It seems incredible but we (humanity) are gluttons for punishment. We have a tendency to make high-level decision-makers out of those who are least qualified for the tasks. We reward them with wealth and income far beyond rationality for their bad decisions while they shift even larger sums of it to the most greedy among them. We elect people to high public offices who can barely find their way across a street without a GPS unit. We reward gun makers who love to sell battle field weapons to the mentally unbalanced who like to kill us and our kids with them. Our elected leaders pass laws that assure the flow of wealth to the already wealthy, while they siphon it away from all others. We make multi-millionaires out of anyone who can throw, hit, kick, or slam-dunk...a ball. We even pretend that those physical activities instill virtues such as honesty, morality and justice. We forgive those at the top who rape, pillage, and plunder while we condemn those at the bottom for minor offences. We reward ignorance, stupidity, chance, and a lust for power among those at one end of the continuum, while we scorn those in squalor—the only place left for them--at the other end. And we lock it all into place by putting up barrier after barrier to keep the rest of humanity away from the mountains of bounty tucked away in tax avoidance schemes and in secret off-shore accounts.

Is this summary an oversimplification? Yes, but not excessively so. As writers we are sometimes called upon to de-obfuscate the obfuscated. Sometimes we must distill and separate the just from the corrupt in order for the great majority to be able to see the corrupt side of humanity with a bit more clarity.

The setting for my rant today is a world that is still blanketed with the coronavirus; where the US Constitution and our way of life are under attack; where liars, cheats, and thugs are out and about creating murkier swirls of effluence in the swamp waters they have created; and Donald Trump continues to survive despite his Big Lie that gurgles up from his cesspool of a mind overflowing with 58,000+ lies; and Vladimir Putin is testing his skills of deception and murder against the world, learned during his tenure at the KGB.  Let's focus on Putin.

We could see 190,000 Russian soldiers invade Ukraine in a matter of days. Why? Because they can. They could be in for a big surprise. Ukraine citizens are tough. They want a better way of life. They see a way forward as a member of NATO. They are much like the Polish people who are tough-minded and not push-overs. They will not lay down their arms against Russia without one hell of a fight. Putin seems to rely very heavily on our reluctance to engage him with the 1960s defense called MAD ( mutually assured destruction) with our arsenal of 5,600 modern nukes v. his 6,200 arsenal of rusty and outdated nukes. It leaves me to wonder what one aircraft carrier and a wing of modern US fighter aircraft could do against a few thousand old Russian tanks and 190,000 shivering Russian soldiers. Russian intelligence is pretty good in cyberspace, but real space with rifles and tanks against supersonic planes and skilled aviators is an entirely different game of chess. I believe we could kick their asses 6 ways to Sunday.

My advice to Biden: Tell Putin that his soldiers will feel the wrath of the NATO Naval and Striking Support Forces and the US 6th Fleet minutes after his troops cross the Ukraine border. The rest of our arsenal is on Def Con One alert. Check or Checkmate?