1.21 Gigawatts!?

This device does 10 Gigawatts (in short pulses)

Ask your friend. When he’s in Ukraine, standing in line at the bank, does he feel like he’s from Ukraine?

I know when I stand in line at the bank in my birthplace, even though I speak the language and know the culture well, I feel quite alien there relative to the other people standing in line with me.

He may be Ukrainian, but is he “from Ukraine” or is he from wherever you’re from.

The human brain is plastic. We adopt the culture we integrate into, and very quickly at that.

I’m a person of several cultures, but I’m only “from” the one I fully integrated into, and it’s not the one I was born into.

Ukrainian-born and Ukrainian “from Ukraine“ are very different things.

I’m also not “from” where I was born. Their mentality is almost alien to me, even though intellectually I can still understand it.

It’s really hard interacting with Ukrainians right now. The first question I’m asked is whether I support their enemy. Then we have to preamble for a while about the war and I have to pass a series of tests to confirm I’m not their enemy too. It’s exhausting.

I get it: when you’re in a war that’s the only possible thing there is. Nothing else really exists until “after”.

You can easily tell how much it has affected their social interactions outside their country and outside their culture.

This was well studied in Dutch kids after WW2. Having been born to stressed mothers during the war or having grown up themselves during the war their entire epigenetic makeup, not to mention their mental health, was permanently skewed to a “fight or flight”, “feast or famine” war-footing.

Heck that’s probably the natural state of all humans. We’ve been fighting wars with each other for as long as we’ve existed. Every person alive today was born to those who happened to survive one war or another.

Kevin James is big everywhere