A bit past mid-day here this Sunday in California’s Central Valley — another shine-filled day with a blustery wind keeping the overall temperature down. Just a matter of time, though.
Heat wins out in the end.
Meanwhile, a couple of tweets I saw this morning seemed to emphasize our current Ukraine/Vlad Putin piece-of-shit and the horror he unleashed for no other reason than using the cruelty the point motif (look familiar?):
The video of all videos: First speaker is a protester. She asks: "How long do you think before I get arrested with this sign saying 'two words' (ie. no war)." The second speaker is about to set off on a pro-Kremlin speech when …
The message: Just don't speak out at all. pic.twitter.com/LSkrdZRXSe— Eva Hartog (@EvaHartog) March 13, 2022
Chart-topping, too, a watershed event:
2,698,280 Ukrainian refugees, about 156k more than yesterday. The 1,655,503 Ukrainian refugees in Poland increased that country’s population by 4.4 percent since February 24th. We’ve seen nothing like this rapid pace of movement in history.https://t.co/A5kJZe1kQw pic.twitter.com/mbOwPvQFme
— The Alex Nowrasteh (@AlexNowrasteh) March 13, 2022
As it becomes apparent, this shit isn’t going away anytime soon and will remain front-and-center as long as Putin runs the gameboard — if and when someone knocks him hard, Ukraine is the linchpin.
Another good seemingly-educated take on Ukraine/Putin is by Francis Fukuyama, director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy at Stanford University, and author of “The End of History and the Last Man,” from last Thursday at American Purpose — among observations about the situation, ‘Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine.’ and the ‘collapse of their position could be sudden and catastrophic, rather than happening slowly through a war of attrition,’ is the consequence in Asia:
The war to this point has been a good lesson for China. Like Russia, China has built up seemingly high-tech military forces in the past decade, but they have no combat experience.
The miserable performance of the Russian air force would likely be replicated by the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, which similarly has no experience managing complex air operations.
We may hope that the Chinese leadership will not delude itself as to its own capabilities the way the Russians did when contemplating a future move against Taiwan.
Go read the whole thing, etc., a more optimistic view of the disastrous-deteriorating Ukraine scenario.
In spite of circumstances, here we are once again…
