Opinion: Putin is playing with fire - CNN.com
It looks like Putin is no pushover. But what can be done to persuade Russia to change? Threats are passe with Russia. After watching the Nazis round up their whole family in village churches and setting it on fire, how big a threat can we make?. These are hard people, and I mean really hard people. They've had everything done to them. Almost half of their population was marched off to Siberia by Stalin, who also is one of a long list of thugs who had charge of the military.
You can see it in their faces. When they are interviewed on one of those war WW2/1 documentaries, try to find some expression of horror. They speak in a detached 'matter of fact' way of the day they watched their children being dragged out of sod houses and hung up on telegraph poles. The horror of those days long past, they now have nothing to lose. Their value of life long detached.
And yet we will sanction them and starve them out of.......what? Food. They live each day with no guarantee. Many times rebels walked in and stole their food and they were left to eat weeds and bark. Clothes. In the dead of winter their coats were taken and they made do with anything they could find. They speak in that familiar tone of taking their infants frozen as hard as cordwood outside under something so the dogs don't get him so they can bury him in the spring.
But if they have no care for themselves, what concerns me is how do they value the lives of anyone else. Adding to the risk, we provoke their attitude and we, thinking that they hold the same things of value as we do, we tease them. Think again.
As a terrorist hyjacking a plane said as an angry mother gave him hell for doing this horrible thing, "I have nothing to lose, your country killed all my family". He offered her the gun and said, "shoot me", and she sat down.
The fighter pilots I'm not too worried about, but the guy in that high flying bomber who has the discretion to obey or disobey orders I'm worried about. His brother in the silos with his thumb hovering over the button; I hope he didn't lose hope when grandpa told him about the same stories as the documentary.
Fighting against live people is easier than the walking dead. I just hope we still can find something in the box that we can still appeal to that they value, because I sure think there isn't much left.
Why do the odds always seem to show that presidents do not like to leave their tenure without some muscle flexing on the way out?. If true, they do so at our risk. It would seem no one likes to leave like that peanut guy left, better to risk a war and slap some faces on the way out.
It looks like Putin is no pushover. But what can be done to persuade Russia to change? Threats are passe with Russia. After watching the Nazis round up their whole family in village churches and setting it on fire, how big a threat can we make?. These are hard people, and I mean really hard people. They've had everything done to them. Almost half of their population was marched off to Siberia by Stalin, who also is one of a long list of thugs who had charge of the military.
You can see it in their faces. When they are interviewed on one of those war WW2/1 documentaries, try to find some expression of horror. They speak in a detached 'matter of fact' way of the day they watched their children being dragged out of sod houses and hung up on telegraph poles. The horror of those days long past, they now have nothing to lose. Their value of life long detached.
And yet we will sanction them and starve them out of.......what? Food. They live each day with no guarantee. Many times rebels walked in and stole their food and they were left to eat weeds and bark. Clothes. In the dead of winter their coats were taken and they made do with anything they could find. They speak in that familiar tone of taking their infants frozen as hard as cordwood outside under something so the dogs don't get him so they can bury him in the spring.
But if they have no care for themselves, what concerns me is how do they value the lives of anyone else. Adding to the risk, we provoke their attitude and we, thinking that they hold the same things of value as we do, we tease them. Think again.
As a terrorist hyjacking a plane said as an angry mother gave him hell for doing this horrible thing, "I have nothing to lose, your country killed all my family". He offered her the gun and said, "shoot me", and she sat down.
The fighter pilots I'm not too worried about, but the guy in that high flying bomber who has the discretion to obey or disobey orders I'm worried about. His brother in the silos with his thumb hovering over the button; I hope he didn't lose hope when grandpa told him about the same stories as the documentary.
Fighting against live people is easier than the walking dead. I just hope we still can find something in the box that we can still appeal to that they value, because I sure think there isn't much left.
Why do the odds always seem to show that presidents do not like to leave their tenure without some muscle flexing on the way out?. If true, they do so at our risk. It would seem no one likes to leave like that peanut guy left, better to risk a war and slap some faces on the way out.
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