Isn’t it funny how it’s always 11? It’s been two decades of always and only 11. I mean, what are the odds?

The odds are probably also 11. In 11 million.

A new chapter in the “there are no open borders” fairy tale:

But hey, just so that nobody thinks it’s a partisan fairy tale, here’s a Republican contribution:

I slaughtered at the yearly budget meeting today. Received so many compliments that I even felt embarrassed, which is unusual because I have a pretty high opinion of myself.

As a result of me producing such a great, problem-free budget, I now have the green light to resuscitate our long-dead Russian program and hire a person to teach Russian.

Last year it took two meetings of two hours each to figure out the budget we had before I became chair. Now the meeting took 15 minutes and most of it was taken up by the compliments.

It’s so great no longer to be the low-achieving department that everybody can’t stand. I’m going to have a gigantic burger to celebrate.

Isn’t it great to have a working vaccine? Give it two more weeks, and we’ll be back to normal.

On a serious note, I want to be sad that it closed but I can’t. If the entire Broadway goes away as punishment for these people idiocy, I don’t care.

Law & Order: SVU has gone full-on QAnon. In the opening episode of the new season, a character everybody calls Q is fighting against a powerful cabal of politician and law enforcement pedophiles.

Back in 2016 they had an episode that introduced millions of normies (including me) to Pizzagate. This is first-class trolling.

United is laying off 600 workers. In New York, hundreds of nurses are being laid off. National Guard is being brought in as scabs to work instead of the nurses. And how does the left react? They celebrate.

Remember that whole thing with Reagan and air controllers? It’s the Dem governor of New York who’s using his playbook to do the exact same thing.

But Reagan, at least, never pretended to be who he wasn’t. These bastards, though, are laying off people by the thousand while blabbing about social justice. How does anybody still buy into their lies?

And to illustrate what I said in the previous post, the UK Labour Party is having a huge internal debate on whether men have cervixes. Apparently, all the rest of labor-related issues have been solved.

This is exactly what Mudge describes in her book. The constituency that is being pursued with the “men with cervixes” line consists of fussy wealthy people. Anybody who has ever done any actual labor (or gone into labor) can’t even comprehend what it’s all about.

What else is there to add?

Stephanie Mudge, a professor of Sociology at UC Davis has analyzed the changes that all mainstream parties in 22 Western countries underwent between the 1970s and 2004 (she also analyzed earlier changes but I’m not that interested in the history of politics).

Mudge discovered that the greatest transformation, irrespective of the country, happened on the left and not on the right. The left – and again, this is in almost two dozen countries, and the evidence she offers in her 500-page book is overwhelming – consistently and dramatically neoliberalized within that period of time. One of the attributes of this neoliberalization was that the left stopped even pretending to speak to and for the working classes and started speaking to and for the business and white-collar constituencies. And by ‘business’ nobody means the mom-and-pop diner in the sticks. The biggest shift towards neoliberalism happened in Nordic non-Anglo countries of Western Europe. (The book came out in 2018, and we’ve all seen the Anglo world catch up in giant leaps and bounds in the past 18 months, haven’t we?)

Milton Friedman aside, says Mudge, the economics profession as a whole was completely interdependent with Western left parties by the early 1960s. Mudge talks about a “persistent leftishness in Western economic professions” manifesting throughout the last 60 years. Political parties are increasingly reliant on the expert class of people who offer “consulting services.” In the field of economics, these consultants are far likelier to be left-leaning because they are simply that more numerous. As a result, the economies and economic policy of these Western countries have experienced a notable leftward (=neoliberal) turn.

That Thatcher and Reagan, the best-known proponents of neoliberalism, were on the right, says Mudge, was kind of accidental. Neoliberalism was new(ish) and Thatcher and Reagan chanced upon it. But it was always going to be reclaimed as its own by the left, and it now has been. The neoliberalized left calls itself “progressivism” and blathers on about “social justice” as a front for robbing the working classes and enriching the already wealthy class it sees as its true constituency. I want to add to Mudge’s unemotional argument that this progressive, social justice elite legitimizes the unfair and oppressive economic order it creates by positioning itself as morally superior to the people it robs. And the people it robs are so cowed by appeals to the thieves’ superior morality that they happily turn out their pockets to assist the robbery. I see it as the greatest goal of my professional life to point out this hypocrisy and contribute to the project of turning academia and the world of art away from leftism (aka neoliberalism). We (academics and artists) were instrumental in creating this monster. Now we have to unmake it.

Please note that Mudge isn’t some right-winger. She’s a sociology prof at UC Davis. Her book was published by Harvard University Press and won every prize in her extremely left-wing discipline. It’s a very well-researched, extremely detailed, and very clearly written book.

I was busy yesterday and missed the news that Putin’s puppet won the German election.

It made total sense to use the EU to solidify Germany’s dominance of Europe so that the entire continent could then be handed over to the Russians (which means China, too, obviously).

In case people don’t know this, the party that won is Gerhard Schröder’s party. And Schröder is – surprise, surprise – chairman of the board of Rosneft, the Russian energy company controlled by the Russian government. He’s also chairman of the board of Nordstream 2. He celebrated his 70th birthday party in St Petersburg, in a palace that his buddy Putin provided. And attended.

Good job, Germans. Russia has bent you over its knee yet again.

That vaccine is totally working, my friends. Yippee.

If I worked as well as this shit does. . . yeah.