This is a nice thought but it will almost certainly never happen, or if it does, the timeline will be similar to Finland's entry into NATO.

I don't know about indefinitely, but you have to create a plausible long-term deterrent. I don't know if it was due to age or just lack of vision but the best time to push for something was probably just before Ukraine's failed counter offensive.

Anyway at this point it doesn't mean that it's wrong to negotiate. It does mean though that the deal can't be something like 'Ukraine gives up its east and everyone promises to play nice from now on.' It might be something like there's a demilitarized zone and Rheinmetal builds a bunch of arms factories on Ukrainian soil, all of Europe and in particular Poland is allowed to export indefinite weapons (Ukraine can of course build its own too) so long as those arms don't cross whatever line, and the US is permitted to install a modern air defense system and provide ammunition and logistical support for it.

I think you're being too reductive, which may well be downstream of the politics created by the Biden admin's apparent lack of strategic thinking.

The question facing the US is whether any settlement with Russia at this moment can result not just in a temporary halt to hostilities but in sustainable peace. If we cut off support to Ukraine and Russia rebuilds and comes back in a few years, like what's happened previously, then it wasn't really peace to begin with. And if that happens, it opens the possibility that the conflict expands to NATO countries which in turn forces us to decide whether mutual defense is real or a bluff. That position is a no win whichever direction we go because we're either in a hot war with a nuclear armed adversary or we've removed ourselves from relevance as a major world power.

So while we need to be cautious about escalations the idea that we can just walk away from this isn't born out by the strategic realities.

Yea a buddy of mine was working for one of the public high schools and he mentioned to me at the end of the 2022-2023 school year that they were all nervous because no one but the about to graduate seniors had ever experienced a normal, in person exam week. Something about that specific example struck me as really eye opening. As grown ups it's easy to forget just how short a time period these big milestone parts of childhood/growing up are.

Seems reasonable to me.

Sterilizing oneself for political reasons has always struck me as kind of a self own.

I remember that urban legend. Hadn't thought about it in a million years. It occurs to me that one of the kind of sad things about the internet is the loss of little myths like that. Some might celebrate that but I think it's part of what makes us human.

Anyway as for us my wife and I had a little valentines date on the couch. We watched Babygirl which was another meh on a long string of movies from which I'd had higher expectations. Is it just me or have movies become too intentional in their ambiguity, especially in the endings? You get the sense that even the writers and directors don't have their own theory of what happened, they just ran out of run time.

Today the older son has a basketball game then going to log some volunteer hours at the school. Tomorrow more children's sports and a birthday party but they're spending the night at my mother in law's after and having their Monday off at her house. No holidays for me in techno-capitalist America but my wife has promised to make some old fashions while we get ANOTHER adult date night. I think we will probably get started on White Lotus season 3.

Heh then I suppose they have nothing to worry about and I'm sure nothing remotely damaging will come out of discovery.

They can. But it is illegal to discriminate in hiring based on race or sex.

I strongly doubt they said that. If they did they should probably settle the case.

That was a hell of a read.

Yea I don't know how anyone who isnt independently wealthy has bought a house since 2022 or so.

If there's a deal on the table my guess is that it's something like Russia keeps most of what it's taken, with some swaps for the areas of Russia it's occupying, Ukraine gets guaranteed massive arms imports, training, and logistical support from the West, sufficient to create it's own credible deterrent against future Russian incursions. NATO is almost certainly out of the equation if it ever was to begin with.

I wasn't really convinced. I think Smith is right in the sense that the government data isn't wrong or misleading. It just isn't measuring what is actually impacting peoples' assessment of the economy.

In my estimation It's all in the cost of living. You can have a job and still feel poorer. People lost a significant chunk of their actual income from inflation and the cost of money made it harder to make big purchases like a home or car. People feel those changes in a way that they don't feel a low unemployment rate or good stock market.

It doesn't matter. He has no credibility on any topic.

If they'd listen to me they'd win so much they'd be getting sick of it. Same goes for the Republicans.

I think compromise is possible but still don't follow where you're going with this. Yea it was stupid to compare Romney to Hitler. It was also stupid to say Obama was a Kenyan born Alinskyite radical black Marxist. And yet. It would be nice if we could establish a consensus that those sorts of politics are stupid and at best unhelpful. But if that's really what we're waiting for I think we will wait long.

Meanwhile the GOP stonewalled Obama from 2010 on, culminating in the Senate refusing to even have a vote on an open SCOTUS seat. Was all of this conducive to the kind of comity we're hoping to establish? I don't think so. And while I don't normally like to put on my partisan hat like this I think it's impossible to have a conversation about the behavior of the Democrats without these facts informing it, along with the unfair attacks against Mitt.

It would take me thousands of words to unpack but I believe that most current political debates can still be traced to the crisis of trust in government unleashed by the GWOT. If I wanted to really get aggressive I'd say it's had the mirror image impact on our polity that winning World War 2 did. Trump is of course very much a part of that.

I feel that way about a handful of things Trump is doing and I am probably to the left of 75-80% of the country. I doubt I'm alone.

However if you ask me if those things are worth the price of other things going on or likely to go on under this administration I'd still say no.

Yea I recall those debates. Clinton was very prominently confronted about these kinds of counterfactuals by Chris Wallace and it was such a big deal it dominated a whole news cycle. I'd say Clinton had the better of the exchanges but I suppose ymmv. I would also say though that the GOP called it 'wag the dog' when Clinton did attempt a strike on bin Laden when he was in Sudan, which suggests to me that if Clinton wasn't taking the threat seriously enough then neither was any politician on the national stage at the time.

Do you think you know? Or that Elon Musk knows?

I'm happy to concede that having a conversation like that on the merits requires a level of research no one on this blog is going to do. However to the extent we're arguing about what was in the platform and legislation actually accepted by the administration I'd say the evidence is clear.

I am not one to defend the constant calling up of the famous Austrian in American politics but that's just changing the subject.

What killed Romney was the proposal for wholesale restructuring (read massively cutting) of entitlements. Some changes there may well need to be on the table at some point but I know that you know that isn't the same as auditing fraud waste and abuse in discretionary spending or ferreting out millions spent on teaching the women of Kandahar about Gloria Steinem or whatever.

Google is your friend:

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2010/07/22/improper-payments-elimination-and-recovery-act-cutting-waste-and-fraud-government

No real disagreement on the principle. This is where I interject that there was a 'smarter government' component to the Obama administration. That inclination seems to have been lost in the Biden admin and the unusual circumstances of slow growth and essentially 0% interest on government borrowing that preceded it. I am all for bringing those concepts back.