• Oil, butter or lard – 2 tablespoons
• Chicken thighs, deboned & skin-on – 2 ½ to 3 pounds
• Onions, thinly sliced – 2 (or 3 if small)
• Hungarian sweet paprika – ¼ cup
• Korean chili flakes – 2 teaspoons
• Pastry flour – 2 tablespoons
• Poultry stock, unsalted – 1 ½ cups
• Red bell peppers, diced – 2
• Salt and pepper – to taste
• Sour cream – 1 cup
• Lemon juice (optional) – 1 tablespoon

1. Heat the oil over medium-high flame in a large cast iron skillet. Add the chicken skin-side down and brown until skin is crispy, about 7 minutes. Remove to a board, and cut into bite-size pieces.
2. Remove any excess oil leaving about 2 tablespoons and add the onions. Sauté the onions until wilted and beginning to brown. Stir in the paprika and flour and cook for 1 to 2 minutes.
3. Whisk in the stock in portions, breaking up any lumps. Add the browned chicken pieces, bell peppers. and the salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the chicken is cooked through and tender.
4. Stir in the sour cream and lemon juice if using. Adjust seasoning and reheat over low flame. Serve hot with noodles or gnocchi.

• Mushrooms can be added with the stock.
• Kosher version: Instead of sour cream, use 50% more flour, 33% more lemon juice, and some extra stock. For passover use potato starch instead of flour.

Putin Chooses a Forever War

His partition of Ukraine is an attack on global peace.

www.theatlantic.com|Tom Nichols

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a long speech full of heavy sighs and dark grievances, made clear today that he has chosen war. He went to war against Ukraine in 2014; now he has declared war against the international order of the past 30 years.

Putin’s slumped posture and deadened affect led me to suspect that he is not as stable as we would hope. He had the presence not of a confident president, but of a surly adolescent caught in a misadventure, rolling his eyes at the stupid adults who do not understand how cruel the world has been to him. Teenagers, of course, do not have hundreds of thousands of troops and nuclear weapons.

Even discounting Putin’s delivery, the speech was, in many places, simply unhinged. Putin began with a history lesson about how and why Ukraine even exists. For all his Soviet nostalgia, the Russian president is right that his Soviet predecessors intentionally created a demographic nightmare when drawing the internal borders of the U.S.S.R., a subject I’ve explained at length here.

But Putin’s point wasn’t that the former subjects of the Soviet Union needed to iron out their differences. Rather, he was suggesting that none of the new states that emerged from the Soviet collapse—except for Russia—were real countries. “As a result of Bolshevik policy,” Putin intoned, “Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine’. He is its author and architect.”

It is true that Soviet leaders created the 1991 borders. That is also true of what we now call the Russian Federation. Putin, however, went even further back in history: “Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood.”

By that kind of historical reasoning, few nations in Europe, or anywhere else, are safe. Putin’s foray into history was nothing less than a demand that only Moscow—and only the Kremlin’s supreme leader—has the right to judge what is or is not a sovereign state (as I recently discussed here). Putin’s claims are hardly different from Saddam Hussein’s rewriting of Middle East history when Iraq tried to erase Kuwait from the map.

For most of the speech, Putin was drinking one shot after another straight from a bottle of pure Soviet-era moonshine. He accused Ukraine, for example, of developing nuclear weapons, a play right out of the old Soviet handbook, when Kremlin leaders would accuse the former West Germany of developing nuclear arms to serve their “revanchist” plans for war.

He even accused Bill Clinton of denigrating him personally when Putin asked, more than 20 years ago, about the possibility of including Russia in NATO. Among the Russian president’s various other quirks, the man knows how to hold a grudge.

Putin then suggested that international sanctions are “blackmail”—a word used almost daily in the old Soviet press about the West—and are aimed at weakening Russia and undermining its existence as a nation. “There is only one goal,” Putin said. “To restrain the development of Russia. And they will do it, as they did before. Even without any formal pretext at all.” This is nonsense, and either Putin knows it (which is likely) or he has become so detached from reality that he has come to believe it (which is not impossible).

Putin left no room for negotiation with the Biden administration. He is prepared for sanctions, which he says will come no matter what Russia does. He asserts that Western hostility is permanent (perhaps because it would be too painful to his ego to admit that most people in the West, if given the choice, would not think about Russia or its leaders at all).

In short, Putin is now embracing a Russian tradition of paranoia, an inferiority complex that sees Moscow as both a savior of other nations and a victim of great conspiracies, a drama in which Russia is both strong enough to be feared and weak enough to be threatened. The West, in this story, is motivated not to seek peace and security, but to undermine Russia, and Putin has cast himself as the beleaguered Russian prophet who must subvert the evil plans drawn against his people.

Back here on Earth, however, we have a more pressing problem. At the end of his speech, Putin recognized the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, the “people’s republics” of Lugansk and Donetsk, as independent entities. In so doing, Putin has effectively partitioned Ukraine. This specific form of meddling in sovereign nations, too, is a Soviet tradition, as the Poles and others would remind us. His claim to these areas—for they will be Russian satrapies, and not “independent” in any meaningful way—is a claim to be the ultimate arbiter of former Soviet borders, including those now within NATO.

• Nobody has ever denied joining hermitcraft, although Joe almost didn’t join at first because he thought it sounded like a scam.
• There will be a central shopping district! The individual shopping districts were too difficult to pull off and the economy was collapsing because everyone already sold everything and had no need to buy anything from others.
• Hermitcraft is not about the numbers, it’s about the hermits’ content and how well they mesh together. On top of that, asking people why they aren’t in certain SMPs or series is very demeaning for content creators.
• A seed for the season has been picked.
• There will be a starter town in season 9, where everyone will start off and be close knit before spreading out. As of now, there are no solid plans for groups, and they’ll see how they naturally develop.
• Hermitcraft is supposed to be a vanilla minecraft series, so if they add custom textures this season, it needs to not be too detailed, and should look like it fits in with the world.
• Hermitcraft tends to wing everything, it’s largely experimental.
• Some of the mods they use are necessary for their videos to look the way they do.
• Proximity chat will return, and has been labeled as a stappe of Hermitcraft, and will be used until it’s unable to be used!
• The moon incident was the furthest they’ve ever gone with modding, and the mod was responsible for all the mood effects.
• Iskall and Stress will be back full-time for season 9!
• Everybody who’s been in last season will be in this season!
• The moon mod will be made public at some point.
• Some hermits might not be available at the beginning, but will be able to join sometime in the season, so they try and shoot for a middle ground for all the hermits.
• Hermitcraft doesn’t have any type of seniority. It’s a flat hierarchy, and everyone has the same level of voice. Hermitcraft has lasted for 10 years because they all have the same voice and everyone is able to contribute.
• When it comes to stories, hermits’ ideas are kept in mind for how the story will go. It’s mostly about timing of the story, for all participants to be able to coordinate together. It’s also beneficial for the viewers to be into it and enjoying it.
• Sometimes the hermits feel creatively limited due to it being survival. It does challenge them though, and encourages them to keep going bigger and bigger.
• Ren believes they’ve scratched the surface of Hermitcraft possibilities and that it’ll keep growing from there.
• People should be inspired by Hermitcraft to find their OWN Hermitcraft. Have ambition to shoot for your goals.
• There’s a world border close to spawn, so when the new update drops, they can expand it outwards in that direction.
• When it comes to Hermitcraft, algorithm and popularity doesn’t occur from it. As long as they make enough money to sustain themselves and their lives, they’re fine with their videos no matter their popularity.
• When they tell stories, they think about their audience and what format for their stories would appeal to their demographic.
• Mostly only YouTubers are added to Hermitcraft. Streamers are live a lot, so it means there’s a bunch of spoilers, and there’s also more of a synergy. However, this is something that’s still debated
• Gem plans her stories in advance. She carries an ideas notebook for her storylines.
• Massive storylines happen organically, and the hermits don’t have plans for it. They think the organic nature helps it with its charm and energy. (“If we all start planning it, then we’d all move to Hollywood and make a Netflix show.”)
• Gem and Pearl have future plans that they can’t wait to unleash upon the hermits. Ren is now scared of them.
• Ren and Doc’s plotline, the Hermatrix, is not returning. They think it would be a bad idea to pick it up right after season 8, but they can build on it instead of repeating the same thing.
• Xisuma’s season 8 story is not continuing into season 9, and he’s focusing on his stories being organic.