Unless you speak Ukrainian or Russian, my updates are probably the freshest you will find. Everything on TV is stale and useless.

June is going to be a terrible month of war for Ukraine. The US has not sent the heavy weaponry promised weeks ago. There doesn’t seem to be any indication when shipments will happen.

There’s enormous pro-Russia pressure in Europe because everybody is terrified of the balance of power in Europe changing too much. Germany, France and Italy are aggressively pushing towards freezing the war. This was done in 2014, and we’ve seen the result. Now there are efforts to engineer the same thing all over again. The power in the US is sclerotic. Decisions are made but nobody carries them out. There’s a lot of virtue-signaling but very little action.

The initial support for Ukraine was enormous. But that lasted until it became possible for Ukraine to win. And that win would dramatically reshuffle the existing state of affairs. What if Germany becomes less powerful in Europe? What if France becomes completely irrelevant? What if people in the US notice that their two-party system is a sham? Nobody knows but the possibility is scary for many.

World’s leading countries are ruled by people who want us, the citizens, to be ready to adapt to any upheaval. They want us to be endlessly fluid, malleable and ready to embrace change. But they don’t want to do the same. Change is hard. Risk is unpleasant. What if a new distribution of power in the world makes the old elites not that necessary or important? They don’t want that. They want to sit there, comfortable and rich, lecturing us sleepily about the need to take more risks.

In the end, they won’t have a choice. Ukraine will win. Globalism will lose. The old guard with its ossified ideas will be replaced by people who have new insights.

God, I miss being able to call my Dad. Ten times a day I grab the phone and then realize there’s nobody to call.

We had a very close relationship. Talked daily, and I don’t mean superficial stuff of the “hi, how are you?” variety. We talked about politics, literature, my work, his work, my friends, his complete lack of desire to have friends.

My father believed that the most important thing in life by far was having children and then creating and maintaining a profound relationship with them. He was very successful at this in a way that is quite rare. We’ve lived in different countries for 19 years but we were always intensely in touch.

Let it be noted that I deleted the comments under the previous post to honor the commenter’s request and not out of a desire to censor anybody.

There’s an extraordinary parallelism in the gun / abortion debate. People want a simple solution – a ban – to solve the the issue and “save lives.” Both groups are completely convinced that a legal ban will stop people from seeking and obtaining guns / abortion pills. Both groups react very aggressively to the suggestion that maybe the issue is more complicated and it makes sense to look at what drives people to seek guns and abortion pills.

Within the past two weeks, I somehow ended up in an online exchange with representatives of both the “ban guns” and “ban abortion” camps. The rhetoric they used was so identical that it would take me a second to figure out which particular debate I was in at any given time. The argument that both groups deployed repetitively, insistently and with no variation was “You want children to die.” It is hard to avoid suspecting that the whole point of both debates is to be able to repeat the words “children” and “die” in the same sentence many times in a row.

It’s very similar to the BLM or the trans debates where absolutely any questioning of puberty blockers or Patrice Cullors’s fabulous wealth merits you an immediate accusation that “you want black people/ trans children” to die. Ditto for the immigration debate. “You want immigrants to die!” Reliving the symbolic death of black people or immigrants in a socially acceptable format seems to be the most important goal of this exercise.

The reason why the Russians army is still fighting is that they get crowds of volunteers eager to enlist. These are untrained people who have no idea how to fight but there are so many of them that fresh batallions can easily be created.

As usual, the MSM that have been telling us how “demotivated” Russians are gave gotten it completely wrong.

No military experience, no training – their chances to come back home alive and unscathed are not good. So why do they volunteer so eagerly? What’s so attractive in the war?

Well, here’s an example. The other day there was news that Russian soldiers raped a 6-month-old Ukrainian baby with a teaspoon. The baby didn’t survive. I imagine that story alone brought several thousand of Russian volunteers to the recruitment centers.