A Time to Listen. Good Bye, Cousin. Thank You, Mr. Drudge. Tidying Up Regarding Elon Musk...

And when is a state not a state?

My late cousin and me.

Welcome new Drudge readers! Thank you Mr. Drudge for linking my website. I hope to earn your readership and friendship.

Oh and С Рождеством Христовым! Merry Christmas!

As a boy my father used to encourage us to spend Christmas, or December 25th, thinking about the year that came before and ask us if there was anything we might do different.

Mostly we were just exhausted. Father sold clothing from around the world at his businesses dotted along the country’s innumerable malls and shopping carts. Sometimes he’d do better in a single Christmas season than he would all year. I often worked in my father’s business.

My parents would give us socks and Barnes & Noble gift cards. Father wanted to think about what sorts of books we would read and so I’d make a list, subject to his final approval. For me it was science fiction and then literature. I’d sit in the back part of the house and transport myself anywhere my mind could take me. In some respects that’s never stopped. In every respect you are coming on these journeys with me on this Substack. Some years Mother would be ill with cancer and these reading sessions would be especially a welcome escape.

We’d go together to the bookstore to take full advantage of the after Christmas sales. My dad called it “Russian” Christmas, or “Epiphany,” and I always really liked this time after New Year’s when the hope of New Year’s Resolutions are still fresh in people’s minds.

His wife, my mother and his mother baptized me as an Episcopalian in Coronado on August 4th, 1989. It was my grandmother’s church but my mother has never looked more Polish/White Russian. She was very emotional about the Ukraine War and flies a Ukrainian flag from my childhood home.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I was baptized on the day of Solidarity’s victory in the first (somewhat) free parliamentary elections in post-war Poland, an event which kicked off a succession of peaceful anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe, leads to the creation of the so-called Contract Sejm and begins the Autumn of Nations.

This is them walking with me some thirty-five years ago.

Father, mother and me

Today marks the day after the four year anniversary of January 6th — an event which occasioned something of a conversion experience for me. I’ve written about it elsewhere and I don’t want to focus too much at picking at my country’s scabs. You can search the archives just as easily as I can. Suffice it to say I am immensely proud of the role that Clearview.AI played in identifying the perpetrators and I pray for mercy for those who got ensnared. I’ve done what I can to be peaceful and loving to everyone.

I’ve been spending a lot of time near the Capitol lately and I trudged through the snow today to come back after an all night meeting nearby. I’m feeling a little less imprisoned by my existence here. There’s pep in my step. I’m working on some rather heavy stuff but I have never felt more energized, more awake.

Maybe that’s what being banned for life from Twitter will do to you. Who knows?

This past year I learned a lot about myself and my responsibilities. I’m getting a lot of insights into things that I hitherto eluded me. I don’t think it’s particular clairvoyance but it seems like a new sensing than anything I have experienced before. It’s making me a little uncomfortable but it’s nothing I can’t manage.

Between my White Russian and my secret Mormon lineage I’ve certainly come to understand a lot more about why I’m being attacked every which way. It turns out that the post-September 11th era was a terribly Mormon and Russian-Jewish. Doesn’t it feel as if we have entered a new era?

I can certainly appreciate why so many of my relatives wanted to hide but I’ve decided that the way to live is in the open — for better and for worse.

That openness has led me to some unexpected places with some unlikely alliances. I’m so grateful for it.

I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t know my Cousin Dylan as well as I ought to have though I understand he and his wife Patty were especially hospitable to my sister and her husband once upon a time. I shamefully didn’t go to see him and he rebuffed my various attempts to talk to him about his father.

Interestingly I do recall how Dylan and I once had a spirited conversation about genetics and privacy when I was just out of high school. He was telling me all about his genetics from his mother’s side. She was descendant from the first peoples of California and he knew he had all manner of health issues, lingering within his DNA.

I suggested to him that maybe one day genomics would help him. For him, it was not to pass, but his death has renewed my focus on Traitwell.com.

Dylan was a marathon runner who seemed like he was always at ease. He was a good father. No, he was a great father. There are deep lessons in the quiet, dignified life he led, however short it turned out to be. I have to tell you that I love him so much because I couldn’t tell it to him. Be sure not to make my mistake. Good bye, Dear Cousin.

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I’ve been summoned to New York this week for a few meetings — one of which is with a documentarian who is profiling Elon Musk — and I have to say I’m a bit nervous.

I have a court case discussing Clearview.AI with the judge.

Am I frightened? Of course I am. But this is what we do. We face our fears, honestly, and I have some wonderful friends who will take up the burden should I fall.

I’m trying to do everything I can to be a good ancestor and steward.

I hope you have a very lovely Christmas this January 7th.