How are you, people in Israel? Please stay strong. We are all very worried over here about the possibility of an attack by Iran. Also, we are ashamed of the terrible anti-Israel protests. There are none where I live, obviously, but things have been downright shameful in Toronto and NYC.

This is the result of the Howard Zinnification (or Zinni-zombification) of secondary education:

Here’s a great question from a reader that I really want to answer. Thank you, reader, for asking it.

Voters are asking, “why should we invest money into defending Ukraine’s borders when we aren’t defending our own?” I’ve been asked this in person, on social media, and during a public talk. This is a very good, reasonable question. I don’t blame people for asking it. They should be asking it.

There’s no good answer to this question. Do you have one? I don’t. I mean, I do but it’s all about the nation-state and the Budapest Memorandum, and you need to be capable of a high degree of abstraction to understand it. Nobody owes me or anybody a higher degree of abstraction.

I don’t know if Mike Johnson is sincerely for closing the border. Maybe he’s pretending, like all politicians. But he’s responding to the genuine and valuable concern of the voters by trying to say, “here’s what I got for you, American citizens, in exchange for Ukraine aid.” There’s no US citizen who is more pro-Ukraine than I am but I don’t blame Mike Johnson for trying to get something for American voters. I do blame the people who are so opposed to doing anything at all for our country that they’d sacrifice Ukraine for that shameful goal. Biden should agree to close the border. He should agree to the natural gas export licenses. Not for Ukraine but for America. And if Ukraine benefits as a result, all the better.

Now my question is, why is Biden refusing? These are good measures that have overwhelming support among voters across the political spectrum. Why can’t we get all three of these things that are beneficial for our economy and the preservation of our nation-state?

I have a wasp nest in my office at work. I mean this literally and not as a metaphor for the state of things in academia. It’s the busiest time of the academic year, and now I’m.an internally displaced person with no office.

It’s barely above freezing outside and I have wasps buzzing over my head in the office. It’s unfair.

When the wasps see me, they perk up immediately because I probably look like their best chance for a meal.

I’ve been invited to write a paid article for a Ukrainian literary portal. Obviously, I won’t accept the money but I will gladly write. It will be about why the word “nationalism” has acquired such negative overtones in the West while it’s seen as a positive thing in Ukraine. I’ll write about the struggle between the nation-state and open-border globalism.

Finally, I’ll be able to bleat excitedly about Zygmunt Bauman to people who aren’t yet sick and tired of me doing it. It’s all good, I’ll get them sick and tired of it soon enough.

Does anybody know? Why is Scotland so… unusual? Why, in general, do separatist societies these days tend to be so far left? And why are they so heavily into the police state? It’s like they want nationhood to snitch on each other all day.

Yes, Je me souviens, I’m looking straight at you and your intense COVID-era snitching. And the rest of your leftie antics because the stories I could tell are quite out there.

I’m happy that I don’t watch the news anymore. It does wonders for my blood pressure not to listen to blatant lies and manipulation.

But the downside is that I have no idea how to pronounce the names of the people in the political process. I only read about them from a large hodge-podge of trusted sources. For instance, I’ve been accenting “Vivek” wrong in my head this whole time.

Christo Grozev’s investigation regarding the Havana Syndrome:

As I’ve said, I’ve known for 10 years, and this has absolutely been silenced until now. The silencing took place during the Obama administration.

I never liked libertarianism. Not that I hate it or anything but it’s simply not my thing. But now that I spend a chunk of my professional time interacting with Ukrainians, I’m really warming up to it. Ukrainians are very libertarian, in case people don’t know.

It’s really pleasant when you don’t have this huge bureaucratic superstructure dominating every activity. Everything is easy. Everything happens fast and effectively because it’s just people doing what they believe they need to do. No compliance paperwork. No paperwork of any kind. It’s just people talking to people and getting things done. It’s kind of really cool.

I now feel a strong desire to reread Ayn Rand because I’m in touch with this very Randian environment, and it’s definitely attractive.

First, the Biden administration refused to close the border in return for aid to Ukraine. Now it refused to allow natural gas export in return for aid to Ukraine:

The Biden administration has rejected an agreement with U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson to connect Ukraine aid with lifting the Biden administration’s pause on new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export licenses.

https://kyivindependent.com/white-house-dismisses-linking-ukraine-aid-to-reversal-of-natural-gas-policy/

Poor Mike Johnson who has been bending backwards to reach an agreement is being vilified as intransigent while the Biden administration refuses every reasonable offer that’s good for the US and the world because all it wants to do is service the far-left agenda.

Almost nobody knows about the Republican efforts to reach an agreement because it’s not on the news.

But it gets worse. The Biden administration is trying to prevent Ukraine from destroying Russian refineries so that the world stays dependent on Russian oil and natural gas. At the same time, Biden is preventing the US oil and gas industry from taking the Russian spot that Ukraine is freeing up for us. And Biden also does everything to refuse the aid that Ukrainians would use to take out more Russian refineries.

It’s the Republicans who are supporting our enemies to the detriment of the US, though. That’s the official narrative, and one has to battle one’s way to actual facts like a miner in the coal mine.