Emboldened by the conciliatory approach of President Trump, Russians have subjected to heavy shelling the Ukrainian town of Avdievka. They have destroyed the water lines and the electrical plant, leaving the town without water and heating. It’s 20 degrees below freezing in Avdievka right now. There are 2,500 children in the freezing town. 

The way Putin operates is that the kinder Americans are to him, the more aggressive he becomes in Syria, Ukraine, or wherever he’ll strike next. Trump talked to him nicely the other day, and as a result Putin started an offensive in Ukraine. Kindness and amiability mean weakness in his world. He sees Trump as a weak leader because after a very disrespectful press conference Putin has given about him Trump still had such a meek, conciliatory response to him. 

Some pricks in academia have discovered my post “Pricks in Academia” and are busily pearl-clutching about it on Twitter. I blocked them because I only use Twitter to get updates on what’s happening at the front lines in Ukraine and their pissy outrage over an insignificant little post is cluttering my feed. 

But hey, pricks, read more, publish more and stop fixating on what people think of you. Because nobody has any interest in thinking of you at all. There’s serious shit happening in the world right now. Go read about that and you’ll forget the petty outrage my post caused you. 

It’s incorrect to refer to Putin as “Vlad.” Vladimir is never Vlad. Vlad is short for Vladislav. And for Vladimir it’s Volodia if he’s a very good boy, Vova if he’s a regular guy, and Vovan if he’s running around with petty criminals. Another possibility is Vovchik, which makes him sound clownish. 

Whoever suggested giving Klara cheerios, THANK YOU! She’s loving them. I thought, for some reason, that cheerios were huge but they are tiny little things. She gets so absorbed in playing with them that I get to have a tranquil breakfast. 

Yesterday Klara had her first borscht and it went very well. She seems to have liked it. 

This week I’ll also try some white fish, like somebody else here suggested. Now that I heard that Klara had a tortilla with melted cheese at school and loved it, I am less fearful about giving her regular foods. 

Now I need more advice. How do I teach her to use a sippy cup? I have a regular one and one with a floating straw. But I don’t know how to communicate to her what to do with them. We didn’t have these things when I was growing up, so I’m clueless. 

On the positive side, she knows how to drink from a glass or a regular cup. Of course, it’s very messy but she figured that out easily. 

Immediately after Putin’s phone conversation with Trump, Russians launched an offensive at the front lines in Ukraine. This is the first time in a while that Russians are so aggressively trying to expand the occupied territory. 

The culmination of the process we are witnessing will be to see American citizens turned away at the airport. Remember, citizenship is an attribute of the nation-state, and nation-state is what Very Serious People want to destroy. 

At the JFK protests – good, crucial protests – some people are holding signs saying “Open borders.”

It’s the extreme childishness of so many in the opposition that’s worrisome. Pink hats, open borders, join the resistance – none of this can stand up to a group of very serious people who very seriously are shredding the remains of the nation-state. 

In order to quash opposition, these very serious people are coopting some of the nation-state’s rhetoric (protect the borders, America first). Of course, the part where national governments guarantee the welfare of the people is lost in the border-related noise. The goal here is to push the opposition into the untenable situation of simultaneously defending and dismantling the nation-state. And it’s going to work because the opposition is taking a piecemeal approach of combating each issue separately instead of coming up with a grand narrative of what it wants to achieve. 

The important thing to remember is that the real enemy here is not some clueless doofus who has been duped into relinquishing welfare protections in exchange for a comforting lie that Trump likes tacos and will battle scary Mexicans. The enemy is a group of very serious people who are carrying out a corporate takeover of national and state governments with the goal of dismsntling them and removing this last barrier to liquid capital. 

I’m having a midlife crisis. 

So I went and bought a frozen pizza. 

I’m going to die, I thought, and what, I will not have even tried a frozen pizza in my whole life?

I have no idea why frozen pizza, of all things. I maybe eat pizza twice a year, if that. Not because I have anything against it but because it never occurs to me. 

Frozen pizza is something that I associate with being a completely different kind of person. Not different in a bad way. Simply different.