True believers. Our neighborhood. Horsemen of the apocalypse.

20220404

I just got another six months' worth of ivermectin for $30. I wasn't running low but I wanted to make sure that it remained available. No problem, several brands for sale.

I wrote a couple of days ago that the ballyhooed double-blind CDC test of ivermectin was designed to fail. It used ivermectin alone instead of the universally recommended multiple drug therapy. They started treatment late, used a small dose, and continued treatment for only three days.

The experts now weigh in and say that despite being designed to fail, the clinical trial shows that ivermectin actually works.  This finding is only of academic interest. Minds are already made up and won't be swayed.

It's that way with the Russians. Despite the horrific evidence of Russian atrocities throughout this war, and now especially in Bucha as Bob Homans wrote about this morning, people who want to believe the Russians go right on believing. They believe the Russians when they claim that right after the photos were taken the corpses got up and walked away. These same people will tell you that tying looters to lampposts and pulling their pants down to shame them is a crime worse than rape or murder. They ignore photos of Russian soldiers in Belarus running flea markets selling loot stolen from Ukrainians civilians.

We have to be well aware that there are some people who will not be convinced. Both about the Russians and about Covid. It has to do with human psychology. People hate to let go. This is a dangerous fact. It is not worth our while arguing with them. As far as the Russians go, it's an indication that common sense is not going to lead them to end to this war. They will only understand force of arms.

Our neighborhood has not been much affected by this war. You may be interested in reading about where we are situated and why we are out of the line of fire.

The left bank of a river is on your left as you are facing downstream. The concept is useful primarily in Paris and Kyiv. The rivers that split the cities are big enough that bridges have played a significant role in their development.

The river Seine in Paris is well tamed. It is only about 1/8 of a mile wide and channeled within man-made banks. The Dnieper is up to a half mile wide.  Including its unbuilt floodplains and river islands it reaches 2 miles. The bridges are major structures, like those spanning the Hudson in New York City or the San Francisco Bay.

The city was founded, and the administrative has center remained on the right bank atop a high bluff that discouraged attackers.  The Pochaina creek which flowed in a mile to the north provided anchorage for traders' boats. It became Podil, the Jewish quarter and the center of commerce.  The public square is called Kontraktova, where  merchant contracts were signed.

The left bank, where I live, is low and sandy. Prone to flooding until dikes and dams were built, most important of which is the 1965 dam holding back the 40 mile long Kyiv Sea, it remained sparsely settled until after the Second World War. It was first connected by tramways, then a metro system built in the 1960s. The closest-in parts of the left bank consist of a high-rise apartments built about that time as bedroom communities. Apartment construction radiated out from  Livoberezhna, the first left-bank metro station, two miles south of us.

These apartments have a Soviet flavor to them. 10 to 12 stories high, with dark, slow elevators, most range from 400 to 1200 square feet. Titles went to the inhabitants when the Soviet Union fell, and perhaps a third of them remain with the original owners. Quite a few of them are now rentals.

The infrastructure supporting these apartment dwellers included a good network of city buses and jitney buses (marshrutkas) connected to the Metro and the regional electric train. Local governments established marketplaces close to the Metro stops, renting stalls to individual vendors. This is how I still shop: the butcher, the greengrocer, the egg merchant, the lady selling household chemicals, the lady selling paper products, the dry fruit vendors from the 'Stans and so on. 

The complexion has changed in the time I have been in Kyiv. Wherever builders could assemble enough real estate they built new 28 story high-rise condos. They put in more amenities and underground parking.  Western-style supermarkets emerged catering to car-oriented shoppers.

Such progress is slowly killing our Livoberezhna market. More than half of the stalls are empty, and the vendors that remain are starved for clientele.  I am happy to say that the ones further out, at the Darnitsa and Lisova metro stations and on the tramway lines at Yunost, Miloslava and Brataslavska are still doing well for now, though I expect that their days are also numbered. They will be done in by big box stores and online shopping. But for now I am happy to shop at them by bicycle.

For the time being, the apartment living paradigm remains viable. Our neighborhood is mostly ringed by very middle-class people living in decades-old apartments. Though similar buildings were absolutely demolished by the Russian army in the villages approaching Kyiv, it is because they were on the invasion path. They were not attractive as targets to simply raise havoc. The Russians chose more upscale neighborhoods when wanton destruction was their objective.

Our location on the left bank also protected us. Even if the Russians had invaded our neighborhood, it would have been a dead end. They would not have been able to cross the Dnieper to the centers of government across blown bridges.

Our immediate neighborhood was established as a dacha complex in the 1960s. The Soviet rules for dachas were quite consistent: no more than 550 square feet of structure on 1/12 of an acre. Our neighborhood was desirable because it was close in. Although there are quite a few rather classy private houses here, 50-year-old wooden dachas still predominate.

We were therefore doubly protected. The Russians did not find the much denser populations around us worth targeting, and even had they done so our backwater would have been an afterthought.

Bob Homans writes that 620,000 Ukrainians have returned since the start of the war. He indicates that the volume now, for the first time, includes more women and children than men.

Our human brains are not well constructed to weigh relative risks in a situation like this. The Russian army certainly poses a threat to life and limb. The degree of danger varies widely from place to place. Mariupol has been a disaster; country towns in the west of been unaffected. The decision we have to make is whether the Russians will be able to take another swipe at Kyiv, and if they do, how much notice will we have. My assessment is that they will not have the strength anytime soon and we would see it coming in time to depart.

Other decisions we have to make now are similar to those that just about all of you readers will be making. How to live in an environment of higher prices, scarce fuel, scarce food and the like. We are putting in our vegetable garden. I will look into getting a Franklin stove and a good pile of firewood to heat the house.

Covid has absolutely disappeared since the start of the war. I haven't seen hand sanitizers for months. Signs remain on the floor telling you to stay 1½ m apart, but people have long forgotten what that was all about.  Only a very few lost souls still wear masks. Restaurants that might refuse us service aren't even open.

According to Our World in Data only 36% of Ukrainians had received one jab even as the war started, and the daily jab rate was next to nothing.  Fewer than half of those got the full two doses, the level that (allegedly) fully knocks out your immune system.  If the prognosticators are right, Ukraine will be right up there with Sub-Saharan Africa for surviving the vaccine regime.  Sorry, Messrs. Schwab, Gates and Soros.  Your apocalypse needs another horseman.  We may survive both the Russians and Covid.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the men remain strong in their opinions, the good-looking women feel strongly about their families, and the schools aren't teaching children to grow up to be unlike their parents.