Thursday, April 14th 2022
From the war and CNBC
Russian sailors evacuate warship in the Black Sea after Ukraine attack; U.S. will send another $800 million in weapons to Ukraine
Presidents of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia visit Ukraine
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda, Polish President Andrzej Duda, Latvian President Egils Levits, Estonian President Alar Karis and Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal visit the town of Borodianka, as Russia’s attack on Ukraine continues, in Kyiv region, Ukraine April 13, 2022.
Ukraine claims it has damaged a Russian warship in the Black Sea
Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Britain’s Karim Khan visits a mass grave in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, amid Russia’s military invasion launched on Ukraine.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said it has been “made aware of increasing reports of Ukrainian women feeling at risk” from sponsors in a British program called Homes for Ukraine.
The agency warned in a statement that it was concerned about potential UK hosts turning out to be a “potential threat to the safety of the refugee.”
***
Good morning. It’s about a quarter to 6:00 and I have been fighting with my internet service. For some reason, my internet was closed this morning. I managed to get it back open easy enough. It was a bit of bureaucracy that I could do online but there was a moment of paranoia. You can’t help having these sorts of paranoid thoughts when suddenly your internet goes off unexpectedly. You have to figure something is up that’s just not going to be any damn good.
I actually don’t understand why I had this problem with my internet. I am ridiculously accurate when it comes to making bureaucratic payments. I don’t like being bothered. Usually I overpay my bills just to avoid problems such as this. I do not know why this problem occurred but it’s fixed now.
I guess today I will go back and do some more raised bed filling. A little bit more manual labor. The weather is supposed to be nice today, it will probably even be warm and then they say we might get rain and even some snow over the weekend.
This weekend however is the start of Passover and as usual I need to find some kind of personal compromise to deal with it. I am not Orthodox in my observance of Judaism. I fully acknowledge and agree that my heritage and DNA is tied into the Jewish people. Even my known history and lineage that comes through Belarus and Ukraine is only because I am Jewish and my family has been Jewish for however long you can trace the line.
Perhaps it’s not like it was at the turn of the 20th century or during World War II. I’m talking about anti-semitism. We know it exists and to my way of thinking, this horrendous situation in Ukraine is as much anti-semitism as a demand to control the seaport and oil rights in the Black Sea.
I don’t really believe there’s any national security about missile battles that anyone needs to worry about. Other than the oil business, nobody really wants War. No right-minded person who doesn’t suffer from deep and sincere mental illness caused by excessive drug use would ever possibly consider starting a nuclear war or even a missile War. Nobody wants to die except people who feel they are insulated from any assault and they themselves don’t want to die, they just don’t care if other people die for them. Or they enjoy it perversely.
But anti-Semitism still exists and technically and ethnically, I don’t think it could be possible for me to be more at the short end of the stick and in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m openly jewish, I even look a bit Hasidic these days, I carry an American passport and my family is split between Belarusians and Ukrainians. My father’s stoic side from here and my mother’s hysterical side from the south.
And as you might be starting to understand, such a combination might make you kind of a tough guy.
But preparations for Passover are kind of sticky for me. Basically, you’re supposed to clean the house. It’s spring cleaning which is understandable but there is a nuance in that the Passover holiday is about eating matso, unleavened bread.
Why do we eat matzah on Passover?
The Passover meal, known as a Seder, is all about remembering Jewish history. Much of the food is deeply symbolic. Matzo represents the unleavened bread the Jews ate while fleeing Egypt, for example, and horseradish is a symbol for the bitterness of slavery.
But it’s a bit more than this because if you are really trying to be kosher, you’ve got to get all of the grains out of your house. In Ashkenazi culture, they don’t even want beans lying around.
Let’s just say, I don’t mind cleaning the house and I’ve got a box of matzah but I’m not getting rid of my food stores. There’s a war on, I’m a vegan, nothing’s growing on the field yet and I am not living on meat and unleavened white flour. I’d get colon cancer from this in about 3 seconds and I’m not going to get drunk to make up for the abdominal pains.
Okay, I’m being a little facetious there. But I had a conversation with some friends in the Jewish community the other day, this is where I got my box of matzah, and I made my point very clear about how much easier being kosher is when you are vegan. The rules about not mixing milk and meat get really intense. I was told that some people genuinely appreciate these nuances and rules but for me, I prefer to keep it simple. If I do not need two sets of plates and dishes and even two refrigerators and two stoves just to make sure that I don’t mix milk and meat, life gets a lot easier if I just don’t eat milk or meat. Bingo, kosher culture.
Without intending to insult anybody as well, as I am reading the Torah portions this year and especially lately when all of the portions are about the endless laws of working with the priests, I find myself leaning towards the thought that keeping people together seems dependent on keeping them addicted to drugs. I personally think that a human being could digest and receive some nourishment from meat if it was cooked over a fire. But I do not believe we are actually built to do this as a species.
I also feel that ingesting animal fat is no good whatsoever for our hearts and please games with our brains. If we add to this the carcinogenic properties in highly processed meat, we are looking at drugs more than we are looking at food. In other words, if it’s not survival, we don’t need it.
This also includes alcohol by the way. I have let alcohol go from my life and I am much happier for it. I still feel drawn to the possibility of bringing home a bottle of vodka but I know that this is only going to deepen my depression and not remove it. In fact, when I got back from town and stopped in at the store to get some cabbage and onions (and some grains, sorry to say), you can’t help notice the alcoholics planting themselves at the bus stop waiting for any possible opportunity to get back in the store to buy more wine or vodka. It’s a sickness.
But these are required foods. And what is more, if you start thinking about all of the animal sacrifices being made in the Torah by the priests (kohens) and all of the rituals, it seems as though there’s a constant smell of barbecue in the air and wine available in the place of worship. I’m sorry, I don’t think pushing addiction is genuinely connected to freedom.
The following is the link to this week’s Torah portion called Metzorah, a word that roughly translates to afflicted person.
Apparently, the children of Israel out wandering in the desert we’re having quite a bit of problems with leprosy and venereal disease. There was the general society and then there was the outsider group where the unclean people would have to dwell. And there are quite a bit of rules about what constitutes clean and not clean.
There are a lot of nuances mentioned but it was basically the priest’s job to deal with open sores and even odd discharges from our genitals. This would include both sexual disease and women getting their periods. They worried a lot about pandemics, very wise of them, but they didn’t really have access to antibiotics and we’re pretty much into segregating and isolating as a way of trying to keep the general population clean.
Unfortunately, our sexual drives are such that I’m sure quite a few men either unsatisfied in their marriage or unmarried tended to roam to the outskirts of town. This would explain all of the mention of genital discharge and further spread of other egregious diseases. And if you may have noticed by my latest trip to the store in my village, not much has changed in the history of mankind since then. We still have the same clean and unclean division. We still make the same mistakes.
I’m invited to go to the Seder. I want to be polite and I like the people in the Jewish community here. I understand what they do and I understand that they are helpful people. I understand how the community works and I understand that there is a hand of friendship out to me. And I’m sure they completely understand that my hand is out there too.
But my association with them has always been that I consider myself a friend of the community rather than a member. Perhaps this is how I consider myself related to the town of Pinsk as well as the entire country of Belarus. I don’t know why I don’t feel the need to be in the pocket. Maybe this is a classic methanthropic Jewish thing. Woody Allen classically quoted Groucho Marx as saying that he would never be a member of a club that would have a guy like him as a member. Again, I am not the only one who thinks this way.
Or maybe this is the essence of the holiday. Perhaps the truth is that we are celebrating our freedom. Perhaps the idea is that our ability to see and reason and understand and make logical decisions are where our freedom comes from. If you can see that the pharaoh is not God and just a man, you are free. And possibly if you can find a way to wrap your head around this, understanding that God exists in nature or that nature is God and that there is no higher thing and that it is above all of us and that none of us should even try to be more than nature is the flaw in the argument.
Our failure as a species is to remember commandment number one. If nature is God and God is nature, we should not have any other and we should give our praise and worship and thanks and appreciation for this lovely Blue planet that we have evolved to live on. We are not supposed to be killing each other. Physiologically speaking, we’re not supposed to be killing anything. I think we are free to live and express ourselves and we are not supposed to be ruled by lunatic drug-addled leaders of countries and their bloodlust for power. We’re supposed to be taking care of ourselves and doing it kindly.
***
I have always been a fan of Rachel Maddow. I got into listening to her during the lead-up to The 2020 American elections and I found that she had probably the most cutting edge and honest reports about the corruption on the conservative side and especially with dumb Donald himself. She is dishy and you get the feeling that she lives for these juicy moments. It’s a shame that her voice gets drowned in the snowblower because it seems as though she is an educated and well researched reporter to go along with her enthusiasm.
And from her, I have learned that Finland and Sweden are preparing to join nato in response to Mr Putin’s decision to elevate himself to the heights of historical conquerors. Or to create more functional business for the Russians by demanding that Ukraine put themselves deeply in debt to rebuild and to be obligated to buy Russian food and building supplies to do so. And the oil in the Black Sea.
Neither of these countries has had an interest in joining NATO up until now. Suddenly, it seems that the world is turning against Mr Putin and his neighbors are getting angry. I know the feeling.
Check this out. It’s actually entertaining as well as informative.
***
Okay, I just want to comment on this and I can’t really find a connection to anything else I’m talking about except about the heavy-handedness of corporate leadership. I am not a Dodgers fan because I’m a Giants fan and I cannot root for Los Angeles in any way (except if they produce one of my movies in which case I’ll make an exception). But Clayton Kershaw just pitched seven of the most dominant perfect innings ever pitched in baseball. I think he had 12 or 13 strikeouts on a perfect game and only had one well hit ball against him. And then they pulled him for pitch count in the 8th instead of letting him go to the end. It’s just inhuman. There is something deeply, deeply wrong with baseball if one of the greatest pitchers of all time is pitching perhaps his greatest game ever and they stop him because of the pitch count. Disgusting. Simply outrageously disgusting.
***
Speaking of disgusting, I am a bit slow getting started today. I had a big breakfast and some coffee and I haven’t quite found the motivation to get out of my chair. I like sitting in my kitchen. I’m nibbling on salty peanuts and some onion, a nice combination really. I don’t have to get working. Nobody is making me work. I know I really should get going but I’m just not feeling it at the moment and as I am the boss and dictator here, I’m just sitting here.
But about 15 minutes ago, back to back, my neighbors exited their house, both of them backing up out of their property, aiming their Auto fumes at me and filling my kitchen with poisonous gas.
Nothing has ever changed. Not a thought has come into their heads to be gracious. They have enough room on their property to even turn around there and drive straight out. It took me a year to get the message over to them that I would appreciate them not gassing me when they drive their shitty cars and I have even had the police tell them to their face. They just don’t care.
Yesterday, when I was arriving in a taxi cab I took a good look at their property. I never really noticed before that it looks like a hillbilly garbage dump. I never really bothered to take a look at what they were doing because I try not to even look at them. But yesterday I had a look and for all of their talk about being so in need of working, looking at their property I can’t help thinking that they are bloody pigs. There is not a single element of beauty to be seen anywhere on their property. Not their house, not their grounds and certainly not their transportation.
Tatyana Britskaya wrote about the Russians and how the FSB had confiscated a first printing of a local author and her book about the history of Finish colonists and their history of both being invited by and then persecuted by the Russians. Yes, the Fins have a very long and difficult history with the Russians.
The story is in my book, Found in the Translation, but you can also find it here in the archives of the Barents Observer. One passage comes to mind in which the difference between the finish settlement is measured against a typical neighboring myRussian village:
By 1913, there were 3 thousand colonists living here and most of them were Finns. Haykara quotes one of these reviews and travelers to the colonies compared what they saw to Russian villages and their reviews were so enthusiastic, they sound like the Soviet people who first went to Scandinavia.
“There are no piles of shit lying near the houses and contaminating the air with stench. Everything is carefully collected and taken out to the pastures as fertilizer. And as a result, the barren desert has turned into beautiful grassy pastures and cattle breeding in the Finnish colonies is in a flourishing state in comparison with the Russians. There is also a noticeable desire for comfort in the houses. Almost everyone has books and even subscribes to newspapers though not the papers from Russia.”
Within a few years, these “non-Russian” newspapers would become material evidence in cases under Article 58.
Even taking some particular feelings about my Jewish heritage in the days before Passover, I can’t help myself from imagining the gruesomeness of the pogroms which absolutely have the exact same feel and underlying racism as the story of the Fins.
How bad were the Russian Pogroms?
The caption below this photo reads: Photo believed to show the victims, mostly Jewish children, of a 1905 pogrom in Yekaterinoslav (today’s Dnipro)
What is going on in Dnipro today?
And yes, the Russians laid siege to this town during the war as well, bombing the town and wiping out the airport. It has become a hub for ukrainians fleeing the war.
And just a few more pieces of this thought from today’s headlines from the Barents Observer
With Russian aggression comes turbulence for Norway’s air defense planning
Survey: Majority of Finns consider Russia a significant military threat
U.S. amphibious combat group deploys to the high north amid high tensions
The Murmansk Palace of Culture is wrapped in Putin’s Nazi-inspired war symbol
***
It’s about 10 minutes to three and I’m taking a bit of a break.
Today ended up being interesting. Let us mark down that April 14th was the day we put some fertilizer in the boxes. You have to know who you can trust and you have to know that you’re getting quality fertilizer and I guess I can guarantee this batch.
It was loaded and spread by hand. That does not particularly mean anything as a standard because there’s no other way to do it except by hand. But it was a smelly morning unless you enjoy such things. I don’t particularly feel offended by the smell of manure. It doesn’t make me gag. There must be more farmer in me than I was aware of.
I also did a little bit of electrical work and built myself a cable to run my water system. OSHA would not approve but I’m not in the United States and there’s nothing really to set fire to. I tried it out on my drill when I did a little woodworking and upgraded one particular spot and it works. I feel incredibly pleased even though I know nothing I did was to code. I was reasonably safe and I added reasonable insurance that everything will be okay. But it was hillbilly. It was definitely hillbilly. It works but it’s hillbilly.
I still need to carry some more dirt but the problem is just that I took 2 days off and I ate a big breakfast and my belly just doesn’t want to let me do a lot of digging and wheelbarrow pushing. You have to be lean to be truly physical. You have to have your muscles in place.
Or maybe I’m not thinking correctly and I’ve given myself yet another about of covid. You can’t go anywhere in town without catching it and hanging out at the marketplace is an open invitation for the virus. Making deals with alcoholics also costs. I’m not overselling this but I don’t ever remember truly suffering any major symptoms. I just feel kind of a numb tongue right now and I’m lethargic. I don’t need to crash and I don’t feel like I have a fever, I just don’t really feel like going hard.
Again, don’t believe me but during the entire pandemic, I don’t believe I ever truly got hurt unless it was when I was in the hospital and they kept putting some guy with covid next to me. If I have to be in close proximity, I start getting sick and if I don’t get away from them, it gets deeper. But if I stay by myself, even if somebody’s microbes get all over me, I generally get rid of it within a day. And I don’t really get bothered by it, which is what I’m saying now.
Do I know I have it? No. But it’s pretty logical to figure that this is what happened.
There always seems to be a reason to go into town. My ex partner works in an office with six or seven people in the middle of a factory and doesn’t wear a mask at work. And then she goes shopping at the supermarket and for every other damn product she needs and then there’s her neighbor and everyone else we all come in contact with. Did I catch covid? Romantically speaking, it would be weird if I didn’t.
I have basically three jobs to do. I have 18 more trips to bring dirt to my boxes, although it’s very warm, I have to cut down a load of firewood to size and I have to do some serious house cleaning. Other than this, I think we’re getting three more water tanks on Sunday, I’ll get a large order of firewood during the week next week, we’re supposed to have inspectors come and measure my property and then the following Sunday is pascha, Russian Easter and that will mean something to somebody. That will also be the second weekend of Passover and it will be a recommended no work day for the chosen people.
Or basically, I have to make a really good effort of at least getting this layer in the boxes tomorrow and then next week I will put the last layers in and we will be ready for planting.
I’m not really saying anything meaningful right now and I’m just speaking out loud. I’m also going to need to tie these plastic tanks together. It’s a worthless idea to have to move them around in order to catch rain. And I need at least two gutter systems put up, one for sure and the other would be very helpful.
Then we plant and then we water and weed and trim and look after everything. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Nothing to it but to do it.
I’ll tell you though, I am not a good electrician. I worked on the electrical while building a motel with a friend of mine one time. I was standing on a box and I asked my partner if we had the electricity turned off and he said yes. The next time my eyes opened I was staring at the ceiling and my partners were standing over me. He thought I meant in the other room.
Ever since then I have shied away from doing my own electrical work. I understand most of it is common sense and if it’s anything really crazy, there are a million helpful DIY educational pieces on the internet. I managed this cable splice without too much pain and it was again, pretty common sense. But I was very pleased that it worked. I wasn’t shocked, but I was very pleased when my drill started working and nothing melted or exploded.
We will see how good my job was when we start pumping water from one place to another. And I’m also interested to know if I can simply put a spray head on the end of the hose with this particular pump. I was told that I should not use a triggered sprayer with this pump and I would need something continuous. But if we have enough hose, there’s nothing wrong with continuous and we can just walk around and water the plants. Nice? I think so.
***
Okay all you stoners, it’s 4:20 and time for a little mind tripping.
The pump I have will move about 17 l a minute. We currently have three tanks which will hold 260 L each. I believe we’re going to get three more on Sunday and this will bring us up to one and a half cubic liters of water, 1,500 L capacity.
What might be considered reasonable gardening requires 25 L of water per week per square meter. If I only count our boxes, we have about 36 m. The requirement therefore would be to make available about 900 l a week. If we water twice a week, it would be 450 a shot and if we do the effort three times a week, 300 each time.
My will has a diameter of 90 cm. It is about 1.8 m to the water line and 2.8 m to the bottom. Using the formula radius squared times depth times pi, I currently have about 630 l of groundwater available to me right now in the springtime. Or to say this more succinctly, not a hell of a lot to do serious gardening with.
Now, it’s going to rain and we can measure how much rain we get because we have containers to catch the rain. It’s not all on the groundwater and of course we need as much rain as we can get. But what this means is that it is imperative to start catching rainwater as soon as possible and to make sure that we continue to maximize our water savings as much as possible.
What are the global warming statistics for Belarus?
The average annual temperature has increased by 1.1°C over the last 20 years. At the end of the 20th and in the early 21st century, Belarus experienced the longest warming period in recorded history, over the last 130 years. Of the 20 warmest years since 1945, 18 occurred between 1989 – 2013.
As I sat here sick as a dog last year, I was awake enough to notice that we were five degrees above average. You take all of your statistics about global warming and you double it and that’s what’s going on here.
How does climate change affect Belarus?
Due to climate change, Belarus will face severe droughts and higher risks of forest fires. These efforts seem timely as Belarus has been experiencing changes in temperature and precipitation patterns.Sep 18, 2019
I understand that nobody listens to me when I talk but I do have quite a few friends in California and they might tell you a thing or two about forest fires. What happened to own a place right next door to a big national Forest. Tell me what I’m thinking right now.
What are the statistics of global warming?
Earth’s temperature has risen by 0.14° F (0.08° C) per decade since 1880, and the rate of warming over the past 40 years is more than twice that: 0.32° F (0.18° C) per decade since 1981. 2020 was the second-warmest year on record based on NOAA’s temperature data, and land areas were record warm.
Anyway, I’m sorry if that was depressing. Weed is seriously illegal in Belarus because of course, the most important thing is… I actually have no rational answer for this. I had something to say but both of my neighbors just came home, driving directly into their property and making sure there is enough Auto fumes to make my dinner not worth eating. They do this every day without ever taking a break. They do this and everyone in Belarus chasing money like chickens with their heads cut off does this every single day without reprieve. Drug addicts trying to get their fixes every single day, 365 days a year and 366 on leap year.
And we can’t talk about ecology and we can’t talk about toxic emissions and we can’t talk about global warming and we can’t talk about modern farming techniques or agriculture or paying any fucking attention to ecology because we have to have a war and we have to support the Russians and we have to drive around like fucking assholes with nothing better to do than chase a few pennies like a bunch of God damn psychotic drug addled idiots. And I am the one who got a gun pointed at me for asking my neighbors to park their car so I don’t have to suck their Auto fumes. And they will not listen when I ask them to park their car normally because, and I absolutely 100% quote, it is uncomfortable for them to even think about it.
Backwater, low rent, hillbilly, human waste, bio-garbage, trailer trash, hick, hen pecking, ball busting, garbage producing shit. I’m so glad I wanted to make a fucking Garden.
Anyway, I do not know how long it takes for my well to replenish itself or how much it’ll hold in the middle of the summer. According to the stains on the walls of the well, groundwater has been a lot better in the past. Also, we have a bog about a hundred meters from our property and I understand it used to be up to your armpits. Now it’s a little bit above your knees.
***
What I’m trying to say is that we all have to try to make things better. It’s nothing that we can hand over to some decision maker, some bureaucrat, some celebrity shiny suit, fast talking money-grabbing shiny tooth feel good huckster. It’s not really about giant ideas given to you around voting time with a coat of paint and a promise. Whatever it is that we are doing, it has led us to a place of lunacy and there’s no one to blame but ourselves.
“I don’t have the bandwidth to have a vested interest in things I cannot control. Russian oil being sold to the US has been going on for decades and there is nothing I can do about it, so why invest my time in it.”
I don’t usually have the tolerance for people that say I don’t care. I usually don’t even have the time for people who say it has a reflex or as an excuse but this is a direct quote from a more than reasonable person. This is the American vote.
For me, it’s not just that putting your head in the sand is unexpected. The Americans are under the same economic pressure as everyone else. They may have more stuff and they may be more in the center of the fluffy noise telling them to keep going and have more opportunity to keep moving than almost anyone else but they are no different than anyone. The Belarusians are just as interested in poisoning the air as anyone. They are just as believing that you need a car to go somewhere and if you don’t have one, you don’t have any opportunities at all.
All I’m saying is that it is extremely frustrating to get it. I understand that I’m not the only one but that doesn’t really do anything but make it worse. In fact, I’m sure that there are absolute pure of heart Eco activists who drive gasoline cars out to the protest. I am absolutely sure that there are people who write comments and sponsor YouTube pages and eat vegan not just for themselves but for the planet as a whole who buy their food at supermarkets and agree that plastic bags are normal and take them home and throw them away.
1: an interest (such as a title to an estate) carrying a legal right of present or future enjoyment
2: a special concern or stake in maintaining or influencing a condition, arrangement, or action especially for selfish ends
It means that it’s yours. It means that you own it, are a part of it and have the right of decision over it and what happens to it is both under your control and affects you.
This is the problem. We have given up our birthright. We Believe that the ownership belongs in someone else’s hands. We don’t understand that it’s our planet, our only planet and our only home and we are the ones who are supposed to make the decisions. This is the big mistake.
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