 17 B.

 

**SHRUG**??

[ValueArb]

On 11/8/2023 at 9:45 PM, Xerxes said:

Reading a book that covers the last chapter of the Romanov dynasty. I am half way through the book about when the first war starts. There are some eerily similarities to 2022 and the way it was conducted. 

 

 

^^^^

…. on the Russian side “the Supreme Command ordered, but the railroads decided” …. 
 

 

^^^^
the jealousy between the minister of war and C-in-C who was a Grand Duke. The then minister of war in 1914 sound very similar to today’ minister of defense: Shoigu  

 

 

 

 

^^^^
The minister of war holding up ammunitions and artillery shells to undermine the Grand Duke … lol

 

^^^^^
The Kaiser summarizing von Moltke battle plan: “Lunch in Paris, dinner in St Petersburg” 

 

 

 

Von Moltke should have never kept strengthening the left, cost Germany the war.

[Xerxes]

3 hours ago, ValueArb said:

 

 

Von Moltke should have never kept strengthening the left, cost Germany the war.

The book (and conventional view IIRC) considers the pulling of two army corps and one cavalry division from the outmost right-wing sweeping through the Low Countries as fatal.  

 

[Parsad]

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/10/business/china-business-leaders-crackdown-intl-hnk/index.html

 

Cheers!

[Spekulatius]

This seems odd - $137B in sovereign bond sales completely suck out the liquidity and crowd out other issuers that live on day by day financing it seems.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-latest-stimulus-effort-unintentionally-023709357.html

[Luke]

[james22]

 

[crs223]

Do all theme parks in China look like that?  I’d rather visit San Francisco… yuck!

 

 

 

[Castanza]

What a f&@$ing joke….we allow hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to come across our border every month; put them up in hotels and give them food while we have thousands of Vets and citizens on the streets. We allow people to march in support of terrorist organizations, tear down our flag and wave the flag of the Taliban. Now we roll out the red carpet for Xi and brush the streets of all the homeless to appease a dictator who’s country was complicit in releasing a global pandemic causing ungodly amounts of financial and human loss. A country who sends chemists to Mexico to teach them the fentanyl trade which is ravaging our populace. 
 

 

Edited November 15, 2023 by Castanza

[Luke]