Former Russian president Dmitri Medvedev has said he doubts the US would defend European allies given a theoretical Russian incursion into the Baltics.

— WarMonitor🇺🇦🇬🇧 (@WarMonitor3) April 21, 2026

Medvedev is a washed out drunk but on this issue he’s right. This is exactly why I keep saying that the NATO is not real. The US has been at war in the Middle East for longer than I’ve been alive. Even that is getting harder and harder to sell to voters but that is the baseline. Adding active participation in a war in Europe to that universally disliked baseline is a political suicide for either party.

Instead of the fiction of NATO, there need to be serious, real, regional alliances. Europe hasn’t been preparing to defend itself because of the belief in the non-existent NATO. But America won’t be fighting in Europe because America will be Fighting in the Middle East. I hate it, too, but it’s reality. Let’s live in that reality already.

On a somewhat related note, if a day comes when Ukraine participates in any war to liberate Moldova, Georgia, Belarus, potentially the Baltics, etc, that’s the day on which my support for Ukraine ends. I’ve heard some rumblings in that direction and they are probably idle chatter but just to make it clear.

This is disturbing:

Let me just double click for those of you that don’t know:

This is probably the #1 litigation law firm on the planet submitting AI hallucinated cases in a ~$8 billion bankruptcy case.

This should be a wake up call to EVERYONE.

If it can happen to them, it can happen to you! https://t.co/IcysM46JF2

— SMB Attorney (@SMB_Attorney) April 22, 2026

How far away are we from lawyers on both sides arguing based on invented case law and the judge allowing it because his case law is also invented?

AI invents things. I ask it for simple book lists, and 40% of books on them are invariably completely made up. I asked for a list of Mexican presidents since 1990, and was horrified to find Porfirio Díaz on it. AI does this with the simplest tasks. It creates very biased narratives that aim to please the person who wrote the prompt. That gigantic, wealthy law firms use AI to write their briefs is extremely disturbing.

It’s annoying to me that people refer to the fake texts generated by AI as hallucinations. AI is not human. It’s an algorithm that creates plausibly sounding texts that might of might not coincide with reality.

The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted for paying sources to infiltrate hate groups, a tactic federal agencies have used for decades. https://t.co/flekWop4XX

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) April 22, 2026

Every single news outlet on the Dem spectrum today came out with the line that SPLC’s payments to racist organizations were completely normal payments to “informants.” That these “informants” would get sums ranging in the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars isn’t taken into account when this explanation is advanced.

I can’t imagine finding out that TPUSA kicked back $250,000 to a BLM chapter and trying to find a justification. I’d condemn them heartily and with ease. But the Left seems unable to demonstrate the same intellectual agility it demands from everybody else.

You were wrong about this organization. Acknowledge it and move on. But no, they’ll keep inventing the most pathetic excuses instead of accepting reality.

Some positive news in addition to those from yesterday:

FBI in the last year has caught 8 out of the 10 of its most wanted fugitive list worldwide.

— WarMonitor🇺🇦🇬🇧 (@WarMonitor3) April 22, 2026

A lot of money and effort goes into convincing us that everything is terrible and nothing works. In reality, things are getting better in several areas of life.

That there is no actual organized racism in our country is excellent news. That criminals are brought to justice is also excellent news.

JUST IN: UK officially approves lifetime smoking ban for anyone born after 2008.

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) April 21, 2026

At this point, it’s clear that the British government is simply trying to see if the population has any boundary at all or is it completely browbeaten.

Great Britain is the clearest, most tragic loser in World War 2. On Germany the jury is still out but the Brits were defeated into oblivion. First, they lost their role on the would stage. Then they lost their self-respect. Soon they’ll lose the country.

At 70, I’m trapped in my £850,000 family house – I can’t sell it https://t.co/RZR7aXJ4tg

— The i Paper (@theipaper) April 21, 2026

I’ll spare you the trouble of having to read this drivel. This British pensioner blames “the situation in the Middle East” and a bunch of other things instead of her own incapacity to figure out a reasonable price for the house.

I pray that the Lord decides to punish me for my sins in some way that doesn’t involve robbing me of all intellectual capacity in old age.

I’ll give an example of what I mean by identity-building. For years, decades even, I was a person who wanted to establish a habit of going to the gym. I kept failing at it, and failure to go to the gym became part of my identity.

And then, after years of the most abject failure, I did figure it out and now I go three times a week with zero effort or exercises of willpower. To the contrary, I love going. It’s my favorite thing. Trying to white-knuckle it instead of tackling it through the side of identity was a mistake.

Here’s what I did. An existing strong part of my identity is that I like to gamify everything. I’m also into productivity tracking. Yes, it’s very neoliberal, duh. So I started doing a challenge where I have to reach 10,000 steps a day. I had to sneak in those steps sometimes in the most bizarre conditions. I find it massively entertaining because nobody knows that I’m doing it. I have an 8 to 4 office job. It’s totally a quest to do the steps every day. I’ve managed to do my steps during blizzards, on intercontinental flights, and during all-day diversity trainings. This is so much fun that I didn’t even notice how I became an active, on-the-move person instead of a clinically sedentary one. From there, it was a short journey towards enjoying physical activity and wanting more of it. I downloaded an app, built a graph, and now I have a new game related to weight-lifting.

Of course, many people aren’t into gamification like I am. They have to figure out their own path of integrating things into what actually is their identity.

Something that you do for 2+ years becomes your identity. If you are getting ready to find time to learn Italian, or failing to lose weight, or trying unsuccessfully to quit gambling, that becomes your identity. You become a person who fails at this thing you propose. And it becomes doubly difficult to achieve because now you not only have to do the thing itself but undo this whole identity you created around the failure and start a new identity-building process. The brain won’t relinquish the identity unless there’s another one to take its place. Even then it’s going to be hard because familiarity is very pleasing to the brain.

In short, you are wasting your time planning to learn, start, quit, etc if there’s no identity building happening previously.

I was named after this original Ukrainian drone operator, one of the first Ukrainian Christians, and a very hardcore woman:

It was her grandson who Christianized the entire Kyivan Rus.

The thaw is over. Amazon started banning Vauban Books publications. It also deletes negative reviews of ideologically compliant novels.

Censorship is about to rev back up. This is so tiresome but seemingly unavoidable.