What Day Is It?

      It's Star Trek day, among other things, the day the first episode of the series aired on NBC, the first step in a long cultural arc that took science fiction from being that crazy stuff your parents razzed you for watching and your English teacher despaired of you reading* to a cherished institution featuring Star Wars day every May and Star Trek day as summer comes to an end.

     Fun stuff, but it's a reminder that every day is History Day.†  I was reminded of that more forcefully while listening to a radio news piece from Kyiv this morning, covering the Russian drone strikes in that city.  The reporter had been awakened in the night by the sound of incoming Sahed drones and recorded parts of her story with the engines of the weapons throbbing in the background.  It's an eerie sound, and reminds me of Edward R. Murrow of CBS, broadcasting live from a London rooftop during the Blitz.‡  Or, much later in that war, the guttural buzz and sudden halt of an incoming V-1.

     We're in the run-up to World War III, or at least to a wider European War.  This time, America First holds the White House and Congress; Zelenskyy is no Churchill, nor is Putin Hitler: history does not repeat.  But it does rhyme, and the present verses carry a familiar rhythm.

     I hope I'm wrong, but there's a chill in my bones that freezes optimism.
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*Not quite a decade later, my high school offered a class on "Science Fiction."  But the English department was pretty desperate, in that huge Sports, Shop and (slightly) Math-heavy high school.  My Dad, on the other hand, never stopped regarding it as silly stuff, unworthy of adult interest.  He preferred Westerns.
 
† Is there a history Day?  Well, yes and no.  It's not just one day.
 
‡ At first, BBC didn't want him up there, and refused use of the roof of their main studio location, Broadcast House, fearing Germans might use the sound to fine-tune their bombing.  Eventually, someone realized the value of broadcasting live coverage of the attacks, and British resolve in the face of them, to the then-neutral United States.

Okay, I'll Bite

     Half everybody -- or maybe it's three-quarters by now -- has their own take on the meeting yesterday between Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Donald Trump, Vice-President J. D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and various assistants, flacks, hangers-on and the Press.

     It's not news that things did not go as expected.  Word was that Ukraine had agreed to a deal swapping access to their rare earth deposits in exchange for past and future U. S. help.

     Everybody went off-script.

     Here's the thing: while such agreements are usually worked out well in advance by underlings, who can have all manner of deep and vociferous disagreements in private, and then put forth by their principals in carefully-planned press events, that particular assortment of national leaders is remarkably lacking in political experience.  Sure, Mr. Trump was President for one term already, but before that?  Real estate promoter.  Reality TV star.  Mr. Zelenskyy was a professional comedian.  Mr. Vance spent part of one term as a U. S. Senator, after dabbling as a memoirist, venture capitalist and attorney.  The only long-term expertise in the front row at that meeting was Secretary Rubio, and it didn't appear to me that anyone was looking to him for guidance.

     Everybody's got some opinion about who was out of line and who was merely standing up for their side, but what I have to add is just this: these are not old hands at diplomatic give and take.  I did not get the impression any of them were playing a carefully calculated game.  They surprised themselves and each other.

     I'm not much inclined to give President Trump or any member of his Administration the benefit of the doubt, and I do my best to take that into account.  Conversely, I'm overly aware that Zelenskyy has had his back against the wall since the Russians first invaded.  But no matter how I feel about the participants, that meeting was a cock-up, in full view of the Press.

     And you'd have to be entirely ignorant of at least the last three or four hundred years of history to know that when major powers fail to oppose aggressive territorial expansion in Europe, it always grows to become a huge problem.

Well, It's Done

     The new President has been installed, with slightly more fuss than screwing a new plug fuse into a 1920s electrical box.  Apparently, we're going to war against Panama, possibly Mexico, and Boy George.  The latter is a Crown subject and presumably protected; Mexico's reaction to organized U. S. efforts against drug cartels is an open question.  But I'd sure hate to be Panama right now.  No, strike that: I'd sure hate to be the Panama Canal.

     The thing about a vulnerable asset, of which the canal is a prime example, is that it is entirely too easy to destroy its value, especially while fighting over it.

     The incoming President's speech was -- and I don't want to be unfair, this is hardly atypical of Inauguration speeches -- long on rah-rah rhetoric and short on specific plans.  So was his express desire to "retake the Panama Canal" chest-beating boosterism or a definite plan?  Are his aims to turn the fed.gov on a dime going to run headlong into the reality that even a cooperative Federal bureaucracy has far worse cornering ability than a 1930s battleship?  I dunno about the first, but the second is likely, and the pile-up will be ugly no matter what.

One Down, 87 To Go

     It depends on how you count them, but there were almost 90 autocratic governments on Earth yesterday, and today there's one less: Assad isn't running Syria any more.  (Present whereabouts unknown; a plane carrying him may have gone down, and no one is looking very hard.  Update: The Russians say he's been granted asylum in Moscow.  He was their boy in the Middle East for a long time, so it's not unlikely. )

     What comes next?  It's hard to say.  What newscasts are calling "Syrian rebels" is a a polyglot bunch, and the largest bloc, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has palled around with both the "Islamic State" and al-Qaida in the past.  They haven't run with either since 2016; guessing if that was a matter of wanting less crazy or more is an exercise for pundits and intel professionals.  Junior partner is the Syrian National Army, a collection of at least twenty-eight groups;* some sources say at least twenty-one of them have received U. S. assistance in the past, against IS and related threats, but we've been known to hand out goodies to almost anyone who'd smile and promise to fight Communists, Islamic extremists and the like.†  Some of SNA's roots go back to the "Free Syrian Army," and Turkey has been one of their main sources of support, despite the occasional armed squabble.

     You can tie yourself up in knots trying to sort all this out, and by the time you have, the situation will have changed.  None of them liked Assad, or the way he was running the country, and it appears that became a strong enough motivation that they were able to work together.

     It's an open question if they'll be able to continue working together, but we can at least hope.  If you're expecting the Syrian James Madison will come running down from the hinterlands, waving a draft Constitution well-suited to the people of that nation, don't hold your breath.  They might -- and it would be good news if they can -- manage to cobble something together that will hold long enough to make serious inroads against the starvation and misery that part of the world has become famous for.

     It says something about our species that the very cradle of human civilization has become a nightmare of failed states and warlordism, with refugees as the prime regional export.  It says something about us, and it's nothing pleasant.
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* At this point, the better-informed might be wondering, "What of the Kurds?"  They're wondering that, too.  They appear to have very little presence in the SNA.  Kurds are about ten percent of Syrian population and are likely to get what they usually get: short shrift.  The French, the British, the various Allied and UN powers, the local potentates and so on all overlooked them when they drew lines on maps, and it's one more smoldering problem in a place that has an oversupply of tragedies.
 
† And that's nothing new -- go read some early 19th-Century Letters of Marque issued by Congress for examples. A proxy war is a cheap war for everyone except the proxies.

Nope

     I'm still getting comments irrationally claiming that the worst thing that could happen in a second Trump term would be "mean tweets," while re-electing Biden is a sure ticket to "nuclear war over a wheatfield half a world away."

     Yeah, no.  Putin will keep on going if he gets Ukraine, and Mr. Trump has all but promised to let him have that country.  At that point, an expansionist Russia is right up against NATO and feeling stroppy, a sure promise of war in Europe even if Mr. Trump tries to play the "too proud to fight" card just as the odious Mr. Wilson attempted.  America stepping back to let Europe burn hasn't worked in the last two European wars that went global and it won't work a third time, either.  We can help put this fire out while it is small or wait until it threatens to burn the entire world before pitching in.  It was a close call last time and we'd be fools to roll the dice once more.

     With Mr. Biden, Russia's ugly little war is safely off NATO turf and it's highly probable the West can outlast Gospodin Putin's ambitions.  Russia's industry still falters; their supply chains are strained and production lags demand.  If you want to limit the scope of this war, the battlefield has got to be kept away from NATO member nations.

     Do you want a mumbler or a loose cannon?  "Mean tweets" are a tea candle to the book-burning bonfire promised by "Project 2025" from Mr. Trump's GOP.  He mishandled the pandemic and trashed the transition last time; this time, he and his allies are promising to do enormously more damage and they've set it out for anyone to read.

D-Day

     It was on this date in 1944 that the Allies began to take back Europe from Nazi Germany -- and it probably wouldn't have been possible even then if the USSR hadn't been pushing back, hard, for a year and a half in the east.*

     The successful invasion of Europe came at a terrible cost in human life, and it took nearly three months of fighting to cover what is now a three hour drive from the landing sites to Paris.  Victory in Europe took eleven months from D-Day, and left smoking ruins.

     There is war in Europe again today, with an authoritarian regime invading a smaller, weaker neighbor.  The United States is beset by "America First " isolationists and a small, vocal contingent of outright fascists, just as we were in 1939 - 41.  Along with our European allies, we're providing materiel support to the invaded nation, while trying to stay clear of the fight.

     Will echoes of the events of WW II -- which themselves echoed the Great War only a generation earlier -- ring across Europe again?  The price of inaction is paid in blood, in labor and goods lost in the flames of war, and it is always high.  Civilization won last time and the time before, but victory is never certain.

     Remember the past.  Understand the present.
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* A source of tension between Russia and the rest of the WW II Allies that persists to this day is that the USSR lost around eleven million soldiers and seven million civilians, and Russians don't think the other Allies ever fully recognized the extent of their losses.  It's a resentment Vladimir Putin exploits now, when he demonizes NATO.

Doesn't Work That Way

     Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, to the U. S. Federal government, over their access to the border: "You don't need to be here."

     Nope.  Exactly backwards.  Whether they are doing a great job or a terrible job of controlling the borders of the U.S., the national border is very much within the purview of the Federal government.  It's a core job of national governments everywhere.  In that part of our country, it has worked that way since 19 February, 1846.  Starting in April of that year, the state government of Texas was damn happy to have Federal troops bleeding and dying on their behalf, and apart from the few years they spent under the ultimately less-sheltering wing of a different federation, that's how it's been.

     It's a bit late to change their minds now.  In fact, there was a war over it.  Texas was on the losing side.

     There's a bill in Congress at present that would give the border hawks everything they've been asking for.  It's got many of the more-liberal Democrats fuming -- and so are the large Trumpian wing of Congressional Republicans.  The Dems are angry because they think it's too harsh.  Mr. Trump's fellow-travelers are not as clear about why they dislike it, but it seems to be based on their presumptive Presidential candidate not liking it: he doesn't want to lose such a great issue to campaign on!

     Yes, there you have it: the fellow who is griping about a flood of informal, illegal and/or refuge-seeking migrants pouring over the border wants them to keep on coming, hurried masses yearning to breathe free,* until the November election.  It's a crisis, he tells the cheering crowds, they've got to be stopped!  --But not quite yet.  At least not for another nine months.

     'Splain me that.  Lt. Gov. Patrick, you can go first.
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* Texas has not yet implemented air tolls for non-residents, though they may be working it.

Dead People Aren't A Math Problem

     Soldiers, civilians and every version of combatant in between from the most innocent of persons to the worst of terrorists aren't counters in a game.  They're people.

     Any time you try to do math with them, you end up pursuing morally repugnant lines of thought.  "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" at least pursues balance, albeit bloodily; ten, or a hundred or a thousand of the other side for one of your own does not, and cannot.  It's a crime to murder one; it's a crime to murder millions, and pseudoStalinesque cynicism aside, turning it from a tragedy into a statistic doesn't actually change what it is.  One killing doesn't magically make another one or thousands more okay, though it may be necessary in order to stop the process from continuing, a matter which is only clear after the fact.

     The usual pundits and online self-appointed experts are holding forth on the interim ruling of the International Court of Justice in regard to South Africa's (essentially a proxy for Palestine) charges of genocide against Israel's military actions in the Gaza Strip.  To them, it either went too far or didn't go far enough, and never mind that the ICJ is toothless: nations accept or ignore its rulings voluntarily, so the World Court tends to not issue orders that it knows will not be obeyed.

     I'd love to have a real strong opinion on the conflict and share it with you, but I keep getting distracted by the piles of bodies and the plight of the survivors, and by the festering emotions on all sides that the present action will not relieve, no more than any of the previous ones have.  I don't have any answers.  All I know is that human suffering isn't a math problem.  The solutions to it may be, but we're not close to knowing how to set up those equations, let alone how to solve them.

Hear Hoofbeats, Expect Horses

     It's rarely zebras.  And outside of zebra country, in places where herds of horses have run for centuries?  It's not going to be zebras.  It's not going to be moose.

     In Europe, they've been staging nasty wars for centuries.  One country or another starts to get stroppy and the next thing you know, there's a problem and unless it is addressed promptly, it festers and spreads.  Napoleon, the Central Powers, Hitler, that stuff you read about in school, it's just the tip of the iceberg.  From at least the Seven Years' War onward, they've been only too happy to let their wars spread.

     The present conflagration is Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but anyone who thinks it will stop there has been whistling past history's graves.

     Congress -- specifically, the U. S. House of Representatives -- has stymied American funding to support Ukraine's war effort.  They say they're concerned about the U. S. border, which today's Republican party likes to claim is "wide open."  (It's not, and I'd like to drop a random group of Congressbeings into Mexico to make their way home via unofficial channels so they can encounter the Border Patrol and find out for themselves.)  That's their excuse for holding money for Ukraine hostage.

     Right now, the conflict in Europe is as cheap a fight with Russia as we're ever going to get: a chance to use up aging military supplies, find out how our stuff holds up against what Russia has under real-world conditions, and do so without spilling a drop of American blood.  Or we can do what the House seems to want -- hang back, complain it's not our fight, and let Mr. Putin succeed in his efforts to regain the former Soviet empire.  Sooner or later, those efforts will bump into NATO.  In the Baltics, in Poland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia (even Finland, and ask the Finns if they remember their last few Russian wars), NATO and Russia stand toe to toe.  And on the far side of Russia's vast expanse, the People's Republic of China is following Putin's transgression of international norms with great interest; having absorbed Hong Kong, the only thing that that keeps them from reaching for Taiwan is the sure and certain knowledge that the free world is watching.

     Russia's invasion of Ukraine is not an outlier.  It's not a zebra.  It's a horse -- the first of a herd of horses that, if not controlled, will surely trample Europe and leave ruin across the world.  We can stop it now, before it spreads, or we can, once again, wait until our backs are to the wall and wage a terrible, uncertain struggle to try to put matters to rights.  Those are the choices.  And if WW III comes, nobody will give a damn about refugees sneaking across the border.

     I don't know if Congressional Republicans are cynical and self-seeking, cowards afraid to stand up to a demagogue, accelerationist religious nutjobs, outright traitors or some combination of all four, and I don't much care.  They're shambling towards another World War and they don't seem to give a damn about the long-term consequences as long as it plays well to their base -- a base whose sons and daughters will be sent to fight and die when the war they are unwilling to avert blossoms.

     Why did it take so long for Europe to cooperate against Napoleon?  Why didn't the civilized world kick the props out from under the shaky alliances that fueled WW I?  Why wasn't Hitler brought to an end when he was only a ranting politician with odious ideas?  Why didn't we stop Putin's aggression when we could?

     You want the answer to the Fermi Paradox?  I suspect any civilization that rises high enough to reduce itself to rubble eventually manages to, and never quite gets far enough ahead to establish a foothold off their planet before they've exhausted the available resources.  Exhibit A is presently on tour in Ukraine, driving a T-90 and carrying some kind of AK variant, crapping out landmines and cluster bombs as it goes.  And Exhibit B can be found in Congressional offices, pretending the oceans are impassable moats.

Whatever You Know About Middle-East Conflict Is Probably Wrong

     But you're not alone in that.  Whatever I know is probably wrong, too.  As near as I can tell, whatever anyone knows about the big picture or the deep (or even recent) history is likely to be wrong, incomplete or biased.

     Fewer dead noncombatants would be an improvement.  Fewer people traumatized, hungry, thirsty and homeless would be an improvement.

     More dead people would not be an improvement.  Anyone calling for wiping out this side or that side isn't really wanting to make the situation better.

     The dead have no national identity.  Corpses have no religion.  History stopped for them when their life ended.

     I can't fix it.  I don't have any clever suggestions.  But the news pains me.  And it pains me even more that while one side looks better to me than another, the governments, would-be governments and militant groups, from the best to the worst, are all standing in and shedding far more blood than is sane.  When the best hope isn't much of a hope at all, it's difficult to believe anything will ever get better -- and easy to understand how the people in the middle of it fall into nihilism and destruction.

Sick Days/What Vacation?

     Still sick.  Better, I think, but still sick.  I am craving salt and flavor -- something awful, like a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.  It would feel like broken glass in my throat and I don't have any anyway, so I'll get by with Ritz crackers and well-honeyed hot tea.
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     Still hoping to get out of the house a little tomorrow.  I'm on a panel at a writer's conference.  We'll see.
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     Yesterday, I learned the rear tray of my little Canon color inkjet printer will feed 3x5 cards!  That simplified making notes for the panel.  While the ink is the usual overpriced nightmare, the printer/scanner has proven over and over that it is a useful, versatile device.  I use it more often than the big laser printer, in fact: the printed pages lay flatter and they're darker.*
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     Without leaning into the ugly politics of the House Republican fight to elect a Speaker, you can darned well bet all factions and both parties would have come together and found some sap for the job if they had to pass legislation every week to authorize releasing their paychecks.  They'd all be saying what a wonderful person he or she was, too.
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     And how bad are things?  So bad I'm not going to get any more political than that today, when it comes to national politics.
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     On international politics: killing civilians is bad, period.  A large part of the tragedy of war is the collateral damage.  If it was volunteer armies parading and clashing on an empty battlefield, war would still be terrible but we could, at least, point to the military virtues.  When you start piling up the dead kids and adults, ruined homes, crippled bystanders, pain, suffering, thirst and starvation, the glory goes right out.
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* On reflection, I think I run the laser printer in "draft" mode most of the time.  I should check that.  The ink for it is pricey, too, but I haven't had to replace it yet.

The Ongoing Tragedy

     All wars are tragic.  The Middle East manages to be even more so, a combination of dense population, scarce resources and conflicts with roots that go back centuries or even millennia.

     The most recent development, a warning from Israel that civilians should evacuate from northern Gaza in the next twenty-four hours, countered by a Hamas advisory to stay put, is a stark reminder that wars can easily become "choose your humanitarian disaster."  Israel's army is coming across the border; it's only a matter of time.  People -- civilians and militants alike -- are packed into Gaza nearly as densely as in New York City and there's only one exit point to the south: you can't march half of Gaza's 2.3 million people out in a day, doubling the density in the southern half of the area is unworkable and anyone who stays home is in the path of an invading army.  Nor are there financial resources to help people get out of the way; per-capita income in Gaza is under $3800, compared to $75,000 in NYC.

     On the other hand, in the last 22 years there have been zero missiles launched from the Big Apple, while Gaza has averaged over a thousand a year.  Plenty of bad actors (Iran, for example) are willing to supply the hardware and it only takes a few people to set up and launch a missile.  Responding in kind can be complicated.

     No matter how this plays out, people are going to die.  Most of them will be innocent civilians, caught in a war they never volunteered to fight.  Hamas is using them as a shield.  Israel is reluctant to do harm, but under conditions of open warfare after recent attacks, they don't see any other way forward.

Oh, Look, Here's A Lesson

     You know what's going on in Israel right now.  You probably know what had been going on in Israel: deeply divisive politics, in which a hard-Right government sought to remove a check on its power.

     Don't look for me to analyze internal Israeli politics; I have trouble enough keeping up with who's on what side in my own country, and what that might imply for the future.  Suffice to say the government was distracted.  The citizenry were distracted.  And for a country with plenty of enemies, many of whom can walk right up to the border on their lunch break, that was enough.

     Israel was distracted.  Politics had ceased to be the usual debate and compromise, the normal small victories and small setbacks that people could ignore, confident whatever needed doing would get done.  Terrorists struck -- and made horrific progress before a response could be coordinated.

     The run-up to recent attacks might find a parallel or two in the United States, where a government riven by internal conflict is busy tying itself up in knots.  These kinds of fights play out in plain sight -- and the world is watching, some of it through unfriendly eyes.

World War Three

     The Third World War.*  It's a buzzphrase, especially popular just now with the farther fringes of the Right and Left, but -- let's face it -- becoming ever more mainstream.

     We've certainly got the classic ingredients for the early stage: an expansionist power moving to take territory by force of arms, a coalition united in opposition but hesitant to engage directly, while at least one small nation is being hacked to bits.  The West may yet be drawn into active conflict.

     This is far from the first time such a prospect has loomed.  It's not even the first time an emboldened Russia has looked westward; but Stalin had other problems, and we ended up with a Cold War instead of a hot one.

     But in 1951, the ambitious editors of Collier's magazine wondered what it would look like if the world again fell into war [PDF] and imagined a situation in which the Soviet Union might try to launch a short, victorious war against a smaller and uncooperating nation.  They chose Tito's Yugoslavia as the flash point, and posited an unsuccessful assassination attempt followed by land invasion.

     Tito, surviving, calls on the UN for help and the NATO responds; after a string of initial successes, the invasion by the USSR (and satellites) grinds to a halt.

     To that point, it sounds familiar, doesn't it?  In Collier's projection -- told as if looking backwards from 1960, five years after the war had drawn to a close, leaving national capitols in ruins -- the UN gives the USSR an ultimatum, which is ignored; the Soviet invasion into Europe falters under a campaign of conventional and fission bombing that escalates after the USSR hits London, then cities and war-production sites in the continental U.S.  The near-destruction of Washington D. C. is followed by a daring raid on Moscow, as the tide of the war turns--

     The magazine's collection of writers, everyone from reporters and columnists to politicians, fiction writers and labor leaders, were envisioning global war at a time before fusion bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles, before "one missile, one city," before Nuclear Winter.  Their WW III included only a limited nuclear exchange, horrific though it is.  Bombs grew more quickly than they imagined.

     The issue was praised as a solemn warning and condemned as little more than nihilistic disaster-porn.  It's worth taking a look at, to see how much -- and how little -- has changed.

     Ambitious autocrats have always been a threat to peace, to the ordinary lives of ordinary people.  And it is the ordinary people who bear the cost of bringing aggressive powers to heel.  History is too often the story of "great men," larger-than life heroes and villains, but the real story is the ruin the worst of men bring about and the effort it takes to stop them, by everyone from the noblest philosopher and most clever strategist to the simplest foot soldier and Home Front worker.

     Like it or not, and I don't, we're in it again.  Maybe everything will work out, Russia will grind to a halt in the snow and mud, and the war will end at the negotiating table sooner rather than later.  A look at history -- or a back issue of Collier's -- suggests otherwise.
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* Some historians dispute the count, pointing out the global scope of the Seven Year's War in the 18th Century and the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th, along with others.  The numbers of fallen in those wars are not changed by the designation, nor any borders changed, and about the only conclusion is that as a species, our wars are as wide-ranging as our means of travel allow.

The Triumph Of The Ignorami

     The last few days, I haven't posted.  I've just been watching it all auger in.  Appalling ignorance and anti-science became Flavor of the Day on the political Right a long time ago, but the rise of Robert Kennedy, Jr. among Democrats has been as disappointing as it has been predictable: the anti-vax, quack-medicine Left has a long and lurid history, after all.

     At a time when technical and scientific literacy are key skills for human survival, when a solid grounding in real history is the only way to grasp the implications of current world events, nonsense is becoming ever more popular.

     This kind of superstition and preference for comfortable fables that confirm one's preconceptions over awkward truths (and best-fit scientific theories) is how civilizations grind to a halt and begin to decline.  I can't stop it.  I don't know how much of the inevitable damage I can personally avoid.

     It's not an easy thing to blog about.  I'm not sure what's next, but my bet is that it won't be good.  And the partisan finger-pointing will be epic -- and useless.

What Is Happening In Russia

     No, seriously -- what is happening in Russia?  Mr. Putin seems to have gotten himself into a bit of a corner and some of the chaos he's been inflicting on Ukraine started to come home.

     At present, it appears the mess has stopped short of Moscow, which means it's not going to be very sweeping, at least not yet; but anyone who tells you they know what will happen next is taking through their hat.

     Interesting times.

The Fog Of War

      You don't get a lot of accurate information from a battlefront, unless you happen to be in charge of one of the two (or more) warring sides, and even then, it's imperfect.

      So don't expect a lot of clarity as things appear to be heating up in Ukraine.  There's no advantage to either side in handing out the unvarnished truth.

      I can tell you there's a very clear aggressor here -- that'd be the side the crossed the other country's border, so it's Russia -- and there's a lot of evidence that they aren't fighting by the rules.  But like so many things in U. S. politics these days, there's some knee-jerk "If the other party is for it, I'm against it," and the far Right appears to have a real mancrush on Vladimir Putin, so you're on you're own sorting that out.

      Autocrats are uniformly bastards; it's inherent in the exercise of that much power by one man, and in the structures it requires.  Some are worse than others, but they're all bad.  But it's not my job to sort your head out for you and if the past seven or so years have taught me anything, it's that it's a lot easier to sell glitter-dusted, bellowing bullshit than cold, hard, quiet facts.  Nevertheless, I remain opposed to fantasy bullshit and in favor of reality; YMMV and if so, it will eventually bite you where you sit down.

Language As Resistance

      It wasn't very long ago that a lot of Ukrainians spoke Russian.  Even after independence from the former Soviet Union, many families spoke Russian at home.

      Russia's invasion has changed that.

      Y'know, if you go to a part of the world where the people are notable for their stubbornness and start pushing them around, you shouldn't be surprised when they start pushing back.

I Keep Following The News

      I keep up with the news but more and more, I don't much want to comment on the news.  Too much of it is too awful, and divisions over what it all means and where we're headed are too deep, even before you get to the "Unless we do..." part.

      Writing that practically guarantees I will see or read something between now and tomorrow morning that I will want to share my opinion about -- saber rattling* from Vladimir Putin and the North Korean government, natural disasters in Turkey and New Zealand, yammerheads and nitwits everywhere.  The older I get, the less convinced I am that it does any good to talk about it, whether to praise constructive responses or point with alarm at danger and destruction.
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* A "buckler" is a small shield; to "swash" is to swagger or wave a sword about.  And now you know what a "swashbuckler" does, sometimes going so far as to to slap the flat of his sword against his buckler.  Presumably this causes considerable rattling.  It's 2023 and our metaphorical language is still dressed like a hoplite or a hussar, with the occasional dragoon carefully keeping his powder dry and not going off half-cocked.

"Of Course You Know, This Means War."

      World War Two was an all-out war -- even Merrie Melodies cartoons went to war.  You can watch a fine example free for nothing, thanks to Wikipedia: The Fifth-Column Mouse.  Just click on the thumbnail at the link and it will pop up.

      Do we have Fifth Columnists these days?  Coullllld be....  The present European conflict is mostly a proxy war for us, and we just might have a few proxy appeasers, too.  Make your own list.