Hey folks, what’s up? Did you miss me?

Yeah, I missed you, too.

Got a couple of nice messages recently, which warmed my heart up until it was nice and toasty, which came in handy as it’s been cold as hell and rainy here despite it officially being Martisor (springtime). Poor tulips are halfway out of the ground and getting pelted by freezing rain as I speak, alas.

Also got a couple of hmm… angry messages? Hard to categorize them, exactly, because they just make me laugh. I mean, I barely post on my own blog a few times a year and have zero social media presence, and yet some folks still think I’m some kind of… influencer? Secret agent? Spy with powerful connections? It’s all pretty silly.

In reality, I’m just a guy with a whole bunch of animals who spends most days rambling by the river and generally keeping to himself. In fact, I’m sitting here, trying to imagine how it’s possible for me to be less of a celebrity or “influencer,” but I honestly  can’t come up with anything.

Of course, I occasionally do have interesting adventures, such as a couple of weeks ago when I got to tour the local police station in Tiraspol on an *ahem* involuntary basis, but, well, let’s leave that until another time, shall we?

Anyhoo…

Silence Gives Consent!

Part of the reason for my absence from this blog is simply that I just don’t have any motivation to play whac-a-mole for the rest of my life.

Every single day, Romanian politicians and oligarchs (often the same thing) do something dumb, or corrupt, or criminal, or scandalous. And yeah, I couuld do an investigation replete with links and “expose” the whole thing. But then the next day, they do it all over again, and the task of keeping up with it all would be, literally, endless.

And, mostly thankless.

Anyone with half a brain already knows that the Romanian government, and Romanian society in general, is going to shit. The Romanian language is getting absolutely infested with English. The villages are emptying out as people pour into the cities, and most of the smart folks are leaving/have left for greener pastures elsewhere. Nothing new or different than how it was when I still lived in Unicorn City except maybe now there’s more migrants.

Things aren’t much better in Moldova, except that the infighting and backstabbing and midnight throat slashing games between the oligarchs are more intense, and unlike Romania, which is a de facto satrapy of the American empire, Russia and Turkey also have a chance to join in on the spooky fun in Moldova. The current president (Maia Sandu) is a dolt and is in danger of not getting re-elected this November sheerly due to her stupidity and greed and that of her ruling PAS party.

So yeah, dissecting all that is a recipe for depression and eternal gloominess because it’s a non-stop avalanche of idiocracy and bullshit, and everyone already senses this in their bones even if they’re unaware of the specific details. Nothing (good) ever gets done, or if it does, it’s by accident, and the only hook left to hang your hat on is the eternal lie of “if we just can stay strong a bit longer, things might get better.”

Actually, come to think of it, that’s exactly what people in the Soviet Union were telling themselves in the 1980s. You know, the decade when everyone turned into an alcoholic. Fun times!

So yeah, I just can’t get inspired much anymore to tackle that wall of crap, especially since I live here in PMR, where things are much different.

Of course, this country isn’t paradise (LOL), and the government isn’t run by angels and saints. But it’s a world away from the hellscape that is modern life in the collective “West”.

The Gap

Anyway, I actually would love to talk about what’s going on in PMR, you know, the real stuff, but I find myself stymied by the fact that a) every few weeks or so, the worldwide media will get into a panic about PMR that sets all my acquaintances crazed with worry that I need to dispel and b) the really weird phenomenon that happens anytime a journalist, even a well-meaning one, tries to write or say abouthing about this country.

Way back when I was a “pre-teen,” a friend of mine turned me onto the Xanth series of fantasy novels by a fellow named Piers Anthony. And let me tell you, they “rang my bells” in all the right way – plenty of swords, dragons, silly puns, and sexy-time girls.

In this Xanth world, which was geographically based on the (American) state of Florida, there was a huge canyon running from west-east across the middle of the place called the Gap. It was inhabited by a dragon, known as the Gap Dragon, and so getting across it was a perilous undertaking.

But here’s the kicker – because a magician had cast a powerful Spell of Forgetting on the Gap, everyone had amnesia about the place. Even after getting across it, they’d forget all about its very existance within a few minutes of leaving the area. So even though there was this massive geographic feature right smack in the middle of the country, people’s minds went blank every time they tried to think about it.

You think I’m joking, but I honestly do believe that some kind of “Forgetting spell” is cast on anyone and everyone who comes to PMR or tries to write about it. I truly cannot remember reading an article about this place which wasn’t at least 99% wrong about everything.

Look, I’m used to outsiders getting the politics wrong, the name of the place, et cetera. But they get everything wrong, including even stuff like the geography.

I shit you not, in December 2023, I saw a fairly popular geography-focused YouTube channel called Places do an episode on PMR (entitled “The Strangest Place on Earth” as if we all walk on our hands and eat lizards for breakfast) which claimed that PMR lies in a “deep valley.”

Uh, what?

The land here is almost as flat as a pancake. There is no valley, deep or otherwise. Okay, there is one very tiny valley located in the far north of PMR that’s such an unusual geographical feature that it’s actually a tourist attraction. But the rest of PMR is flat flarmland, yo. Even if you want to slant the politics and history of the place to conform to your bizarro ideology, can’t you at least get the geography right? Sheesh!

I mean, even the friggin’ New York Times can’t get the basic facts right:

Uh, what? PMR declared its independence in 1990. Even Wikipedia knows that.

And France24 (which has a weird obsession with PMR) is hardly any better. Check out this recent video piece they did:

Notice anything interesting? Here, I’ve cropped the relevant portion of the photo for you:

In the the upper right-hand corner, you’ll see the flag of Moldova, yo! That’s not PMR! And the Orange mobile phone store is a dead giveaway because it doesn’t operate in PMR.

In fact, I know exactly where that image was taken – in the Western journalists’ all-time favorite place to report “from PMR” – a little town called Varnita, which is kind of an exclave of Moldova.

Varnita sits between two PMR cities on the right (aka Western) bank of the Dniester River and so is a kind of spooky “in-between” place where the shops only take Moldovan lei, but you need PMR rubles to ride the bus. And the banks pretend like PMR rubles don’t exist because it’s “Moldova,” yet good luck finding anyone who speaks Moldovan there as Russian is the language of choice.

And honestly? Varnita is a depressed little shithole of a town where everyone is always cursing and yelling. I only go there when I absolutely need to use an ATM, which thankfully these days, isn’t very often.

And there are hundreds and hundreds of similar examples I could show you of journalists getting their “facts” completely wrong, and have shown you on this blog, of people just pulling wild-ass facts out of their ass and imagining all sorts of silly nonsense like giant billboards of Stalin looking down on we, the cowered populace, terrorized into submission by evil Russki troops.

In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I was on a political forum (unrelated to PMR), and someone found out where I lived, and then they started googling the place and getting worried, asking me if I had a gun.

I said no, which is the truth. And they said, “Well, it says here PMR is a lawless place run by bandits and criminals,” so how could I possibly survive without a gun?

Um, listen, I don’t even lock my front door, even when nobody’s home. I mean, I know we got a key to the front door when we bought the place three years ago, but I have no idea where it is.

So no, I don’t have a gun LOL

Fun and Deadly Games

Those guys from the forum getting the wrong impression from a quick search on El Goog is one thing, you know? It just made me laugh. And all those wacky stories about Lenin on the money used to make me laugh, too.

Listen, I know this sounds stupid, but I really used to think that, all right, folks are having their fun, but surely somewhere, someone knows that it’s all just a bunch of crap, right?

Right?

But as the war in Ukraine is making people crazier and crazier, I’ve finally started to realize that, holy shit, no, no one does know what’s going on here. They actually do believe their batshit insane theories and fantasies.

Right as I type these words, there really are fucking MI6 spooks at the British embassy in Chisinau making plans to send Ukrainian hit squads into PMR yet again. There really are mooks at NATO headquarters talking about sending entire divisions from Romania to overrun PMR en route to occupying Odessa. And there really are dipshit CIA goons in Washington making plans to systematically destroy PMR’s economy.

Whew, it’s fucking scary, you know? I mean, I understand that war is a serious business, but I was always under the naive impression that you had to at least know what the fuck you’re dealing with in order to send men to their deaths. But no, not in this clown world, not anymore.

Sad to say it, but there’s no one left who could actually even tell you who the PMR Prime Minister is or where the Ukrainian refugees in PMR live or even what the fuck happened back in 1992.

And I wish it was just the collective “West” that was colossally ignorant about PMR, but the Russian-language media is only a tiny bit better. In fact, I’ve never seen seen a basic profile on PMR’s president, even in Russian.  You know, the language that the guy speaks.

And I doubt there’s even one Russian speaker in a million who knows that PMR is literally the only place on Earth where Ukrainians and Russians get along in perfect harmony.

So yeah, in one reality, I’m walking down the street, saying hi to my neighbor as she feeds the homeless cats outside her bloc, and then I get home and log onto the internet to discover a completely different reality that’s so dark and twisted that calling it Satanic feels like an understatement.

So that’s why I find it so hard, sometimes, to write about PMR. Because first I’ve got to say, “Hey, guess what? Literally everything you know about this place is wrong, even the fucking geography.” And that’s a pretty big barrier to cross.

Frankly, it’s just a whole lot easier to take my doggos to the river for walkies :)