You Can't Make This Stuff Up...
Let's start with Donald Trump.
DJT45 has sued CNN for a half-billion dollars, apparently using language in the lawsuit that looks like it came off a Twitter feed, and with a summation of his objection amounting to "they were mean to me".
Oh, come ON!!!
The man calls political opponents demeaning and racist names, treats the entire world as a piggy bank from which he seeks to draw unlimited money, is utterly boggled by the thought that anyone doesn't like him (while calling them the aforementioned demeaning and/or racist names), yet it has been proven that he will turn on everybody, everybody, the moment they fail to show the proper level of fealty to him. He's raised at least three children who show psychopathic/sociopathic tendencies; I'm not sure about Tiffany, and Barron will be just plain scary once he hits adulthood.
He treats people like dirt. He stiffs anyone he can get away with stiffing because he's got a revolving circus of lawyers who are fiercely loyal to him right up to the point where they aren't, meaning he sues or counter-sues everybody who wrongs him for no other reason than he can.
Shockingly, he has become what millions of Americans aspire to be: a white man who speaks whatever is on his mind and regrets nothing because no one has ever adequately been able to quash his basest instincts, which are to win at all costs.
What keeps making my eyes cross is the fact that virtually any other politician in the past, Republican or Democrat alike, who had even a tenth of the smoke curling around him that DJT45 does, would step back and leave politics because they would realize that they were unfit examples of what "the people" desire to see in a leader. But he now has apostles like MTG, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz, who I'm pretty sure share a single brain cell between the three of them, all of whom desperately want him back in office because, again, he's who they aspire to be like, and if he whispers the word "pardon" in their direction, I'm pretty sure they'd up and faint for joy. They're beyond incompetent - they are actively failing to pursue the legislative needs of their constituents. But their constituents don't seem to care.
I mean, consider Herschel Walker. If there was ever a walking poster child for the dangers of CTE, I think he would count! He strings together illogical, rambling sentences with zero coherence, filled with lies and partial-truths, and he may not actually think he's lying! Seriously! It's possible that he can't even remember signing the cheque for his ex-mistress' abortion all those years ago, despite the fact that the signed cheque and a signed card that is definitely written with his handwriting has been produced! His sole criteria for awesomeness, a la Trump, is that he was in the NFL back in the days when Trump wanted to buy a franchise and was prevented from doing so by the NFL itself. He was on TV. If DJT45 saw it on TV, it must be awesome... unless it speaks ill of him, in which case it immediately has falling ratings, ("Sad!") and will be gone soon (Narrator Voice: "No, it won't be!")
From everything I've read over the years, DJT45 is a broken man, broken by his father, Fred, and he is still trying to prove to his father that he would have been worthy of his love. He's still trying to prove that he belongs to the elite billionaire's club. He's still try to prove that he's worthy of praise. If I actually dug through my DSM-5, I'm pretty sure I'd be amazed by what it would suggest for a diagnosis!
Speaking of football...
Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback the NFL has ever seen. No, shut up, he is, and there's no, NO objective criteria that you can offer me to say otherwise. Most Super Bowl wins, most passing yards, most touchdown passes, most wins by a quarterback, period - with a career of 245/75, he has fifty-nine more victories (as of October 5, 2022) than Brett Favre. He has a winning percentage of .766, and the only people ahead of him are Patrick Mahomes (53/14, so only 67 career decisions to this point!) and two guys who played in the 50's and 60's and had only 70 and 82 total games!
Tom Brady, the oldest man in the NFL
After making umpty-million dollars in New England, Touchdown Tom decamped for Tampa bay, one of the league's foremost als0-rans and promptly took them straight to the top. In his second season, the Bucs got bounced in the second round of the playoffs by the eventual champions, the Rams. Brady turned 45 in August, right around the time he spontaneously "un-retired", apparently to fulfil his ancient prophecy of playing until he was 45 (and the season ending when he was 44 doesn't fulfil the terms of what he had declared).
I'm confused.
He spent the first few months of this year talking about all the things he had missed in the lives of his wife and his children (and he's married to a supermodel who makes more money than he does!) because of football - birthday parties, holidays, family gatherings, and so on - but I remember seeing him at a soccer game back in the early summer (Women's national game, I think?), and as the camera lingered on him, I know I saw a look in his eye that said, "I don't want to be in the stands - my place is on the field!" I said as much to my wife. I told her that I figured he was going to un-retire because he can't conceive of life after football. Everything else is just less...
So now we hear that he and his wife have retained divorce attorneys, that they have been living separately on the estate (because they can), and he's still missing everything in his kids' lives because he's giving it all to football. Nobody's able to talk to him because, I mean, he's Tom Brady! But instead of going out "on his own terms", I predict that some 22-year-old rookie lineman trying to make a name for himself is going to break him like Bane broke Batman, and he'll be taken off the field with a crippling injury that will cause him pain for the rest of his days.
In short, he's not proving anything to anyone, except maybe to himself... and, as in law, one who is only accountable to oneself can have a nincompoop as an advisor! He's going to lose everything, and for no tangible gain. I don't know, maybe he wants to die out there on the field, so that he doesn't fade away and die of cancer or liver disease or, say it with me now, "CTE"! Time, after all, is a relentless juggernaut that stops for no one, unless it be stopped while everyone is watching.
Speaking of relentless juggernauts...
I watched a fascinating short clip the other day that addressed the dangers of invading Russia in winter. "Everyone" knows that you don't invade Russia in the winter, lest General Winter himself destroy your army and laugh at you for your pathetic attempt.
This is like saying that Jerusalem was never captured... except by David... and the Babylonians... and the Romans... and the Romans again in 70AD...
Russia was "successfully" invaded several times, by the Polish on one occasion, by the Mongols on another. What they brought to the table was proper planning and logistics, a plan for the mud, and they counted on a fractured Russia to help their plans succeed. Napoleon attacked when the government and the people were unified in their will to resist - Napoleon invaded in mid-June, and his plan was to forage/steal from the natives along his line of march. The Russians burned everything - every field between the French army and the horizon, and when they were on the verge of capturing Moscow, the citizens burned the city to the ground to deny the French both supplies and adequate shelter. The retreat through the snow was murderous, but the troops were already starving! According to Wikipedia, Napoleon's army entered Russia with more than 450,000 men, more than 150,000 horses, around 25,000 wagons and almost 1,400 pieces of artillery. Only 120,000 men survived (excluding early deserters); as many as 380,000 died in the campaign.
During WWII, Russia / the Soviet Union was again unified by fear / fanatical devotion to Stalin. Hitler was determined that this was the "true" war (Western Europe was just a sideshow to permit this event!), but by this time was starting to suffer from the mental instability that historians would later suggest was the early stages of Parkinson's Disease, bolstered by incompetent medical treatments. As heard by DJT45 again and again, he mistrusted his generals (and, indeed, thought of them as "his" generals), and made certain strategic decisions just to show that he knew better than they did. Stalin didn't want to believe that the Germans were invading at first, going so far as to order several senior officers to be shot for even suggesting it (though many were already dead, as they had been overrun by the advancing Nazis). But when he realized what was happening, he awakened "the sacred duty to resist" in all Russia (as well as empowering commissars to shoot those who were not sufficiently fervent in their patriotism!). Where Hitler kept changing his targets and moving his goalposts, the Soviets fortified their factory cities, blunted the German advances, let winter indeed take its toll, then crushed the dispirited Nazis with a flood of men and equipment.
German lost 4 million dead in all of WWII. The Russian dead, soldiers and civilians, amounted to 20 million plus.
So, now, in 2022, we have the Russian military invading Ukraine. At the start of the war, the fear was that the amazingly superior Russian forces would flood to the west and capture Kyiv in a matter of days, if not hours. President Zelensky, the comedian-turned-politician-elected-president of Ukraine, awakened that same "sacred duty to resist" in the people of his country, and they have been kicking Russian ass for six months of the seven-month (to this point) war. A few days ago, Vladimir Putin, in a stunning bit of bullshit theatre, claimed that four eastern provinces of Ukraine had overwhelmingly voted in favour of being annexed by Russia, which would make them de facto Russian territory, and anyone fighting in that territory would be fighting on the grounds of Mother Russia herself, meaning that ultimate retribution (such as the use of tactical nukes) might well have to be brought into play. (The West has repudiated those referenda is invalid. Duh.)
The current president of the Chechen Republic, a rabidly pro-Russian fellow, was one of those who went on-record as saying that Putin should use the nukes. Ironic, in some ways, since Chechnya was a breakaway rebellious republic not so long ago, and having the Russians nuke Ukrainians on nominally "Russian" soil would just be too delicious to be savoured properly! But then it was noted that there are a number of Chechen fighters who have sided with the Ukrainians, because really, if you tell a Chechen to kill Russians, he'll first have to change his underwear due to overwhelming joy!
Chechen fighters in Ukraine - these may be fighting *for* the Russians, or *against* them!
I told my wife, "Russia invading Ukraine is a bit like if England decided to invade Scotland, even today - of all the "British" people, the Scots are probably the meanest of them all (and for those of you who would be protesting that hey, the Canadians proved themselves pretty vicious in the First World War, I'd suggest that those who were slitting throats and pounding skulls with trench clubs were probably speaking with Glaswegian accents, as opposed to the nasal tones of what has become the "Canadian" one). So, you already had the uppity English engaging the snarling Scots, but now you've got Gurkhas on the field, and their fighting with the Scots!" This is what it means to me, that Chechens are fighting on the Ukrainian side: the nastiest of the nasty in all of the Republics have chosen a side, and even if there are those who follow their President, I'm not sure how long they will last.
Putin tried to have a conscription of 300,000 men. So far, the number of refugees who have fled to other Republics to avoid this call-up has exceeded the number of casualties in Ukraine! Tell them the Chechens are there and you might well have another Russian revolution! "Not just no, but F*** NO!!" Putin is flailing. Putin is losing the image battle. There is no way he comes out of this able to deal well with any Western power ever again. Even the Chinese are reportedly pulling back support, strategically withdrawing any help they might have offered so as to see the Russian monolith fall once and for all!
The question is, can we keep the nukes out of play?
And if we can't, who goes in first? SEAL's? SAS? Mossad? I remember an old GI Joe comic book in which, after a raid had gone hot, the camp commander orders his men to "Get after the Americans!" How do you know they're Americans? "Because if they were Mossad, we'd all be dead, and if they were SAS, we still wouldn't know they had been here!" These teams would be headed to Moscow to take out Putin - don't think they don't have a plan, because they do, and I'm sure they all have agents inside the Russian Special Forces / MVD to make it happen!
As for the nukes in the field - again, the tasking orders are already written and being rehearsed, don't you ever doubt it! If one nuke drops, an absolute hurricane of Western planes will sweep over the front and obliterate anything Russian that they can find. Russians that try to surrender may find themselves shot out of hand by blindly raging Allied forces ("What was he saying?" "Look, I washed for supper!"). I figure that if they try to drop more than one, the units themselves will rebel and refuse.
Here in Canada, we're trying to figure out how to rebuild after Hurricane Fiona ravaged the Maritimes, while there are still fires burning in the West, I'm sure. The Conservatives have put a right-wing populist in place as their leader, and I can't even roast him properly because I've ignored almost everything about him. The PM keeps trying to rule by executive fiat because it's easier than engaging Parliament to enact legislation, but I'm not sure he's doing anything out-and-out evil, just self-serving and often incompetent.
But we're living in a time filled with things that, really, you just can't make up!
