Unsurprisingly, yesterday was kind of a loss.

I barely remember it, to be honest. I spent most of it asleep. But that’s not unusual for the day after a convention. They have a way of wearing you out even if you are getting plenty of sleep.

And I got lots of sleep after I got my sleeping pills. More proof that I would sleep a lot better if I was just more active.

And soem time soon, I am sure I will be. Aaaaaany day now.

Oh well. Getting upset over lost days and implacable immobility doesn’t make things any better, so I might as well say “these things happen” and try to get on with my life.

Speaking of things which upset me, I guess I am ready to talk about Putin and the Ukraine now.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I am amazingly and profoundly angry at Putin and Russia right now. Even when I heard about the “military exercises” near the Ukraine border, I never really thought Russia would go ahead and invade. But invade they did, and now the whole world has to deal with this mess they made.

And I just cannot figure out what their end game is here. Putin is not a stupid man. He cannot possibly have thought this whole “unmarked vehicles” gambit would keep people from knowing who was behind it all and throwing a completely righteous shit fit over this blatant act of imperialism.

So what the hell is he up to? Sure, he has gained territory (sorta) but Russia is already pretty big. He can’t need new land that bad. Whatever they have in Crimea cannot be worth the precarious position he’s put us all in. This can’t possibly be what is best for Russia right now.

It just adds to my suspicions that Putin is only a figurehead now, and it’s his cronies that are now really running Russia. And when the cronies take over, madness and chaos always ensues because they are all quite accustomed to being controlled by the formerly iron will of Putin and when that control slackens, they just go hog wild doing whatever they want to do.

So you get anti-gay laws(Russian Orthodox cronies), enormously shameful Olympic facilities (fat government contact cronies), and now a genuine motherfucking invasion, presumably backed by his military cronies.

I am forced, in fact, to wonder if this is just the execution of a long term plan by Russia to regain the part of the Ukraine they lost way back in the 50’s. A plan that was put on ice for a long time under Gorbachew and Yeltsin, who were more interested in the actual welfare of Russia over settling old scores, and which were still on ice with Putin until his leadership weakened and he had to start actually giving his cronies the things he had promise them in return for their support.

Russia is, in effect, without a leader. Putin is just a plaster puppet of himself that his cronies can hide under while they loot, plunder, and despoil mother Russia. Nobody is in charge, so nobody feels any responsibility for the consequences of their actions. It’s not like his cronies are in any danger, if they go down, so does he. So they can do all the things they have always wanted to do and he can’t do a thing to stop them.

So his socially conservative cronies get the hateful anti-gay laws they have always wanted (plus laws against ‘disrespecting’ religion), the borscht barrel robber barons get their billions in Russian contact money (with a highly convenient lack of having to actually do anything with the money but to line their nests with it), and now apparently the old KGB cronies and military cronies get the war they have asked for every Xmas since 1951.

I have no idea what the international community can really do now that Putin’s hands have slipped off the wheel and the loony bus is driving itself to crazy town. Any kind of threat or punishment contains with it the assumption that there is someone in charge and that this someone cares what happens to Russia.

But there’s nobody in charge now. None of these asshole cronies of his will suffer at all if Russia gets into hot water. In fact, odds are their own little empires of influence and control (and corruption) will do just fine no matter what, or even prosper under the current system of unchecked chaos.

We need to stop acting like Putin is some towering monolithic menace determined to drag the world back to pre-WWII days and start calling it like it really is : he is a weak leader who cannot control his own people.

As long as we treat him like a master villain, his ego is intact. If we start treating him like the weak willed joke of a shadow puppet that he is, maybe he will get upset enough to grow a pair and rope things the fuck in.

Otherwise, things will only get worse from here. The incontinent monkeys currently running Russia have only begone to settle old scores. Remember, they are all very old now, and hence, there is a great chance that like their contemporaries worldwide, they are just a bunch of petty, cranky, spoiled old man-babys who have absolutely no sense of pragmatism and restraint, only pathetic scraps of ideology crudely pasted together with old grudges and sheer spiteful meanness.

Basically, imagine if the government of Arizona was running the USA. That’s the kind of madness we are talking about here. Whatever mental faculty that normally keeps cranky blinkered ideologues from actually enacting their insane plans is gone, gone, gone, and what is left is just about the worst possible form of unrestrained darkness.

You can’t even rely on their sense of self-preservation to rein them in. They are too old to care and too privileged to believe anything bad can actually happen to them.

And so far… they have been right about that, more or less.

Let’s hope someone can grab the wheel before it’s too late.