I counted the graves at the baby cemetery – those who want to stop reading now should do so because the post isn’t getting more cheerful after this point – and here is a weird thing. The baby cemetery hasn’t existed for long, but in the years it’s been there, there are usually two dead babies per year. Sometimes, there is one. Sometimes, there are three. There were two in 2010, two in 2011, two in 2012, two in 2013. None were added in 2014, which is great.

But 2008 is a year that really stands out. There were nine dead babies in that single year. There wasn’t any other year that even comes close.

I have no idea what this means.

In case you haven’t seen this video, here is Hillary Clinton doing a short parody of Putin:

Westerners share a curious fantasy. They imagine that everybody in the world wants to live just like they do. In this fantasy, everybody is dying to work 60 hours a week 52 weeks in a year in order to pay off an enormous mortgage and buy a bunch of things the TV told them they urgently need.

Depending on their political leanings, Westerners either pity the poor losers who have no access to these extraordinary joys or engage in gloomy fantasies of how the hordes of the poor losers, starved for work and debt, are coming to take all of it away.

No evidence suffices to convince Westerners that there are crowds of people in the world who have no interest in this lifestyle. The greatest punishment they can imagine inflicting on their enemies is preventing their existence in the work / debt cycle.

This is precisely the delusion that motivates the Western sanctions against Russia. The sanctions are expected to work because Russians should be devastated if they are not allowed to keep buying and borrowing.

But just like an enormous number of people around the world  (the people whom we either pity or fear), Russians don’t see this way of life as hugely attractive. They don’t want all of this stuff we keep buying and they really don’t want to work all the time to buy the stuff. Sanctions are making them happy because they are offering an exit from the onerous work / buy / borrow cycle.

Russian troops are moving forward inside the territory of Ukraine. Now they are shelling Mariupol, a peaceful Ukrainian city that has the misfortune of being located between Russia and the Crimea.

Peaceful inhabitants of Mariupol are dying.

No action against the Russian invaders is being taken on the basis of the bill passed by Congress and signed by Obama. There is no indication that the Russians are planning to end the hostilities. To the contrary, they are being very open about the plan to keep spreading the hostilities to an ever greater territory of Ukraine.

In the following post, I will explain why economic sanctions against Russia don’t work.