So much I can say today. But don’t worry. I do know how to control myself. Let’s get started.

Have you ever wondered what is going on in Russia? I listened to two very recent (very, very recent) podcasts today, both featuring Russians now living in exile. The first spoke about political unrest in Russia. He claimed that Putin is in fact very unpopular, and that he expects one day soon he will no longer be running the country. His claim is that there are groups everywhere just looking for a way to combine and remove him from office. He didn’t convince me, and I admit that I don’t remember his name. It started with a P.

The second podcast featured a man named Ilya Samoilov, who apparently at one time served in the Duma and had been involved in the construction of power plants. He was fascinating. Here goes:

First, he said that Russian life had been improving until the war began. Then, he said everything has been going downhill. The majority of the Russian budget is now devoted to military manufacturing and that fewer consumer goods have been made and fewer are available. This means that prices for consumer goods have gone through the roof, inflation is very high and to control inflation that central bank has now increased the borrowing rate to 16%. He also said that there has been an enormous problem this winter with the failure of heating systems (all, but the newest of Russian apartments buildings are heated through regional or city-wide central heating plants), for which he gives several causes. First, a large number of workers have been conscripted into the army, so that there are insufficient employees to maintain and repair systems when they fail. Second, there is a shortage of replacement parts, which normally are manufactured by Siemens and General Electric, and neither company is now supplying them into Russia. Third, in order to make repairs to these old Soviet-era systems, you need to have experts who have experience with the systems, or the international companies send their own experts in to supervise major repairs, and this just isn’t happening. Fourth, the systems are simply aging. And fifth, although new buildings are supposed to have their own heating systems, there can be exceptions if local authorities grant you an exception and local authorities are more than happy to do this if you pay a sufficient bribe. The bribes, he said, are enormous and London, Miami and Dubai are filled with former local Russian officials who have taken their bribes and left the country. How can the bribes be that large? Because building a new power plant is even more expensive. If you are granted an exception, you hook your new developments to existing power supplies, stressing the old power plants beyond capacity.

What else? 

Well, I looked at the Times of Israel website yesterday and saw the following three headlines, one after another. I paraphrase: (1) Netanyahu says he is not going to pull out troops just to get the hostages back, (2) Hamas says that they are not going to release hostages unless Israel pulls all troops out, and (3) Blinken says that he is optimistic that a deal for the hostages will be announced soon. So, there you have it.

I also listened to an interview with Gen. Petraeus. Can’t say I agreed with everything, but he did say that we should not have left Afghanistan (he blamed both administrations equally) and that leaving Afghanistan was bad enough, and now it looks like we are going to leave Ukraine, so our influence will vanish as we will be seen as completely unreliable.

He also said that he was completely apolitical and will stay that way. So unpolitical, that does not even register to vote. What?

And what is Biden going to do about Greg Abbott ignoring a ruling of the Supreme Court? This is no different from George Wallace standing in the school house door.

One more thing. Have you heard that the Super Bowl has been fixed, and that Kansas City will win (place your bets now), giving Taylor Swift the ability to become even more famous and throw her fame behind Joe Biden? Yes, apparently it’s a done deal. And it seems that this arrangement is even going to outclass the goings on at Comet Pizza (just up the street), where Hillary Clinton and her cronies kept kidnapped children in the basement before they sex-traded them to the third world. I think there will be a new pizza on the menu at Comet called the Taylor Swift featuring Kansas City BBQ. Not a bad idea.