Just spent an hour with my sister in Canada looking at the humongous collection of posey, tear-jerking photos of Canada’s new PM Trudeau. The fellow has been in office all of 2 seconds but he already has a bigger portfolio of staged beauty shots than contestants on America’s Next Top Model.

There are no nude photos of Trudeau just yet but it’s early days. Canada’s first reality TV Prime Minister seems to believe that his job is organizing photo ops for himself and every member of his family.

The guy is such a fake.

So some Hispanic guy with signs of retardation gets charged but the grandma who set up the marriage and hovered over the entire conspiracy start to finish plus was cozy with Anwar al-Awlaki doesnt? What sense is this making?

I’m not sure everybody fully understands that professors don’t want any of this insane PC extravaganza. We don’t want to tell students how to talk to their families. We don’t want to indoctrinate them into any ideology. Nobody has any time or energy for stupid shit like that.

What we want is for students to memorize their Spanish conjugations, read their Shakespeare, avoid using “basically” and “actually” in every sentence, break up essays into paragraphs, and things of this kind. And it’s hard enough to get them to do all that.

And the prize in egregious dumbassery goes to Harvard College’s Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.

I don’t know if people have the slightest idea how little money goes, even in the Ivies, towards actual academics as opposed to the enormous sums invested in these dumb bureaucrats who torture everybody with their bizarre inventions.

I’m not that sorry for Harvard because that’s a school which can afford this idiocy. But think about state universities like mine. We are stretched paper thin, resources-wise, yet we have to have our own Diversity and Inclusion offices (and all the rest of them). They take up the best buildings, suck up cash, and waste everybody’s time like they are paid to do it. Because they are paid to do it.

This is really, really the last one on Putin’s press conference today, I promise. When asked whether Russia’s military presence in Syria was something that the country could afford, Putin said,

“This is the best kind of military training for us. We can train our military in Syria for a very long time without incurring high costs.”

Got it? Syria is training ground for the  Russian military. Now ask yourself what the Russians are training for.

Remember that the Russian training in Syria consists mostly of bombing the Syrian Turkmen and the anti-Assad Syrians.

And one last post on the subject of Russia for today, I promise. From reader NG, here is a link on Putin’s love of Trump:

Russian President Vladimir Putin had kind words for his “stablemate” Donald Trump during an annual end-of-the-year Q&A session in Moscow.

“He’s a really brilliant and talented person, without any doubt,” Putin told reporters, according to a translation by Interfax. “It’s not our job to judge his qualities, that’s a job for American voters, but he’s the absolute leader in the presidential race.”

The GOP front-runner has been blunt about his plans for defrosting U.S. relations with Russia should he be elected president.

“I would get along with him,” Trump previously said of Putin, adding, “I would get along with a lot of the world leaders that this country is not getting along with.”

At Thursday’s press conference, Putin seemed to support Trump’s claim.

“He says he wants to move on to a new, more substantial relationship, a deeper relationship with Russia, how can we not welcome that?” he said. “Of course we welcome that.”

I’m glad finally to have a link in English because everything I had on the subject before was in Russian and people didn’t believe me. Remember what I always say: Putin always declares exactly what he wants with extreme honesty and clarity. We just need to listen. Putin’s advisors and analysts have been singing embarrassingly exuberant praise of Trump for months. I can’t turn on the Russian TV without hearing how fantastic Trump is.

Putin did amazingly well the last time a Republican was in the White House. He hates Democrats, hates everything they stand for, detests Obama, loves flamboyant oligarchs, feels it easy to relate to anybody who is also a billionaire. None of this is surprising.

And since we are on the subject of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the poor freaks from Donbass who ran away to Russia because they believed the lying propaganda about the horrible persecution they were about to undergo in Ukraine because of speaking Russian are now finding themselves in a really bad situation.

Russian authorities stuck them in temporary housing all over Russia (to prevent them from forming communities, obviously.) After the refugees served their propagandistic purposes, they became unnecessary. Now, they are being thrown out into the streets with small kids and ailing elderly parents. Where these confused, undocumented people will go in the midst of a harsh Russian winter is of interest to no one.

The refugees can’t go home because their houses and apartments were either destroyed or occupied by the Russian invaders and their gang of criminals.

The reason why I keep posting all these stories is that sometimes it is really good to open oneself up to events that have no bearing on one’s own life. It gives one a less self-involved, skewed worldview.

Today Putin officially recognized that Russian military is present in Ukraine’s Donbass region. A while ago, he recognized that he was planning to deploy nuclear weapons if his attempt to annex the Crimea was thwarted.

I wish that out of all the people who came here to the blog in 2013-14 to argue and say uninformed things about Russia’s war in Ukraine, at least one single person had the maturity and the honesty to tell me, “Hey, you were right this whole time. Sorry!”

But no, that never happens. What’s more, those same folks who were calling me a fascist and ranting about a CIA-sponsored coup that was persecuting “ethnic Russians” in Ukraine will now say that they always knew Russia had invaded Ukraine and this is no news at all.

People have an amazing capacity of an uncritical acceptance of their own ignorance and ugliness. It’s not a result of a healthy self-esteem, however. It’s the exact opposite.

The main motivating fear of the Russian political establishment is that the country will fall apart.

The territory is enormous and sparsely populated. It’s inhabited by people of different races, ethnicities, languages, and cultures who don’t have much in common and tend to dislike each other. People who live in the humongous greater Moscow despise everybody else and everybody else despises them. There is no discourse of shared values that would be meaningful to everybody.

None of this sounds like a working nation-state, does it?

It’s impossible to bind such a heterogeneous group together with its meaningless, recently adopted symbols of nationalism and no time or resources to manufacture a shared history and artistic legacy.

So what do such wannabe nation-states do to stay afloat? They cultivate a sense of togetherness by spilling the blood of a shared enemy. Blood ties them together but if no other means of cohesion are found, more blood will be needed.

Is it clear what I’m saying? Nobody can provoke Russia into violence right now. Russia is acting out violently in pursuit of national cohesion, i.e. a completely internal need that has nothing to do with you or anybody else.