It’s almost 04:00 and I’m awake, sort of. I wedged a piece of salo between my gum and sore tooth last night, and it worked.
First impression, after aimless scrolling, mostly on Telegram, and checking messages, is that lots of stuff is still falling from the sky and burning.
Stick my neck out the window. Complete silence. Then some low rumblings and flashes in the sky from the Left Bank. The first period of relative calm after days of turmoil, confusion and plain horror.
This announcement grabs my attention:
The revolution and start of World War IV eight years ago has been followed by all sorts of new dangerous tyrannies, fascist and semi-fascist, including in the United States, one-party and military dictatorships (Belarus) and finally, the seemingly firm establishment of a neo-totalitarian mess in Russia next door.
Team USA should authorize A3E and nip this in the bud.
Hope you are OK still.
Watching on from Western Europe with horror, the most concerning thing at the moment is my own realisation that Putin is “all in”.
With the international reaction over the past 72 hours to cut Russia out of the world economy, there is no way back for Putin now. Only forward.
We have now destroyed Russias banks, destroyed their peacetime economy.
I don’t think we have all realised this yet, but we should give Russia a ladder to climb down.
We need them to climb down a ladder!
But now there is no peaceful future for Vladimir Putin. His only path now is forward to violence. I know we took all these measure for all the right reasons. But I wonder if we made the right moves this week, or if 18 months from now the world will look back and say… maybe we should have given them a ladder?