Wow, Chesa Budín has been recalled in San Francisco! That’s amazing news. The guy is a total bastard. Good job, San Franciscans! Such a beautiful city deserves better.

Unfortunately, Michael Shellenberger has no chance to become California’s governor, even though he’s amazing. But at least the Boudin recall happened. Now George Gascon needs to get recalled in LA.

There’s a never-ending stream of articles about problems with American culture. “There’s rot at the heart of this culture!” people keep proclaiming. “There’s too much violence! Too many guns! Too few guns! Too little religion! Too much religion! Something is wrong with us!”

Yet those same people go into fits when I say that there’s something deeply wrong with the Russian culture. They seem to accept the idea that a culture can go in a wrong direction but only if this culture is American.

I’m especially grateful to the individuals who keep posting smug graphics about gun violence in the US and Europe. The gun violence in Europe completely excludes the gun violence that Russians have been inflicting on Ukraine for 8 years. But hey, I recently saw a graphic where World War II was neatly edited out of gun violence stats to demonstrate that even in the 1940s there was more violence in the US than in Europe. There’s no doubt in my mind that the creators of this graph are the kind of people who see imaginary Nazis under every bed. But it’s politically expedient to excise Nazi violence from the record, so why not?

Eight years ago on this day four Evangelical men were leaving their prayer house in the occupied Donbas. Russians arrested them, tortured them in horrible ways, and then murdered them. These men were among many victims singled out for their religious beliefs.

Russians have been murdering believers – Muslims in the Crimea, Protestants in the Donbas, Orthodox in Svyatohirsk and many other places – for eight years. There’s no religion they like more than another. Well, that’s not completely true. They really like their own cult of superiority.

The cult’s dogma is that Russians are superior and the world is evil because it refuses to recognize that superiority. They’ve been battling religion (any religion) for over a hundred years under one pretext or another.