I saw more political ads at the gym, and it seems clear that in Missouri the Democrats are planning to run on abortion and, even more confusingly, gay marriage. The gay marriage ads were being aired during a report about the healthcare emergency declared in NYC over monkeypox, which added a layer of irony to the situation.

There was absolutely nothing about the economy in the ads. I don’t agree with Marx that the economy is everything but I don’t believe it’s nothing either. If Dem voters seriously get motivated to vote by gay marriage at this point in time… I feel sad for them. Let’s see if they manage to resist this very basic manipulation trick.

What is the name of the politician who announced his presidential bid in 1979 with a call for an “open border project”?

It was Reagan, of course. And he delivered, creating the largest amnesty program for illegal immigrants in the history of this country.

As I always say, the difference between Reagan and Justin Trudeau is that Reagan let the insane out of asylums and Trudeau put them in government.

I want to recommend this beautiful essay about Waffle House. I’ve been once and didn’t enjoy the food or anything else but there must be something to the place if it inspired such beautiful writing.

The US policy towards China and Russia failed so badly because it’s Marxist in nature. Marxism is the belief that economic relations are at the root of everything. The economy is the basis, and everything else is the superstructure, i.e. an outgrowth of the economy.

The US leadership assumed that once China and Russia joined the market economy, they’d adopt the political and social structures that are the most hospitable to the markets. People will see that the material conditions of their lives are improving dramatically and will want to keep living well. So the theory went.

But Marx was wrong. He was right about some things but this central, core idea of Marxism is a mistake. Human beings easily throw away material well-being for other things. Russians don’t give a toss about the collapse of their material existence that they have experienced as a result of waging war. They are happy to sacrifice their material needs to the psychological need to feel insulted, unfairly persecuted, and misunderstood.

The economy is important but other things trump it easily. The US has delivered a deep wound to its own economy by exporting this unworkable theory and losing its manufacturing sector and its security while gaining zero friends internationally.

I bought a bunch of pickling cucumbers today at the farmer’s market but then discovered nobody is selling any dill flowers. Not even at the exorbitant price of $6 for a tiny bunch that I paid last summer. This year, with inflation, those $6 bunches would probably be closer to $10.

Be that as it may, the dill was nowhere to be found.

And you can’t pickle cucumbers without it. Or maybe you can, but I’d lose my Ukrainian membership card if I tried.

I went back to the car, going over potential sources of dill flowers in my mind.

As I was thus occupied, a car drove into a parking spot next to mine, and an older gentleman emerged, holding… Yes! A huge bouquet of dill flowers!

“Is the dill for sale?” I asked, trembling.

“No,” he said, “I’m bringing it to share with the people who need it. It’s pickling season, but nobody sells dill at this farmer’s market, and people get stuck.”

Just think about it. This was a very elderly man. He was bent over and walked with great effort. Yet he wanted to go pick some dill, drive into town, and schlep it over to the market in very hot weather, just to do something kind for others.

This is the same farmer’s market where an older couple shows up every Saturday with a snow cone cart to treat passer-by kids to free snow cones. All summer! Just to be kind! They’ve done this for years.

And then folks are going to tell me all cultures are the same. No, they aren’t. In some, people do these things, and in others, they don’t.

We should be proud of this country, and not spread ridiculous, baseless libels about it.

I went to Klara’s room at midnight to tuck her in. She sat up in bed and mumbled in her sleep, “Hey, you lady, whatever your name might be.” I was very heartened by the correctness of her grammar at this late hour.

Kamil Galeev finally explained in a thread that Navalny – the great Russian hope of Western liberalism – is a real, not a metaphorical neo-Nazi:

But more interestingly, Galeev provides photos demonstrating that the chief ideologue of Russian Nazism, Egor Prosvirnin, was friends with a supposedly anti-Putin pundit named Stanislav Belkovsky. It does feel weird to see the Jewish Belkovsky standing next to a fanatical admirer of Hitler and a rabid anti-Semite like Prosvirnin.

What Galeev doesn’t mention (probably to avoid confusing the English-Russian readership) is that Belkovsky is a secret agent of the Putin regime. He clearly infiltrated Prosvirnin’s inner circle using the Nazi leader’s notorious weakness for hanging out with people who appear on TV. Being an agent of Putin’s secret police is only marginally better than hanging out with Nazis for fun but still, Belkovsky deserves to be cleared of the charge of being chummy with Hitlerites.

Putin’s operation against Prosvirnin was successful. Prosvirnin joined the rest of the Russian nationalists where Putin sent them to shut them up about his hatred of ethnic Russians.

Milton Friedman was on the commission that ended the draft in the US. I knew he had to be behind it before I found out about this. Hah!

Friedman is the founder of US neoliberalism. Severing the contract between the citizen and the nation-state from both ends was his raison d’ētre.

I once talked to a Marxist colleague about Stalinism. He dismissed everything I said about Stalinist horrors with, “yeah but the US is so much worse!”

It’s quite disappointing to discover that some people on the Right have embraced the same mentality. Whatever you say to them about terrible things happening anywhere, they come back with, “we can’t judge because the US is worse.”

I want to remind everybody that I spent 20 years on the American Left. I have heard the narrative that “the US is the worst country in the world” many times. I find it neither original nor interesting. The fact that some simpletons only recently discovered it doesn’t negate the fact that it’s moronic and profoundly leftist.