A Russian person could not visit New York, Chicago and Los Angeles and then say they visited The United States and have an understanding of Americans. They might think they understand, but any American would giggle at the notion.
Conversely, the same is true in Russia. You cannot visit Moscow, St Petersburg and Kazan and think you have an understanding of Russians. However, if you give yourself time, join in the daily tasks and challenges of ordinary Russians, you can easily discover some of the deeper stuff that really puts context on life in the Russian Federation.
Perhaps what follows is a different perspective.
It took a while, but I finally figured out what this phrase “the Motherland” is all about.
Let me start by sharing another phrase that almost every American will find familiar, yet virtually every Russian asked has no reference to comprehend: “you work for us.”
When talking to a federal, state or local government official in the United States and saying, “you work for us,” everyone listening would completely understand your sentiment. However, in Russia that phrase is akin to asking a Martian for a canoe. This is the way to understand “the motherland.”
Within Russia the social compact is organized around the premise (key word “premise“), that government is the mother figure within a family – and all of the citizens are children. The government knows best. The state engages in all facets, systems and structures as if they are the omnipotent mother who cares about the children.
This is a very good essay, well-worth reading. It provides an outsider’s sympathetic view of what Russia today is and why it is that way. It’s not easy to compose an overview of this type. ABN
Confidence in Minnesota‘s social safety net has been shaken by fraudsters who authorities say have stolen more than $1 billion in public funds from programs meant to feed children, assist the homeless and provide autism therapy.
Over the last five years, people mostly within Somali communities have gotten rich by running companies that bill the state for millions of dollars in social services that were never actually rendered, The New York Times reported.
Federal prosecutors say of the 86 people that have been charged, 59 have been convicted so far in what they describe as three separate fraud schemes.
One central case involved the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, which claimed to serve tens of thousands of meals to low-income children during the pandemic.
Prosecutors allege most of those meals never existed, and instead, the taxpayer money went to luxury homes, cars, jewelry and real estate abroad.
‘No one will support these programs if they continue to be riddled with fraud,’ Joseph H Thompson, the federal prosecutor who took on the cases, told The Times. ‘We’re losing our way of life in Minnesota in a very real way.’
I was unfamiliar with the idea of the scapegoat also being a “truth teller” in a narcissistic family. The truth teller might also be called a witness; it’s the child that knows something is not right and thus threatens the vulnerable narcissist. Many if not most traditional cultures have very large narcissistic components. Their moral strictures, religions, duties, values, manners, etc. almost all contain elements of narcissism. So there is an important historical dimension to this diagnosis.
Aspects of Buddhism as it is traditionally practiced even today can also be seen as being narcissistic or fostering narcissism. Same for all the Abrahamic religions, Confucianism, Aztec beliefs and so on across the globe. Just as consciousness is fundamental to our human reality so are the many ways of interpreting it, almost all of which historically have tended toward narcissistic systems.
Truth tellers typically are most likely to escape the web of the narcissistic family even though their role in it was to be the most despised, the scapegoat. Sometimes I see the Buddha as a truth teller who freed himself from his father’s make-believe world despite the power and luxury it offered. In this vein, Jesus can be seen as an outcast black sheep who was tortured and grossly humiliated. Both embody the hardship of earning freedom from delusion.
President Donald Trump has declared the airspace over Venezuela ‘to be closed in its entirety’ as the US continues to threaten military action against the country.
In a Saturday morning post to his Truth Social, he asked all ‘airlines, pilots, drug dealers, and human traffickers’, to steer clear of the area.
The Trump administration has accused Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro of leading and protecting a criminal network known as the Cartel de los Soles.
Troops have been amassing in Puerto Rico, some 500 miles from the South American county, with Gen. Dan Caine, Trump’s military adviser, visiting the area on Monday.
I am sure millions of American citizens, naturalized or not, would love to see her deported. Worth mentioning is there are many parasites in USA, some of whom have been here for many decades. We will never get our country back until the vast majority of parasitic gangs infesting us are busted; deported if possible but at least busted, exposed for all to see, and driven from public life and seats of power and influence. ABN
My ancestors lived as white slaves in a backward part of Europe which was colonized for hundreds of years. My people have made contributions to Western civilization, but they pale compared to Western and Southern Europe. So I kind of think like this guy. Be grateful to those who invented science, technology, working economies and political systems, and made them truly great. Western, Central and Southern European men created the modern world, made billions of people worldwide healthier, wealthier and freer than they ever had been. Ask anyone from any other part of the world do you want to go live like your ancestors centuries ago? No honest person ever says yes unless they are living in a fantasy. ABN
Lev Tahor, a 200-300 member ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect founded in 1988, promotes isolationist practices and has faced U.S. federal charges since 2021 for child exploitation, including forced underage marriages and sexual abuse, per DOJ indictments and Wikipedia summaries of peer-reviewed investigations.
Lev Tahor has a documented history of international raids for child abuse allegations, including Canada’s 2014 removal of 14 children, Mexico’s 2018 rescue of two, Guatemala’s 2024 extraction of 160 minors, and Colombia’s November 2025 rescue of 17, as confirmed by Reuters, AP, and BBC reports.
This country took us in. It gave us safety, schools, jobs, freedom to worship, things most of our parents and grandparents never had back home. America didn’t just let us live here; it let us become something bigger.
But some of us still act like we’re just visiting. Some put the ummah first, no matter their hypocrisies. Some think sharia should ever come before the Constitution. Some make excuses the second another “Allahu Akbar” shooter opens fire on our streets. Some scream for foreign flags while American soldiers and cops are bleeding ten miles from the White House.
If that’s you, do us all a favor: go home. Go back to the country you or your parents ran from. They obviously need you more than we do.
The rest of us; the ones who tear up at the national anthem, who thank God every day we’re American, who see every citizen here as family, aren’t going anywhere. And we’re done staying quiet while the loudest voices make the rest of us look bad.
So here it is, plain and simple:
Put America first or get the f*** out.
No third option. – An American Muslim who bleeds red, white, and blue.
The fall of Andriy Yermak – Zelensky’s fixer, enforcer, gatekeeper, and indispensable ally, isn’t a “corruption scandal.” It’s Washington slapping the table. NABU, the U.S.-trained attack dog of Ukrainian politics, didn’t raid the Presidential Office by accident. It raided to remind Zelensky that the war isn’t his to command, the peace process isn’t his to veto, and the leash around Bankova Street is held in Washington, not Kiev and certainly not European chihuahuas.
Because the real story isn’t Yermak’s resignation. The real story is the West turning on itself over how to end a war Russia has already won.
The fall of Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s most loyal ally and the de facto power manager of Ukraine, is not a scandal. It is a strike from above. NABU, the U.S.-funded, U.S.-trained anti-corruption bureau, didn’t raid the home and office of Ukraine’s most powerful unelected official by coincidence. And in any other country, his resignation after a corruption raid would be a political scandal. In Ukraine, it’s a geopolitical detonation.
Yermak wasn’t just a chief of staff, he was the shadow architect of the regime, the man through whom every appointment, every oligarchic negotiation, every Western request, and every wartime decision had to pass. And the speed of his resignation makes clear this was less about corruption, and more about pressure — engineered, timed, and executed by the one actor that can pull such a lever, Washington.
For months, the U.S. has been split between the neocons clinging to fantasies of a battlefield reversal, and the rising bloc of realists (JD Vance et. al) who have finally accepted what the frontlines have shown for over a year, Russia has already won. Ukraine’s army is shattered, NATO’s ammunition reserves are exhausted, and American voters are done with a war that offers no victory and no strategy. The realists now want a controlled, face-saving diplomatic exit, that locks in territorial losses quietly while Washington claims it “secured peace.” Zelensky has resisted every inch of this pivot because peace ends his power. And Yermak was the immovable pillar of that resistance, insulating Zelensky from any pressure to negotiate, the filter preventing unwanted messages from reaching the president. By purging him through a NABU raid, the U.S. has isolated Zelensky.
Meanwhile, the EU is panicking. European leaders fear peace more than war because peace forces accountability… why did they destroy their own industries, torch their energy security, plunge their economies into recession, and funnel hundreds of billions into corruption for a war Washington itself is now preparing to fold? Brussels supported Zelensky unconditionally not out of conviction but out of sheer self-preservation. If the war ends, they must answer for the ruin they inflicted on their own populations. Europe needs perpetual conflict to postpone the political reckoning. Washington, by contrast, wants a face saving offramp. This is the real EU–US divide: Brussels wants to delay the inevitable, Washington wants to manage it, and Kiev wants to deny it. Only one of them has the power to dictate the timeline, and it isn’t Europe.
Moscow sees the Western fracture, senses the desperation, and understands its advantage. Putin’s message has been cold and consistent: either negotiations occur on terms that reflect the battlefield reality and addreses the root cause of the conflict, or Russia will continue grinding down NATO’s proxy forces until nothing remains to negotiate with. For Russia, both paths lead to victory. Russia has no reason to rush, it is the West running out of time, weapons, unity, and credibility.
And when European publics finally realize their leaders sacrificed prosperity, stability, industry, and geopolitical autonomy for a war that ended exactly where Moscow predicted it would, the political reckoning will be seismic. Yermak’s fall is not the end of an era, it marks the beginning of the collapse for the EU.
American Buddhist Net 
