To illustrate my progress in German, I want to share that I understand about 85% of this speech without looking at the captions.

🔥Full-frontal attack on the radical left – the president didn’t like it 🔥

“Pedro Sánchez is turning his country into a multicultural experimental laboratory: legalizing 500,000 illegal migrants. Overnight. By decree. Bypassing parliament. Bypassing the people.

That is a crime… pic.twitter.com/piDqlZm2uD

— Tomasz Froelich (@TomaszFroelich) February 12, 2026

Yes, it helps that he’s talking about Spain. It would be much harder if I didn’t know the facts he’s referring to. Plus, he’s speaking into a mic and trying to be understood.

Still, these are great results to attain completely from Duolingo. I don’t even have a German notebook and never take any notes because I have no time.

Where I’m failing is the pronunciation. What comes out of my mouth sounds like nothing similar to how this man speaks. I have to keep practicing.

At Munich, Rubio delivered a great speech. Neither side believes a word of it but it’s a great speech. At least, somebody said the words, which is the most we can hope for at the present.

Just fantastic pic.twitter.com/RBtfaAb6VK

— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) February 14, 2026

Paul Kingsnorth is a wonderful writer. Reading him is a great joy. His conservatism is not mine but variety is good within a movement.

The reason I say Kingsnorth’s conservatism is not mine is that he came to the movement from a very particular type of leftism. There used to be variety in leftism, too, but then it was all swallowed by the corporate HR style that is now the only flavor of leftism on offer. Before, though, there were all kinds, and Kingsnorth belonged to the hippy leftism that loved nature and wanted to live in a commune in the woods away from any form of capitalism and corporatism. These leftists were obsessed with feudal Europe which, for them, was the perfect model of society because it remained pre-capitalist. They hated capitalism and industrialization because those were bad for the nature and brought in mass society instead of small communities.

I hated these leftists and their hemp outfits even when I was still on the left. I was an industrialist, nation-state leftist, and all these feudal fantasies bored me.

Then, both my kind of left and Kingsnorth’s left were kicked out of the newly corporatized left. Now we are conservatives, and I feel for Kingsnorth the kind of tolerance that the left doesn’t foster. I find his enthusiasm for quoting Marx and his profound hatred of “the bourgeoisie” to be entertaining.

To clarify, Bothelford’s Gone is not what I refer to as a novel of conservative sensibility. It’s a straightforward right-wing novel. I have never read anything from this century that would be this right-wing in fictional form.

If you ever wondered whether it’s possible to write right-wing fiction, the answer is yes, it is. This author is not trying to be cute and coy about his right-winger state.

It’s interesting because in Spain we have authors who have not only right-wing but far-right beliefs. They express those in their non-fiction writings but their novels are politically as bland as anything. Juan Manuel de Prada is one example of this phenomenon.

Then all of a sudden an Englishman comes out with a hardcore rightist novel. Are Anglos ready to take back the lead? Let’s very much hope so.

In a joint military training with Ukraine and NATO troops, it’s not hard to guess who won and completely humiliated the opposing side:

NATO: "We are fucked!"

10 Ukrainian soldiers eliminated 2 NATO battalions in a half a day of training.

So, the myth of all-powerful NATO that can stop Russia is no more.

WSJ: NATO forces were horrible and wiped out in a 16,000-troop drill in Estonia. 1/ pic.twitter.com/6LC6csYFy2

— Tymofiy Mylovanov (@Mylovanov) February 13, 2026

The NATO troops have received zero training in actual existing forms of warfare. They are still fighting like it’s 20 years ago.

Read the whole thread. It’s very eye-opening.

What have we been paying for when we paid for NATO?

I’m now recognized as a foreign agent in Russia which means I’m barred from engaging in a whole list of activities in Russia. Which I never wanted to do anyways.

These people are weird and obnoxious.

When I receive an article back from reviewers with proposed changes, what I love to see is a large number of suggestions in the first two pages that gradually taper off into zero suggestions after pages 5 or 6. This means that they got won over by my argument after initially finding it weird. You can often see the exact moment when their minds were changed where, after several pissy comments, a reviewer says, “this is so interesting” or “I love this approach.”

The article I received back today has the record number of 4 reviewers but this is a German publication, and Germans do like to be thorough.

If you like the philosophy of Paul Kingsnorth, you should read the novel Bothelford’s Gone by Edward McLaren. I’m listening to Kingsnorth on Audible while I drive and I’m reading McLaren on paper when I’m not. It’s the most unusual feeling to find oneself amidst a dialogue between a right-wing philosopher and a right-wing novelist.

I’ll talk about both books at length when I finish them but for now I want to say yay to right-wing art.

My IQ is below the “gifted” cutoff but still in the 95.8th percentile. I do feel the absence of those additional 6 points keenly. Things would be easier if I had them. I need to explain things to myself in order to understand them. I don’t mean practical things of daily life but theory. It takes a lot of repetition for me to understand a text in philosophy or a new type of literary theory.

N doesn’t share my interest in IQ and hates it when I talk about it. Which probably means his IQ is higher than mine because nobody hates talk of IQ as much as people with the highest IQ. I believe they are mistaken. It gets easier to live in the world when you understand that, through absolutely no fault of their own, most people cannot carry out the same cognitive operations.

Instead of being ashamed of not having genius-level IQs, people should be proud. I overcome my sad lack of 8 additional IQ points every day by working like a bastard. I didn’t do anything to deserve the IQ but I did do all the work that went into my every publication and award. There’s honor in that.

She always extends her back paw like this so that she can maintain contact with me at all times:

I have concluded that this cat was probably abandoned. She gets instantly attached to whoever shows her the least kindness. Poor animal.