Ukraine is not as much of an oligarchy as Russia but the economic stratification is still outrageous. If we add up the fortunes of Ukraine’s 100 richest people, they will equal 22% of the country’s entire GDP. As a comparison, in the US the richest 400 people possess the equivalent of the 13% of the country’s GDP (which is, obviously, still a lot but not as bad as in Ukraine.) 

The war with Russia, however, is making an impact on the economy. The Ukrainian oligarchs have lost over $13 billion since the beginning of the Russian invasion. Since they were not creating any wealth for the country, it’s hard for me to feel bad for them.

An article I read on the subject today (the link is in Russian) points out that an average Ukrainian with the median monthly salary of $267 would have to work for 3,370,786 years and 7 months to make a fortune similar to that of Ukraine’s richest ban, the Donetsk bandit Rinat Akhmetov. 

Some freak of nature threw a plastic bottle into the Ondatra Creek. You really have to be a disgusting creature to throw around plastic bottles or other sorts of garbage. The nature we have around here is truly majestic. I don’t get people who find it too hard to walk to a garbage can with their plastic bottles.

N is now trying to fish the bottle out of the creek.

I was asked to comment on the following:

Vladimir Putin and Mikhail Gorbachev could not be more different as leaders. But they are both proud Russians who don’t think their nation is getting its due. They are like “ bent twigs springing back after being stepped on,” in the phrase Isaiah Berlin used to describe how resentment and aggressive nationalism are rooted in the backlash against humiliation.

The narrative of the Russians’ hurt feelings is spreading like a forest fire. For the past 20 years, Russia has done nothing but invade, torture and persecute its neighbors. Today, a massive number of Russian troops is edging closer to the border with Ukraine.

For some reason, though, there are no articles about the hurt feelings, resentments or humiliations of Georgians or Ukrainians. This is the weirdest situation anybody can imagine: everybody is fussing over the hurt feelings of victimizers while paying no attention to the victims.

” Not getting their due” is the central organizing idea of Russian national identity. As all national identities, it’s a fiction, a myth. If every other country on the globe were to disappear, Russians would still feel aggrieved and slighted because that’s the foundation of their identity building.

This is all so clear and so obvious, yet the idiot Liberals are joyfully lapping this shit up because the narrative of aggrieved Russians feeds into their intense negative – vector patriotism. They find it intolerable that the US was omitted from the narrative of Putin ‘ s invasion of Ukraine. The story of aggrieved Russians allows these American Liberals to return to their favorite pastime of delicious, narcissistic self flagellation.

Found it at the Epicene Cyborg blog which is a treasure trove of great links:

In 2001, soon after George W Bush was inaugurated, I called the White House press office for comment on the latest IRS income data. The deputy spokesperson expressed disbelief at the official figures I read, so much so that I asked, “What do you think is the median income shown on tax returns in America?” The answer: $250,000. The actual figure at the time: $28,000.

The “but men and women are different!” freaks tend to become more active during weekends. Today, I already spammed 4 comments from 3 different ones. Their extreme loneliness and an incapacity to form healthy, loving relationships becomes more intolerable on weekends, so they go online to reaffirm that the way of thinking that is causing them so much grief is valid.

The only cause for a protracted misery in one’s personal life is entertaining one or several erroneous beliefs. Removing them will cure the problem once and for all and give one a blissful personal life. Sadly, people prefer to look absolutely anywhere for explanations of their problems to avoid looking inside themselves.

And there are still facile idiots who think that sending troops to fight ISIS was wrong:

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported Tuesday that it received a video showing fighters believed to be ISIS militants stoning a woman to death in the presence of her father after accusing her of adultery. The video, which the London-based monitoring group said was recorded in Hama, where ISIS has seized large swathes of land, showed the woman pleading her father for forgiveness. Two ISIS militants approached the father and pressed him to “forgive” his daughter because “she will depart life and meet God.” One of the militants then began explaining to the woman the reason why she had to be “stoned,” saying that she would set an example for other women not to practice adultery.

But there is good news:

President Barack Obama is sending up to 1,500 more soldiers to Iraq to train Iraqi and Kurdish forces to fight ISIS, in a deployment that would almost double the total number of American troops there to 2,900.

Of course, it isn’t nearly enough but it’s something.

Since we have considered our anti-whetstones, let’s discuss what our whetstones are. Jonathan Mayhew says:

Spain is my whetstone. Maybe one of my whetstones, because the blog is too; other conferences I might go to. My Thursday tertulia can act like that as well, though the conversation tends to be more social than intellectual there. Without this one has “one thought less, each year,” so to speak.

A whetstone is an activity, an experience, or a person that makes your mind sharper, gives you a heightened consciousness of the life of intellect, and helps you generate new ideas. My major whetstones are:

1. Spending time with my sister. She has a very intense professional and intellectual life and being around her makes me think faster, move faster, and want to achieve as much as she does.

2. Airports. The crowds of people, the constant movement, the sense of new arrivals and departures, seeing all of those people on the go, moving with a sense of purpose really inspires me and makes me think more clearly and with a better sense of direction. Also, the airplanes soaring into the skies make me want to soar intellectually, so to speak.

3. Malls or big department stores. I’m fairly starved of sensory impressions in the small town where I live. There are too few people, too few changes, everything is always the same, repetitive, routinish. At least, at a mall there are crowds of different people, objects with different textures that I can touch, various new smells I can inhale.

4. Big cities but not the ones like St. Louis that are empty and dead. Only the cities where there are crowds of people outside day and night.

5. Conferences sometimes. But not nearly often enough. One conference that really charged me up was the one where a very interesting performance artist from Latin America gave a talk and showed her art. 

So ideally, I would take an airplane to meet my sister somewhere in Berlin or Barcelona to go to a department store together and then visit an exhibition of modern art. That would totally result in a whole new book project or at least a few articles.

What are your whetstones?

There seems to have been a leak to the effect that the grand jury will refuse to return an indictment against the officer who shot Michael Brown. There is also a rumor that the decision will be handed down very soon and that there will be massive protests in Ferguson and neighboring towns.

These are just rumors I’m sharing. I have no definitive source to quote. All I know is that today I was warned not to go near St. Louis in the coming days by three different people.

Jonathan Mayhew posted a great question on his blog:

What’s your anti-whetstone?

It could be alcohol. For me, that is a way of shutting my mind down from time to time. Otherwise, the weight of intelligence could be overwhelming.

It could be the ease of not having to struggle very much to have your ideas accepted. You don’t have to be sharp because you are in a mediocre environment.

Maybe it’s a social thing: you can’t be as sharp as you want because that would make it socially uncomfortable for you. It’s easier not to be the asshole and just go along with the flow.

The anti-whetstone is what dulls your mind, over the long term.

Research is like brushing teeth. It works best if done for limited stretches of time on a daily basis. But if you do it for five hours straight once a month, the activity becomes quite useless.