The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for 15 years and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

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Oh helllll fucking no! President Donald "I rape little girls” Trump thinks he’s going to use billions of American taxpayer dollars to fund his little South American road trip? Eat shit, piggy.

If you’re not sure what I’m referring to, let me catch you up on current events. Obviously, you know we invaded Venezuela and kidnapped their president, Nicolas Maduro, and, inexplicably, his wife, Cilia Flores. You should also know by now that all of the reasons the regime gave for targeting Venezuela up until the last couple of weeks were a lie. Fentanyl. Cocaine. The newly invented and completely fictional “narcoterrorism.” Spreading freedom and democracy. Bullshit. All of it.

Then Trump just decided to stop lying and told everyone it was about the oil. Trump wanted the oil. He really REALLY wanted the oil. He said it over and over and over again. That was OUR oil. Venezuela stole it from us and we wanted it back!

It was the whitest, most colonizer shit I have ever heard in my life. I don’t even think in terms of “colonizer,” and that’s all I could hear when Trump opened his creepy little anus mouth. That’s how blatant it was. I just watched all three Avatar movies in the last two weeks,1 and the invading bad guys from Earth are quite literally colonizers looking to steal the native resources and even THEY weren’t that much of a fucking caricature.

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Now, I don’t mean Trump is going to have us pay for the invasion itself. We’re already paying for the military’s almost trillion-dollar budget. Yaaaaay military-industrial complex. What I mean is that Trump thinks we’re going to foot the bill for the fucking disaster that’s already unfolding because he’s a fucking moron and so is everyone else in his regime of morons.

This is from NBC:

Moreover, he said, the U.S. may subsidize an effort by oil companies to rebuild the country’s energy infrastructure — a project he said could take less than 18 months.

“I think we can do it in less time than that, but it’ll be a lot of money,” he said. “A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue.”

Less than 18 months? The fuck it will. But Pedobrain is right that it will cost a lot of money. Conservative estimates suggest it will cost over $50 billion and take years just to maintain the decrepit systems already in place. To rebuild, much less expand, would take over a decade and cost over $180 billion.

The reason Trump is “offering” OUR fucking money to pay for it is because there is not one single oil company interested in doing business in Venezuela.

“But Uncle Ogre!,” you say, “Weren’t the oil companies behind this war in the first place?! Didn’t they push Trump to invade so they could steal the oil and make money?”

That seems like a really obvious conclusion, right? What kind of fucking moron invades a country to steal its oil only to discover no oil companies WANT the oil?

Allow me to reintroduce you to Donald “I stare directly into solar eclipses” Trump, the dumbest motherfucking pedophile to ever sit in the Oval Office.2

Yeah, this fucking genius, the greatest businessman in allll of American history I tells ya!, has been planning this invasion for months and overlooked a few crucial details. Such as:

1. What happens the next day. Like THE VERY NEXT FUCKING DAY! Who knows? We didn’t bother to plan that far ahead. Too boring. We’ll just fucking wing it!

2. Which bootlicking Trump lackey would run point on the whole thing after declaring ourselves conquering heroes? WE STILL DO NOT FUCKING KNOW WHO IS MAKING THE DECISIONS HERE AT HOME!

3. If the goal was to secure the oil, how would that be done? Would we just pump it onto American tankers? Would we just take over their oil industry? Would we hand it over to a friendly oil company and take a piece of the profits? NO ONE FUCKING KNOWS BECAUSE NO ONE THOUGHT TO ASK!

It seems like we were planning to have an American oil company move in and run the whole thing for us. ‘Murika! But after, Jesus Fucking Christ AFTER!!!!, we invaded, that’s when Trump and the imbeciles working for him/pulling his puppet strings looked around and realized no one wanted to touch Venezuela with a ten-foot pole.

And I get it. And so will you.

$50 billion just to keep the lights on is a lot of money. Venezuela is only producing about 1.1 million barrels of oil a day. Even getting it up to 2 million, it will take years to recoup a $50 billion investment. Let’s say someone drops the $180 billion to really get that oil flowing. It’s still going to take well over a decade to see a profit. Possibly twenty years.

Now, oil companies have the money and the patience. Buuuuut why the fuck would they EVER risk dropping that kind of money in a country where the oil industry was nationalized? Trump will be dead or in prison or living in exile within the next five years. The next Democratic president in 2029 is not going to go to war for oil in fucking Venezuela and every oil CEO knows it.

That’s why they all said “No.”

But if the United States government is paying for it? Well…that might be worth it. After all, if the whole thing falls apart, my oil company didn’t lose anything but some time and manhours and some equipment that’s already paid for. And the reward is access to a massive oil field.

Sure, the price of oil is kind of low right now and opening up a new giant market would be bad for business, but imagine being able to tell OPEC to fuck itself whenever I, the CEO of whichever oil company controls Venezuela, want? Kind of tempting…

But that means you and I, the American taxpayer, would be footing the bill while the oil company CEO gets all the profits. We already subsidize these greedy fucks to the tune of around $35 billion a year in the US. Fuck them and fuck giving them a single penny more to steal Venezuelan oil. If the people of Venezuela want Exxon or Chevron there, they can invite them in and cut their own deal. I’m not paying for a goddman thing so Trump can collect more bribes and soulless CEOs can buy a third or fourth yacht.

This whole thing is going to be a fucking disaster, and I’m tired of MY fucking money being set on fire by neo-con fucksticks with delusions of empire.

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“They said it was like having a teacher in their pocket,” she said. The tools could help students work through a particular problem, brainstorm ideas, research for projects and provide feedback, she said.

 "Help" and "work through" are doing some heavy lifting here. "Provide feedback" remains one of the popular items in the AI arsenal. I remain unconvinced. Feedback that does not understand or include student intent-- what they thought they were doing, what they meant to do-- is just correction. "Do this instead of that." If you don't know why the student did "that" in the first place, you can't provide much in the way of useful correction, and since AI does not "know" anything, all it can do is edit the student's work for them. What do students learn from this? This is the pedagogical equivalent of an adult who shoulders the student aside and fixes their work while the student watches.

But the proud example of an AI project, shared by the superintendent in a board meeting, is even worse. 

Students in a middle school social studies class used AI to create and question “digital peers” and “characters” from the Middle Ages while the teacher guided them in evaluating responses for accuracy and evidence.

Many teachers (including me) would recognize this assignment immediately, only Back In The Day, we would have the students create and role play the characters themselves. In Mrs. O'Keefe's eighth grade English class (back in 1971), we had to research a historical person and then portray them as a guest on a talk show (my friends Andy and Stewart drew Van Gogh, and in the middle of his interview he became over-emotional and cut off his own ear, complete with fake blood).  My sister-in-teaching Merrill annually had her students put Milton's Paradise Lost on trial, with students role playing characters from the work.

This is a variation on that same assignment except AI does the role playing and students are transformed from actors into spectators.

Almost any version of this assignment would be better. Let students role play. Let them craft faux social media accounts for their characters. Anything that had them actively creating the character based on their own research, rather than feeding some stuff into an AI and sitting back to observe and judge the result. What does the teacher even assess in such an assignment? How is this any better than just watching a video about the topic?

If you're considering incorporating AI in your lesson and wondering how to decide what to have it do, here's a hint-- do not have it turn students from active participants into spectators who simply watch what the bot does for them. Students should be main characters in their own education, and not observers, sidelined so that the plagiarism machine can shine. 

Installing new ed tech? Implementing new policies or procedures? I wish with all my heart that the People In Charge would ask a simple set of questions.

Who is helped by this? Which job does this make easier?  

This has always been an issue, because it is easy to sit in an administration office and come up with procedures and paperwork that would make your life easier. And that's a perfectly human impulse-- to look at the work you're slogging through and think, "Man, this would be so much easier if I had my subordinates do X." 

In education, it's often something data related. "I would love to have data on how many left-handed students bring their own pencils," muses some admin. "I wonder who could collect that data for me?" (Spoiler alert: it will be the teachers). 

You don't have to look any further than the Big Standardized Test, which is the result of a whole bunch of policymakers saying, "Well, we could impose some of our favorite policies if only we had some data to excuse them."

The astonishing thing about applying the "Whose job does this make easier" lens to education is how truly rare it is that the answer is "teachers." 

It's not always huge stuff. When my old school switched from a paper attendance system run out of the main office over to a computerized system run by teachers, it created one more nuisance. Now every period had to have a built in moment within the first five minutes of class that allowed me to go to my desktop computer and record attendance, rather than doing it on paper to be checked later against the master attendance list. 

Was this a massive inconvenience? Of course not. But what generally grinds classroom teachers down is not the massive weight of large policy ideas, but death by a thousand small paper cuts. 

And this was a case where the central office was very proud of how this saved labor and made their job easier. But many labor-saving programs are actually labor-moving programs, and in school, the labor is most commonly moved to teachers. A thousand paper cuts.

Imagine a district where the administration said, "Yes, this would make my job easier, but it would put more burden on the teachers, so let's not do it." If you don't have to imagine that district, God bless you.

I am not arguing that the goal should be to make teaching the easiest walk-in-the-park job ever envisioned; that is neither possible nor desirable. But the basic function of a school administration is to make it possible for every teacher in the building to do the best job they can, and every administrative decision should be examined through that lens. Every decision should be centered on the question, "Will this support teaching in classrooms?"

A whole family of ed tech products are based on the proposition "If teachers put their work into these tech platforms, it will be easier for administration to monitor them." Digital lesson plans don't make it any easier for teachers to plan, and in fact can add time to the whole process, but they do make it easier for admins to monitor those plans (and in extreme cases, admins may have visions of an entire digitized program, so that the teacher can be more easily replaced).

The newest tech wave of AI products should face the same question. What job does this AI-powered whizbang actually make easier? Is it, for instance, easier to have an AI extrude lesson plans which the teacher must then edit and check for errors? Who does this actually help? Does it help a teacher to automate the brainwork of teaching (hint: does it help athletes to have a robot lift weights for them). 

Teachers aren't the only stakeholders who need to be considered. Yes, it may make communication easier for the school, but does it really help parents and students to have to download one more app in order to get important information from the school?

Even worse is the tech that is adopted simply because it's cool, with no idea that it will help anyone at all. It's just cool, you know, and we've heard other schools are getting it. Surely you'll figure out some use for it. 

The thing is, every new tech a teacher adopts (willingly or not) is either helping or hurting. Even if it's not actively making the job harder, a non-helping piece of tech represents opportunity cost, money that could have been spent on something that was actually useful. 

So administrations, I beg you-- before you adopt, ask yourself who would be helped by this new technowidget, and if the answer is not "The people who do the actual work of teaching students," maybe ask yourself if it's really worth purchasing.

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Let’s be perfectly clear: Our latest military adventure in South America will end in disaster. We will not establish a functioning democracy free of corruption. We will not purge the drug cartels. We will not end crime or migration. At best, we will leave things more or less as they are and spend billions trying to steal Venezuela’s oil before finally giving up.

At worst, we throw the entire country into violent chaos and destabilize the entire region. This will lead to increased poverty, crime, and even MORE migration as people flee the violence and deprivation we caused. This is the most likely scenario or something close to it for reasons I’ll discuss in a minute.

It’s important we be clear about this: When this plot to steal the oil fails, and it will, there will be a huge, disastrous mess left behind with the giant bootprint of the United States all over it. America went in guns ablazin’, taking names and kickin’ ass, oorah!, but then failed to achieve anything of substance yet again.

The humiliation will be monumental, and every drop of shame and blame will be dumped on the Republican Party. We must make sure that happens because god fucking dammit, the first thing the press and the GOP and the people who don’t pay attention are going to do is try to blame “both sides.”

Because when everyone is guilty, no one is guilty. And then no one is held accountable.

Fuuuuuck that. We all know who did this, and there is no fucking way I am letting those pieces of shit dump their garbage on our laps again so the fucking collaborators in the press can whitewash their neo-con warmongering. Keep those fucking receipts and be prepared to shove them down the throats of scumbags like Dana Bash in three years:

Today, it’s a great idea. Tomorrow, no one will be responsible. Just you fucking watch.

Here’s the reason we know the regime’s brilliant idea to seize Venezuela’s oil will fail: Since the end of WWII, we have toppled numerous dictators. Several of them in Latin America. Not once have we succeeded in doing anything but making the situation worse. We, the mighty United States, have not once, not one fucking time!, left behind a country with a vibrant democracy, a thriving economy, a happy populace. Our legacy has uniformly been one of death, destruction, and arrogant ignorance. This last part being central to why we keep fucking it up.

Despite having access to any number of experts and natives, in our own government, willing to explain the ins and outs of the cultures and governments we blindly seek to remake in our own image, ‘Murika! has a habit of shooting first, asking questions never. Then we’re shocked SHOCKED when things fall apart again and again and again. Who could have foreseen that not understanding the people we’re trying to rule would lead to friction and compounding complications? Truly a mystery for the fucking ages we may never solve…

Now, add to this equation an American regime run by white nationalists who view Latinos as subhuman. Add to this the fact that these particular white nationalists are, even for their ilk, uniquely stupid and historically incompetent. The cherry on top of this coming clusterfuck cake is their utter lawlessness. By that I mean their only motivation, really, is personal greed. They’re not even in Venezuela to steal the oil for America. The Trump regime is there to loot the country for themselves and their own personal bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.

If a competent American government went all in on regime change with an eye to “bringing democracy” to South America while ensuring US power and privilege were protected, it would still be a tall order. But the fucking clown show we have in charge now? There is no possibility at all and let’s be honest, they haven’t planned for anything past the “Drop bombs and brag on TV” stage. If it’s not written down in Project 2025, they have no idea what the fuck they’re doing. And even when it IS written down in Project 2025, the second the real world deviates from what they thought was going to happen, which it has repeatedly, the morons in the regime spiral out of control, completely unprepared and clueless.

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So, yes, this will all blow up in their dumbfuck faces. It’s been two goddamn days and we STILL do not know which imbecile from the regime will be in charge of “running” Venezuela. Will it be Marco “I have 20 jobs” Rubio? Maybe! Oh, wait. Now we’re hearing it might be Stephen “Kill All The Brown People” Miller:

The White House is weighing giving Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff and homeland security adviser, a more elevated role in overseeing post-Maduro operations in Venezuela, the Washington Post reports.

Miller was behind the campaign to blow up the boats in the Caribbean because he’s a murderer who gets off on having people he hates killed. He’s been telling Trump for months that Venezuela “stole our oil” when they nationalized their oil industry back in the 70s. I promise you, Miller has visions of personal wealth and a lot of dead Venezuelans dancing through his creepy bulbous Nazi head.

Regardless, it’s clear no planning whatsoever was done for what happens next. Kind of important to know what to do when the dog catches the car, no? But Trump is at the helm, a dying pedophile desperate for a win, something to make people stop talking about Jeffery Epstein (not gonna happen, you kiddie fucking degenerate), and immediate gratification. Whatever plans we DO form will change from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour (minute to minute?) as Trump tweets out whatever deranged stupidity leaks into his diaper next. I’m sure that won’t push Venezuela into a more defiant stance or tip it into anarchy. What could possibly go fucking wrong with such a strategic genius at the helm of the United States?

And in three years, when the regime, ours that is, is ousted, the Venezuelan adventure will have metastasized into another foreign quagmire, draining our resources. Or turned into a free-for-all in South America, fueling instability and migration at our border.

When we have to clean up the Republican mess, it is absolutely vital we do not allow the press and the GOP to clutch their pearls and cry their big sobby tears and wail to the sky, “HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?! WHY DIDN’T DEMOCRATS STOP THIS?!”

If you think that won't happen, I really need you to read this tweet:

Kat Rosenfield is not a central figure in journalism, but her attitude is very much how the legacy press treats Trump and the entire GOP. They never do anything. Nothing is their fault. It just…happens. Republicans have no agency because of COURSE they act the way they act. They can’t help themselves so what is there to do about it?

This is why I say constantly, Republicans are not held to a lower standard; they’re held to no standard at all.

I promise you, they will 100% try to do the same here. Trump has been fed delusions of empire by the fools around him as well as his puppetmaster, Putin. Putin, who has delusions of his own of re-establishing a vast Russian empire with dominion over all of Europe. He can’t even conquer Ukraine. But he expects to conquer all of Europe with its much larger and vastly more powerful military? Sure. Good luck with that, Vladimir.

The assumption for Republicans, though, as always, is that nothing matters because there will be no consequences. Who went to prison for lying us into Iraq? No one. Who went to prison for lying us into Vietnam? No one. Consequences are for the little people.

This will all fall apart, and everyone involved will immediately seek to blame “both sides.” In the best case scenario (for Republicans), it will be used as a cudgel against the next Democratic president. The press used the withdrawal from Afghanistan to maul Joe Biden. I promise you, a lot of “journalists” and even more Republicans laughed themselves silly that they got away with pinning it all on Biden and erasing Trump’s culpability entirely.

It’s up to us to take their cudgel and shove it down their collective throat when they try again. We may have to clean up their fucking mess because we’re the adults in the room, but I’ll be goddamned if we’re going to keep taking the fucking blame for it.

The monkeys with the guns pulled the trigger. They can take all the credit for the fucking disasters they caused. The subtext for 2028, the one thing underlying every other message about affordability and democracy and equality, must be accountability. Without it, Republicans get away with their crimes and they’ll just do it again. That cannot be allowed.

They have to pay for what they’ve done. All of them.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

There are 301 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

Every time an American president wakes up in the morning and decides this would be a good day to dispatch the American military to a foreign land for reasons of alleged national security masking plunder, it is traditional for the media, not to mention the Congress, to have a say about the matter. Neither the Congress nor our print media has distinguished itself.

Both of our major newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, took positions in favor of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964 which justified and authorized U.S. military involvement in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war. Both papers supported the disastrous Bush administration decision to invade Iraq in 2003 that was Congressionally approved by the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution. The New York Times ended up being sufficiently embarrassed by its coverage of and support for the Iraq war that the paper issued what amounted to an editorial apology in May of 2004.

Yesterday’s New York Times editorial on Trump’s kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and his wife in Venezuela can be summed up by its headline: “Trump’s Attack on Venezuela is Illegal and Unwise.” The editorial hits all the right notes. It points out the hypocrisy of kidnapping Maduro to charge him with drug trafficking soon after pardoning the former president of Honduras who was convicted in a U.S. court of the same offense, and looks askance, to put it mildly, at the prospect of the U.S. “running” Venezuela while we avail ourselves of the country’s oil resources.

You may be wondering what the Washington Post has to say about yet another foreign adventure this time around? The Post’s editorial headline says it all:

“Justice in Venezuela.”

You really have to read the whole thing to get the full flavor of the complete and utter capitulation by the Jeff Bezos editorial board to Donald Trump’s dreams of profitable hegemony in this hemisphere, but the first few paragraphs give you enough sense of the thing to leave a taste in your mouth that you will not quickly rid yourself of:

“Millions of people around the world, most of all in Venezuela, are celebrating the downfall of the dictator Nicolás Maduro. President Donald Trump’s decision to capture him on Saturday was one of the boldest moves a president has made in years, and the operation was an unquestionable tactical success. The next step is ensuring that this triumph sets Venezuela up for stability and prosperity rather than more of the same, or worse.”

“What happened in Caracas was a clear reminder that America’s military, intelligence and cyber capabilities are second to none. More than 150 aircraft supported the Army’s Delta force in capturing Maduro and his wife. The couple are being extradited to the U.S., where they will face narco-terrorism, weapons and drug charges in Manhattan. There were no American deaths, although some U.S. service members were injured.”

“Maduro’s removal sends an important message to tin-pot dictators in Latin America and the world: Trump follows through. President Joe Biden offered sanctions relief to Venezuela, and Maduro responded to that show of weakness by stealing an election.”

“Trump had telegraphed for months that Maduro could not remain in power, yet Venezuela’s illegitimate leader clung on. What are Iranian leaders thinking now as they consider how to respond to widespread anti-government protests? Are the communists in Cuba sleeping well after Secretary of State Marco Rubio put them on notice Saturday?”

You knew that they wouldn’t be able to resist taking that dig at Biden. It’s as if Trump dictated the editorial from Palm Beach, and all they did was have someone on staff put it into complete sentences and remove his randomly capitalized words.

As if the Post’s over-the-hill-and-up-the-holler-lip-smack on Trump’s ass wasn’t loud enough to be heard in Mar a Lago, not to mention Moscow, they threw in this kicker about their hope for Maduro’s fate: “Now he should spend the rest of his life in a humane American prison.”

I wonder if before they ventured to write such a sentence they thought to inquire of anyone behind bars in a U.S. prison how “humane” the place is. Hmmmm…not.

I’ll let you determine for yourself how far the Post has fallen with this gift link: https://wapo.st/44VfGfr

It’s a long, long way from the days of Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham to Jeff Bezos, isn’t it? In his eagerness to protect his government contracts and ensure that he and his wife Lauren Sanchez are invited to the big opening of the big White House ballroom, Bezos has transformed the Post into a cheering section for the Republican Party’s inarticulate, rampaging champion of autocracy, Donald Trump.

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Considering the Option, and Questioning Why It Hasn’t Been

Russia claimed that Ukraine sent drones to bomb Putin’s private house. This was taken as shocking by all sides. Ukraine strongly denied it. Putin presented it as something obviously terrible. Trump took it as a horrible thing for Ukraine to have done (evidence is they didn’t and Trump has since said they have not) and that it might cause him to reevaluate his stance on negotiations (which seems exactly what Putin wanted). Trump later came to agree with the CIA assessment that no such bombing of Putin’s house had occurred.

My question is, why not? Why not bomb Putin’s house? I’ve wondered about this for years, not only about the war on Ukraine but about other attack/conflicts in the past. Since Mr. Putin himself has brought up the topic it seems an appropriate time to ask the question openly. Why not?

This war seems to be driven entirely by Putin. I haven’t seen anything that would indicate that if he retired, was voted out of office, grew into the ill-health of age, or lost interest that any of the other leadership in Russia would be determined to pursue this. It is almost entirely a Putin obsession which he will pursue until he can’t. Either he gets what he wants, or Ukraine, with help from allies, overwhelms the attack, or the people of Russia, or other high leadership in Russia, rebel against what it is doing to them, to their young people, and to their economy.

Or maybe he would stop if it hurt too much to bear personally. What if, when his troops were at the border ready to invade, a coalition of the U.S., Ukraine, and some European countries made it clear that if he attacked there would be immediate attacks on everything to do with Putin. On his homes, his yacht, his equivalent of Air Force One. The heck with the international banking laws, go ahead and threaten to steal all the money he and his closest cronies have in western banks and block them from withdrawing it in the meantime. And if he did attack, then carry out all those threats. If it hurt Putin too much, that might be one way he’d decide it wasn’t worth it. Or if he went ahead anyway, at least he’d be paying all the personal price we could inflict.

I’m not talking about killing anyone. It’s not unusual when attacks on property happen that first anyone present is warned to get out. There are reasons we don’t typically casually assassinate leaders we are in conflict with, in part to discourage them trying the same against our leaders.

I’m not a general. Maybe the Joint Chiefs of Staff would say this is crazy and would just start a nuclear war. Or maybe they’d say there is little of that we could actually accomplish because the defenses are too good. I don’t know, but I do wonder. Imagine if we had done that and it had prevented or quickly stopped the war. It would be a terrible escalation but if it had prevented tens of thousands of Ukrainian deaths, and all of that destruction, that would be such a huge plus side that it would balance out some very big downsides. Keep in mind it’s not just about Ukraine. Many knowledgeable sources, the Council on Foreign Relations for one, think Putin may want to go beyond Ukraine if he can. The nations affected then would be allies and members of NATO. So it is security of the U.S./European world that is being threatened.

Putin is a bully and at some point it’s going to take something similar anyway. It seems to me there are two ways a bully gets stopped. One is you give such a strong response immediately that it makes it clear they’re not going to get anything out of pursuing this. The other is you have a long, drawn-out process of gradually trying to discourage them. You eventually have to escalate anyway to where they see they’d better stop, but in the meantime they’ve gotten some of what they want, and you have suffered a long terrible price in the process. So is escalating up front really such a bad cost/benefit trade-off?

Best case at this point is: all of those deaths and all of that destruction has already occurred, and if a big enough commitment is made by the U.S. and European countries to arm Ukraine so well they could clearly stop the war where it is, and some truce is found, with Russia occupying what it has, in other words having gotten some reward for attacking. That’s if best case is achieved. If that’s how it goes would attacking Putin more directly back at the beginning seem like such a bad idea?

As I’m writing this, news about Trump kidnapping Maduro has just come out. Just to be clear, I would not have been suggesting that. Such a different situation. Maduro was not actively bombing civilians in neighboring countries or threatening war across territories of our allies or friends.

As far as bombing Putin’s house I really don’t know what I’m talking about, and among readers of this, every other one who ever read history books about wars and who fancies themselves knowledgeable about such things will, no doubt, be swift to raise a chorus of how ignorant I am. Regardless of all that, I still wonder. I can’t help but wonder.

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