The bully gets a smack. We get explosions.

20221010

Everybody loves it when a bully gets a well-deserved smack in the face and seethes with impotent rage because he can't do anything meaningful about it.

This is happened a few times recently to Mr. Putin. We sank his favorite toy ship, the Moskva. We pushed his troops out of Kharkiv oblast. And now we have blown up his supposedly indestructible pet four billion-dollar bridge. His three day war has stretched out to nine months and he appears to be losing.

Ukraine is cautiously ecstatic. I expect that supplies will be delayed for a long time. Rail carries much more than highways, and there is only one side of the highway left.  My bet is that the fire from the burning petroleum atop the railroad bridge will have heated the bridge structure itself sufficiently to cause distortion and metal fatigue. They may have to replace a couple of sections.

I have watched Ukraine replace the damaged section of a bridge they were building here in Kyiv. It took months. I am watching them rebuild an apartment building that was hit by a Russian rocket in February. They are still not done. It is not a quick process.

A Russian spokesman said that traffic had been restored. He cannot mean rail traffic – just clearing the mess is bound to take a few days.

The bully of course always has excuses for what he does. The United States biolab's here in Ukraine offered one. They claim that Ukraine was shelling the people's republics.  Probably true – and I'm equally sure that the People's republics were shelling Ukraine. They also course have always called us Nazis, which prior to February I simply thought was a curious absurdity. Ukraine was denazified almost 80 years ago.

The problem is that there are several bullies in the game. United States certainly throws its weight around. It is not innocent when it comes to color revolutions. In my mind the jury is still out on Maidan,  but more for want of awareness than want of malice on the part of the CIA. I have heard enough from Argentinians, Nicaraguans and Costa Ricans about CIA involvement in Latin America from people in those countries, and read enough to thoroughly believe it.

United States interests were certainly behind the bulk of the Covid nonsense. Much of the blame lies with the United States government itself – the FDA and the CDC – but the corporate powers behind the government seems to have dictated the game plan. The same can be said of Europe. The supposed men of judgment, the imminent statesmen, dance to the tune of the deep pockets. Whatever the case, the CIA, FBI and every other agency of the government was pressed into service promoting the Covid agenda. They bullied the world, and much of the world is not happy about it.

I have long written about how the United States government is bullying the world with regard to the gay and transsexual agenda. Edward Dutton (below) has a lot of room to operate because nobody else is willing to talk about the elephants in the room. He writes. “It has been found that the salivary response to seeing two men kissing, even of men who insist they are not homophobic, is the same as their salivary response to seeing a bucket of writhing maggots (O’Handley et al., 2017). This is what they are being forced to suppress.” I expect that the United States embassy’s flying the rainbow flag, their sponsorship of gay pride parades, and their plastering the Metro with posters of men holding hands advising people to get AIDS tests is perceived as bullying by other people than me.

It has always been different in Russia. The czar was the supreme power.  So is Putin. The problem there is that czars and Putin alike were surrounded by yes-men. The intelligence upon which Putin based this war was flawed from the beginning. People could not afford to tell him the truth.

People on the right and the left of the political spectrum have their favorite enemies. On the left it seems to be Russia. On the right it is Biden, which has led all too many people to blind themselves to Putin's malevolent nature. They're willing to believe his excuses for going to war, which have some substance is certainly not enough to justify this carnage.

American conservatives like to compare Putin erratic moves to 5D chess, as if there were some grand design. They find brilliance in his supposed feint towards Kyiv and subsequent retreat.  They likewise make excuses for his retreat from Kharkiv.  Some would even like to attribute the bombing of Daria Dugina, Nordstream and Crimea to some sinister plot.

Nope. There is evidence that he rose to the premiership by the 1999 apartment house bombings in Moscow.  Those were small potatoes, against defenseless targets. It took nothing but ruthlessness. Ruthlessness is a better definition of Putin's style than cunning and certainly much better than genius. He has played with fire all of his career and been lucky so far. This time he is getting burned.

Putin does not have good alternatives.  The Kerch bridge is an obvious military target – the key logistics link for the Russian military in Kherson, Melitopol and Crimea.  He has responded, as usual, with terror.  Rocketing apartment buildings in Zaporizhia.  This morning we have heard two explosions.  Oksana just phoned to say one was as the University metro station.  Both civilian targets.  He is mean, nasty, and ineffective.  Also vulnerable.  Moscow has a much bigger metro system.

Eddie has been slow getting his reading done. There is always something else interrupting him. This morning he asked me how much he had to read. I told him it was the wrong question. It went something like this: “Eddie, that is the question a pissant asks. It assumes somebody else is and will always be in charge of your life. Take charge of your own life. The question is how much you can get done, not how much you have to do.”

I repeated that my objective is to make him competent at reading, writing and arithmetic.  The tools are the three textbooks which I expect to complete in the school year. My question is not how many pages to read today, but of whether he is wasting his time. I give him a lot of crap about wasting his time.

I tell him that we are all surrounded by pissants.  People who let others control their lives, do what other people tell them, and are generally dissatisfied. He is in a position to rise above that. His challenge is to take control of his life and do it. 

I am reading Ed Dutton’s book “The Past is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution.” More than anybody else, he exquisitely examines the modern liberal mind and why they will die out. There are tens of people I would love to send it to. Unfortunately, none of them would read it. Few of them talk to me anymore. That is as succinct a description of the problem as you could ask.  Here’s a quote:

This fact is the fundamental paradox which our book aims to solve. Modern culture appears to move ever-leftwards—ever-more in the direction of individualizing values, the promotion of equality as a good in itself, scepticism about traditional religiosity and its morality, and self-actualization being the essence of the good life. Yet, at least since the 1960s, fertility has been associated with traditional religiousness and with being right-wing; the more right-wing, the greater the fertility advantage. Those who are high in fertility are strong in ‘binding moral foundations’; that is, the belief that the group is more important than the individual. They do not perceive equality as a good in itself and they often believe that people are not equal. They believe in traditional religiousness and they are also ethnocentric, geared towards promoting their own ethnic group which they perceive, accurately based on analyses of genetic assay data, as an extended genetic family. Two random Englishmen are more closely related than a random Englishman and a random Frenchman, meaning that, in a war, it would sometimes make sense, in terms of promoting your evolutionary fitness (the direct and indirect maximization of the extent to which your genes are passed on), to lay down your life for your ethnic group (see Salter, 2007; Hamilton, 1996, 1964). They hold to the worldview of religiousness and national interest that was common a century ago. In that the heritability of these viewpoints is high as we will explore later, we would surely expect society to become ever-more right-wing, both due to genetics and due to the transmission of right-wing views within families.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where I am savoring the uses of adversity. Eddie is staying home because Oksana is scared by Putin’s bombings here in Kyiv. Wonderful! He has a lot to do. A third, fourth and fifth explosion shake the house just as I write this. As powerful as any I remember from March.

Graham