Fact checked. What would war look like? Health news.
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I got fact checked. According to Nadezhnuiy Novestiya (ie, Trusted News Initiative) founding member Reuters, the graph I presented yesterday is flawed. They call their piece a six minute read, though making sense of it would take much longer. Their primary excuse is that the average age of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations were different.
Yeah, but a 2:1 difference? In my mind that would take a couple of decade average age difference. As they would say in the United Kingdom, not bloody likely, especially since by October 31 more than 75% of that tight little island had been vaccinated. Kids and all. There was not much place for that rascally bunch of unvaccinated rapscallions to hide.
Reuters made similar "fact check" claims for Denmark, rebutted here. With a sense of humor. Here's the accompanying cartoon.
Memory lapses are one of the characteristics of us as we get older. One of the reason that Joe Biden's handlers keep him away from the press as much as they can, is that he has them quite frequently.
As I wrote yesterday, mine seem to be a function of my general health and nutrition. As I recover from this winter crud I am weak, and I do not remember things as well as usual. Like Biden, I have developed tricks to overcome it. Today I wanted to write about Ray Kurzweil. His name should be at the tip of my tongue, but it was not. However, I remembered the title of his book, The Singularity Is Near. That was enough that I was able to find it quickly on the Internet. No problem.
I am fairly confident that in a week or so, when I'm back up to par, these memory lapses will be largely forgotten. I will revert to the ordinary lapses from which we all suffer. I'm sure I'll still give you mistakes like 2006 / 2016 to check.
On the health front, Anna came down with Covid despite her previous exposure. She had all of the vitamins. I gave her some ivermectin. Her daughter Sophia is getting better, as is Oksana. Zoriana is going crazy, bouncing off the walls and the other kids are doing fine.
Many of you have asked what I will do if the Russians invade. My reply has been that they wouldn't want to – they don't need to. Why on earth would they want to occupy a country full of 40 million restive Ukrainians? Russia has enough territory of its own. I offer this critique by Scott Ritter, the American analyst who has had pretty good insights into our conflicts in the Middle East.
The first point on which I agree is that the Biden administration does not have competent people running diplomacy in this part of the world. The same people were pretty much in charge in 2014, and it was a disaster. Same ones they have had in Syria and Afghanistan.
They have systematically purged the military of the kind of general who would provide honest assessments to the civilians in charge. Instead, they are quite wrapped up with gender and diversity issues. The American military is a shadow of its former self, and that even former self has not won a war since I was in diapers. It was a whole lot stronger, relatively speaking, when I was working in Vietnam. And still we lost. What is the source of our hubris? I cannot imagine.
I have said repeatedly that the 2008 war in Georgia is probably as good a precedent as any. Russia went in, destroyed Georgia's warmaking ability, significantly diminished NATO and the United States' credibility, and retreated to their own borders without much life lost on either side.
I think the same would happen here. They don't need anything from Ukraine except to be left alone. If we would do that, all would be well. But the US government has a hard time leaving anything alone. Back in the United States they do not leave peaceable, ordinary citizens, us descendants of the founders, alone, but rather attack us continually as deplorables of one sort or another. Free-floating anger and frustration sound familiar?
To cut to the chase, I think that a war here in Ukraine would be quick and decisive. The Russian armaments are sophisticated enough to avoid killing us civilians as they destroy Ukraine's warmaking ability. Russia can finally underscore Putin's point that he does not want to control Ukraine by squashing Ukraine's expensive US provided armaments and walking away from the carnage without picking up the pieces.
I certainly hope it doesn't come to that, and that the eastern flank NATO countries take a sober look at how fecklessly the US has abandoned its allies in Vietnam, Nicaragua and here and there in the Middle East. It does not make sense to spend their lives on our hegemony.
It would present the danger of escalation to nuclear war. Happily for us, Ukraine is not a nuclear power and hence not a nuclear target.
That's the sweetness and light from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong men have better stuff to do than fight wars on behalf of Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon, the good looking women don't want to give up their husbands and lovers to satisfy American fantasies, and the children don't need to grow up in the rubble and refuse that follows war.