Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
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John Quiggin 
Blowing up trains: the beginning of the endgame?
Ukraine has being attacking Russian oil refineries and tank farms with long-range drones for some time. It now seems to have added a systematic strategic campaign against the Russian rail network, vital to the logistics of its invasion of Ukraine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7Ythl2nok0
Why didn’t this start earlier?
The fine analyst Phillips O’Brien provides a useful historical analogy to a high-level dispute on targeting within the Allied bombing of Germany in 1944. Spaatz, the commander of the US bombers, favoured oil refineries. Tedder, Eisenhower’s British deputy in air matters, pushed for rail infrastructure. They were both right. In the upshot, oil stayed first because the daytime bombing force was American, protected by the hugely important Mustang long-range fighter. But Tedder had enough clout to get a smaller-scale but still effective rail campaign.
A few speculations on the putative change in strategy. Rail lines are difficult targets for air attack: they are narrow, very robust, and easily reparable. The vulnerable bits are only a small part of the system: bridges, junctions, trains, signalling and power supply. Leave the long and indefensible stretches of rail lines in the country to partisans and saboteurs if you have them – IIRC in June 1944 the scale of sabotage by the French Resistance and British special forces prevented the German army from moving any troops, equipment and stores by rail west of the Seine. Modern Russian rail lines are almost completely electrified, good for the planet but much more vulnerable than the Reichsbahn’s coal locomotives and stockpiles. Contrast oil refineries which are big and with flammable materials everywhere in thin-walled pipes, pumps and tanks.
Perhaps Ukraine has only recently developed good tactics and drone models for rail targets. Ukraine has been ramping up production of drones and increasing their payloads, so perhaps it can now afford an all-of-the-above policy. Perhaps the refinery campaign has plateaued. If you damage a refinery badly enough to shut it down, it makes sense to let the enemy put scarce resources into repairs before paying a second visit. The explanation does not matter much, the campaign does.
Ukraine correctly asserts that both oil refineries and the rail network are vital parts of Russia’s war economy, and hence are legitimate targets in spite of the likely collateral damage to civilians. This is limited: Ukraine does not attack civilian passenger trains. However, disrupting civilian rail travel breaks the cocoon of indifference and willed ignorance in which many big-city Russians still live, in the same way as closures of airports and gasoline shortages do.
The oil and rail campaigns are not morale-boosting sideshows; they are Ukraine’s main strategic weapon against Putin’s Russia. Can they deliver victory? Their 1944 predecessor played a large part in the final collapse of the German economy and war machine in 1945. It wasn’t just possibly biased Allied air staffs saying this. Highly-placed Germans said the same: Speer, Goering, Galland. “Luftwaffe Field Marshal Erhard Milch, referring to the consequences of the oil campaign, claimed that “The British left us with deep and bleeding wounds, but the Americans stabbed us in the heart.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II]
The victory scenario requires two things. One is that, in conjunction with Ukrainian tactical superiority on the battlefield, the air campaign can compromise Russian logistics to the point where the Russian army can no longer engage in significant offensives. This would leave Putin with no politically viable narrative to justify continuing the war. Over a million casualties as the price for occupying two-and-a-half ruined oblasts? The second is that the difficulties of the Russian economy grow into widespread crisis, with rising inflation, insoluble shortages of gasoline and other key products, collapsing public services, and the insatiable demands of the losing attritional war for cannon fodder, together crippling the civilian economy and home-front morale.
I am still convinced that Putin’s spray-gilt empire is headed for dramatic collapse. Ukraine’s allies should stop fretting about negotiating a peace based only on battlefield stalemate, requiring impossible territorial concessions by Zelensky. When this happens, it will be linked to the collapse of the Russian economy and splits in Putin’s fragile political base in the kleptocratic and *MRGA elites. Putin’s problem will be staying alive in the face of mass riots and disaffected generals, not crafting a clever negotiating position à la Metternich.
*MRGA = Make Russia Great Again. My coinage, probably not original.
Olive tree vandalism in Palestine
George Monbiot in the Guardian:
“The Israeli government has been felling Palestinians’ ancient olive trees for decades to deprive them of subsistence, demoralise them and break their connection with the land.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/27/israel-ecocide-gaza-bombs-agricultural-land-genocide
Deuteronomy 20:19, NIV:
“When you lay siege to a city for a long time, fighting against it to capture it, do not destroy its trees by putting an axe to them, because you can eat their fruit. Do not cut them down. Are the trees people, that you should besiege them?”
Many on the Israeli Right are religious fundamentalists, and fully aware of the prohibition they are violating.
Deuteronomy is not a pacifist text: the next verse says that cutting down non-fruiting trees to make siege engines is fine. The split-the-difference spirit is very much that of the Geneva Conventions. Second best beats no cigar.
Something in the water
The number of self-reported transgender people has risen in recent decades. The two leading environmental theories are that (a) the real incidence has not changed, only the willingness to leave the closet (b) it’s a delusion, a fad promoted by left-wing culture warriors. Both theories have lots of holes. Where is the growing tolerance of transgender identity we have seen on gay marriage? How exactly do the handful of trans ideologues get their message across to troubled teenagers?
Above all, neither theory explains the steady fall in incidence by age group. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Age-Trans-Individuals-Jan-2017.pdf Why should 65-year old pensioners, with no bosses or workmates to placate, feel more constrained in admitting their condition than 50-year-olds with jobs to lose? Nobody stops us from spending all day in pyjamas if we feel like it. Have the 50-year-olds really been more exposed to trans propaganda than us pensioners?
My theory: it`s something in the environment, in the air or (less plausibly) water, like lead. It would be pretty easy to check this out using the same epidemiological number-crunching used to establish the air pollution link to dementia. A positive finding would also stick it to the annoying culture warriors who have picked this issue to fight over, to the detriment of large numbers of unhappy young people.
There is a likely pollution link. Some uncertainty and denial is likely funded by the big money involved in manufacturing certain plastics, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. If enough money were put into researching the link it probably would be found. This is IMHO of course. This document is of interest.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1281309/