John T. Reed’s news blog
Russia is poorer than they want you to know and this war is more than they can afford.
Posted by John Reed on
Given its population, Russia is a relatively poor country on a per capita basis. .The large explosions happening more or less constantly in Ukraine are quite expensive. In Vietnam, I was a platoon leader in a mixed heavy artillery battalion (self-propelled 8-inch and 175mm cannons http://www.quanloi.org/OtherBatteries/Charlie%20Battery/BillPoseyPhotos/Gallery%202/BIllPoseyVNPhotoGallery2Page.htm) for a while. Every round they fired costs a bunch. Around $1,000 each nowadays. The most expensive US artillery shell the Excalibur, costs $140,000 each. The self-propelled cannons cost about $1,000,000 each and I am guessing they need lots of maintenance because the violence of what they do every time they fire has to wear...
Zelenskyy may agree to never NATO and let them have the eastern provinces he stole
Posted by John Reed on
Ukraine President Zelensky now says he has cooled to joining NATO and he is willing to discuss letting Russia have two eastern provinces that they have been fighting over since 2014..Both of these positions reward Putin’s misbehavior. That must never happen anywhere. If he is rewarded for these invasions, he will do it again. This got a name in 1938: appeasement. The Brit who signed it said it achieved “Peace in our time.” In the event, it got precisely 324 days of peace. On teh 325th day, Hitler invaded Poland starting WW II. The consequence of it was WW II in...
Green energy has not been revealed to be an expensive fraud
Posted by John Reed on
The eventual inevitable has arrived. That green energy is a fraud has finally hit the low-information voters in the face at the pump. Green energy is now a dirty word. .America has more energy than any nation on earth, yet our president is now begging hostile nations—Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and UAE—who have less fossil fuels than we do—to produce more oil so that Biden does not get yelled at by the woke children of the Democrat party..The claimed reason to oppose fossil fuels is they put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Biden essentially is somehow arguing that fossil fuels from outside...
Facebook suspended me again. A little more of that and I will tell them to write their own content.
Posted by John Reed on
I have been on Facebook for so many years I do not remember when I started..They just suspended me for the second time in two weeks..The first time we were discussing Ukrainians attacking the Russian convoys. I am a West Point graduate Vietnam vet and many of my Facebook readers are also service academy grads or other vets..I explained that the armored vehicles (tanks and armored scout vehicles) were buttoned up—hatches closed, steering by looking through periscopes. You can attack them with anti-tank weapons and Molotov cocktails but not rifles. .But many of the vehicles in the Russian convoy are...
Some disadvantages of gold go away if you keep it abroad.
Posted by John Reed on
The highest gold price per troy ounce adjusted for inflation was $2,450.18 in January, 1980. Second highest, August, 2011, $2,264.83. Today: $1,967. That means the fear of inflation is up there among the highest it has ever been. The average long-term (220 years) price of gold adjusted for inflation to 2011 dollars is $500 according to Forbes magazine. https://www.forbes.com/.../04/22/gold-bugs-swatted-again/... What is the future of gold? I cannot put dates on it. But here are a couple of facts: • Hyperinflation fear is what makes the price of gold rise above $500 in 2011 dollars. Gold pays no interest and it...