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.