planning ahead

This month has been tough. Not as tough as for the people getting bombed in Ukraine, but it's depressing to keep wading into the news about it. I've completely given up giving a fuck about electoral politics, but geopolitical controversy can still get its teeth into me, apparently.

Least, think that's why I've been depressed, but who the hell knows. I'm constantly falling back into depression for one reason or another. I've been getting to the gym less regularly, since getting sick a few weeks ago. 

Didn't get to the gym yesterday, didn't think I'd make it today, but somehow managed to get it together at the last minute, and wow, I did really well. Got some nice takedowns and submissions. Executed a perfect no-gi seoi nage on someone way bigger than me, and then got him with a kimura. For once, tapped other people out more times than I had to tap out.

I'd planned on competing at a BJJ event in New Hampshire tomorrow, but getting sick derailed those plans. Easily derailed, because I'm pretty reluctant. It's something that I need to do. I need to be able to say I've done it. It's the safest place to start, before moving on to anything more exciting. I didn't register in time, but tagging along to spectate instead. Maybe that will help me feel more confident about giving it a shot next time. April 16th I'm told. Oh crap, that's soon.

Now I'm home again and not sure what to do with myself. Guess I'll go back to reading about the collapse of western civilization. Sure, it sounds kinda cool, but to be honest, it's going to be really miserable. A slow painful process most won't live to see the end of. As we lurch from each catastrophe to the next, everything else is still getting worse in the background, from wealth inequality and authoritarianism, to climate change.

Now we've got this war, where the US crossed a red line that people across the political spectrum, left, right, and center, have been calling a red line we really shouldn't cross. Biden himself said it 30 years ago. Corporate media stenographers are scrambling to muddy the waters of history, but the real decision makers in our government knew their actions would strongly provoke Russia to invade Ukraine. I'd assumed they'd overestimated their ability to bully every other country in the world, but what if they'd actually planned all of this?

This has been in the works for years, maybe decades, whatever they're up to. The color revolution in 2004, then Maidan in 2014. Arming and training militants the entire time, funding far right political groups, organizations, and propaganda.

Maybe they wanted Russia to do this. They clearly want to drag the war out as long as they possibly can, no matter how many Ukrainians have to die. They've admitted that the goal is to bleed Russia. Maybe that was the plan. One way or another, I suspect their real intent is to cripple Russia, so that they can do what they've done to so many other countries. Regime change, chaos, war.

Do you think Putin is really that bad? How much do you know of where Russia was twenty years ago vs where they are now? And stop with the evil dictator nonsense. It's a country of over a 150 million people, many of which view Putin favorably and his actions in Ukraine necessary. 

How much death and destruction this time? Orders of magnitude more than what's going on now. If any country is the new Nazi Empire, it's the USA, and we need to be stopped. I'm hoping from the far east to the global south, they realize it.

They may not need to attack us militarily. We've overextended ourselves with these sanctions. We're more vulnerable. Maybe they could do it economically. De-dollarize the global economy, sell our debt. Watch us collapse under our own morbid weight. One way or another, the US has become an existential threat to the entire world.

Not that I really have any hope. I'm pretty sure everything will play out even worse than I could have predicted.