Rod Dreher links to this utterly ludicrous article in WashPo that he seems to take seriously even though one would expect him to know better:

It took me 15 minutes to disentangle who these utterly imaginary “Ukraine insurgents” might be. The idea seems to be that if Russia invades again (which is a big if), and if it manages to retain any territory beyond what it now has (which it already failed to do several times), and if in the occupied territories a Ukrainian insurgency will form (which never happened in any previously occupied territories), and if the Ukrainian regular army decides not to participate in the conflict in any way (which never happened before and would be insane), then Biden might want to arm those imaginary insurgents (which he won’t because they aren’t real and he’s not interested).

This is the definition of fake news. An intelligent person who has seen these fakes being created for years at this point asks, why is such a transparent, silly lie being created now? What purpose does it serve?

The answer is painfully obvious. The Biden administration desperately needs a success story. Inventing a fake scenario of a looming military conflict with Russia gives Biden a chance later to pretend that he was successful at averting a major crisis.

This is an electoral strategy, and a pretty pathetic, limp-wristed one. It’s the WashPo, for Pete’s sake! All it does is print lies that are half-heartedly fed to it by the administration.

Yet people keep buying into the lies.

P.S. Yes, it’s +17° Celsius here. It’s ridiculous.

I saw an interview with a male swimmer who has declared himself a woman and is breaking all of the women’s swimming records, and I remembered this old Soviet joke.

Americans decided to send a spy into the USSR. They trained him for years. The spy learned to speak Russian perfectly. He learned how to behave, gesticulate, and dress. He was fitted out with Soviet-made clothes. Even his hair was cut by a bad, inexperienced barber to make it look like a Soviet haircut.

Finally, the spy crosses the border into Western Ukraine. He walks down the street of a small village, and the first Soviet person he meets is an old Ukrainian woman.

“Hello!” he says.

“Hello, American spy,” says the woman.

“How did you figure it out so fast??” exclaims the spy. “What gave me away?”

“You are black,” says the woman.

The joke is at least 40 years old but it’s as fresh as ever.

A small quote from the essay that I linked in the previous post. This encapsulates my position on getting myself (not you, you do whatever you want) vaccinated perfectly. I don’t worry about side effects. But I don’t want to participate in the vaccine passport regime. It’s terrible, and it leads to very bad places.

But for now, it is enough to say that my personal Vaccine Moment has arrived. Where once I was on the fence, now I am firmly off it. Even if I were to be convinced that these vaccines worked safely, I could never get myself a vaccine passport and acquiesce in the technological segregation of society. I could never scan my code without shivering. I cannot participate in this.

I found a link to a writer’s Substack on Rod Dreher’s blog, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. This long essay on the biopolitical security state is brilliant. I know I’m preaching to the converted here but I don’t know how to get across to people what a dangerous game we are collectively playing. Please read, share, and stay strong.

The rushed and hysterical introduction of vaccine passports in Chicago and other cities, the partial shutdowns in Montreal, etc show that people have not caught on to the seasonality of the virus. I was hoping they would but, apparently, fear is stronger than rationality.

Let’s hope they catch on in the next cycle. August is the peak wave in the South, January is peak wave in the North.

It’s possible that they might need two more cycles after the current one to notice the seasonality and stop perceiving each wave as a shocking, unpredictable development. Please do your part gently and softly to introduce the word “seasonality” into people’s perception of the situation. In my experience, when I say, in the most caring and unthreatening voice possible, “it’s a seasonal virus,” people look shell-shocked, and then a realization dawns on their dumb little faces. It’s actually quite beautiful to see the timid awakening of a tiny part of their atrophied brain function.

This administration can’t give people anything except for a sense of fake moral superiority. So that’s what it gives in spades. This is the definition of the postmaterial realm of politics.

And yes, Trump did that too with his endless “build the wall” while not building any wall.