(*P.O.E.S. – Person Of Extreme Stupidity)

This pre-empts Time’s Person of the Year by 10 months.  If Time is still around to award it then, I predict that Putin will be the winner, hands down.  It’s going to take an awful lot to displace him.  TS Eliot’s 1925 poem, The Hollow Men, ended with the lines:  This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.

Wrong, but then again, they hadn’t discovered the neutron yet, let alone the nuclear bomb, and it was to be 27 years before the unfortunate Mrs Putin would carry the spawn of the devil to term.  This single Horseman of the Apocalypse made the Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2007 when he completed his first term of office.  Time was rather presentient as they stated in the accompanying article, “If Russia fails, all bets are off for the 21st century.”  Perhaps they should have said, “If Putin fails, …”  After the drunken and chaotic Yeltsin years, Russia hankered for stability, order and the respect of being a superpower, even if it was oppressive dictatorships that provided it.  Cometh the hour, cometh the maniac – Putin.  Using all the techniques from the Communist playbook, he has taken complete control of the country until 2036 and has stopped all forms of opposition by assassinations and secret trials on trumped up charges – ask Novalny.

Using extensive false flag techniques, outright lying that the West was the aggressor and peddling false historical facts concerning the Ukraine, Putin justified the invasion of Ukraine in his and his coterie’s warped minds.  Unfortunately for his troops this wasn’t Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 when a column of tanks could reinstall a puppet regime.  The Ukrainians have fought back.  As his triumphant invasion has stalled, the rhetoric has increasingly become unhinged to the point that he is effectively threatening nuclear Armageddon in the West. 

The West: I raise you 5 sanctions.  Putin: I raise you 2000 nuclear warheads.

How do you begin to negotiate with a P.O.E.S.?