Well, that changes everything! Finally, we know what word to use. What a relief!

See this tree on the left that forms a sort of canopy over the walkway? It grew completely naturally. N trimmed the top so that it wouldn’t obscure the flag but everything else happened by itself.

We used to have a small bush there that got eaten by bugs while we were on vacation. We removed the sad, blackened stump, and started debating what to plant in this spot. I proposed a big, wild specimen. N wanted a small, neat plant. While the discussion continued, this tree grew, and now I adore it. I particularly like that it’s a weed.

If anybody knows the name of this plant, please let me know.

But hey, it’s not only Russia that keeps going in the same direction:

Some people always end up in the same place, no matter where they try to go:

A loaf of sourdough costs $9 at the farmer’s market, and everybody seems to think this is a normal price.

I ended up buying nothing because I keep mistaking prices for telephone numbers.

Within an hour today, Russians lost two fighter jets and two helicopters that were accompanying them.

Prigozhin is saying he’s having to waste too much ammunition shooting at the regular Russian troops that are trying to escape from Bakhmut.

Moscow has been on fire for days. Today, it’s a hotel that’s burning. (Owners burn them on purpose because the economy is bad and they can’t pay the mortgages and the maintenance).

Immediately, Russians started asking on social media, “Are Ukrainians a superior race? Were we wrong and they are racially superior? Ukrainians, come save us from the Tajiks and the Chechens!”

They will never learn.

The James Patterson I’m going to tell you about isn’t the famous mystery writer. Instead, he’s the son of an American Communist who visited the USSR in 1934, loved it, and decided to stay. The American Communist was allowed to marry a Soviet woman because she was from a family of a major counterintelligence officer, so it was considered OK for her to… erm, get infiltrated, so to speak, by a black American defector.

James was one of the kids of the Soviet woman and the black American Communist. As a baby, he starred in a Soviet blockbuster movie about a black kid persecuted by international fascist racists. In the movie, the black baby is lovingly welcomed in the USSR. In the closing scene, representatives of all Soviet ethnicities pass him around in a circus arena and sing lullabies in their national languages.

The funny part was that one of the Soviet ethnicities featured in the movie was Jewish. Back in 1934 it was still OK to show Jews onscreen. The famous Jewish artist Shmuel Mikhoels holds the black baby in the movie and sings to him in Yiddish. Obviously, after World War II, it became unacceptable to acknowledge the existence of Jews, let alone mention Yiddish. Mikhoels was murdered by the regime. He was excised from the movie. As a result, the poor black baby ends up kind of flying across the space in the circus arena where the Jewish artist originally stood.

After the USSR collapsed, James Patterson and his Soviet mom emigrated back to the US.

Wow, it’s totally like those idiot lefties who were trying to emigrate from the US to the USSR at the height of Stalinist purges. There were over 50,000 of them and they were as deluded as the poor fools who believe that Russia – with its sky-high abortion rates and most children growing up without their fathers – has “traditional” values. I mean, yes, it’s traditional for Russia but for nowhere else.

N and I have spent an enormous amount of time over the past year watching videos, listening to lectures, and attending online classes in Ukraine. We now have a daily content strategy meeting where we discuss what each of us heard, read or watched because there’s too much good stuff for one person to be able to cover it all.

Maybe 10% of what we watch and listen is about the war. The rest is history, philosophy, productivity, psychology, parenting, international relations, theology. It’s all really good stuff. My brain is finally getting fed like it should. There are loads of fresh insight, new ideas, real freedom to think and speak.

When I left Ukraine in 1998, it wasn’t even an intellectual backwater. It was an intellectual non-entity. Nobody talked about anything that mattered. And look at how thought is flourishing there now. A Ukrainian Matt Walsh or Jordan Peterson is light-years ahead in originality and value. And I’m only naming people on the right because the American left has nobody at all. At least, Peterson is trying. Nobody left-of-center knows how to produce a thought at all. At least, since Zygmunt Bauman died, and he was Polish anyway.

In North America today it’s obviously not nearly as bad as it was in the post-Soviet Ukraine in the 1990s. But insight is dead, my friends. All we see in lieu of intellectual life is purely reactive. “This thing happened and I’m appalled” is the narrative offered by the left, the right, and the center. People don’t even remember what ideas are. They have lists of grievances instead of ideas.

And by the way, it’s not just Ukraine. Spain, too, has a richer intellectual life than America, all of a sudden. When I read a book-length essay from Spain, and there’s actual analysis. People think, they create something new. In America, essay writers are now strictly into describing. “This is what happened. The end.”

I’m sure we can recover our ground. North America has everything anybody needs and more to stop the small-scale, parochial, repetitive whining and go back to thinking. We can snap out of it real fast. I suggest we proceed to do that as soon as possible.

The CNN is actively promoting Trump, and he’s doing fantastic:

It’s strange that the network didn’t at least try to get a serious journalist to interview him. I don’t know who the anxious woman is but she’s the last person who should be doing this interview. The only sexual abuse I’m seeing is what Trump is doing to her onstage.