Political Cartoons

In March of 2022 I made the following guess about the eventual outcome of Russia's Ukraine invasion:

Russia will blast Ukraine into powder, extract some concession like "we won't join NATO and those new republics are not part of Ukraine", then pull back into the republics, leaving them bristling with hardware for years. The Russian economy will burn low for a long while during which they will be at the mercy of the Chinese and whatever belt-and-road-style economic devil's bargain they care to name. Animosity between Europe and Russia, the US and Russia, will remain high for a decade, accomplishing nothing.

Ukraine will remain a depopulated ruin for at least that long. The EU will turn up its nose, sensing another debtor country like Greece. Putin will die or ""step down"" in something like five years, probably less, and his replacement will try and turn the page with the West, but without internal reforms the hands that are extended will all be those of the same old oligarchs and the Russian people will continue to be screwed for another generation, continue to be susceptible to jingoism and propaganda, and will lean even harder into the Chinese philosophy of governance: Not a government of, by, and for the people, but a people of, by, and for the government (by swordpoint if necessary).

This guess was mostly about stagnation. I figured the situation would not change for years, even as more people died and more hardware was thrown at both sides. This has come true, though there are some external consequences: NATO is re-arming and growing more independent, and Russia's ostensible allies are taking advantage of their economy being leveraged out over a financial abyss.

I set a limit of five years, which was a bit arbitrary, but I'm rolling with it. I think we're still headed for this state of affairs two years from now and there's only one thing that could realistically alter the course: Russia's economy going into a complete tailspin, before Putin's death.

If that happens, the Russian people might, maybe, get so sick of total war and sending their sons into a meat grinder that they strike Moscow hard enough to put a crack in the state oligarchy. But if I'm honest, this is unlikely. Never underestimate the capacity of Russian people to suffer.

Viruses are very very small, and so numerous that their quantity is beyond all hope of human understanding.

Consider the ocean:

There are 10 nonillion viruses in the ocean. That's a 10 with 30 zeroes after it.

That's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 viruses sloshing about.

Let's play around with that number a bit just to understand how we, as mere humans, cannot actually ever understand it:

• There are 100 billion times more viruses in the oceans than there are grains of sand on all the world's beaches.
• If you put the viruses of the oceans together on a scale, they would equal the weight of 75 million blue whales. (There are currently less than 10,000 blue whales on the entire planet.)
• If you placed all the viruses in the ocean next to each other in a straight line, that line would stretch for 42 million light years.

The good news for humans is, only a minute fraction of the viruses in the ocean can infect us. Some infect fish and other marine animals, but their most common target is bacteria and other single-celled microbes.

Marine viruses are incredibly good at infecting their chosen targets. In the ocean, with every second that passes, one hundred billion trillion microbes are newly invaded by a virus. Every 24 hours, viruses kill between 15 and 40 percent of all the bacteria in the world's oceans. Those that survive, reproduce... And the next day another 15 to 40 percent are murdered by viruses. Over and over again, every day, this war rages as the ocean churns.

Paraphrased from A Planet Of Viruses, 3rd Edition