The new talking point has dropped. Now let’s see what subservient Americans will repeat the “dragging the Ukraine conflict out” slogan like trained poodles.

It’s really funny how after “winning the Cold War” the very people who most celebrated this “win” are repeating the TASS directives like they are God’s word.

I can’t tell you, people, how much psychological and physical good the hobby of decorating my bullet journal brings me.

I say physical because it’s been hot like the dickens around here, and I’m keeping my blood pressure very normal by virtue of 1,5-2 hours of journal decorating a day.

For those who are wondering, the hobby consists in decorating a notebook with stickers, washi tape, colored markers, little drawings, and to-do lists. I bought a bunch of winter time stickers, and they are really helping to distract me from the weather.

The funny thing about this “the wife of an important man” model is that the man in it doesn’t need to be really important. Women play this role just as seriously as Patricia when their husband is a janitor. Or men. This isn’t a gender thing. I knew a couple where the man made himself into “the husband of an important woman.” His wife was a completely normal, regular person but he glamorized her and behaved like she was Isabel Preysler and he her secretary. Obviously, she dumped him, just like Vargas Llosa dumped Patricia.

I’m equidistant from both the Patricia and the Isabel models. I see neither myself nor my husband as accessories. And Isabels are rare. You need a high guaranteed income to be an Isabel. Plus, extraordinarily good health. I’ve never met any Isabels ever.

Patricias are easier to come by. I wouldn’t say they are extremely thick on the ground but they exist. Academia used to be a breeding ground for them but not anymore. I don’t know a single academic wife of the Patricia type under 60. When I was young, though, they were everywhere. There was this professor in my field who’d come to every conference with a long-suffering Patricia of his own. He’d immediately engage in a loud and scandalous affair with a graduate student or a visiting colleague, and as often as not run away with her, leaving the wife to cry quietly at the back of the conference hall. Ritual humiliation seems to be a culminating point of such relationships. And of course, she’d always take him back and they’d come to the next conference, as a sort of a traveling circus.

Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian writer and a Nobel Prize winner in Literature. He’s one of my favorite Hispanic writers, and he’s pretty unique among Latin American intellectuals in that he’s not left-wing. Vargas Llosa is a libertarian. US lefties haven’t forgiven him that, and even now The Nation and the likes keep publishing pouty screeds about him. But he’s a genius, and his contribution to world literature is immense.

Vargas Llosa was married to his wife Patricia forever. Their marriage was an institution in Latin American literature. She was one of those “the wife of an important man” types. He was the sun, and she orbited him. She existed to be supportive of him.

When they were in their seventies, Vargas Llosa dumped Patricia for Enrique Iglesias’s mom Isabel Preysler. She was no spring chicken either, having gone through a string of rich and famous husbands between Julio Iglesias and Vargas Llosa.

Isabel is used to moving from man to man, and none of this was big deal to her, but imagine poor Patricia. Vargas Llosa was her life. All of a sudden, she was 70, and let go like hired help. This was all mega public because Vargas Llosa and Isabel are both celebrities, and she even more than he among the less well-read among us.

What do you think happened next?

It’s easy to guess. Vargas Llosa and Isabel stayed together for 7 years but then Isabel got bored, like she always does, and moved on. She’s on boyfriend # 3, I think, since dumping the Peruvian writer. All the boyfriends are famous, rich, aristocratic. She’s 72 and very rich but the boyfriends are richer.

And Vargas Llosa?

He’s a Latin American man of the older generation. He can’t live alone. He went back to Patricia. And, of course, she took him because she has no existence outside of serving him.

There’s a point I want to make here but I’ll put it in the next post because I know everybody hates long posts.

The word “science” has been emptied of all meaning. This gentleman positions himself as a clear-eyed supporter of the scientific method while in the same breath saying that men can mother children.

It’s a truly Soviet tradition of using words to say the exact opposite of what they mean. And also a truly Soviet tradition of banning real science and facts in favor of insane fantasies.

In Vladimir Dudintsev’s novel White Robes, set during Stalin’s purges of biological sciences, professors and scholars at a research facility are listening numbly to stories of one specie transforming into another, incapable of saying that this is all unscientific gobbledygook. It’s bizarrely similar to how we listen to stories about one sex transforming into another.

Dudintsev’s novel is about the immense courage of biologists who worked clandestinely to save real science from ideological obscurantism. Many of them died.

Today we don’t resist the ongoing war on science because our ideologues are smarter than Stalin. They don’t use our fear but our kindness to shut us up. We all know that “men who mother” are a myth. But we have been persuaded that pretending to agree is the kind thing to do. What would be kind to an infant doesn’t enter into our reasoning because we have a faulty understanding of human development.

The marriage of ignorance and mealy sentimentality produces monstrosities that even Stalin couldn’t manage to create.

I hear that the excessively priapic among us are getting sore over the subject of the use of cluster munitions in Ukraine.

Cluster munitions have been used by Russians to terrorize peaceful cities and heavily residential areas since February of 2022.

Here’s my native city of Kharkiv:

They are used constantly by Russians to destroy Ukrainian civilians in the Donbass. And I hear that Russians really loved using them in Aleppo but nobody gives a crap about Syrians, so that’s fine, I guess.

It’s really cute how some people have decided that cluster munitions are bad now that Ukraine might use them to kill Russian occupiers in the trenches. These same people had zero objections when Russians used them on different continents to murder civilians. And these same people will pout endlessly about the double standard they experience.

https://twitter.com/NikaMelkozerova/status/1677376860400009216?t=9AkJDh9NzFILCEPdrb00pQ&s=19

This is just Kharkiv, mind you.

Only disorganized people need to make heroic efforts.

If you feel like you are putting enormous, gigantic efforts into something, it means that you either are doing something you don’t need to be doing or that you are poorly organized.

I don’t think that the Biden administration is preventing Ukraine from beating Russia and ending the war for some evil reason. I think the reality is worse than evil intent.

I strongly believe that the real problem is that there’s no capacity to make a decision in the administration. Nobody has a vision for the future of world politics. Nobody has created or is trying to create a foreign policy plan for the US.

This is a complete disempowerment of the nation-state. It’s like, you know, I’m not trying to see if I can soar in flight because I already know that humans don’t have wings. I don’t need to check because I already know it.

In the same way, national politicians aren’t trying to work out the new international consensus (or achieve anything significant domestically) because they have accepted as indisputable, self-evident fact that they can’t.

I think they are wrong. I think there’s still time. But these absolute wusses are acting like they have as much power to make decisions as I do to sprout wings.

People will ask if I think it would have been better with Trump. I can only say that I don’t know. He’s impulsive, so nobody can say for certain. There’s a possibility that he would have tried to “negotiate” with Russia, Putin would have humiliated him in some very painful way, and Trump would have blown a gasket and gotten propelled into action.

Or not.

I don’t know. What I do know is that this feeble, forlorn, foolish fumbling of frowzy forces of formerly planetary significance is painful to observe.

They are not evil, these Bidens, Macrons, Trudeaus, Trumps, and the rest of them. They are just passive. Empty suits, terrified of their own shadow.

The former Attorney General of Ukraine has been fighting in the trenches near Bakhmut this whole time. He’s 58 years old and a cancer survivor. Obviously, nobody made him enlist. This is a guy who clearly had options. And he chose to do his patriotic duty.

There are leading scientists, opera singers, Supreme Court justices and TV stars fighting on the Ukrainian side. This is the power of the nation-state, the only source of real patriotism.

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