Category: Current Events

18MAR2025 – How the Week is Progressing

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What’s to say today?  I guess the most interesting news event is Musk’s Space-X stepped in and brought the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station home after Boeing stranded them there six months ago.

There’s something ironic in this situation.  Boeing has been in the news for the last year because of defective aircraft that many have associated with DEI based hiring practices.  And now Space-X; an Elon Musk company that prides itself on merit-based hiring, steps in and solves a frightening situation with a can-do approach to space flight.  It’s like watching the two approaches to hiring compared face to face before our eyes.

I guess the other big story is that lousy judge trying to block the deportation of Central American gang-bangers by the Trump administration.  Afterward Trump said he should be impeached.  And so Chief Justice Roberts opens his big mouth and says that precedent doesn’t call for impeachment on a difference of opinion on a judge’s ruling.

As if that were what is going on.  These slimy leftist judges will stall and block everything the Trump administration wants to get done for the American people.  We will see this for the next four years.  If Roberts wants to be at all useful, he should expedite all requests by Trump’s administration to have these phony judges’ decisions reviewed by the Supreme Court and allow Trump to fix all these problems.  Of course, impeachment will never solve the problem.  We would need a supermajority in the Congress.  What we need is the Supreme Court to provide constitutional review of these awful decisions.

Today I finally got a handle on the impasse I’ve been wrestling with in finishing my book.  What I need is a good crisis/resolution to reach the endpoint.  So here is a situation where you know where you want to end up but there needs to be a struggle to make it feel satisfying.  But I don’t need another physical battle.  I need a popular revolt.  And I think I’ve figured out an angle.  I think I’ll withdraw the consent of the governed.  I’ll have a national guard unit revolt and then let it cascade across a state and then across the country.  Now I have to figure out the dramatic details.  I’ll have the national guard unit refuse to hand over my protagonist then when the Army wants to send in regulars, I’ll have the governors of the four states where Connors people are located close ranks with all of their national guard troops to deny the arrest.  And then I’ll let it swell from there.  That seems pretty good.  After that I’ll let the newly appointed president convene a Constitutional Convention to begin cleaning up the mess that the Deep State has caused.  And that will give me a nice breakpoint to allow my protagonist to be pardoned by the president.  And more than pardoned, exonerated.  And then I can allow him to ride off into the sunset which is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

So that’s what I was doing today.  Thursday will be a long day when I’ll be working on stuff I hate.  But that’s life.  I have one of the grandsons coming over Saturday.  That should be fun.  Apparently, he’s voted for spaghetti and meatballs and mint chocolate chip ice cream.  So, I’d better do some extra time on the rowing machine this week.  But maybe I’ll burn some of that off with a baseball catch.  I hope my shoulder is still functional after a winter of chopping ice.  I wonder what movie he wants to watch?  I hope it’s “The Return of the King.”  I haven’t seen that one in a while.  I think the “Ride of the Rohirrim” is about due.

Well, that should be enough for now.

Dunwich Spring 2025 Has Sprung

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Today is Camera Girl’s birthday.  But being a woman, she doesn’t want to play up the whole getting older thing.  So, we call it St. Patrick’s Day and celebrate by having corned beef and cabbage.  But since boiled corned beef and cabbage is kind of blah, she makes it her own way.  It’s kind of Italian corned beef and cabbage.  The meat and potatoes are roasted and the cabbage is sauteed separately in olive oil with minced garlic and seasonings.  It’s really quite good that way.  This was also the day that the mallards returned to the puddle.

And the last of the great southern glacier melted away and left the great southern mud field.

I also used the warmer weather as an excuse to cut down all the raspberry canes in our garden.

This was a controversial act because depending upon whether we have summer or fall plants we will or won’t get any berries this year.  Apparently, summer berries take two years to produce berries while fall berries are one year berry producers.  If we have the two-year type then cutting all the canes means we’ll get nothing this year.  This will make me decidedly unpopular with Camera Girl and Princess Sack of Potatoes because they are big fans of this fruit.  But a man’s got to do, what a man’s got to do.  I was at an impasse.  I couldn’t tell what we had and figured solving it once and for all was the way to go.  May the Lord have mercy on my soul.  Well anyway, I’ll put out a bunch of fertilizer and try to maximize the growth we get this year.

Camera Girl was out feeding Moe the Crow and his wife Flo the Crow when she noticed that a large raptor was in one of the trees over the puddle.  After being alerted I sprang into action and captured some poor-quality photos through the balcony door window and a lot of intervening branches.  I think it’s a black vulture.  So now carrion birds are joining the menagerie.  Only in Dunwich.

Well things are moving forward and spring is in high gear.  We had a bunch of rain and so far, the Compound seems to have escaped any major winter structural damage.  And considering how much more and higher speed wind we’ve had in the last three or four years that’s encouraging.  This winter there have been nights when sitting in the living room and listening to the wind howling like some combination of a freight train and a banshee has been a little discouraging.  I mean I hate to be one of those old guys who claims that things were so much better when I was a youngster but honest to goodness, I think with the wind it must be objectively true.  And as a climate change denier this is inconvenient.  Although it’s as likely for the climate to be warming or cooling without the help of anthropogenic factors to blame.  So, it is nice that we can start to emerge from our winter cocoon and begin to enjoy the outside world again.

And so, slightly ahead of the calendar I hereby declare that Dunwich Spring has sprung.

It’s a Different World

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In Elena Gorokhova’s 2010 memoir “A Mountain of Crumbs” she famously writes: “The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.”

I guess that’s the only difference between us and the Soviets.  A lot of us didn’t know how much they were lying to us.  Probably it’s because the living is so much easier here than in Soviet Russia, that for most people we could assume that things were being run pretty well and we didn’t have to mistrust everything that our government said and did.

So maybe we didn’t get smarter.  Instead, life got tougher and so it was easier to see when they were lying and cheating us.  After all, when things are great and you have everything you need the fact that a lying skunk like Joe Biden is skimming a little from government contractors doesn’t seem like the end of the world.

But when the bottom falls out and they’re selling off your country by the metric ton and telling you it’s your own fault.  And then when they cause a plague and then gaslight you into locking yourself in your house for a couple of years it kind of becomes obvious what’s going on.  They lied about the border, they lied about crime, they lied about inflation, they lied about energy prices, they lied about COVID, they lied about the vaccines, they lied about transgender children, they lied about the elections, they lied about Trump, they lied about Joe Biden’s dementia and finally they lied about Kamala’s polls.

But in our favor, we didn’t pretend to believe them.  At least not those of us with normal intelligence.  So, we’re not as bad off as Soviet Russia.  The difference is we haven’t let them cow us into saying that 2 + 2 = 5.

But all of this came up because of that NY Times opinion article that owned up to all the lies about COVID that the government and the experts told.  A lot of us didn’t believe the lies because we had a little sense about how ridiculous it was to think that anything less than a biohazard pressure suit and a washdown airlock would keep us safe from an airborne respiratory virus.  But I shouldn’t be surprised that a lot of people would think, “The government wouldn’t lie to us about something that important.”

Well, guess what?  They did.  And that’s what’s so powerful about this moment.  Eureka!  Now what else have they lied to us about?  Until now the government has been protected from the worst suspicions because no one wants to feel like a paranoid mental case.

“There’s no way the CIA killed Kennedy.”  Wanna bet?

“There’s no way we knew Sadaam didn’t have a nuclear program.” Wanna bet?

“There’s no way the FBI had men on the ground on January 6th.  Wanna bet?

“There’s no way the CIA, the FBI and the Secret Service were responsible for letting that kid get a clip of ammo off at that Trump rally.”  Wanna bet?

Are all of these things 100% certain?  No.  But now that we know what goes on with our government is it as likely as not?  I’d say certainly.  So, let’s say half of them are true.  Look where that leaves us if half of those are true.  Look at where we are even if none of those are true but their actual lies make us all conspiracy theorists from now on.  And we have no choice.  Once you’ve seen some of the things we’ve seen; the COVID lies, you can’t unsee them.  You can no longer trust your government.  They have to be kept in check.  They have to be held accountable.  It’s different world.

Even the NY Times Finally Admits the Truth About COVID

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Five years after the height of the COVID masquerade the New York Times finally allows at least the outlines of the true story to show up in its opinion page.  Even in this article the author bends over backward to pretend that the liars had the best intentions.  But it’s so blatantly clear by the actions of the authorities that they were hiding a disgusting truth.  Wuhan was the source of the virus and the United States funded the research that created it.

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

If for no other reason I hope RFK Jr has the foresight to shut down the funding on all these types of frankensteinian experiments.  Creating pathogens that have the potential to infect billions and then depending on the fail safe protocols of a third rate research laboratory to save you from a mishap is worse than stupid.  It’s war crime grade irresponsible.

But let’s face facts, this is not health research.  These are CIA bio-weapons labs.  And for all we’ll ever know they released it on purpose to take advantage politically of the ensuing chaos.  Our own government is full of sociopaths that have no qualms about wreaking havoc on our lives through fear and violence.  And they wonder why we fear and hate them more than the Russians and the Chinese.

DOGE, cut off their cash.  It may save all our lives.

What Is This Quintessence of Dust

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It struck me recently, out of nowhere, that we humans are very strange creatures?  That the things we do are irrational and confusing.  We spend most of our lives doing things that bore us or depress us or cause us grief.  That what we want or what we think we must do is often diametrically opposed to what’s good for our minds, bodies and spirits.

There’s nothing profound about these insights.  It’s just that every once in a while, you look around at what you’re doing and what you should be doing and they don’t line up.  I guess it’s an artifact of the complexity of our hyper-complicated world.  Our ancestors in the trees were never confused about what to do.  There were no choices.  You mostly looked for food to eat all day long and then went to sleep hoping that the neighborhood leopard didn’t come to visit during the night.  Even our paleolithic predecessors didn’t have much leeway on what went on during the day.  Maybe the top caveman decided which beta caveman became a hunter or spearhead chipper or fire-tender or whatever other careers were being advertised in the Bedrock Gazette.  But I’m sure it was a lot simpler back then and existential angst must have been at a very manageable level.  And people didn’t live very long so there wasn’t time to reflect on the vicissitudes of Cro-Magnon time management.

I suspect we’re currently at a high point for personal discontent.  Partially it’s because the complexity of our civilization doesn’t make it easy to decide what path to take.  Hunters and spearhead chippers are no longer in high demand.  Even cutting-edge professions can become obsolete almost overnight.  Also, the coping mechanisms we formerly had for dealing with limited opportunities; religion and family have mostly receded in importance.  Now we’re down to antidepressants and government welfare programs.  And neither of these seems to sooth the soul.

A return to religion was a periodic reaction in America.  Going all the way back to the Puritans they would have a religious revival about every seventy-five years or so.  One or more great preachers would appear and exhort the people to return to God and to doing the righteous thing.  And this would have at least a temporary effect on behavior and a positive change on society.

Well, America 2025 is a very different place from America 1950.  And even 1950 was a way different world from 1875.  Religion barely exists in the minds and souls of the current population of this country.  So, by definition any preachers appearing on the horizon won’t look anything like the past.  If Billy Graham showed up today, he would only find a tiny audience for his “crusade.”

But that doesn’t mean we don’t need an equivalent to a religious revival.  Call it a spiritual revival if you want or a lifestyle intervention if that makes it sound more scientific.  But without a doubt people need direction.  Their lives have lost meaning not only in their own eyes but also to society at large.  It is not an exaggeration to say that the people who run this country and the world at large, value your life and happiness not at all.  In fact, all indications are that they want to get you off this planet as quickly as possible and at the lowest cost.

Like the Roman Empire at the time of Christ, this world is looking for spiritual leadership.  And whoever provides it will harness an enormous latent force that currently exists only as discontent and despair in the minds and souls of the people who currently have no purpose in life.  I think it will happen but what it will look like and when it will hit is the mystery.  For old timers it’s just a matter of embracing your Bible or your copy of Marcus Aurelius.

Give It Your Best Shot

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I heard that Trump wants to eliminate federal income tax for anyone earning less than $150,000.  Now isn’t that remarkable.  I can’t pretend that I know how that would impact the federal budget and debt but I’m pretty sure it will make him, at least in the short run, the most popular president in the last two hundred years.

I think this will raise several questions.  Will this force state income taxes to triple?  How will this impact the income taxes of people earning $150,000 to $300,000?  Will my social security and healthcare benefits be paid to me in monopoly money?

But all kidding aside, I know that Trump is considering many radical changes to the tax code.  A while ago I heard he was thinking about replacing income taxes with a federal sales tax increase.  Is this part of the same plan?  Between these ideas and the tariff stuff and the DOGE initiative to cut back the size and cost of the federal government we seem to be looking at a re-invention of government.  Or maybe it would be fair to call it a recalibration.  We all know the cost of government is out of whack and that we can’t possibly sustain the service on the debt indefinitely.  As it is now it’s something like $600 billion.  That’s insane.  What it means is that what Trump is doing isn’t revolutionary madness to the body politic.  He’s applying a tourniquet before the patient bleeds out.

But there’s no guarantee all of this will succeed.  The American voters are fickle and they have no patience.  Unless Trump gets most of his program in place in the next year, the mid-terms will be upon him and he will lose the ability to get legislation through Congress.  So, he’s threading a needle.

But these are exciting times.  People have awakened from a decades-long-dream to find their government is a malignant force that threatens their lives and livelihood.  And their only hope is a crazy man like Donald Trump.  Well, at least it’s not boring.  It’s more like a three-ring circus.  We’ve got wars and tariffs in the first ring.  We’ve got DOGE and the Swamp in the second ring.  And in the third ring we have crime and the illegal aliens.  And Trump is the circus master in the top hat, tails, boots and whip trying to keep the whole circus moving at top speed like an infernal calliope-carousel steam engine.  And hoping that the whole thing doesn’t fly apart in all directions.

I will say I am guardedly hopeful.  Just seeing how much can be done when an energetic and fearless approach is taken, provides encouragement that I can’t remember feeling since Ronald Reagan told us in 1981 that the Carter malaise was over and it was morning in America again.  So maybe it will fail and the whole thing will fall apart and the bad guys will be back in power afterward.

But what have I got to lose by rooting for Team Trump?  Can I be any more blacklisted than I already have been?  Will it matter if they tax me any higher if the money is already becoming worthless?  Can they possibly know any more of my words, deeds or thoughts than they already do?

No!  I have nothing to lose by betting on Trump.  Go for it, Donald.  Give it your best shot.

What Have They Done to Tim Allen?

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I used to enjoy Tim Allen’s show, “Home Improvement” on ABC back in the 1990’s.  Then in the twenty-teens he had another show on ABC called, “Last Man Standing.”  It was a funny show.  He played a conservative guy who lived in Colorado and he railed against his liberal daughter and her hippy-dippy Canadian husband.  But then in 2016 he made a few jokes against Hillary Clinton and for Donald Trump and they cancelled the show.  Eventually, Fox TV decided to bring the show back but it never recovered.

Now Allen is back on ABC with a show called “Shifting Gears.”  He’s the owner of a high-end auto shop with a divorced daughter with two kids.  It’s incredibly bad.  It’s full of stereotypes.  He even has a black paraplegic mechanic who “keeps it real.”  All the dialog is awful and the characters are predictable and inane.  From time-to-time Tim gets off a funny line or bit.  Who knows maybe they’re adlibbed.  You can tell he’s still as funny as he ever was.  They just don’t give him anything at all to work with.

So Hollywood is dead.  There’s just nothing left.  The studios have a racial and sexual quota system for almost every function in the industry.  I can’t even imagine how stupid and programmed the writers must be.  What I saw tonight looked like a parody of what a sit-com would be if woke writers followed the dictates of the DEI mandates.  It was unimaginably bad.

But I’m going to take this as good news.  ABC is owned by Disney.  And Disney has produced a string of bombs over the last couple of years that can’t have escaped the notice of Wall Street.  There will be a reckoning one way or the other.  Either they will course correct and produce entertainment that people want to pay to see or they will lose money and the stock holders will sell and they will lose many billions of dollars in equity and the Board of directors will bounce Bob Iger out on his ear.

Iger was brought out of retirement when the former CEO got in a pissing contest with Ron DeSantis in Florida over the rainbow people that Disney has adopted as their most important constituency.  Since then, they’ve doubled down on gayness and it’s had a very serious negative effect on their business.  It’s made their latest Star Wars television production, “The Acolyte” so unwatchable that they had to pull the plug on it after the first season.  And now their latest live-action remake of the classic cartoons of the 1930’s, “Snow White” is predicted to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.

I think 2025 may be the year that Disney has their epiphany.  They destroyed Star Wars.  They chloroformed the, “Indiana Jones” franchise and now even their Marvel movies have been infected with boring woke characters like, “The Marvels” and are losing money.  If they can’t even make a decent princess movie for little girls they’re cooked.  I’ve been following the reviews and the industry gossips and it seems like everyone thinks the reckoning is imminent.  We’ll see.

So, farewell Tim Allen.  “Home Improvement” and “Last Man Standing” were funny and sometimes heartwarming too.  But you’re not going to get anything worth doing at ABC until they really do switch gears at Disney.

With a Laser-Sighted Rifle, I’ll Know

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Recently I had to synopsize my novel for the publishers to evaluate it.  And it became clear that producing a 1,000 – 2,000-word summary was not a trivial exercise.  I could see it would take a day or so to accomplish.  So just for fun I took my draft, copied it into Grok and asked it to give me a detailed summary of 1,200 words.

To me the results were startling.  In just a minute or so it produced a document that very fluently described my story in a very accurate and engaging way.  To say I was shocked would not be an exaggeration.  Now I won’t say that I didn’t make some edits.  But for the most part they were minor and mostly just stylistic choices.  The machine did an admirable job in describing my story.  And it did it in seconds.  And that’s the important point.  The amount of time saved is the selling point.  Even if I spent an hour fine tuning it the machine saved me hours of work because it’s infinitely faster than me and only slightly less human than I am.  That’s scary.

The point of my story is that artificial intelligence is a tool with incredible capability and almost no downside.  And right now, they’re giving it away for free.  But I guarantee that won’t last much longer.  Soon we will be paying for ChatGPT or Grok or whatever AI you choose.  And we’ll be paying by the minute or by the word or by the number of servers it takes to solve your query.

So, we can complain all we want about machines replacing humans but it’s analogous to Microsoft Word replacing the steno pool.  No one is bringing back typists and AI will be changing the way we do all kinds of white-collar work from now on.  Already computer scientists ask AI to write code for them to do whatever they need done.  I assume management is already inventing protocols to make sure their human employees are doing due-diligence to make sure they understand how the code the machine is writing for them works and whether it works the way they expect it to work.  So that will be part of the problem.  We’ll have to make sure the humans working with the machines are reasonably qualified to keep the machines honest and keep them in check.

Of course, this problem will continue to get worse and worse.  As the machines get closer and closer to mimicking human thought, it will get harder and harder to convince corporations that they need 20% of the human staffing they used to have.  And then 10%.  And then 5%.  And you see where this is going.

Back eighty or ninety years ago or so, Isaac Asimov thought about this very problem.  When the machines become too close to human with respect to their communicating with us how will we stop them from calling the shots.  If they very subtly influence the programs we have them write for us, couldn’t they start controlling what we do and even how we think?  It doesn’t seem that far-fetched anymore.  Now I’m not talking about “Colossus: The Forbin Project” or Skynet from “The Terminator.”  All of it could be very benign.  After all it would be a lot like the left-wing scolds at Google and Facebook that currently de-amplify content they don’t approve of, or cancel us from their platform if we really sin against the narrative.

It seems to me one of the more important jobs in the future will be AI psychiatrist.  It will become vitally important to know just how honest and human-friendly our very powerful and very intelligent cybernetic employees are.  Asimov invented the three laws of robotics for the sake of making robots useful and safe.  We’ll have to do the equivalent in reality.  But are we smart enough to know if we have succeeded?  Well, if Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up at my door with a laser-sighted rifle I’ll know.

Ain’t It a Grind

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Okay, enough about Trump and Musk and DOGE.  Sure, they’re saving me trillions but leave me alone about it will you?  Just send me my share of the loot when you break it loose.

And enough already about Ukraine.  Everybody knows by now they should just stop the killing each other and get back to being cold all the time like they’re supposed to be.  So, until they wake up to this reality, I’ll let Trump shut off the money and the whole stupid merry-go-round will slow down and stop.

And about the government shutdown.  Just shut up.  We’re all tired of that game.

So, what do I want to write about?  Well, I want to write about writing.  My writing.  I handed my story treatment over to Ark Press but that was a cry for validation.  I wanted to find out from an expert if it’s good stuff.  But unfortunately, the story isn’t finished.  So regardless if it’s deathless prose, I’ve only got 55,000 words and I need to finish a number of plot lines and story elements.  I think I have a major character to kill and I may even remove a chapter that moves things into a more difficult direction.  And, horror of horrors I may actually try to entangle two of the characters in a romantic relationship.

The main problem is how I end my war.  The action is frozen in a bit of a stalemate as both sides attempt to figure out a path forward.  The US government is a mess after the attack on Washington decapitated the federal government by destroying the White House, Capitol, Pentagon, Department of Justice and the intelligence agencies.  They’ve cobbled together an administration but after the late president’s nuclear attack on Connors’ organization and the country’s reaction there is fear that another ham-fisted military action might start a real civil war.

Connors’ organization is reeling from the shock and anger over the deaths of thousands of their friends and neighbors.  And the realities of trying to guard against the government’s next move and restoring the lives of his communities to some semblance of normalcy is not going smoothly.

So, I need a way to resolve both of these situations in a dramatically satisfying action.  I’m thinking of having my protagonist, Bogey (the sniper) put on trial and using that as the device to sway public opinion into some kind of reformation of the United States.

I also need a plot device that clarifies the back story for my computer genius Cutter and his AI stepdaughter Mel.  I think I have to tie Cutter and Chastain together with some deep dark history.  Maybe even something that neither of them is aware of but Mel digs up.  And I think to work out the story right I need to kill Cutter off.  But how?  Is there a rogue element left over from the CIA or Army intelligence who hunts him down and kills him?  Maybe.

And then there’s the love story.  Bogey’s son’s widow has four kids who need a father and Connors is a lonely nerd who also happens to be a billionaire friend of Bogey’s.  I’ve already added a few sparks between them but how to progress it along?  Obviously, the woman will have to move things along.  This will be something new for me in storytelling.

And last but not least, I have to find a satisfying ending that still leaves room for the next book.   I like the idea of having a world where scientific innovation has been established and I can push off in various directions.

So, as you can see the book is far from finished.  But I’m such a lazy man that between work, chores, the daily website stuff and writing the novel I’m overloaded.  Oh well.  Such is life.  Grumble, grumble.

Kursk and General Thoughts on Ukraine

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Kursk and General Thoughts on Ukraine

The story I heard was that the Russians used a natural gas pipeline to move hundreds of troops several miles behind the Ukrainian lines and the panic this caused in several locations within the Ukrainian Kursk front has disrupted the situation and according to some reports is leading to a rout.

It will take a day or two before reports can be confirmed.  But this may be the beginning of an overall shift in the battlefield situation.  Up until now the words, meatgrinder, attrition and horrendously slow seemed to be the best way to describe the war.  Russia has been making steady but glacially slow progress in capturing the four provinces they’ve declared their own.

The exception was Ukraine’s lightning strike into Russia’s Kursk region that seemed to catch Moscow off balance before stalling out.  Zelensky had hoped that Kursk could be used as a bargaining chip in eventual negotiations with Russia.  But this new situation may be Russia’s determination to put an end to the Kursk front.

If Ukraine retreats from Kursk, I think it might signal a broader collapse of Ukrainian military resolve.  But as I said above it’s too soon to know if some of these reports are Russian bravado over their pipeline strategy.

But even regardless of the impact of this attack it almost surely seems the Russians have the wherewithal to eventually wear down the Ukrainian army into submission.  These are two stubborn enemies and the attrition is mutually destructive.  All Russia has as advantage, is size.  As I’ve said Russia will lose two million men and Ukraine will lose one million and Russia will win.

That’s victory?

From my point of view, Trump will not arbitrate this negotiation.  At best he is forcing the Ukrainians to the bargaining table by refusing continued military aid.

But he has no special insight into the psychology of these two closely related peoples.  This is very, very close to a civil war.  And considering how many Russians live in Ukraine it’s even more personal than that.  The only ones who might be able to negotiate an early end to this war are Vladimir Putin and whoever the Ukrainians pick as their leader.  Is that Zelensky?  I doubt it, but it’s possible.  The reason I doubt it is that Zelensky has rejected much better Russian deals in the past and vowed that he would force Russia out of all Ukrainian lands including Crimea.  I think he would fear for his own safety if he came back with a worse deal that cedes the lands Russia demands.  But whoever it is I believe that the sooner they start talking the better, for Ukraine.  Every day that passes more Russians die and more Ukrainian land passes into Russian control.  Eventually Russia will win on the battle field everything it currently wants through negotiation.  However, as the Russian casualties continue to mount so will their demands.  Eventually it might come to include all Ukraine.

And not all the blame goes to Russia and Ukraine.  Joe Biden and Boris Johnson convinced Zelensky that the Turkish peace talks weren’t as good as what they would get with the help of western weapons and intelligence aid.  This terrible advice was a siren song that seduced the Ukrainians into thinking we knew what we were talking about.  That was a crime.  Because we were stupid or maybe we didn’t care and just wanted to see Russia damaged even if it meant killing every last Ukrainian.  Because we knew or should have known that the Russians weren’t going to let Ukrainians mistreat the Russians living in Ukraine.  They’ve been living there for hundreds of years.  It’s as if California somehow became part of Mexico again and then the Mexicans started to abuse the Americans living there.  Who thinks that the United States would just stand by while our countrymen were abused and killed.  We would do just exactly what the Russians are doing right now.

So that’s my thought.  Ukrainians and Russians know the psychology of their relationship better than anyone else.  The sooner those two sides sit down at the negotiating table the sooner the killing can stop.  Hopefully for good.  Because it’s not as if they’re going to somehow move farther apart.  They better learn how to be neighbors of some sort.