He and his circle already made millions on puts and invested the winnings back into a dipping market, now it’s time to ease off the gas to drive the value back up. Repeat every week or two.

American “commitment” to anything is worthless now more than ever. Like giving cash loans to a bombed out drug addict you can only expect pain by penning deals with us.

We’re an angry drunk running down the street with a shotgun trying to pick fights. Dangerous and repulsive, but all reasonable people can do is try to get out of the way until police arrive. Except there is no police in this geopolitical metaphor.

Targeting or even murdering random Americans will only accelerate the breakdown of civility and accomplish nothing. Recognize your words as an emotional outburst and channel your anger into something more constructive.

Notifying others requires you to think of other people and value them. The US, under the leadership of a pathological narcissist, will do neither of these things.

I didn’t say it was the wrong choice. Just that now it is more of an uphill battle than ever, perhaps with exception of the first month or so of the conflict.

Europe needs to step up and quickly.

We’ll see if he can hold out if/when we lift our sanctions on Russia and start allowing the transfer of everything they need to rebuild their military hardware. Or even worse, selling them our own weapons.

EDIT: And now around three hours after I posted this, White House announces directive to drop sanctions. gg

Russia’s Admiral Kuznetsov is also very large and theoretically more able to defend itself than at least the Nimitz class…if it wasn’t a reeking shitpile that can’t even move under its own power consistently.

The reason is that they expected that carrier to sail with little backup or none at all. Meanwhile every American carrier is just the centerpiece of a larger, exorbitantly expensive battle group. They can’t afford that, so they have to compensate somehow.

I’d assume the logic is the same with Chinese ambitions here.

They DO want to be like modern Russia, earnestly. The national chauvinism, the suppression of LGBT, the violence against women, the kleptocrat oligarchs running the show, the use of the Church as a political tool, the brutal wars of spoils…the list goes on.