Why hasn’t Ukraine won the war yet, people might ask?

The problem is that Ukraine isn’t allowed to retaliate against Russia. Russia masses enormous numbers of missiles next to the Ukrainian border, and Ukraine isn’t allowed to take out the missile depots to prevent a strike. Ukraine is receiving foreign aid (and we are extremely thankful) under the condition that no Russian will suffer on the Russian territory and no Russian military object, depot, train station, etc will be hit by Ukraine. No matter what happens, Russia should not suffer. This is the condition of continuing foreign aid.

So we have to sit here and watch Russians bring hundreds of missiles to the border, aim them, and shoot them at maternity wards. A newborn boy died as a result of just such a strike yesterday. This can continue pretty much forever because why shouldn’t it? Russians aren’t experiencing any negative consequences from the war. Why would they stop? If you could engage in something that brought you great pleasure and no negative consequences, would you stop?

OK, you’ll ask, but why is there a prohibition on doing any damage to Russia?

Because in spite of the talk about “regime change”, the Western plan is to preserve the Russian regime exactly as it was before February 24, 2022. “Regime change” is an expression only used by stupid people. Like “gender-fluid.” Like “America’s proxy war against Russia.” Russia has been babied, coaxed, cajoled, and pandered to in an extraordinary way since 1991, and more than ever throughout 2022. Zero bombs have dropped on Russia during the war. Zero Russian towns were destroyed. Zero Russian civilians were inconvenienced, let alone hurt.

Words are so much more powerful than reality. People find a turn of phrase they can easily memorize and gladly sacrifice their capacity to observe reality on the altar of being able to repeat this beloved phrase. This is equally true for the “systemic racism” and “proxy war” crowds.

Terrible news from Ukraine again. Russians delivered missile strikes all over the country, aiming at hospitals, residential buildings, and power stations. Ukrainians are rising to the challenge, acting heroically and engaging in feats of resilience and strength.

In the US in the meantime, there’s yet another spat over who misgendered whom.

Wars will never end because comfort and opulence don’t bring out the greatness of the human beings. They bring out pettiness, poutiness, and performative fragility. Wars, on the other hand, bring out heroicism and unbreakability.

We keep talking about “world peace,” but what would we do with it? Argue endlessly over who’s the biggest victim?

This gigantic, toad-like creature is a butterfly. The place I took Klara today teems with them. I’m terrified of butterflies but I still went. There’s even a stand there where the scary creatures hatch, and it’s the stuff of nightmares. Unsurprisingly, all the long way to the activity, Klara sang religious hymns, and on the way back she performed Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” for us.

I blame the butterflies.

This is a book I’ll never forget because it’s so bad, so ridiculous, so poorly written that it’s hard to believe someone could come up with 200 pages of such irredeemable drivel.

Barnes’ Elizabeth Finch is a thesis novel. This means it was written to make an ideological statement. Nobody writes thesis novels anymore because readers aren’t very interested in being clobbered over the head with political slogans. Unless you are brilliant at creating great characters or fascinating plot twists – and Barnes is extraordinarily inept at both – don’t attempt a thesis novel.

The ideological argument that Elizabeth Finch tries to deliver is that Christianity is the worst thing that happened to the world. It sucked all joy and wonder from people’s lives. If it hadn’t spread, Europe wouldn’t be a horrid, miserable place of evil ‘whiteness’ that it is today but would, instead, be a tolerant, multicultural, joyful paradise of multiracial, polygamous sustainability.

This idea is being delivered by means of the title character, Elizabeth Finch, a brilliant professor who dazzles students with her extraordinary intellect. The problem with writing about a character who dazzles with intellect is that you need to have some of your own. Barnes has none, so the witticisms of the brilliant professor sound like a collection of particularly pompous Hallmark cards.

There is no plot and, aside from the professor and one of her students, there are no characters. All that happens is that Elizabeth Finch talks (or writes) about her dislike of monogamy, marriage, children, Christianity, patriotism, and ‘whiteness’. She has no family or personal life of her own, and the most important thing that happens to her is that she gets cancelled by rabid right-wingers who control the press (I know, right?) for expressing all of these brilliant Hallmark views.

Oh, and Elizabeth Finch pretends to be Jewish. I have no idea why. She despises Judaism almost as much as she does Christianity, so it’s a strange thing to fake. This attempt at a plot twist is never explained. Nothing is explained. It’s all about stupid woke people considering themselves smart woke people.

After the extraordinary enjoyment of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels, I’m plunged straight into this dreck.

Apparently, nobody in Montreal homeschools because on a Monday morning we have a huge rec center entirely to our disposal:

On school holidays, it teems with people and the noise is intolerable.

I’ve been having amazing sleep here in Canada and I couldn’t figure out why. I usually sleep many hours but the quality of sleep is low, so I never feel rested. Over here, though, I get really great sleep. I think what’s causing this welcome experience is that the blanket I’m using here is heavy. Maybe there’s something to those weighted blankets one sees on TV? Has anybody tried them?

The new thing in Russian propaganda is that Russian scientists are far ahead of everybody in the world and know how to regrow lost limbs. Wartime amputees shouldn’t worry! It’s no trouble to make new legs sprout where the old ones used to be. Then the soldier can go back to the front, lose them again, and, I assume, keep regrowing the legs in perpetuity.

It’s curious that a flight from reality these days always involves the capacity to rearrange parts of human body like Lego pieces.

Twitter thinks that when I’m in Canada, I become a completely different person:

What is all this? Who cares about all this incredible weirdness?

I had to travel up North to find at least a little bit of snow. Now I’m staring at the snow, having breakfast, and reading Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. Her novel Angel was great but Mrs. Palfrey is a bleeding masterpiece. Why I never heard of it before is incomprehensible.

Taylor is a writer who is incapable of writing a sentence that is anything but beautiful. I want to speed through the novel to find out what happens next but the beauty of the writing stops me on every page.

Mrs. Palfrey is a novel about old age. Even in Angel it was clear that Taylor’s at her best when writing about elderly people. Chirbes read Taylor in his thirties and didn’t connect to the topic of aging. He connected deeply with Taylor’s description in Angel of what makes a writer. Chirbes didn’t live to be as old as Taylor’s characters in Mrs. Palfrey but I’m sure he would have appreciated the novel later in life. It’s such a great book, such a joy to read.

Never did something this good cost this comparatively little. I watched footage today of Kherson residents going grocery shopping to a normal store with full shelves for the first time in 8 months. Russians had looted all the stores, so there was nothing for the locals to buy. And now finally they can buy food like normal people. Helping eject the thieving, murderous Russian bastards from their lives was, among many other great things, made possible with this American money. Finally, this huge black box called “defense budget” is producing tangible results.

But it’s not only Ukrainians who benefit. It’s the American budget, so it should benefit Americans first. And it does.

There are many (albeit very far from all) such benefits listed in the article, such as this:

The war is also pushing NATO partners to quickly increase spending to the 2% of GDP and above target. Given the US’ technological advantage in defense equipment, a sizeable share of this additional military outlay will be spent on US equipment. 

https://cepa.org/article/its-costing-peanuts-for-the-us-to-defeat-russia/

Trump tried to achieve this and failed. And note that it’s good for the US not only militarily but also economically. Unlike “sending free money to people”, which had already devalued our dollar by 10% in a record-setting inflation, getting foreigners to pay for our technology is great for the economy.

But wait, there’s more:

The revelation that Russia’s defense industry is something of a Potemkin village also generates other strategic and diplomatic wins for the US. Countries eager to secure defense capability to meet their own threats – think of Turkey, India, Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia — might have opted for cheaper, “value” Russian defense offerings. However, with the quality/capability of this equipment now being questioned because of poor battlefield performance, they will likely be vying to acquire a better US kit. But this will require improved diplomatic relations. This is currently evident in the improved US–Pakistan relationship, with Pakistan securing upgrade kits for its F-16s.

https://cepa.org/article/its-costing-peanuts-for-the-us-to-defeat-russia/

What kind of an absolutely extraordinary dumbass would sacrifice all these benefits (and the linked article lists more) to save 5,6% of the defense budget that hasn’t done anything this good for us and the world in decades?

But why shouldn’t this money be spent on the many social ills we suffer from here in the US, people ask?

Anybody who has worked with state money knows that funds allocated for X can only be used to pay for X and never for Y. The pots of state money allocated for different purposes are not communicating vessels. You might have a large surplus in the X pot but you can’t use it to patch a hole in the Y pot. This is why “the money going to Ukraine should have been spent on securing the border / opioid crisis / crime / schools” is moronic. There was never any likelihood that the defense money was going to be spent on any of these worthy causes. Refashioning the US budget to spend significantly less on defense and channel that money into welfare is a cherished goal of the far left. When I was on the Left, we talked about it all the time. It’s a long-term project but those who believe in it should definitely try to get it done. For that project to work, you need all 3 branches of power working in unison, the Pentagon needs to agree, the entire US diplomacy should be refashioned, new state agencies will spring up to administrate the diverted funds, etc. But a couple of decades later, it’ll all settle down and the shift will be achieved.

For now, though, let’s be glad we are spending these 5,6% so well.