It is drizzling and chilly outside but it feels like Spring. After an unending, cold, dry winter, in the last couple of weeks, it must have rained three inches and the garden, Michele, and I are happy for it. Between rains, the sky is blue and the sun is bright, and the flowers are blooming. Everything looks fresh, and new, just like spring. And, after being in what seemed like an endless loop of medical problems, it is starting to feel like spring for me too.

The endless loop started, about the time Fall had turned into Winter and I noticed, after trying not to – a troubling open wound on my leg. I had always sort of held a mindset that whatever the specific problem was, it was a specific problem and could be fixed. But The Wound really rattled me. Holy Fuck, it is like I’m rotting from the skin in, like a rotting pear. Like a leaper, like an old leaper. Unclean, unclean. This was not a problem to be solved, this was just my old body giving up the ghost.

Up until The Wound, I didn’t really think of myself as old. That’s not quite right, I thought of myself as old, but not Dianne Finesteirn old, more like oldish with a lot of new parts. Most old people I know seem to be stuck in the past and I don’t yearn for the past at all. I feel young-minded, but The Wound rattled me. It made me feel very old.

This was also a time of backed up doctor appointments, a foot doctor who would, after a month or so of my thinking about it, remove part of my big toenail to stop it from being driven into my very sore flesh by the neighboring hammer toe, and a skin doctor doing a biopsy on my arm. Neither doctor ran screaming from the room when I showed them The Wound which was encouraging and both bandaged the wound in different ways but it kept getting worse. Finally, a couple of days later, I went to a rheumatology specialist that Michele had recommended and he recommended that I go to the wound center. Now! They recommended that I start wearing compression socks to mitigate my varicose veins and they put a new bandage on The Wound.

As an aside, and, since it came from the certified Wound Center, I’m going to call it a tip. They put a square of Duoderm CGF directly on the Wound. The Duoderm CGF is like an artificial scab over a wound that retains the moisture and I left it there for something like four or five days between changing. Underneath, a wound just heals itself. End aside.

About this time, at the apogee of my age-angst, I tore the meniscus in my left knee making it much harder to get around and then I gouged a hole into my left hand with a sharp fingernail on my right hand and I sank into a winter lethargy. The Wound Center also recommended that I get an ultrasound of my varicose veins to see if they were a problem that could be solved. The ultrasound led to my having a radiofrequency ablation of my varicose veins last week and I feel like the endless downhill loop is starting to end. Next week I’m getting a steroid shot in my left knee and my hand gouge has even miraculously healed under its Duoderm CGF scab all of which has led to my feeling much more spring-like this week.

So, Happy Spring.

People who destroy whole nations do not have the right to teach us democracy and the values of living free. Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Another recent report, from the International Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance, noted that more than half of all democracies have experienced a decline in at least one aspect of their democracy over the last 10 years, including the United States. American President Joe Biden

We consider ourselves a Democracy, it’s in our DNA. Moreover, our Democracy is so strong and so good that we have entrusted ourselves to be the protectors of Democracy: worldwide. At least that is what we tell ourselves, incessantly, more than is seemly, it seems to me. It’s like we need constant reassurance that we are not the bad guys. Our national story is that we are such a good democratic nation that our very existence is a threat to autocratic states – or fascist states if you prefer – because we are an advertisement for the wonders of Democracy.

We also, somehow, relate Democracy with Capitalism, in a soft sort of way. Nobody would say that Democracy and Capitalism are the same thing, but, in our national story, they are closer than distant cousins. When the Old Soviet Union imploded, our national reaction was less like “Oh boy, now they can control their own destiny by voting.” and more like, “Oh boy, now they’ll be able to get the nice things that are only available under Capitalism; they won’t have to put up with the shoddy clothes, cars, TVs, airplanes – the list is close to endless – that are a result of grey, faceless, Communism.”

However, our natural enemy isn’t really autocratic states – and here I was going to say it is Communist or Socialist states, but that is also wrong – we are fine doing business with the Saudis or China, or, even Russia, we are fine with selling weapons to Vietnam, after all. Looking again, it seems to me that our natural enemies are really countries that threaten our global hegemony.

For the first forty years or so after World War II, that threat came from the USSR – the United Socialist Soviet Republic – and they were our enemy. We fought a forty-year war over who would be the most influential – which is sort of a euphemism for most powerful – but, because both the United States and the USSR had tens of thousands of nuclear devices¹, both countries were afraid that the war would turn into a nuclear exchange destroying both countries. So we rarely fought directly and, then, not on the battlefield. Neither country wanted to be obliterated. In 2014, I wrote a post entitled, World War I and Cold War II in which I postulated that we were entering another Cold War that had been generated by the same mistakes we made with Germany after World War I that resulted in World War II (check it out here).

To quote myself, Russia is pushing back just like Germany did when its troops marched into the Rhineland, and we will not like it, but there is not much we can do except move troops around and install sanctions. I don’t think that the new Cold War II will turn into a shooting war but I do think it will involve a lot of pushing around the edges and posturing. It will make it much harder to solve our mutual problems.

However, I was sort of wrong on the no-shooting war prediction part. However, if President Volodymyr Zelensky hadn’t been so brave and President Joseph Biden hadn’t been old enough to have been around for the first round of the Cold War, Russia might have rolled over Ukraine as they did in Georgia and Crimea. But Zelensky seems to be another Hồ Chí Minh and Biden, unlike Bush or Obama, saw this as a continuation of the first Cold War in which the US and the USSR fought by proxy.

I know that this war doesn’t look like a proxy war: it is in Europe so it looks more like World War II than Vietnam, and, to state the obvious, the Russo-Ukrain is a shooting war for the poor souls who are actually in Ukraine and we see on TV. But it is similar to the Korean War or the Vietnam War in that one side is fighting a war with an opponent supported by the other side rather than fighting the other side directly. What is different from Korea or Vietnam is that our side is the covert player and Russia is the overt player. What I think is also different from Vietnam is that we are on the side that is fighting for their independence, the side that is trying to break away from the oppressor. In other words, what is different from Vietnam is that we are on the right side of history.

1. In 1985, the USSR had about 39,700 nuclear devices and we had about 23,000. Now, because of treaties, both sides have drastically reduced their nuclear capability. (France and the UK had about 350 each to give you an idea of scale.)

We cannot change the hearts of the people, but we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that however brave and gallant and devoted to their country, still, they are mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war. Excerpt from a letter by Major General William Sherman to Lieutenant General Ulysses Grant after Sherman’s leveling of Atlanta and his destructive March to the Sea.

In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school–
Till our lives wore out. A short poem by Randall Jarrell quoted in The Guns At Last Light, The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 ( Volume Three Of The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson

The brave Ukrainian resistance is a front in a larger fight: for the essential democratic principles that unite all free people. These principles are essential for a free society, but have always been embattled. Every generation has had to defeat democracy’s mortal foes. A Tweet, allegedly from President Biden @POTUS United States government official 46th President of the United States,

Great start to the season. We gave it our all and ended up with the best result we could have. Well done to the Ferraris, great to see them share the podium. Big week of work ahead but I know we got this Tweet by Lewis Hamilton @LewisHamilton Plant-Based Diet. Love Animals. Constantly searching for my purpose, for adventure, open-mindedness, and positivity

We, humans, have been warring against our fellow humans since we were all hunters/gathers. War may be as old as humankind but, for me, this winter has seemed like a winter of only war. First our Civil War, then everybody’s World War II, and then today’s real war between Russia and Ukraine, with its daily horrors. Now that war, the real war, is bleeding into spring.

Last January, I read my Christmas book from Michele. It was To Rescue The Republic Ulysses S Grant, The Fragile Union, and The Crisis Of 1876 by Bret Baier (chief political anchor for Fox News Channel). It seemed like a slightly different take on Grant with the emphasis on Grant’s last days as President. Surprisingly, at least to me, this Grant biography was written by a conservative. Surprisingly because Grant’s rehabilitation has always been a liberal cause while the Confederacy, Bobby Lee, and, The Lost Cause – allegedly about States Rights – have been championed by Conservatives. It is gratifying to read about Grant’s role in saving our country while he was President even if the book was written by a Fox News guy. The book had the usual narrative of Grant’s leadership during the Civil War, but, with the Russian build-up of forces in the background, it was especially troubling to read, again, about the carnage of our Civil War.

In February, I started The Guns At Last Light, The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 by Rick Atkinson. It is volume three of what he calls The Liberation Trilogy I had read the first two books of the trilogy years ago and liked the first one, An Army At Dawn, very much. It had a lot of new information, for me at least, and was beautifully written. I didn’t like the second book as much but, now I think, this was because the endless carnage in Italy, which was the center of the book, seemed unnecessary and endless. So I was surprised and pleased anew, at the quality of Atkinson’s writing in this book. But this book feels nastier, maybe more truthful is a more truthful way to say it. Part of it is that the buildup to the Russo-Ukraine War and the attack on Ukraine has made a European war seem more real and part of it is that wars evolve and escalate and by 1944, World War II had escalated to the point that the killing of non-combatants had become routine.

As an aside, I knew a guy who was a photographer during World War II, photographing bomb damage from the plex nose of a British de Haviland light bomber. I asked him how he justified killing German civilians and he said that they were “willing to do anything to win and that involved killing as many people as possible.” (For the record, the British Bomber Command and the USAAF 8th Air Force killed about 410,000 non-combatants – mostly women and children – in what the British called “their city programme”. End aside.

As the Russo-Ukraine war grinds into its second month, I’m reminded daily that killing people is not an unfortunate byproduct of war, as we are told, it is the principal goal. War is a catastrophe for all involved. Killing people and destroying infrastructure is the point of war. No matter how virtuous the cause, no matter how right we are – or righteous, for that matter – war is still one of the worst things that can happen to a people, it is right up there with pestilence and famine. But pestilence and famine are, sort of, natural occurrences, and war is man-made. Almost always – no, always, really – the result of one man. One man who we all say is crazy but really isn’t, he is just a selfish son of a bitch.

Looking at pictures of trashed Mariupol, I’m afraid that this war will get worse for the people of Ukraine. Our fear of Putin starting a nuclear war seems to have resulted in our giving the Ukrainians just enough lethal equipment to push back at the Russian bear, but not enough to actually have a decisive win.

I am ready for a diversion from the horrible day-to-day reporting of the carnage from Ukraine and I’m hoping it will be an interesting Formula One season. This year, Formula One is making its biggest change to the regulations in, probably,  forty years, and, for the first two races, that has been a game-changer. During the last forty years, the cars had become very similar in design and performance so a game-changer is most welcome. One of the old similarities was that all of the cars left a big and turbulent air wake – for lack of a better term, think of a boat wake in 3D – and that wake made it very hard to follow close to another car and, of course, even harder to pass. The great majority of the new regulations were designed to change that. 

Last year, the main downforce holding the car on the road was generated by the front and rear wings which are upside down airfoils and the underneath of the racecar was flat. This year, the wing regulations make the wing force weaker with the main downforce being generated by the bottom of the car. Each team had to design this year’s car based on what they thought would be the best design direction to take but, each team built their car in isolation and they had no idea what the other teams were doing. Two cars that were at the bottom last year, Haas – the only American team – and Alfa Romeo, are doing much better and Mercedes which was fastest at the end of last year, is now much slower.

What makes this interesting to somebody like me who is interested is that, as the actual racing starts, all the teams are seeing what the other teams thought was the right answer and are changing and upgrading at a frantic rate. It should be fascinating.

Why do most people believe Putin will launch his nukes and actually end mankind? I understand he is ‘unstable’ at the minute, but surely he isn’t a total psychopath? Unanswered question on Quora.

Providing Kyiv with MIG-29 fighter jets and other potentially game-changing weapon systems could help turn the tide. Refusing to do so may only prolong Ukraine’s agony…. Refusing to impose a no-fly zone in Ukraine may be justified because it exceeds the risks NATO countries are prepared to tolerate. But the idea that doing so could start World War III ignores history and telegraphs weakness. New York Times editorial by conservative columnist Bret Stephens.

Senior EU official: “The longer the Ukrainians hold out, the more they can withstand attacks on buildings, the more likely it is the Russians will either use chemical weapons or targeted, limited nuclear weapons. We can’t rule this out; can’t say for sure we wont see this happen” A Tweet by Mujtaba (Mij) Rahman @Me_EuropeMD Europe @EurasiaGroup. Formerly @hmtreasury@EU_Commission. Senior Research Fellow @LSEEI. Columnist @POLITICOEurope. My views. Seeking analytical truth.

About thirty-five years ago, I was involved in a development that involved another builder. He had bought one half of the project from the landowner and I was developing the other half for a group of three investors who had bought it several years earlier from the same guy. We were processing the properties through the city at the same time and he wanted us to name the streets after his family and the owners of the property I was processing had already named them for a couple of members of their family. The former owner had no leverage with us but did with the other builder and he wouldn’t sign on some needed city documents without his street names.

I agreed to meet with the other builder and the seller to talk about the roads but going in I told them we weren’t going to change the names. When I got there, the other builder was frantic, saying something like “He’s crazy, he’s going to cancel the sale unless you change the street names. He is up the road yelling at somebody but he’ll be back in a couple of minutes. You’ve got to change the names.” I told him that I didn’t see how the seller could cancel the sale but, if it really became a problem, I would agree to change the street names. But first, I asked the other builder to let me try an experiment.

When the seller came back, he started yelling at me that saying that, if I didn’t agree to change the street names, he was going to sue me. I started yelling back. I remember I had a clipboard with a small map on it and I threw the clipboard on the ground and started kicking it, doing everything I could to start frothing at my mouth. Spitting, swearing, and kicking the clipboard around in the dirt. The seller immediately stopped yelling and switched to trying to get me calmed down. He was fine with our names, all he had wanted to do was have a conversation, blah, blah, blah. He told the other builder that of course, he would sign the documents. It was shocking.

When I was in college, probably my sophomore year, I spent Easter vacation on campus. If I remember right, there was only one other student there, a RA from another dorm. He was a Quaker – formally known as the Religious Society of Friends – and we couldn’t have been more different, but we both played chess and we bonded over two games every day. He had been an orderly at an insane asylum and he told great stories about it. He more or less held the opinion that almost all the patients were rational in their own world and he told one story I still remember. He was watching a guy eating soup and his head had fallen to the side, almost laying on his shoulder, so that the soup was dribbling out of his mouth and he couldn’t get any. My friend asked him why his head was like that and the patient told him he didn’t know, “the head just did it”. My friend thought about it for a few minutes and said, “I see the problem, you are only using your right hand, use your left hand for a while and that should tilt your head back up.” And that’s what happened.

We are afraid of Putin, everybody is afraid of him, it seems. Afraid that Putin is crazy – like irrational crazy – and he might start a nuclear war if we directly confront him. Our fear disempowers us as it empowers him and he is counting on that and is continually stoking our fear. To quote Molly McKew, who says it better than I can, writing on the www.greatpower.us website; the fears Putin creates for us are boxing us in. This has been the Russian strategy from the start. It is the clear reason why we have so much intelligence on what they planned to do and what it would look like. Because they wanted the White House to see it, because they knew what the likely reaction would be. And they were right. We put ourselves into the box and took actions off the table that could have changed the outcome. We accepted the stage that Putin set…

Putin is a coward — by which I mean, he is not brave. He plans and acts in ways where he believes he has the greatest advantage and will endure the least costs for the greatest rewards. He does take risks — when there is empty space before him into which he can move before an opponent can. But he is not the type to die bravely and nobly in heroic sacrifice for his nation…

This matters in particular in relation to his overt nuclear fearmongering — which he is doing exactly to keep the White House penned in and afraid to act, not because he wants to risk his own annihilation…

[T]here is nothing to indicate he is a blaze of glory guy. It seems unlikely he would use a nuke in a circumstance when there would be equal retaliation. In one sense, this means that we should stop being hemmed in by this fear and accept that the risks and costs are Ukraine’s to assess and determine. Ukraine is taking all the risk. They are paying all the costs. We should listen to them about what risks they are willing to take and costs incur. This is the minimum amount of respect that we can give to them when they have already shown the soundness of their strategic planning against Russia has far, far surpassed our own.

People are always picking and choosing when to act like art, entertainment & media has no political power & I’m so tired of it. A Tweet by Bree Newsome who identifies as artist – grassroots organizer – free black woman – proud wife & mama – removed sc’s confederate flag in the name of Jesus on june 27, 2015

Hitler was one of the first great rock stars. He was no politician, he was a great media artist. How he worked his audience! He made women hot and sweaty and guys all wished they were the ones who were up there. The world will never see anything like that again. He made an entire country a stage show. Said David Bowie after he and Mick Jagger had seen Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, fifteen times.

I’ve been reading Hitler and The Power of Aesthetics by Frederic Spotts and it is fascinating. I recommend it if you are at all interested in World War II or how Hitler came to power although it isn’t really about either one. It is about Hitler as an artist and the power of that art, especially performance art. As far back as I can remember being told anything about Hitler, it was that he was a buffoon. I don’t think I have ever been shown a movie clip of Hitler speaking except to demonstrate that he was a foolish little man.

That is ad hominin thinking at its purest. Hitler was evil, he was a narcissist and a sociopath, and, after he was in power, increasingly out of control and out of touch with reality. At twenty, he was a powerless evil man, and how he became a demi-god is fascinating. As I type this, I can hear myself getting defensive to an imagined “Why would anyone want to read about that little evil man?” so I’ll resort to quoting Timothy Snyder: It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.

This book was written – or, at least, published – during the Trump Administration and there are times when what Hitler did seems to resonate with what Trump did during his 2016 campaign, especially in terms of his rallies. In both cases, they have been criticized and ridiculed for their use of language but in Hitler’s case – and probably Trump’s also – his use of language was thought out and practiced. Hitler admired Llyod George, the Liberal Party Prime Minister of England, for the primitiveness of his language which Hitler thought connected him to his followers. Hitler’s speeches were all emotion, he didn’t lay out programs, he charmed his listeners and they adored him. According to William Shirer, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich who saw Hitler in Nuremberg in a 1934 rally, They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman. If he had remained in sight for more than a few moments, I think many of the women would have swooned from excitement.

I started this blog post just before Putin launched his attack on Ukraine which has sucked up most of my bandwidth and stalled me out. But I did find this book fascinating and wanted to comment on it so I can get it off my desk. I also want to comment on the isolation and paranoia of autocrats. Hitler and Putin are very different men but there are commonalities worth looking at. One of them is the arc towards isolation that all autocrats seem to follow.

Humans are social animals and, to a certain extent, that socialness is what keeps us sane. Bumping into other people – not physically but emotionally and developmentally, at least – is what sets boundaries and keeps us coherent, it enables us to be in a relationship with our fellow travelers. People who amass great power sort of step out of normal societal rules, they do not follow the conventional wisdom, they are, almost always, sociopaths. It becomes increasingly easy for them to think they are the only one who is right and everybody else is wrong, that has been the case up to that time after all. Their advisors become sycophants and the only reality they see is the sociopathic leader’s reality which they reflect back to them. As their reality drifts away from our common reality, the sycophants follow them, and the sociopath is free of checks, leading him into a fantasy land of his own making.

As late as Spring of 1945, as Germany was imploding, Hitler was in his bunker, moving imaginary armies around on the situation board and refining models of his plans for rebuilding German cities as grand displays of the power and longevity of the Third Reich. I don’t think that Putin has reached that level of delusion yet, but he clearly thought taking Ukraine back into the Russian fold would be easier than it has turned out to be and his army is clearly not as well trained and equipped as he imagined. I’m beginning to think that, with enough support, Ukraine has a chance in this war.