I took Klara to Walgreens to get a passport picture. We are going to Canada for the 40-day church service and gathering.

She has a huge black eye because right on the eve of the picture-taking she ran into a friend. It was cold, so I wrapped her in my shawl. Her facial expression was that of extreme misery because she detests having her picture taken.

“You look like a Ukrainian refugee,” I joked.

The photographer gave me a dirty look.

“I’m Ukrainian!” I said. “I’m allowed!”

The photographer is way too young to remember Seinfeld and understand the reference. I discovered today that Seinfeld is only 3 yours younger than my Dad. This kind of blew my mind because I always associated him with Gen X.

Another funny fact: I read an article about the very recent end of Seinfeld and how much everybody was going to miss it on the plane to Canada when I was emigrating. I remember thinking, “what an amazing life it is when people can watch this kind of show and enjoy it.”

I only caught the tail-end of the North American 1990s but I remember them fondly.

What an extraordinary idiot:

Russia’s war in Ukraine is the COVID pandemic for the globalizing elites. They face the possibility of losing the old, comfortable ‘normal’ if Russia is defeated. And they are freaking out. It’s kind of enjoyable to see them squirm and wriggle in fear. The question is, will we let them weasel out of the consequences of their own actions or make them embrace the joys of change, adaptability and endless pivoting that they lectured us about so smugly?

In 2014 we sat vapidly by as Obama and Merkel let Russia occupy parts of Ukraine. This allowed these bastards to speed up globalization and inflict biopolitics on us under the guise of COVID. Our standard of living has been collapsing ever since.

If we let these same bastards do this to us again, what will be their next step? It’s only reasonable to assume it will be more of the same. Why would we agree to that?

It’s time for a big reshuffle of the world order back towards the nation-state and away from globalization. Globalization has been a failure for everybody but the Scholzes, the Putins, the Obamas and Co. And they know we are on to them, which is why they squirm so much.

My mother has 5 sisters. All 5 ended up with abusive husbands. Beatings, verbal abuse, STDs passed on by cheating husbands, death threats, more beatings. One was thrown out of the house in winter with a 6-month-old baby. My father took them in and being a surrogate father to the baby. Another had such a violent husband that her son ended up disabled trying to protect her.

My mother is the only one of the 6 sisters who broke out of the abuse cycle and found a husband who never said a single mean word to her in 47 years. And consequently, her daughters have completely different lives.

A lot of things are defined by our circumstances but we can always rise above them. It rarely happens but people do have a capacity to break out of negative patterns.

Often, though, they choose not to. That baby my father took in grew up, and I had to end my relationship with him because he once came to my father’s house and started saying horrible antisemitic things in the house of a Jewish uncle who had taken him in when his own dad threw him out like a used condom. This now grown man has been used and disrespected by every woman in his life.

The aunt whose son became disabled trying to defend her from the violent dad went back to the abusive husband after they were divorced and he had a new woman in his life.

There was every reason for all 6 sisters to end up in abusive relationships. But one of them didn’t. My mother ended a relationship with a boyfriend she liked more than my dad and chose my dad because the boyfriend disrespected her once. Ultimately, we do decide much of the course of our lives. Not everything, of course, but a lot is in our hands.

Also, my mother is the only one of the sisters who never had an abortion even though she was the only one who got seriously pressured to abort. She had the best excuse but never gave in. So it wasn’t just one instance of making a choice and sticking to it, is what I’m saying.

Friends, have you heard about the Sussmann trial? It’s a trial of the guy who was one of the leading creators of the Russia collusion hoax. I only found out about the trial today, and for three se who are similarly lost, here’s a link to a great thread about what took place in the trial so far.

The Russia collusion was an obvious hoax from day 1 as I said from the start. Ultimately, it proved to be a good thing because the Democrats achieved nothing of value with it and entrapped themselves into having to help Ukraine when Russia invaded in February. Without the Russia collusion hoax, we would see the repetition of 2014 when Russia invaded Ukraine and the entire Democratic establishment spread lies about “Ukrainian Nazis” who invaded themselves. So I’m grateful for the hoax but the truth needs to come out because we lucked out with this one and might not be this fortunate in the future.

My infected ear turned into another illness which, in turn, brought on yet another health complication. It’s clear that at this point this is psychosomatic. The illnesses began at the exact moment when I realized my father was going to die. I didn’t let myself fall apart emotionally, so now I’m falling apart physically to compensate. I can control the emotional, so the physical rebels because I can’t control it.

I’m hoping that recording this insight will lead to a cure because I’m tired of being an invalid. These are really uncomfortable conditions. I’m very ready to not have them. And yes, I have another doctor’s appointment. They’ve only made things worse so far. They prescribe stuff that gives me side effects that turn into another illness and we are off to the races.

The very moment I tried to check out the US news, this is what I found:

I’m going back to my Ukrainian news because at least there are no snowflakes getting massive air time there.

As Arestovich said in today’s devastating interview,

The problem isn’t that the West doesn’t know what to do with Russia. The problem is that the West doesn’t know what to do with the West.

The West doesn’t see why it deserves to win. It doesn’t see why civilization is better than barbarity.

The dynamic in the class I’m taking in Spain is identical to what I saw in the Ukraine of my youth. The women are speaking, arguing, and feeling completely comfortable to express themselves. Even when they we don’t have much to say, we go on and on, admiring the sound of hearing ourselves speak. In short, we act like American male scholars.

The men in our class giggle uncomfortably and say nothing beyond, “oh, I don’t know. I never thought about it. Hee hee.” In short, they act like American female scholars.

Everybody in the class is Spanish except for me and a female scholar from Poland. Obviously, the female scholar from Poland never shuts up. And clearly thinks I speak too much.

I know very well what makes men (and I mean collectively, not individually) lose their capacity to speak. Once stable employment and familial responsibilities go out of reach, this is what happens to them. Spain is suffering enormously from precarity and the subsequent collapse of the family. And here’s the result.

Let’s draw some hope that school shootings will drop in popularity like serial killings did. Look at the serial murders graph across the decades:

There does seem to be something like a fad (or a Zeitgeist, if we want to put it more respectfully) governing this kind of thing. And curiously, my part of the world seems to follow the US graph of serial killers. All of the really famous ones are from the 1980s.

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.