A loaf of sourdough costs $9 at the farmer’s market, and everybody seems to think this is a normal price.

I ended up buying nothing because I keep mistaking prices for telephone numbers.

Within an hour today, Russians lost two fighter jets and two helicopters that were accompanying them.

Prigozhin is saying he’s having to waste too much ammunition shooting at the regular Russian troops that are trying to escape from Bakhmut.

Moscow has been on fire for days. Today, it’s a hotel that’s burning. (Owners burn them on purpose because the economy is bad and they can’t pay the mortgages and the maintenance).

Immediately, Russians started asking on social media, “Are Ukrainians a superior race? Were we wrong and they are racially superior? Ukrainians, come save us from the Tajiks and the Chechens!”

They will never learn.

The James Patterson I’m going to tell you about isn’t the famous mystery writer. Instead, he’s the son of an American Communist who visited the USSR in 1934, loved it, and decided to stay. The American Communist was allowed to marry a Soviet woman because she was from a family of a major counterintelligence officer, so it was considered OK for her to… erm, get infiltrated, so to speak, by a black American defector.

James was one of the kids of the Soviet woman and the black American Communist. As a baby, he starred in a Soviet blockbuster movie about a black kid persecuted by international fascist racists. In the movie, the black baby is lovingly welcomed in the USSR. In the closing scene, representatives of all Soviet ethnicities pass him around in a circus arena and sing lullabies in their national languages.

The funny part was that one of the Soviet ethnicities featured in the movie was Jewish. Back in 1934 it was still OK to show Jews onscreen. The famous Jewish artist Shmuel Mikhoels holds the black baby in the movie and sings to him in Yiddish. Obviously, after World War II, it became unacceptable to acknowledge the existence of Jews, let alone mention Yiddish. Mikhoels was murdered by the regime. He was excised from the movie. As a result, the poor black baby ends up kind of flying across the space in the circus arena where the Jewish artist originally stood.

After the USSR collapsed, James Patterson and his Soviet mom emigrated back to the US.

Wow, it’s totally like those idiot lefties who were trying to emigrate from the US to the USSR at the height of Stalinist purges. There were over 50,000 of them and they were as deluded as the poor fools who believe that Russia – with its sky-high abortion rates and most children growing up without their fathers – has “traditional” values. I mean, yes, it’s traditional for Russia but for nowhere else.

N and I have spent an enormous amount of time over the past year watching videos, listening to lectures, and attending online classes in Ukraine. We now have a daily content strategy meeting where we discuss what each of us heard, read or watched because there’s too much good stuff for one person to be able to cover it all.

Maybe 10% of what we watch and listen is about the war. The rest is history, philosophy, productivity, psychology, parenting, international relations, theology. It’s all really good stuff. My brain is finally getting fed like it should. There are loads of fresh insight, new ideas, real freedom to think and speak.

When I left Ukraine in 1998, it wasn’t even an intellectual backwater. It was an intellectual non-entity. Nobody talked about anything that mattered. And look at how thought is flourishing there now. A Ukrainian Matt Walsh or Jordan Peterson is light-years ahead in originality and value. And I’m only naming people on the right because the American left has nobody at all. At least, Peterson is trying. Nobody left-of-center knows how to produce a thought at all. At least, since Zygmunt Bauman died, and he was Polish anyway.

In North America today it’s obviously not nearly as bad as it was in the post-Soviet Ukraine in the 1990s. But insight is dead, my friends. All we see in lieu of intellectual life is purely reactive. “This thing happened and I’m appalled” is the narrative offered by the left, the right, and the center. People don’t even remember what ideas are. They have lists of grievances instead of ideas.

And by the way, it’s not just Ukraine. Spain, too, has a richer intellectual life than America, all of a sudden. When I read a book-length essay from Spain, and there’s actual analysis. People think, they create something new. In America, essay writers are now strictly into describing. “This is what happened. The end.”

I’m sure we can recover our ground. North America has everything anybody needs and more to stop the small-scale, parochial, repetitive whining and go back to thinking. We can snap out of it real fast. I suggest we proceed to do that as soon as possible.

The CNN is actively promoting Trump, and he’s doing fantastic:

It’s strange that the network didn’t at least try to get a serious journalist to interview him. I don’t know who the anxious woman is but she’s the last person who should be doing this interview. The only sexual abuse I’m seeing is what Trump is doing to her onstage.

Here’s an example of how the “inactivity before activity” method works.

My whole life I’ve found it very hard to get myself together after waking up in the morning. It doesn’t matter if I sleep 10 hours or 4. It doesn’t matter if I get up at 7 am, 9 or noon. I wake up feeling chewed over and spit out. For an hour or two, I drag myself around feeling like an invalid, and then I’m fine.

It’s not even an age thing. I was exactly like this at 14. But it’s definitely not getting better with age, that’s for sure.

So I came up with a plan. If I get up 40 minutes earlier than usual, go for a run, breathe deep on the veranda while having coffee, and then take a shower, I’d short-circuit the waking up issue, and avoid the problem.

It sounds good but utterly fantastical from my perspective. I feel really shitty in the mornings. If you haven’t experienced it, you wouldn’t get it. My knees shake, I drop things, my head feels like it’s been filled with damp cotton wool. “Get up earlier and run” sounds akin to “sprout wings and fly.”

But I did it. Today is the second day I’m getting up early, running, going on the veranda, the whole thing. It happens easily, as if I’ve always done it. And it works. At 7 am, I feel almost as good as I do at 7 pm. (People like me are at our peak between 7 and 11 pm).

The way I did it was that after making the decision, I didn’t try to get directly into putting it into practice. I would have failed if I had. Instead, I did a lot of silent contemplation. Staring at the crowns of trees really works for me. Looking at the clouds. Observing how the wind moves the flags. I wasn’t thinking about my plan. Or anything specific. I let my mind and body catch up with my rational decision-making process. They did, I felt ready, and the plan worked out easily.

I also didn’t believe the method would work before I tried it. It sounded kooky. But it costs nothing, and I was kind of desperate. I’m stunned at how well it worked.

There’s something disturbing cropping up around the story of the Texas mall shooter. People keep saying that what we hear about the shooter from the media can’t be true because it’s too inconsistent.

This makes me want to ask, have you actually met any people lately? Or do you interact solely with curated social media profiles anymore? People are inconsistent. Unexpected things happen. Life is complicated, and if that’s too scary, grow up.

I have no idea what’s true in the mall shooting situation. But I do know that expecting life to arrange itself into a simple, clean, straightforward story and pouting when it doesn’t is the favorite cope of first-level people. “This is too confusing for my brain, so it must be fake” is their standard mode of operation. The problem can never lie inside themselves. It’s always somewhere out there.

Let’s say you want to make an important change in your life. You make a resolution: that’s it, a new life begins tomorrow!

Of course, you then proceed to break the resolution.

OK, you say. I’ll go with the method of small steps. I’ll do x tomorrow, y the day after, and little by little, these small changes will bring big results.

A year passes, and you are exactly where you were before.

The reason for this failure is that you forgot to let the inner change happen before plunging into action. It’s like throwing yourself into a swimming pool without first becoming a person who knows how to swim.

A philosopher said, “at the threshold right before great actions lies inaction.” It’s great that you made the decision to seek positive change. Now you need to stay still for a bit to let yourself become the person who is capable of those changes.

Another philosopher said, “Change isn’t born when you decide to act. It’s born from your unconscious transformation during times of inactivity. Without that, you are bound to repeat what you’ve been doing until now.”

[These are German philosophers whom I’ve read in Spanish and am translating into English, so don’t search for these exact quotes].

So if you are looking for a big change, take some time to stay quiet, walk aimlessly, stare at the ceiling with no purpose in mind, study your eyebrows in the mirror, pick a flower and contemplate it.

And then the change will happen as if by magic.

The main selling feature of neoliberal states is supposed to be that they don’t wage war against each other. This might be true but only because they are too busy waging war against their own populations.

Look at the homeless encampments in Philadelphia, or the bombed out villages in rural Spain, among many other examples.