Not only that. It’s quite possible that the law of unintended consequences will strike again.
In this case, it means that it’s rather easy to fight fu*king dirty wars with a professional army, ‘cause no one else knows or cares. But when conscription starts… mah boy, people gunna start talkin’! Talking, and say aloud what no dictator likes.
But another unintended consequence may be: what if the Putidiot REALLY starts panicking?
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Interesting side effect:
Flights out are apparently sold out.
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What worries me is that I do not know a good answer to this. People keep saying that using nuclear weapons would be unprecedented, breaking the ultimate taboo and turn Russia into a pariah and all that. They are right. And yet, if Russia does it, what is supposed to happen in very concrete and specific terms? Do you really push the big red button, the one thing that plays to Russia’s strengths more than anything in the world, killing more people in a few days than all the wars in hidtory combined? Are you confident that it is possible to strike the country that has just proven itself willing to use nukes just so much as to avoid escalation? Or do we end up with what amounts to an angrier version of the status quo, only with a collapsing Ukraine?
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“It’s not a bluff,” he bluffed.
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And it doesn’t look good that this is what Putin is resorting to:
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Because mutually assured destruction is something you never want to have happen, but are using as a deterrent, the theory is you’re supposed to be very clear about the line you are willing to have everyone die for. So far as I know our line is any attack on a NATO country. Ukraine is not one of them so that shouldn’t be the automatic response…but of course nobody knows anything about how escalation might go if a country tries a tactical nuke.
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Not familiar with weather patterns over there, but fallout does not tend to respect national boundaries.
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I’m soooo not ready for wassail and iodine pills.
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“A strange game. The only winning move* is not to play.”
“How about a nice game of chess?”
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Indeed, I think we have radhard 200Mhz CPUs, the rough equivalent of an early 1990s $10k system (well except it can survive a whole lot more radiation then say a Sun 4/whatever could). Go go sapphire substrates!
(Oh, sorry, BB is anti war, um, these are actually great for space exploration! No lie! Around as much CPU as a modern smart watch…)
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at this point it seems more like a suicide note
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Also, because I prefer Genesis’s version:
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Overwhelming the enemy with huge numbers of ill-equipped, ill-trained and ill-fated soldiers was how they defeated the Nazis in WWII. Why mess with (certain definitions of) success?
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Is that a typo/autocorrupt, or a reference I’m not getting?
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Oh yeah…
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True, but it was a little easier to motivate the troops after the Nazi’s brutalized the country and made no secret that they intended to wipe Slavs from the face of the earth.
This is, well, Ukraine. Hard to motivate the troops to lay down their lives when the consequences of not fighting is that Ukraine leaves them alone.
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D’oh! Tiny phone keyboards 
Thanks for catching that! Corrected!
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