March 7, 2014

Milder today, with even a touch of the sweet melancholy of spring. I think that when spring (that you can feel) really arrives, maybe next month, there will be an usually exuberant explosion of green. And maybe a particularly hot summer. The meteos predict much warmer weather starting later this year as El Nino gets cooking. Good, this year's heating bill have just about bankrupted us.

First, a reminder that Eisenhower did not do a thing when the Russians invaded Hungary in 1956 and killed about 30,000 people; Johnson didn't do anything when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, and George W. Bush didn't do anything when Russia invaded and stole part of Georgia.

Fascist Russian dictator Putin still occupies Crimea and it looks at this point that not much will be done about it, at least in the short term. The Europeans fear that Putin will turn off their gas supplies; they have also essentially disarmed. This shows yet again how being dependent on fossil fuel from dictators is a dangerous thing.  The more local, renewable energy you can get, the safer you are.

Will Obama continue to look and act weak in the face of this thug? Or now that he has learned that sweet talk doesn't work with tyrants,  maybe  all of a sudden get tough, as happened when the scales feel from Jimmy Carter's eyes about the Soviets in 1979, when they invaded Afghanistan (helping to elect Ronald Reagan in 1980)?

Obama's retaliation  so far is a joke -- suspending some  visas and freezing some assets of people who weren't really in charge of the invasion of  Crimea. In fact, this was all  done at the order of Putin. It is the assets of Putin and the people around him, including the economic oligarchs of the  astonishingly corrupt current version of the Russian Empire, that need to be frozen.

By the way, one reason that Putin decided to seize Crimea is that the Soviet/Russian port there has been used to constantly resupply with armaments his fellow dictator Bashar Assad and other thugs around the world.

But reminder in all this: Eisenhower did not do a thing when the Russians invaded Hungary in 1956 and killed about 30,000 people and Johnson didn't do anything when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968.

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