Ukraine Invasion

[Kane]

[uebermann]

I think Russia is just trying to suss out the world's reaction and see who moves and how. If no one does anything significant in response, they will stage an attack some time in the near future. It really doesn't benefit them to start a war over Ukraine, so if they think a war will come because of it, they will just say it is the world overreacting and they are just running exercises.

If the world has no real response, then they will do just as they did with Crimea and get away with an invasion with little to no effort. The only thing is how much Ukraine is prepared to battle with Russia on this. Many Ukrainians are tired of a government that does nothing for the people and is typically always extremely corrupt, mixed with their lives being in the dumps, I don't know that it really matters as much to an average Ukrainian trying to get by in life, in the grand scheme of things.

[Kane]

[Saracen]

We're living in an age where autocrats like Trump, Putin, Jinping, Erdogan, Netanyahu, Bennett, Sisi, MBS, and MBZ are celebrated and fawned over by masses of useful sheep whereas the reality is that they're all bullies in a large playground flexing their muscles and playing with toys they shouldn't be playing with... and the people of the Global South are paying the price for their hubris.

[Kane]

Latvia is piling on requesting a permanent US presence..

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/la ... 021-11-29/

Airfields in Guam and Australia to see some money...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/us-china-p ... lead_pos10

Taiwan has been working on submarines...

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/sp ... ubmarines/

Polish PM says it's "Time to wake up"

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59470839

Coincidentally Poland is on the path to doubling their military size after recent disastrous wargames....

https://apnews.com/article/europe-polan ... 6172237217

[Kane]

[Kane]

[Kane]

[Kane]

Yeah this was published by WSJ as an exclusive...

https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/bei ... ntral-bank

Reserve requirements for banks are going down. And recently transparency about certain sectors in the Chinese economy have become more...opaque. Not a good sign.

[Kane]

https://news.yahoo.com/nicaragua-switch ... 42622.html

Nicaragua just flipped and went Beijing

https://dailyuknews.com/business/us-spo ... s-posture/

This is the wrong read. I don't know if this is intentionally being framed the wrong way or if the admin is just communicating it poorly - this is the Biden admin attempting to clarify when nukes would be used. This is them trying to establish a red line for the utilization of nuclear weapons and trying to accomplish the hard task of separating that from conventional warfare. This is worrying not because the Biden admin is signaling a "no first use" policy but because....the admin has reason to worry that this will require clarification soon.

Russia is going to invade Ukraine.

Macron is sending the right signals but it's a bit late....

https://dailyuknews.com/business/macron ... ence-ties/