Strike while the Internet is (still) hot. Blackouts. About the Slavs.

20221101

Getting this piece out with a minimum of editing while I still have the Internet.  Apologies in advance.

Electricity went out last night at 7 o'clock, just as dinner was ready. We went to bed early because there is nothing much to do. This morning I woke up and just had time to finish shaving when it went out at seven in the morning. My reading of the schedule shows that it will be out for four hours, until 11 o'clock. This is rather of an inconvenience, but it is wartime.

We don't have proper discipline and I don't know how to enforce it. Specifically, since our water comes from a well.  The pump depends on electricity. We run out of water very quickly after the electricity goes off. This is our own fault. People use it as if they were an endless supply, flushing toilets and stuff like that, instead of conserving it for when we need it. I've made enough noise about this that I'm just being quiet and putting up with the inconvenience.

I thank God for small things. We have the butane stove to cook breakfast. I got another tank last night – they realized that it is a seller’s market and the price went up 50% just in the two weeks between buying the first and the second. I paid it. The next challenge is to get the tank filled, which I attempted to do later in the day.  No luck – the pumps work by electricity.  I’ll try tomorrow.

We need to learn to live life more slowly, at the pace of our ancestors, when the day ended when the sun went down and people simply went to bed. Last night I tried to tell stories. I got interrupted by everybody. My dear wife a couple of times to tell me how to tell stories. I gave up. I suppose I should persevere, but I'm sure I will have lots of opportunity.

This story was a little bit risqué, the kind kids like. About the time that princess Zoriana adopted two frogs and to keep them secret from her parents she kept them in her breast pockets where they moved around a little bit causing a great deal of comment among the commoners in the kingdom. Or rather queendom, because the women did run everything in that particular sovereignty.

It appears to me that Putin once again shot himself in the foot. In his desire for revenge for our attacking three of his ships in Sevastopol, ships which had of course been firing missiles at us for the duration of the war, he seems to have prematurely launched his attack on our heating infrastructure. The temperature is still somewhat above zero. We can survive satisfactorily by getting dressed more warmly. Most significant, we now have time to import the replacement parts for our electric generation plant and get it more or less in order in time for the coldest part of winter. He may have done us a favor of showing us what is coming. I expect we can live with it.

Meanwhile, he seems to be running out of cannon fodder. The were reports that two days ago he lost 950 men, a record number for the war, in fruitless assaults against well-established and defended Ukrainian positions west of Donetsk. Here's a link to French pundit and Sorbonne intellectual Françoise Thom reporting that there is chaos within the Putin regime. She says there is deep unrest in Russia.

Of course, one must discount any news coming out of Russia. Just as has always been the case. Go back to books I have reviewed and refer to often, Letters from Russia written in 1839, and Homo Sovieticus, written in the 1970s. Things are never as they seem. I think Churchill said the same. Russia is never as strong as she seems, nor as weak. We just don't know, but we have to maintain the fight until we win, because we do know what life would be like if we lost.

I wrote that I didn't see anything come out of Zoriana's visit to the doctor. She didn't know of anything. But I am still wrong. There is some medicine she is supposed to drink every morning.  She must wait 20 minutes after taking it to eat anything. Dammed if there is not a stopwatch on that 20 minutes. So as we are trying to scramble around and get everything done in the morning so she can get to kindergarten, we have this 20 minute block in which she can't eat. It would be a convenient time to get dressed, but that seems not to happen either. So as usual we have a last-minute scramble and sharp words to get everything ready to get out the door.

This morning we had the usual household drama. Zoriana was wearing Eddie's roller-skates. They had been just lying there – he wasn't wearing them. But he is all upset because they are his. Both children tend to wear roller-skates all over the house all the time. It works downstairs where we have linoleum. It is forbidden upstairs where it appears to scratch the parquet floor. At any rate I think it's useful that they get used to balancing on roller-skates and perhaps get some exercise when the weather is good.

The electric company publishes a schedule of outages. They have raised the frequency. According to the schedule we will be without power almost half the time, on for five hours, off for four, staggered throughout the week. The schedule was published Friday but we had no outages over the weekend. However, starting last night, it looks like they are on schedule. At night when we have no light things are little slow, as I indicated. In the morning we get by.

We bought some milk at the farmers market on Sunday. It was a little bit sour, but that is something that we look forward to. That makes kefir, the national drink. We had pancakes yesterday morning, and were having them again this morning. The frying pan works well on the gas stove. So the hardships are minimal at this point.

Edward Dutton is a guy with endless energy. He writes a book about every few months, in addition to his Jolly heretic show on YouTube. I looked on Amazon to see if he had any new books, and lo and behold one came out in September. Not really by him – just a his forward to a book of limericks by one of the fans of his Jolly Heretic YouTube series.

I figured what the heck and bought the book. The limericks are not terribly entertaining, which fact called to mind a Limerick that I heard long ago:

A Limerick packs laughs astronomical

In a space exceedingly economical

but the good ones I've seen

so seldom are clean

and the clean ones so seldom are comical.

What it needed was a bit of ribaldry, and I wrote as much in a book review. Adding one of my own.  Only the second review for this book. I wonder if it will get read whatsoever.

I preordered Robert F Kennedy's new book, due out in January, about the involvement of the spook community in vaccines. It sounds rather ominous, and it’s ominous that we hadn't read anything about it until now although it's been going on for decades. It leads you to put credence in the claim that there is close collusion between the news organizations and the government. The government would not want you to know these things, and it appears the media were quite happy to oblige. At any rate, I look forward to reading the book. It substantiates what Robert Malone wrote a while back about the spooks being behind the “vaccines” that use the mRNA technology he invented.

Edward Dutton had a Jolly Heretic piece on the Slavs. I watched it to see what he had. A listening to an analysis of your people is rather like listening to a horoscope. You have a confirmation bias – you would say yes yes that's us when in fact he would say that about anything. But they say about the Slavs is that we are a rather joyless bunch, as intelligent as Western Europeans in general but not as successful because we don't get along with each other. We don't have high levels of trust.

He says that per J Philippe Rushton's r/K theory we are more r selected because we live in an uncertain environment. We have put up with wars, slave raids in one thing and another throughout our history. This is certainly true. Given the uncertainty, he contends, we tend to have more of a tendency to live for the moment, reproduce as we can and just keep on slogging. That's probably true. He correctly says that there are quite significant differences among Slavic peoples, which I have noted among Russians, Ukrainians and Poles. The Poles are more extroverted more self-confident and one could say obviously more successful throughout history and more unified than we Ukrainians.

Per Dutton, neuroticism is one of the characters traits of Slavic people. They are distrustful and get angry easily. And they get up obsessed over small things. It's also a supposed characteristic of Japanese. My half Japanese ex-wife was an absolute nut about following doctor's orders. She would take the children to the pediatrician at the slightest cough or sneeze. We went to a boutique practice in the Foxhall area of Washington DC where the visits cost $100 in 1980s dollars. The children of course got all of the mandatory shots and standard of care treatment for whatever was wrong with them. Not coincidentally, or perhaps coincidentally, all three of them turned out to be a little bit weird.

We have our own neuroticism.  I mentioned we have the obligatory 20 minute wait after taking cough medicine before the kids can have breakfast. Zoriana must dressed super warmly as she gets goes out the door. She must get some sort of a medicine up the nose for blocked sinuses or whatever. She doesn't like it. She cries and fights and resists all of the stuff. The fact that she doesn't like it makes no difference. Mother and grandmother will force it on her. They will not brook my saying it makes no sense.  As I write this I am being blamed for Eddie’s cough.  My defense that I care a lot but can do absolutely nothing is not an adequate defense.

The medical boards are going ahead and stripping the outspoken leaders of the anti-Covid vaccine movement, Peter McCullough and Merle Nass of their licenses to practice medicine. This strikes me as stupid. It is such an obvious travesty that these evil people who are pushing this agenda must realize it will backfire on them. Peter McCullough has such a big platform now has so many followers but they simply cannot shut him up.  The same with Merle Nass.

These are people who are in their late 50s or 60s, who can survive without the income. If they were not in that position they might not have been so bold and speaking their minds in the first place. The persecution therefore serves only to underscore the justice of their cause and the injustice of the of team Covid who would shut them down.

If Emily Oster of The Atlantic thinks it’s time to let bygones be bygones, and amnesty all of the stupidity surrounding Covid, she should first advocate abandoning the stupidity.

I think we are reaching a tipping point. I have not commented on Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. He says he is striking a blow for free speech. If Twitter once again as a platform for free speech it will certainly show Facebook Google and the others to be exactly what they are, tools of the establishment, and it will indeed greatly enhance Twitter's credibility and hence its market value.

The media continues to destroy its credibility. Most recently they ascribed MAGA motives to the crazy man who attacked Paul Pelosi. This is transparently false. I know that type of guy. I lived in his neighborhood, at 2211 Blake St. in Berkeley from 1964 to 1966. I knew the precursors of this type of hippie. Of course the drugs were not as powerful or as available in that day, but the dropouts were indeed dropping out. I lived in a house with Jack Plasky, an earnest young fellow who made sandals. The deal was that you ordered the sandals and then you bothered Jack about five or six times until he finally delivered. I never ordered a pair I don't know what the quality was.

One of the things I remember about that household is a bottle of king-size Coke – a 12 ounce glass bottle in the traditional Coca-Cola hourglass shape. It had been drunk months ago and it spawned generations of new life. House flies would fly into the bottle to get something to drink, be unable to get out, die, and their carcasses would feed the next generation of house flies. I don't know how long it went on, and nobody in the house could be bothered to clean it up. I watched the drama unfold out of curiosity. 

We in the house were known to do a dooby or two., Edward and I lived in that menage, were amused by the antics, got our lives together and got out and got on. I'm sure that Jack Plasky was too far gone for ever manage that. Others in the house, like Farid, the Iranian guy, went on to lead their own interesting and different lives. Farid I, understand from Edward, is now gone.   

As I wrote this I heard distant explosions. Probably Iranian drones being blown out of the sky. Who knows? As I started the walk on which I dictated this piece there were air raid sirens going. Reminds you that there is a war going on, although as before we don't see signs of it in our little suburb.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where three children with above-average coughs are early to bed, the good-looking woman not far behind them. 

Graham