Russians

 

Old Russian proverb about Germans — a fine fellow, maybe, but it's better to hang him. I agree. I'm 3/4 German by descent, often the worst kind of autocrat with an ancestral claim of nobility, and I grew up surrounded by millions of grumpy Germans, some of whom goose stepped in Nazi parades of the Bund during the late 1930s in Milwaukee. Poles lived on the downwind side of an industrial smokestack river basin. There were very few Jews, and the Italian quarter was squashed into a dozen blocks on the Lower East Side. When blacks migrated north, they were segregated in a ghetto of dilapidated rentals where they froze in the winter and sweltered in humid summers. They did not visit Wisconsin Ave.

 

Generally speaking, Germans are not nice people. They are stolid, industrious misers who think they're superior. In the 1960s, my hippie cohort respected the Mafioso, dated Polish girls, marched in civil rights demonstrations with blacks, and were baffled by brainy Jews. There were no Russians in Milwaukee.

 

Ambition took me around the world early in life, traveling with Jewish girls to New York, a brief stint working with rich gays and dangerous Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia, a much longer stint in Hollywood consorting with blacks of every ethnicity (there are many) and a project in Sydney where I mingled with sexy blonde girls, rambunctious musicians, and smiling Kiwis. At a San Francisco marina bistro, I met a Scottish girl who rearranged my life for decades, traveling together to Los Angeles, Holland, England, Belgium, Luxembourg, Nevada, and Scotland. Very slowly, rising to a challenge, I was wooed into Scots enlightenment at gigantic snooker tables and became a somewhat nicer vagabond.

 

That's how I met the Russians in Costa Rica. There are distinct ethnicities, aristocratic White Russians, brainless Ukrainians, psychotic Chechens, fierce Tartars who can be trusted to follow orders and attack without hesitation if ordered to do so, and Siberian Cossacks who are tall, dignified, and slightly dim. I worked with them all, befriended some, feared others, and made a keen study of the confident ruling class White Russians who had Kremlin connections and diplomatic status. They accepted me because I used a pen name that disguised my Teutonic heritage and we met in sunny laid back Costa Rica.

 

What I want to say about Russians is simple. They are not effete, pampered Americans. They are worse than stuffy, perfidious English "old boys" and colorful Irish comedians with a festering grudge against brutal Brits. Russians are happy to exploit egotistical Frenchmen and sullen Krauts, who they see as easily manipulated chumps. They don't have to feed a billion Indians or fight with China. Sadly, Russia is a dying society, outnumbered by Western Europeans who need Russian oil and gas, the world's largest endowment of fossil fuel, 50 times larger than U.S. reserves and five times bigger than the Arab and Persian resource disasters of grasping greed and waste, doomed to decline and die like Venezuela.

 

Death is front and center in Russian history. They are partying while they can, no expectation of a happy ending, led by a cowardly and highly competent scientific elite, no different than Britain, but smoothly groomed, bankrupt Brits prevaricate, bluster, and beg. Russians never beg.

 

Without Trump, we have no hope of stopping them.

 

As a matter of justice, United States has no absolute duty to save Europe or Taiwan. It's mooted that we should contain Russia and China by arming Ukraine, Taiwan, Philippines, South Korea, who knows maybe Vietnam, Finland, India, Greece, Armenia, Bhutan, and Rockall. No ceiling in modern monetary theory. Just print more dollars and say goodbye to prosperity and fiscal solvency. That's the Democrat platform in a nutshell, tax and spend our crops and seed corn, kill U.S. pension assets with inflation. How that will make us stronger is a dumb Democrat daydream, echoed by Republican hawks who say that price is no object to arm Arabs who have oil and refinery production to power U.S. military expeditions, allegedly capable of fighting and winning two wars at the same time, except Iraq and Afghanistan, which we lost to Iran and Pakistan respectively, both of whom are Chinese client states, little more than pawns.

 

Russia and China are capable of beating us in the game of arming proxies like North Korea and Belarus, rescuing Iran by helping them to exploit more oil and gas production, subsidizing and defending Syria. Germany and France are frozen strategically, dependent on Russia for energy. Indonesia has no choice whether to export coal and appease the Chinese leviathan. We do it, too, giving China food and IOUs to build up their armed forces, training Chinese scientists at U.S. universities and idiotically funding their recombinant virus bioweapons research in Wuhan.

 

Idiocy never pays. Think. Stop trading with China. Leave Russia alone.

 

I've met quite a lot of Russians — scientists, gangsters, security teams, diplomats, and electric Russian babes incapable of love. The Russians are a melting pot of failure and cruelty, concentrated by centuries of failure and cruelty. Most everything Russians attempt is irrational, fake, paranoid, and suicidal. They are alert natural liars who lunge at opportunity if they smell fear or hear empty threats.