Monthly Archives: June 2022

It’s a Weapon that should only Work Once

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Vladimir Putin is extending his murderously physical war on Ukraine into an economic war against Ukraine’s European nation supporters.

Russia’s state-owned gas giant Gazprom PJSC throttled deliveries via the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany this week….

And

Russian natural gas deliveries through a key pipeline to Europe will drop by around 40% this year, state-controlled energy giant Gazprom said Tuesday….

And

Slovakia’s state-owned gas importer SPP said it expected Thursday’s Russian gas deliveries to be reduced by about 30%, while Czech power utility CEZ said it had seen a similar fall….

And

France’s multinational utility corporation Engie said on Thursday that Russia has reduced gas shipments….

This should be a one-shot effort by Putin, and then his energy production should find no buyers outside of India and the People’s Republic of China—to which there are inadequate delivery routes for several years. The single shot aspect of this, though, requires the European nations to have courage and to move apace to find alternative sources—and there are a plethora of them. And then, Russia, which depends on exports of extractions rather than of manufactured goods would be…stuck. The Indian and PRC markets just aren’t all that.

Where in the World is Joe Biden?

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Last Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi all travelled to Kyiv to meet face-to-face with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a show of support, even by the three European national leaders who are the most wobbly in their support for Ukraine.

Which once again raises the question: where is the guy who sits in the American leadership chair, Joe Biden?

Not in Ukraine. Not ever in Ukraine. Mostly Biden is laying low in Delaware, with occasional sojourns to the White House Oval Office to sit in the big boy’s chair at the Resolute Desk and to spend the night, like a celebrity tourist in the Lincoln Bedroom, in the Presidential Bedroom Suite.

Another Example of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Racism

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This time, it’s in the housing market, via the Federal government-run Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The plans released last week [by FHFA, which regulates Fannie and Freddie] might have been written by California Representative Maxine Waters (D). Central to Fannie’s plan are “Special Purpose Credit Programs” that increase access to credit and encourage “sustainable homeownership for Black consumers.”
One program would assist black borrowers with down payments. Most home-buyers are required to put down at least 20% of the cost of a new home to reduce the risks of default. Fannie’s plan would effectively require taxpayers to subsidize down payments for black borrowers.

It goes downhill from there.

Once again, Party explicitly favors one group of Americans while explicitly disfavoring another group of Americans—solely on the basis of race.

The Putin Producer Price Inflation

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More evidence of President Joe Biden’s (D) fantasy of a time travel weapon possessed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. This time, the evidence is the Producer Price Index, as published by the US Labor Department and printed by The Wall Street Journal.

The WSJ‘s graph is constructed from data released by Labor. The monthly data in the graph are hard to read, but the WSJ‘s rendition allows mouse-over readings. What those readings illustrate is instructive.

In January 2021, when Biden took office, the year-on-year PPI was 1.6%. By the next month, it had risen to 3%. A year later, January 2022, the PPI had gone to 10.1% year-on-year. In February 2022—Putin didn’t invade Ukraine until the end of that month—the PPI was 10.4%. By May it was 10.8%.

My third-grade arithmetic says that fully 96% of the PPI’s increase had occurred before Putin’s invasion.

Plainly, for Biden’s blame-shifting assertions to be true, he has to be, once again, insisting that Putin’s regime has succeeded in developing time travel and is using it to wage economic war against us while he wages murderously killing war against Ukraine.

Oh, and one more thing. Given the lags inherent in economic forces as they move through a real-world economy, these producer-level data essentially baked in even the consumer inflation outcomes following Putin’s invasion. That shows even more clearly how fantastical Biden’s assertions are.

“Negotiate”

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French President Emmanuel Macron is at it again vis-à-vis Ukraine.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Ukraine would eventually have to hold peace talks with Russia, while Ukrainian troops fought hard to hold back the Russian invasion force in the country’s east.
“At some point, when we will have helped Ukraine as much as possible to resist, when I hope Ukraine will have won and fighting will have stopped, we will have to negotiate,” Mr Macron told reporters while visiting French troops in Romania.

Whose definition of victory, though? Whose definition of what’s possible? Whose definition of fighting will have stopped?

Will the fighting have stopped because the Ukrainians have run out of weapons and ammunition because wobbly (to use a Margaret Thatcher term) nations like France have decided for Ukraine that it’s enough and stopped supporting Ukraine materially and materiel-ly?

Will Macron decide for Ukraine that fighting—or supplying Ukraine—is no longer possible? Will Macron decide for Ukraine when “victory” had been achieved?

Ukraine is in a war for its very existence as a polity and as a society, and it’s fighting a barbarian bent on destroying that polity and society. Macron apparently has forgotten his own nation’s struggles for existence in two wars in the last century, the first of which threatened its existence but for the unalloyed aid of other nations, and the second of which did erase France from the map except for one part that was a satrap of another nation and the other part that was a rump country wholly subsidiary to that other nation, an erasure undone only by the unalloyed aid of other nations.

The only victory possible for Ukraine has already been articulated by Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That victory consists of the Russian barbarian (my term) gone entirely from Ukrainian territory.

I suggest that the only negotiation with the barbarian that is possible once he’s driven from Ukrainian territory is how far back into Russia from the Ukrainian border all roads and railroads must be torn up and plowed over.

“We, Europeans, we share a continent, and geography is stubborn: it turns out that at the end of it, Russia is still there,” [Macron] said.

Macron’s cheap snark, despite itself, puts a premium on victory on Ukrainian terms and on subsequent negotiation on my term. We do, indeed share a continent under stubborn geography. However, France is still there, as I noted above, only because other nations came, without hesitation or reservation, to its aid.

So it must be for Ukraine. France above all owes this debt to Ukraine, owes this debt to Europe.