So Funny I Forgot to Laugh

We're not all content to do business like this in the West anymore, Paul.  Tell your friends.  The news business is gonna have to change too. It's not funny anymore.

You're in the minority with your numbers, and you don't speak for us. You might have some prizes and connections and, nothing to be ashamed of, an admittedly affluent lifestyle now, but you cannot keep controlling what affects the rest of us.  Democracy, respected, makes you equal to us -- one to one -- in voting numbers.  Despite all the alleged expertise that proves faulty in practice, and is often unethical (ie/enron), you aren't very convincing to younger minds who are still thinking and not just subscribing out of habitual practice.

Everyone knows the broad outlines of the story so far: Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded in February of last year, expecting a quick victory over Ukraine’s much weaker army, but the Ukrainians, astonishingly, defeated the would-be blitzkrieg and the war has turned instead into a brutal slugging match.

No matter how valorous, Ukrainians on their own would have no chance in such a match. But they have received crucial aid from Western nations that see Ukraine — as do I — as a crucial front in the defense of democracy.

Can the West afford to provide aid on a sufficient scale to turn the war’s tide? Of course, and easily, because Western economies are vastly bigger than Russia’s. The United States has committed about $80 billion so far, which sounds like a lot — and is a lot, from the point of view of the combatants — but is only a bit more than 1 percent of the U.S. federal budget. Americans who complain about the expense of aiding Ukraine are either innumerate or disingenuous; it’s no secret that many people on the right and a few on the left actually want Putin to win.

But while money isn’t really an issue here, getting Ukraine the specific things it needs in order to fight turns out to be more problematic. Nobody expected a sustained war of attrition to break out in the 21st century, and while we have vast production capacity in general, it turns out that we have limited capacity to produce key military goods. The most pressing problem, reporting suggests, is that Ukraine is firing artillery shells faster than the West can produce them — and increasing production quickly is apparently very hard. (Russia seems to be having similar and probably worse problems, but I’m not going to play armchair general and prognosticate about the war.)