Rural Life

It’s true, we have excellent real estate prices in Illinois. I constantly see students who pair up in college, get married and buy a house at around $140,000-180,000 in the area. The little towns around here are safe, beautiful, with excellent air quality, amazing hiking trails, and perfect for children. Plus, we have foodie culture.

It took me a long time to figure out the suburban/rural life in America but now I really get it.

Boring Show

Ah, I see that the Bidenites and the Trumperites have once again caught each other committing treason.

What a boring series. The writers keep copy-pasting the same plot twists over and over. “Biden admitted to treason on tape” is identical to “Trump admitted to mass rape on tape”. Both are deeply moronic and excruciatingly boring.

People who take these “open admissions” seriously should be treated with the kindness due to all victims of cognitive disorders. But those who purposefully inflame our low-IQ brothers and sisters with these fake dramas should be ashamed.

Writing Marathon

The positive side effect of engaging in a self-imposed daily marathon of writing in Ukrainian is that now writing in English feels exceptionally easy.

I have written 50,000 words in my Ukrainian book since April. I don’t think people realize how crazy that is given that I never spoke Ukrainian in my daily life and was incapable of writing even a page in it until April. My only published article in Ukrainian was translated by my father because I couldn’t do it.

It’s really nuts, that’s what it is.

Avoiding the Excitable Crowd

And the result is that intelligent people begin to hope that this army of idiots should have no impact on anything that matters. If the overheated ignorants are going to inflict the AOCs and the Boeberts on us, let all the important decisions be taken out of the hands of the legislature. Let everything be decided in the space of flows where the voting power of the excitable idiots won’t reach.

That’s how the consensus to get rid of the nation-state solidifies.

Sign of Age

One sign of getting older is that friends start having medical procedures in such numbers that you have to put them on the calendar to keep track.

I tend to have older friends, too.

We Have a Choice

https://twitter.com/BRyvkin/status/1673503676248334336?t=0Wc-YiJ66vErVpZWSy1K3Q&s=19

Exactly. And it’s not a country because countries, in the sense we understand the word, only exist in the nation-state context. Russia is showing us what the future looks like if we don’t stop the collapse of the nation-state.

Ukraine is showing us how to stop that collapse.

Now is the time to choose.

Furnishings

Today we received a survey asking us what furnishings would induce us to use the library more often. Because apparently people go to libraries for furnishings.

There were zero questions (and I mean, none, not one) about what books or movies we would like to see at the library. Please don’t assume that books were addressed in other surveys. As I wrote before, our library got rid of books a while ago and is now buying up these stupid furnishings – sofas, armchairs, bean bags, settees – to fill the space from which books were banished.

Contrary to expectations, this didn’t attract more people to the library, so librarians are now trying to figure out how to improve the furnishings. The library is turning into a museum of fussy furniture but the poor buggers aren’t getting it.

Siamese Twins of US Politics

The people who voted for Trump’s impeachment are just as eager to distract the public with arrant silliness as those who are proposing to vote to expunge the impeachment.

The supporters of both groups of legislators keep talking about “the national divorce” but they are in fact closer than Siamese twins. Both groups are infantile, easily excitable, easily duped and very ineffective.

Semitic Noses

Why, why would anybody do that to a beautiful man? I hope it’s not real.

My sister has this kind of a semitic nose, and she loves it, and everybody who sees her loves it. Semitic noses are great.

The problem is never in a nose, people. It’s always 100% in the head.

Language Policy

N has a favorite journalist who publishes half of his material in Ukrainian and half in Russian. Of course, the best and freshest material appears in Ukrainian first. N is eager to find out what the journalist has to say, and as a result, his Ukrainian is improving by leaps and bounds.

In Quebec they went the opposite way. Instead of creating great content in French that people would be desperate to access, they are trying to coerce people into speaking the language through control and harassment.

Language is like nothing else. It comes through love or it doesn’t. I crossed an ocean and changed my life completely to become a Spanish speaker out of love. And stopped being a French-speaker in a Francophone country because my love was spat at.

Ukraine managed to recover Ukrainian as a widely spoken language within a generation precisely because there was no coercion. It became a language that young people find cool to speak. The best music groups are performing in Ukrainian. The coolest influencers speak it.

Quebec effed it up royally, in my opinion. The only way to promote a language is what’s been done in Ukraine.