Wednesday, October 19th 2022
Overview
Overview
And for a change, some serious overview offered from Russian free media. If you ever wanted to know how hard Russian culture really is, try making your way through this one. It’s in Russian language but it pulls no punches. If you need to, there is an English Auto translation that is not perfect but close enough for rock and roll. You can also run the video at half speed if it’s going too fast for you. The big news? Ukraine is considering the complete deucification of the country and abandoning Russian language in the country. Some of the Russian troops borrowed from Muslim countries have started shooting at each other out of outrage at racism from the officers. Russian wives abandoned by husbands called to mobilization are turning to strip clubs which, unfortunately, have attendance falling from lack of men wanting to go there. And amidst all of this, yes, the Russians are getting ready for nuclear war and are starting to build shelters.
Getting back to European news, here is a view of what a couple of Ukrainian villages look like after the occupation.
Here perhaps is a glimpse at what the European Union is planning to do about all of this. Basically more sanctions and more money and more weapons. However, they are holding back on allowing Ukraine into NATO. It seems that the gas and oil business and full on fear of global chaos is clouding the judgment of complete acceptance.
They also believe that a European court might somehow mean something other than ego placation for the Europeans and Americans. As if they have juresdiction to even make such decisio0ns. House arrest means simply staying within the confines of the largest country on Earth.
Perhaps however it’s all about fascism and what it’s like living in a voteless society with no checks or balances and no need for the leadership to do anything for the people whatsoever. Here is just a tiny clip about Hitler being on drugs. This is just conspiracy theory and hearsay. On the other hand, the logic seems pretty realistic to me…
With the American elections coming up in 3 weeks, Rachel Maddow is talking about how the Americans seem to want to bring Hitler back. Anti-semitism is in conservative speeches ahead of the elections? Of course it is. Of course they’ll never learn.
But basically, it seems that it all boils down to Putin against the world. It’s not just play time, he is threatening everybody now and it doesn’t seem as if anybody likes this very much at all.
And finally, I guess I might as well let Zelinski close the show this morning.
***
It’s 6:00 a.m. and I am coming to the end of a pretty sleepless night. Nothing particularly to blame for this except possibly yesterday’s laziness. Well, it wasn’t really laziness. Yesterday was a holiday, a religious holiday. I was completely in the right for my inactivity. Or, if that wasn’t the case, I just lost the spirit of running around and fixing things. In fact, though I absolutely agree that things need to be fixed and put in order, sometimes I just don’t particularly care if it stays chaotic another day. No one cares and I’m one of them.
There are even a few more clips. I seem to be addicted to listening to news about the war. I guess you can’t blame me. It’s not really an abstract. About Belarus’ involvement, perhaps it’s wishful thinking. My ex partner’s opinion is simply that the president is a Sly leader. Squirrely is a pretty good English word for it. Even weasel-like perhaps. What this means is that what he says and what reality is often has a bit of a gap. Also, he is obviously influenced by the tides. He’s a tough guy but he’s a tough guy that doesn’t particularly like to row upstream.
Which means as with all things here, we are in the war but we are not. As of the moment, the focus of the troops is more to the east. I haven’t even been out to tell you what’s going on near the store or down by the river. I have no first hand knowledge of what’s going on. I just have the online map readers and what I hear from when I talk to locals. Nobody is happy but they are not throwing bombs around here specifically. So far, everything here is just remaining normal and we are heading into winter just like always.
This does not mean that no one is in fear. People are definitely in fear. People are deeply afraid right now. It is an incredible feeling to be this on edge everyday and to me, it inspires nothing but genuine dread and hatred for the people who do this to us. Not only to us of course. I genuinely cannot stand the Russian regime. It is not that I am making any heroic stand here nor am I standing with the popular global belief in this. I don’t need to repeat myself that I am simply an independent and an ecologist and perhaps some kind of prisoner of circumstance. But I cannot support someone who brings so much misery to the world. I cannot have love in my heart for someone who is simply practicing arbitrary murder and threat. This is deep psychosis. There is no possible positive ending to this. It is a suicide mission for the Russians and one that threatens to take us all with them.
Do I have any understanding of this? I guess the answer is yes. I am not going to say that I have any personal metaphors. I’m just saying that I believe I do understand the depressive thought process about a Kamikaze global war. I actually do understand the underlying mentality behind people who actually probably do want to press the reset button.
I mean, to be as honest as possible. They do blame the United States and the West for all of their problems. Whatever may have happened to Russia since about the year 2000 has been a sado-masochistic relationship with the West. The West has no problem sending their money for Russia’s natural resources and also has no problem using the place as a whorehouse and stealing every available resource possible.
There is no question that the fall of the Soviet Union came as a result of money spent on the Afghanistan war, a war prolonged by US involvement. There is no doubt that there is inevitable fear of the West’s encroachment. There is no doubt that the Cold War left many scars and the loss of the Communist economy in favor of this bullshit garbage market economy that only suits the needs of a few people is extremely painful for people who actually lived another way or at least tried.
I was here for the end of it and people really were very nice and open with each other. Anything you practice, you get better at and all of the blah blah blah about the negatives and the corruption are true. But the underlying philosophy that the citizens lived under was something that was practiced for a very long time and communities did support each other very, very well. It was a very comfortable place to live and everybody did help each other to get by. This is part of the blackmail used against me now. They believe in this still even though it practically, in a practical sense, doesn’t exist anymore. This was and is therefore part of the consciousness and mistrust of the West. This residual feeling when everybody was comfortable together fuels the hatred.
Take all of this philosophy for what it’s worth but let’s remember that we are talking about a good solid 30 years of poverty. Blame the Russians for this or blame the Russian government for this and he would be correct. The corruption and theft and Miss you by the oligarchy is obvious and real. But let’s remember what happened when the Soviet Union believed that there would be investment and help from the wealthy rich. It never happened. There were no loans. There was just exploitation of resources, the prostitution of women, the brain drain, and all of these motherfucking factory products that suddenly people needed to waste their money on to drain even the last drops of money out of the regions.
What I’m saying is, if Russia is suicidal and playing a game of chicken where they are not particularly afraid to press that reset button it is because they have nothing to lose. They already live close to the Bone. I’m already living out in the country and working on growing my own food. Saving potatoes and cabbages and beans is a lifesaving technique without the help of the supermarkets. People here already live close to the land. They have less to lose and all that will happen will be nothing. The West will fall to chaos and the Russians will just go on as they are.
I know I’m speaking in a very complex way today. Nobody wants a war. Nobody wants their towns to look like the images from the occupied territories. Nobody wants missiles falling from the sky or guns being fired in the streets or explosions going off in the night. Nobody wants this war and nobody wants war in general. But what I am saying is that I understand what they’re thinking. I understand the emotional thought here. And even if he is a complete psychopath drug addict, and he is, the Russians are being ruled by a Russian guy. And even if they are coerced into voting and our brainwashed by the constant state propaganda, at the heart of it is a Russian soul that understands this for what it is.
They are saying that they hate the world as it is and would just as soon see it all go up in flames.
Meanwhile, there are compromises from the West. They have plenty of money to spend on killing machines and weapons. I’ve heard the Americans say that the ukrainians just want weapons, as if it is their benevolence being tested. But there are no NATO troops other than trainers or volunteers. There is no mobilization and there certainly no general setting aside of automobiles for the purposes of retaining resources. People are not abandoning their vehicles in favor of public transportation. People have not given up on Russian oil. NATO is not accepting Ukraine unilaterally and immediately. Everything is about making sure that the world actually stays exactly the same and nothing breaks the flow of money.
Sometimes I wonder how history will look back on this period of time. Of course, we might not have such a thing as a population reading history books and looking back. Perhaps the history of the world will just disappear like the burning of the library in Alexandria. The past will simply become legend as literacy ceases to exist and the world heads back into pre-industrial circumstances. That is if we survive the nuclear fallout and the mass Exodus from the bombs around the city centers. That is if we survive Mass starvation.
What I’m really saying is that when I tell you that I have days like yesterday where I just don’t care anymore it is because I have days where I just don’t care anymore. I understand my situation can be made much worse very easily. I understand I’m not doing myself any favors by doing this writing. I understand a lot of things. I’m just saying that we live in a Time of mass Hysteria brought on by the desire that people live in Hysteria for the purposes of keeping the economy going. And we don’t care about global warming and we don’t care about climate change and we don’t care about the destruction of our lands, air and water. And we do not care about the future. We just want our drugs now. We just want to be lazy and selfish now. We just want to forget about it now.
I don’t know, maybe I’m addicted to watching these clips. Maybe I’m just praying for something good to happen in the news. Maybe I’m afraid to turn off the news. Maybe I’m just afraid of the world.
Anyway, I’m going to start getting up and getting into my day. I will find something to do with myself.
About whether or not this is the last week, even though it is not my main focus which is supposed to be food this year, the Americans have elections coming up in 3 weeks so maybe it really is worth paying attention to all the way to the end of the plan. I do feel as though I am repeating myself. But then again, it ain’t over until it’s over. You never know. Maybe something good might actually happen.
***
Okay, just a second. I can’t not say this.
Everything that I wrote this morning is the truth. But just like people want to boil every complicated thing in the world down to just a few sentences or even just one, I am no different. Let me put it to you this way:
People do not like capitalism. Capitalism does not make humans happy. It is a carat and a stick to continue slavery. And it’s a slavery in which we are all asked to spend what meager allotments we are allowed on things we don’t need and that are enormously detrimental to our lives in every way imaginable. The things we are asked and coerced and forced to buy and spend our money on are bad for our bodies, our communities, the land and the environment we live in. We are all committing suicide every single day.
The truth is that people hate capitalism because it is not sustainable. It is not anything that remains more than momentarily. It is nothing that can be counted on or distorted or corrupted. It is nothing but a game that is played by people who have the money to make things happen and people who do not end up being toys and puppets dangling on the end of strings.
The truth is that people hate capitalism because it puts pressure on us every day of our lives. We do not even know what it is like to smell freedom anymore. We don’t even know what it is and all we have is the drugs that give us a moment of numbness for the world that we are forced to live in and The lies We are forced to listen to.
The truth is that it is capitalism that has killed us. There is an English grammar to this and perhaps I could say is killing us or has been killing us. But look where we are right now. Look at the state of the world and the state of the ecology. There is no news story that global warming has stopped and everything continues as normal. That is an impossibility. That is a paradox. That is yet another propaganda lie. We will never hear on our propaganda devices that everything is okay and we have fixed all the problems. It cannot be.
So this is what I have to say. I’m not a capitalist. I have never agreed that this is the correct way to live or the correct behavior for us to adopt. We are the worst species of life on the planet and our way of life is already taking every living thing with us on our pleasure boat suicide mission.
News flash: the system does not work. It is not sustainable and our leaders trying with all of their hearts and all of their resources to keep their jobs and to keep the economy moving are to blame right along with the rest of us.
I could blather on for a while and riff on this subject but I think I made my point. The world is a miserable place to live in because we made it this way.
***
You know what? How about some AI art to go along with Black Sabath. War Pigs.
***
It’s a little after 4:00 and I am outside on the bench taking a bit of a break. Today has been a busy day and today has been a rainy day.
I think today got started a bit like yesterday. I really didn’t want to get up from my place in the kitchen Cafe. I was comfortable and there was a lot of food and I have salted peanuts which are basically my kryptonite. I understand that I should not eat so many of them but I just can’t stop once I get started. I don’t think I have any other addictions besides salted peanuts. We even thought about growing them this year but that thought got lost in the hustle at the beginning of the year.
I Noodled around a little, wasting time in different places and pretending I was interested in what I was doing. Finally I decided that enough was enough and it was time to do something.
Not being exactly sure about what tasks I should give myself, I just started working generally. I started by sweeping the floor and then I remembered that I really wanted to do something serious with the Warm room. I went in there and looked around at all the materials that I had stockpiled and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why I shouldn’t just start building. I’ve had a couple of alternative thoughts about putting together things that might work. But today, just like yesterday, I had a practical view of the situation and simply came to the conclusion that my original plan was the best plan.
However, even though I am just kind of winging it and doing caveman building here, there were some definite steps that needed to be taken care of. I only have so many materials and I can’t overuse them. I generally know what I’m doing and how everything is going to be put together but still, when you actually get down to the nitty gritty, there are compromises that need to be made.
The first problem arose when I needed to tack down a bit of carpet on top of the existing platform. Part of the way that all of these things are going to be tied together will be through the carpets being firmly attached. The problem was that the drill was still not working correctly. This started a couple of weeks ago and there was some kind of a short in the cable. It made working a bit ridiculous and I knew eventually I had to sit down and fix the bloody drill. So, today was the day.
I probably voided the warranty but I don’t give a damn about the warranty. It’s a good screwdriver/drill. It didn’t cost a lot of money and it has plenty of power.
There were 10 screws holding the two sides together. That should have been the easy thing but the actual screwdriver that I needed was nowhere to be found. 30 minutes later I found it in exactly a logical place, right in the box where I keep all of my electrical stuff. This wasn’t where I normally keep my tools, but it was a good place for a tool that was needed for an electrical project.
The screws came out and the two halves of the drill popped open and it looked pretty much exactly what I expected it to look like. I plugged it in and played around with the electrical cable until I found the basic spot where the short was. I cut out that area and spliced the wires and used some heat shrink insulation to wrap the whole thing up. Everything got screwed back together and it works. Slightly shorter cord but it works.
So then I was back in the warm room trying to get things lined up. I came up with a pretty simple design. Everything is basically exactly as it was before but the electric heater is getting moved. There are two possible places for it but either way, it’ll still do its job. Possibly even more so with the cold weather coming. We are due for a frost tonight and tomorrow. There has been a lot of frost on the ground in the grass over the last week or so but we are getting down to the mighty number zero. When it’s zero, things get serious around here. It’s not a choice about making a fire or not.
A bit earlier in the day Lena came by. She was desperate for something to do to earn some money. I didn’t really have much for her to do but we figured it out and I slipped her at 10:00 and she was very happy. I don’t mind.
That cat showed up again to say hello. It also invited itself into my house and whined and cried hoping I might give it something to eat. I have some cat food on the way. I am not going to keep a full-time cat but if this guy comes a few more days, likely by Friday, I might actually have something for him to eat. Actually, I think it’s her. Anyway, I might have something for the cat to eat and then I can be on its regular rounds. I can’t say that this will absolutely solve the mouse problem but if I have a cat as a regular guest, it will probably do something good.
In the middle of the building, I got a call from my neighbor Tanya. She was a bit flirtatious actually. She said she was coming by with some mushrooms. Unfortunately, she got caught in the rain while she was out there. The woman is stoic. But she brought me a rather gigantic bag of beautiful white forest mushrooms and another variety that she calls polsky. Really, it was a huge bag and she only asked me for whatever money I gave her last time. It wasn’t very much. It wasn’t even close to the value if we were buying our food in supermarkets.
Then she told me that she was finished with her husband and probably finished with this village. She was happy to be in town. She has a three bedroom apartment there and she’s living with her daughter. She says she gets along with her daughter’s father. She believes that anybody who has a common child should communicate with each other. But she says that she’s probably finished with her husband who lives here in the village. It’s his house, not hers.
This is where a lot of the flirtation came in. It was a bit unexpected. I guess women around here get kind of direct when they get hungry. Why beat around the bush? If a situation comes up and you want to do something about it, I guess you better do something about it.
So I got some love. Actually, I got a lot of love if you count people who are hungry and think that I’m a good option. Who knows? Maybe I am.
So I’m not quite finished with my work. I ran into a slight layout problem and I’m going to have to modify my plan just a bit. No pain and everything will fit together well. But I have to remove a portion of one of the boards so that it will fit with the leg of the bed in that room. I’m not going to bother to rebuild the bed right now. I don’t need to. I might do something with it but I don’t have to do anything with it.
After that, it’s just a matter of laying down the boards and tacking the carpets into place. The piece I’m building right now is going to require a tiny bit of insulation. I’ll probably need more insulation for the whole thing later on but for now, I have a crappy old blanket that will do a really good job of keeping the floorboards quiet. I’ll know how well it works over the course of the next few nights. If I don’t go insane, I did a good job.
***
Well, it’s almost 10:00 and it is time to say good night.
Looking back over the whole affair, today was definitely a good day. It was a good day because I got a lot done. I got things done that have been a part of my mind for so long it seems crazy that it never happened before. But today was one of those days where the energy came and I simply moved and was never beaten for this choice.
The layout of the warm room has changed significantly and all for the better. Everything is cleaner and more organized and I am very much enjoying what this platform feels like. I am a floor guy. There is nothing really to explain. Some people just like being on the floor more than they like being on furniture. Some people like the world a little harder. I don’t want to get caught up @@saying the wrong thing or being misunderstood here but for those of us who have discovered it, being on the floor just feels better.
A little earlier I had a long conversation with my ex partner. The thing to me really is that it has been an incredibly long time since I’ve been free to build things. The more I thought about it, it’s probably been a decade and a half since we had our place in the country or even since I lived in a place that was owned. I’ve been in rental apartments for the last 14 years. I’ve been here for two full years but this has been the first time I’ve had the health.
I called Minsk and they gave me the runaround concerning the situation. However, whether it’s true or not, they told me there is a huge backlog and the problem has to do with Russian logistics. There are people waiting more than a year for help. I cannot say that this is true or not. Most probably it’s nonsense because if it were true, this would mean that the blackmail game that the bureaucrat played on me was pointless. Even if I did pay they never could have helped me. It was just torture for nothing.
In the end though, I’ve been taking care of myself and that’s the main point. I was able to do the work today because I was a good doctor for myself. This little building project doesn’t make me a great builder but I did it without any help. Self-sufficiency is everything.
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