So how do things stand?
Well, the fifteen days to flatten the Tsar is turning out as usual:
Ensuring Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine fails could take "months, if not years", the [UK] deputy prime minister has told Sky News.
Oh, well. Tough for the Ukrainians and the Russkies, but I'm nowhere near, right? Wrong:
"The ongoing war and associated sanctions will also have a severe impact on the global economy," the IMF said...
"Price shocks will have an impact worldwide, especially on poor households for whom food and fuel are a higher proportion of expenses," the IMF said in a statement. "Should the conflict escalate, the economic damage would be all the more devastating."
On his radio show, Howie Carr now has a regular feature in which listeners call up and relate the pump price when they drive past the gas station on the way to work, and what it's up to as they head home in the afternoon.
Gee, it's almost as if, just as ChiCom-19 was getting too boring and ineffectual to prevent the recovery of the world economy, the globalists decided enough with Mister Nice Guy, time to get serious.
The war is widening. Anthony Blinken, the US "foreign minister" (as Biden called him the other day, somewhat curiously), is currently on a tour of Eastern Europe:
U.S. in talks with Poland on deal to send fighter jets to Ukraine
Here's how it works: The Poles and other former Russian satellites have air forces full of old Soviet MiGs. So Warsaw would give its MiGs to Kiev, because Ukrainian pilots already know how to fly them.
And, in return, Washington would give Warsaw a new fleet of US-made F16s, plus a thorough training course in how to operate them.
So the US military-industrial complex would get a huge wartime fillip of new orders, but it's the crappy old Soviet-made planes that would have to do all the fighting. Boy, you can't say the world's most lavishly funded war-losers haven't learned any lessons from Kabul.
But don't worry, I'm sure all those Polish Air Force jets will be repainted in the Ukrainian colours - otherwise Putin might get the idea that he's being hit by a Nato country, mightn't he?
The US media have enthusiastically reported the above developments as the latest example of the new Nato "unity", so Blinken has now moved on to do the same deal with the Baltics. Alas, the only people who don't seem to be on board are Warsaw, as befits the government of a country whose national anthem begins "Poland is not yet lost..." From the Prime Minister on Sunday:
!!FAKE NEWS!!
Poland won't send its fighter jets to #Ukraine as well as allow to use its airports.
We significantly help in many other areas.
I have no idea why whoever controls "the Biden Administration" is so anxious to bring on World War III. But, even if you thought World War III was a good idea, are you really sure you want these guys running it? As Rochelle Wolensky's mea sorta culpa suggests and the released Pfizer documents confirm, for the last two years we have been governed by elites that are either corrupt and evil or corrupt and totally incompetent. Whichever you opt for, they're entirely relaxed about ruining millions of lives - and then ruining them all over again if it suits their mad ambition.
Tomorrow, or maybe even later today, the number of refugees from Ukraine will reach two million. That's the biggest number of displaced persons in Europe since the end of World War II. Poland alone has taken in over a million: That may be enough to destabilise the place even without the US Government leaking to their media poodles that Polish MiGs will now be going full Red Baron on the Russian Air Force.
Meanwhile, Russia is being subjected to the world's first geopolitical Twitterstorm. CNN, Facebook and Pornhub have all pulled out of the country: Feel free to do your own jokes here. More significantly so have Visa and MasterCard. Putin, on the other hand, is still shipping gas and oil to Europe and America every day of the week as if nothing has happened. Shell is tweeting its apologies for still buying Russian oil even as Tchaikovsky and Doestoevsky are cancelled.
It is a well-worn truism that the Permanent Five of the UN Security Council is the Second World War victory parade preserved in aspic. But China, India, Brazil and many others think that other features of the so-called "international order" are similarly obsolescent and Eurocentric, far beyond government and diplomacy. The broader aspects of global life - economy and culture and access to both - are regulated disproportionately (as they see it) from New York and London, Brussels and Geneva. The western corporate stampede to pile on Russia will only have confirmed that, and accelerated plans for alternatives that reflect twenty-first-century reality.
Earth, wind and fire: Net Zero, respiratory virus, war. With each step, the governing classes of the west get more reckless and paralytic. Two million refugees in a first fortnight: Where does this end?
Aw, don't worry, the Leader of the Free World is on top of things:
PRES. BIDEN: "How did we get to the place where, you know, Putin decides he's gonna just invade Russia? Nothing like this has happened since World War II." pic.twitter.com/ljLX9v2OIw
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) March 6, 2022
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with our latest Clubland Q&A, which dealt mostly with war, near and far. Rick McGinnis's weekly film date was Bob Fosse and All That Jazz, and our Sunday song selection remembered a somebody who sang "Nobody". Our marquee presentation was the launch of our latest Tale for Our Time: Sir Sacheverell Sitwell's Journey through the Bucovina - land of eternally shifting borders and peoples, then as now. Part Two airs tonight.
If you were too busy demanding your local concert hall cancel "The Flight of the Bumble Bee" because Rimsky Korsakov has been silent on Putin, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
Clubland Q&A and Tales for Our Time are special productions for The Mark Steyn Club.