thermometer

Finally bought a thermometer last week. I've been meaning to do that for a few years now. Never got around to it until now, years into a pandemic. I feel like this is a good illustration for how dysfunctional I am. Whatever else I might say about why I never get around to shit, I wonder if there's something fundamentally off about how I live day to day.

Sometimes it seems like the small things, the easiest things, which make the best examples. I've been to the pharmacy many times. I make a list, I have prescriptions to pick up, an immediate need to go, which I have no problem with. Thermometer just never made it onto the list for some reason. I never get anything, unless I remember to put it on the list before I leave my apartment. I've learned to cope, but things can still slip through the many cracks in my organizational efforts.

Picking up a thermometer was always in the background, but it took a really long time for it to click that the pharmacy was the best place to pick it up. It's not merely that I never got around to doing it. I never even got around to thinking about it. There were many times these past few years that I've thought it would be nice if I had a way of checking my temperature. Now imagine how much worse I am at dealing with bigger issues.

Now that I have it, I'm not sure it's accurate. Don't these things have to be? It will tell me 101.8, and then 100.3 a minute later. I keep checking because it gives me a different reading every time, but it's always been elevated. I miss the simple glass tube filled with mercury. I'm like an old man who can't figure out this newfangled technology, but it's not that complicated. I'm not sticking it in different places every time, or trying it after a cup of tea.

I don't really have any symptoms, aside from feeling run down. Feeling the worst today, but fever finally seems to be mostly gone. Which is to say, I have no symptoms at all now, aside from feeling vaguely crappy, and that could mean I'm back to normal. Sometimes being sick feels like a break from feeling normal. It can be hard to tell if I'm feeling sick, or just crappy for no reason. So, finally I have this thermometer which was supposed to clarify things.

z * Z * z

Everything is an information war. It's really incredible that even now, almost every argument I get into immediately exposes complete ignorance of the Euromaidan. You know, the US backed far-right coup in 2014, that replaced Ukraine's government with Russia-hating fascists? You know, the civil war that's been going on ever since? 14,000 dead Ukrainians? Doesn't ring a bell?

What, you don't know anything about it, but think it sounds like Russian propaganda? 

There's no getting around that. It's just sad. People largely trust mainstream media, and think others are nuts for trusting random YouTubers, instead. I figure that must be how it looks, but no, there's a little more to it than that. Finding an array of independent journalists and following their work across various platforms can be more of a process than flipping on MSNBC every night.

It bugs me to get into any clashes about which side is winning. From what I can tell, Russia is winning by an overwhelming margin, but taking more losses than what some may have expected. There are reasons for that, but it doesn't say much about the overall direction of the conflict, in which Ukraine is severely outmatched. I hate being put into a position of talking about death and destruction as if I think any of it is good or positive.

It's surreal how many people think Russia is losing though. I don't want to argue, like we're talking about sports teams, like I'm trying to gloat about how well my preferred side is doing. The western propaganda machine seems to be pushing this crazy narrative of Russia being massacred left and right, when Ukraine is actually losing TEN TIMES as many combatants. 

They're pushing this narrative so that we keep pouring weapons and funding into prolonging the conflict. They don't care how many Ukrainians have to die to drag this out, but they have to sell billions in war spending to a populace that might care how futile it is. So there's all these Ukraphiles gloating about how Russia's getting smashed. It's disturbing to see so many cheering a winning team that's actually being massacred. 

Ukraine may be winning the information war, but Russia's busy fighting an actual war. We hear these phrases over and over; that it's "unprovoked" and a "war of aggression" because those are the precise terms which make it a war crime. It's a lie though. It was indisputably provoked, but more legally significant, it was not a war of aggression. It was a war of collective defense, of the Ukrainian separatists along with thousands of civilians being killed by the Ukrainian military in Donetsk and Luhansk. That's why western media tries to sweep that entire part of the story under the rug. Nothing to see here, pretend it never happened.

Seems Russia may have to take Donbass by force, but they've nearly succeeded at that. They were never after Kiev. This will leave nothing left to negotiate but NATO neutrality. Meanwhile, the west can't stop shooting ourselves in the foot economically, while Russia succeeds with their new gold-backed petroruble.

My hope for humanity now lies in the downfall of the US and western hegemony.