President Trump gave Ukraine an actual (as opposed to Biden’s imaginary) permission to strike objects deep in Russia. Daily, heavy strikes are gladdening my heart. Not words but actual strikes.

None of this is being discussed in Western media because people here aren’t ready for reality. I’m very glad it’s not reported because what’s the point? People are attached to their fantasy that “Biden was for Ukraine.” Why hurt their feelings by revealing the complexity of life?

My flow lasts between 53 and 56 minutes. By flow, I mean the trance-like state when you are completely into whatever you are doing. Everything else falls away, and you are focused on what you are doing, be it reading, writing, translating, grading, or preparing the quarterly report. It’s the state of heightened creativity and concentration.

The flow is extremely enjoyable. It’s been described as

the biggest neurochemical cocktail [that] blend[s] all six of the brain’s major pleasure chemicals and may be one of the few times you get all six at once.

Steven Kotler, The Art of the Impossible

If you’ve experienced it, you know that it is, indeed, very pleasant.

I don’t know why my stretches of flow are always timed so exactly at 53 to 56 minutes.  It’s one of those things that one’s brain does that are incomprehensible and really cool.

Is anybody else on here into chasing the flow? How long does yours last? What do you do to kickstart it?

By the way, I’m back stateside, and regularly scheduled programming will now resume.

This is a very fantastical scenario, to be honest. The overwhelming majority of divorces are initiated by women. Threatening to leave is a female thing. As for “threatening to cheat”, honestly, you aren’t serious. Where is all this happening? Turkey? “Have sex with me or I’ll cheat” is just not a thing anywhere where women in burqas aren’t chained to the bedpost. Also, cheat with whom? Imagine the process of convincing a strange woman to participate in this project. Unless the man is rich, I’m not seeing it.

The outlandishness of the scenario shows that there aren’t any serious objections to my post.

The NYTimes printed the information that a whopping 15% of prisoners in federal female jails are transgender. That, of course, is many, more than the percentage of trans people in the general population.

15% of biological men in federal women’s jails. That most of them have intact penises is a guarantee. How can this possibly be a good idea? How can anybody be opposed to putting an end to this?

Also, if the NYTimes recognizes the number of 15%, the likelihood is that the actual number is higher.

Spotted at a museum in Galicia. The tiresome “other gender” has infected the world, and it will take a while to get cured from it.

The knowledge of certain principles makes knowing certain facts unnecessary. For instance, if you know that it’s generally cold in Montreal in January, you won’t need to conduct research on whether to bring summer sandals on a trip there. You also know that Canada is a country with a developed economy, so even of you fail bring something important, you’ll easily buy it there.

Once you know about the nation-state, why it’s needed, what its trajectory has been, and what the alternative looks like, you can easily answer whether renaming the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America is a good idea and even why the idea appeared at this point in history. All you need to understand such situations and decide your approach to them is to figure out how you feel about the nation-state. Once that is done, you have your answer about a whole lot of things already provided. You won’t have to decide on a case-by-case basis about this, the defunding of the police, the open borders, the 1619 project, and so on. You’ll have a principle to guide your judgment. Most importantly, you won’t have to base your approach on political partisanship.

There’s a raging alcoholism problem in Spain. In Madrid today, we saw a manifestation of a group of very drunk oldsters waving the flags of the Spanish Republic and screeching slogans in defense of corrupt South American Communists, Putin, and Palestinians. Anybody who comes out with the flag of the Second Republic is a clínical moron but these people were also tragically drunk.

Then we got into a cab and were too naive to realize that the driver was off his face drunk. When we left the cab, he abandoned his vehicle in the middle of the road and followed us. That was when we discovered that he’d pissed his pants and had been driving in that state.

In Galicia, we saw an exhibit of the painter Castelao, and at first we thought his paintings were very exaggerated.

Then we realized, no, they aren’t. People do drink themselves into this state.

We must be very sheltered because all this shocked us a lot.

If there’s a really pleasant and helpful bellboy at a Spanish hotel, should we give him a tip? My sister is suggesting I’m a poor excuse for a specialist on Spain for not knowing, so please help.

While the English version of the Budapest Memorandum uses the term “assurance” with regards to Ukrainian territorial integrity and security, the Ukrainian and Russian versions of the signed document use the term “guarantee.”

I actually only read the text in English and have spent years not understanding why in Ukraine the word guarantee constantly crops up in the discussion of the issue. It’s got to the point where I’d beg people to please stop saying “guarantee.” I sincerely had no idea it was in the Ukrainian translation, and it’s the bastard translator’s fault 45 million people sincerely thought there was a security guarantee.

Fuck that idiot translator. And fuck Bill Clinton who got us all into this mess.

And this is our sumptuous dinner at the castle:

After years of trips to Spain, I still haven’t figured out how to get fed around here. We’ve gone to great lengths to find food today, and failed abjectly.