^{Polina, who was nine or 10 years old, was shot dead alongside her parents by Russian Military}

Alive one minute, dead the next. Can there ever be a valid reason or excuse for this barbarity? Why should Putin be allowed to be alive when because of his greed for power, this little girl is dead?

It’s not countries that start wars, it’s individuals.

It was March 16th 1935 when Adolf Hitler informed the world he was re-arming Germany in direct breach of the Treaty of Versailles . A modern air force, an army of half a million men, emerged from that declaration and Britain, France, and the League of Nations did nothing to stop it.

The world was too busy partying, enjoying peace after the war to end all wars was won in 1918. Twenty million dead and another twenty-one million wounded was truly something to party about. Meanwhile, Germany steamed ahead with its military buildup, while the West depleted its military, in the sure knowledge it was unlikely to be needed again.

But is was needed again, and the sloth-replicating governments of the rest of Europe and the United States were caught off-guard when Hitler made a fool of the then Prime Minister of Britain, Neville Chamberlain, and with Russian support, invaded Poland and massacred between 150,000 and 200,000 Polish civilians.

When Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia in 2012 the West was busy partying yet again. This time the Cold War was over. The West had won yet again when Reagan and Gorbachev shook hands after signing the INF treaty in late 1987.  The USSR was being demolished and Russia was no longer a threat to the rest of the world. Germany was re-united, the wall had come down. Perestroika and Glasnost were the two words on everyone’s lips in the 1980s and early nineties.

Yet again, the West rested on its laurels, contenting itself with the relatively minor squabbles of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, to hone it’s ever-depleting militaries.

Putin entrenched his power as a Russian dictator over the years. No-one recognised the burning hatred and frustration in his cold heart at the loss of an empire that could have been his to control. Inflaming that hatred was the knowledge gnawing at his innards, that the United States had broken it’s promises to Gorbachev, and no sooner was he out of power than first Reagan, and later George W Bush, moved missile bases into what were once satellite Russian nations on that country’s border.

If Western governments were aware of the Russian military build-up ordered by Putin, they certainly seemed unconcerned. There couldn’t possibly be a war between two nuclear powers. It would end in mutual destruction. Wasn’t that the whole point of a nuclear deterrent?

The lessons of the 1930s had not been learned. Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 on the pretext of claiming back territory once German.  Putin has now invaded Ukraine on the exact same pretext. Meanwhile, the rest of the world stands by and does nothing but make speeches of condemnation against the aggressor.

In 1939, Britain and France had a treaty of protection with Poland. When Germany, and two weeks later Russia, invaded Poland neither Britain, nor France, made much effort to assist the Poles.

There is no such treaty with Ukraine. It has asked repeatedly to join NATO and been refused on each occasion, no doubt in an effort to appease Putin, rather than for any genuine grievance. Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, are all NATO members. Only Belarus, under the harsh dictator and Putin supporter, Lukashenko, and Ukraine, a democratic nation, are not NATO members verging onto the Russian border.

Putin is now threatening nuclear war against the West, if so much as one Western soldier sets foot in Ukraine. The West sits impotent. Will yet another civilian massacre take place in Ukraine as it did in Poland in 1939?

And when Putin conquers Ukraine and turns his military against Latvia, or Lithuania, or Romania, or maybe for a second time in recent history, against Poland, where will the West be then? It cannot sit on its hands then. According to the NATO pact, “An attack on one is an attack on all.”

When power turned a man into a madman, we saw the effects in a major world war lasting six devastating years. The next one may be over much more quickly.

At least the little nine or ten year old Ukrainian girl, Polina, along with many of her schoolmates, won’t be around to suffer it.

 

 

 

It’s been a long time since a post was written on Sparrow Chat. On April 11th 2021 I wrote an article entitled, “When The Tears Have Dried,”  following the loss of my wife to cancer. I did try to keep the blog going, but when grief is paramount everything I would normally consider writing about seemed somehow trivial and not worthy of effort.

I really wanted to write about the loss of my wife, but it was impossible. To try was to induce a flood of tears, and even now I cannot find the stamina to keep them at bay long enough to write even these two short paragraphs.

So, a change of subject is required, and I found it in today’s Guardian newspaper. It appears that Mastercard has been fined £31.5 million for price fixing with other companies involved in running and distributing pre-paid debit  cards.

I’d not had much to do with pre-paid plastic cards, but after twelve months on my own in a foreign country with no friends and only one neighbour who speaks an unintelligible amalgam of Breton French, I was in desperate need of some company, preferably of the female variety. As I live in the wilds of Brittany and the only females around, apart from cows, are farmer’s wives I turned somewhat reluctantly to the internet chat and dating sites.

My late wife and I met on a dating site. She was in America and I was in Wales in the UK, and the site was Yahoo’s “Find a Friend.”  Totally free, with no adverts, and even a box to tick for “Pen Pals Only,” it bore no relation to the highly commercialized, advert-ridden, glossy, expensive, caricatures pervading this genre today.

I rapidly learned that ‘Free’ meant you didn’t pay an exorbitant fee to become a member. That came later, after going to much trouble to input a ton of information on yourself that took a good hour or more. The relief of completion and the exhilaration of expecting at any moment a bevy of suitable ladies to be paraded before one’s eyes, rapidly dwindled when the resulting next page was a price list of what was available for a considerable sum of money.

Having just expended all that energy setting up my ‘profile’ I muttered a few well chosen expletives at what I perceived to be the gang of crooks who ran the site, then did what I imagine most fellows did at this point, begrudgingly coughed up the minimum sum required.

Finally, the ladies began to show themselves. It wasn’t long before I was selecting likely females and offering myself as the answer to these maiden’s prayers.  After a goodly selection, I settled back and waited for the responses to come flooding in. Needless to say, there weren’t any. Not one of my selected ladies bothered to show any response, least of all swooning at my photos or pledging undying love.

Meanwhile, my ‘profile’ had gone live, and messages began to appear in my site ‘Inbox’. Oh dear, now I’m no spring chicken, but it was obvious these were ladies of very advanced years. It saddened me that loneliness drove them to expose themselves in this way, but they were not for me.

Eventually, I cancelled my subscription and a friend suggested I try a site called Mingle2. In hindsight I’m not sure I should call him a friend.

“Oh, yes,” he enthused, “there’s great girls on Mingle2!“

Yes, there are great girls on Mingle2. It also houses probably the greatest collection of scammers, fraudsters, and general criminals of any dating site online.

At first glance, many of the photos could have come straight from Vogue. I’m sure many of them did. I was inundated with offers of lifelong love from ladies young enough to not just be my daughter, but my grand-daughter. Their persistence, assurances that “age means nothing in love,” and even offers to move in with me right away, were at first an effective boost to my ego, until I learned a new phrase that rapidly took some of that shine away.

“I need a recharge.”

The first time I heard it, from a young woman in her thirties, left me scratching my head. Was this some new sexual proposition I’d not heard before? It certainly conjured up a myriad of possibilities in my fertile imagination. I asked, as delicately as I could manage, for clarification.

“A recharge,” was the response, “I need a recharge on my PCS card. Are you going to help me out?”

Okay, I was now beginning to comprehend that this wasn’t some new method of engaging in any romantic activity. Further investigation revealed that the lady in question held a pre-paid debit card issued by Mastercard. In order to use it, she – or more likely, me – would go to a website online that sold ‘codes’, colloquially known as ‘coupons’, and for a fee it was possible to buy one of these codes, with a value ranging from 50€ to 250€, present the code to the lady who would then upload it to her PCS card, which she could then use to purchase anything that could be purchased using a credit card such as Mastercard.

After explaining that I never gave money to someone I hadn’t met, and was not going to make an exception for her, I rapidly found myself no longer chatting with the lady. Oh well, better luck next time.

No, there was no better luck, although some women would happily keep up a conversation for weeks before raising the subject. It was lulling the unfortunate male into a false sense of security.

I soon came to realize that Mingle2 was awash with women whose only reason for being there was to make a dishonest living. If they had no joy with one man, they simply moved on to another.

It was prostitution without sex. I’m quite sure some of these ‘girls’ were actually men who downloaded photos of beautiful women and used them to entrap their victims. One I encountered, used images of an America porn star. Google ‘Lens’ brought that to light, though it’s not such a good tool since Google has discovered they make a lot of money from it by using it to sell stuff.

There are some genuine ladies on Mingle2, but they’re hard to find. Usually, like me, they’ve been directed there by an ill-informed friend.

Mastercard’s large £31.5 million fine, as reported in the Guardian today, was not specifically about PCS cards, but there is no doubt much of the business they make from such cards is through their use for fraudulent scamming on the internet. I’m sure Mingle2  isn’t the only site where it’s prevalent.  From my experience, it’s obvious that there’s a whole host of women, mainly French on Mingle2, making a good living by offering their love and affection to men in return for a ‘coupon’.  Once the man has made the mistake of coughing up the money, they find their loved-one either disappears, or stays until that particular well runs dry, before moving on to their next victim.

As for Mastercard, they’ll always make a profit. A fine of £31.5 million is a drop in the ocean to them.

Meanwhile their product is a great tool for the anonymous scammers and fraudsters who prey on lonely men.

^{(With acknowledgement to the New Yorker Magazine)}

No fuel at the pumps, Mister Brit? No food on the supermarket shelves, Mrs Brit?  Who is to blame for this catastrophe? Apparently not your government, Mr and Mrs Brit. It can’t all be because of Brexit, can it? No, of course not, that nice Mister Johnson is quite adamant about that.

It’s such a pity he’s a liar. Or, maybe he’s just deluding himself? The evidence just doesn’t seem to back him up. Certainly, the pandemic has caused economic problems worldwide, but there’s plenty of fuel and food available throughout Europe – that’s the set of nations you guys once belonged to – and British politician’s don’t seem to have noticed there’s no shortage of fuel at the pumps or food on the supermarket shelves, in Northern Ireland. How can that be? Because Northern Ireland is still technically a part of the European Union. Remember that border down the Irish Sea, that Boris Johnson said he’d never agree to when Theresa May projected it, yet soon latched onto when it was his turn at  negotiating Brexit.

Northern Ireland can get it’s fuel and food through the south, again an EU member, because there’s an open border between the two.  Which seems to prove Mister Johnson and his bunch of political gangsters are somewhat skewed in their assessments.

Most Europeans agree. The general consensus is that you guys on your tiny island only have yourselves to blame.

“We tried to talk you out of it,” they cry, “but you decided otherwise. Now you have to face the consequences.”

According to a recent editorial in the French newspaper, ‘Libération’:

La sortie du Royaume-Uni de l’UE entraîne de nombreuses pénuries en main-d’œuvre et en produits outre-Manche. Pendant ce temps-là, Boris Johnson préfère, lui, disserter sur l’affaire des sous-marins français…

“After Brexit, the risk of disaster
The UK’s exit from the EU is causing numerous labor and product shortages across the Channel. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson prefers to discuss the affair of the French submarines.

There is already a shortage of English condoms, which the English call French letters. The foreign plumbers have gone to the English, translated as “take French leave”. And the shortage of vegetables means that many people have to make do with an English-style dish, the famous French cuts. And nothing is more embarrassing than the disappearance from supermarkets of toilet paper, an English derivative of the French word “toile”. Two years after the start of Brexit, hundreds of thousands of drivers, farmers, waiters, plumbers and even doctors, working in Britain with their European passports, have returned to their country with no intention of returning. The consequences were said to be unforeseeable, and yet observers had predicted, for example, that McDonald’s restaurants would no longer be able to serve milkshakes or that it would be difficult to find cans of Coca-Cola…”

Numerous other European media outlets contain similar, somewhat scathing, reports of the British government’s ineptitude and the consequences of abandoning a huge trading partner on their doorstep, for the vain hope of obtaining a “very substantial” trade deal with Donald Trump’s USA.

It’s not just the Europeans calling out the British government over its bungling of Brexit, America’s largest news media outlet, CNN, carried the September 29  headline:

“Boris Johnson’s Brexit choices are making Britain’s fuel and food shortages worse”

“Although shortages, supply chain delays and rising food and energy costs are affecting several major economies, including the United States, China and Germany, Britain is suffering more than most because of Brexit.

Specifically, the form of Brexit pursued by the UK government — which introduced stringent immigration policies and took Britain out the EU market for goods and energy, making it much harder for British companies to hire European workers and much more costly for them to do business with the country’s single biggest trading partner.

It didn’t have to be this way — there were other options for a future EU-UK relationship. Worker shortages, for example, were not an inevitable outcome of Brexit, nor was going it alone on energy. But in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s ideological rush to “get Brexit done” amid fraught negotiations with the European Union, agreements in several crucial areas, including energy, were sidelined…”

No fuel at the pumps, Mister Brit? No food on the supermarket shelves, Mrs Brit? But you’re not holding Boris Johnson to blame, are you?

It seems the rest of the world isn’t fully in agreement with you.