Monthly Archives: May 2022

Inflation Ain’t Joe Biden’s Fault

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Illustrated in two graphs. The first is the overall Producer-Price Index performance over the last 11 years.

The second breaks out services from goods, the latter absent food and energy.

Now certainly, in addition to the immediacy of expectations, there are lags of some weeks to months in our economy, and it can take time for policies to have impact.

Oh, wait—notice those periods before the current inflation began spiking: the PPI was declining through the year-and-a-half before President Joe Biden (D) won the election. The PPI began its sharp rise right after that on expectations of Biden’s policy implementations, and it continued unabated as those expectations were realized and began their material impact on our economy.

Look, too, at the steadiness of the PPI rise. Neither supply chain disruptions nor Putin’s war have had any impact on the inflation rise. Look again at the 18 moths preceding Biden’s election. The pandemic, too, is wholly irrelevant to this hard rise.

This round of inflation really is Joe Biden’s fault, no matter how deeply he ducks under his desk, or how many times he scurries off to Delaware to avoid facing us average Americans.

Force Ratios

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But ratios of what? A simple ratio of three attacking soldiers vs 1 defending soldier is too narrow and dangerously misleading, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is demonstrating.

Soldier equivalents of a number of other factors apply, also, and “force ratios” of the following, at the least, must be included in developing the operational force ratio:

  • quality of soldier training
  • quality of commanders, officers, and NCOs
    • their ability to function in fluid, information-foggy environment
    • quality of intel available to them
  • quality and condition of equipment
  • technology of equipment
  • impact of other avenues of attack
    • cyber
    • space
    • propaganda
  • what’s being defended
    • home territory from invader
    • invader territory from counterattacking defender
  • who’s defending
    • attacked nation defenders
    • attacking nation now defending
    • attacker position on invaded territory
    • attacker position in attacking nation’s territory
  • who’s attacking
    • defending nation against attacker’s position in attacked nation
    • defending nation against attacker’s position in attacker’s nation

All of that disregards the nature of the terrain being defended/attacked, but terrain merely informs the level of required force ratio: 3:1 to 7:1, the upper bound of what’s nominally considered attackable or worth the cost to attack, or somewhere in between.

It may be that a 3:1 ratio of attackers to defenders is a valid minimum ratio for a successful attack. However, all of these factors have to be converted into their own weights on force-on-force—however hazily the estimated conversions might be—and included in the ratio calculations.

It’s especially critical, too, that cold-blooded, wholly objective estimates of the quality of one’s own soldiers vs the enemy’s be made. “The enemy is ten feet tall,” or “We are,” serve only to get friendly soldiers killed, and the attack likely defeated, regardless of the other factors incorporated into the final force-on-force estimate.

Another VA Failure

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…in image form:

Each bureaucrat with some form of a medical certificate more interested in her checklist than in the patient in front of her.

This is yet another reason to disband the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, the VA, and return all personnel to the private sector (not reassign them elsewhere in government). Instead, use the current and putative future VA budgets to provide vouchers for our veterans so they can seek their own care with the hospitals, clinics, and doctors of their choice and with far more responsive attention in a far more timely manner.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Because Housing Price Inflation Isn’t High Enough

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California State Senate Leader Toni Atkins (D) wants to exacerbate it with $10 billion more thrown at the State’s housing market to create even more buying demand for this supply-limited product.

Democratic State Senate Leader Toni Atkins on Wednesday unveiled details of a proposal she’s pushing to create a revolving fund that would provide interest-free loans for up to 30% of the purchase price of a home for low- and middle-income households.

Even spreading the money over 10 years would throw $1 billion per year at a housing market that’s already suffering enormous inflation—nearly 12% just since last August—due to the limited supply of houses for sale vs the burgeoning number of buyers, both institutional (viz., Blackrock) and individual.

That won’t add to the inflation of housing cost will it?

I Sympathize

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Ukraine is preparing to put a captured Russian soldier on trial for a variety of war crimes committed over the course of the Russian barbarian invasion of Ukraine, an invasion still in progress. The 21-yr-old soldier stands accused of

fir[ing] several shots from a Kalashnikov rifle at the head of an unarmed 62-year-old man, who died on the spot just a few dozen meters from his own home in the village of Chupakhivka in Ukraine’s Sumy region[.]

Ukraine Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova says the murder occurred on February 28. The soldier is a tank commander, which in the Russian army makes him a junior NCO.

The soldier absolutely stand trial for the crime, and I think the 10-15 years to life in prison should he be convicted is light. This is the sort of crime that should draw capital punishment.

However.

It occurs to me that before those who are no more than foot soldiers are tried for the war crimes they’re accused of committing, their officers—who created the environment within which their subordinates felt free to commit these atrocities—should be tried for their complicity in war crimes.

Unfortunately and especially in the present case, where so many of the Russian barbarian officers have evaded capture (or those few of them remaining have been killed in action), it will be hard to bring the foot soldiers’ officers in, try them, and if convicted, execute them.

Put this 21-yr-old on trial, certainly. But be sure he’s being tried for what he did, and punished suitably for it if convicted; do not use him as a scapegoat for not being able to get at the officers who allowed, if not actively encouraged, these atrocities.