Tiw's Day Thing, 8/30/22

The clickable links are really fun in this one; plus my delicious nalysnyky recipe or some shit.

No, Tyr isn’t a fruity hipster for drinking IPA.

Stuff and things ahead!

• We had one, last, final livestock breakout last Thursday. Brothermouth didn’t electrify a small, one-foot patch between the entrance gate to our main pasture and the fencepost. Apparently it was enough for the bull to force the whole thing open and for us to be led on Cow Recovery #3,675. (But seriously, it is probably roughly the 20th time.) After fixing the spot we missed, we ended up on another manhunt, calling the sheriff’s department, going door-to-door, and basically losing an entire day of all of our day jobs. We finally found them deep in a neighbor’s corn field, which is a crazy claustrophobic experience once the corn is tall enough to be over your head. Another 2-mile death march all the way back home, pulling miserable protesting cows the whole way, and the bull broke and ran right at the end. He was then gone for 2 full days, reappearing late Friday next to a nearby rancher’s fenceline hanging around his herd of Angus and, I guess, trying to offer the lady cows cigarettes and One Direction tickets if they would go on a date with him in the back of his Camaro. This wasn’t the end of the story, though; he resisted all attempts to be captured, running away as we devised comical Rube Goldbergian mazes with electric fenceline to coax him into a trailer, begging and pleading with buckets of food, and strafing him with ATVs to try to chase him into a corner. Who knew all this open space would be such a giant pain in the ass? The endlessly patient rancher on whose land we spent the better part of a day and a half trespassing locked him in by himself, and said we could try and catch him the following day but after that we had to “figure something out” (in the same sense that the CIA “figures out” foreign elections) because he had to let his own cows out eventually and our boy would contaminate his herd.

• We came back early Saturday morning, hopped up on 5-hour energy drinks and Typo O Negative songs, and after about a half hour or so of more futile coaxing found the poor bastard collapsed in nearby tall grass, having gone 3 full days now with no water beyond the moisture in all the forage he’d been eating, covered from head to toe with biting flies and burrs, and I feel like a sap because all my rage went out of me seeing him so pathetic and on the verge of death, a dumb animal not at all comprehending how his situation was entirely of his own making and being defiant at something he was incapable of understanding. He was finally so weak that the three of us were able to put lassos around his neck and drag him into the back of the trailer- a feat that was alternately impossible or suicidal the dozen or so times we attempted it in the days prior. It was still no small feat, and I think my arms only stopped being sore yesterday.

• Fear not, happy ending: the jackass got home, immediately ran to the salt lick and began replenishing electrolytes, surrounded by the rest of the herd who began licking and nuzzling him. It was incredibly gay. He then drank a bathtub full of water, got into a shoving match with the new boar who is now large enough to actually menace a bull at this point, and went to sleep, during which time I hosed him down with fly killer and got as much of the painful vegetation as I could out of his coat. As of Monday he looked better than he has in weeks, the prick.

• An old friend from NY that I grew up with visited last week for three days with his wife and 3-year old son, who delights in screaming “Aunt <dramatic mispronunciation of my name>!” and endlessly demanding my attention to long lectures about the observable universe that go absolutely nowhere. This particular friend ran with Brothermouth and I since high school, now nearly 30 years ago, and we have tons of shared memories of getting in trouble, road trips, taking turns living at each others’ homes when our own were impossible, and nursing each other like siblings through the absolutely awful romantic encounters of young adulthood that humans used to have before social media. I have pretty much lost or drifted from all the friends Brothermouth and I had of that period (our friendship circles were barely a Venn diagram, with slightly more girls in my circle), so I cherish this relationship, especially since his son adores me and my friend loves that this is the case. The tough part is that our politics are so radically divergent at this point- he’s an avowed socialist and a religious Covidian- that for quite a long time I have basically completely avoided bringing up any real-world topics of conversation for about 5 years now- a large roster of shared interests and hobbies have kept us flush with things to talk about, but I have basically lived undercover with this friend for years.

• Lest you think I’m a spectacular hypocrite or coward (though you’d be forgiven if you did), I have never flat-out lied to my friend, and if confronted, I never would; I just sit politely quietly when he rants about Trump or anti-vaxxers, not saying a SINGLE word, and, amazingly, he never inquires whether we disagree with him. We don’t have any mutual friends anymore, so he never heard from the big contingent of friends we lost during lockdown for being anti-science white supremacists about our bad behavior. It was just fantastic to have them at the farm, and he threw himself into helping us with the farm work and build projects, being a burly, blue collar type like pretty much our whole friend circle was in those days. His son gave us an excuse to go to dorky amusement centers and spend tokens on overpriced sensory overload games and drive go-karts, because “I want Aunt <gobbledygook> to drive my car and we gonna beat daddy so bad.” One of my personal highlights was when the kid passed out in my lap watching cartoons, after a long period of nonsense conversation, and Husbandmouth remarked that we definitely need to have a kid in our family soon because “this side of you is so beautiful and it never gets to come out.”

• Remember about a month ago when I said we were planning on processing our original breeding hogs in a month or two because they weren’t getting it on? Apparently the arrival of the Roadrash Crew lit a fire under their crotches, or else they read my substack, because beginning about a week ago it’s been like what I imagine the uncut version of an Insane Clown Posse video or Young Progressives Cuddle Party is like, with pigs of every age violating YouTube’s terms and conditions loudly and, um, vigorously. We have two, possibly three (a quite young one) fertile females and based on frequency and effort thus far, I’d consider it a safe bet they’re all knocked up already. I’m going to stop talking about this now, except to mention that TIL that a pig penis is really horrifying.

And now…

I told you I wasn’t going to get bored with this.

A reader recently asked if I was “going to write anything about Ukraine,” which surprised me a little bit, but I realized it’s no more tangential to the general geopolitical shitshow I’ve been talking about- nor am I any more unqualified to speak on it than anything else I’ve spoken on- so I guess I shall.

I can’t claim any authority whatsoever to “educate” any of you as to productive ways of viewing, understanding, or morally framing the situation in Ukraine. In some respect, I see it as something that is almost none of my business- like a pregnancy that leads to miscarriage, a cancer diagnosis, or your child becoming a TikTok influencer, if you haven’t personally experienced a very particular kind of tragedy, you lack certain context and should probably shut up.

On the other hand, the conflict has been MADE all of our business, whether we wanted it to or not, so I feel I am at least “allowed” by social niceties (which, you may have noticed, I have a very fragile relationship to) to opine at this point.

Here, then, are my many opinions and hypothesis about the Ukraine situation, based entirely on my grasp of geopolitics, my understanding of the region’s history and modern Russian history, the information I’ve been able to tease out from a wide range of sources that range from 100% verifiably bullshit to credible independent journalism and commentary, and my internal analysis of how all this input interfaces with what the Ukraine conflict has represented to political power and activities in the United States.

Before I begin, though, I want to put out a little excerpt that I think is valuable as a kind of priming device. Brothermouth keeps a copy of 12 Rules For Life in the downstairs bathroom, and the bit I read before starting today’s post felt extremely salient to this section:

I believe it was Jung who developed the most surgically wicked of psychoanalytic dicta: if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences- and infer the motivation… When someone claims to be acting from the highest principles, for the good of others, there is no reason to assume that the person’s motives [divorced from the consequences of their behavior] are genuine.¹

Here we go. Deep breath. Don’t hit me until the end.

• I believe Putin is acting in a manner that is entirely logical for someone whose job it is to assert the interests- and existential survival- of his country, Russia. I believe that NATO and other Western interests in general deliberately threatened Russian defensive parity in the region, strongly implied that direct action would be forthcoming, and have basically done what dog experts call “fear biting,” where, though not-actually-violent-yet but threatening and harassing activity (“I’m not touching you, I’m still not touching you”) an individual is made, or made to feel, cornered, prompting a physical lashing out that then justifies- or, in the geopolitical language, gives cassus belli- for a nice, big, balls-out ‘retaliation,’ because “he started it.”

• It is also entirely logical for Ukraine to want to defend its sovereignty, but this is a complicated issue, too. Like many of the ethno-states carved out of eastern Europe, or Israel and Palestine, it is a fiat state created largely by external actors that has, at numerous points in its history, been called something other than Ukraine. The region has spent much of its history, with various borders, being part of the Russian empire, the Soviet Union, and the precursor states of Lithuania. There are a substantial number of people who are ethnically and culturally Russian that have absolutely no problem with the idea of their part of Ukraine becoming part of Russia, but state sovereignty very rarely ends up working that way, or we’d be referring to California as “The Former Soviet Republic of Tupyyeamerikantsy” and Texas as “Texas.” There are also absolutely organized subcultures condoned by the state that are into things Americans would- if tricked into being objective by covering up the Ukranian flags- consider Nazism or at least ethnic white supremacy. These subcultures, in addition to being tacitly condoned, have explicit representation in the military.

• Ukraine has been the center of incredible amounts of American political activity, particularly the Democrat party, for decades, including large amounts of “investment” by sitting members of the federal government that, generously speaking, look very much like bribery, money laundering, and pay-to-play schemes to anyone without tremendous ideological blindness gumming up their brain cells. These corrupt activities have involved both the Ukranian national government itself and associated big businesses tied to government corruption. There ARE numerous bioweapon- sorry, “anti-bioweapon defense” research labs all over the country being run by American public agencies often in conjunction with private multinational pharmaceutical companies. This is no longer a censorable piece of “transphobic racist Russian disinformation”- it has been reluctantly acknowledged as fact. This otherwise uninteresting corner of Europe has become a hotbed for political and financial activity by Democrats because its government is incredibly corrupt, to an extent even acknowledged by patriotic Ukranians.

• There has been a tremendous amount of lying by Western media sources, but especially in the United States, about the goings-on in the Russia-Ukraine war. Numerous postings to social media of alleged Russian war crimes and atrocities against civilians have been debunked as doctored images, repurposed photos from unrelated or historical events, or events staged by crisis actors complete with fake blood and makeup. There have been numerous failed attempts to create iconic Ukranian “war heroes,” again using doctored or falsified images, achieving incredibly victories against Russian bad guys. Much like EGM, I continue to find this kind of behavior baffling because the combined autistic powers on the Internet end up meticulously debunking them within minutes (actual debunking, not Snopes “well, you didn’t capitalize the letter F, so no, your statement that ‘fauci said the COVID vaccines prevent COVID is false because there’s no such thing as a ‘fauci,’ lmfao”-style debunking). I can only assume the people creating agitprop for the US or Ukraine are older boomers who never actually learned how social media works and still don’t realize there’s a permanent record, or else are simply mentally ill and have convinced themselves that reality is, indeed, malleable through the power of words alone.

  • Besides how dumb it is to try and get away with it, I also don’t understand it as a strategy, because if you’re already perceived as the legitimate victims of aggression, why would you risk being caught lying, which would then undermine your position as a (ostensibly) genuinely innocent victim? It would be like someone who was actually raped telling the cops “and then when he climbed off of me, he told me he was going to take a time machine and make the Confederates win with AK-47s and rename the country MAGAland.”

• The United States, and other entities but very especially the United States, have been spending INSANE amounts of money on “aid” and “relief” and “supplies” for “the war effort” in the Ukraine- $54B as of a couple weeks ago with further expenditure set to continue. This is in the midst of an international energy crisis caused in large part by embargos of Russia, leading to massive increases in consumer fuel prices, already runaway inflation in the United States, a continuing economic recession (YES IT’S A RECESSION YOU DISSEMBLING PIECES OF SHIT). Additionally, President Brandon is now going to attempt to foist several billion more dollars of student loan debt onto Americans who don’t have student loan debt but have all the aforementioned financial problems already. It’s worth mentioning that as of yet we have had NO (official) DIRECT MILITARY INVOLVEMENT in the conflict whatsoever (though it is safe to assume we have plenty of covert observers). As a reference point, $54B is about 1/10 of the direct military spending on Operation Enduring Freedom, aka the “Fuck You Osama For Making Me Take My Shoes Off At Airports Now” War, which lasted 12 YEARS and DID involve actual military action. The Ukraine conflict has lasted less than one year.

• Just to reiterate: a conflict that has involved federal spending on a scale proportionate only to wars (BIG ones, mind) we have actually fought ourselves, that has consumed western media as a moral proxy for “the liberal world order” and has become, like COVID and radical queer and race theory, a widely-accepted all-or-nothing virtue signal in support of “the current thing” is somehow not worthy of any direct military action whatsoever. It’s insanely important to anyone who’s a good person, but we are absolutely not going to shed a single drop of the blood of professional soldiers over it- instead, we’re going to bankrupt and possibly kill civilians in our own countries with skyrocketing energy costs, further heat up the culture wars over having a stupid flag in your profile, further destabilize the dollar (currently the world’s reserve currency), and so on- and somehow, Putin will see our current posture as somehow different from actually shooting at him ourselves (and with good reason).

Got all that? Here’s my incredibly amateur opinion of what I think it all means.

• The US and NATO have not gotten militarily involved and aren’t going to. The time is long past where it would have been time to directly intervene if they actually gave a shit about stopping or reversing the invasion. They are going to continue spending their citizens’ money by the boatload and extending “thoughts and prayers.” There was never any intention of actually stopping or deterring Putin with direct military force, and this would have been 100% possible if the alleged importance of this conflict in the name of the “liberal world order” was a truly sincere concern. Apparently we are quicker to shoot Americans that are “threats to democracy” than people who are actually invading other democracies.

• I believe Putin was goaded into following this entirely predicted course of action for a number of possible (potentially inclusive) reasons:

  • To attempt to, Cold War-style, financially and militarily exhaust Russia through indirect threat, for strategic purposes I cannot understand because there are a dozen states that are greater direct threats to the US that we aren’t acting like erratic lunatics about. There are theories that this all represents some kind of punitive action against Russia for defying the globalist Great Reset, but like Edward Slavsquat and other Russia commentators, I just don’t buy it, there are plenty of technocratic globalists in Russia doing the same biofascism shit as everywhere else.

  • Maybe I’m being entirely America-centric here, but I’ve never been ashamed to play into stereotypes: I think there’s a real possibility that the entirety of US response, from the insane amounts of fruitless, futile federal spending of taxpayer money on a conflict so important we won’t lift a finger on it to the culture war bullshit blazing through the mainstream media and social media with virtue-signaling flag waving everywhere, has been entirely to distract the public from the massive amount of dirty laundry American politicians had in the Ukraine, from the collapsing COVID narrative, and (I think potentially the most important/significant/real) to create a convoluted economic catastrophe around energy markets to be leveraged by Green Revolution bullshit actors, and THIS is the reason why no one is actually jumping in to to “save Ukraine” or end the conflict quickly, because a prolonged embargo against Russia and Russia’s subsequent cutoffs of fuel create an energy crisis that Global Green could only have accomplished if they had gone around blowing up power plants by hand. Wow that was a long sentence, but entirely grammatically correct, so fuck you.

• I believe that, since it is clear that direct military action is off the table, this could also have realistically been resolved already through a negotiated peace. Russia is absolutely going to eventually win the military conflict (because- AGAIN- if the US or NATO were going to intervene, they would have already), and this will end in a greatly diminished Ukraine, probably with a significant part of its historically Russian-leaning territory annexed, maybe even its existing government abolished, and absolutely no upside to the civilian population for having prolonged it. This could have happened already, and all the actors involved, including Zelenskyyyy, know it. The only differences in the outcome would be lower casualties (and possibly less of Ukraine getting sliced off) and A LOT LESS WESTERN AID CASH AND WEAPONS having been dumped into the area. I wonder how much of it is in Switzerland now? I wonder how much of it will be funneled right back to the Democrat Congress-creatures that made it happen in the first place in exchange for a taste? I wonder how much American and NATO weaponry will go for on the black market?

For everyone outside of the Ukraine, this conflict is like COVID- a misrepresentation of a bullshit crisis orchestrated to create opportunities to shift truly immense amounts of money and power around without citizens having any say in it whatsoever, with some of them being further brainwashed into accepting a constant cynical lurching from crisis to crisis by being given neat blue and yellow flags to wave next to their pronouns.

One way or another, we’re getting fucked.

So, how’d I do? Please don’t let this discussion end here- if you’ve been devoting any headspace to this situation, I’m dying to know what you make of my analysis and your own interpretation of events.

Also, coming very soon, in time for another month of giveaways for paid subscribers, my first contribution to the legacy of the esteemed Dr. Fauci, with a CTA for audience participation.

1. Jordan Peterson, “12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos.” 2018.