Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Russia bombs Ukraine’s maternity hospitals; Republicans in the House can’t sort out supporting Ukraine.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Never forget that he train is barreling down on Trump, even as he dances on the tracks.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

He really is that stupid.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

Fuck that bum, let’s go Joe!

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

Nikki Haley, who can’t acknowledge ‘slavery’, is a pathetic shill.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

You cannot shame the shameless.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Everything Is More Interconnected Than Ever…

Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Everything Is More Interconnected Than Ever…

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…The company said it had taken the action of globally disabling the Google Maps traffic layer and live information on how busy places like stores and restaurants are in Ukraine for the safety of local communities in the country, after consulting with sources including regional authorities…

Online services and social media sites have also been tapped by researchers piecing together activity around the war.

A professor at California’s Middlebury Institute of International Studies said Google Maps helped him track a “traffic jam” that was actually Russian movement towards the border hours before Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the attack.

Google said live traffic information remained available to drivers using its turn-by-turn navigation features in the area.

======

Horny conscripts leaking sensitive information has been a known military risk since approximately a week after conscription was invented. But now opposing armies don’t even need plausibly attractive potential sex partners — just code monkeys with jpg files…

Reader Interactions

216Comments

  3. 3.

    Almost Retired

    Russian soldiers have access to social media on the front?  Is swiping right on Tinder the modern equivalent of the Betty Grable poster in the barracks?

    ETA, if it’s just a bunch of male Russian soldiers clustered on the border, Grindr would probably have more practical utility.

  12. 12.

    Geminid

    At this point those soldiers’ lives are pretty bleak. I can see why they’d be hitting up women on social media, even if they suspect that the women are just spies.

  13. 13.

    JoyceH

    @Almost Retired:

    Russian soldiers have access to social media on the front?

    Remember, they were told, if they even knew they were going into Ukraine (some of them didn’t), that they would be Greeted As Liberators. So naturally they expected to roll in, waving at the cheering crowd that was flinging flowers at them, settle in, and have some hot dates with sexy, grateful Ukrainian chicks.

  15. 15.

    JoyceH

    @JoyceH: Adding to my last – that blonde girl demonstrating how to drive the Russian tank is the girl they imagined would want to date them.

  17. 17.

    Baud

    To be fair, doesn’t eastern Ukraine have a more pro-Russian population?  I guess some of them might be excited about hooking up with Russian soldiers.

  18. 18.

    germy

    A friend in the #Netherlands tells me: He had several Ukrainian handymen doing renovations in his house. The other day, they apologized to him, left all their tools, & headed back to #Ukraine to defend their country from #Russia.

    This is what military analysis couldn't predict.

    — Matthew Kupfer (@Matthew_Kupfer) February 28, 2022

  21. 21.

    germy

    A thread on Russia

    It will be becoming clear to those around Putin, the first and second tier of ‘siloviki’ (security apparatus), oligarchs and technocrats that make up the ‘greater Kremlin’, that whatever happens with this war,

    — Gabriel Gatehouse (@ggatehouse) February 28, 2022

    things will never go back to normal under the same leadership: ie Russian politicians who rant and rail against the West at home while at the same time hiding their stolen cash in the West and enjoying their European holidays in their villas in Tuscany and the south of France,

    — Gabriel Gatehouse (@ggatehouse) February 28, 2022

    their yachts mooring at exotic destinations around the world, their children getting expensive educations at British private schools. That is over. The potentates and princelings of the greater Kremlin are today contemplating their future and asking themselves:

    — Gabriel Gatehouse (@ggatehouse) February 28, 2022

    Do I want to live in a vast replica of North Korea, completely cut off from the rest of the world. I think Putin, if he isn’t too divorced from reality to understand this, has made his choice. He is prepared for total isolation.

    — Gabriel Gatehouse (@ggatehouse) February 28, 2022

  22. 22.

    Almost Retired

    @JoyceH:   You’re right, I’d forgotten about that element of the drumbeat to war.  Wait until they find out that the Ukrainian women are eager to shiv them.  At any rate, it’s striking how, until recently, I hadn’t given much thought to Ukraine – and now, like almost all of the rest of the world, I admire the hell out of the place.

  24. 24.

    Starboard Tack

    @JoyceH: They should take a clue from the young Dutch women, the Oversteegens and Schaft, who seduced and killed German soldiers in WW2, especially if Russia occupies Ukraine

     

    ETA: 35 years or so ago, I was peripherally involved in pressuring the Soviet government to release a Ukrainian woman, Irina Ratushinskiya (sp?), who’d been committed to a psychiatric hospital for criticizing the government. The Ukrainians have been resisting the Russians a long time. Don’t think they’ll stop now.

  28. 28.

    hueyplong

    I’d like to see Putin burn one GOPer as a warning to the others to get in gear and pimp for the invasion or at least for an off-ramp. L Graham is a logical candidate. I’d prefer RonJon but would settle for Graham, who is probably clueless as to how utterly expendable he is.

  29. 29.

    JoyceH

    I also saw a short video where Ukrainians were displaying ration boxes they’d captured from the Russians – the expiration date on the boxes was 2015.

  33. 33.

    Starboard Tack

    @hueyplong: If I had any sympathy for Repubs, it would be for Lindsay Graham because of what a sad, broken, abused, trivial man that he is. But, nah. Fuck him.

  35. 35.

    germy

    https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/local/south-carolina/2022/02/28/senator-lindsey-graham-calls-expand-us-oil-production-combat-russia/6973487001/

    As the Russian invasion into the country of Ukraine enters its fourth day and the U.S. and its allies announced layered economic sanctions, Sen. Lindsey Graham echoed other GOP lawmakers and called for sanctions targeting Russia’s oil and gas industry, which makes up about 36% of its revenue.

    “Now we’re doing a lot of good things. Europe has stepped up and we’re hitting the Central Bank of Russia, the Ruble is in decline,” said Graham, who spoke Monday at an event in the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR). The university was announcing its research partnership with the U.S. Army to develop virtual prototyping tools for on- and off-road vehicles.

    “But the one thing we haven’t done that would make the biggest difference is to sanction the oil and gas sector of the Russian economy.”

  38. 38.

    burnspbesq

    @Haroldo:

    Crypto exchanges are refusing to freeze Russian accounts

    I imagine that NATO offensive cyber capabilities include mounting DDOS attacks that can’t be traced, or can be falsely attributed to Anonymous.

  39. 39.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Everything is always interconnected. “[T]hou canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star.”

  40. 40.

    Alison Rose

    Refreshing the updates on NYT and I’m just…I know “boots on the ground” is apparently THE WORST THING THE U.S. COULD DO NO NO NO NEVER NEVER but at this point, if I were in charge, I’d sure as shit want our boots in their fucking faces. We can blather all we want about not wanting WW3 but Putin clearly wants it. I am generally anti-war but I feel like I’m holding onto that sentiment by the thinnest of threads.

  41. 41.

    delk

    Pat Robertson claims that Ukraine is just a pit stop for putin on his way to Israel to kick off the end times.

  42. 42.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    When working for the Army as a civilian, I had to take the same annual security training as the soldiers. That’s where I learned about the many ways soldiers were blowing OpSec via social media.

  43. 43.

    catclub

    @burnspbesq: Crypto exchanges

     

    Crypto exchanges are not, in principle, the only way to transact bitcoin, right? they facilitate exchange but they tell me the immutable code is all that really matters, and so any two entities who agree to trade can trade, right?

  44. 44.

    Spanky

    @burnspbesq:

     imagine that NATO offensive cyber every eighth grader’s online capabilities include mounting DDOS attacks that can’t be traced, or can be falsely attributed to Anonymous.

    Fixed.

  45. 45.

    VOR

    @germy: I doubt the US imports much oil and gas from Russia. The impact of such a sanction would have to borne by our European allies. Germany already stopped Nordstream 2, but Senator Graham needs to acknowledge this is a big ask.

  46. 46.

    Kirk Spencer

    @Haroldo:

    Crypto exchanges are refusing to freeze Russian accounts,

    I suspect several exchanges are going to discover how insecure they really are. Oh, I know the raw math is good, but most hacking is done by going around the math, not through it

    eta: And I have to admit I’m waiting for the first successful ransomware of the crypto servers.

  48. 48.

    catclub

    @delk: Pat Robertson claims that Ukraine is just a pit stop for putin on his way to Israel to kick off the end times.

     

    This is disappointing. It means Trump is not  the anti-Christ.

  51. 51.

    Ken

    @David Anderson: The crypto currencies run consensus algorithms, and I don’t think that they’d found a way around the Byzantine consensus limits. (I don’t follow the computing literature as closely as when I was in grad school, but I think I’d have heard of a discovery like that.)

    With that caveat, if you’re an entity with a couple of hollowed-out mountains full of server racks, you can configure them as miners and prevent the algorithm from reaching consensus. Or if you’ve got enough of them, you could control the results of the algorithm and write whatever you want to the ledgers.

  52. 52.

    Kelly

    @Almost Retired: At any rate, it’s striking how, until recently, I hadn’t given much thought to Ukraine – and now, like almost all of the rest of the world, I admire the hell out of the place.

    Same

  54. 54.

    sdhays

    @delk: What will it mean if Putin takes a wrong turn this evening and falls out a window, followed by a piano? Will he have thwarted god’s will?

    God might be a bit miffed.

  55. 55.

    dr. luba

    @delk:

    Pat Robertson claims that Ukraine is just a pit stop for putin on his way to Israel to kick off the end times.

    So is he for or against?

  57. 57.

    germy

    ⚡️Several thousand foreigners applied to fight for Ukraine, according to Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar.

    They submitted an application to the newly created International Territorial Defense Legion to help Ukraine fight against Russia.

    — The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) February 28, 2022

  58. 58.

    Alison Rose

    @raven: Considering I have multiple disabilities that have rendered me housebound, I don’t think I would be of much use. But I don’t think not being able-bodied means I can’t have an emotional response to watching innocent people be decimated and driven from their homes.

  61. 61.

    Almost Retired

    @Ken:  I am genuinely interested in this, but although I recognized that you were speaking entirely in English, I understood none of this.  Can you translate (..ok, dumb down) this for a liberal arts major?  Because I think the crypto angle of the financial sanctions regimen is important.  Thanks (not that it’s your job to explain difficult concepts to the technologically challenged)!

  64. 64.

    dr. luba

    @germy: Same thing happened in 2014; lots of expats came home to fight.  Two friends of mine, for example; both were working as builders, one in Italy, the other in England.

  66. 66.

    ARoomWithAMoose

    @Haroldo:  The crypto bros go on and on about the promise of decentralized finance, but the crypto exchanges aren’t capitalized well enough in sovereign currencies to run an industrialized nation’s foreign trade through it.

  69. 69.

    JoyceH

    @dr. luba: he’s for it. We must never lose sight of the fact that a significant faction of the GOP not only expect the world to end in their lifetimes, they are actually looking forward to it.

  70. 70.

    Alison Rose

    @raven: Of course not. But why does that mean I can’t have one in a moment of fear and frustration? Biden isn’t calling me to find out what he should do. I mean, fine, mea culpa for being human and scared and angry, but I think I’m hardly alone.

  72. 72.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @delk:

    Are you trying to give me nightmares?

    ETA: He looks like a special guest on Tales from the Crypt.

    Of course, one could say the same of Nancy Reagan in her declining years.

  74. 74.

    Citizen Alan

    @delk: The fact that we lost Betty White but Pat Robertson is still kicking around like a goddamned Highlander immortal is powerful evidence that there is no God.

  77. 77.

    debbie

    President Zelenskyy has earned his Lakota name — Akicita Was’te Ke — “Warrior of Hope.” Also, I embrace the man as an honorary brother to the Lakota Nation. ???
    — Lakota Man (@LakotaMan1) February 28, 2022

  78. 78.

    dm

    @Ken: I think all it takes is a majority.  A few years ago a majority of the Bitcoin miners were in China.  It wasn’t hard to imagine the Chinese government, if it wanted, suggesting to the miners that the blockchain’s consensus might be persuaded to reflect a different reality.  But I think it might take more than a couple of hollowed-out mountains….

    On the face of it, the question about energy use is a fair one. According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Terawatt Hours per year — 0.55% of global electricity production, or roughly equivalent to the annual energy draw of small countries like Malaysia or Sweden.

    (https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actually-consume).

    So you need to provide maybe 6-12 GW to your hollowed-out mountains to match the wattage of the existing servers, which I suppose might hint at how many servers one is talking about.

    The Chinese government has been grumbling about cryptocurrency mining, so I don’t know if they still have indirect control of a majority of miners or not.

    But denial of service is a lot easer.

  83. 83.

    JPL

    @Alison Rose: I just got an alert on my phone from the NYTimes.  It was a link to an article about how little time people had to leave Afghanistan.    Apparently, they have already moved on.

  86. 86.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Geoduck: yup, I think if there were any dirt on Graham it would’ve come out by now. He’s desperate to stay, as he puts it, “relevant’. I see Susan Collins and probably several others who aren’t really on my radar, mediocrities who stumbled into being among the most powerful people in the world. They’ll cling to that for all they’re worth.

  88. 88.

    Alison Rose

    As an addendum since it’s apparently needed, I don’t actually want us to go to war, I don’t want our people sent to die, and I pretty much always oppose military action. I’m a human being with human emotions who sometimes responds to horrible things in a slightly less than pragmatic way. Me saying a thing in a moment of fear =/= me actually wanting that thing to happen or that it ever would.

  91. 91.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @raven: I was very surprised to hear Russell Honore on MSNBC calling for active engagement, a no fly zone and for NATO to basically take the fight to Putin. He might even have used those words

  92. 92.

    Butter Emails

    @JPL:

    Somehow I knew that we were leaving Afghanistan months before Trump left office. How did they miss the memo?

  96. 96.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @JPL:

    It was a link to an article about how little time people had to leave Afghanistan.

    That’s when Biden’s approval ratings dropped.  The media successfully nailed a narrative to Biden that he utterly screwed up the withdrawal.  I’ve been wondering if Biden will be getting popularity points because of this Ukraine situation, and I would not be surprised if the NYT especially would want to crush that.

  98. 98.

    Geminid

    @dr. luba: Maybe he’s neither for nor against the invasion. Pat Robertson is definitely for donations, though, and he’s probably found that nothing brings in donations like preaching the End Times.

  102. 102.

    Roger Moore

    @Ken:

    As I understand it, the individual transactions have to be signed by the private keys of the wallets involved.  That means that someone with enough compute power to create consensus could reorder transactions or even deny them completely, but they would still need to crack the private keys to fabricate transactions from whole cloth.

    FWIW, the “reordering” part is absolutely anticipated as part of the system.  If there are more pending transactions than will fit in a block, miners have to figure out which ones to include.  People who want to give their transaction priority can include a tip that goes to the miner.  The miners will then reorder the transactions to include the most generous tips in the pending block in order to maximize their take.

  104. 104.

    brendancalling

    @Almost Retired: my ex is a Ukrainian immigrant. During the pandemic i reached out a couple of times to make sure she was OK, but never got a response.
    I posted the thread from that West Point trainer on how civilians can fight back an invasion, and got a message saying “thank you, Brendan!”

    Do not mess with Ukrainians.

  107. 107.

    Ken

    @Almost Retired: Crypto is designed for a world where none of the participants trust one another. That means that before an entry can be added to the (world-readable) ledger, all the participants have to agree that the entry should be made. That requires the servers to exchange data that shows the entry should be accepted, so each server can individually decide to modify their copy of the ledger.

    This problem has been studied (see the link I provided) and is called “Byzantine consensus”. One of the early results, which as far as I know is still valid, is that there is no algorithm that can reach consensus if over one-third of the participants are “traitors” who are trying to prevent consensus. Also, if over two-thirds are traitors they can impose their own consensus on the network.

    The crypto software is publicly available, so anyone can run it — but that also means anyone can hack it, and run their own “traitor” version. If they have only a few servers, it won’t matter; the rest of the network will reject their claims. But if they have one-third of the servers, they can prevent the others from adding ledger entries; and if they have two-thirds, they can write whatever they want.

    The crypto systems may have mechanisms to prevent this. I would think, however, this would require human intervention, since the algorithm can’t detect these traitors (if it could, it could reach consensus in the presence of traitors). There might be some mechanism for a human to exclude some servers, for example.

    I know there are mechanisms where humans can intervene and re-write the ledger, since there was a well-publicized case where they did just that when some coins were “stolen”. Though the facts that currency was stolen in the first place, and that someone could re-write the ledger, both undercut some of the common claims for cryptocurrency.

  109. 109.

    Martin

    @Urza: Most of these aren’t Russian tanks so much as they are Soviet tanks.

    Russia doesn’t throw out tanks. They fix them and keep using them until they’re blown up. See also: US B-52. The B-52 will turn 70 in April.

  110. 110.

    debbie

    Someone at Fox has a soul:

    wow — Jennifer Griffin continues her live fact-check of Fox colleagues and guests:

    “I feel like I need to correct some of the things that Col. Douglas MacGregor said, and I’m not sure that 10 minutes is enough time to do so, because there were so many distortions.” pic.twitter.com/nsdvoGwwXi
    — j.d. durkin ? (@jd_durkin) February 28, 2022

  112. 112.

    Martin

    @catclub: Yes, but because Bitcoin cannot really be used directly, at some point it needs to convert into something else. Saying ‘I have a billion dollars in Bitcoin’ suggests that at some future point someone will hand over a billion dollars for your bitcoin. So you can focus on that interface. And yes, Putin could give Donald Trump a billion dollars in Bitcoin, but then Trump is left with the problem.

    At the end of the day, either you convince the world to directly accept Bitcoin for goods and services (which has not happened) or you have a closed ecosystem that has to interface with conventional financial vehicles for any of its value to be realized. And you can always apply pressure to those conventional vehicles.

    In some ways this is reminiscent of the financial crisis, where these mortgage backed securities were the trading mechanism (like Bitcoin) but a day had to come when someone needed to fork out real Earth dollars, and when that day came, it turns out nobody actually had any real Earth dollars, and the value of those securities immediately went to zero.

    The value of crypto is entirely depending on the ability to convince people to convert conventional currency to crypto. If that conversion mechanism stops, or if the willingness of people to voluntary put money into it goes down, it straight up crashes.

  113. 113.

    Almost Retired

    @Ken:  This is awesome, thanks. So, basically, a large enough group of bad actors can undermine the integrity of the cryptocurrency and circumvent sanctions.

  114. 114.

    Wapiti

    @catclub: About 20 years back, some Christianist numbskull told me that Muhammad might have been the Antichrist. I was like, so we’re past the end times or what? Why would someone repeat such blather?

    I guess it was a good question to find out if I was a fellow numbskull Christianist.

  115. 115.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @dm: China banned crypto mining last year, resulting in all of the mining operations decamping to Russia, Ukraine, Texas, etc. Yesterday, China just banned crypto trading, which essentially is the last nail in the coffin of cryptocurrency in the country. I have a relative working in one of the largest block chain companies in China. They have been pivoting to other black chain applications over the past year, & apparently has maintained viability & success.

  116. 116.

    Roger Moore

    @Martin: 

    Russia doesn’t throw out tanks. They fix them and keep using them until they’re blown up.

    They may not throw out tanks, but they will export older ones. For example, they sent a lot of T-34s to North Vietnam during the Vietnam war. The US does this kind of thing, too; we shipped a lot of our WWII-vintage Shermans to our allies.

  118. 118.

    Roger Moore

    @Martin: ​
     
    I assume one desired end state for crypto bros is for some major country to make their cryptocurrency legal tender. It’s one more way they’re like the goldbugs, who understand the value of their gold stash will massively increase if the US reverts to the gold standard.

  119. 119.

    JPL

    @debbie: I think they are keeping it up to direct people to avoid areas where there are skirmishes.   I don’t know if it is still up because now there is a curfew.  I’d like to think not.

  120. 120.

    Ken

    @dm: So you need to provide maybe 6-12 GW to your hollowed-out mountains to match the wattage of the existing servers, which I suppose might hint at how many servers one is talking about.

    But that’s the beauty of using traitor software. It doesn’t have to run the real algorithm – it just has to fake the messages that real servers generate for distributing proof-of-work.  A batch of transactions are sent out, one of the traitors takes a microsecond to generate an “I have the proof-of-work” for that batch, and all the other traitors immediately respond with “yup that’s a valid proof-of-work”.

    They don’t need special hardware, or outrageous amounts of electricity. You could easily run them by the dozens as containers in a single virtual machine. They could even be spread as a virus, turning every home computer out there into a traitor-miner — and without using noticeable resources.

    In fact… If I were a three-letter agency, I’d have that virus prepped and ready to spread — or even already sitting on as many machines as possible, ready for the “go” signal.

  123. 123.

    YY_Sima Qian

    Don’t trust Lindsey Graham to be acting in good faith. Sanctioning Russian energy exports will send gas/oil prices skyrocketing. The only people benefitting will be his buddies in the oil companies. The resulting rampant inflation, & the economic turmoil, also strengthen the chances of GOP sweeping into control of Congress in the mi-terms, & the presidency in 2024. When there is rampant inflation, it will be the middle class & the poor that will suffer the most. Europe will also bear most of the direct impact of energy shortage. There is a reason energy & foodstuff  have been exempt from SWIFT sanctions so far.

    Sanctioning Russian energy & food exports is the equivalent of economic warfare w/ WMDs, not to be undertaken lightly.

  124. 124.

    Ken

    @Almost Retired: So, basically, a large enough group of bad actors can undermine the integrity of the cryptocurrency and circumvent sanctions.

    I would say that undermining the crypto would prevent someone from circumventing the sanctions, by preventing the exchange of rubles (or anything else) for the crypto.

  126. 126.

    Almost Retired

    @Ken:  Yes, that’s what I meant, I worded it poorly and meant to add “the ability” to circumvent sanctions. Understood your explanation even if my response didn’t reflect it, and thanks.

  129. 129.

    Roger Moore

    @Ken:

    But that’s the beauty of using traitor software. It doesn’t have to run the real algorithm – it just has to fake the messages that real servers generate for distributing proof-of-work. A batch of transactions are sent out, one of the traitors takes a microsecond to generate an “I have the proof-of-work” for that batch, and all the other traitors immediately respond with “yup that’s a valid proof-of-work”.

    Would that work, though?  I thought the essence of the Bitcoin algorithm was that it was hard to find a valid solution to the work but easy to check whether a proposed solution was valid, so miners can easily reject fake blocks.  That’s basically how mining works; the miners try a bazillion possible solutions until they either find (and publish) a valid one or they get a message announcing a new valid block.  They’re already checking an absurd number of possible solutions, so just checking each message claiming to have found a valid solution to see if it’s true only adds marginally to the overall work.

  130. 130.

    Martin

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: The question is whether the west can contain Putin long enough until he’s deposed or dies of old age, and ensure that some clone doesn’t take his place. Because until then, Russia has been able to use the threat of fighting a nuclear power to engage in this kind of activity, and we have no remedy to that. Sure, you can sanction, but at the end of the day Putin can simply take the land value of Ukraine, put down their population, and generate internal wealth from that land (in theory, at least).

    If you conclude this is a durable state, then at some point you have to engage with it, and then you just have a matter of timing. How do you do it as safely as possible, how do you do it while holding together nations that share your values, and so on. If Russia is threatening to kill or displace 10% of the Ukrainian population – 4-5 million people, at what point do you look at those numbers and decide that yeah, we need to risk 10s of thousands of lives establishing a no-fly zone, or whatever.

    There are no solutions here that don’t suck. They’re all horrifying. But at least one of those horrifying outcomes is going to come to pass, you at least have the ability to influence which one does.  I honestly don’t know if this is that moment, but we do seem to have an extraordinary degree of unity among NATO and the west. I’m not exactly sure why Putin would bother to differentiate between the US giving Ukraine Javelin missiles, and the US sending in a special forces guy to shoot the very same Javelin missile. They can interpret either one as a direct provocation. It’s not like there are rules to this game. If Putin wants a wider engagement he can have it using whatever bullshit set of rules he wants to invent – I mean, that’s how we got where we are. Putin wants to write the script. But this might require at some point having NATO write the script.

    But I will note that Honore is not a politician. He’s a ‘what’s the objective, and I will take it’ guy, which is why he was a good choice in Katrina. If the objective is to keep Putin from taking Ukraine, sanctions won’t achieve that. Is that the objective? Or is the objective to weaken Putin whether or not he takes Ukraine? I think Honore would say the objective is the latter, and not the former based on our actions. If you want the former objective, we’re probably going to have to start throwing the USAF at the problem.

  131. 131.

    Jay

    @Roger Moore:

    the Soviet Union/Russia tended to export new build “M” models. Downgraded models, often simplified for easier use, with also downgraded ammo.

    Their best “product” when it ages, tends to get upgraded, mothballed and parked in a “tank park” for future use in WWIII or “The People’s War”.

    Of course, these “tank parks” required/require regular service, maintenance and testing. A lot of former Soviet States either sold them on, legally, illegally, or let them rot in place.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryPorn/comments/kmvq2m/tank_graveyard_in_the_city_of_kharkiv_in_the/

  132. 132.

    Kalakal

    @Frankensteinbeck: The thing that gets me is that Biden has done an astonishing job of diplomacy in the last few weeks, galvanising Nato, getting sanctions in place, getting supplies to Ukraine, even the Swiss are cutting off Russian accounts, Germans allowing exports of arms, in Finland & Sweden joining Nato is now a popular choice, any of these would be a major achievement, to do all this plus more at what, for normal diplomatic speed, amonts to warp 10 is staggering.

  133. 133.

    Citizen Alan

    @Martin: As I’ve said before, the thing that pisses me off the most about bitcoin is that when the crash inevitably comes, every single Libertarian in the country will demand a government bailout.

  135. 135.

    Gin & Tonic

    So reportedly the Ukraine Library Association postponed an upcoming conference and said “we will reschedule as soon as we finish vanquishing our invaders.” The librarians….

  137. 137.

    Martin

    @Roger Moore: Yes, that would work. But the traitors need to be able to outvote the non-traitors. Think of it this way:

    Voting officials count up the votes and say “hey, Joe Boden got more votes than Donald Tramp”. Democrats in the House say yes, we accept your vote counts. But more Republicans in the House say “no, that’s wrong, Donald Tramp against all odds beat Joe Boden by exactly one vote in every state”. The only thing that actually matters is that the Republicans outvoted the Democrats. The actual votes are meaningless.

    I mean, Bitcoin has forked a couple of times, as has Etherium. There are active disagreements about what the state of the network should be that will never and can never be resolved. The fork occurs when one group of miners accepts an outcome and other does not, and the group that doesn’t accept the outcome basically secedes and splits into a network that works exactly the same as original but permanently disagrees with the state of the network. One network led by Joe Boden and another led by Donald Tramp.

  139. 139.

    Ken

    @Roger Moore: That’s where the Byzantine results come in. If you have just a few “traitors”, the “loyalists” can agree that the traitors’ results aren’t valid, and reach their own consensus using the normal computations. But when there are enough traitors, the loyalists can’t do that.

    I think what would happen in practice is that each “loyal” machine would refuse to extend its copy of the ledger, since it could tell that the last proof-of-work wasn’t valid. But the traitors would be presenting a consensus that the block was valid, and accepting new work. That would be where human intervention would be needed, to identify the traitors and split the loyalists into their own network (a fork, as Martin describes).

    I don’t exactly know what you could do while you controlled the network, since (as was mentioned above) it’s hard to forge a transaction for the ledger since you need the participants’ crypto keys. You could certainly fill the ledger with ping-pong transactions among a few dozen wallets you controlled, and let other transactions sit in pending state forever.

  140. 140.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Kalakal: from The Bulwark (aka The Daily Nevertrumper)

    Biden did not draw lines in the sand. He did not personalize the conflict. He did not turn himself into the star of the show. He did not allow anyone, anywhere, to believe that this was about America.

    Since the invasion, Biden has been a full partner with our European allies. He has not pushed them into decisions. He recognized that having a united front was more important than any particular aspect of the response. And after only four days Europe came to the conclusion—on its own—that it would do everything the American foreign policy establishment had wanted. Biden understood that these countries needed to come to the decision to fight back on their own, and not be publicly cajoled into it.

    Biden also understood that the EU and NATO are actually very powerful allies and that when they work in concert with the United States, we represent a significant geopolitical force. […]

    The West is stronger because of the actions of the Biden administration and Russia is weaker because of them.

  141. 141.

    Almost Retired

    @Kalakal:  Amen!  Putin probably bought into the framing of Biden as a weak and senile.  History will not be kind to Trump (I could end this sentence here, but I’ll continue) with respect to NATO and the reversal (I hope) of the resurgence of authoritarianism.  Underestimate Biden at your own peril.

  142. 142.

    Martin

    @Citizen Alan: Absolutely. They’ve already asked the system to build them out a few times. That’s what the forks were – a couple of whales telling the network to pretend that transaction didn’t happen, which the network agreed to do, and a splinter group that said ‘fuck that, we’re not rewriting the ledger’. And it’s the ledger that keeps getting rewritten which is the dominant one.

  144. 144.

    Kalakal

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: That’s it exactly, they are not only powerful allies, they are willing allies, acting of their own volition on a course of action, which by a remarkable coincidence, is the course of action Biden wanted them to take. Bismarck would tip his hat

  145. 145.

    Kay

    Dr. William Horne
    @wihorne
    Indiana, which banned Black Americans from moving to the state in its Constitution of 1851, now has EIGHT (8) (viii) different laws working their way through the state legislature than ban, in various ways, teaching abt these laws & their impact.

  146. 146.

    Ken

    @Martin: I see those forks as a consequence of the lack of trust. In boring old non-crypto finance*, I trust Visa to keep their ledger correctly. The result is that there is one Visa ledger that the world agrees on. Well, the world would agree on it, if it were public; as things stand, Visa and I are the only ones who can see my transactions.

    * A bit of a misnomer, since finance uses some of the most hellaciously secure crypto on the planet.

  149. 149.

    Roger Moore

    @Kalakal:

    Nearly as old as the AK-47

    In truth, though, the AK-47 wasn’t produced in very large numbers.  It had a bunch of teething problems, and it was only with the development of the AKM (modernized AK) that production really took off.  Besides, the AKM was replaced by the AK-74- the same basic action but rechambered for a 5.45mm round- in the 1970s, so they’re out of service in the Russian military.

    If you really want the Russian equivalent to the B-52. it would be the Tu-95 “Bear” bomber.  It’s even older than the B-52 and still in active service.  Like the B-52, it’s been extensively modernized and long outlasted the supersonic machines that were supposed to replace it.

  152. 152.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I saw this tweet earlier from Engel, and he’s getting dragged so hard for it he’s one of the top trending topics

    Jon Schwarz@schwarz
    Remember that in Richard Engel’s book “War Journal” he said that before the invasion of Iraq he knew it “was a land where careers were going to be made” and that being there for war was his “big break”

     Richard Engel @RichardEngel · 5h

    Perhaps the biggest risk-calculation/moral dilemma of the war so far. A massive Russian convoy is abt 30 miles from Kyiv. The US/NATO could likely destroy it. But that would be direct involvement against Russia and risk, everything. Does the West watch in silence as it rolls?

  153. 153.

    Kalakal

    @Roger Moore: I never knew that about the Bear. It’s amazing how long some military hardware lasts, the mauser 98 and lee enfield 303 were standard issue for over 50 years, 62 in the 303s case.

  155. 155.

    catclub

    @Ken: Though the facts that currency was stolen in the first place, and that someone could re-write the ledger, both undercut some of the common claims for cryptocurrency.

     

    understatement award candidate.

  157. 157.

    Sebastian

    Wouldn’t it be the most monkey paw thing ever if the West called on the Russian population to overthrow Putin and his gang, in return to return all seized assets the Russian people?

    Maybe that’s the plan and it wasn’t Anonymous who took over the TV channels, but just a test?

    I have zero evidence but a huge hunch we are witnessing a much bigger operation.

    The $50k for each deserting Russian is another test balloon methinks.

  163. 163.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Sebastian:

    The $50k for each deserting Russian is another test balloon methinks.

    I hadn’t heard about that. That’s the US? the EU? I think this from Michael McFaul is a good idea, too

    Michael McFaul @McFaul 9h
    The West should signal clearly that they will unfreeze assets and lift sanctions on Russians who actively press Putin to stop this war. We want these elites to defect.

  165. 165.

    Sebastian

    Apologies if already posted. The Russians just lost their petro business.

     

    BREAKING: And wow!!! After BP, the deluge. Shell announces it's exiting all its joint-ventures with Gazprom, including its 27.5% stake in the Sakhalin-2 LNG facility. Shell carries those JV at $3 billion valuation on its books, and it's warning of impartments #Ukraine— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) February 28, 2022

  168. 168.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Baud: I read that thread earlier and someone said it’s a typo for “impairments”, meaning Shell is really gonna eat it on those joint ventures

  169. 169.

    Roger Moore

    @Ken:

    I think Bitcoin is a bit more resilient than you present. For traitors to take over the system, it’s not enough to present a bunch of invalid blocks, because everyone’s software- clients as well as miners- can recognize they’re invalid.  They would reject the proof of work because it hasn’t actually been proved.  This is an essential part of the system.  If you didn’t do it, people would spam the system with invalid blocks in hopes of collecting the mining reward.  To really muck with the system, you need to be able to do valid proof of work fast enough to trigger the Byzantine fault.

  172. 172.

    Jinchi

    @Doug R: ​
     Remember when we were seeing maps of “secret” bases because Armed Forces personnel were jogging with their fitbits on?

    Yup. People are oblivious to the information they’re sending out. Most of us think our app data are stored exclusively on our devices, because why would anyone else need to know how many steps I took today?

    Heck, even the calculator and flashlight on my phone want permission to share my location.

  173. 173.

    Jinchi

    @Roger Moore: To really muck with the system, you need to be able to do valid proof of work fast enough to trigger the Byzantine fault.

    I realize I’m going to regret asking this, but what does Bitcoin consider proof of work?

  175. 175.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Julia Davis @JuliaDavisNews 5h
    Thoughts and prayers to Putin’s mistress, with her $4 million luxury digs in Monaco.

    Bill Browder. @Billbrowder · 5h
    Monaco clamps down on Russian assets after Ukraine invasion. This is a headline I could have never imagined reading. Prince Albert was one of Putin’s best friends.

  178. 178.

    Roger Moore

    @Jinchi:

    I realize I’m going to regret asking this, but what does Bitcoin consider proof of work?

    It’s a hashing problem, where you try to find a nonce that, when combined with the rest of the block, will result in a hash with a whole bunch of leading zeros.  I don’t know how much you know about the technology, so I don’t know if that’s just gobbledygook to you.  Basically, though, the key to it is that it’s a problem where it’s much, much easier to check that a solution is valid than it is to find the solution in the first place.  This means it doesn’t work to falsely claim to have found a solution, because you’ll be trivially found out.

    An example of a similar “hard to find, easy to check” problem is factoring the product of two very large prime numbers.  Finding the prime factors is so hard it’s the basis of RSA cryptography, but it’s trivially easy (for a computer) to multiply the numbers someone claims are a solution and see whether they are or not.

  181. 181.

    Kalakal

    @Peale: Getting more embarrasing for Flobalob by the day. At this rate London will be the only place left where Putrid can park his loot

  182. 182.

    Hellbastard

    Met two of our Ukrainian students today. Was told that the shops in Kyiv were open briefly today so people could stock up on supplies. But now back in the shelters.

  183. 183.

    Anne Laurie

    @hueyplong: I’d like to see Putin burn one GOPer as a warning to the others to get in gear and pimp for the invasion or at least for an off-ramp.

    Putin — realistically, the minions still loyal to Putin — aren’t gonna do this, because making such threats in public would imply that ‘things concerning the battle are not necessarily proceeding in a fashion most favorable to the Empire.’  Flailing autocrats do *not* wish to be perceived as anywhere in the vicinity of losing.  (Just look at the ever-wilder posturings of our own failed would-be Emperor after November 3, 2020.)

    If we ever find out which Repubs actually made themselves blackmail-able by America’s enemies (and I don’t think Graham was necessarily part of that cadre), it’ll be when the scorched ruins of Putin’s headquarters / luxury dacha are scavenged by the ICC.   And the really fun part will be the squabbles over which intel is actually true, and which has been forged, not least by other Repubs looking to shiv their fellows!

  188. 188.

    Bill Arnold

    @Roger Moore:
    A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that nearly all computation ever done by or on behalf of humans is SHA256 computations, for bitcoin mining. (For others: SHA256 is a 256 bit digest of some block of data, , usually larger, one way (cryptographic), which basically means that it cannot be reversed easily). Bitcoin mining is done by ASiC hardware that is ludicrously faster at doing SHA256 than even GPUs – the ASIC hardware is roughly 5 orders of magnitude faster than CPUs.

    https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/efficiency-of-bitcoin-mining-hardware

  189. 189.

    Suzanne

    @Geoduck:

    Everyone talks about Graham being blackmailed somehow, but I can totally believe he’s just a spineless authoritarian bootlicker. 

    I am skeptical, too. We all know he’s gay and I don’t think that would hurt his career if it came out. See what I did there.

  191. 191.

    Captain C

    @Anne Laurie:

    If we ever find out which Repubs actually made themselves blackmail-able by America’s enemies (and I don’t think Graham was necessarily part of that cadre)

    With regard to Senator G, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he had some illicit pleasures that his average constituent might regard as horrifying.  I’m not talking about gay rumors either.  On the other hand, he does seem extremely eager to attach Krazy-glue his lips to whichever powerful person’s posterior is in the vicinity, so leverage may not be needed.

  192. 192.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @delk: I can remember religious speculation that Gog and/or Magog in Revelation were Russia.  I also remember Catholics (particularly the right-wingers) praying for the conversion of Russia, and at this point, I want to yell at them, “you forgot to specify conversion into what.”

    And somewhere, I read a great blog post checking off how many characteristics Trump shared with the Antichrist of Revelation (a fairly liberal Christian so it wasn’t here, and I can’t find it on John Pavlovitz’s website either)

  195. 195.

    HumboldtBlue

    Well, well, well, who woulda thunk a dipshit good ol’ boy would embed with the Russians and broadcast his avid and open support for the invasion of Ukraine?

    Fucking traitor.

  202. 202.

    Suzanne

    I have been having a thought for the last couple of days, as I consider the visual culture and image craft of this event: Zelensky is young, on the tail end of Gen X. Putin (and Trump) are very Boomer. I feel like this event has the potential to kind of create the semiotics of Gen X heroism and leadership.

    Contrast: Putin on video screen at the end of that ridiculous, overwrought, Citizen Kane table, wearing an expensive suit and a passive expression. Trump trying to shake down Zelensky with that stupid shit on his head and all his tacky gold stuff. Contrast with Zelensky taking videos of himself in the city, refusing to leave, wearing the same clothes for days, apparently openly crying.

    I have been thinking about something Rorty wrote in Achieving Our Country, about the importance of a positive vision/conception of one’s national identity for the left. It feels like Zelensky talked about the idea of being simultaneously Ukrainian as well as European, and he is of course Jewish. This conception of national identity as being multi-level feels like a generational difference.

  203. 203.

    Chetan Murthy

    I’m late to this thread, but …. about BTC and crypto generally, and these exchanges.  The fact that theyr’e using BTC/crypto is irrelevant to how these exchanges operate.  Sure, eventually, *eventually* they send trans to the blockchain.  But almost all their transactions are internal, as their customers go in-and-out of owning BTC/ETH/etc.  All that “market-making” is internal, and is done just like at any brokerage.

    They’re just like e-Trade, or any other online brokerage, up until you want to actually move out of your Coinbase account.  So the question isn’t about the penetrability of the BTC algorithms, but about whether Coinbase did a good job setting up their website and its security.  Gosh, y’know, I gotta wonder about that …. given the track record of these exchanges.  And besides, they’re 100% vulnerable to be served with a court order or the FBI showing up with a phalanx of agents and telling them to fucking ‘assume the position, asshole.’  They’re all ‘money-changing businesses’, which means they’re already required to abide by Treasury Dept AML/KYC (anti money laundering/know your customer) laws.  These would be another turn of the same crank.  I don’t see these fuckers lasting long with their “libertarian” bullshit on this.

    The Treasury would just tell their banks to cut them off, and that would be that.

  204. 204.

    Annie

    @Kalakal:

    I agree.  I think Biden/NATO/ the EU have been preparing the ground for this for some time.  I mean, Denmark allowing its soldiers to go fight for Ukraine 3 days afte the war started?  Really?

     

    @Sebastian:

  206. 206.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Annie:

    Denmark allowing its soldiers to go fight for Ukraine 3 days afte the war started? Really?

    I read up on some links — not sure if I got them here or not — about how groundbreaking it was for Denmark to allow soldiers to volunteer for Ukraine. The country has severe and strict laws against such action, but completely dropped them for this event. Interesting.

    @Raoul Paste:

    Yeah, he’s gonna be buried with Kim Philby an’them.

  207. 207.

    Sebastian

    @Annie:

    Yeah, there is also a lot of spontaneous action, e.g. Germany’s change of heart is genuine and born in the necessity of the hour.

    In 1991, Germany and Austria recognized Croatia as a sovereign country after Vukovar fell. The decision came after Alois Mock, the Austrian Foreign Minister (It was Alois Mock and Gyula Horn, the Hungarian foreign minister, who cut down the barbed wire at Sopron which allowed East Germans to flee into the West, making them the two men who actually and literally cut down the Iron Curtain) implored the German Chancellor Kohl and Foreign Minister Genscher, appealing to their humanity and role in history, after the atrocities committed in Vukovar, a city founded under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

    On Saturday, the Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki rose as the voice of conscience and shook Germany out of its paralysis. Germany changed its stance when Morawiecki openly lambasted them:

    Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Saturday slammed Western countries such as Germany for displaying “unyielding egoism” in the face of Russia’s war in Ukraine, saying “crushing sanctions” were needed.

    “There is no time today for the kind of unyielding egoism that we see in certain Western countries, including here in Germany unfortunately,” Morawiecki said in Berlin ahead of a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

    “That is why I came here… to shake the conscience of Germany. So that they finally decide on sanctions that are actually crushing,” he told Polish reporters.

    https://www.deccanherald.com/international/world-news-politics/polish-pm-slams-western-german-egoism-amid-war-in-ukraine-1085429.html

    And shook Germany he did. He shamed them into action, so much so, that Germany stepped up to its responsebility.

    Historic times.

  208. 208.

    Kent

    @delk:How are these guys charging their phones?

    Every machine they are driving has 12 volt electrical systems powering it.  Trivial exercise to tap off any fuse and get a charge with a cigarette lighter or whatever.

  209. 209.

    Sebastian

    @HumboldtBlue:

    The same for Germany and weapon exports into conflict zones. Austria has the same laws.

    It literally takes an Act of Parliament to grant an exception. Germany doing an 180 AND vowing to step into it’s responsibility as largest European country? Generations will study that day and its implications.

  211. 211.

    Another Scott

    ObOpenThread – Another example of the wonders, and pitfalls, of the English language:

    Sometimes people use "respect" to mean "treating someone like a person" and sometimes to mean "treating someone like an authority"

    For some, "if you don't respect me, I won't respect you" means "if you don't treat me like an authority, I won't treat you like a person" https://t.co/2RaAEW8yqG

    — Rachel Thomas (@math_rachel) August 28, 2019

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  216. 216.

    oatler

    The GOP swore a blood oath to keep misusing “democrat” as an adjective. It’s been a nonstop firehose of contempt since Bush. And  no, Chuck, “both sides” don’t hate the Democratic party.

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