Friends, if you want to have a big, stonking laugh, do watch Tucker Carlson’s interview with Mike Huckabee. We all know I don’t like Tucker because he’s anti-Ukrainian and says the most moronic things about Russia but in this interview he cooked Huckabee. He made mince pies out of Huckabee. There’s a new special on the menu called Hucka-hash.

This isn’t because Tucker is some sort of a genius. He’s not. He blew the interview with Putin who is not known for high IQ, let’s put it that way. Tucker slayed Huckabee because Huckabee was advancing a narrative of Israel’s statehood that is a losing narrative. I’ve been saying this for years as somebody who is quite friendly towards Israel. Also, Huckabee lied a lot, in a very clumsy, bumbling way but whatever.

The narrative of statehood I’m referring to is “we’ve been here for 3,000 years, so we have a right to have a nation-state here.” To Americans who most definitely haven’t been in their land for 3,000 years, this does not sound cute and endearing. This sounds like their own nationhood is being denigrated. It’s always a good idea to consider how your argument comes across to the people hearing it.

And by the way, I say the exact same thing to Ukrainians when they start on who lived where in the BC and the Sarmatians and who’s the real Slav and who’s actually a Finn. It’s moronic, I tell them. Kharkiv shouldn’t be bombed today entirely outside of whether the inhabitants of the Kyivan Rus considered themselves Ukrainian. Which they didn’t because people didn’t think in terms of today’s nationhood a thousand years ago.

The nation-state is a historically new formation. Even the nation-states that don’t look new very much are. France, for example, was stitched from very different ethnicities and brutally destroyed the linguistic, ethnic and cultural communities that existed on the territory of what is France today. Are we going to start doing DNA tests and reordering the planet accordingly?

There’s much more but I don’t want to torture people with an excessively long post.

The School of Engineering lost its entire graduate program. As a voluble professor from that school explained to the Faculty Senate, 100% of the students in the program were Bangladeshis who had zero interest in studying engineering and used this program as a way to get visas into the US. Once the visas started getting denied, the “students” stopped coming.

I’m not surprised about the situation but I did find it shocking that this is so openly and casually admitted by the professors themselves.

“Why don’t you try to attract American students, then?” asked a faculty senator.

“Oh, they won’t come here,” explained the professor. “People with the actual brains to become engineers will go to a good school with a real program.”

See my previous post for an explanation of how we are doing everything to not be a real school and instead remain a visa scam. The only person who routinely votes against these measures and measurettes is me. Sometimes I’m joined by one other person, who is always either a Middle Eastern or an Indian professor with no fucks left to give.

I’m on the Faculty Senate, and we constantly work on approving a large number of small or smallish measures. If you only work with each individual little measure, you can easily miss the big picture. But if you see all of them at once, it becomes clear that they all aim to make the university less academic and give as much power over assigning college credit to people who are not professors but poorly educated and miserably paid staffers.

Yesterday, for example, we passed a measure that will give a random staffer the authority to assign college credit for “experiences.” Students will bring “portfolios” that explain the value of these “experiences” and will be assigned credit for them as if they actually took college courses. One person voted against, and of course that was me.

I asked the random staffer what will prevent anybody from getting AI to generate a completely fake “portfolio of experiences”. She got very upset and told me that she “took a training on evaluating portfolios.”

The staffer was very emotional, shaking, and acting extremely insulted. I wasn’t, and of course, everybody sided with the measure. We are rapidly moving towards a model in which professors are unnecessary. Staffers will assign credit and hand out diplomas in exchange for payment. Any argument against this is greeted with, “don’t you trust that I know how to do this?” and tearful declarations of emotional distress caused by my doubts. Then everybody feels bad for the wounded, crying individual, and the measure passes.

Canada and Ireland simultaneously decided to introduce new categories of immigration to attract soldiers to their armies. Given that neither country has any plans to engage in warfare, this is as clear a gesture as can be of repudiating the nation-state.

No matter how she might be otherwise occupied, whenever I start doing my German exercises, the cat plants herself next to me and refuses to be dragged away until I finish. No other language interests her in the least.

Now I’m really curious where she lived before the shelter.

Somebody who knows me well wrote to say he’s shocked that I like Paul Kingsnorth because he’s the opposite of me. And OK, I’m still me, I disagree with about 80% of what Kingsnorth says. He detests industrial modernity. I love it. But that’s precisely why it’s interesting for me to read this author. I’m discovering an extremely different worldview. In the process, I’m learning stuff of which I would otherwise be utterly ignorant.

For example, Kingsnorth, a lifelong, passionate Green, explains how the Green movement changed into its exact opposite in the past 30 years. The Green New Deals we keep hearing about are a manifestation of a technocratic drive towards eliminating nature, Kingsnorth says. I honestly didn’t know there was any difference between 2002 Greens and today’s Greens who keep repeating the word “sustainability” like unhinged parrots. Turns out these two groups of Greens are engaged in an extinction-level battle against each other. I found this very helpful because I like nature but detest sustainability. I don’t like nature anything like Kingsnorth likes nature because dude clearly spent his whole life bemoaning that it’s impossible to live in a haystack. But it’s very useful to find out when and how things went sideways in eco circles.

I’m still reading Against the Machine, and much of it is alien to me but also every page has something new and useful.

Kingsnorth’s support for nationalism is all backwards and very nutty, for example, but that’s a topic for another post.

This really spoke to me:

🔥🚨DEVELOPING: This clip displaying the difference between a man’s reality and a woman’s is going viral. pic.twitter.com/plGrbGUpEp

— Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives (@dom_lucre) February 17, 2026

This is totally me and N. People online are calling this Eastern European slop and yes, guilty as charged.

I already do this. We have 10-20 kids ages 0-10 over here at least once a week, and we have groups of 40+ people here 3-8 times a year.

You have got to be the partying you wish to see in the world. https://t.co/8GhzZgsU9d

— Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 (@lymanstoneky) February 19, 2026

This makes me want to do something extremely nice for my husband and child for not inflicting something like this on me. I’m not inflicting it on them either, so they must really appreciate me, as well.

What interesting things happened on our political horizon in the past week?

This is for my show.

There’s nothing I dislike more in people than helplessness and self-infantilization. This is why I write obsessively about it in my research.