When I first read about this it seemed unbelievable. I promised myself that I’d eventually get back to it. So here it is. The following is from The Moscow Times, April, 2019.

“More than one-fifth of Russian households do not have access to indoor plumbing, according to official statistics obtained by the RBC news website on Tuesday.”

“Russia leads the developed world with the worst sanitation record, according to the London-based WaterAid NGO. A 2012 estimate citing official data placed the number of Russians whose households are only equipped with outhouses at 35 million, or roughly a quarter of the population.”

Are you still wondering why Vladimir Putin, a man whom Donald Trump has called a “genius” invaded Ukraine? It’s simple, really. He needed a diversion from his miserable failures as a leader.

At the same time, we have a real “glass houses” problem here in the U.S.. With more than 66-thousand homeless on the streets of Los Angeles County alone, the County Supervisors have just voted to create an office to coordinate their response to the problem. Isn’t it surprising they didn’t do so sooner?

Nationally, by one estimate, there are more than 580-thousand homeless in the United States. On another front, Buzzfeed estimates that some 700 people died in February of 2021 in Texas, as a result of the power going down during Winter Storm Uri.