Diary

I'm behind on my posts because I haven't had much to say. The arrival of spring always prompts changes in my daily activities. I spend less time reading, less time on the Internet, more time preparing for gardening and more time outdoors. I have also been attempting to help my daughter buy a house, which is a nerve-wracking experience at the moment. All of the decent houses in good school districts that come on the market near Lebanon, New Hampshire are sold almost immediately at prices above the asking price. Buyers have no way of knowing whether they have bid high enough, and the houses are overpriced to begin with, usually $100,000 to $200,000 more than they would have cost three years ago. Higher interest rates are starting to reduce demand a little, and one can only hope that the market will stabilize within a few months. In the meantime, my daughter's situation isn't bad. They have a nice apartment, my grandson is being homeschooled, and it takes my son-in-law three minutes to get to work. They also have access to the Dartmouth library for reading material.

As you might expect, I am following the war in Ukraine, which is also a source of unease. After Donald Trump, I'm a little desensitized to idiotic political leaders, but Vladimir Putin is far worse. Like Trump, he is completely out of his depth as a leader, but he is emboldened because he has little fear of being removed. In an ideal world, he would be arrested and charged with war crimes, but that seems unlikely. He might also be assassinated, but he is prepared for that too. All of his propaganda will collapse eventually, because, with the Internet and news coverage, the rest of the world can see in real time what is going on. The Russian-speaking inhabitants of the Donbas have no particular loyalty to Russia, and Putin's arguments are pure fantasy. One Putin expert says that Putin is waging this war only to increase his popularity in Russia, a strategy that has worked for him in the past. He is actually ruining the country by damaging its economy and accelerating the brain drain that has been going on there for decades. It doesn't help that he is using a dated Soviet-style propaganda campaign similar to the one that ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. I always wish that people like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin would be forced to participate in an interview in which they were required to answer difficult, fact-based questions. Neither of them has ever done that, as far as I know. Though I don't think that Trump is as dangerous as Putin, they have a similar modus operandi in that they remain in power by making a deliberate attempt to appeal, with disingenuous theatrics, to the most ignorant and suggestible inhabitants of their countries. Both Trump and Putin know that their supporters are morons. They both have a peasant-like persona that works in either democracies or autocracies. Putin is worse than Trump because he has no qualms about killing people who get in his way; Trump pretends to emulate mobsters, but I don't think that he has ever ordered a killing. The widespread idealization of democracy in the West fails to take into account the weaknesses of human nature. Frankly, the political models dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are completely obsolete.

Well, I won't bore you with geopolitics. I have a couple of decent books on hand and will read them one of these days.