Putin the palooka – again.
If you search my archive for the word palooka you will find it frequently applied to Vladimir Putin. The guy is a psychopath, true. He may be truly evil but he is not that smart. Had he been, given Russia’s resources, the war would’ve been over three years ago and we would all be speaking Russian.
Putin is brutalizing Ukraine with ever increasing missile and drone attacks. These have had the beneficial effect of forcing Donald Trump to support us. It has been my contention that Donald Trump was under few illusions about Putin, but had to allow Putin to show his true nature in order to rally support from his conservative base. At any rate that has happened.
We are going to receive Patriot air defense missiles that we need to protect ourselves against Russia’s larger missiles – Kinzhal hypersonic missiles, KH-101 cruise missiles, Iskandar cruise missiles and the like. The Kinzhals appear most capable of circumventing our present defenses. They are new, having just entered mass production during the war, expensive and not produced in great scale.
Ukraine has developed its own defenses against the far more numerous Shaheed drones. Although Iran and Russia continue to improve their technology, we have a greater than 90% success rate knocking them down. Our new technologies include drones to intercept them and acoustic devices to accurately locate them. YouTube has videos explaining both.
The drone swarms are certainly inhumane. Their use is definitely a war crime. The videos of the destruction that they cause arouse worldwide revulsion against Russia. They kill a handful of civilians every day.
What for? Although Putin may imagine that they weaken our morale, they only reinforce our conviction that the Russians are cruel and immoral and that we should do everything in our power to stay out of their control. I do not even think Putin actually believes drone swarms will help his effort. I think he is doing it because it is all he can do. And because he is cruel. His military, for all of its massive advantage in size, is making minuscule advances on the battlefield.
Throughout his career Putin has had no concern for human life, Russian and enemy alike. He started his career with the false flag Moscow apartment house bombings. He bombed Chechnya absolutely flat. In this war he bombed Mariupol absolutely flat. Briefly put, everything he has won since his bloodless coup in Crimea has been so thoroughly destroyed in the process of conquest that it is of no use to Russia or anybody else. He is a true heir to the Mongol hordes of the 13th and 14th century, destroying everything in its path, building nothing.
Our family passed a couple of a sleepless nights filled with loud explosions lasting as long as 10 hours. The amazing thing was that although there are a few wounded and dramatic video of destroyed apartment buildings, the body count in the morning’s news is in the single digits, sometimes as low as zero. It is far beneath the scale of the London blitz, the bombing of Dresden and Doolittle’s raid over Tokyo, all of which the natives stoically survived.
The news sources, links to which I have shared here, have not offered much new over the past month. I sense in this quiet that Russia’s collapse is an ongoing process. Internal repression is accelerating, the economy is continuing to crater, sanctions are continuing to bite and so on. The battlefield reports are that the front-line wobbles back and forth, with Russia gaining small bits of territory at a vast cost in men and material, as Ukraine prioritizes protecting its soldiers over holding farmland. It feels like the calm before the storm.
Bottom line, my impression is that Ukraine would have prevailed without Trump’s coming around. But with even greater sacrifices – I’m glad for all the suffering he can spare us. Having been so apparently reluctant, but still now convinced, he may drag along other reluctant actors in MAGA and also Europeans like Orban and Fico.
That’s enough for one day’s blog, but many other issues are related. I am looking at franchises as a way of doing business in Ukraine. Many local businesses I patronize seem to be very poorly run, and the franchise model appears to be a reasonable way to capitalize on that observation. Bitcoin is at an all-time high of $117,000 the very minute that I write this. It is an ominous signal. El gato malo continues to offer trenchant insights into the problems with American society, reinforcing the insights I have posted about my former family over the past 20 years. This bad cat has figured out the reasons why none, NONE of my family or my other woke acquaintances even return my emails. They hate themselves, and they especially hate me for not hating myself. But those are topics for future blogs.
I know exactly the fix for the ill that el gato malo describes - it's called "learning a skilled trade" - and then being employed it it. It produces a radical transformation in thought, ideology, and politics, from what I've seen. BTW, gender appropriate trades - no male nurses... I knew a guy who went to art school - a good art school - and like 99% of his class, the only job he could get was manual unskilled labor. And he had a horrendous college debt, despite the scholarship he got (which, I am now convinced, was just another part of the confidence trick played on him...) - and he could work all of the rest of his life, and if he lived to collect Social Security - if it still existed, which is debatable - he'd be making loan payments out of the Social Security money. And he was a raging Communist - a Stalinist, a "tankie". And in conversation with him, I found out that his degree was in Sculpture - and that all Sculpture students had a welding certificate - he knew how to do all sorts of welding... So I told him to check out the local community college courses in sheet metal fabrication - that welding certificate was precisely the ticket he needed to get in the door. Maybe $3000 more for the first year - the second year was a paid apprenticeship, and when he got out he had a well-paying job, within 3 years he'd paid off all of his student loans and was on the way to buying a house - and he was turning rapidly conservative. He lost all of his punk-rock commie friends, they now hated him because they were stuck in their lousy jobs, but they wouldn't be subjected to the shame of actually becoming part of the working class - the class of skilled labor, which the university educated feel themselves to be superior to, both intellectually and morally... So skilled trades are the cure for this malaise, at least here in the US. It might be different in Ukraine.
PS - When I see weapons actually move to Ukraine from the US, I'll begin to think that he's finally cottoned on to the truth of the matter - that he was being catfished, being treated as a big dumb idiot by Vlad and his rat-faced friend, Peskov. Maybe that will piss off Trump even more - and he'll take appropriate action, maybe use the Defense Production Act to make more weapons like he used the same Act to produce ventilators in the latter part of his first term...
I'll never forgive Biden for slow-rolling arms to the Ukraine, and Trump is escaping my wrath for supporting Putler the Palooka for so long. Slava Ukraine!