What everybody wants to know is, of course, why the Russians are doing all this insane shit. Why are they invading Ukraine, threatening the world, and waving about the nukes?

The reason is our old friend, the nation-building. Russia is a federation where people of different races, ethnicities, languages and cultures inhabit an enormous territory. These people don’t have much in common. 

When you have such an extremely diverse population, you can either try to unite it around a powerfully positive set of feelings that will bind these people in love or you can try to unite the against a powerfully negative set of feelings that will bind them in hatred. In simpler terms, people need either to love or to hate together to feel they have something in common.

Remember, a nation is a myth. It is a myth that is so patently ridiculous that every vestige of reason has to be swept away by powerful emotions. Americans, for instance, glue themselves together with positive feelings of love and pride they direct towards the Constitution, the freedom, the American Dream, the Civil Rights movement, etc.

Russians never managed to create this kind of a shared positive emotional wave. So what’s left? Hatred, obviously. Hatred and blood. The blood spilled together is the greatest glue for communities. 

The fear of the country shattering into dozens of little pieces has been extremely strong in Russia for decades. This is a really grave concern for the Russians that is nothing like the funny preoccupations of the silly little secessionists in Texas. Russians are uniting against the imaginary foe (big evil Americans) and are killing Ukrainians in the name of that hatred. 

There is nothing like a search for a positive shared imagery in Russia right now. Until such imagery is generated, Russians will not stop lashing out in ever-growing violence.

Ukrainians, who also inhabit a large and diverse (although not anywhere near as large and diverse as Russia) country did manage to find a powerful positive agenda to unite around. And when Russians saw that, they really freaked out because they were being left behind even by the neighbors they saw as very similar to them. Russia needs to demolish Ukraine’s positive national project to convince itself that the project of hatred and violence is the only one possible.

P.S. For a smaller scale example of the same phenomenon, see Israel.

An idiot on Twitter is asking Ukrainians, “Are you sure you are ready for European values like separation of church and state?”

The wonder of social media allows dumbasses to transmit their idiocy to all continents instantly.

For the first time since I started teaching my course on Hispanic Civilization, I had to remove 1991 as the final year of the Cold War and put a question mark instead. What we thought was the end turned out to be a short pause. 

I just want to remind everybody what one smart blogger wrote back in 2011:

Nobody wants to talk about Russia, though. Russia is already a huge nuclear power. It is also a country that owns a lot of oil and natural gas, has a huge population, cannot be defeated militarily, and is consumed by a huge bout of anti-Western hysteria.

Western politicians have been bamboozled by the empty talk about democracy and the end of the Cold War that Russia has been offering for two decades. This is all a sham, though. The Cold War continues. And I have no doubt that the side to lose this war will be the one that refuses to recognize that the war goes on.

And today we all have ample proof that the brilliant blogger was right this entire time.

Here is a quote from another 2011 article:

As to the end of the Cold War, if you seriously think it’s over, you need to stop spending so much time listening to the American media and turn to some external sources of information every once in a while. The winner of the Cold War is yet to be decided but I somehow doubt that you can win any war by pretending it isn’t taking place.

The really funny thing is that too many people in the US are still refusing to accept that the Cold War never ended.

More cuts suggested by Mr. Rauner and described by him as “compassionate”:

Significant cuts to the Department of Children and Family Services. Eliminating services for youth ages 18 to 21.

Community care for senior citizens.

Mental health services.

Addiction treatment.

Dental Care for adults on Medicaid.

Support for children on ventilators.

Yes, who cares about those stupid kids on ventilators. We should have thrown them off a cliff a long time ago, like they did in Sparta.

The funding for the following programs is cut completely (to 0%):

Arts and foreign language

The Children’s Mental Health Partnership program

Advanced placement courses

Regional Safe Schools, which offer education to students who are expelled or suspended.

And this is just a small portion of vital services that will be destroyed.

The Governor is convinced that all this will massively improve our state’s economy and “empower out workforce”. He’s not offering any details on how taking kids off ventilators will do that but it makes total sense to take them off ventilators first and think later. Or, ideally, not think at all.

Does IL stand for “idiot losers”?

So Governor Rauner proposed a $400 million cut to higher education in Illinois, which constitutes about 30% of the total budget of the Illinois Board of Higher Education. One of the (many) things he proposed is eliminating $1.2 million in funding to our university’s School of Pharmacy. Because nobody needs pharmacists in Illinois today. Those suckers (and the very highly ranked school from which they graduate) are a total waste of space.

Good job shooting your kids in the foot, citizens of Illinois. Depriving them of education so that Mr. Rauner’s buddies can buy even more yachts and mansions is totally a brilliant move.

Ukrainians are so easy to recognize. I requested 3 Ukrainian stickers but got 4 in an envelope covered with happy hand-written messages. This is the very typically Ukrainian exuberance: whatever you ask for, you’ll get more just because the world is beautiful and the joy just has to be shared.

There is no Russian on the planet who’d do this. Not because they are inherently bad or anything. Simply because their stance vis-a-vis the world is a lot more suspicious. Remember the story of how N suspected, throughout the first year if our relationship, that I only said nice things to him to get him relaxed and then deliver a mortal blow? That’s very Russian.

Everybody keeps dumping on Fox News but how is MSNBC any better? I turned on the channel to hear about the conference on Islam held in DC but all I heard was endless and extremely offensive bellyaching about the poor Russians who  were not even invited and how is it possible not to invite a great country like Russia to this conference. Apparently, some Russians said they were upset over not being invited. And how can anybody possibly discuss Islam in the US without inviting the Russians? I’m guessing Russians are eager to share their expertise in killing Chechen and Afghani Muslims.

Ask me once again where I find all those Putinoid Liberals.

Russians are suffering enormous losses in Ukraine. At least two thousand were killed just in the battle for Debaltseve. 

I’ve seen the photos of their dead, mangled bodies, and I feel sad for them. Not for their families because those will just celebrate getting a bigger payout for a dead soldier and use it to get massively drunk. 

But these boys – why did they have to die? Why did they have to come all the way to Debaltseve to kill and be killed? There is no reason for them to be there other than that they are superfluous human beings their country has no use for. Russia spits them out into Ukraine where they will be ground up by the war.

They could have made something of their lives, created something. But nobody taught them anything but how to hate everybody and sacrifice themselves on the altar of that hatred. What a waste. What a horrible waste. 

N swept out the snow in the driveway, washed the floors and vacuumed the carpets in the entire huge house, cleaned all the bathrooms, did all the dishes, did 3 loads of laundry, cleaned out the chimney, and repaired the bird feeder.

At first, I wondered what was causing this bout of hard work. But then I saw he was wearing his new T-shirt:

The mystery was solved: he’d simply turned Ukrainian!

The stupid Neutrogena starts a commercial for an anti-wrinkle cream with the word “graveyard.”

Ad agencies keep hiring the most excruciatingly stupid employees in the world.