War Drums
29/01/23 07:01
Good morning, boys and girls! How is everyone this morning? We have another week unfolding before our very eyes, and who doesn't love to have front-row seats in the greatest show on earth? That's a lot of bluster on my part, to be sure. I hope I can deliver. I'm feeling a little anxious just thinking about it. It has very little to do with me, thank God, but I have my tickets just like everyone else. Whether I get up on stage and join the chorus remains to be seen, so you'll have to stay tuned to find out. Like Nancy Pelosi used to say when they asked her about the legislation that she was looking to pass, she said, "you'll have to pass it to find out what's in it." The same can be said for Johnnyblog. You'll have to read it to find out what's in it.
It's funny how you get used to things, and when the time comes to change things up, you wonder what took you so long to do it. We have forever been complaining about the lighting that we have in our computer area, and we've made no efforts whatsoever to rectify anything. You get so married to the status quo that you become resistant to change, even when that change can be for good. I don't mean to beat around the bush here, so let me get to the point. I was looking around in Home Depot yesterday, and I ended up by hook or crook in the lighting section of the store. One particular lamp, an LED lamp with a swivel stem, caught my eye. My God, I thought to myself. This will be the bees fucking knees on our desk. Now that I have it up and running, it's incredible. It puts our 60-watt soft white light bulb/lamp to shame. That's how you do it.
I hope to put a lovely broccoli and cheddar quiche in the oven this morning before the missus wakes up. I like to mix a carton of egg whites with an egg or two just for color and maybe to take the cholesterol down a notch or two. I can only go on with what they tell me, and they tell me that eating too many eggs can be bad for your cholesterol. It's not something I worry about, but it is something I'm mindful of. I'll need to steam up some broccoli beforehand, and I'll want to saute a few Baby Bella mushrooms to throw in as well. I'd love to add some Canadian bacon, but that is not something the missus enjoys, so maybe I'll make a side of bacon for myself. I don't use a crust when I make this particular recipe, and you'd never know it didn't have one if someone didn't bring it to your attention. A pie crust would be just fine, but it's not on my list. I'd also like to throw in a little feta cheese before popping this puppy in the oven.
I don't know what got into me yesterday. I had so much energy that I didn't know what to do with it. Does this have anything to do with my efforts over the last week or so to purge my system of sugar? I think it does. I have another week to go of minimizing sugar and carbs in my diet, so who knows where all of this is going? Anyway, I was running around the house doing things that I'd been avoiding doing for weeks and maybe even months. You know, little things like putting things away that should have been put away a long time ago. It was liberating, I have to say. Having the energy was important, but having the missus offsite was also important. The things you do when left to your own devices says a lot about what you value when push comes to shove. If what happened to me yesterday says anything, it says that I value organization over chaos, clarity over confusion, and maybe sanity over insanity. It was all good.
We finally got some real snow hereabouts. It wasn't much, maybe five inches or so, but it was enough that I had to get out the snowblower. The snow fell off and on throughout the day, and I worried that the mix of rain and snow might be such that I'd be out with the snowblower trying to move the resulting sludge. That's never fun. And don't forget, I also do my neighbor's driveway. It occurred to me that I might have to tell her that I couldn't do her driveway since my snowblower doesn't do a good job moving sludge. Then, where would she be? Up shit's creek without a paddle, as my old man used to say? Just call me a fair-weather snowblower if you must. I do not want to push myself into an early grave so her dog can have a place to pee. Granted, her dog is more important to her than my life is to me, so let's say that right up front. Anyway, the "sludge" never came to fruition, so I tidied everything up, and her dog now has a place to pee. For now, anyway.
I read a few tweets this morning about that Buffalo Bills football player (Damar Hamlin) who collapsed on the field of play a few weeks back. The tweeter said something about the fact that the guy who showed up at the Bills game over the weekend was not, in fact, Damar Hamlin, despite reports to the contrary. Now that I think about it, when I saw the image of the guy on the telly, he was standing in the shadows and behind closed doors such that you couldn't really tell who it was. He, or whoever he was, was wearing what appeared to be an inflatable jacket, and I thought to myself when I first saw him that he must have some kind of defibrillator beneath the jacket. Why would anyone indulge in such tomfoolery if that was not Mr. Hamlin? I have to agree with the tweeter, it had to be a ruse of some kind. To what end, for God's sake?
Is the real Damar Hamlin lying on a cold stone slab somewhere, awaiting the embalmer? Is Mr. Hamlin strapped into a rocking chair somewhere where he has round-the-clock care? There was a lot of discussion when all of this went down that Mr. Hamlin might have suffered brain damage while they worked feverishly to revive him in the moments after he collapsed. Reports were that they brought him back to life a couple of times before the ambulance arrived. All of that aside, I'm more interested in why someone thought it a good idea to have this imposter show up in the stands and behind closed doors to give the appearance that Damar Hamlin was alive and well. Is this the work of Big Pharma doing its level best to craft yet another narrative to cover their sorry asses when it comes to the killer vaccine that they've unleashed on the American public? I also think the tweeter was right when he said that were Damar Hamlin still with us that he would have been on the Good Morning Show with Robin Roberts by now.
I'm reading a story or two this morning about a few high-level governmental officials in Ukraine getting thrown out of office for corruption. This is a joke. Right? Just so you know, the words "Governmental officials" and "corruption" are synonymous when it comes to shitholes like Ukraine. This has to be some kind of political power grab, a consolidation of sorts to give Zelensky even more control. You know what they say, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Or is this an unraveling of sorts? An unraveling, if you will, of the entire government under the grifter, Zelensky? Maybe the powers that be have decided that putting billions of dollars worth of military hardware and might in the hands of someone like Zelensky is not the best idea since sliced bread. He is, after all, a comedian, and comedians typically don't make good generals. If I'm right, Zelensky isn't long for this world.
And then you have the tanks. It reminds me of the back-and-forth discussion a while ago about whether or not we would send planes to Ukraine. I'm not sure why that never happened, but it didn't. You can't believe a word you see or hear from either side. I'm convinced that every story I see on CNN is a story that either Ukraine wants Russia to see or, conversely, Russia wants Ukraine to see. Would it surprise anyone that CNN plays both sides against the middle? Or that CNN is a patsy for the Putin regime? Anyway, this tank story might have some legs. Russia has threatened to burn the tanks should they arrive on Ukrainian soil. I don't even know what that means. Are we talking napalm in the morning here? Maybe some sort of technical nuke? Were I Putin, I'd be concerned that the West is now in it to win it. Stalingrad or bust?
Hasn't Putin already warned that if Russia's national security were threatened, he would stop at nothing, including using nuclear weapons, to protect their national sovereignty? Indeed, he has. Is there a Russian translation of the expression, what's good for the goose is good for the gander? In other words, Putin has been doing his level best to lay waste to Ukraine, albeit with limited success, but damn Zelenssky and his men if they try to fight back and win. The West will raise the ante once again by sending the tanks, so we'll see what difference that makes. The delivery of Patriot Missile systems to Ukrainian soil won't be far behind. We'll soon discover what Putin means by "burning" the tanks. Will it be more hyperbole, or will he follow through on his promise? Should the West decide at some point that they finally have Putin on the ropes, what then?
It also seems to me that Putin is in a bind. He can't threaten nuclear war without accepting that Russia might be incinerated in the process should that come to pass. It almost takes the nuclear stuff off the table. That leaves him fighting a war of attrition which, if you believe everything you hear from the western media, that is a war that Putin is losing. Why don't we ever hear about troop strength or conscript availability in the country of Ukraine? I hear the term "meat grinder" now and then, referring to what Ukrainian troops must be experiencing on the front lines. Do they have an inexhaustible supply of men willing to go into battle against the Ruskies, or are they working with a largely mercenary army thanks to the generosity of the Western nations? Russia has the Wagner group fighting on their behalf, and Belarus is on the verge of joining the battle on the side of the Ruskies. This is starting to look more and more like Vietnam all over again.
Fast forward 24 hours, and I'm reading in the news that Ukraine is calling all Ukrainians residing in Europe to return to Ukraine to help fight in the war. I was asking this very same question in my previous paragraph. If I'm a Ukrainian waking up in Italy this morning, I'm reading this headline and saying, hell no. I love my country but not enough to go back into that meat grinder that is now Ukraine. How long will it be before we end up giving Ukraine nukes? At what point does Putin say, let's take care of matters once and for all? Is there anything that Putin can do in Ukraine before the arrival of the tanks heading there some three to four weeks out? What would that be, precisely? I'm talking about some preemptive action that would render the tanks less useful than they might otherwise be. Alternatively, how do you sneak something the size of a tank battalion into a country without ending up on someone's radar?
With every European country now participating in the Ukrainian conflict, how long will it be before Putin declares war on countries like Germany and England? They are basically already at war with Russia, albeit in a proxy war. They all seem to have bought into the fallacy that has likely been sold by Bumbles and his crew in Washington that, should Ukraine fall, Putin will come after their countries next. I'm old enough to remember that when all of this started, the big question on everyone's lips was, what does Putin want? How much of Ukraine does he intend to "conquer"? Surely, they said repeatedly, Russia doesn't have the ability to take the entire country. It's too big, they said time and time again.
The war has grown exponentially since then, thanks largely to the resources thrown at Ukraine by the West, and it seems oddly unstoppable now for the very same reason. The big question now is, how far is each side willing to go to attain what they consider a victory? There has to be something short of complete annihilation that would appeal to one side or the other. No? How many men left standing is too few to continue the fight? How lifeless does the country of Ukraine have to become before someone decides it's no longer worth fighting for? At what point do targets in Russia become fair game for the weapons being wheeled into Ukraine? You know, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. That fool, Zelensky, is on television talking about how the West can help rebuild Ukraine after the war. The war isn't close to being over, and that stupid fuck is on national television shilling for more cash. It's beyond despicable.
The missus is up and talking to me this morning earlier than usual. She tells me that this is the first time she's waking up to the sounds of birds singing. I haven't noticed that, but it makes sense. It won't be long before they're out and about building nests and making babies. It's the circle of life thing, I suppose. At what point do we allow ourselves to start feeling good about the prospects of Spring arriving? How many more snow storms will have to come and go before we're done with them for another season? I was out on my bike yesterday after taking a six-day hiatus due to the weather. It's no longer the cold that keeps me from biking; it's the snow and ice that have yet to be cleared from the roadways and bike paths on those same roads. God, it felt good to be back out there again.
I almost didn't make it. Biking, I mean. We had problems with the Ev man's car again, which sucked up the better part of the early afternoon. There were so many things that seemed to go wrong yesterday that I told the missus that my going on a bike ride might be pushing the envelope. I'm not one to tempt fate; it felt like a fateful day. I told the Ev man that had someone told me that it was Friday the thirteenth, I might have believed them. I fell prey to what can only be described as confirmation bias when I took notice of a woman walking along a sidewalk with her dog, whose head was sticking out of her backpack. Who does that? What is someone trying to tell me? And then, after dropping the Ev man back at his house, I drove away only to be held up by a train rolling through town with 50 freight cars in tow. The matter of Ev's car, which we thought was nothing more than a dead battery, turned into something worse. That's what I'm talking about here.
Have you ever watched Jesse Waters on FOX? I think he's a complete idiot. What programming networks have on their shows tells me a lot about how they view their viewers. When you have a frat boy like Waters dishing up his nonsense five days a week, don't think for a moment that FOX doesn't think anyone watching is just as stupid as the guy they have on reading the teleprompter. Anyway, I was flipping through the channels, and I just happened to see this idiot, Waters, pushing a narrative that Hunter Biden was an asset for the CIA when he was shaking down foreign governments on behalf of the Biden Crime Family. That's why, he continued, the investigation of Hunter Biden will never become a criminal investigation. I'm thinking to myself, wut? So, this Waters guy is now a stooge for the intelligence agencies? He's spewing their bullshit to try and throw everyone off the scent of Hunter and his demented and corrupt father, Bumbles? Maybe this explains why the FBI has done nothing for two years despite possessing Hunter's laptop, and all the evidence of crimes committed contained therein. Sorry, I'm not buying it. Not for one fucking minute.
I don't usually pay much attention to what this group, Project Veritas, puts on the web, so let me just start there. Most of what I see them put out on the internet in the way of undercover videos go nowhere. Maybe they play up these revelatory releases too much, and then the real thing is a nothing burger. So what if they get someone on video saying something dishonest? Since when is anyone surprised that people are dishonest? Is it criminal? Maybe, maybe not. How is what Project Veritas does any different than that show back in the sixties, called "Candid Camera"? We laughed at the hilarity of it all back in the day. Anyway, this latest video from Veritas, where they out an executive from Pfizer, is quite something. I was less interested in hearing what he (the target) had to say in the video and more interested in seeing what passes for a Pfizzer executive in this day and age. My God, what a flipping twat! These are the people developing vaccines to protect people across the globe from Covid? No fucking wonder we see twenty-somethings dropping dead in their tracks after receiving the vaccine.
I hear that the US senate is now scheduling hearings in the wake of this video from Project Veritas. I mean, what the hell have they been waiting for? It took a video from Project Veritas to get their attention? They didn't think that people dropping dead after receiving the vaccine warranted a closer look at what Pfizer has been doing? Maybe they should put Project Veritas on their payroll so they can have an excuse to look into a few more things. I suspect that the Senate might be more interested in what this executive had to say than how he appeared in the video. Bringing him in for questioning might be interesting, if he lives that long. The guy thought he was out on a date impressing a potential paramour when, in reality, he was being videotaped by an undercover person from Project Veritas posing as a potential paramour. What was that he said about mutating viruses?
Speaking of nothing burgers, I'm happy to report that the problem with the Ev man's car turned out to be a nothing burger. There is a "fused" cable that connects the battery to the starter that apparently went bad. That's why we couldn't jump the car with jumper cables. It didn't need a jump. It needed a new cable, or better yet, forget the fused cable altogether. It didn't need a new starter, it didn't need a new battery, it didn't need anything of the sort. The car did need a tow, and it did need the attention of a professional to put all the pieces together. The missus and I like to drive by the repair shop once we've dropped the car off to be repaired to see if we can tell where he is in the process of fixing what needs to be fixed. If the car is in the back lot around the corner from the entrance, that's a good sign. It tells me that the repair has likely been done. If he hasn't called me, and the car is sitting in the back lot, it tells me that it was a minor repair and he didn't need my permission to go ahead and fix the problem. It was a fifty-buck fix. That's it. It could have been so much more.
I'm always sorry to hear when someone loses their life needlessly, but in the case of this guy in Memphis who died after being beaten by five cops, it always leaves me wondering if they might not have lost their lives had they complied with the commands issued by the officers. It was difficult to tell what preceded the scene where the cops pulled this fellow from his car. Still, one has to imagine that it was hopefully a textbook case of cops seeing a bad guy doing bad things and then doing what they needed to apprehend the criminal. If brute force is called for to subdue or otherwise control the alleged criminal, that might explain why they yanked this fellow out of his car and forced him to the ground. The suspect continued to struggle, as best I could tell by watching the video, and he did subsequently get loose and run for it, which may well justify actions taken by the police who were trying to subdue him in the first place.
I didn't watch the entire video, so I don't know how he ended up dead within shouting distance of his mother's home. CNN reported that his final words were "mamma" or something similar. He was a black man who was "killed" by five black police officers. That's just a fact. The officers have now been charged with second-degree murder. The mainstream media went into in full George Floyd mode. They promptly dispatched their reporters to hot spots across several cities from coast to coast to cover the anticipated riotous actions once the Memphis Police Department released the tape. One network displayed a news dispatch released by Antifa instructing their members to "burn it all down." Traffic in and around the city of Memphis was brought to a halt by hordes of angry black people enraged by yet another heavy-handed police action that resulted in the death of one of their own. There wasn't a policeman in sight. How much of this will change once the full story emerges is anyone's guess. This is Joe Biden's America in the year of the Lord, 2023.
We all know that Antifa is just another enforcement arm of the Biden Justice Department. They are colloquially referred to as "Biden's Brownshirts." They do the bidding of Bumbles and his democrat party. Do you need a race riot? The word goes out from the White House, and the next thing you know, it is going out across social media to every last maggot hiding in their mom's basement that their participation is needed to restore social justice. Bricks need to be delivered to participants, bats and truncheons need to be collected and distributed, targets need to be identified, and the appropriate footage needs to be taken and sent to their contacts in the leftist media in order to fan the appropriate flames of civil unrest when the time comes. People will die, property will be destroyed in the name of social justice, and the left will applaud them. There will be no investigations. There will be no congressional hearings. Biden's brownshirts will wreak havoc at will, and the DOJ will look the other way. Like I said, Biden's America in 2023.
I was following a thread or two on Twitter last night before bedtime about explosions here and there in Iran. These explosives were reportedly delivered by drones and were, no doubt, targeted with pinpoint precision. Does this have anything to do with reports in the media within the last week of America declaring or going to war with Iran? I remember thinking that Iran has many bad actors, and America has no shortage of reasons for wanting to see them put in their place, but don't we already have our hands full with arming and financing a proxy war in Ukraine? There was no mention of America being involved in these bombings on Twitter, but who did it and who gets the blame is almost an afterthought in the scheme of things. The obvious culprit would be the State of Israel which also has a lot of reasons why they might want to take out a target or two in Iran. I don't know much about drones, but they sure come in handy when you can't launch missiles or fly sorties to reach your targets.
I'm on day number 14 today of my attempts to cut back on my sugar consumption. It's working pretty well, if I do say so myself. The first few days were the most difficult. Nobody said going cold turkey was going to be easy. It's all about ridding your diet of those foodstuffs that spike your sugars like pasta, bread, etc. I know it sounds like something you can just nip in the bud by buying fewer cookies and candy bars every time you go to the store, but it's not that easy. The frequency with which I purchased these items, not to mention how much of what I was buying got consumed in short order, was of concern to me. I started to hate how little control I had over making such purchases. I got to the point where I thought it was literally going to kill me if I didn't do something to make it stop. The cravings have largely dissipated, but I'm mindful of how easy it would be to go back to that lifestyle were I to drop my guard for even a minute. For now, mission accomplished.
Trump was in New Hampshire yesterday, giving a policy speech. It's his first policy speech since he announced his run for the presidency in 2024. I listened for a while and then stopped listening when all I heard from him was the same old stories he gave back in the day when he held rallies almost weekly. Who the hell is writing his speeches? It all sounds so tiring. He's like the grandfather who's lost a step or two and continues regurgitating stories from his youth. It's one thing to listen to Bumbles Biden talk about his days with Corn Pop. You know he's a demented old fuck, so you just ignore him. Despite his age, Trump is not supposed to come off as an old man. Trump is the one 70-something who has always burned the candle at both ends and the guy who still has gas in the tank after everyone has gone home for the night. He'd better fix this and fix it fast. I'll still vote for him if he gets the nomination, but I can't listen to him until something changes for the better.
It's funny how you get used to things, and when the time comes to change things up, you wonder what took you so long to do it. We have forever been complaining about the lighting that we have in our computer area, and we've made no efforts whatsoever to rectify anything. You get so married to the status quo that you become resistant to change, even when that change can be for good. I don't mean to beat around the bush here, so let me get to the point. I was looking around in Home Depot yesterday, and I ended up by hook or crook in the lighting section of the store. One particular lamp, an LED lamp with a swivel stem, caught my eye. My God, I thought to myself. This will be the bees fucking knees on our desk. Now that I have it up and running, it's incredible. It puts our 60-watt soft white light bulb/lamp to shame. That's how you do it.
I hope to put a lovely broccoli and cheddar quiche in the oven this morning before the missus wakes up. I like to mix a carton of egg whites with an egg or two just for color and maybe to take the cholesterol down a notch or two. I can only go on with what they tell me, and they tell me that eating too many eggs can be bad for your cholesterol. It's not something I worry about, but it is something I'm mindful of. I'll need to steam up some broccoli beforehand, and I'll want to saute a few Baby Bella mushrooms to throw in as well. I'd love to add some Canadian bacon, but that is not something the missus enjoys, so maybe I'll make a side of bacon for myself. I don't use a crust when I make this particular recipe, and you'd never know it didn't have one if someone didn't bring it to your attention. A pie crust would be just fine, but it's not on my list. I'd also like to throw in a little feta cheese before popping this puppy in the oven.
I don't know what got into me yesterday. I had so much energy that I didn't know what to do with it. Does this have anything to do with my efforts over the last week or so to purge my system of sugar? I think it does. I have another week to go of minimizing sugar and carbs in my diet, so who knows where all of this is going? Anyway, I was running around the house doing things that I'd been avoiding doing for weeks and maybe even months. You know, little things like putting things away that should have been put away a long time ago. It was liberating, I have to say. Having the energy was important, but having the missus offsite was also important. The things you do when left to your own devices says a lot about what you value when push comes to shove. If what happened to me yesterday says anything, it says that I value organization over chaos, clarity over confusion, and maybe sanity over insanity. It was all good.
We finally got some real snow hereabouts. It wasn't much, maybe five inches or so, but it was enough that I had to get out the snowblower. The snow fell off and on throughout the day, and I worried that the mix of rain and snow might be such that I'd be out with the snowblower trying to move the resulting sludge. That's never fun. And don't forget, I also do my neighbor's driveway. It occurred to me that I might have to tell her that I couldn't do her driveway since my snowblower doesn't do a good job moving sludge. Then, where would she be? Up shit's creek without a paddle, as my old man used to say? Just call me a fair-weather snowblower if you must. I do not want to push myself into an early grave so her dog can have a place to pee. Granted, her dog is more important to her than my life is to me, so let's say that right up front. Anyway, the "sludge" never came to fruition, so I tidied everything up, and her dog now has a place to pee. For now, anyway.
I read a few tweets this morning about that Buffalo Bills football player (Damar Hamlin) who collapsed on the field of play a few weeks back. The tweeter said something about the fact that the guy who showed up at the Bills game over the weekend was not, in fact, Damar Hamlin, despite reports to the contrary. Now that I think about it, when I saw the image of the guy on the telly, he was standing in the shadows and behind closed doors such that you couldn't really tell who it was. He, or whoever he was, was wearing what appeared to be an inflatable jacket, and I thought to myself when I first saw him that he must have some kind of defibrillator beneath the jacket. Why would anyone indulge in such tomfoolery if that was not Mr. Hamlin? I have to agree with the tweeter, it had to be a ruse of some kind. To what end, for God's sake?
Is the real Damar Hamlin lying on a cold stone slab somewhere, awaiting the embalmer? Is Mr. Hamlin strapped into a rocking chair somewhere where he has round-the-clock care? There was a lot of discussion when all of this went down that Mr. Hamlin might have suffered brain damage while they worked feverishly to revive him in the moments after he collapsed. Reports were that they brought him back to life a couple of times before the ambulance arrived. All of that aside, I'm more interested in why someone thought it a good idea to have this imposter show up in the stands and behind closed doors to give the appearance that Damar Hamlin was alive and well. Is this the work of Big Pharma doing its level best to craft yet another narrative to cover their sorry asses when it comes to the killer vaccine that they've unleashed on the American public? I also think the tweeter was right when he said that were Damar Hamlin still with us that he would have been on the Good Morning Show with Robin Roberts by now.
I'm reading a story or two this morning about a few high-level governmental officials in Ukraine getting thrown out of office for corruption. This is a joke. Right? Just so you know, the words "Governmental officials" and "corruption" are synonymous when it comes to shitholes like Ukraine. This has to be some kind of political power grab, a consolidation of sorts to give Zelensky even more control. You know what they say, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Or is this an unraveling of sorts? An unraveling, if you will, of the entire government under the grifter, Zelensky? Maybe the powers that be have decided that putting billions of dollars worth of military hardware and might in the hands of someone like Zelensky is not the best idea since sliced bread. He is, after all, a comedian, and comedians typically don't make good generals. If I'm right, Zelensky isn't long for this world.
And then you have the tanks. It reminds me of the back-and-forth discussion a while ago about whether or not we would send planes to Ukraine. I'm not sure why that never happened, but it didn't. You can't believe a word you see or hear from either side. I'm convinced that every story I see on CNN is a story that either Ukraine wants Russia to see or, conversely, Russia wants Ukraine to see. Would it surprise anyone that CNN plays both sides against the middle? Or that CNN is a patsy for the Putin regime? Anyway, this tank story might have some legs. Russia has threatened to burn the tanks should they arrive on Ukrainian soil. I don't even know what that means. Are we talking napalm in the morning here? Maybe some sort of technical nuke? Were I Putin, I'd be concerned that the West is now in it to win it. Stalingrad or bust?
Hasn't Putin already warned that if Russia's national security were threatened, he would stop at nothing, including using nuclear weapons, to protect their national sovereignty? Indeed, he has. Is there a Russian translation of the expression, what's good for the goose is good for the gander? In other words, Putin has been doing his level best to lay waste to Ukraine, albeit with limited success, but damn Zelenssky and his men if they try to fight back and win. The West will raise the ante once again by sending the tanks, so we'll see what difference that makes. The delivery of Patriot Missile systems to Ukrainian soil won't be far behind. We'll soon discover what Putin means by "burning" the tanks. Will it be more hyperbole, or will he follow through on his promise? Should the West decide at some point that they finally have Putin on the ropes, what then?
It also seems to me that Putin is in a bind. He can't threaten nuclear war without accepting that Russia might be incinerated in the process should that come to pass. It almost takes the nuclear stuff off the table. That leaves him fighting a war of attrition which, if you believe everything you hear from the western media, that is a war that Putin is losing. Why don't we ever hear about troop strength or conscript availability in the country of Ukraine? I hear the term "meat grinder" now and then, referring to what Ukrainian troops must be experiencing on the front lines. Do they have an inexhaustible supply of men willing to go into battle against the Ruskies, or are they working with a largely mercenary army thanks to the generosity of the Western nations? Russia has the Wagner group fighting on their behalf, and Belarus is on the verge of joining the battle on the side of the Ruskies. This is starting to look more and more like Vietnam all over again.
Fast forward 24 hours, and I'm reading in the news that Ukraine is calling all Ukrainians residing in Europe to return to Ukraine to help fight in the war. I was asking this very same question in my previous paragraph. If I'm a Ukrainian waking up in Italy this morning, I'm reading this headline and saying, hell no. I love my country but not enough to go back into that meat grinder that is now Ukraine. How long will it be before we end up giving Ukraine nukes? At what point does Putin say, let's take care of matters once and for all? Is there anything that Putin can do in Ukraine before the arrival of the tanks heading there some three to four weeks out? What would that be, precisely? I'm talking about some preemptive action that would render the tanks less useful than they might otherwise be. Alternatively, how do you sneak something the size of a tank battalion into a country without ending up on someone's radar?
With every European country now participating in the Ukrainian conflict, how long will it be before Putin declares war on countries like Germany and England? They are basically already at war with Russia, albeit in a proxy war. They all seem to have bought into the fallacy that has likely been sold by Bumbles and his crew in Washington that, should Ukraine fall, Putin will come after their countries next. I'm old enough to remember that when all of this started, the big question on everyone's lips was, what does Putin want? How much of Ukraine does he intend to "conquer"? Surely, they said repeatedly, Russia doesn't have the ability to take the entire country. It's too big, they said time and time again.
The war has grown exponentially since then, thanks largely to the resources thrown at Ukraine by the West, and it seems oddly unstoppable now for the very same reason. The big question now is, how far is each side willing to go to attain what they consider a victory? There has to be something short of complete annihilation that would appeal to one side or the other. No? How many men left standing is too few to continue the fight? How lifeless does the country of Ukraine have to become before someone decides it's no longer worth fighting for? At what point do targets in Russia become fair game for the weapons being wheeled into Ukraine? You know, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. That fool, Zelensky, is on television talking about how the West can help rebuild Ukraine after the war. The war isn't close to being over, and that stupid fuck is on national television shilling for more cash. It's beyond despicable.
The missus is up and talking to me this morning earlier than usual. She tells me that this is the first time she's waking up to the sounds of birds singing. I haven't noticed that, but it makes sense. It won't be long before they're out and about building nests and making babies. It's the circle of life thing, I suppose. At what point do we allow ourselves to start feeling good about the prospects of Spring arriving? How many more snow storms will have to come and go before we're done with them for another season? I was out on my bike yesterday after taking a six-day hiatus due to the weather. It's no longer the cold that keeps me from biking; it's the snow and ice that have yet to be cleared from the roadways and bike paths on those same roads. God, it felt good to be back out there again.
I almost didn't make it. Biking, I mean. We had problems with the Ev man's car again, which sucked up the better part of the early afternoon. There were so many things that seemed to go wrong yesterday that I told the missus that my going on a bike ride might be pushing the envelope. I'm not one to tempt fate; it felt like a fateful day. I told the Ev man that had someone told me that it was Friday the thirteenth, I might have believed them. I fell prey to what can only be described as confirmation bias when I took notice of a woman walking along a sidewalk with her dog, whose head was sticking out of her backpack. Who does that? What is someone trying to tell me? And then, after dropping the Ev man back at his house, I drove away only to be held up by a train rolling through town with 50 freight cars in tow. The matter of Ev's car, which we thought was nothing more than a dead battery, turned into something worse. That's what I'm talking about here.
Have you ever watched Jesse Waters on FOX? I think he's a complete idiot. What programming networks have on their shows tells me a lot about how they view their viewers. When you have a frat boy like Waters dishing up his nonsense five days a week, don't think for a moment that FOX doesn't think anyone watching is just as stupid as the guy they have on reading the teleprompter. Anyway, I was flipping through the channels, and I just happened to see this idiot, Waters, pushing a narrative that Hunter Biden was an asset for the CIA when he was shaking down foreign governments on behalf of the Biden Crime Family. That's why, he continued, the investigation of Hunter Biden will never become a criminal investigation. I'm thinking to myself, wut? So, this Waters guy is now a stooge for the intelligence agencies? He's spewing their bullshit to try and throw everyone off the scent of Hunter and his demented and corrupt father, Bumbles? Maybe this explains why the FBI has done nothing for two years despite possessing Hunter's laptop, and all the evidence of crimes committed contained therein. Sorry, I'm not buying it. Not for one fucking minute.
I don't usually pay much attention to what this group, Project Veritas, puts on the web, so let me just start there. Most of what I see them put out on the internet in the way of undercover videos go nowhere. Maybe they play up these revelatory releases too much, and then the real thing is a nothing burger. So what if they get someone on video saying something dishonest? Since when is anyone surprised that people are dishonest? Is it criminal? Maybe, maybe not. How is what Project Veritas does any different than that show back in the sixties, called "Candid Camera"? We laughed at the hilarity of it all back in the day. Anyway, this latest video from Veritas, where they out an executive from Pfizer, is quite something. I was less interested in hearing what he (the target) had to say in the video and more interested in seeing what passes for a Pfizzer executive in this day and age. My God, what a flipping twat! These are the people developing vaccines to protect people across the globe from Covid? No fucking wonder we see twenty-somethings dropping dead in their tracks after receiving the vaccine.
I hear that the US senate is now scheduling hearings in the wake of this video from Project Veritas. I mean, what the hell have they been waiting for? It took a video from Project Veritas to get their attention? They didn't think that people dropping dead after receiving the vaccine warranted a closer look at what Pfizer has been doing? Maybe they should put Project Veritas on their payroll so they can have an excuse to look into a few more things. I suspect that the Senate might be more interested in what this executive had to say than how he appeared in the video. Bringing him in for questioning might be interesting, if he lives that long. The guy thought he was out on a date impressing a potential paramour when, in reality, he was being videotaped by an undercover person from Project Veritas posing as a potential paramour. What was that he said about mutating viruses?
Speaking of nothing burgers, I'm happy to report that the problem with the Ev man's car turned out to be a nothing burger. There is a "fused" cable that connects the battery to the starter that apparently went bad. That's why we couldn't jump the car with jumper cables. It didn't need a jump. It needed a new cable, or better yet, forget the fused cable altogether. It didn't need a new starter, it didn't need a new battery, it didn't need anything of the sort. The car did need a tow, and it did need the attention of a professional to put all the pieces together. The missus and I like to drive by the repair shop once we've dropped the car off to be repaired to see if we can tell where he is in the process of fixing what needs to be fixed. If the car is in the back lot around the corner from the entrance, that's a good sign. It tells me that the repair has likely been done. If he hasn't called me, and the car is sitting in the back lot, it tells me that it was a minor repair and he didn't need my permission to go ahead and fix the problem. It was a fifty-buck fix. That's it. It could have been so much more.
I'm always sorry to hear when someone loses their life needlessly, but in the case of this guy in Memphis who died after being beaten by five cops, it always leaves me wondering if they might not have lost their lives had they complied with the commands issued by the officers. It was difficult to tell what preceded the scene where the cops pulled this fellow from his car. Still, one has to imagine that it was hopefully a textbook case of cops seeing a bad guy doing bad things and then doing what they needed to apprehend the criminal. If brute force is called for to subdue or otherwise control the alleged criminal, that might explain why they yanked this fellow out of his car and forced him to the ground. The suspect continued to struggle, as best I could tell by watching the video, and he did subsequently get loose and run for it, which may well justify actions taken by the police who were trying to subdue him in the first place.
I didn't watch the entire video, so I don't know how he ended up dead within shouting distance of his mother's home. CNN reported that his final words were "mamma" or something similar. He was a black man who was "killed" by five black police officers. That's just a fact. The officers have now been charged with second-degree murder. The mainstream media went into in full George Floyd mode. They promptly dispatched their reporters to hot spots across several cities from coast to coast to cover the anticipated riotous actions once the Memphis Police Department released the tape. One network displayed a news dispatch released by Antifa instructing their members to "burn it all down." Traffic in and around the city of Memphis was brought to a halt by hordes of angry black people enraged by yet another heavy-handed police action that resulted in the death of one of their own. There wasn't a policeman in sight. How much of this will change once the full story emerges is anyone's guess. This is Joe Biden's America in the year of the Lord, 2023.
We all know that Antifa is just another enforcement arm of the Biden Justice Department. They are colloquially referred to as "Biden's Brownshirts." They do the bidding of Bumbles and his democrat party. Do you need a race riot? The word goes out from the White House, and the next thing you know, it is going out across social media to every last maggot hiding in their mom's basement that their participation is needed to restore social justice. Bricks need to be delivered to participants, bats and truncheons need to be collected and distributed, targets need to be identified, and the appropriate footage needs to be taken and sent to their contacts in the leftist media in order to fan the appropriate flames of civil unrest when the time comes. People will die, property will be destroyed in the name of social justice, and the left will applaud them. There will be no investigations. There will be no congressional hearings. Biden's brownshirts will wreak havoc at will, and the DOJ will look the other way. Like I said, Biden's America in 2023.
I was following a thread or two on Twitter last night before bedtime about explosions here and there in Iran. These explosives were reportedly delivered by drones and were, no doubt, targeted with pinpoint precision. Does this have anything to do with reports in the media within the last week of America declaring or going to war with Iran? I remember thinking that Iran has many bad actors, and America has no shortage of reasons for wanting to see them put in their place, but don't we already have our hands full with arming and financing a proxy war in Ukraine? There was no mention of America being involved in these bombings on Twitter, but who did it and who gets the blame is almost an afterthought in the scheme of things. The obvious culprit would be the State of Israel which also has a lot of reasons why they might want to take out a target or two in Iran. I don't know much about drones, but they sure come in handy when you can't launch missiles or fly sorties to reach your targets.
I'm on day number 14 today of my attempts to cut back on my sugar consumption. It's working pretty well, if I do say so myself. The first few days were the most difficult. Nobody said going cold turkey was going to be easy. It's all about ridding your diet of those foodstuffs that spike your sugars like pasta, bread, etc. I know it sounds like something you can just nip in the bud by buying fewer cookies and candy bars every time you go to the store, but it's not that easy. The frequency with which I purchased these items, not to mention how much of what I was buying got consumed in short order, was of concern to me. I started to hate how little control I had over making such purchases. I got to the point where I thought it was literally going to kill me if I didn't do something to make it stop. The cravings have largely dissipated, but I'm mindful of how easy it would be to go back to that lifestyle were I to drop my guard for even a minute. For now, mission accomplished.
Trump was in New Hampshire yesterday, giving a policy speech. It's his first policy speech since he announced his run for the presidency in 2024. I listened for a while and then stopped listening when all I heard from him was the same old stories he gave back in the day when he held rallies almost weekly. Who the hell is writing his speeches? It all sounds so tiring. He's like the grandfather who's lost a step or two and continues regurgitating stories from his youth. It's one thing to listen to Bumbles Biden talk about his days with Corn Pop. You know he's a demented old fuck, so you just ignore him. Despite his age, Trump is not supposed to come off as an old man. Trump is the one 70-something who has always burned the candle at both ends and the guy who still has gas in the tank after everyone has gone home for the night. He'd better fix this and fix it fast. I'll still vote for him if he gets the nomination, but I can't listen to him until something changes for the better.