The Prime Ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia are traveling to Kiev.

OK, Biden is ancient. But Trudeau, Macron, Sánchez and even Johnson aren’t. Where are they?

Of course, now everybody went, “who’s Sánchez?” And that’s precisely why Spain still isn’t “real Europe.” It isn’t about what happened in 1542 anymore. It’s about vapid, passive behavior today.

I heard Trudeau is hugely into traveling. Well, now is a great time. Mr Trudeau, you could chip away at your reputation as an irredeemable pussy if you traveled to Ukraine. Or are you only brave when you fight your own unarmed citizens?

Soviet-era scenes of people fighting over scarce food supplies and consumer goods are being recreated in Russia. In this video, for example, we see Russians fighting for sugar.

These are people who slobbered nostalgically over the USSR for 30 years. It’s heartening to see that their dream came true and now they get to experience it.

I don’t know if that Russian journalist who held an anti-war poster on the Russian news is a fake. She’s a terrible person. They are all terrible people. I read her pre-recorded statement, and it’s deeply offensive. “We are brotherly nations, the war is a result of a single crazy person.” Russians have used the expression “brotherly nations” as an excuse to invade. Time and again. Sincere or not, she’s promoting the narrative that’s at the root of the problem. For 9 years she collaborated in the war-mongering at the top propagandistic channel. If she sincerely came to believe the war-mongering garbage, that’s on her. Becoming upset years into the war and only after your credit cards and international vacations get cancelled is not that heroic.

They’ve learned nothing. Nothing. Thousands of corpses, and it’s still all big bad Putin who caused this. I went to school in the USSR. We were taught that Russia was our big brother. I felt inferior as a kid because we had no Russians in the family. This word “brotherly” has been wielded against us, time and again, until it turned to real weaponry.

It’s so great to be a small child. I took Klara to the dentist today, and she had a blast the whole time. Laughing, giggling, chirping, telling stories, asking if she could come again tomorrow “because this is SO MUCH FUN.” The childish capacity to enjoy the most mundane and even not so pleasant things is amazing.

At my age, I have to make a lot of effort to experience this kind of pure joy, and she just feels it naturally.

“Klara, put on shoes.”

“Shoes! I love shoes! Shoes are amazing! Do you want to hear a story about my best friends called Shoes?”

“Here’s your backpack.”

“I love my backpack! It’s a true friend! It’s the best backpack ever!”

And so on.

A wokester idiot in a meeting tried to roll out the narrative that “people only care about Ukraine because everybody there is white.” I shot her down like a Ukrainian artilleryman going after a Russian bomber airplane. I gave a mini-speech on the plight of the Ukrainian Tartar community that has been persecuted by the Russians for 8 years (and during the XXth century, as well).

“If you don’t know about the Crimean Tartars, if you don’t care, if the news sources that you trust don’t tell you about this tragedy, that’s on you,” I said. “If you need some reading material, I’m here to help. Please feel free to reach out.”

Of course, she hasn’t reached out.

He knew they were going to torture him, so he chose to die and take the enemy out.

I grew up on such stories about WWII. We learned them in school, we saw them in countless movies, we read mountains of books about them. In my worst nightmares did I expect that in 2022 Ukrainians would have to repeat the heroic actions of their great-grandparents. Even less did I expect that the Russians would play the role of the Nazi invaders in this version of the story. They heard the same stories and watched the same movies. Who could have thought they’d learn absolutely nothing from them?

In 2014 when Russia invaded Ukraine, the NYTimes and the NPR were saying exactly what Tucker Carlson says today. There is no war, Russia never invaded, and if it did, it was completely justified because Ukrainians are Nazis sponsored by the CIA and the Pentagon. I’m not even upset to hear it today. I’m amused because I already heard all this.

But Democrats are smart. When Russia launched a much larger-scale invasion last month, they realized that “Ukrainians deserve it” won’t be a popular position. No normal person will cheer images of dead children in mass graves. So it’s smart and good for the ratings to pretend to care and make it impossible to notice that your cheerleading of the Russians in 2014 and your policies back then made today inevitable.

There’s a bunch of secondary gains, too:

1. You reinforce the image of yourself as caring and the image of the opponent as callous.

2. You force the opponent into a ludicrous and unsustainable counter narrative.

3. You hide your screwups not only in 2014 but much more recently, for example, inflation and high gas prices.

4. And you pretend to help while sabotaging at every turn.

We’ve seen this before. “#MeToo! We care about women!” Then they introduce COVID policies that are devastating to women.

“BLM! We care about black people!” Then they introduce policies that are devastating to black people.

And everybody falls for it every single time.

I don’t want to accuse Juan del Val of plagiarizing Argentinian novelist Claudia Piñeiro, but his Delparaíso is so similar to Piñeiro’s Thursday Night Widows that I read it as a sequel to Piñeiro’s novel.

I loved Delparaíso. It’s gossipy, chatty, very undemanding – a great, relaxing read about clueless rich people in a chi-chi gated community in Spain. Piñeiro’s gated community is in Argentina but otherwise the differences between the novels are minimal.

It’s not necessarily suspicious that gated communities attract the attention of writers in different countries, but it’s not just the subject that’s identical. It’s the contrast between the lives of the rich residents and the hired help that comes from a very similarly named community. It’s the slight preachiness in the way they story is narrated. It’s the indistinguishable characters and the same story lines.

But a very nice book. I can never get enough Piñeiro, so it’s nice that somebody is cloning her novels.

The new Law & Order is timidly unwoke. The first episode made the point that defunding the police is a stupid idea. The second suggested that some #MeTooters are lying sociopaths.

Midterms are clearly scaring some people. Let’s not fall for their self-serving retrenchment.

An old grandma is protesting against the war in Russia:

Now look at what happens to her next. Pay particular attention to the reaction of the passersby.

Do you know what would have happened to these police in Ukraine? Hint: they wouldn’t have any extremities left to touch the grandma. It’s a cultural difference.