Friday: Hili dialogue

February 25, 2022 • 7:30 am

Lots of cats in today’s Hili.  I leave in two days, and get my Covid PCR test today, so I’ll be on the North Side for a while. Posting will be light, but, as always, I do my best.

Good morning at the end of the work week: Friday, February 25, 2022: National Chocolate Covered Peanut Day (I’ll take cashews or even raisins, thanks).  It’s also National Clam Chowder Day (I asseverate again that the New England style sans tomatoes, is the only one to eat), Let’s All Eat Right Day (that depends on what you mean by “right”), and, in Kyoto, Japan, it’s Kitano Baika-sai or “Plum Blossom Festival” at the Kitano Tenman-gu Shrine in Kyoto.

News of the Day:

The latest: Russian troops have entered the city of Kyiv.  The NYT adds this:

. . . . officials warned residents to stay indoors and “prepare Molotov cocktails” to defend against advancing Russian forces who had entered a northern district of the city.

and this:

Russia on Friday rejected talks with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and made it clear that it was seeking to topple his democratically elected government, which Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov said was steered by “neo-Nazis” and the West.

“We do not see the possibility of recognizing as democratic a government that persecutes and uses methods of genocide against its own people,” Mr. Lavrov said during a news conference in Moscow.

*It’s hard to be enthusiastic about anything given what Ukraine is facing, or to read news about anything else.  All I can say is this: Putin has won, and though Russia may be squeezed, it won’t be squeezed enough to vacate Ukraine. This was inevitable given that Biden telegraphed his sanctions in advance and Putin went ahead and invaded. He will not leave if all he faces is the Ukrainian army. The sanctions are not even that tough: Putin’s assets are untouched, and the harshest penalty on Russia’s finances, denying it access to the SWIFT global banking system, is not even on the table. And that denial is precisely what the Ukrainian government wants us to do. (The Wall Street Journal explains why the West is not imposing this hardest of sanctions.)

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was interviewed on NBC news last night, and all he could do is utter pieties, especially when asked, “Well, the sanctions are on and Putin’s ignoring them. Why do you expect them to work.” He had no answer, and the station showed clips of Biden and Kamala Harris maintaining, before the invasion, that sanctions were always meant as a deterrent. Well, it was already too late when they imposed them. Now I worry about other European countries, particularly Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. But I’m not a pundit; I’m just thinking on paper (or rather on photons on a screen).

Useful links about the war in Europe:

From the NYT, a good historic summary and overview of what Putin’s seeking to do: “The roots of Ukraine’s war: how the crisis developed.”

And if you want to get the latest, scroll down through the NYT’s useful feed of “live updates.”

*Something heartening: Anti-war protestors in St. Petersburg! For more, read the NYT article, “Thousands of Russian protest President V. Putin’s assault on Ukraine. Some chant: ‘No to war!'”

Thousands of protesters took to the streets and squares of Russian cities on Thursday to protest President Vladimir V. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, only to be met with heavy police presence.

Many Russians, like people across the world, were shocked to wake up and learn that Mr. Putin had ordered a full-scale assault against a country often referred to as a “brotherly nation.” At the protests, many people said they felt depressed and broken by the news of Russian military action.

In Moscow, the police blocked off access to the Pushkinskaya Square in the city center, after opposition activists called people to come there. Police officers dispersed even the smallest groups of protesters, ordering them to clear the area through loudspeakers.

A few hundred people, mostly young, flanked the streets leading to the square, some chanting “No to war!” and unfurling a Ukrainian flag. The police detained more than 600 people in the city, according to OVD Info, a rights group that tallies arrests.

One bit of video:

*More bad news from Texas, which passed an unconstitutional anti-abortion law designed to evade legal restrictions by having the law enforced by private citizens who can sue for $10,000 per incident or person involved in a “pre-heartbeat” abortion. The case is now before the Texas Supreme Court, but a lawyer for the clinics says that as long as the enforcement is specified the way it was, he sees no way around Texas’s law.

In December, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to keep the law in place and allowed only a narrow challenge against the restrictions to proceed. So on Thursday, the Texas Supreme Court, which is entirely controlled by Republican justices, heard arguments on the issue of whether state licensing officials have a role in enforcing the law.

[Reproductive rights lawyer Marc] Hearron said that if the state Supreme Court rules that licensing officials can’t enforce the law in any way, that would “effectively end” their challenge to the law.

He said said that if the court said such officials could enforce the law, they would seek an injunction so the officials couldn’t revoke the licenses of abortion providers who performed abortions after six weeks.

“The best outcome we can get in this case would be a ruling blocking the state licensing officials from discipling doctors and nurses, pharmacists and facilities or revoking those facility licenses for violating” the law, he said.

The attorney representing Texas, Judd E. Stone II, told the judges a that the law is clear that no enforcement “may be taken or threatened by the state.”

But that best outcome still makes abortion after six weeks against the law. The clever but creepy “citizen militia” provision is what’s making this hard. However, it’ll all be moot after the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. 

*Censorship afoot again in school libraries. From reader Ken:

This saga continues apace, with Oklahoma attorney general John O’Connor considering whether 51 books (including Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies) should be removed from school library shelves in response to parental complaints.

These books are being investigated for violating Oklahoma’s “obscenity law.”The list of books, at the bottom of the article, contains some familiar names, including The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I’ve read all but one of these books (the one by Thomas), many of them when I was still in secondary school, and I have no beef with any of them.

Apropos of censorship, Stanley Kurtz has an NYT op-ed called”The battle for the soul of the library”, though it’s title on the front page is: “The ‘woke’ librarian is everywhere, and not helping anyone.” Although Kurtz is a conservative, he’s still standing up for a liberal principle: viewpoint neutrality in education and lack of censorship by school librarians. (Once regarded as the gatekeepers of neutrality, they’re getting more ideological and more ban-ny.):

What in the world is a woke librarian? After all, through venerable proclamations like the Library Bill of Rights, America’s librarians have long pledged to “provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues.” The declaration adds, “Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.” This professional stance is known as “neutrality.”

By vowing ideological neutrality in the provision of knowledge, librarians ideally enable readers to develop opinions based on broad consideration of the available alternatives. In contrast, librarians who allow their personal politics to control or curtail the provision of information violate neutrality and betray the public trust. A woke librarian, then, is a contradiction in terms.

Contradiction or not, woke librarians — by which I mean librarians who see it as their duty to promote progressive views on race, policing, sexuality and other issues — are everywhere. Yet the Library Bill of Rights has it right: The library should remain sacred ground — a neutral sphere above the fray — precisely because libraries leaven and inform the fray itself.

. . . On the left, politically one-sided collection building by avowedly nonneutral librarians would amount to book banning by other means, more insidious for being less obvious than parents with pitchforks. As conservatives capture school boards, I expect examples of this backdoor form of book banning to increasingly come to light, exacerbating an already fraught situation. Ultimately, librarians who work to balance a library’s holdings will be far more persuasive advocates for intellectual freedom than those with a political ax to grind.

*Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 943,312, an increase of 1,868 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 5,949,582 5,927,781, an increase of about 21,900 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on February 25 include:

Duke Margiris defending Pilėnai against Teutonic Knights 1336

The original patent:

  • 1932 – Hitler, having been stateless for seven years, obtains German citizenship when he is appointed a Brunswick state official by Dietrich Klagges, a fellow Nazi. As a result, Hitler is able to run for Reichspräsident in the 1932 election.
  • 1939 – As part of British air raid precautions, the first of 21⁄2 million Anderson shelters is constructed in a garden in Islington, north London.

These were made of corrugated steel and were usually buried. They held four people, and were issued free to all householders who earned less than £5 per week:

Here’s a very short documentary of Khrushchev’s speech, a secret at the time:

  • 1986 – People Power Revolution: President of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos flees the nation after 20 years of rule; Corazon Aquino becomes the Philippines’ first woman president.

Notables born on this day include:

Renoire: “Julie Manet with Cat” (1887):

  • 1873 – Enrico Caruso, Italian-American tenor; the most popular operatic tenor of the early 20th century and the first great recording star. (d. 1921)

Here’s Caruso’s last recording (1920): can you recognize the song?

  • 1894 – Meher Baba, Indian spiritual master (d. 1969).  The “god incarnate” did not speak a word for the last 44 years of his life. See Wikipedia caption below. 

Don’t worry! Be happy! He will help you.

From 10 July 1925 until the end of his life, Meher Baba maintained silence. With his mandali (circle of disciples), he spent long periods in seclusion, during which time he often fasted. He also traveled widely, held public gatherings, and engaged in works of charity with lepers and the poor. He now communicated first through chalk and slate, then by an alphabet board, and later via a repertoire of gestures unique to him. On 1 December 1926, he wrote his last message, and began relying on an alphabet board.

Meher Baba dictating a message to a disciple in 1936 using his alphabet board

A 26-minute film about Baba’s life. (Do you think he ever said a word when he was completely alone?)

  • 1901 – Zeppo Marx, American comedian (the youngest of the Marx Brothers) and theatrical agent (d. 1979)
  • 1943 – George Harrison, English singer-songwriter, guitarist and film producer; lead guitarist of The Beatles (d. 2001)

One of his best post-Beatles song by Harrison, and a touching paean for John Lennon, here’s Harrison’s “All Those Years Ago” (1981; with lyrics modified after Lennon was shot). It marked the reuniting of the last three Beatles: Ringo is on drums and Paul does background vocals.

Those who closed their eyes for the last time on February 25 include:

  • 1957 – Bugs Moran, American mob boss (b. 1893)

Bugs died in Leavenworth Prison after spending several stints in prison for forgery and robbery.

  • 1970 – Mark Rothko, Latvian-American painter and academic (b. 1903)

Rothko and his kitty:

Tennesee Williams and his cat:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili muses about evolution:

Hili: Why do humans walk on their hind paws?
A: To be able to serve the cats.
Hili: How could that have evolved?
In Polish:
Hili: Dlaczego ludzie chodzą na tylnych łapach?
Ja: Żeby móc obsługiwać koty.
Hili: Ale jak to mogło wyewoluować?

And a formal portrait of Kulka:

More fun with snow from Peter:

From Merilee:

Koalas don’t like to hold still when they’re weighed, so some clever people found a way to weigh them when they’re immobile. From reddit:

The proper way to weigh a koala from Damnthatsinteresting

From Masih. This is what happens to Iran’s political dissidents:

From GInger K.:

Tweets from Matthew. He found the Auschwitz Memorial’s take on the Ukraine situation:

Have a look at this huge bacterium. Not only is it nearly an inch long, but, if you read the paper, you’ll see that it’s DNA is encased in a membrane, sort of like a cross between a eukaryote, with a nucleus, and other bacteria whose DNA string floats free in the cell:

Matthew explains: “Viktor is a entomological palaeontologist in Germany but his family is still in Ukraine. His reply tweet shows pic of cat which came back and is safe.” Yay!!

A woman evacuates Kyiv with her kitty:

The Japanese should make a horror movie out of these events:

Matthew offers some “beauty to palliate the horror” that is going on in Europe:

25 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

    2. Literary karma at it’s finest.They need to find a homeowner in Tahoe with blond curly hair, and interview her about how it was either papa bear, mama bear, or baby bear who broke into her house. 🙂

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  2. Did we get to hear the final reading choices for Jerry to take to the Antarctic?

    Also, the bacterium – surely that means one cell??? Is a bacterium not a single cell rather than a conglomeration? If it is a collection, surely that makes it a multi-cellular organism?

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  3. “Although Kurtz is a conservative, he’s still standing up for a liberal principle..”

    Perhaps he is trying to conserve traditional liberal philosophy. Like from the Bolsheviks or woke Taliban.
    The idea of woke people running our libraries, museums, and archives scares me to death. It is no different than letting religious extremists run those places. They should be guarded from such people. They should be inviolable.

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    1. Perhaps, but in the story right above that we have Oklahoma’s AG, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, censoring books from a school library at the bidding of/to score points with the State’s conservative government and conservative voters.

      So I would not take the second story in isolation and extrapolate that in this fight conservatives are the ones defending free expression. Rather, we are in an era where the middle is getting whacked by both ends of the political spectrum.

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      1. I don’t disagree with you. What we probably need is more specific language to describe people, especially those on the far ends of the spectrum.
        The follow-up to the Oklahoma story is that parents groups filed complaints with the AG alleging pornographic materials in schools. So he did a cursory investigation, and concluded that no further action from his office would be appropriate. It sounds like he did not want to get stuck to that particular tar baby.
        It is a mess. I wanted to see why Lovely Bones and Lord of the Flies got onto that list, but could not find any specifics on that. The groups mentioned in the articles I found were clearly opposed to some of the books that seemed written specifically with trans grooming in mind, but did not mention the mainstream books.

        While I cannot find anyone confessing to putting classic literature on that list, there is a woke movement in the schools that the parents are pushing against.
        The Oklahoma Council of Teachers of English published the following agenda statement-
        “Queer theory argues that inclusion is not enough . Instead, heteronormative institutions need to be questioned, challenged, and disrupted . While having LGBTQ+ stories in school libraries may seem to emphasize inclusion, such presence can be a vital, initial step to disrupt schools as heteronormative sites.”
        I don’t really want my 7 year old’s English teacher to believe that the tenets of queer theory are a vital part of my kid’s education. I also don’t want puritans imposing their perspectives at my kid’s school.

        It is easy to look at articles about the subject and assume that the primary feature is nutty conservative extremists fighting against normality. Certainly some of those people are involved, but it looks to me like there is a mainstream push against wokism, and the usual religious suspects are jumping aboard to try to move the agenda for their own goals. Additionally, the woke people always portray anyone who disagrees with them as racist fanatics. It does not seem like stories about this subject can be taken at face value.

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  4. Yes the Jim Crow party is well on their way down in Texas and in most red states. Maybe they will declare the party an annex of the Putin party. Going back in time seems to be the only trend they know. Back to the days of dictators and slaves and kind of a lawless politic. You declare that Putin has won? Just two days in and you surrender? Our own civil war took 4 years. It took 6 years to defeat the Nazis.

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  5. Thank you for the photograph of the Anderson shelter. A child in WW2 I spent many London nights so buried in the garden.

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  6. A woman evacuates Kyiv with her kitty

    All it took to evacuate a city was a woman and her kitty!

    Perhaps other religious leaders too should consider shutting up for forty-five years. I’d be happy to listen.

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  7. “Don’t give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero’s facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem. It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced — in a word, insane.”

    Frank Herbert

    Many people are fascinated by force (Force can be different things, often power and control)
    Many people are psychopaths, so there is no power to explain to a psychopath that there are people who are completely different from themselves. That’s a lot of a problem.

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  8. 1894 – Meher Baba, Indian spiritual master (d. 1969).

    For a few months in the mid-70s I worked as a cook in a restaurant in Myrtle Beach, SC, not far from the Meyer Baba Spiritual Center. (Although Meyer Baba had died a few years before, the center was still active.) Turned out, some of the waitresses who worked at the restaurant were followers of Meyer Baba and lived there to be close to the center.

    I’d bring a book to work every day, to read after setting up the kitchen, before the dinner rush started. One day, the book I brought was Be Here Now. One of the waitresses who was a Baba follower espied the book, and she and the others rushed over all excited to tell me about a visit Ram Dass had made to their Center. “Cool,” I said, though I wasn’t really interested in pursuing the woo-ish aspects of the book, more in catching up on the story of whatever had happened to Richard Alpert, PhD, after he and Tim Leary got booted off the Harvard faculty for dropping acid with undergrads.

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  9. That picture of Tennessee Williams and his cat by the pool was taken at his home on Duncan Street in Key West. For a while, I used to ride my bicycle past that house on my way to work every day.

    One night, shortly after I got to Key West, Williams got rolled a block or two off of Duval Street. (In those days, it was practically a rite of passage for local juvenile delinquents — the locals being known as “Conchs” — to roll a drunken sailor or gay guy late at night as they were staggering home from the bars downtown.)

    There was a story about the incident in the local newspaper the next day. According to the story, Williams (whose last couple Broadway plays had been heavily panned and had closed early) was asked by the cops if he recognized his attackers. “Nah,” he said, “but I’m pretty sure they were New York drama critics.”

    I’m guessing his ability to come up with a great line like that spontaneously was related to his ability to write great plays.

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  10. Congress is still fully empowered to draft a pro-choice bill that would override the Texas law (right?). I don’t see why the current leaning of the US Supreme Court is necessarily relevant. In most other Western democracies, it was the legislative body that legalized abortion, and not the court system. I’ve heard that the fact that a US Supreme Court decision legalized abortion demonstrates a clear democratic deficit in the US, and built up a significant amount of hostility between the parties.

    It’s depressing to see people trying to take Constitutionally-enumerated Congressional powers (like the power to declare war) and let other branches take them over. People ignore the separation of powers when it is inconvenient – bringing me back to my comment from yesterday that more people give democracy lip service than actual support.

    I also accept that there are limits to democracy. Maybe we should consider this a case where democracy is not the answer, in the vein of ‘get your laws of of my body’. I would like more discussion worldwide about when democracy is not the answer.

    (So once again, I have more broad considerations than clear policy stances.)

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    1. Much of what you are saying here is true. The congress should be the branch of government that does things and makes law. Not the courts. We have major flaws in our Constitution that are the cause for this and other problems. But, do not think that the founders were happily saying we had democracy when the Constitution was ratified in 1789. We did not. They made a republic not a democracy. So first understand this and then ask your questions and have your discussions.

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    2. Congress has the power, but the Senate Filibuster means no such bill would ever pass.

      It’s depressing to see people trying to take Constitutionally-enumerated Congressional powers (like the power to declare war) and let other branches take them over.

      Congress is the sole arbiter of how Congress delegates it’s authority to the executive branch. “People” didn’t do it, Congress did. Congress gave away it’s own farm.

      For a combination of three reasons, IMO, one of which is fine. (1) Growth and structural – you cannot legislate all the detailed necessary rules for a nation of 370 million with the same direct approaches you use for a nation of 2.5 million. It is a natural and inevitable thing that as the US grew, Congress would have to delegate either down to their own support staff or across to the Executive Branch more decision-making. Many Executive Branch agencies came into effect this way; Congress simply doesn’t have the time to both do their ‘day jobs’ of drafting and passing bills, and at the same time be the EPA, be the HHS, be the DHS, be the DoE. So they created Executive branch agencies to do those things for them. (2) Political self-interest. Congress often doesn’t *want* to make decisions that will reduce their chances of reelection. Thus with sanctioning military action, many of them are perfectly happy to let the President take that risk, knowing they can avoid public ire if it turns out to be unpopular yet ride on his coat tails if it turns out to be popular. (3) Party. IMO a lot of the shift of Congressional power to the executive branch has to do with party loyalty over state loyalty or “branch” or “Constitutional structural” loyalty. A Maryland Democratic House member (for example), when there is a Democratic President in office, will likely prioritize the Democratic party power first (i.e. give our President more power!), Maryland power second, and House power a distant third. Note also that a lot of Americans tacitly support taht prioritization as the way they think it should be. Thus when Manchin and Sinema put their party’s agenda second to other concerns, Democratic party members across the entire US get really, really mad at them.

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    3. Our system of government maintains a tension between states rights and the federal government. It’s true, or system doesn’t seem to be working very good. States are supposed to have the freedom to make their own laws with a minimum of constraints from the federal government, Congress is supposed to make new federal laws and the SC is supposed to guard against Congress making illegal laws by, when a suit is brought before them, judging whether or not the law in question conflicts with the Constitution and or precedent.

      It’s not immediately obvious to me that this is a particularly bad system. The problem is that the system has been gamed, corrupted. This can and does happen to all systems of government that have ever been tried. We need better ways of preventing corruption from overwhelming the system. This is the problem for any decent society, how to devise systems of government and justice that prevent the liars, cheaters and stealers that will always be trying to game the system to their advantage from corrupting the system so much that it no longer functions as intended.

      People criticize our system for having a court with the authority to decide whether laws created by the legislature are legal or not. And yet when congress has been corrupted that court inhibited a corrupt political party in control of congress from passing legislation that a sizeable majority of the people would have disagreed with. Now that bit of protection is gone. Worse, the SC is now a tool to further the corruption.

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      1. We need better ways of preventing corruption from overwhelming the system.

        The traditional response the founders might have given to your complaint is: elections are best (or maybe ‘least worst’) way to prevent corruption from overwhelming the system. IOW the way to ensure legislators don’t get too corrupt is allow voters to vote them out.

        However the founders also didn’t seem to anticipate party loyalty as a major political or psychological force. You look at historical examples like Boss Tweed or modern ones like Trump, people seem perfectly happy to keep a corrupt person in office so long as it’s their corrupt person in office.

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        1. +1

          I actually wrote a paragraph in my first comment addressing just that, but decided to delete it. But, yeah, ultimately in a representative system the problem traces back to the voters. How do you prevent voters from being easy marks for cons? How do you prevent voters from convincing themselves that bad people are a better choice than decent people to be leaders? How do you prevent voters from being prejudiced? How do you prevent voters from being susceptible to being recruited as devoted supporters of people like Trump? How do you prevent voters from “Yeah but both sides are bad” attitudes, thereby indirectly supporting people like Trump, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary? How do you get voters to avoid the Sunk Cost fallacy?

          Such a multifaceted issue. I’m sure humans will be struggling with this problem for as long as there are humans. I think we can do better though. We’ve (humans in general) certainly made some steps in the right direction.

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          1. The best and perhaps only solution to the myriad problems you correctly address is education. Especially the type of public education the US used to provide. A simple example is how we’ve stopped teaching civics in this country. Civics used to be a mandatory part of American curricula. I know it’s complicated how this happened, but now it seems our collective civics course is droning the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. We also failed in allowing students to choose a vocational career (which creates more opportunities for the future). I think it got too expensive (since most public schools are woefully underfunded) to keep classes like wood shop, metal working, auto shop etc. up and running. I remember in middle school (early 80’s) our wood shop class had every commercial (and extremely dangerous) machine tool you could imagine. Our art class had kilns. In HS, the auto shop class had to assemble/reassemble a car engine. The transition into the computer age was in its infancy, and I don’t know how that may have transformed our public schools. Probably the rich schools all got computers and the poor schools didn’t, but the vocational classes continued to dwindle. There is also data showing that many of the problems you cite are countered with education. The better educated someone is, the less likely they’ll vote against their interests, vote for a con-man, realize both sides aren’t the same, etc.

            This got longer than I thought and I figured I better stop now since this topic could fill a book or two.

  11. Now I worry about other European countries, particularly Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania.Well as pointed out to me, they are NATO. So a whole different kettle of fish.

    a lawyer for the clinics says that as long as the enforcement is specified the way it was, he sees no way around Texas’s law.

    I am surprised that the bit in the law that says the accused cannot recover court costs from accusers even if the accusation is found to be false passes legal muster. Surely there must be some constitutional or standard federal precedent that protects the right of a person who is frivolously dragged into court to at least ask for court fees. I’m not saying the always get it, just that I’m surprised it’s legal to prevent such an action. It seems to violate all sorts of notions of equal legal access. If A sues B frivolously, B can ask for court fees. But if B sues A frivolously, A can’t. A and B are not equal under law.

    Oklahoma attorney general John O’Connor considering whether 51 books (including Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies) should be removed from school library shelves in response to parental complaints.

    Conservatives like O’Connor should just skip to the GOP end game, and consider whether libraries should be removed from schools in response to parental complaints. That’s where they’re going, after all – young people should have no access to any ideas or literature other than what their parents hand them to to read.

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    1. IIRC both Steinbeck and Golding are Nobel prize laureates. Effen Nobel prize laureates! Don’t these censors have no shame?

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  12. I like the shrine photo, it’s very serene and beautiful.
    According to the news, Ukraine is suffering, I hope the war could be over soon and may the peace rest in Ukraine. 🇺🇦

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