Author Archives: RomanInUkraine

RED TERROR – ANTIFA Cheers as Church is torched in Chile

‘An expression of brutality’: Antifa cheers as torched church burns to the ground

Masked protestors filmed and cheered as the burning spire of a Chilean church crashed to the ground Sunday night, video shows.

Protests and riots erupted in Chile’s capital city of Santiago over the weekend ahead of a referendum on whether to throw out the country’s constitution, the Wall Street Journal reported. Demonstrators looted stores, vandalized buildings, and set churches on fire on the anniversary of the beginning of the massive 2019 protests against the government.

“This is an expression of brutality,” said Interior Minister Víctor Pérez, the publication reported. “Today we must lament the violent acts, but we will confront them.”

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Apparent Biden Ukraine Corruption Blowing Up via NY Post story

As shocking as the corruption is, the determined censorship by Big Media and Big Tech is even more shocking. Facebook blocked links to the NY Post story in PRIVATE messages.  Twitter temporarily shut down the account of the White House Press Secretary. 

Here is pretty good commentary from Tim Pool:

And here is the NY Post stories that started it all:

Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad

Emails reveal how Hunter Biden tried to cash in big on behalf of family with Chinese firm

Meest Express

I’ve previously complained on this blog about Meest Express’s horrendous customer support.  I’m happy to see that they’ve really gotten more professional.  They’re now an excellent service.  Their website (https://my.meest.us/) now allows you to coordinate the arrival of multiple deliveries from American companies, and then put those deliveries into a shipment to Ukraine.  It’s fantastic.  Happy to see a Ukrainian company giving great service.

Yesterday, we received a shipment –

For my kid – a constructor toy, Roald Dahl stories, and for me, E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology.

The Sea Monster to Lviv

We haven’t been able to take my son swimming very often since returning to Lviv.  On the two occasions that we managed, I tried to keep him accustomed to the water, and specifically to holding his breath, by having him dive for Hotwheels cars or coins which I toss into the water. 

He manages when the water isn’t too deep, and seems to enjoy it.

So much so, that last night he practiced his diving kills in the bathtub after asking my help putting on his goggles. 

He’d also gotten a hold of a bottle of shampoo, unscrewed the cap, and dumped the whole thing into the tub.  There were Islands and hills of soap suds on the surface. 

After one exploration of the depths, he somehow resurfaced right into a large island of soap suds, and they completely covered his head and face, leaving only the smooth, dark plastic of his goggles.  It looked like the head of a snowman atop a boy’s shoulders.

My some coincidence of timing, my wife had just walked in to check on him with our 6-month old in her arms.  Little Marichka took one look at the sea monster and started to cry.

Could It Happen Here? The Parallels Between Soviet Bloc and Modern US

From https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/10/05/rod-dreher-discusses-parallels-between-soviet-bloc-and-modern-us/ :

Dreher, a senior editor at The American Conservative, received a phone call in 2015 that sent him on a journey to investigate whether America is losing its freedoms in the same way that Eastern Europe lost its liberty to the Soviet Union. What he found inspired his latest book, “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.”

. . . .

Can you tell us what it was about that call that alarmed you and led you to write “Live Not by Lies“?

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Ukraine’s Emerging Middle Class

In my opinion, Ukraine has three stories right now. 

1) Independence from Russia.
2) The fight against corruption and oligarchy.
3) An emerging middle class.

The third is much less appreciated than the other two.  But the signs are everywhere.  Back when my wife and I were still taking the Covid-19 quarantine seriously, we’d go for drives through the country, and even in little tiny villages we’d see fliers posted about driving instructors offering their services.

With a middle class, tastes and entertainment get more sophisticated.  Restaurants are becoming more numerous, and more unique.

Resorts are springing up everywhere.  Suburbs are forming outside of Kyiv and Lviv. 

And usually, when we go to a recreational facility, I find it to be clean, safe, modern, and well run.

 

30 Methods and Characteristics of Communism

by Roman Skaskiw

(Two short essays recently published on American Thinker were excerpts from this longer essay.  If you’d like to read these excerpts, visit Leftism’s Casual Relationship with the Truth Is Intentional or The Radical Left Will Never Tolerate a Messiah Who Actually Arrives .  But if you have time, read the essay below. It’s the important one.)

French historian and philosopher Rene Girard observed, correctly in my opinion, that communism was not popular despite killing millions of people, but precisely because it killed millions of people.

I’m told that my grandfather climbed from the window of a school at which he was teaching when a breathless neighbor told him that “they” were coming for him. So began his trek across war-torn Europe with my then-four-year-old mother. Another relative, who would have been some sort of great uncle to me, was taken to a labor camp in Uzbekistan for belonging to an anti-communist club in his high school. He was sixteen. His family received two letters from him — the first saying it was extremely cold and asking for them to send a pair of boots, the second saying that the boots had been taken by another prisoner. He did not return.

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The Radical Left Will Never Tolerate a Messiah Who Actually Arrives

The worldview of the radical left offers many dizzying contradictions and fantasies. One of the strangest is the extent of indifference and even hostility with which radical leftists treat those who deliver on the very vision they so tirelessly advocate.

There are myriad examples, some so obvious that articulating them seems like shaking the foundation of the postmodern reality (or anti-reality) in which we live.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/the_radical_left_will_never_tolerate_a_messiah_who_actually_arrives.html

Fatherhood

My son love to respond to any mention of “para trooper” with “para pooper”.

“Your father was a paratropper.”

“Para pooper.”

***

We give my son an extra hour of time on his tablet. He sobs and say, “anything but an hour.”

“Danny,” I say. “First of all, you don’t even know what an hour is.”

He cracks a smile.

“And secondly, crying only works on your mother.”

He laughs.

Senate report links Hunter Biden to Eastern European ‘prostitution or human trafficking ring’

Hunter Biden sent “thousands of dollars” to people who appear to be involved in the sex industry, according to a report released Wednesday by Republicans in the US Senate.

The report says unspecified records show that Biden “has sent funds to non-resident alien women in the United States who are citizens of Russia and Ukraine and who have subsequently wired funds they have received from Hunter Biden to individuals located in Russia and Ukraine.”

“The records also note that some of these transactions are linked to what ‘appears to be an Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring,’” the report says.

https://nypost.com/2020/09/23/senate-report-links-hunter-biden-to-trafficking-ring/

The Perfect Rib Eye

Since figuring out where to get great steaks here, I’ve made three attempts at the perfect rib eye. Last night’s attempt was pretty damn close.

The strategy which I’d been contemplating since the second try, was simply “faster and hotter”.

I played a Bluegrass playlist while cooking. That probably helped.

Leftism’s Casual Relationship with the Truth Is Intentional By Roman Skaskiw

In The Soviet Tragedy, Martin Malia describes many Soviet citizens feeling great relief at the outbreak of World War II. These were people less than twenty years removed from devastating wars, so they were unlikely to be naïve to the horrors, yet many welcomed the news of war because, as Malia describes, war provided a coherent, tangible reality again, in contract to the schizophrenic insanity of communism.

The incoherence is everywhere.

It’s difficult to believe, given modern rhetoric, but in the early days of communism, wealth was considered a good thing, and, they argued, communism was superior because it created more of it. By the mid-1950s, it became impossible to ignore communism’s poverty and deprivation, so rather than abandon their revolutionary ideology, the communists completely replaced what had been their fundamental goal. Yes, capitalism caused wealth, they conceded, but the wealth caused inequality, and inequality, not poverty, was the great evil against which all society’s resources must mobilize.

The intellectual bankruptcy is absolutely shameless and calls to mind an observation from the great black conservative Thomas Sowell: “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

Philosophy professor Stephen Hicks’s excellent little book Explaining Post-Modernism details the many outrageous ideological pivots the radical left has been forced to make over the years to preserve a revolutionary posture, including even its abandonment of the presumption of truth.

Read more at the American Thinker.