So remember that airport near Kherson?

Yesterday Russians brought troops there for the sixth time in a row. As in number 6.

What happened then?

Ukrainians bombed them. Russians died. Including a Russian lieutenant general.

Yep.

I’m getting some popcorn as I await efforts number 7 and 8.

If you think you can’t concentrate or focus, you are fooling yourself. You are very focused. The problem is, you aren’t focusing on what you think you should. You aren’t managing to force yourself into a persona you have chosen rationally but are resisting with everything you’ve got. Find out what you are really concentrating on. In all likelihood, it will be some crude form of self-numbing. You are concentrating on it not because you are lazy, unfocused, or defective but because without it your psyche is going to blow. Berating yourself for poor focus is like telling a drowning man that he’s concentrating too hard on staying above water and not focusing as well as he should on learning Japanese.

One exercise is to spend 2 hours a day doing nothing. Really nothing. Not looking at a screen, not working out, not talking, not reading. Stare at the sky (or at a wall), and let your thoughts roam. Eventually, after doing this daily, you’ll re-learn to notice the world around you and will start figuring out what hurts, what soothes, and why.

Time and again, I feel taken aback by how poorly these highly paid journalists write. Look at the highlighted sentence. Who writes like this? “Except because” is how my 6-year-old speaks. Cute, childish, but not appropriate for a serious argument. In “so outdated,” the “so” part shouldn’t be there. Either explain “so outdated as what?” or simply say “outdated.”

Another problem – and this is probably the worst issue with this extremely tortured sentence – is the use of “therefore.” There’s absolutely no observable connection between outdated and unfair. I have outdated shoes. That doesn’t make them unfair. Unless you can prove a logical connection (e.g. the tomato is rotten and therefore inedible), you can’t use ‘therefore.’

This is a 10-word sentence, and it’s a mess. And there are many other problems in this tiny excerpt. “Involves how she” sounds tortured. Why not simply say “is that”? 70% do not constitute “almost every case.” “Latest statistics” is clumsy and vague.

Curiously, the only readable part of the excerpt is the quote from Hawley that the article tries to rebut.

Of course, this isn’t accidental. The task of the writer is to sneak by the reader inexistent logical connections and specious arguments. The author of the article has no argument to offer in response to Hawley’s charges. This uncomfortable reality has to be hidden in a mountain of fake “so” and “therefore.”

So I went to Arestovich’s website and purchased his seminars as a way of donating to the Ukrainian army. I didn’t want anything from the seminars themselves because I hate videos. And recorded Zoom lessons? I’ll be tortured with them in hell.

Still, out of curiosity, I decided to take a glance on the videos. They turned out to be so good that I watched for 5 hours straight (I can watch in one language while writing , grading, and emailing in another). As a result, I feel better than I have at any time since February 23.

Of course, now I feel guilty. The point was to donate money, not to make myself feel better. Maybe I should buy another seminar to learn how not to feel guilty.

One that I watched is about how stay focused and not let anybody distract you from what is important to you. Really good. I also started one on strategic planning.

My agenda right now is insane. I have three public appearances next week, and that’s before I leave for a conference on Thursday. After I come back, there are three more public appearances in the next two weeks. All but two of them have to do with Ukraine, even the conference talk. And the biggest public appearance I’m doing is supposed to be about the future of democracy worldwide, and what are the chances that the audience won’t want to make it about Ukraine?

Most appearances are in person but I’ll probably share a link to one of the online ones later.

The appearances are good for me because at least I feel like I’m doing something. Also, when I’m speaking, I’m not crying or freaking out, so that’s good.

Turns out that Alexei Arestovich, the Ukrainian presidential adviser I listen to daily because he calms me down, is a professional psychologist. I keep saying that this guy has a great future as a psychotherapist after we win the war, and now I discover he already is one. Arestovich can deliver the worst news in a way that makes people feel stronger.

Like Alex Berenson during COVID, Alexei Arestovich is saving my nervous system during the war. And by the way, there’s an easy way to donate to the Ukrainian Army through Arestovich’s school at apeiron.school. It takes Google Pay and Apple Pay.

Now let’s hear about how Russians don’t support the war but were forced to attend and jump up and down with joy because if they hadn’t shown up, the big, scary Putin would have killed them all dead.

Ah, I know. They were saving the grandma by showing up to this event.

What’s happening in Ukraine today already happened in 2014, if at a smaller scale. The murder of civilians, the bombing of peaceful villages, Ukrainian cities reduced to rubble. What was different was that nobody knew or cared. And those who did invariably cheered on the Russians. The New York Times and the NPR were publishing the most ridiculous Russian propaganda about the utterly invented persecution of “ethnic Russians” in Ukraine, calling Ukrainians Nazis, etc.

That was the time when I was going through a terrible personal catastrophe, and then the invasion began. I remember walking around in a daze, petrified by the horror, and nobody around had a single kind word because they read in the New York Times that Ukrainians were Nazis, so it served them right.

It’s tragic that it wasn’t enough for the West to see the destruction of Donetsk, Lugansk and Ilovaysk and that Kharkiv and Mariupol had to be reduced to rubble for it to become unfashionable to cheer on Russia. I’m grateful that now, at least, people have managed to shake off the pro-Russian daze. Not all, of course, but most people have. But the cost of this realization didn’t need to be this high.

It’s a very strange feeling to see a completely correct evaluation of russischen Barbaren in German. It’s weird to realize that russischen Barbaren have finally managed to displace deutsche Barbaren in Ukrainian historical memory as the most recent evildoers.

It’s not only Ukraine as a place, as cities, villages, fields and buildings that I don’t want to see destroyed. I’m also deeply attached to the idea of Ukraine. To what Ukraine was starting to become in the past 8 years.

A real nation that was going to show the world that the nation-state is not dead.

A country that happily, openly and very loudly embraced and celebrated the Western Civilization even when the Western Civilization seemed eager to undo itself and drown in a sea of stupid, idiotic guilt.

Democracy without wokeness and socialism.

A sense of humor that the West painfully needs.

A desire to take pride in resilience and strength and not in snowflakery and mental issues.

Love of history without self-flagellation.

A real free press.

It was a long and bumpy road with a million setbacks like everything worth anything in life. But it was starting to happen. I had left Ukraine in 1998 because I didn’t believe this was going to happen in my lifetime. I didn’t think Ukrainians were going to abandon the USSR and shake off its totalitarian torpor.

But then they did.

Seeing the results of the painful, hard reforms being bombed to the ground hurts. The reforms aren’t vague conversations. I’m talking about buildings, roads, schools, bridges, factories, businesses, restaurants, stores. All that was built in recent years. The reforms were tangible, physical, you could see them and touch them. And now it’s all rubble and dust.

All of those buildings, hospitals, schools, and roads were the reason why Russians got rabid and invaded. You know which city stood out in terms of the reforms? Which city had experienced a miraculous transformation before the war? It was so amazing that I saw articles about it in the foreign press. Want to know the city’s name? It’s Mariupol. And look what the Russian envy and hatred did to it.