Tucker Carlson says that we are “now far closer [to a nuclear war] than we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

He’s right. Soviets were not on a death spiral while Russians are.

Where he’s wrong is in ascribing to the US the capacity to save Russia from itself and by doing so save the world from Russia and its growing dysfunction. That’s magical thinking on par with “men can become women.” Tucker has interiorized the belief that people are interchangeable widgets. Cultural differences don’t exist in his worldview. Everybody thinks the same, in his worldview, and that sameness means that everybody thinks like he does. Life is good, so it makes sense to preserve it. That it might not be as good for everybody as it is for him never occurs. This is exactly the mentality of “I believe women are skirts, heels and makeup, so it must be obvious to everybody else that if I’m wearing them I’m a woman.” It’s also the mentality of “migrants immediately become just like Americans once they step over the border.”

I love this question, thank you!

My father was convinced that we would one day move to an English-speaking country. This was back in the 1970s when the USSR seemed unbreakable. But my father was a visionary, so he started to prepare. He mastered English to such perfection that there was never a way to convince Americans he would meet after 1987 that he wasn’t from Texas. I remember there was this conference sometime around 1990 when an American scholar ran towards us across the room, exclaiming, “I had no idea there was going to be another Texan here aside from me!” It took a while to explain to him that my father has never been outside the USSR.

Try to imagine what it means to learn a language with such a degree of fluency in a country where you can’t talk to a native speaker under the penalty of a jail sentence and there’s nowhere you can legally hear the language spoken.

When I was born, my father decided to make things easier for me and teach me from cradle. He only spoke English to me when I was a child, and then he did the same for my sister. Again, imagine the effort of doing that for years, no matter how tired, busy, preoccupied, unwell, etc. Consider that you need to know the names of every household object, which is atrociously hard when you have never been to an English-speaking country and can’t watch TV or read magazines in English.

I learned to read and write in English before any other language. I could do beautiful English cursive by the age of five because we had this old textbook from back in the 1950s, and it paid a lot of attention to English cursive. Also, my father taught me about syntaxis and morphology by age four. Really, he did. We would play this game where he’d write a long sentence in English and I’d analyze its structure and underline different parts of the sentence with different types of lines. We also played lexemes and built trees of word families.

Of course, people didn’t always react positively to hearing another language spoken in their vicinity. My father was denounced to the KGB for speaking “the Jewish language” to a small child. The busybody neighbors had no idea how English sounded and drew their linguistic conclusions on the basis of my father’s distinctively Jewish appearance. But even this danger didn’t stop us.

Nobody would do all this for just any language. English to us meant freedom. It was a door to a different world.

I’d have to talk about other languages in future posts because this will turn into a dissertation otherwise.

The political unrest in South Korea is very concerning because Western militaries have come to depend on South Korean weapons systems way too much.

We shouldn’t depend on global supply chains for crucial stuff as much as we do. This shouldn’t be a partisan position because it’s simple common sense.

I don’t remember if I shared this story, so I apologize if it isn’t fresh.

We often are forced to undergo corporate-style trainings at work. The most recent one was on leadership, a word I have come to detest.

“Everybody can be a leader!” we were told.

I’m a well-known grouch, so I had to pipe up.

“Of whom?” I asked. “If everybody is a leader, who is left to be led?”

“Everybody should lead everybody else!” the facilitator chirruped. “Any choice you make in life is an opportunity to show leadership.”

I was getting grumpier by the second.

“I chose what to have for lunch today,” I said. “Is that leadership?”

“Yes!” squeaked the facilitator, brightening up. “If you chose to eat healthy, that can inspire others. And that’s leadership!”

“How would others know what I chose to eat for lunch?” I persisted.

An uncomfortable pause settled in. Then, the facilitator perked up.

“You could post it on social media and show leadership that way!” she explained.

“Excuse me, I apologize,” chimed in an older professor. “Do I understand you correctly that we were asked to gather here in other to be told to post pics of our meals on Insta?”

By this time, the walls of the room were shaking with laughter and the workshop was soon wrapped up.

People keep saying this doesn’t happen at their universities. But it does, all the time. They don’t know it because they aren’t in an administrative role. Get into administration, and it will start happening. The higher your role, the more of this crap you get. If you haven’t been able to get a crucially important meeting with your Provost for months, I can pretty much guarantee that it’s because she’s in leadership workshops and manifesting trainings all day. There’s gay leadership seminars, non-binary black leadership seminars, all sorts of thing. There’s absolutely nothing particularly black or gay about them. They are all standard neoliberal drivel about the importance of downsizing, cutting costs, and getting the remaining workers to do the job of three fired colleagues while looking excited about it.

I have told the above story to exactly zero people out of the 30+ I supervise. To them, it doesn’t happen. But to me it does every other Tuesday of each month and twice as often June through October.

Biden should pardon the J6ers. That would be a strong move, calling attention to the fact that Trump didn’t do it and preventing him from doing it now. Plus, it would distract attention from his pardon of Hunter.

What keeps people from sliding into lumpenization and dysfunction is control. A sense of boundaries between self and the world. This goes from the basic acts of not expectorating on a sidewalk and not throwing around garbage to the more complex task of being emotionally contained in public.

When these boundaries aren’t put up around a person by means of religion, tradition, ritual and community, all that’s left to perform this function is a highly concentrated inner motivation that most people simply don’t have.

It’s easier to function and be happy when all these things keep you together.

Parental feelings aside, I’m very sad that Hunter’s shady dealings in Ukraine won’t be investigated. Burisma was property of Kremlin-friendly Ukrainian oligarchs. On the eve of the 2022 invasion, Ukraine passed an anti-oligarchy legislation that would have led to an investigation of these and other oligarchs. Then the invasion took place, and obviously the investigation was put on a very distant burner.

Biden has done everything to ensure that the war drags on. I’m not saying this is the reason but now we won’t find out.

At a Syrian restaurant in Montreal:

“Let’s order this dish!”

“No! It says impossible meat.“

“So?”

“That means fake meat.”

“It’s a Syrian restaurant. I don’t think they’d use fake meat.”

“Their bathrooms are mixed-gender.”

“Eww, this must be fake meat, then.”

As I’ve been saying this whole time, Trump will make an overture, Putin will piss on it because he’s a congenital idiot, and the only interesting thing is how Trump will react. Russia wants a long-term, large-scale American humiliation. It wants something like the Afghanistan withdrawal but on a world scale. And even if that happens, it will still not be enough. As with any narcissistic injury, nothing can feed the narcissist’s hunger. This is beyond logic and reason. It’s an emptiness inside the size of the universe that only grows larger the more it’s fed.

People who are hand-wringing about Biden’s pardon of his son, please ask yourselves if Trump wouldn’t do exactly the same.

Of course, he would. Anybody would. Even Pete Hegseth’s mother probably would.

“But he lied!”

Trump also didn’t end the Russian war in 24 hours after being elected, which everybody with a functioning brain understands was an electoral figure of speech aimed at the congenitally simple among us and should not be taken literally.

We all need to grow up and stop relating to politicians like they are our parents. It’s icky and immature.