For Mother’s Day, N organized a surprise visit to a local farm for a strawberry picking outing. The Ukrainian woman who is staying with us was in stitches. “I got to film it!” she kept exclaiming. “I’ve got to show it back home! American not only work for free in the fields. They pay to do it! Cultural differences!”

On the positive side, we finally tasted strawberries that I’m no way reminded us of plastic.

We have guests staying over, so yesterday I watched several episodes of a reality TV show where teams of regular people compete in physical activities, such as climbing, obstacle courses, jumping, etc.

The show routinely pits all-male teams against all-female ones. Every single time, women lose most abjectly. They don’t just lose, they are creamed. It’s painful to watch.

Anybody can predict this will happen because there are male and female sports for a reason. But everybody on the show behaves like this competition makes sense and enacts surprise every time women lose by a trillion points. I even had to explain to Klara why the result is predetermined. And that at her age, girls’ teams do often win against boys’ teams, which will end by 8th grade. And that this is OK because different bodies are made for different reasons.

I had to tell a colleague I can’t go with him to a writing retreat because I’m excluded based on my race. I felt ashamed when I said it. Not for myself but because neither he nor anybody else will refuse to go to an event where colleagues and friends are excluded for racist reasons. That it’s OK to keep people out because of their skin color, and that everybody has accepted it, is an absolute shame. But the people guilty don’t feel it.

Remember disparate impact? In 1989, even a very liberal Supreme Court realized the ludicrous nature of its 1971 ruling banning businesses from engaging in practices that had disparate impact on different groups. I’m that year, SCOTUS dramatically limited the disparate impact legislation, ruling that all a company needed was a business justification to adopt disparate impact policy (such as, for example, IQ tests or criminal checks).

That reprieve lasted only for two years, though. In 1991, George H. W. Bush made a deal with the Democrats to bypass SCOTUS and turn disparate impact into the law of the land. That legislation not only made disparate impact laws our permanent reality, but it introduced an even larger bureaucracy tasked with investigating any entity or organization that sinned against “equity.” Since then, that bureaucracy has grown year after year.

Trump, by the way, did try to limit disparate impact policies, specifically the ones under the control of the DOJ, of which there is enormous number.

In early January of 2021. That’s when Trump tried to curtail disparate impact for the first and last time. We have been had, ladies and gentlemen.

At 5 am, in my native city of Kharkiv, high school students are practicing for the graduation ball:

What are you noticing the most about these young people?

It’s really symbolic that we currently have two of the strongest nation-states – Ukraine and Israel – at war with diffuse anti-nation-state forces while the US vacillates, unable to decide if it’s for or against.

People sometimes ask me, “why should the US participate in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine that started centuries ago and has nothing to do with the US? Why should America be obligated to participate in ancient blood feuds not of its making?”

My answer is always, “My dude, I’m so with you. Your question is true and the way you word it is perfect.” It’s totally an ancient blood feud that we have with the Russians. It started way before the grandparents of the people who built the Mayflower were even born. The US is definitely not to blame. I’ve been bashing my head against the wall here on the blog for a decade, explaining that it’s not about the NATO expansion, the non-existent CIA coups or “color revolutions.” It’s a civilizational struggle which, yes, is similar to the one between Jews and Arabs.

If America could remove itself completely from it, that would be great. But by completely, I mean just that, completely. Not disarming one side under false promises. Not trying to manage the war from afar. Just completely. But if you can’t do that, then pick a side already and stick with it.

What I do not like and actually despise is when people ask, “But why am I supposed to care about Ukraine?” It’s whiny and infantile. Nobody can make you care or feel anything at all. Your emotions are completely under your control. Stop asking for permission to feel or not feel. Stop trying to involve others in your emotional self-regulation. I have no knowledge or feelings about Taiwan, for example. Am I running around the people who do, moaning at them about why I “should care”? Obviously, not.

Stop being a snowflake already. It’s unbecoming.

I said all this after my most recent talk but in a kinder way. I didn’t want the snowflakes to start weeping right there.

Once upon a time, humans decided to become gods, refashioning themselves and the world in an unceasing act of pointless creation and re-creation. They decided to be the judges of Good and Evil. This poisonous attitude corroded their capacity to be with and for each other. They became lonely, suspicious, competitive, and miserable. As they remade themselves, cracks appeared between the constantly reshuffled parts of their bodies and souls. They tried to plaster over these cracks with drugs and medical procedures. They self-soothed by consuming objects and each other. They sought freedom by cutting all ties and severing all roots.

This is from a writing exercise where we narrated our research projects as stories. Curiously, several people went in the Biblical direction, which shocked some of them.

I have a feeling we have a good number of new readers here on the blog. If you joined us recently (say, in the past year or so), could you mention what brought you here? I’m very curious.

Meantime in Canada, my 14-year-old niece reports the following:

The kid is a passionate reader but the school is doing everything to nip that in the bud. It’s also doing everything to make kids detest the gay, the trans, and the indigenous.