The irresistible attraction of sore losers is not to be underappreciated.

Somebody please convince me not to drag a suitcase of books and paintings to Canada for a weeklong Thanksgiving stay where I will have zero time to read or paint.

We will have four Ukrainian and Peruvian grandmas, three parents, and three kids celebrating American Thanksgiving under one roof in Canada.

Some people are unteachable. The CNN broadcast Trump’s campaign announcement in full while Hannity on Fox didn’t. Once again, the Democrat media are trying to get Trump nominated. Once again, they believe he’ll be easy to beat and offer an easy win to the Dem nominee.

Do they never learn anything? A rabbit would have figured out by now that this is a bad plan.

These people created an utterly ridiculous narrative (“Trump lost the midterms”), repeated it many times, ended up believing it, and are now acting as if their fantasy were reality. Never mind that the fantasy that “Trump is unelectable” already backfired royally in recent memory.

They are going to hang on his every breath again, give him outlandish amount of airtime again, get him elected again, and have a massive freakout when he wins – also again.

Everybody wondered, how will Russians react to the loss in Kherson? Will they finally admit they lost the war and go away?

Russians clarified their peace-loving position soon enough by “accidentally” dropping a bomb on Poland and killing two people.

Now they are asking? What kind of an incredible bastard mutilates healthy children and then starts wondering about the consequences? Excuse me, not consequences. “Costs.” To “buy time.” The semantic field is overcharged with market terminology.

We have a family in the parish, five kids, dad left mom just as one of the girls hit puberty. You don’t have to be Freud to figure out why in this situation the girl cut her hair short, started wearing boy clothes and answering to a boy name. This is a religious family – at least the mom is; the dad quit both the mom and the church – so there was no plan to medicate the girl.

And guess what? Like these kids almost invariably do, she grew out of it. This past Sunday she was at church looking radiant in a beautiful frilly dress, and her hair is growing back.

But if some eager bastard started medicating and surgically altering this girl in response to what’s clearly a psychological issue, she wouldn’t have walked away from it so easily.

To continue with the animal theme, today all Ukrainians and sympathisers are talking about the famous Kherson raccoon:

I started my day with a raccoon confab with my husband at 6:30 am and have clocked two more raccoon conversations since then. I’m in class all morning, and the raccoon didn’t reach me there, at least.

Folks, one thing I’m completely incapable of is a personality cult. I grew up in the USSR, I’m immune to this shit. My favorite writer Rafael Chirbes wrote two ridiculously bad novels. I have no problem with saying that they stink.

A negative personality cult is no different from the positive one. Whether you believe that an individual is at the root of all good or of all evil doesn’t matter. You still give that one person an outsize importance. Whether you worship him* as a benevolent or a malevolent deity, it’s the deity part that is the problem.

This is why I very rarely mention Putin or Trump. I’m not very interested in individuals and their failings. Trump has devolved badly since early 2020 when COVID hit. It’s a pity but talking about that looks quite pointless. I’m interested in the issues that he tried or seemed to advance. People come and go but issues remain until they are resolved.

It’s the same with Putin. He’s just a guy who’s trying to hold on to power in the only way available to him. He doesn’t mean much, either positively or negatively, because Russia’s problem – and everybody’s problem – isn’t one bad person. It’s childish thinking to hope that Dorothy’s house will drop on the evil witch’s head and the witch problem will be solved. Even in the fairy-tale it doesn’t work like that.

On the positive side, there’s a million places where Trump and Putin worship (both positive and negative) is raging, so it should be ok that I’m not interested. Nobody needs to feel deprived of indulging in this form of entertainment on my account.

* It’s usually a him but it can be a her, as with some people’s negative worship of Hillary Clinton.

Specifically for the people who keep saying that Ukraine should negotiate with Russia:

https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1592151435726454785?t=L-3VQtfPkUM-0Khw27Ef7A&s=19

“Red-listed” means these animals are under a threat of extinction. But that’s not even the point. What can anybody possibly negotiate with the people who think this is a good thing to do?

The real leader of the hardcore MAGAs is very active on Telegram but he also makes regular public appearances. He gathers pretty big crowds, and these are not free events. You need to pay, often quite a lot, to get in. This is so much smarter than a rally for FBI purposes because they get everybody’s credit card information and a separate list of people with money who share these ideas. A VIP pass to a meeting costs between $500 and $750. There are also packages for events that last several days. These start at $2,500.

Isn’t it interesting that such a story isn’t being reported anywhere? These are very well-attended meetings but there’s zero coverage in the local press when they happen. And you can’t find them online by location or speaker name. There was one such meeting in a neighboring town. It was packed. I had a source at the meeting who took video clips and showed me. The funny thing is that the event was mentioned nowhere at the website of the conference facility where it took place. In fact, it had no online presence at all. The link to make reservations said something completely different and it mutated fast.

The first of these events I heard about was in Miami in December of 2020. It was a gigantic venue but you couldn’t find it online or in the press. I saw photographic and video evidence of the event. I know people who went.

Everybody has the perfect right to find this uninteresting but to me it’s very curious, which is why I shared. And mind you, I didn’t go off half-cocked the moment I heard about this. I’ve been tracking this for two years.

Everybody loves my posts about my father. The relationship I had with him was profound and made me who I am. But why do people perceive it as unique? Why don’t more men have profound relationships with their children?

When a child is born, the mother bonds to it immediately and powerfully on a physical level. At the same time, for many women, the birth of a child is the first opportunity in their lives to feel like the authority and the expert on something important. Both first-time parents are absolutely clueless about how to handle a newborn but the woman has an edge because the infant’s food comes out of her and her presence is immediately soothing. From the start, the father learns to look to the mother for guidance as to how to handle the baby. It flatters the mother’s ego, so she exaggerates her competence. Soon enough, this relationship – the expert / the kid / the expert’s occasional helper – solidifies.

The father never starts to build his own relationship with his child because he has no idea that’s an option. At best, he carries out the mother’s orders regarding the child. But the father and the child don’t have a relationship in which the mother doesn’t play a role as an instigator, planner, reminder, and a hovercraft.

The father starts noticing that something exists between his wife and his child that doesn’t exist between him and either of them. It’s his child, he’s supposed to be feeling it but he clearly sees that his wife is getting something out of being a parent that he’s not. Within his own family he feels excluded, and that’s a pretty uncomfortable feeling.

To get rid of this unpleasant feeling, the father often attaches himself to the mother-child dyad in the capacity of the child’s older brother. This way, he can at least love his child in some way. The problem is that the child never gets a Dad, the Dad never experiences the father’s role, and the wife invariably loses some of her respect for the husband who acts like her older son. This is one of the most frequent complaints one hears from mothers. “I feel like a mom of three, with my husband being the eldest kid.” Or not even the eldest.

In other cases, the father withdraws from the family into his work, his hobby, his male peer group – or, if he’s particularly dense – into a new relationship where he’ll recreate the same pattern.

People recreate this pattern because that’s what they see growing up. And everybody ends up being robbed. In order to break the pattern in a healthy way, you need a mother whose ego is so well-fed that she doesn’t try to compete with the father for authority over the child and the father who’s either a bit on the autistic side and doesn’t know how other people do things or has a very strong personality and great emotional competence. Have you noticed that many of the best dads are somewhat autistic? Mine was.

Of course, there are situations where the mother has mental issues, doesn’t bond to the child and the father has to step in. But that creates the exact same problem with the excluded, resentful mother.