Month: October 2026

Ukraine: The War I Thought I Understood

Ukraine: The War I Thought I Understood

What I saw in 2019, what I believed in 2022, and what I believe now

The Ukraine I Saw

I went to Ukraine in late 2019 to sell rubber hose.

That is not a metaphor. I run Crushproof Tubing, an industrial and automotive hose manufacturer in Ohio, and the Ohio Department of Development’s IMAGE grant program will pay to have someone on the ground identify potential distributors and customers for an Ohio manufacturer in a foreign market. The partner search came back with prospects in Kyiv, Dnipro, and Lviv, plus a few in Poland.

So I went.

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How I Know What I Think I Know

I have spent about twenty-five years working with quality systems in manufacturing.

That is probably not the opening line you expected on a post about history and politics. Bear with me.

If you have ever sat through a quality audit, you know that an auditor has very little interest in what you know happened. You can stand next to a machine you have run for twenty years, explain exactly why the part failed, and be completely correct — and still get written up.

Why?

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The AI State That Wasn’t There

There are two ways to build a surveillance state.

The first is spectacular.

You announce a revolutionary new artificial-intelligence system. You make a video. You talk about simulation and prediction. You tell everyone that government is about to become smarter, faster, more efficient—and perhaps even capable of anticipating problems before they happen.

Maybe you put the president in the announcement.

Maybe you put Sam Altman in it.

Maybe you attach a number like $25 billion.

Everybody writes about it.

The second way is considerably less interesting.

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DEATH TO AMERICA The History Behind the Chant Part VI – The War Nobody Voted For

On October 10, 1990, a fifteen-year-old girl sat before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and told a horrifying story.

For her protection, she was identified only by her first name: Nayirah.

She had been in a hospital in Kuwait City, she said, when Iraqi soldiers came in. She watched them take premature babies out of the incubators, take the machines, and leave the infants on the cold floor to die.

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