Time for a Closer Look

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Ozymandias

When I think of our current era and all of its dictators and would-be dictators, there is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley that rings as true now as it did when he wrote it:     I met a traveller from an antique land,     Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone     Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,     Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,     And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,     Tell that its sculptor well those passions read     Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,     The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;     And on the pedestal, these words appear:     My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;     Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!     Nothing beside remains. Round the decay     Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare     The lone and level sands stretch far away.” His poem was a stark warning. Follow these men (they are almost always men) to your ruin and grave, or perhaps a ditch or nearby river. For y
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Could a Russian Revolution End the Ukraine War?

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A Russian revolution ending the Russo-Ukraine war? Oh, that would be so wonderful. As Zeihan explains in a short video, it's complicated. Any sort of palace coup is a non-starter, apparently. The people Putin has surrounded himself with generally view the world no differently from him, and they come from the same KGB/FSB background. So, don't expect the elites to necessarily change stripes and turn on Putin. A mass uprising that becomes a revolution? Zeihan doesn't see that as a prospect in the short term. I don't either. Yes, the sanctions are causing some discomfort, but not to the extent that a critical mass would very violently demand a change. Will the regime crumble? Eventually. In the meantime, Ukrainians must continue to fight for their existence, and anyone living in the nations that successfully declared their independence when the USSR crumbled at the start of the 1990s need to keep a watchful eye for what might be lurking on their borders. Regrettably, we li
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Leap Day 2020 retrospective

It is difficult to believe that four years have passed since the last Leap Day. That particular day in 2020 was a strange day. By that point in late winter 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was well-underway. I probably was not the only one doom-scrolling the developments in China, the EU, and NYC by that point. Although I lived and still live in a somewhat more isolated portion of the US, we do sit at a crossroads when it comes to the Interstate and US highway systems, and we do have our own airport which at the time had flights to and from Atlanta (if you flew Delta) and Dallas (if you flew American Airlines). There was certainly some business tourism into my city at the time, even as the proverbial storm clouds drew near. I was still a couple weeks away from passing by a fraught meeting administrators would be holding, and was already getting a lot of advice from my parents (more directly from my mom) about what to stock up on.  Although there was already plenty of reason to want to avoid
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