China appears irked and embarrassed that Russia is making such a hash of this invasion. I don't think they have any moral qualms, but they have to be distressed at how it is going to screw up China's plans.
My man streamfortyseven got this very interesting piece that he says is allegedly from a prominent Chinese scholar. Whoever wrote it, it makes some very good points. Zerohedge weighs in on the same theme, with a somewhat more direct take.
The observation of both is that China is offering Putin only lukewarm support and very much wants this war to be over. Other countries such as Israel seem to be weighing in as well. Putin went into this thing fairly isolated – he appears to be on the verge of being totally so.
I mentioned the Rotary a couple of blogs back. Here is the Facebook site for Kyiv City Club, founded by my friend Sergiy Zavadsky. They are very active in providing relief to those who need it.
The Internet is a mixed blessing. Oksana is outraged reading a telegram channel that includes 20,000 Russians cheerleaders for the war. She assures me that she knows what bots, bot farms and trolls are, but cannot be led to believe that the threads she is reading may not be legitimate dialogue between real people.
Our situation is not helped by well-meaning offers of support to get out of town. I don't even want to discuss it. It is highly unlikely that somebody could come up with a vehicle that would hold seven of us plus themselves. The road west to Poland would itself be somewhat dangerous – refugees sometimes come under fire. But most significantly, there are already more than 1,500,000 refugees in Poland.
Oksana is deeply concerned about the explosions we are hearing in Brovary, more intense than they have been in the last couple of days. Danang came under rocket fire fairly often in 1969. Even back then the Katushka rockets shot from the other side of the mountains were accurate enough that they usually landed on military targets instead of in town. I heard explosions louder than I am hearing today, but I never felt unduely threatened. I have more experience to assess this situation than anybody else here, but war is inherently unpredictable.
There have been 2500 civilian dead in the hardest hit Ukrainian city, Mariupol, which the press claims is almost fully destroyed. That would be 0.5% of the population. Turning that around, most people will survive even that horrific assault. The Russian soldiers, ignoring the rules of war and wanting to terrorize civilian, have targeted apartment buildings, markets and fleeing refugees.
Mariupol is in open country, along the beach, very close to the Russian bases in Crimea. It is also a long way from Ukraine's logistical base. Even given all that, the city has managed to hold out for a couple of weeks against the Russians.
Kyiv has a whole lot more resource to resist. If and when the Russians subdue Kyiv they will have accomplished their military goal. The fighting should stop and the danger abate.
The avenues of approach are clear. Since the bridges will undoubtedly be out, the Russians have to approach the city from the right bank. Their forces coming through Brovary, on the left bank, could advance up to the river and provide artillery and rocket support. The gun positions would probably be to our south, although they could possibly fire artillery over our heads. But there is nothing to shoot or bomb in our neighborhood. There are scattered single-family dwellings, no military installations, no significant infrastructure, and no roads leading to Kyiv or anywhere. We may be without electricity, we may have to deal with marauding Russian soldiers, but the odds of getting bombed or shelled would seem to be minimal.
I have written about depopulation. Here is a gloomy Malthusian take to the effect that this war is simply continuing the work of Covid, which itself appeared to be a high-powered tool to advance an agenda that had been underway for a long time.
Zooming world populations in the 1960s caught the attention of the punditry. Paul Ehrlich made a splash with his Population Bomb book. He predicted the world would have run out of natural resources and we would all have starved by now. Julian Simon made a series of bets that he was wrong, and collected on every one of them.
Nonetheless, there has to be a limit. I reviewed a book entitled How Many People Can the Earth Support written back in 1996. It's practical conclusion was that it depended on those peoples' standard of living, but more than 10 billion would be uncomfortable. It could not go on forever.
All the while, the eugenicists of the world did what they could to curb population. A century ago, before Hitler gave the effort a bad name, they were quite open about it. While the elites lamented the lack of fertility of their own social class, they were enthusiastic as Planned Parenthood campaigned to limit the size of less desirable families.
Birth control failed spectacularly as a eugenic tool. Educated women use the pill to avoid pregnancy while they pursued their careers. Marriage and family were most attractive to those with a high school education and below, especially as welfare would subsidize their children.
The 1967 Jaffe memo from Planned Parenthood proposed that they advocate homosexual and other lifestyles that would not lead to procreation. Happily for the people panicked about overpopulation, several social trends supported them. Working women did not have time for children. Families had more money – they became absorbed in consumerism and didn't want their income diverted to taking care of kids. People lost faith in God, and did not feel obliged to have families to perpetuate beliefs that they had given up. As Satoshi Kanazawa writes in The Intelligence Paradox, smart people are not programmed to reproduce.
Putting it together, the developed world was well on its way to depopulation two years ago, before Covid and the Russia – Ukraine war came along. Moreover, as Edward Dutton, Richard Lynn, Helmuth Nyberg and many others noted, we were getting stupider by the generation. Dumb people were having most of the children. Developed countries were bringing in immigrants from countries with substantially lower average intelligence.
Dutton also noted that we were becoming less healthy. Up until the Industrial Revolution Darwinian selection had purified the human population just like all others – the less genetically fit disproportionately either died in childhood or didn't get the chance to reproduce.
Add to that a dose of environmental toxins – unhealthy diets, agricultural chemicals, plastics, vaccines and the like – and a lot of wise commentators concluded that the human race was indeed doing itself in.
Stuff shows up in my mailbox every day on the extent to which the pharmaceutical industry is killing Americans. Toby Rogers posts a lot of good stuff on Substack. Here is yesterday's post on that theme.
A cynical Malthusian might have said that the population problem was solving itself. There may be too many of us now, but it appeared as if our numbers were falling quickly. Perhaps not quickly enough for the World Economic Forum folks. They were ready to speed things along with toxic injections and forcibly reducing our consumption to a point that makes life not worth living.
I see a ray of hope in all this. Assuming my kids survive, they will belong to a small generation inheriting the task of putting things back together. Perversely, those cohorts that survive catastrophes often turn out to be the strongest and most productive. That's what I have to hope as I prepare my kids for whatever comes.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the boom of rockets has been the most consistent yet, some of them clobbering high-rise apartments here in the city. The strong man hopes he has made the right decision. The finger of blame will point directly at him if he was wrong. The good-looking woman is mollified at the moment but would certainly rather be out of here, underway anywhere, even without a plan. The above average children are taking advantage of the situation to watch Mary Poppins.
At this point, it's too much of a gamble to move, too many people with itchy trigger fingers, whether Russian or Ukrainian - there is controversy over the question of which side shot up those journalists yesterday. If you've been through this before, then you've probably got a better handle on the risks. If there's a ceasefire and an official refugee convoy organized by the International Red Cross or the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, I'd think strongly of doing that, otherwise stay put...