It’s N’s birthday, and here’s the breakfast my sister prepared for him:

Enjoy your Wednesday!

The system of development levels I wrote about recently is actually very helpful. I’m reading the novel Hey Beautiful by Ann Napolitano, and it’s incomprehensible without the knowledge of these levels. The characters do the most outrageous things to each other for absolutely no reason.

A mother treats her grown daughters like absolute garbage. They’ve done nothing wrong. She simply feels like hurting them.

A man tries to commit suicide, and when his parents learn about it, they say, “we don’t care. Please leave us alone.” The man never had a fight or a conflict of any sort with the parents. They simply don’t understand why they are supposed to care that their only son has been fished out of Lake Michigan half-dead.

A young woman decides not to inform the father of her baby that she gave birth to his child. He never hurt her in any way. She just feels like excluding him, so that’s what she does. Nobody asks why she does it. People accept her decision stupidly, like they accept everything else.

A man decides to walk out on his wife and newborn baby and relinquish parental rights. Why? Why do these people ever do anything? They simply feel like it.

The amounts of casual cruelty these characters engage in towards each other is stunning. These aren’t stupid or uneducated people. They get college degrees, go to graduate school, and love books. It’s not a problem of low IQ or being congenitally stupid. So what’s causing this?

Everything becomes completely clear once you realize that these are first-level people. They don’t have even the most basic philosophy of life or a moral code. They have no insight into their own behavior or feelings. They don’t even know it’s possible to have insight. “But I wanna” is the main – no, the only – driving force of their lives. As a result, they often can only exist if they are constantly and aggressively medicated. Otherwise, they become too destructive.

The book is very enjoyable if you know about first-level people. If not, it becomes completely incomprehensible.

Turns out that Klara already memorized the definitions of verbs, adjectives and nouns at school.

This is a good school. I have college students who have no idea what an adjective is.

Good as it is, we are skipping school again today because it’s still better to be out of if it.

The quote I posted above is great. But its author, David Kingsbury, spent his life ploddingly rewriting Dune. This is the strange thing about the clumsily called “genre literature.” It attaches to a single plot, and recreates it endlessly, sometimes for centuries.

Romance literature, for example, is hung up on the plot where the male character treats the female heroine horribly but then it’s revealed he was doing it out of love. This trend can be traced from Pride and Prejudice to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca to Gone with the Wind to 50 Shades and on and on into infinity. I was once forced to read nothing but Harlequin romance books because there was nothing else, and pretty much every book was a variation on this plot. I guess women are desperate to believe that shitty men are actually in love with them. This is what a psychologist would call an archetype. It’s an idea or a story that humans are use over centuries to grapple with difficult things in life.

In sci-fi there seems to be a fixation on re-possessing the human body by either drinking its fluids or eating its flesh. There’s also a trope of women with secret knowledge of the “mommy knows best” type. These are clearly male archetypes, and I don’t understand them well.

Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.

David Kingsbury

Yes, he was always nuts but this is simply shameful. This is also a very typical Russian propaganda device: the US is imperfect, and that justifies everything that Russia does.

In Albania half of the population of the country lost all their savings in Ponzi schemes, and that triggered a civil war.

Pyramid schemes were massively popular in all post-socialist countries. Albania was by far the worst case but the phenomenon existed everywhere else. N lost some money in the Russian most famous Ponzi scheme called MMM. He’s smart, so he realized immediately that the money was gone. But thousands of people hoped that the author of the MMM Ponzi scheme was going to give them their imaginary high earnings if only the conditions were right. They protested, demonstrated, and elected him member of Parliament to protect him from going to jail on criminal charges. The guy went on starting fresh Ponzi schemes in Russia and Africa for the next twenty years until he finally died.

My mother participated in an unofficial Ponzi scheme started by a neighbor who was emigrating to Israel and wanted to raise cash for his new life there. He promised the neighbors gigantic returns on any cash they gave him, and the poor fools gave them all their savings.

I remember my mother making endless calculations of the fabulous riches that her $200 were going to turn into. I tried to explain to her that the idea was nuts but it was useless. The neighbor left for Israel with his neighbors’ money, and nobody heard from him again.

The frustrated love of easy money is the main reason why Eastern Europeans are in a pout. Everything was done in socialism to make sure that people hated working. The concept of work was profanated and perverted. People no longer saw the possibility of working hard, enjoying what you do, and deriving emotional and financial satisfaction from the process. Work was to be avoided, and money had to appear from other sources.

This is what many people don’t get about socialism. It’s not simply an economic system that doesn’t work. It messes with your head. If half a country’s population simultaneously gets involved in a pyramid scheme and then starts murdering each other when it collapses, there’s a deep dysfunction here, way beyond the economic.

Yes, there are Ponzi schemes everywhere. Believe me, I’ve watched documentaries about every single one of them in the US because N loves them, so I know. But it’s the scale, the persistence, and the consequences of these schemes in places like Albania that is different. Most importantly, it’s the reaction that is scary. N’s “ha ha, I was young, I was so dumb but now at least I’ve got a funny story to tell about it” is rare. Mostly, the reaction is what you see in Lea Ypi’s memoir. It’s deep hatred towards the West for not immediately providing enormous wealth to everybody. That hatred has already erupted in the largest European war since 1945. It’s not going to go away no matter how much we pretend it isn’t there.

My 7-year-old informed me that she will henceforth brush teeth after her bath and not before.

That’s how she put it, henceforth. I was waiting for her to whip out a contract and ask me to sign on the dotted line.

You’d think that the number of pouty Eastern Europeans upset that the West didn’t make them all instantly rich in 1991 would diminish with time. But it’s not true. Those who were small and barely remember socialism and those who were born after 1991 and don’t remember it at all are just as angry as 70-year-old babushkas.

Obviously, I’m not talking about all Eastern Europeans. Many are not like that. I’m not like that. But enough are. Enough to start wars that will go on and on because you don’t need to have a memory of socialism to feel nostalgic for it.

Capitalism actually did make Lea Ypi rich. The property expropriated from her family before Albania became Stalinist was returned to her. She became a professor at a fancy place. Her life is that of extraordinary luxury. Capitalism gave her everything. Compared to the terror and misery of her socialist childhood in a repressed family of political undesirables, she’s living in paradise.

Yet Ypi is as angry as any unemployed pro-Putin drunk somewhere in Kaluga. She became an ultra-woke professor of Marxism and teaches about “capitalist oppressions.” She’s a fanatic of open borders, an idea she says she discovered at a Soros class in Albania in the early 1990s. My personal hatred of Soros dates back to that time because he was doing this in every formerly socialist country. He was poisoning the minds of these stupid teenagers or even pre-teens. They had no place to go, and the Soros organizations would bribe them with fun activities and food. Then they’d be brainwashed. And now they are bombing Ukrainians at worst or advancing the woke revolution at best.

We are in for a lot of upheaval brought to us by the pouty Eastern Europeans like Ypi. This is the second book in as many weeks that I randomly come across where an ultra privileged woman from Eastern Europe throws a tantrum about “bad capitalism.” Both books are very popular. Ypi’s collected every award imaginable because the endless repetition of the word “Marxism” soothes the sore brains of award committees.

Still, I recommend the book because you can find out a lot about the horror show that socialist Albania was. Ypi learned nothing from her experience there but we can. Most importantly, we can prepare ourselves for the future designed for us by the hordes of angry, rich Ypis.

Russia is already planning the second Russian-Ukrainian war. It’s scheduled for around 2027. The plan is to learn from the mistakes that caused Russia to lose the current war, regroup, and try again.

When will they stop trying?

Never.

If Putin dies and there’s a regime change to some pro-democracy leadership, the next war might be postponed to 2037. But it will still happen.

We need to be realistic about the future.