Sebestyen’s 1946 is a great book about the most important events of the post-war era. Here are some highlights that I found especially interesting:

1. The very first conflict in the Cold War started in a place called Tarbiz, in Iranian Azerbaijan. It was the world’s first global oil crisis.

2. In the UK, a man called Victor Gollancz led the campaign to send food parcels from the starving Britain to the even more starving Germany. “Nothing can save the world but a general act of repentance because we all have sinned,” he said. The campaign was extremely successful. Obviously, Gollancz was a Jew.

3. According to Keynes, the only reason for Britain’s post-war money problems was the enormous upkeep of the Empire. Let’s remember that, contrary to the opinions of idiots, economically Empires bring nothing but extra costs or even financial ruin that lasts for centuries.

4. A mid-level US officer wrote the “Declaration of Humanity” delivered by the Japanese Emperor Hirohito. After the Emperor publicly declared that the Japanese people were not of divine descent and not superior to other peoples, Japan started on its way to modernity. Pity the officer is no longer among the living because it would be great to make Russians adopt a similar declaration.

Unfortunately, it seems like Ta-Nehisi Coates does not respond well to positive motivation. After the genius grant and massive popular adulation, he lost his touch and started publishing incoherent, rambling pieces that make little sense.

First, there was an article that pretty much accused Bernie Sanders of being a white supremacist. Given that Sanders is a Jew, this is a needlessly offensive accusation that is unlikely to achieve anything useful.

Nobody seems to have understood what Coates was trying to say in this piece, but instead of letting the whole thing go, the writer decided to explain what he really meant, which is always a losing strategy.

In another disorganized piece, Coates informs readers that the European welfare state did not “banish racism” and hence the policies Bernie advocates will not “banish racism” either. Coates is not dumb. It is not possible that he actually believes in the capacity of any policy to “banish racism.” This must mean that his entire attack on Bernie is nothing but a vacuous attempt to remain relevant while riding on the coattails of Sanders’s popularity.

On the negative side, the Donetsk Airport is still an abandoned ruin, and both Donetsk and Lugansk are still in the hands of bandits. Russia is still paying to keep the conflict simmering but the money, the weapons and the soldiers Russians are sending have decreased dramatically.

The bandits feel betrayed by Russia’s refusal to keep fighting for more territory. They still try to provoke Ukrainian armed forces into a skirmish alongside the entire demarcation line.  Today, for instance, there were at least 53 instances of the bandits shooting at the Ukrainian army.

The bandits who are holding Donetsk and Lugansk are a pathetic, disgusting bunch. Constantly drunk and high, they blow up buildings, get into shootouts with each other, and entertain themselves by torturing prisoners. Clandestine citizen organizations have been after a few most vicious ones, executing them for their crimes. So there is a resistance movement.

The Ukrainian government is pushing the bandits to allow free elections to take place in the occupied areas. The local population is, for the most part, behaving according to its usual pattern: sitting there passively and waiting to see who will take power (and with it, the sacred obligation to feed them).

After Ukraine finally takes Donetsk and Lugansk back, getting the people into a passable mental state will take forever. The region is in ruins. There are 1,8 million refugees. This is a wound that will ache for decades.

On the positive side: Ukraine is managing to pull through its desperately needed post-Soviet anti-corruption reforms. It’s a slow and infuriating process but it’s underway, and what a miracle that it’s finally happening. Ukraine is actually starting to produce and export things, which is huge.

The propaganda war with Russia has pretty much been won by Ukraine. This goes to show that money cannot defeat sincere conviction. The army of Putin’s paid propagandists has been defeated by passionate volunteers.

Seeing that the propaganda war had been lost and the military invasion of Ukraine did not achieve its goals either, the Kremlin tried to change tack and started peddling the narrative of, “Our dearly beloved Ukrainian brothers and sisters! The evil Americans almost managed to break us up and destroy our historic brotherhood! But we still love you! And we forgive you! Let’s get over this minor disagreement and keep loving each other as we always did.”

First, this narrative was hinted at in some of Putin’s speeches, and then it started appearing massively in mainstream media and social networks. Yes, Russians really seemed to think this would work. Yes, they are really that clueless.

After Ukrainians suggested many inventive ways for Russians to stick their brotherly love deep into their anal cavities, there’s been a momentary lull in the propaganda wars.

Ukraine is trying to rebuild in many different directions right now. It’s hard because it’s a lot of work with very little immediate gratification. But there is progress. There are even interesting albeit timid developments in the art world, and that’s always a great sign.

Russians are now sending weapons to Fiji in an effort further to destabilize the region. It’s crucial for Russia that there is as much instability as possible everywhere in the world.

Prissy tone-policing is not just a Liberal thing. See Christie flip out over an innocent touch of levity on Rubio’s part.

An anti-Semitic history professor might have been an ISIS recruiter.

How can anybody trust economics if it’s such an ideological field?

In spite of the sentimental idealization they are so often subjected to, hunter-gatherers were just as violent as later civilizations.

[Russian] Russian racists have a bizarre fixation on antibellum South.

There are many annoying things about Rod Dreher, not the least of which is his pathological hatred of women, but this is good, insightful writing: “It frustrated me to no end that reason was useless; “ideologically unmoored cultural passions” weren’t just something, they were the only thing. This was a tribal conservatism, one that had very little to do with ideas, and everything to do with nationalism and a sense of us-versus-them. To be a conservative is to agree with Us; to disagree with us means you must be a liberal.” Of course, the same can be said about Liberals.

“21.5 percent – The probability that a white, middle-age, college-educated American is a millionaire.” And still, people whine and moan and feel massively sorry for themselves. Truly, a wondrous country.

Rapist Holtzclaw has been sentenced to 263 years in jail. I hope all the losers who belly ached about “the all-white jury” that was supposedly eager to acquit at least have the decency to feel some shame.

People are so incredibly superstitious. Superstition allows them to use all the positives of religious belief without having to do any work of personal growth, improvement and self-awareness. Superstition is the religion of consumerist societies. And self-help drivel is their Bible.

“Less than 2% of the people in America hold Ph.Ds.  Those with doctorates are regularly asked their opinion on societal issues.  When Ph.Ds. speak, people listen.  Regardless of what discipline your degree is in, people believe that you should know the answer to everything, no matter how absurd that may sound.  You have forfeited your right to say “I don’t know.”  Once you graduate you will be looked upon by many people as a member of society’s elite.” All true. It’s both flattering and scary, and I totally dig it.

The so-called “holistic admissions criteria” suck! They are a horrible idea!

Good news! The UK passed the psychoactive substances bill.

So remember the story of the Donetsk Airport? A Russian journalist wrote a novel titled Airport on the subject of the heroic defense of the airport by Ukrainians. I haven’t read the book and I’m not planning to because it’s a very painful issue and I can’t deal with knowing more about it than I already do.

The novel is gaining popularity, though, and the author received an offer from Hollywood to sell the rights to the novel so that a movie can be made.

After a negotiation, the writer refused. He said that the idea of some overfed idiot from Hollywood turning this tragedy into a stupid dime-a-dozen blockbuster was intolerable.

“Of course the money would help,” the writer said, “but there are more important things. Let this be my penance for what my people have done to Ukrainians.”

As we all know, Putin believes that the collapse of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century. This week, however, he finally named the person he blames for the death of the Soviet Union.

Who is, according to Putin, to blame for the collapse of the USSR?

God, people are stupid. See the following bit of idiocy:

Europe’s elites acted on their class interests by opening the door to massive immigration, providing cheap workers in their business and homes.

This fellow probably thinks all immigrants are exactly the same and imagines us all as vaguely Hispanic, working as maids, gardeners, and babysitters. The fact that the current wave of massive migration into Europe is more likely to sprout wings and fly than work in the elite’s “homes” does not sink in.

It’s fashionable to rag on Bernie for being all about class. But I think Bernie is right in that we don’t notice class issues nearly often enough.

Take racial issues, for instance. Spoiled rich brats at Oberlin, Yale, etc are getting tons of coverage because they have learned to throw around the word “black.” (I’m convinced that their organizers, especially at Yale, are not even black, by the way.)

In the meanwhile, our black students from South Side Chicago, East St Louis, Ferguson, etc have their MAP grants stolen by Governor Rauner, and how much coverage do they get? These are young people who experience real hardship and who are trying to get an education. They are being massively defrauded by the state but does anybody care? No, we are all too occupied with the inauthentic sushi lunches of the spoiled brats.

So yeah, Bernie is onto something important.

Here is an interesting thing. The Bernie Sanders campaign contacted me from the very start. They knew my name, my email, and my address. The only way for them to have this information is through the Obama campaign databases. I donated to Obama back in 2012, which is how my information got out there.

However, I haven’t been contacted by the Hillary campaign. They don’t seem to know I exist. So what does this tell us? Who is really supported by the DNC?