My 15 minutes of fame. Two sides on biolabs. Everyday life in a war zone.

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Success is a matter of being at the right place at the right time. This war found me – I certainly would not want to be a war correspondent. Let me take a paragraph to explain to new subscribers who I am and why I'm in Kyiv.

The best single article is this interview from last June.  You will find a fairly full, but patchy autobiography on my website.

The short story is that surveying my life at just short of 64 I found three woke children who did not talk to me anymore and a wife who didn't care. There would be no grandchildren. I had kept myself in shape and was convinced I could be a successful father somewhere. I had lived in Vietnam and Germany, and traveled a lot in Latin America. But what I read of Eastern Europe intrigued me. I came to Kyiv in September 2007 and never looked back.

Social capital, dignity, and traditional values such as study and hard work interest me. I love Ukraine because children respect their parents, respect one another, and would not even understand a question about what gender they were. Children absorb their values, their sense of themselves from the community in which they grow up. Bethesda, Maryland was a disaster for my first family. Kyiv is a healthy place. The resistance the world now observes to the Russian invasion is a validation of the qualities I love in the people here.

As to the question of why I am still here, I know something about war. I served four years in the Army National Guard and worked with the military, four years in Vietnam and another four in Germany. I was the author of an Army standard software system for logistics. I don't panic easily.

I am sure many of you subscribers will drop off after the war is over. But if you are interested in the issues of raising children with your own values, and to give you grandchildren, please plan on hanging on. Glad you found me. Now on with the news of the day.

I have often written that in this age of a totally sold out media, the guys I trust are independent voices like Alex Berenson, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.

Guess what? Just like journalists are supposed to do, they question one another. They disagree. Alex Berenson certainly knows more than I do about the bioweapons business. He says that those perfidious Russians are lying once again. I find that easy to believe, but how? He says that the laboratories in question were left over from Soviet days, and that the United States continued to fund them so that those researchers would not be tempted to work for the other side.

I find that to be a bit of a stretch. The Soviet Union folded 30 years ago. Those guys would be retired by now. It certainly should have been possible to close the laboratories, and that apparently didn't happen. But Berenson has earned such credibility with his reporting on Covid and other things that I am going to continue to listen to him. You can find his posts here and here.

Berenson goes on at length about the way in which the traditional media has totally destroyed its credibility by lying consistently about Russiagate, the elections, Covid and so forth. Whether or not he is right about the laboratories, he is absolutely on the money with regard to the media.

Glenn Greenwald comes down on the majority side on this issue. Given that his habitual stance is as a contrarian, he also has credibility.

I don't think that the truth of the matter will make a whole lot of difference in the outcome. The Russians will be properly blamed for this war, and their excuses will be swept aside. The point of interest to me is that Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak and the full nest of vipers are being fully exposed and these programs will probably be terminated. I hope so, for the sake of my children.

A point in support of Greenwald's argument is that the United States and Ukraine apparently worked to eliminate the evidence of the laboratories' projects early in the war. If you act guilty, you just might be guilty.

It's a quiet day for the war. A few cruise missiles going off here and there, undoubtedly killing civilians through war crimes while doing nothing to advance the Russians' war aims. We can offer our prayers for people living in high-rises in the suburbs of Kyiv. But let me take advantage of this lull to give you some glimpses of wartime Kyiv.

Although Eddie has a lot of time to study, he is understandably distracted. I am asking him to do his math and practice writing. He is not making quick progress with either. He did use dictation software to put together a book report on Roald Dahl's "The Twits." The good news is that he picked the book up and read it cover to cover on his own initiative. More good news is that he is learning to put up with the quirks of the software. Computers are great productivity tools, but you have to learn how to work around their multitudinous glitches. He put together 315 fairly acceptable words over three days. It’s a start.

Gary in London gave us a double twelve dominoes set a couple of years back. Best gift ever! Eddie, Oksana and I have played periodically for those three years now. I created a double  six subset because Zoriana, four years old, couldn't handle the arithmetic of double twelve. She has learned the scoring combinations up to 20 or 25. Sometimes she even keeps score. Her fine motor skills are such that she needs a whole sheet of paper, and although she can write down individual scores she can't yet add them up, but we don't care. It's pretty good progress for a kid her age.  Yesterday we moved up to a double nine configuration.

Marianna, two weeks shy of a year and a half, now says Daddy as well as Mommy. I take her to mom in the morning from her crib at the foot of my bed. Today as I said goodbye, she waved bye-bye. She is just able to reach up and put her hand in the bathtub that we keep full for when the power goes out. It keeps her busy for 10 minutes while I shave. The bunny is also a source of endless fascination. He does nothing but sit in his cage and wiggle his nose, but it keeps her occupied.

This is a great time for reading. I am reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to Eddie. It is a source of amazement how incredibly witty Anita Loos was, writing of the flapper era 100 years ago. Eddie gets most of it. There's a lot I have to explain, such as prohibition, prostitution, shopping in the Rue de la Paix in Paris, the fact that there was a Ritz Hotel in every major city, how bellhops work and so on. Always a lot of good conversation, and his brain sponges it all up. We also have quite a bit of occasion to talk about Bill Mauldin's book "Up Front" about World War II, which we read last year.

Mauldin wrote about the efficiency of the German panzers, the need for infantry support of armor, building foxholes and bunkers, the sounds of various munitions and so on. As often as not we have a point of reference to what's going on outside our window. Malden wrote that the American G.I. had respect for the Germans' ability to make war. Ukrainians do not have a similar respect for the enemy in this war. Thank God.

Grandpa Sasha is a sick man. Kidney problems, circulation problems, heart problems and now a lower respiratory infection. I bicycled 3 miles into town in 20° weather yesterday to get the prescribed antibiotics.

The streets are just about empty. The only thing open are a few drugstores. After waiting in line about 20 minutes I was able to buy all the superfluous stuff that Oksana had added to the list, but they did not have the antibiotics. I was able to buy some carrots, grapefruits (?) decent, ripe Hass avocados (??) and bananas out of the back of trucks parked in front of the closed stores.

The antibiotic in question is sorcef.  Like many drugs, it is manufactured in Europe and not available in the United States. After returning home, I went to web MD to determine that there are a whole bunch of antibiotics that are useful for lower respiratory infections. However, better to use what the doctor prescribed if we could get it. Oksana put together a list of analogs that have the same active ingredient as sorcef.  I made another 6 mile round-trip and returned with five of the 10 tablets we need – all that they had – but enough to get Sasha started.

The war and inflation have people on edge. The woman in front of me in line the second time was so distracted that I had to remind her when one of the pharmacists became free. Standing at the window, she kept asking about prices and finally had an argument. After a few minutes of this people in the line reminded her she was holding up progress and she relented.  Sasha is much better this morning after just one does of sorcef. 

We still have electricity and Internet. We still have about two liters of milk in foil packages. I am running out of coffee, but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to buy some today. I love my bicycle. When everything else comes to a standstill on account of lack of gas, roadblocks and power outages I will still be rolling. Glad to say, however, that those eventualities seem ever more distant as the Russians seem to be foiled at every turn.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the men are strong, the women are good looking, and the children are banging at daddy's door for attention.

Graham