So, we come to a rather special anniversary today: as of today, Russia has been at war with Ukraine as long as it was with Nazi Germany in WWII. One thousand, four hundred and eighteen days. That means, as of tomorrow, this “Special Military Operation” to topple the government in Kyiv, and absorb Ukraine into the Russian Federation, will have lasted longer than the Great Patriotic War.

In the time it took Stalin’s forces to smash the Wehrmacht ad conquer Eastern Europe, Putin's Russia has barely overrun the Donbas region, ground to a bloody stalemate by a country roughly a quarter of its size.
Nice one Darth Putin.

It’s a tribute to the courage and tenacity of the Ukrainian people they’ve managed to keep back this murderous deluge for so long, and a lesson for the those tankie shitheads bleating on Twitter about Russian invincibility. It is tantalizing to think about what might have been had Ukraine’s alleged allies shown similar courage and tenacity instead of voting a Putin sycophant into power.  

Slava Ukraine! 

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-invasion-ukraine-soviet-war-hitler-/33646197.html

 I will be brief: the 28 point plan is a disgrace.  (Read it here) 

The concessions are all on the Ukrainian side. 

Russia's guarantees aren't worth the paper their printed on. 

Every Russian talking point is represented here. From recognizing its territorial conquests, to crippling Ukraine's military capacities, to replacing Ukraine's leadership with pliant puppets, Russia gets everything it wants and need make only a handful of empty pledges in return. 

The loss of Ukrainian territory is not the worst part of it - that's something even the most sympathetic observer was somewhat expecting. But limiting the size of Ukraine's military, and cutting it off from the only measure that would actually guarantee its security - membership in NATO - practically invites Russia to try again later. 

Do I need to repeat Rome's demands of Carthage? Hitler's demands of Czechoslovakia?  Never trust anyone who demands you remove protections. 

Some of the smaller items on the list are less disastrous, but infuriating all the same. Bringing Russia back into the G-8 (#13-C). Giving it amnesty for all its war crimes (#26)(an admission if ever there was one). The whole thing's a petty wishlist. A reward for its efforts.  That which doesn't directly benefit it doesn't inconvenience it. 

You will not be surprised that the United States "will receive compensation for the guarantee" (#10). Probably in the form of lucrative reconstruction and resource contracts. It could be said that the US stands to benefit from the agreement. Or at least some small groups within it. At the cost of Russia dictating its security polices. And its honour. 

Perhaps the most galling thing is that these aren't conditions Russia could have imposed on its own. Not with its army bogged down and its economy in the shitter. No, it needed Ukraine's chief ally to turn its back and sabotage their defence efforts. Only with a puppet in the White House could the Kremlin get away with this. 

For the second time in a hundred years, America has bailed out Russia. 

This will amount to the worst betrayal since Munich. It is the most disgusting, pusillanimous piece of servile slobbering sycophancy I have seen in my lifetime. Our civilization will deserve history's mockery if we let it pass.  

The Tangerine Tyrant's Territorial Travesty.

 The tangerine toad has struck again. 

According to the Guardian, he's of the opinion that the battlelines should be frozen in place, and each side just keep what they've got.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/17/trump-putin-phone-call-sinks-kyiv-ukraine-hopes-for-us-tomahawk-missiles

Among other chestnuts from his latest tantrum was the golden line: “You stop at the battle line, and both sides should go home, go to their families.”

Imagine telling Ukrainians to "Go home." Where does he think they live? 

It gets better. 

"You have to be a little bit lighthearted sometimes.”

Indeed. While coddling a megalomaniacle dictator bent on genocide, one has to look on the light side of things doesn't one?

Needless to say, there will be no tomahawks for Ukraine.   

This is all in advance of his meeting in Budapest with two of the world's other Most Loathsome Leaders, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. Doubtless they will jack each other off while dividing Other People's Territory between them, and call it peace.  (The "Piece" cliche is, sadly, all too appropriate here). 

The plan to stop the killing by giving the killers everything they want already has some support amongst pieceniks like Simon Jenkins of the Guardian. (Potential spoiler: "Fuck Ukraine, Suck Putin's" has been the entirety of his analysis since 2023). 

It won't work. Putin will only play ball if he can keep everything he's stolen, and Ukraine will only agree if someone can guarantee he won't take any more, which no one will. So it's a dead end all around. 

Putin will not stop. The murders will not stop. And Trump will not get his Peace Prize. Sorry bub. 

 

 Those idiots left the summit seating plan in the hotel printers, according to NPR. 

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/16/nx-s1-5504196/trump-putin-summit-documents-left-behind?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

 

The Keystone clumsiness of this administration should surprise no one anymore. That they control nukes terrifies me. That they are held up as geniuses by millions of voters, a mass delusion of Biblical proportions, fills me with despair. 


Apparently Trump wanted to give "His Excellency" a desk weight as a gift. The sycophancy beggars belief. 

 

I'll leave it to others to speculate on what exactly Trump hopes to gain from so very publicly licking Putin's boots. My favourite explanation so far is Vlad Vexler's idea that Putin provides him with some sort of narcissistic fulfillment.  He desperately craves the approval of someone he looks up to. Putin constantly dangles like a carrot on a stick, permanently just out of reach, just enough for Trump to think he might get it next time. If he just speaks flatteringly enough, if he just makes enough concessions, if he just puts enough pressure on Ukraine. . . 

Putin plays him like a flute. 

It all defies words, but there are a few that come to mind: pusillanimity, cowardice, naivete, cynicism, stupidity, self-abasement, ignorance, delusion, disingenuity, corruption, greed, betrayal, nihilism, evil. . . I could go on. Actually, I can't: I need a break, because the whole things is just too damn sickening (there's another one). 
 

 So Trump has invited Putin to Alaska, so they can calmly discuss the butchery of sovereign countries like gentlemen. Trump has never met a dictator he didn't like, and for this one has rolled out the red carpet and furled the white flag. He applauded Putin's entrance, shook his hand warmly, clasped him on the elbow, and all but begged for his autograph. It was nauseating. 

Is this how you treat a monstrous dictator? 

 Compare this with how he treated Zelensky. 

In Trump's world, only strong men are worthy of respect. So of course, he will cow tow to the bullies, and do all he can to placate the prerogatives of power. No harsh words for the aggressor, no words of support for the victim; only pathetic grovelling. For these two, working for "peace" means convincing the Ukrainians to give it up and pack it in. Obstacles on the road to peace are Ukrainians who insist on surviving.   Ukrainians are preventing both men from getting what they want - conquest for Putin, a Nobel Peace Prize for Trump - and they are the problem these men will will attempt to amicably solve. 

Munich? Molotov Ribbentrop? Choose which analogy you like. Once again, evil men are deciding the fate of the world, and we're all to blame.  

 

 

Of Needles in My Ear.

 

            So, Esso gas stations have now taken up blaring advertisements from their pumps.

            Advertising is obnoxious at the best of times, but there is something particularly, murderously, irritating about it coming from a gas pump. Perhaps it’s the proximity to my ear: a TV blaring in the distance, or a loudspeaker overhead, can somewhat be tuned out. But a speaker blaring directly in my ear like an airhorn – that’s my personal space right there. My poor old ADD brain can’t handle disembodied voices in my ear while I’m trying to perform a task, even one as simple as pumping gas.

            Especially one as simple as pumping gas.

            Fact is, I don’t want those little needle voices injecting themselves into my brain at any time. I don’t care what the reason are, it’s an intrusion, and I don’t want it.

            We live in an era where commercial interests feel entitled to blare noise at you at every given opportunity, and society as whole, enamoured as it is with noise, feels no need push back. Silence in the public sphere is treated much like farmland or green space: empty voids to fill with things, preferable profitable. Of no intrinsic value in itself. These days even libraries are blaring inane shit through loudspeakers and screens.

            Ray Bradbury predicted it all of course. A huge theme of Fahrenheit 451 is not just the burning of the books, but the sheer amount of noise inflicted on everyone all hours of the day, so that no one is ever alone with their thoughts. I’ve lost count over the years of how often I’ve felt like the protagonist Guy Montag, as he sat on a subway train trying to remember some lines of poetry.

 

            Trumpets blared. “Dendam’s Dentrifice!”

            “Shut up!” thought Montag. Consider the lilies of the field

            “Dendam’s Dentrifice!”

            They toil not. . .

            “Dendam’s. . .”

            Consider the lilies of the field, shut up, shut up!   

            “Dentrifice!”

            He tore the book open and flicked the pages and felt them as if he were blind, he picked at the shape of the individual letters, not blinking.

            “Dendham’s! Spelled ‘D.E.N…”

            They toil not, neither do they. . .

            A fierce whisper of hot sand through an empty sieve. . .

            “Dendham’s does it!”

            Consider the lilies, the lilies, the lilies. . .

            “Dendham’s Dental Detergent!”

            “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

            It was a plea, a cry so terrible that Montag found himself on his feet.

 

            How often I’ve just wanted to scream shutupshutupshutup! at the incessant racket all around – not least on the trains, as the recorded voice repeatedly warns people, in English and French, not to stand in front of oncoming trains. At least they’ve not introduced advertising or muzak yet, which I am sure some folks would be only too pleased to have (don’t get me started on those cretins who actually tried to put muzak in schools. In Bradbury’s book, people wanted the distraction, actively feared and dreaded silence, and the unwanted thoughts that might emerge within it. Our world has very much fallen into that pit – can anybody be alone with their thoughts anymore, without whipping out the phone?

 

            I’m not blameless in this regard: my own pohone has become something of a defence against other people’s phones. Like going armed with one’s own six-shooter into a wild west saloon, it feels necessary. My ADD brain may crave the dopamine, but my soul recoils at it.

            Again, I must defer to Bradbury. In “The Murderer”, a man is jailed for waging his own personal war against noisemakers. His description of the phone feels prescient: the “Ghost Machine. Voices without bodies.” He then goes on to describe the long term effects of phone dependency: “it just drained your personality away until what slipped through at the other end was some cold fish of a voice, all steel, copper, plastic, no warmth, no reality.”

            I’m tempted to quote “The Murderer” in full, every line being so damn perfect. Substitute a few words, and you’ve got the exact encapsulation of our modern lives:

 

The telephone’s such a convenient thing: it just sits there and demands you call [text] someone who doesn’t want to be called [texted]. Friends were always calling, calling, calling [texting, texting, texting] me. Hell, I hadn’t any time of my own. When it wasn’t the television or radio or the phonograph [Facebook, Youtube, Tik-tok], it was motion pictures at the corner theatre, motion pictures projected, with comericials on low -lying cumulus clouds. . .music by Mozzek in every restaurant; music and commercials on the busses I rode to work. When it wasn’t music, it was interoffice communications, and my horror chamber or a radio wristwatch on which my friend and my wife phoned every five minutes.

           

            In some ways Bradbury was too optimistic: his characters are bombarded with Beethoven’s 5^th, Bach, Hayden, Rachmaninoff, and Duke Ellington. We should be so lucky: autotuned, drum-machined, sampled, AI-Generated digital slop is what we get in our dentists offices and grocery stores. But the principle stands. The main character is driven to dump chocolate ice cream into every device he sees, and it is strongly implied that his prison shrink will come round to his point of view. Glorious wish-fulfillment fantasy.  

            Anyway, I get my gas at Petro-Canada now in glorious silence. Who knows how long they’ll hold out, or what I’ll do after they decide to puncture the bubble. Buy a donkey I suppose.

             I think it was Ambrose Bierce (though it might have been Gustav Flaubert), who defined patriotism as “the belief that one’s own country is best because one was born in it.” It’s as good a definition as I’ve been able to come up with. While I am not so humble as to not believe that most places aren’t improved by my presence, I don’t necessarily think that any one place, including a state, is necessarily better than any other place because it happens to be where I am.  I’ve long been skeptical of the idea that I automatically owe the state any particular loyalty, our acquaintance being largely based on cosmic chance.

            I’ve always rather taken to heart Robert Heinlein’s quip that “no state has any business putting its own survival ahead of my own” (or words to that effect), and think about them when I look around the world and see most states doing exactly that. In Russia, North Korea, China, and who knows how many other places, the state largely sees the citizens as the property of the state, as embodied (coincidentally enough) by whoever’s running it at the time.

            Whoever coined the adage that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel must surely have had in mind whichever scoundrel first declared “my country, right or wrong”, which so happens to be Yuval Noah Harari’s very definition of fascism: the idea that loyalty to the state should represent the entirety of morality. One owes everything to the state, and has no inherent loyalty to any human being, especially if they were born on the other side of the line in the sand. How may atrocities have been committed over the years under the aegis of this noxious principle? I think about that a lot. I remember thinking about a lot during the invasion of Iraq (“Gulph War II” I tend to call it), when “support our troops” was code for “never-ever question Government foreign policy”.

            Having said all that, it is possible for the state to earn some amount of loyalty, by being better than whatever else is on offer. Canada, for all its faults, continuously tops lists of most livable countries. There is a remarkable amount of bullshit we don’t have to put up with that others do. A lot of people come from elsewhere to make their homes here. My own grandparents thought this place a vast improvement over nazi-occupied Poland; a veritable oasis in fact, after watching relatives executed in the streets, and faking death to escape the SS. For them and others like them, Canada had earned their loyalty.  I think providing safe-haven to people is a much worthier goal and loftier ideal than whatever it is those who would keep them out claim to aspire to.

            Not having fled nazi-occupied Poland (or Stalinist ruled Poland for that matter) myself, I will have to defer to their judgement. I will confess to a rather deep gratitude to have Come to Be here rather than there. Besides this, my affection stems from sources rather more mundane: when I hike the Bruce Trail in the fall or look out across the Niagara Escarpment, or scale the moss-covered rocks of the Canadian Shield. This, I realize, is affection for a place rather than a State, but I find places altogether more worthy of affection than States. No politician provided those and no national stereotype accounts for it. There is no pride there, as neither I nor anyone else can take any credit for it. Only gratitude.

            (That the current Captains of the Ship of State, Doug Ford and Mark Carney, are more than willing to bulldoze such places further demonstrates the gulf between State and Place – the State can claim very little affection from me if it fails to protect the Place.)

            When I wander these Places, and consider that I am there rather than some GUlag, that my Gran’s final hospital stay will not bankrupt the family, and that my nephews will probably not be shot in their elementary schools; when I listen to loons or listen to Rush, watch cartoons on TVO, and even scarf down a dishwater-like Tim Hortons Double Double, I am forced to admit that whatever this weird convergence of Place and State is, I should like it to continue to exist, and that whatever replaces it must not be that nihilistic kleptocracy to the south.
            Happy Canada Day, eh?