[Note by Jack Wheeler: Early yesterday morning (1/24), the London Daily Mail ran this cover story by British former (and quite possibly the future) Prime Minister Boris Johnson.  By early this morning (1/25), Germany got the message, Der Spiegal announcing: Ukraine Will Receive 80 Leopard Tanks from Germany and Other European Countries, and the Wall Street Journal reporting: White House Approves Sending Abrams Tanks to Ukraine.  Thanks, Boris!]

Come with me into the ochre mud of the churchyard in Bucha, past the bullet-riddled church of St Andrew. Stand over the graves of some of the 416 inhabitants of this town – 9 of them children – who were shot by the Russians in an attempt to terrify the rest.

Look at the photos of their corpses, their hands tied behind their backs, left in the street to rot or to be eaten by dogs.

Stand with me by the blackened remains of an apartment block in Borodyanka, the twisted plumbing and smashed children's toys. Look at what just one of Putin's 500kg airborne bombs can do to an eight-story building.

Try to meet the pleading eyes of the people who pulled 162 corpses from the rubble, and who searched for the 28 whose remains were never found.

Look at those brave Ukrainians and answer me this question: just what the hell are we waiting for?

Why does the world need a Ukrainian victory?  The answer is inarguable.

Because the world must help Ukraine to stop Russia’s genocidal war before the latter’s fascism and aggression spread and are copied by other nations.

Let’s unpack that with 14 specific reasons:

1. To halt atrocity.  Russia's occupation is genocidal.  Wherever the Ukrainians recover territory, they save lives, and re-establish the principle that people have a right not to be tortured, deported, and murdered.

2. To preserve the international legal order.  Its basis is that one country may not invade another and annex its territory, as Russia seeks to do.  Russia's war of aggression is obviously illegal, but the legal order does not defend itself.

3. To end an era of empire.  This could be the last war fought on the colonial logic that another state and people do not exist.  But this turning point is reached only if Russia loses.

For all Joe Biden’s talk about “semi-fascist” and “un-American,” “ultra-MAGA” Republicans, it is the Democratic Party that has far more radically changed. It is descended into a woke, neo-socialist, radically green party. And it is committed, as Barack Obama once promised, to fundamentally transforming America. How it proceeds with that agenda is now as entirely predictable as it is creepy.

Sometimes an institution or movement turns on the society that supports it, harming the whole for its own benefit. A public bureaucracy can forget its underlying purpose and focus on perpetuating itself, or an organization comes to believe that the rest of society owes it special privileges. When an organ within the body of society becomes thus corrupted, and proves itself unwilling to reform, society must excise the diseased tissue before it spreads.

Cancer starts when cells within an organ begin to operate outside the strictures and rules that the body’s cells were programmed to follow.

As a cancer grows, it slowly corrupts the organ it arose within, impairing or changing its function. Demanding more nourishment to support its own rapid growth, it saps the body’s ability to support the rest of its billions of cells. In time the whole body deteriorates, though the cancer continues to grow and extract nourishment to the end, effectively repurposing the body solely towards its own support.

Death may be averted by removing the offending cancer, or even the entire organ from which it arose. But if the organ is vital to survival or the cancer has infiltrated other vital organs, excision is not possible. Sometimes the cancer may be poisoned or killed with radiation or immunotherapy without killing the entire body. But if it cannot be so dealt with, it takes the entire body down with it. This is a relatively common way to die.

Society is in many ways like the human body. Its various organs perform their functions to support the whole, all interdependent for survival. Corruption of one organ will, if left unchecked, corrupt the whole body.

The call to ban gas stoves in the U.S., based on environmental concerns, certainly drew backlash from an angry public tired of seeing their household appliances, critical possessions and standard of living being targeted.

After all, they've already gotten our incandescent light bulbs and flush toilets in many quarters. They've meddled with the design of our cars and guns. They're trying to get our meat, telling us to eat bugs instead. Many consumers, and professional chefs, who say gas is best for cooking, simply put their collective foot down.

Where did this lunacy come from?

About where you'd expect -- from our enemies.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is recognized for three things: (1) She was the first Hispanic female justice on the Court; (2) She’s a leftist’s leftist; and (3) she is not wise but is almost staggeringly ignorant and biased.

All those factors benefit Democrats, but now they’re getting worried, not because of her manifest legal and intellectual deficits but because there’s a possibility that they will not hold the White House and Senate after the 2024 election.

Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor to the Supreme Court in 2009, following her eleven-year stint as a Clinton appointee on the Second Circuit. Of Puerto Rican heritage, she has the Ivy League credentials that mean so much to Democrats. No matter that she got them being an affirmative action baby.