break

 


Russia's war takes perilous turn as strike nears NATO doorstep.

Lent: treat yourself, take a break, a day, an hour, ten minutes - recess, remember how delicious ten minute recess was back in grammar school, elementary school? If God was answering your prayers that morning, the bell might ring for recess just as the teacher was about to call on you, What's the main export product of Lapland? Carroll Weller? When terror and hatred are indistinguishable, The Bell. And when class resumes it will be a different subject, spelling instead of geography. 

A break: instead of watching War News, this morning I'll work a sudoku, then late morning an appointment to have my other ears re-tuned. 

Spring break has started actually, so take a week off, you're entitle'. 

Why such a hurry to take a break! My friends, life is short, and we haven't much Time - - for anything. World War Three has started, Putin pushing to draw us in, he is not testing, he started this round with Ukraine screaming for more help than we dared risk, this will continue until he triple dog dares us and we run out of options. What's the price of dishonor, shame, not keeping your word. Ukraine as the concession, but Russian shelling this weekend striking near Poland, a former Soviet satellite, now a NATO member to whom we are treaty-bound. Once hostilities break into the open between us and Russia it cannot other than instantly escalate to nuclear, and Putin will go for first strike, so best we beat him to the punch? Can we simultaneously take out his first and second strike capabilities? This is a good time to have been born in a South American jungle? Where will civilization regenerate? Or will it be as total a mass extinction event as Chicxulub? Who has read Cormac, "The Road" raise your hand.

Take a break, as I say: have we already enjoyed our final Christmas vacation, CFB season, Thanksgiving feast, Fourth of July fireworks. Easter morning? Depends on how rapidly this develops. 

Shall we fall back and let Putin have his way in order for the world to have a future generation, or shall we push buttons and destroy the world in order to save it? Is the greater good the lesser evil? Are we Patrick Henry or Neville Chamberlain? 

What do I say? It makes no difference what I say, I was alive when Hitler took Czechoslovakia, then Poland, soon France, moving toward a United Europe under the Reich's protection, humans do not change and it's easy to see where this is going. Why should I blog irrelevancies. 

What a shame and a stupidity for peace to evaporate just as we seemed to be there again. Thomas Hardy may have a poem for precisely this moment in Eternity, today may be a good Time to give it a search.

Too late for reason, diplomacy, finger-crossing; and prayer isn't magic, it's turned back upon us for efficacy, God has no hands but our hands.

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pic above and words below pinched from a look back on the first half of the 20th century - - it was not just the Versalles Treaty, "Fascism was the trouble – fascism in a time when the liberal democracies were too weak to resist it or to defend the Versailles status quo. France and Britain were never, until the very end, quite able to grasp that the dictators were not rational, that deterrents did not deter them and that a diplomacy which offered concessions seemed to them an admission of weakness."