It didn’t get much attention in the United States, but Vladimir Putin ending the year-long agreement to allow Ukrainian grain shipments to a hungry world strikes me as a big deal. And a sad one.
I guess it should not be surprising that a Russian leader who orders pointless missile strikes on civilian targets cuts off the supply of millions of tons of grains to world markets.
Now, Putin has ordered shelling and missile strikes on Ukraine’s main port of Odesa, sending thousands of tons of grain up in smoke.
No one will be able to point to the starving families who didn’t get to eat the grain that didn’t get shipped. They’ll just get added to the tons of unseen corpses of innocents who perish because of turmoil in distant places they know nothing of.
And what’s a dictator who oversees war crimes got to lose in terms of his PR image?
The recent short-lived mutiny by Wagner mercenaries against Putin’s regime did reveal an unexpected weakness in the former KGB colonel’s rule. Someone sometime will try again to topple him. Eventually, one plot will succeed. It always does.
Joe Biden’s economic sanctions haven’t stopped the war or changed Russia’s behavior. Sanctions never work. They just look good at the photo op announcing them.
And, in fact, some of Biden’s assaults on Putin’s regime actually helped the Russian leader make billions more in oil revenues.
There are no term limits or peaceful regime transitions in Russia the last century or so. They usually involve executions of some kind. Prison terms at best. So Putin’s demise will not be orderly. A couple dozen one-time Putin supporters among Russia’s oligarchs have curiously fallen out of high-rise windows the last year or so.
More details and thoughts in this week’s audio commentary.
One of the most intriguing things about the pets who have saturated my entire life is the way every pet lover spends a lot of time wondering what they’re thinking, what the soulful looks really mean, and the tilted heads.
So, I wrote about that in His Name Was Edgar. Not Ed. Not Eddie. But Edgar. It drew thousands of readers and dozens of comments, which are special to peruse as readers share stories and memories of the dogs and cats who lived long in their lives and taught them much.
On the heavier side, this week’s column looked at the little-noticed depth of collusion between media and the Democrat Party, whose interests merge to help Republicans pick the worst candidate for president.
It’s tricky to detect the little ins and outs, but important for conservative voters to understand if they’re going to be both intelligent news consumers and voters, which are intimately tied.
Joe Biden’s Afghan exit was a colossal and deadly screw-up. Likely the most enduring and tragic action — or, really, non-action — of his presidency so far was erasing the Band-aid controls Donald Trump had carefully erected on our southern border with Mexico.
The result has been a cataclysmic tsunami of humanity allowed to enter the country without verifications or identity checks on most. And, in fact, the Biden team has flown and bussed thousands of them to inland cities across the country, there to merge into the already huge illegal immigrant population.
The pressures, both political and economic, he has imposed on these localities will endure for decades. And that’s what set me off on the most recent MOTR, No. 72.
As always, feel free to share this post and your thoughts in the Comment section below. I enjoy chatting with readers, as you can see in the Comments beneath the Edgar post I linked above.
