Tea and Vitriol

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...

  Ahh, the good old days of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union! Claiming to be "democratic," the Soviets featured regular "free" elections. Voters were handed ballots that sported the names of various candidates for various offices. All were card-carrying Communists approved of by the party. No other parties were represented. Voters were allowed to "choose" between the same sort of candidates, which fulfilled the theory if not the spirit of Democracy. Sort of like the Democratic Party's stranglehold on politics in the City of Rochester. Most of my European friends and acquaintances are fascinated by this concept of one-party rule in a so-called democracy, since they have a variety of parties representing different points of view that actively participate in the political process, which makes for some very lively election campaigns. It becomes even more amusing to explain what goes on in Rochester's Democratic Primary, which takes place tomorro...

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...