A week ago, the day before the event, Zoriana and I went shopping for the baby doll she wanted for her sixth birthday. We spent an hour in the store before she decided on this one.
Before this week I would not have called Zoriana especially maternal. However, she has taken that doll everywhere. This picture was taken on our Sunday outing to Victory Park. She has named the doll Melania. No, not after the first lady but after her late great-grandmother. She sleeps with her. She took her to her last day of kindergarten and her first day of school. Now that we have insisted that taking the doll to school every day is inappropriate, she has me watch over Melania during the day.
It is a German made doll, a bit over $50. The best one in the store, maxing out our budget. The doll came with accessories including a pacifier, a paper diaper and a cup.
They showed a bathtub on the package, but it was not included. Zoriana insisted that Melania needed a bath, so we went back to the toy store yesterday to shop for the bathtub with the thousand hryvnya ($27) cash she had received as a present.
Though I can't find it on the Internet, we used to have expression "they make it up on the fries." The idea is that a fast-food restaurant will set a low price on the hamburger knowing that almost everybody will also by French fries and a Coke. This doll manufacturer set the price of the bathtub at $80. I told Zoriana that no way was I going to make up the difference. She could use the regular baby bathtub we had for her and Marianna, which undoubtedly cost less than $80.
Zoriana is undeterred, continuing to be as maternal as can be. She even gave Marianna the smaller doll she had had forever, and Marianna is following suit.
I used to look askance at all of the baby paraphernalia that women drag along wherever they go. There is a baby buggy packed with a thermos, baby bottle, hats, jackets, and a week's worth of food. I wryly joke that bringing a baby buggy makes the difference between an outing at an expedition. Between moving at a walking pace and the snail’s pace you can maintain pushing a baby buggy over dirt roads. To me, carrying the child is a small price to pay for the ability to get where you are going in a reasonable time. However, it is a battle that I rarely won.
I am sure I am up against something profound. All of this baby stuff establishes a woman's role in the scheme of life. Making it abundant and expensive as a matter of status. If I want babies – or grandchildren in this case – I had better shut up and learn to accept it with a smile.
Our day in the park was wonderful. We rented a rowboat for an hour, and Eddie and Zoriana did all the rowing themselves.
Zoriana invited three of her favorite adults from the Toastmasters group for dinner on her birthday last week. Ludmila is the president of our club, Yuriy and Eric are the current and past presidents of the Dnipro Hills club. All three of them enjoy the company of our kids, and the feeling is totally mutual. The dinner went on until well after bedtime, when the kids were yawning but still hanging in there.
Anna, our babysitter who left for Poland the first week of the war, was back to clean up affairs here. Her daughter Sophia, a day younger than Eddie but entering puberty, is already a head taller and blossoming into a woman. Anna called just before dinner and Oksana invited them over as well. I had made a huge moussaka, so all we had to do was drag up another table.
This has been a big month for entertainment. We had the large Toastmasters barbecue, then Oksana's colleagues from Orff pedagogy, and now this. I enjoy cooking and Oksana enjoys entertaining. With the intent of keeping it up, I bought a bunch of lasagna noodles yesterday. Our big casserole will easily make enough to serve 12.
None of us have time to dig through all the material that we should read with regard to issues such as climate change and the Covid injections. Per Daniel Kahneman, we are forced to rely on fast thinking rather than slow, methodical approaches to deciding what is real. The propagandists know this. It reifies the old advice that "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."
We have been baffled, with whiffle-dusted, and gaslit up the wazoo over the past few years. I expect that I read more than almost any of you in my audience, but I have to confess that I can't keep up in any field, much less all of the fields. I depend on people whose expertise I respect such as Jessica Rose, Robert Malone and Peter McCullough. None of them, I am sure, have time to read everything themselves. They have circles of trusted associates who feed them information that they are confident that they can relay with authority.
I disappoint some of you subscribers when I blow off articles that you sent me from the Washington Post or the New York Times. Yes, my time is limited and I'm afraid that my mind is made up. Unless you accompany the link with a convincing argument as to why I should read something, I'm not going to give it my time.
Kaitlyn Jetelina is one of the propagandists whom I systematically reject. When I read something like this recent piece citing statistics on the incidence of Covid and the effectiveness of the vaccines, I simply disregard it. I don't have time to dive into the sources. You may recall that I did such a dive earlier this year on a climate change issue, only to find that the statistics cited came from the European Space Agency and upon inspection were not credible to me. I'm not going to bother with this one. As far as I'm concerned, she is an establishment mouthpiece and I don't want to waste my time.
Here's a Science Direct article to the effect that people who accept the jab are more intelligent than the rest of humanity. I'm already skeptical of the peer review process and the way pieces like this are put together. Those of you who have been injected, and feel yourselves to be intellectually superior, may take comfort from stuff like this. I remain skeptical.
Here is a graphic of an opinion poll that I find somewhat more credible. I didn't complete my PhD, but you can lump me in with that group. From this I would conclude that people who have completed their degrees have learned to be properly skeptical of others who can make the same claim.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the children are off to school and daycare, and the good-looking woman is off for a relaxing massage. The weather is perfect and the 10-day forecast calls for more of the same.
It seems to me that vaccine hesitancy, AKA rejection of the lies pushed down our throats about Covid and the killer clot shots, was a wise decision. I had my shots when I went into the Navy way back in the dark ages, and I haven't had a shot since. It seems to me that about 40% of the population rejected forced vaccination, but your chart doesn't reflect that. It doesn't even reflect 30% rejection. I do however know some smart people who got the shots. You know why? They trust the pricks that promoted them. I had a nice little walk before the war with a very smart Ukrainian couple. The female half of that couple works in the RADA. I asked her how many of the RADA deputies she trusted, and it turns out after thinking about it that her guess was 35 out of about 500. And then I asked her: So, you trust them to advise you to get these shots? It was an explosion in her brain. You see, many people say that they don't trust government, but they do trust in the corruption. Sad, very sad.
I've found it easiest to simply dismiss anything and everything the MSM vomits out. They lied about Iraq, they lied about Libya, they lied (and continue to lie) about Trump, they lied about Covid, etc., etc.
If Germany starts vaccine mandates, then war or no war, I will immediately pull the kids out of German school and bring them back home. I miss my wife and house. The family separations (during what I believe are my last productive years) have become unbearable to me. Germany is a failing state and it deserves to go down the toilet for its ridiculous decisions about middle Eastern refugees, Covidioticy and "wokeness." The sooner it dies, the better. Far too often, I am getting the stink-eye with my Ukrainian license plates, although I am not a refugee and not sponging off of anyone.
Thanks for another opportunity to spleen-vent!