After the recent Holocaust – related debacles on the blog, I decided to refresh my own knowledge of the Holocaust and realized I didn’t know as much as I thought I did.

Did you know, for instance, that Hitler tried to attract Poland as its ally in a prospective war against the USSR but the Poles were very dedicated to the plan of creating a Jewish state in the territories that had been mandated to the British Empire by the League of Nations in Palestine? So Hitler and the Poles ended up being at odds, and Hitler allied himself temporarily with the USSR against Poland.

And now a question for everybody. What is it that Hitler had against Jews? What sin did he impute to them? And please don’t say world domination because that’s no answer at all. Hitler had nothing against world domination itself. It’s only the supposed Jewish world domination that bugged him. So what were Jews doing that bugged him so much?

From an article in the NYTIMES, I gathered that some naive folks actually expected somebody in Russia to give a damn about the so-called doping scandal. That, of course, didn’t happen.

Russian – speaking people are extremely jaded about things like lying, cheating, stealing, sexual violence, domestic violence, corruption, bribery. None of these acts are considered to be a big deal. Ukrainians are now painfully and slowly trying to extricate themselves from this way of thinking. Russians are yet to see anything wrong with it.

This is all a legacy of the Soviet Union, of course. There, the greatest sin was not having enough money or consumer goods. This bleak, soulless materialism was only reinforced during the bandit wars of the 1990s. Morality could only stand in the way of personal enrichment, so there was no space for it.

In Russia’s war with Ukraine, we have seen mothers and wives (fathers are always absent either physically or in any way that matters) agree to pretend that their sons and husbands never existed for either a payout or a promise of one. More recently we’ve seen complete indifference in Russia to the crash of a Russian plane in Egypt. We’ve seen so many horrible things, and now we are to believe that somebody is going to have anything to say about a sports doping scandal?

The biggest reaction to the scandal will be a flaccid condemnation of the evil West for, once again, scheming against Russia, and that will be it. Once again, Russia will descend into a soporific admiration of its own uncontested greatness.

On the subject of getting rich, I always wanted to become so rich that I’d be able to buy any book that struck my fancy, even a hardcover. Now I can do that but the problem is that I don’t have the time to read all the books I can afford to buy.

At this stage of working on my book, there is a lot more cutting than writing. It’s sad to have to cut but it’s also a good sign. It means that the end is in sight.

As we saw yesterday, candidates for the highest political office in the country prefer to get really easy, boring questions that pose no challenge to them and get very traumatized when moderators do anything but coddle and humor them.

Now, please remember that those whiny students at Yale are children of this same class. Is it surprising that they are just as fragile and want the university to be their “safe space” instead of an intellectual environment?