Clarissa's Blog

Please never donate to the Red Cross again. I never donated them because they are extraordinarily corrupt but now there’s even more reason to not waste money on them.

Elderly people in Ukraine who are being evacuated from Mykolaiv. The subtitles are in English:

https://twitter.com/antiputler_news/status/1506931836735434752?t=vjIH0_4nZ2J44cPVws8rWw&s=19

In the video, a group of unarmed Ukrainians are singing the national anthem as they face off with heavily armed Russians. I promise there are no horrors in this video:

https://twitter.com/AlexandruC4/status/1506761204462669834?t=ulTYPXMDOyDmVwTB4MbVyg&s=19

I cried until my eyes stopped opening.

P.S. People are asking what the Ukrainians are saying before they start to sing. They say, “calm down, put your weapon down, just calm down already, you moron.” Ukrainians on the ground know exactly what I’ve been saying all along: Russians are experiencing a massive collective freakout.

This is the real problem with Judge Jackson:

She’s terrified. Terrified of a tiny group of men in dresses to the point where she prefers to look like a complete idiot than to say what a woman is. How can it be a good idea to have a Supreme Court Justice who is so scared of a tiny interest group that she can’t perform an intellectual operation accessible to most 4-year-olds?

Ironically, Jackson was only nominated because she is a woman, as the person nominating her said openly. I assume President Biden isn’t a biologist either. How did he manage to figure out that Judge Brown is a woman if it’s such a fraught task?

Twenty-first century. And we are at a point where we are afraid to say that we know what a woman is.

And who says if they feel threatened? Remember, what you feel is the reality. The Russians will decide if they feel threatened. We are watching the idea of a nuclear war being normalized. It’s being mentioned daily as a possibility on Russian TV. Now things have progressed to the point where a leading government official feels comfortable saying it. Russians are clearly trying to talk themselves into a nuclear strike. This is a closed system that admits no feedback.

Going back to the conversation of whether Russia or China is more dangerous. Is the Chinese government openly and aggressively priming its population for a nuclear war? I don’t think so.

Here is a really fun exercise I did today. Draw the following graph (or whatever you call it, I’m not much of a mathematician):

Now put the things and the people that are foundational to your life wherever it feels right. Don’t overthink it. What makes you who you are? What are the things and the people that are central to your sense of self? Arrange them in circles of any size wherever you want on this graph.

Mine, for instance, has books at the very center, my inner life and the capacity to express my thoughts at the bottom, Klara on the right-side arrow, etc. Do yours (come on, it’s just for fun), and then I’ll explain how to glean insight from all of it.

After you have filled the graph, here is how to interpret it:

Turns out that women tend to put their children on the right side of the horizontal axis. I did that, too. These are the women who tend to sacrifice themselves on the altar of “being a good mother,” which is not good. In a healthy situation, children are on thee bottom part of the vertical axis.

Forget the Russians who are currently in Russia. What about the immigrants from Russia? Where are they in all this?

I’ve had people (acquaintances, colleagues, etc) from all over the world reach out to me. Somebody from India I worked with briefly in 2009 and never saw since. Somebody from Nigeria I used to know years ago. A guy from Mexico who was in my BA program with me. And so on. People do the sweetest, kindest things to show support. People who really don’t have to care.

No Russian people have manifested themselves, though. Nobody reached out to say, “hey, I know you have relatives in Kharkiv, is everybody OK?” Colleagues, acquaintances, relatives – zero contact. Once again, I’m talking about immigrants. So please don’t tell me they are scared of Putin. Besides, I’m not looking for public statements. But pretending all of a sudden that your colleague, acquaintance, brother doesn’t exist? That’s not great.

And it’s not just me. I asked around. Nobody has heard anything from their Russians.

Things are getting so dire for the Russians that they have started sending their spetznaz (Special Rapid Response Units that are the approximate equivalent of the SWAT teams in the US) to the war. But spetznaz aren’t troops. They are police. They are useless in a war.

To give a single example of what this means, the spetznaz of the Russian city of Vladimir – which hadn’t had a single casualty in 30 years according to its own data – yesterday buried its entire command. Four lieutenant colonels dead.

If that’s a good military strategy – just sending people to die as cannon fodder – what’s a bad one?

It’s another question why the families and friends of the dead officers don’t seem to have a problem with what’s happening.

And these are the losses that the Russian government is willing to recognize officially. I’m purposefully not giving you the Ukrainian estimates. These are the Russian official numbers, and in a war everybody reports smaller losses for themselves and larger losses for the enemy. But let’s assume that Russians are being uncharacteristically honest. It’s still very high numbers.

What do personnel losses of such magnitude tell us? The Russian military strategy has been a complete and utter failure. There’s also a bizarre incapacity to depart from a clearly suicidal strategy. More and more Russian soldiers are being brought to the exact spots where Ukrainians already destroyed Russian troops.

As I said before, I don’t watch (or read it listen to) the MSM coverage of the Russian war in Ukraine. Or of anything. So I’m wondering, what are the MSM saying? Who’s winning the war, according to them? If anybody can briefly enlighten me, I’ll be grateful.

I know the correct answer but I wonder what’s being reported.