It's good to finish one project before starting on another. In this case, I finished rereading all 47 Xanth novels before I started playing Final Fantasy 16. Apoca Lips isn't particularly worse than books 46, 45 or 44, it's just one more bad book in a row. That makes four bad books in a row for this series. The sad thing is, it's so close to over that I can't stop reading it even with this. I have to keep going to the end because I've already come this far. It would be ludicrous to not see the ending when it's this close to done. Any day now Piers Anthony will die of old age or at least retire of old age and admit he can't write good books anymore. The man is 88 years old. I can outlast him.
While rereading Xanth I was diligently listening to my 2-star music tier and deciding which songs could be demoted to 1-star or promoted to 3-star. That project continues but I'm most of the way done. I'll need a new book series to read so I can keep listening to music, and that looks to be The Sword of Truth series, which I haven't read in ages.
I edited '100 Waifus' to cut a phrase about children in Eden getting vaccines. In a world separate from Earth, with no diseases evolved to haunt humanity, and with magical healing powers for anyone who does get infected, there's no benefit in getting vaccinated. In addition there's ample evidence that vaccines have negative side effects, from asthma to allergies to autism, even when you're not talking about the deadly Covid vaccine. Even if all these side effects are vanishingly rare, the cost benefit ratio still resides in favor of not vaccinating, because there's no benefit to preventing non-existent diseases. Here on Earth studies show that unvaccinated children have healthier lives across their entire lifetimes than vaccinated, so there's no evidence vaccines are good here either. But at least there's an argument for some vaccines on Earth, like maybe the unvaccinated are free-riding on the beneficial effects of other people getting vaccinated which wouldn't work if scaled up in mass, or maybe unvaccinated children just come from healthier family lines and it's a selection effect, not due to them being unvaccinated but in spite of them (though if that's true vaccines have such a small benefit that other factors can determine your health far more than them, which again brings into question why anyone should bother) -- there's just no possible argument for them on Eden.
I think vaccines are along the same lines as circumcision, an obviously brutal and appalling violence on the human body which evolved to defend itself and is already in its ideal state before humans start whacking and jabbing away at it. Humans cannot possibly understand health as well as millions of years of evolution can, our natural immune system, and our foreskins, are there for a reason. Nothing negative to the health of a human could possibly exist after this many generations, if modern science thinks evolution is wrong, then it's modern science that is wrong. You can always bet on mother nature over some arrogant guy in a white coat. If we learned anything from the Covid crisis it's that doctors don't know what they're doing, or worse they're maliciously out to get us, and you can't trust their opinion on a single thing. If they can be that wrong about lockdowns, masks and deadly non-working Covid vaccines, they're obviously incompetent (or worse, evil) when it comes to any other medical question too. It has now been proven that doctors designed covid in a lab and then unleashed it on the world. If anything doctors are the biggest threat to human health in the world, not people who refuse to listen to doctors. If doctors weren't inventing new plagues to unleash on the world there wouldn't be any diseases to begin with.
Meanwhile Prigozhin, head of Wagner group, has gone mad and announced he's going to overthrow the Russian military in some sort of coup. Hopefully the people who serve under him will not go along with this treason, I was given to believe they were loyal to the Motherland not Prigozhin personally, but who knows. Maybe Russia will now descend into civil war in the midst of its war with the outside world. Like 1917 all over again. Russia has never been known for stable governance. Regardless of how stupid or pathetic Russia is, it still doesn't change the fact that Ukraine overthrew its elected government in 2014 in a violent coup, and that any province of Ukraine that didn't wish to associate with said illegitimate government has every right to secede from it. Once seceded, a polity has every right to join any other country they please, like how Texas seceded from Mexico and then eventually became one of the United States of America. This right to self determination is enshrined in our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, as well as the United Nations charter. Russia had every right to support the right to self-determination of their oppressed neighbors who were being bombed and shelled just for wanting to live free of an illegitimate, unelected coup regime whose goal in life was to stomp out all Russian language, religion and culture in a country that was majority Russian language, religion and culture.
Nothing changes about who the good guys and who the bad guys are here. Ukraine and all its supporters are the bad guys even if Russia is a basket case. It's like how it doesn't matter if Russia is corrupt or not, that's irrelevant to this foreign policy dispute. It's irrelevant how many people Putin assassinates at home or abroad, because that changes nothing about who is in the right in Ukraine. It's irrelevant who shot down MH-17, because that doesn't change who is in the right in Ukraine. It's irrelevant who blew the Kherson dam, because that doesn't change who is in the right in Ukraine. It's irrelevant if Chechnya really bombed those Moscow apartment buildings, which began the second war between Russia and Chechnya and ended up with Chechnya losing its independence from Russia -- because Russia is still in the right with regards to Ukraine. It's irrelevant whether Georgia has the right to attack the breakaway province of South Ossetia and Russia shouldn't have interceded to protect them in 2008 -- because Russia is still in the right concerning Ukraine. It's irrelevant whether Transnistria should be part of Russia or Moldova, because Russia is still in the right when it comes to Ukraine. It's irrelevant if Lukashenko really won the previous presidential election in Belarus, because that doesn't change who is in the right with regards to Ukraine.
Also, this doesn't change who is destined to win this war, because Wagner group cannot take down Russia any more than NATO can. Russia's military has shown itself to be competent with or without Wagner. If Wagner wants to die alongside Ukraine and all the other foreign mercenaries in Ukraine, then okay, they can die too. Russia now has a 700,000 man army, much stronger than when it started this operation, and it's ready to take on anyone or everyone on Earth.
Prigozin has been ranting and raving like a madman for the past three months or so about how awful Russia is even while it skates from glorious victory to glorious victory, completely astounding and confounding the west which had been so confident they were about to win the war. Hopefully now Putin can shut his lying mouth, his treasonous attempts to undercut morale, for good by putting his head on a pike outside the Kremlin with a sign underneath saying, "thus to traitors." Anyone attempting to undermine or disrupt Russia in this world historical moment in its attempt to free the world from Western hegemony is unforgivable, regardless of their previous contributions to the cause. This is Benedict Arnold all over again.
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