Tea and Vitriol

One definition of stupidity is "To repeat the same failed actions numerous times but expecting a different and successful result this time." The European Commission's head honcho and tough titty Ursula von der Leyen announced yesterday that she was imposing a 19th package of sanctions against Putin's Russia. This is supposed to somehow help to end Russia's war of aggression in the Ukraine. And the previous 18 package of sanctions against Putin's Russia? What did they accomplish? Why, absolutely nothing. Putin is winning the war in Ukraine. He has been unimpressed by the babbling of western European "democracies" since he forcibly annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and despite all 18 ensuing packages of sanctions, the European Union STILL does business with Russia, either directly or in a roundabout way. For that matter, so does the United States. So, what will the 19th package of sanctions do to hurt Russia? Why, absolutely nothing. And that is the...

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is effectively dead. Conceived to prevent further Soviet expansion in Europe and bankrolled largely by the United States, it was merely a paper tiger and rarely effective anywhere. It took NATO a good long time to counter Serbia's genocide against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo at the turn of the 21st century, while it ignored Serbia's similar attempts at genocide against Muslims in Bosnia Herzegovina (ethnic cleansing) just a few years earlier. Go figure. One can argue that neither case involved states or territories that were part of NATO, yet NATO ignored the one case but involved itself in the second. Which, quite frankly, could provide NATO with an excuse to intervene in Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine. If they had the balls to. Which they don't. Then, after 9-11 in the US, then President George W. Bush called upon NATO to make war against the terrorists based in Afghanistan who perpetrated that outrage. The result wa...