Is America Still a Serious Nation?

It was a little bit of a shock that Russia stormed into Ukraine as a result of as a sensible matter, it didn’t essentially make a lot of sense. There was no casus belli or risk to Russia from Ukraine. Sure, Russia didn’t probably need one other NATO member shoved up in opposition to its border down the street and should have preferred the concept of turning that nation into a puppet state, however there isn’t a compelling motive for Russia to invade proper now. That’s doubly so since Russia didn’t seem like absolutely ready for the invasion. Granted, you possibly can’t essentially take the information you hear initially of a battle at face worth, however the basic consensus from coverage specialists appears to be that the invasion isn’t off to a nice begin. Surprisingly, Ukraine nonetheless has planes within the air, some fairly embarrassing footage of captured Russian troopers has leaked out, the West has stood surprisingly sturdy, there have been important protests in Russia, Putin and firm have confronted damaging sanctions, and no main Ukrainian cities have been taken… but. It remains to be totally potential that Russia will pour extra assets into Ukraine, shortly crush the Ukrainian army, and settle in for years of bloody guerilla combating fed by huge arms shipments and help from the West because the Russian economic system bleeds out due to sanctions, however that looks as if a Pyrrhic victory at greatest.

How all of that finally performs out stays to be seen, however the one factor that has been noticeable because the starting of the invasion is that it appears to have centered individuals’s minds on extra severe points.

The individuals in Ukraine have REAL issues. How a lot of what we combat over in American politics represents a real-world sensible downside and the way a lot of it represents self-created nonsense issues? Can we even inform the distinction anymore?

For instance, it appears fairly notable that at a time when the entire world is rallying in opposition to Russia and that nation is being hit with punishing sanctions that each Europe and the United States are persevering with to purchase their vitality. Why are we within the United States doing that? Because if we reduce off the availability of Russian oil, costs would spike dramatically. Would we be in a wholly totally different state of affairs if the Keystone Pipeline had been up and working? Absolutely, as a result of the pipeline would have provided us with extra oil than we get from Russia. Unfortunately, Democrats have been slow-walking the pipeline since 2008 and Biden killed it. That wasn’t executed due to any actual or substantial objections to the pipeline, it was executed as a political ploy to placate environmentalists. We’re speaking about an extremely useful supply of vitality that might have produced giant quantities of jobs and oil that had been killed for no different motive than to attraction to individuals whose pondering doesn’t go any deeper than, “Oil bad! Must stop more oil.” On high of that, runaway inflation additionally means it’s politically tough for Biden to make a resolution that might improve the worth of fuel. Both events and the Fed bear accountability for that, nevertheless it’s price noting that even because the inflation was cranking up, Democrats stored pumping more cash into the economic system with none regard to the implications.

That’s the place we’re in America. We are so positive of our place on the earth, so positive that the Golden Goose will carry on laying golden eggs, so positive that there’s nothing that may actually threaten us, that we’ve got allowed our authorities to turn out to be like two cliques of squabbling kids combating over who will get handy out monopoly cash. Do you recognize why they don’t have fights over issues like Critical Race Theory, gender pronouns, and males in girls’s bogs in locations like Ukraine? For one factor, they’re not as degenerate as us, however the important thing motive is that they’ve REAL PROBLEMS. On the opposite hand, we don’t actually even have “first-world problems” in America. We have spoiled brat issues that we invent to provide our status-hungry teachers one thing to do and our failing residents one thing to fixate on. This is us:

We’re in a snug, air-conditioned home, consuming delivered pizza for dinner with a couple of beers earlier than we fall asleep in our snug mattress pondering, “Wow, life sure is hard.” Then, we invent issues to complain about on-line. “Oh, did you hear what that Karen did?” “Can you believe what AOC (if you’re conservative) / Marjorie Taylor Greene (if you’re liberal) said?” We get huffy over some supposedly outrageous quote about Trump or Biden – and we’re careless concerning the issues that actually matter.

It’s like that good speech from one in every of my all-time favourite motion pictures, Limitless, when Carl Von Loon explains to Eddie Morra that he hasn’t earned the unimaginable reward that he has:

“You do know you’re a freak? Your deductive powers are a gift from God, or chance, or a stray shot of sperm, or whatever or whoever the hell wrote your life script – a gift, not earned. You do not know what I know because you have not earned those powers. You’re careless with those powers and you flaunt them, and you throw them around like a brat with his trust fund. You haven’t had to climb up all the greasy little rungs, you haven’t been bored blind at the fundraisers, you haven’t done the time in that first marriage to the girl with the right father; you think you can leap over all in a single bound; you haven’t had to bribe or charm or threaten your way to a seat at that table; you don’t know how to assess your competition because you haven’t competed. Don’t make me your competition.”