I'm having a sort of split experience where on the one hand lots of my right-leaning mutuals say there's no way to work with the Dems bc it's impossible to make headway against Woke, while on the other a ton of people to my left are saying "that was a failure. let's adjust" https://t.co/pu9a14jCqE

— Jack (@tracewoodgrains) May 30, 2026

This is entertaining but I can’t imagine anybody with an ounce of gray matter willing to entertain the possibility that this adjustment is remotely sincere. What happened between 2012 and 2024 wasn’t a small innocent overreach that can now be corrected. It was a consistently expressed belief in the need to destroy the foundations of society that was aggressively and consistently put into practice.

People who are asking us to believe that this was an accidental overreach which they are now ready to undo are using the exact same method to make this argument that they originally used to unleash and maintain the woke movement. They are denying reality. They are gaslighting us by pretending we didn’t see what we very clearly saw. They did not change. They want everything and everybody around them to change beyond any recognition and keep embracing the most painful of changes that they inflict on everybody but they themselves want to be immune from change. They will not bend, compromise, or accommodate.

The second we believe them and give them a chance to demonstrate how they have adjusted, they are going to go from zero to a thousand, introducing policies that will make Woke 1.0 seem like child’s play.

Let’s not make that mistake.

The great Spanish writer Rafael Chirbes was from a working-class family that existed in such poverty that his mother had to send him to an orphanage as a child because she couldn’t feed him. When he grew up, he became one of the most well-read and brilliant Europeans of his time. Nobody in his family could begin to understand what it is that he did and what constituted the daily fabric of his life.

Sometimes something glitches and the most unexpected families produce a genius who is forever separated from his environment of origin by his out of place brilliance.

A Ukrainian drone pilot who participated in training NATO drone pilots says it’s very hard to work with them because they have so many regulations that they never manage to actually fly any drones.

“We can’t fly here, we aren’t allowed to fly there, the wind is too strong, it’s raining, we need 8 hours of sleep.”

The NATO soldiers are great. It is the structure of the entire system that has been infected by safetism and whiny mentality.

The full interview is here:

What I didn’t like about the movie “Single White Female” is something it shares with many American films. In the last 20 minutes, the movie completely falls apart. Everything that we learn about the characters up to that point flies out of the window. A succession of very cliched scenes with standard facial expressions, screams, and gimmicks becomes tedious. I sat through that exact scene of two characters, a good one and a bad one, beating each other to a bloody pulp a trillion times before.

This is why it often feels that watching American movies is a waste of time. These filmmakers know how to create an amazing ambience. They do great characterization. The premise is often very good. But they can’t finish a story in a way that is not very boring.

I asked the IT to make changes to the departmental web page. The IT guy wrote back at 1:00 AM to tell me that he had completed the task. I had lodged my request during normal business hours. Yet I feel profoundly guilty that this poor dude had to work on my stupid task in the middle of the night on Friday. But then again, IT people might actually derive pleasure from working at night. Right? Or should I go on feeling guilty? Please help me decide.

I remember watching this movie back in the mid-1990s from the post-Soviet reality where I then lived and everything about it seemed entirely incomprehensible to me. The main character, a young woman named Allie, wants a husband and a bunch of kids but her fiancé is a cheating piece of garbage. She half-heartedly attempts a life of an independent New York businesswoman. Of course, she ends up inviting a psychotic serial killer into her life and all sorts of crazy things begin to happen.

Even back in the 1990s it was clear to me that the movie betrayed a profound anxiety over the lifestyle that the young women depicted in it were trying to live. It is also clear what creates dysfunction in their lives. The only positive male figure in the movie is Allie’s gay neighbor and he is unavailable as a potential life mate. Men are insensitive, lecherous creeps, the movie tells us, so young women are forced to engineer their lives around that vacuum.

We all know how Allie’s story plays out in our era but the movie is definitely worth watching because it depicts that old New York of myth-making and a thousand movies and books. I never lived in New York but I feel nostalgia for the city that still exists in these old movies. It was a crazy yet magical place. The knowledge that everything we see in Single White Female is gone is not easy to process. The movie is based on a novel but I was never tempted to read it because the visual memory of the city, its buildings, its environment, and its people is a lot more powerful than words.

For everybody who is also missing their Dad tonight:

I answered one survey from my local state rep who is a former colleague and, of course, a Democrat. Exactly 3 minutes later, I received this:

Yes, it’s stupid to answer these surveys. But I’m in a mile-long line for an oil change. Plus, I wanted the state rep to know that her idea of “fighting to preserve women’s rights” is extremely unappealing to me as a voter.

Speaking of Talarico, he should be commended for providing excellent comedic relief to everybody who even marginally follows politics.

On our last night at the spa in the north of Quebec, a group of rowdy men next door to our suite was yelling and cheering well into the night. My sister, who is usually very stringent about protecting her customer rights, called reception to complain. However what they told her immediately changed her outlook.

“It’s okay”, she said happily. “These are hockey players celebrating the win of their team.”

That’s how I knew that she was now a true Canadian, and I find that very endearing.

JUST IN: Senator Elizabeth Warren urgently calls for AI regulations to prevent a “permanent underclass”

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) May 27, 2026

There is no doubt in my mind that these regulations will be limited in their entirety to ideological supervision of AI-generated content. Most AI tools are already woker than a BLM riot but there is never a limit on how far leftist ideological conditioning can go.

By the way, college professors in the Humanities who have the biggest number of issues with AI cheating are very left-wing. The kind of texts that they want students to produce are precisely the type of swill that AI generates most easily. I don’t have problems with AI in the classroom because I don’t expect students to create lists of politically charged talking points. I don’t want either left-wing or right-wing propaganda from them. What I look for is an actual thoughtful engagement with literary texts. AI is not helpful with that so they don’t use it. Exactly zero assignments that were handed in to me this semester were AI-generated. Each essay and composition that I received had a very appropriate and expected number of language mistakes. Each piece of writing also represented original and often very interesting thinking on the part of the students.

I issued no AI policy in my teaching this semester because it was unnecessary. AI is useless for the kind of work that I expect students to do.