I’m in North Carolina, and it’s very warm. Today is a bad day in the war, so I’m not in a great place. While I traveled, I read a novel titled Un amor by the Spanish writer Sara Mesa. This novel is from 2020, so it hasn’t been translated yet, but Mesa’s earlier novels have appeared in translation. I particularly recommend Scar. It’s very good.

Mesa is one of the leading Spanish writers today. She’s my age, which is youngish for an author, and Mesa’s skill grows massively from one novel to another. Un amor is very good. Clear, unpretentious, strong writing. I rarely see my own experience in the literary depictions of love but what Mesa describes is exactly what I understand as love. It’s intense, relentless, and obsessive.

An excellent novel that helped me not think about the war all the time. I can’t tell you, friends, how exhausting it is to live completely dependent on the damn war. A Ukrainian who’s under the bombs every day wrote today that we shouldn’t let the war reduce the amount of happiness that exists in the world, and that people who are safe should go do things he can’t do and really enjoy them. But it’s hard.

One thing people need to remember that Russians who are trying to emigrate from Russia right now aren’t leaving because they have a problem with Putinism or the war. They are leaving because they miss Starbucks, Instagram, and their credit cards. Wherever they go, they’ll promote the same values that have caused the war.

Dissident Russians are a myth. The appeals to facilitate the immigration process for citizens of Russia are deeply misguided. We have enough America-haters right here. Honestly, who needs more?

Immigration isn’t an answer to everything. These people should go back home and make things right, not inflict their dysfunction on all of us.

Please never donate to the Red Cross again. I never donated them because they are extraordinarily corrupt but now there’s even more reason to not waste money on them.

Elderly people in Ukraine who are being evacuated from Mykolaiv. The subtitles are in English:

https://twitter.com/antiputler_news/status/1506931836735434752?t=vjIH0_4nZ2J44cPVws8rWw&s=19

In the video, a group of unarmed Ukrainians are singing the national anthem as they face off with heavily armed Russians. I promise there are no horrors in this video:

https://twitter.com/AlexandruC4/status/1506761204462669834?t=ulTYPXMDOyDmVwTB4MbVyg&s=19

I cried until my eyes stopped opening.

P.S. People are asking what the Ukrainians are saying before they start to sing. They say, “calm down, put your weapon down, just calm down already, you moron.” Ukrainians on the ground know exactly what I’ve been saying all along: Russians are experiencing a massive collective freakout.

This is the real problem with Judge Jackson:

She’s terrified. Terrified of a tiny group of men in dresses to the point where she prefers to look like a complete idiot than to say what a woman is. How can it be a good idea to have a Supreme Court Justice who is so scared of a tiny interest group that she can’t perform an intellectual operation accessible to most 4-year-olds?

Ironically, Jackson was only nominated because she is a woman, as the person nominating her said openly. I assume President Biden isn’t a biologist either. How did he manage to figure out that Judge Brown is a woman if it’s such a fraught task?

Twenty-first century. And we are at a point where we are afraid to say that we know what a woman is.

And who says if they feel threatened? Remember, what you feel is the reality. The Russians will decide if they feel threatened. We are watching the idea of a nuclear war being normalized. It’s being mentioned daily as a possibility on Russian TV. Now things have progressed to the point where a leading government official feels comfortable saying it. Russians are clearly trying to talk themselves into a nuclear strike. This is a closed system that admits no feedback.

Going back to the conversation of whether Russia or China is more dangerous. Is the Chinese government openly and aggressively priming its population for a nuclear war? I don’t think so.

Here is a really fun exercise I did today. Draw the following graph (or whatever you call it, I’m not much of a mathematician):

Now put the things and the people that are foundational to your life wherever it feels right. Don’t overthink it. What makes you who you are? What are the things and the people that are central to your sense of self? Arrange them in circles of any size wherever you want on this graph.

Mine, for instance, has books at the very center, my inner life and the capacity to express my thoughts at the bottom, Klara on the right-side arrow, etc. Do yours (come on, it’s just for fun), and then I’ll explain how to glean insight from all of it.

After you have filled the graph, here is how to interpret it:

Turns out that women tend to put their children on the right side of the horizontal axis. I did that, too. These are the women who tend to sacrifice themselves on the altar of “being a good mother,” which is not good. In a healthy situation, children are on thee bottom part of the vertical axis.

Forget the Russians who are currently in Russia. What about the immigrants from Russia? Where are they in all this?

I’ve had people (acquaintances, colleagues, etc) from all over the world reach out to me. Somebody from India I worked with briefly in 2009 and never saw since. Somebody from Nigeria I used to know years ago. A guy from Mexico who was in my BA program with me. And so on. People do the sweetest, kindest things to show support. People who really don’t have to care.

No Russian people have manifested themselves, though. Nobody reached out to say, “hey, I know you have relatives in Kharkiv, is everybody OK?” Colleagues, acquaintances, relatives – zero contact. Once again, I’m talking about immigrants. So please don’t tell me they are scared of Putin. Besides, I’m not looking for public statements. But pretending all of a sudden that your colleague, acquaintance, brother doesn’t exist? That’s not great.

And it’s not just me. I asked around. Nobody has heard anything from their Russians.

Things are getting so dire for the Russians that they have started sending their spetznaz (Special Rapid Response Units that are the approximate equivalent of the SWAT teams in the US) to the war. But spetznaz aren’t troops. They are police. They are useless in a war.

To give a single example of what this means, the spetznaz of the Russian city of Vladimir – which hadn’t had a single casualty in 30 years according to its own data – yesterday buried its entire command. Four lieutenant colonels dead.

If that’s a good military strategy – just sending people to die as cannon fodder – what’s a bad one?

It’s another question why the families and friends of the dead officers don’t seem to have a problem with what’s happening.