Tea and Vitriol

The war in Ukraine has begun. People have already died in this new war. It has been expected for months, yet world leaders have done nothing to seriously dissuade Russia's Putin from going to war. Now that the war has begun in earnest, despite all of the "diplomacy" used to prevent it, world leaders are condemning it. That includes the United Nations, which has long been an expensive, impotent forum for world opinion. And doing nothing. To be sure, world leaders have threatened Putin with economic sanctions against Russia if he went to war. And yes, they did provide Ukraine with wholly inadequate amounts of money and war materiel to be used against the Russian powerhouse should war come. But that is all. Because they are afraid of provoking Putin into a nuclear world war. Putin himself has stated to the world powers scolding him that they had better not interfere with his plans for Ukraine, because there would be "consequences you have never seen." This was espe

  Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, fell to the Taliban this past weekend and with it the effective government of that nation. It was not unexpected. The US and our NATO allies have been leaving for months, although there was still a sizable US presence in Afghanistan, as well as tens of thousands of native Afghanis who were associated with the Western Powers whose lives were therefore at risk after our departure. What shocked the world is the swiftness with which the Taliban captured Kabul, since the US blithely informed everyone that such an event was months away and the the western withdrawal could continue in a slow, steady pace. Then, pow! The Taliban took over, chaos reigned in Kabul as tens of thousands of people tried to get to the airport to escape on US transports out of the country, more Americans were trapped in other parts of Afghanistan... And President Joe Biden? He was on vacation. Yet, there was a sense of deja vu about this. We HAD been there before, in Saigon, when