Why Ukraine Fights?

Putin's Chef Yevgeny Prigozhin is now bragging that he is turning recruits for his "Wagner Group" into "real cannibals".   Well, given Prigozhin's history of pretty nasty food safety violations, Wagner's current status as a haven for illness due to nonexistent sanitation, and Wagner's pattern of not providing luxuries like "food" to their soldiers, it all makes a lot of sense.  Might have something to do with why Russia is invading a major supplier of food to the world, eh?  The only thing hanging out there is whether they're using Monty Python's "Lifeboat" sketch as a training video.

Hopefully at some point in the future, to paraphrase the sketch, the Wagner Group and the Russian Army will get cannibalism mostly under control.  

What kind of war is this?

One thing that is very interesting about the war for Ukraine is that  Russia often "retaliates" against Ukraine when Ukraine advances, gets new weapons systems, and the like.  Now as a (very) amateur historian, it seems to me that Russia is telling us a lot about their objectives and motivations.  In an ordinary war, the parties relentlessly move to achieve strategic goals--we didn't wait for Hitler to make a shipment of Tiger tanks, for example, before we bombed his ball bearing plants.  We bombed the ball bearing plants so shipments of Tiger tanks and such would never arrive.

But Russia does, and it tells us that their goal is to get what they can by bullying, committing a lot of war crimes in the process.  Our response therefore ought to be to grant Ukraine the ability to give them a real war.  They'll back down soon enough, and hopefully giving Russia and Belarus the ability to do what Ukraine has started to do; eliminate the power of the old KGB/FSB.  Hopefully soon, Benito Putina will have his own "Lake Como" moment.

Putin delenda est!

And who's next?

First President Trump was caught with classified documents due to the work of the National Archives, and now not only President Biden, but also Vice President Pence have been found to have such documents at their homes.   To be honest, the latter two are the ones that bother me most, as the National Archives are supposed to have a checkout list like any other library, and they're supposed to track down when documents are not returned--but in these cases, it appears that they were not on the ball, to put it mildly.

The case with Biden is even worse, as there appears to be evidence that the boxes where the classified documents were found were...the subject of photographs found on Hunter Biden's laptop.  This raises the reality that if the FBI had been on the ball, a lot of this would have come out a lot earlier, like "when Biden was running his campaign from his basement."  Worse yet, why was it important for the 'ol crackhead to be taking pictures of the classified documents his dad had taken?  Perhaps important for Hunter's handlers in Russia and China?  

The question comes to mind; is there anybody in DC that takes national security seriously, at least above a sergeant's pay grade?  

Scientific illiteracy in government

....yet again, of course.  What's going on?  Well, the federal government, via the Consumer Product Safety Commission, is arguing that natural gas and propane stoves ought to be banned. Now to be sure, the burning of natural gas produces a certain amount of carbon monoxide and nitrous oxides, as well (mercaptan burning) as sulfur oxides.  They are certainly pollutants, and for that reason, natural gas and propane stoves have been installed with ventilation hoods as far back as I can remember.  

So exactly what problem the CPSC wants to solve, beyond a lot of code noncompliance in cities run by Democrats, is beyond me.  It's also worth pointing out that carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides are produced by power plants that burn natural gas, and the Carnot efficiency of these plants is typically 35% or less--meaning that when you swap from a natural gas stove to an electric, you double or triple the amount of pollutants, even allowing for better heat transmission from an electric stove to your pans.  Oopsie.

But when you get down to it, the article indicates what's really at stake; since one can buy LNG or propane at small businesses all over the country, the CPSC wants to stop that and make us "sole sourced" with the nation's utilities--yes, the same ones that are telling us not to use too much electricity to avoid blackouts already.

It's worth noting as well that this is a camel's nose in the tent with regards to overall government regulation of the economy and our personal lives, because all kinds of things produce CO and nitrogen oxides in the home, including natural gas heat, natural gas or propane hot water heat, candles, wood stoves, grilling, barbequeing, and of course smoking.