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BREAKING: Axios reports that there is evidence that US war with Iran is "imminent" and Israel is preparing for a scenario of "war within days," which is expected to include:

1. Weeks-long "full-fledged" war unlike the Venezuela operation, sources say

2. Joint US-Israeli…

— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) February 18, 2026

Only absolute morons keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result:

"We don't have time for all this bullshit." The negotiations in Geneva were extremely tense

The meeting lasted about six hours, covering three formats: Russian-American, Russian-Ukrainian, and Russian-American-Ukrainian talks.

In an interview with Axios, Volodymyr Zelensky said… pic.twitter.com/TY6Tz5Mvn0

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) February 18, 2026

Russians have demonstrated in every way possible that they don’t want a peace deal. Yet with the insistence of a schizoid woodpecker, the Trump administration keeps trying to engineer one. It’s a closed loop. No external information is allowed to seep in.

It’s the same with Iran.

One part of Paul Kingsnorth’s book Against the Machine that I really like talks about the increasingly frequent prohibitions on lighting fire in the fireplace of one’s own house. This was done in many parts of Canada, for example, and in Ireland where Kingsnorth lives. Kingsnorth is a lifelong conservationist and even a former Green. But he realizes that these prohibitions are not about nature.

The hearthstone has deep connotations in every European culture. Everybody knows the expression “heart and hearth” or its equivalent in their own European language. Our civilization arose from our capacity to survive and thrive in cold weather. The fireplace, thus, had a cosmological significance across time for Europeans, Kingsnorth explains. It symbolizes the warmth of the household. Somebody needs to stay at home and keep the fire going for those who go out into the cold. “She who guards the hearth” is how Ukrainians refer to a woman*. We say that a woman is the heart of the family because a child’s heart begins to beat under her own.

There’s a lot more to it though. Remember how we talked about focus? We are all in a battle against the technology that tries to destroy our focus, disperse our attention, and steal our capacity to create. Do you know what focus means in the Latin original?

It means fireplace.

If you’ve ever stared into a fireplace, you know why. In our shared European past, the hearth was a point of convergence, a place where the family gathered for warmth, companionship, and stories. We can gather around a fireplace. Or we can stare at individual screens that prevent us from focusing on our own thoughts.

“Lose your fires, and you lose your focus as a culture,” Kingsnorth says.

Thousands of years of cultural memory come alive for a descendant of Europeans who gathers firewood, chops it up, brings it home, and starts the fire. The fragrant smoke, the crackling logs, the jumping flames — all of it awakens the memory of the chain of generations before us that made, smelled, and saw the same fire. You can’t substitute for that with an electric fireplace.

This is what’s being taken from us. Our hearth, our home, our cultural memory. We are being deracinated and de-cultured.

*We say it with one word. Its the translation that’s clunky, not the original.

Once again, thank you, Elon.

It was really dire before he got involved and shut down Russians’ comms. I was completely desperate in early February. I thought Ukraine wouldn’t survive the month. And then there was this dramatic improvement.

Please enjoy another quote from Bothelford’s Gone by Edward McLaren. Jack Grundon is a teenage boy who becomes a pariah after attacking the Alawite rapist of his classmate Agatha:

His father: what did he have to say about his father? The man had secured a livelihood without maintaining a marriage; in any other historical context but the modern one, Jack wondered, would it have been conceivable that his life was something other than a failure, a shame? And now that shame had deepened because of Jack, his actions, and because John Grundon, his father, was no longer himself anymore but the one responsible for raising him: Mad Jack, the undesirable lunatic who had squandered, all in one go, his serious chance of getting into a good university and due to striking Basil, the reputation of his entire family. Even if all the accusations of his assault on Agatha were cleared up, that stain would linger. ‘Funny how everyone pretends that
honour doesn’t exist’, Jack thought to himself, ‘but as soon as you embarrass yourself in the wrong way—not by molesting a girl, but by acting against the one inconveniently responsible—suddenly it’s the Victorian Age again…’

People are discussing on social media whether it’s possible to travel internationally with small children. And yes, it’s possible but a more important question is whether it’s necessary. Children don’t need it. It’s done exclusively for adults. We’ve traveled internationally with Klara. She tolerated it as a form of eccentricity in which her parents engage for incomprehensible reasons. I don’t experience any need to pretend that she benefitted from it in a way she wouldn’t have from spending that time at home with her parents.

I’m fairly well-traveled but I don’t see why people turn travel into some sort of a meaning-conferring activity.

There are enormous benefits to being an unsociable curmudgeon. For one, you can’t get cancelled for hanging out with people. Because you don’t hang out with anybody.

He’s a very old dude standing with clearly adult women holding his scientific papers in the NYC house of who was then celebrated and welcomed in mainstream political and cultural establishments

Let’s see if there’s any suggestion of him doing anything inappropriate https://t.co/MVstpQuPQ6

— Sunny (@sunnyright) February 17, 2026

There was no need for the old dude to go anywhere and stand next to any women. Whether he did that innocently or not, his memory is now tarnished and his scientific discoveries are downgraded. I hope he enjoyed standing next to the prostitutes for 3 minutes because at least it should be worth it.

Neoliberalism promotes self-indulgence but punishes for it severely. Only the self-control of a sincere medieval monk promises comfort in a neoliberal world.

No, I never heard of these people. I can say, however, that high culture has always been the purview of a tiny minority, and that is absolutely fine. It might feel like the number of stupid people with terrible taste is growing. But it’s not growing. We simply see them more often because of social media. The number of people who can understand and enjoy the novels of Anthony Trollope was always small. The number of those who can understand philosophy is even smaller. What changed is that reading Trollope is a superior form of entertainment because it requires a higher IQ and a better organized brain.

The progressive left that has seized so much of the heights of Western culture is not some radical threat to the establishment. It IS the establishment. Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. It enables the spread and growth of machine society by launching an all-out war on any cultural norms that remain to us in the 2020s, norms that act as a brake on the spread of machine values. The Left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer. One attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to heteronormativity to national identities. The other moves in to monetize the resulting fragments.

Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

By the machine, Kingsnorth means the ultra-digital surveillance apparatus produced by the merger of the corporate world and the government in neoliberal societies.

A brilliant statement from a serious philosopher. Zygmunt Bauman would love Kingsnorth.