Before I begin, remember that, in addition to being a fictional spirit-guide, I’m also a genuine country hick so keep that in mind.
Although I probably wouldn’t have handled things the way that they were handled, I don’t have any real issues with the way Trump and Vance handled the situation because I assume (yeah, that’s usually not a good thing) that they have more in-depth info than I have.
As I watched their discussion and the discussions on here concerning Putin’s invasion, it brought to mind something from my youth. There was a guy in my general area who was a self-taught wildlife expert. He traveled all over the country advocating for wildlife. His main focus was snakes. Especially venomous snakes. He’d put on shows educating the public about snakes, and he’d rescue snakes. Again, it was usually venomous snakes. I heard him say one time that out of the thousands of venomous snakes that he’d dealt with that he’d only been bitten once. On that occasion, he’d caught a venomous snake for one of his upcoming educational demonstrations. He said he put the snake that he’d caught in one of his standard bags to take to his home. When he got home, he reached in to grab the bag, but he got careless. He grabbed the bag in the wrong place, and the snake bit him. That was the only time that he’d ever gotten bitten, and he said that he never blamed the snake. He knew what snake was capable of, and the snake was just being a venomous snake. He said that HE was the one that screwed up and that if HE would have been paying closer attention the bite would not have happened. I view the invasion of Ukraine in a somewhat similar light. As much as I despise Putin, Putin was just being what Putin is. If the USA would have had a real president, I’m not so sure that the invasion would have happened. I put most of the fault at whoever or whatever group was supposed to be playing US president at the time.
When the invasion did happen, like most people I fully supported Ukraine and Zelenskyy. I’ve been very impressed with the Ukrainian people’s bravery, but it’s getting to the point that they are like a person with a cut on the leg that has developed gangrene. They’ve got to decide if they want to keep trying to fight the gangrene and risk losing the entire body or if they want to sacrifice the limb to safe the body. It’s a tough decision either way.
As far as Zelenskyy goes, I initially was impressed and viewed him as a freedom fighter standing strong for his county. I'm still not in the anti-Zelenskyy camp, but the longer things stretch on, the more he’s beginning look like one of those televangelists who talk about your soul and wellbeing while asking for everyone’s money. I don't know if he's skimming money or not, but I would be interested to know if his net worth has increased during this war while his country has suffered.
On a different but somewhat similar topic, I recently realized that in my high school and college career I never had a course that dealt with the NATO Treaty in any real depth, and I’ve recently begin wondering about something that some of you guys probably know the answer to. Let’s say a new country that we’ll call Scamastan joins NATO. A few years after joining, without the knowledge of the other NATO members, Scamastan has been doing secret ops on their neighbor who we’ll call LeaveMeAloneton. It gets to the point that LeaveMeAloneton feels that it has no other choice but to attack Scamastan. If the other NATO nations find that Scamastan essentially “had it coming” is there a way, within the treaty, to get around Article 5?
