Russian lawmakers authorize Putin to use military force outside the country

[Labster]

Because you're not in America, Hazard, you don't get how mainstream Fox News is here.  Fox News is the most watched news network.  Tucker Carlson gets 3.1 million viewers a night on average.  If ten percent of his regular viewers start believing the Russian propaganda, that's half a million enemy sympathizers.  I mean, it's not the size of audience that Father Coughlin got, but it is worrying.

And yes I am trotting out all of the WWII analogies because if we're not in a world war right now, why on Earth is the great power China acting like it's being forced to take a side on a military action 3000km away?  (Although I could also argue it's a tankery (sensha-do) competition because of all of the white flags popping out of Russian-made tanks.)

And while I think it's a good idea to change in track gauge in the Baltics, it's not critical because they are NATO members.  An attack on Estonia means nuclear war.  There's no point in worrying about too much about conventional defenses when a conventional attack means an nuclear first strike on Moscow.  I mean, conventional defenses are good so as to prevent fait accompli attempts (which is only for Russian leadership dumb enough to not realize that even that would trigger a first strike from the US and France).  It's also not critical for Finland either, which is basically an island and it's hard to imagine Tornio being at the center of anything defensively.

Rail access is critical for Ukraine, but everything is critical and infrastructure is falling much faster than it is getting built.  If we want to help on this specific issue, it would probably make more sense to build wide gauge tracks into Poland to put transfer stations there.  There are transfer stations in Romania and Moldova, so it's not as critical on the southern lines.  There's one wide gauge line that goes far into Slovakia as well.