I’m doing intermittent fasting and keto for the epic New Year’s feast we are planning.

This is the traditional Ukrainian cold meat in jelly called holodets’. It’s different from the Russian version in that the jelly is clear and almost transparent while the Russian is more cloudy.

In the meantime, the non-dieters in the household will be eating the salad called “Chrysanthemum.” Potatoes, Christmas turkey leftovers, cucumbers, boiled eggs, corn, and cheese:

Of course, my absolute favorite is the traditional Ukrainian kulish:

Kulish is supposed to be cooked outside, on an open fire, which gives it a beautiful, smoky flavor. This time, however, we didn’t bother because it takes forever to wash the soot off the pot. Kulish has ham, chicken, potatoes, egg and millet. It’s like a very thick soup or a watered down porridge. Unfortunately, it’s the opposite of keto.

I especially like it when the open Southern border is linked to aid to Ukraine. The border has been open for years. It was open all through the “build the wall” presidency. It was open during Obama. Open during Bush. Open during Clinton. And really open during Reagan. There was no Ukraine as a country during Reagan, so something else must have been to blame.

Yes, right now the border is open in a really crazy way. But there’s nothing anybody will do about it. Have you been to a restaurant lately? Any restaurant, fast-food, casual, fancy, locally owned, a chain, any kind. Have you noticed anything? There are no workers. Everything is slow or doesn’t happen at all. Even at $25 per hour for unskilled workers with no experience, you can’t find people. Where I live, the local landmark restaurant that stayed open during COVID and defied the governor had to close because there’s nobody to work. They survived COVID only to go out of business right after.

I have no idea why this is happening but with the terrible shortage of unskilled labor, there’s zero chance anybody is going to crack down on an incoming flow of unskilled labor. If it didn’t happen during the high unemployment of 2009-10, why would it happen now? I’m not saying, mind you, that it’s a good solution. I don’t think it is. But it’s clearly the solution that was chosen and is being implemented. This is about Ukraine like I’m about to jump out of the window.

You can’t solve a problem that you haven’t diagnosed. And we are being distracted from doing exactly that by silly slogans and false analogies. No wonder that decades go by while the problem remains.

Speaking about energy, the heater in the swimming pool of my gym broke. I had to swim in +8°C water. This was quite invigorating.

My father taught me to swim when I was 9 in water of that temperature, so it felt nice.

There’s really no excuse to be low-energy at this time in history. Look at the guy in the famous photo:

If he found this light inside himself – and survived, and came home, and enlisted again – then you definitely can. Make a list of what drains your energy and what replenishes it (and isn’t orally ingested) and get on it. Now is the perfect time because the year is drawing to a close and it makes sense to try something new.

This is a new genre of pouting that’s increasingly popular with people of low intelligence.

“We should have used the money that went to Ukraine to solve poverty in the US!”

The project of giving out cash to citizens has been tried very recently and created a historic inflation. We have all seen that it’s extremely counterproductive, yet the pouting continues.

“We should have used this money to close the border!”

Again, we have seen very recently that the border will not be closed because there’s no political will to do it. Even voting for a president whose main slogan was “build the wall” resulted in no wall. It’s not a money problem. It’s a “there’s no politician willing to do this” problem. Still, the pouting continues.

“We should be used the money to solve the opioid crisis!”

How? How do you solve the opioid crisis with money? This is one of the most maddening leftist obsessions that I’ve been writing about for years and that consists of the belief that everything is about money. If there’s a problem, throw money at it! But that’s not how things work. Some problems can be solved by money but others can’t. There’s absolutely no amount of money that will make people stop being addicted or make everybody do equally well in school.

“The money to Ukraine” isn’t actually “money.” It’s getting rid of existing but outdated weaponry that creates a vacuum and spurs manufacturing at home. It’s a tried-and-true conservative method of reducing inflation. Pumping more cash into an inflationary economy does not reduce inflation. It worsens it. Investing into military production does.

But the people who engage in this pouting don’t really care about inflation or the economy. They are in a grip of an anxiety caused by low energy. To our subconscious, money is energy. If you have dreams where you are running out of money, it’s your subconscious warning you that your energy is low. The mistake in this situation is to open yourself up to a further loss of inner resources by leaking resentment and woundedness. Of course, this is all too complex for the pouters. Instead of getting themselves under control, they will continue to leak, get weaker, become more anxious, and so on. This is yet another problem that cannot be solved with money, by the way, because it requires an effort of individual will and a certain degree of intellectual capacity.

The cause is very simple. The definition of the acronym has changed. It now simply means “a good person.” These young people are trying to tell the world that they are good, kind individuals.

I’m not being facetious. This is quite literally what teenagers think the words “bisexual,” “non-binary,” and “queer” mean.

And here’s a Pomodoro timer from 1841:

https://twitter.com/KopalniaWiedzy/status/1607409663137705986?t=l6yy-yPqxVwOJjkACncUjA&s=19

The school that my sister’s first-grader attends played a really nasty joke on the parents.

They conducted an activity where children wrote letters to Santa telling him what gifts they wanted.

But instead of telling the parents, the school mailed them “a reply from Santa” in which Santa promised to deliver the gifts the kids asked for. The reply arrived two days before Christmas.

Imagine having to explain to a kid why Santa won’t be delivering the $500 Playstation that he promised in a letter. Or a puppy. Or a gigantic dinosaur. Kids can come up with a lot of cuckoo-bananas stuff without parental supervision.

Obviously, any woman who achieved anything of note at any time in history must have been a man.

What a victory for progress.

One great idea in Stolen Focus is to read fiction to improve your focus. Hari provides a solid scientific argument to support this idea and also explains why reading for pleasure is on the wane and how that is connected with the general erosion of attention.

I don’t need to be persuaded to read fiction but I’m happy that other people are seeing its importance, too. I’m currently trying to decide which novel will be my first read of the new year because I’m very superstitious about my reading. Start the year with a great read, and the whole year will be filled with wonderful reading experiences.