In the cool of evening rain I saw the first hoppy frog ever, on this thoroughly paved property most of a mile from the river.

If you made the ‘Okay’ sign with your fingers he would have fit snug inside the circle.

Three JDs for you to take or leave.

NPR Turns Against Ukraine
The Truth About Ukraine SLIPS OUT On CNN

The main point of these two is that the same people who got you wound up to support brave sovereign Ukraine a few months ago have now been given a cautious yellow light to start getting you wound back down. As for Why, that’s still somewhat murky, but apparently you’ll soon be allowed to call yourself a good American even if you don’t think Zelensky is the second coming of the Christ.

Putin Drops 2 Minutes Of Truth About America & Ukraine

I know there are many among you my dear readers who would like it if Putin dropped dead tomorrow. But if you can, put that propensity aside for a moment and listen to just a few of his words.

I think you’ll be at least a little surprised by how his worldview lines up with your own. As always, I carefully place the disclaimer: in the end, Putin is just another oligarch, one who happens to be Russian and not American or German or British. I will never ever try to sell you on Good Guy Vlad.

But if he ran for Senate in Arizona, I’d feel one hell of a lot better voting for him than I do having voted for that Sinema bag of shit, or even the hapless Mark Kelly.

This is the very shortest version of a speech he has been giving over and over for many weeks now.

Central to them all is this concept of ‘the golden billion’, as in a billion people out of trillions, for whose benefit the world has been run, for decades and in some cases centuries. I probably should do a post on this phrase, but for now it’s enough to know that he means the upper classes in America (one-third of a billion) and Western Europe (two-thirds of a billion).

Those of use who for decades have used six or seven times our fair share of the world’s resources per capita, and grew to maturity thinking that it was God’s plan that we were so blessed, that it didn’t hurt anyone else for us to be wealthy, and that if anybody were to threaten god’s plan, we of course were morally obligated to smack them down through assassination, regime change, ‘sanctions’, genocides, and increasingly endless wars all across the planet.

While kicking off catastrophic climate change along the way; oh well. But I digress.

Any conscious being with the slightest shred of soul left knows that the age of the golden billion is fast coming to an end, and that this practical fact is in general a step toward the light.

For us who have unjustly benefited from being raised dirty golden, it’s going to be scary as hell in some ways.

This guy they told you to hate isn’t the real target of your fears.

There’s your bosses, though, they count. The pumpers of the gold gravy train of evil.

But the real scary part is just other people, and in fact trillions of them. The sheer scale, of the great unwashed.

The five existing members of the BRICS economic alliance are already three trillion of them, and they’ve had enough of the game the way we rigged it. Who can really blame them?

BRICS is about to get a lot more members, because the Atlanticist billion has seriously and badly overplayed their hand this time. Half the world just laughs now when our leaders wag their fingers in their face and tell them to get on board with the latest round of sanctions.

I’ve gone far longer and deeper than I meant to.

This is a post about a frog.