Slowly ending another day here in California’s Central Valley as Friday evening and darkness draws close at hand, initiating the start to the weekend — which nowadays shows it’s not necessarily a time of rest.

Ukraine continues unabated as the cruel news source of the era — yet as history indicates, Vlad Putin may be the shit-worse villain to come along ever, considering the ranking within the parameters of insanity and a nuclear arsenal:

You know what they say about those who fail to learn from history? It’s not really that useful. https://t.co/SuuAuJS1S8

— Jonathan M. Katz (@KatzOnEarth) March 19, 2022

Jonathan M. Katz at The Racket this afternoon writes on the ideal fuck-up destroyer-asshole at our displeasure, and it’s Putin, indeed unique in history, and not because of any skill set or intelligence — atomic-powered asshole:

Distracting as it is to play the parlor game of “which mid-twentieth century dictator is Vladimir Putin most like this week” (Mussolini in ‘35? Stalin in ‘39?), my answer is: None of them.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is really an unprecedented situation.
We are confronted with the autocrat of a failing petrostate with a military that has revealed itself to be far weaker than analysts feared, but who nonetheless possesses the presumed power to destroy every major city in Western Europe and the United States within the space of about half an hour.

Forget Genghis Khan, Chandragupta Maurya, or Catherine the Great on one hand, or Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, or the failed Austrian art student on the other.
There may be some parallels to Lyndon Johnson, Deng Xiaoping, Leonid Breshnev, or George W. Bush — each a leader of a nuclear power who embarked on a murderous and ultimately failed colonial war (the first two successively in Vietnam, the last two in Afghanistan, and Bush alone in Iraq). But in all those cases, those leaders and their governments took pains not to threaten, and in many cases worked actively to avoid, a great-power conflict against their imperial rivals. Putin is to my knowledge the only example of a leader whose army can barely take or hold new territory yet loudly and confidently keeps reminding everyone of his ability to obliterate much of the inhabited world.

Another go read the whole thing, etc. Although Katz doesn’t know what to do now, he does believe — rightly so — that the US and the rest of the allies should stay away from anything that could stir up a nuclear confrontation which can easily come with Putin’s nutcase vision of empire Russia. And Putin knows, too, he must, he’s fucked up way-big time with Ukraine.
Touchy days ahead.

Allows for some worldwide-depressive rainy nights in Georgia:

Once again here we are…

(Illustration out front: ‘Vladimir Putin,’ oil on canvas, by Tomislav Suhecki, and found here).