Lords A'Leaping
I have discovered this year that my dominant genealogical roots trace back to three distinct geographical areas: the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey, the Scottish Highlands, and County Clare, Ireland.
For those familiar with these regions, it should be readily understood that the blood that courses through my veins is not only averse to concentrations of population, but also intractably rebellious against imagined authority.
My progenitors left the British Isles no later than the mid-19th century, and were among the original European settlers of the seemingly God-forsaken desert expanses of the Great Basin of North America — places no one else wanted, at least back then.
As those who have followed me for any length of time can likely appreciate, this more granular knowledge of my genetic inheritance has been received with pride and approbation. It is fully consonant with my long-established predispositions.
I instinctively disdain the vanity and unwarranted hubris of the self-anointed “nobility” of western civilization.
As I have often mockingly observed, for the scant remnant of the British aristocracy, it is always the early spring of 1912, and the Titanic is still at the docks.
British noble "Lord Ashcroft” (Michael Anthony Ashcroft, b. 1946), in his most recent opinion piece (widely disseminated by the venerable British propaganda tabloid The Telegraph), with all the imagined authority he can muster, would persuade us that the collective west must act now to stop Russia in its tracks before its resounding victory against the fading empire's #MotherOfAllProxyArmies in Ukraine is set in stone.
He, along with a burgeoning host of others, now realizes that the proxy war gambit against Russia is a hopeless bust. And notwithstanding the degree to which western weakness has been indelibly exposed over the past two years, "Lord Ashcroft” imagines victory can yet be snatched from the jaws of defeat if only the rapidly dwindling western powers will band together one last time to put the Slavic barbarians in their place.
In other words, he imagines that the combined military power and tactical prowess of the empire and its dutiful vassals can be boldly employed to restore order to the galaxy.
It's utter madness, of course.
The iceberg awaits just over the horizon, and this doomed ship's arrogance cannot be arrested in time to avoid its appointed fate.
The stems of the three civilizational powers of Russia, China, and Iran have brought forth fresh strength from their roots, and will reign in their respective vineyards for a season, even as the terminally degenerate last fruits of the latter-day Roman world drop from the vine to the ground, and their tall ships to the depths of the sea.