People are saying that the non-existent reaction of Russians to Prigozhin’s march on Moscow shows that Russians no longer support Putin.

This is a complete misunderstanding of what Russians are like. Nobody gave them an order to resist, so they didn’t resist.

You can bring NATO troops waving rainbow flags onto the Red Square, and the people of Russia will sit vapidly by. And if you tell them on TV to worship the rainbowed NATO troops as their gods and saviors, they will.

This is a collectivist culture with an absent concept of personal agency.

The headline:

From deep in the article:

Twelve people in 41 years. Every death is tragic, of course, but it’s still 12 people in 41 years.

We will be bludgeoned over the head with this 7.7 statistic for years, and nobody will ever mention what the actual numbers are.

And we won’t be able to object because we have chosen to believe that Biden admitted to selling state secrets at a state dinner and a million other comforting lies, so our credibility in pointing out untruths is trending towards zero.

It’s true, we have excellent real estate prices in Illinois. I constantly see students who pair up in college, get married and buy a house at around $140,000-180,000 in the area. The little towns around here are safe, beautiful, with excellent air quality, amazing hiking trails, and perfect for children. Plus, we have foodie culture.

It took me a long time to figure out the suburban/rural life in America but now I really get it.

Ah, I see that the Bidenites and the Trumperites have once again caught each other committing treason.

What a boring series. The writers keep copy-pasting the same plot twists over and over. “Biden admitted to treason on tape” is identical to “Trump admitted to mass rape on tape”. Both are deeply moronic and excruciatingly boring.

People who take these “open admissions” seriously should be treated with the kindness due to all victims of cognitive disorders. But those who purposefully inflame our low-IQ brothers and sisters with these fake dramas should be ashamed.

The positive side effect of engaging in a self-imposed daily marathon of writing in Ukrainian is that now writing in English feels exceptionally easy.

I have written 50,000 words in my Ukrainian book since April. I don’t think people realize how crazy that is given that I never spoke Ukrainian in my daily life and was incapable of writing even a page in it until April. My only published article in Ukrainian was translated by my father because I couldn’t do it.

It’s really nuts, that’s what it is.

And the result is that intelligent people begin to hope that this army of idiots should have no impact on anything that matters. If the overheated ignorants are going to inflict the AOCs and the Boeberts on us, let all the important decisions be taken out of the hands of the legislature. Let everything be decided in the space of flows where the voting power of the excitable idiots won’t reach.

That’s how the consensus to get rid of the nation-state solidifies.

One sign of getting older is that friends start having medical procedures in such numbers that you have to put them on the calendar to keep track.

I tend to have older friends, too.

https://twitter.com/BRyvkin/status/1673503676248334336?t=0Wc-YiJ66vErVpZWSy1K3Q&s=19

Exactly. And it’s not a country because countries, in the sense we understand the word, only exist in the nation-state context. Russia is showing us what the future looks like if we don’t stop the collapse of the nation-state.

Ukraine is showing us how to stop that collapse.

Now is the time to choose.

Today we received a survey asking us what furnishings would induce us to use the library more often. Because apparently people go to libraries for furnishings.

There were zero questions (and I mean, none, not one) about what books or movies we would like to see at the library. Please don’t assume that books were addressed in other surveys. As I wrote before, our library got rid of books a while ago and is now buying up these stupid furnishings – sofas, armchairs, bean bags, settees – to fill the space from which books were banished.

Contrary to expectations, this didn’t attract more people to the library, so librarians are now trying to figure out how to improve the furnishings. The library is turning into a museum of fussy furniture but the poor buggers aren’t getting it.

The people who voted for Trump’s impeachment are just as eager to distract the public with arrant silliness as those who are proposing to vote to expunge the impeachment.

The supporters of both groups of legislators keep talking about “the national divorce” but they are in fact closer than Siamese twins. Both groups are infantile, easily excitable, easily duped and very ineffective.