Spring, waiting

And two days ago it was Spring

When worlds collide

Excerpt from How Far Will Joe Biden Go to Stop Putin? by Franklin Foer, Atlantic, 2/24/2022

But from the start, Biden worried about how tensions with Russia could spin out of control. The White House has always regarded Putin as an adversary who can’t be deterred by conventional means. They believe he has the mindset of a guerrilla fighter—who has no conscience about widening the battlefield to civilian targets—which limits the ability of the United States to respond in kind.

Excerpt from Masters of the Air by Donald L. Miller, Simon & Schuster

“Churchill did not share Harris’s confidence that bombing alone would bring down Nazi Germany, but in the absence of alternatives, he endorsed a bombing program of ruthless resolve…

“And the prime minister had no moral reservation, then or later, about unrestricted air warfare. After the war, he wrote to a former officer in Bomber Command: “We should never allow ourselves to apologize for what we did to Germany.”

And it bears repeating, this Munich is not that Munich

First snow for this little guy

I guess it's true, you can't win 'em all

We've dodged every big storm this year until…

So much for swift and severe

Biden says sanctions will take time to impact Russian economy

"This is going to take time. It’s not going to occur, he’s going to say, 'Oh my god these sanctions are coming, I’m going to stand down,'" Biden continued.

A contribution from across the pond

[H/T Ruud]

OSINT

 OSINT stands for "open source intelligence," and it's a thing. Big, CIAish agencies do it all the time. It simply means deriving intelligence from publicly available sources, such as newspapers, speeches, social media, etc. Which is a lot more difficult than might be imagined, since public information is not always, well, intelligent.

Nonetheless.

The best-known and probably most active organization doing OSINT on the web is Bellingcat, available here. 

A sensible amount of caution is advised.

Twitter, for one…

…is 99.973% wrong about everything by SWAG* estimate, and running true to form about Ukraine. The mainstream media is not far behind. These are the things we know for sure.

• It's real, and it's dangerous.
• Ukraine's defenders are outnumbered, outgunned, and out trained.
• The "swift and severe sanctions" promised are not very swift and possibly not too severe.
• The whole thing can blow at any time, at any seam (H/T Tom Wolfe). 
• A lot more will be said before there's anything more to say.

In the meantime we continue on our way around the sun. And only 24 days until Spring.

*Swinging Wild-Assed Guess

Free parking

As someone who, for years…

Biden team seeks port revival plans as it spends infrastructure cash

The U.S. Department of Transportation on Wednesday requested proposals for $450 million in grants to expand port terminals, piers, rail yards and storage facilities. It’s the highest amount ever offered through the Port Infrastructure Development Program, officials said.

…observed infrastructure improvements being made to the expressways of Chicago, I can assure you they invariably slow things down for a very long time before they speed things up. And by the time they do speed things up they're nearly ready to be improved again.

So don't make any ambitious plans.

It's not about who won, it's about how big the prize is

Ukraine’s economy is another victim of Russia’s ‘hybrid war’

[AP News]

Daniel Fried, a former U.S. diplomat who helped write sanctions in 2014, said the challenge in designing any new sanctions is that Russia is already succeeding in what he called “the slow strangulation of Ukraine.”

“When we saw the airlines pull out of Kyiv — they’re not pulling out of Russia. They’re pulling out of Kyiv. Putin is getting something that he wants without war.”

Everything crypto is

Elon Musk Urges McDonald’s to Accept Dogecoin for Payment

[Wall Street Journal via Apple News]

McDonald’s later tweeted “only if @Tesla accepts grimacecoin,” in reference to the purple character featured in some of the fast-food company’s advertising campaigns. Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.…

Dogecoin, initially started as a joke in 2013, is currently in the top 10 by market value for cryptocurrencies, according to CoinMarketCap. Its value tends to fluctuate based on what Mr. Musk says about the volatile cryptocurrency.

[I don't know if it's pronounced "dodge coin" or "doggie coin," FWIW.]

Design by algorithm?

The woman in the picture (Julia Fox) and the abortion pill are two different stories, a little fact not made entirely clear in this layout. This is the kind of editorial glitch that can create…problems.

[From Apple News]