It’s totally the same PR firm that came up with the “January 6 insurrection” and “Ottawa trucker occupation*.” Both “insurrection” and “occupation” are outdated and appeal to the slightly nerdy “good boy / girl” sensibility of the target audience. The two words even rhyme, which tells me they are a product of a single mind. Or a single working group.

I wonder how much this PR firm was paid for the “insurrection / occupation” branding campaign.

“Two weeks to flatten the curve” was also created by a PR company. Or marketing, branding, whatever they are called now. It’s neat, it’s easy to remember, it suddenly appeared everywhere, like an ad jingle. In fact, it was an ad jingle, and it sold the product it aimed to sell extremely well.

* Pro-government forces in Canada now refer to the trucker protest as “occupation.” Curiously, the same hardcore leftists who were all for #Occupy when it consisted of wealthy spoiled brats are now against “an occupation” when the actual proletariat does it.

https://twitter.com/goodblackdude/status/1490167832021065728?t=Aaydz9ZtpuE0UzxBCU6-gA&s=19

And after this, somebody is still going to tell me the Biden administration isn’t completely on Putin’s side? This is an utterly ludicrous statement that gives Putin exactly what he wants. As Biden has done from day 1.

We all know about the bribes Biden received from the Russians through his son. Why would he all of a sudden be against Russia? Why would he be against a fellow open-border globalist and in favor of nationalism and real borders?

Biden is completely pro-Russia, just as he made clear when he casually undid all the great work that Trump had done on Nordstream 2.

While Americans are engaging in a scheduled installment of their favorite ritualistic masturbation session around “the n-word,” I want to share that the newest cozy mystery by Sophie Hannah is excellent. Hannah has been writing Agatha Christie mysteries (which I don’t read), and studying the founder of the genre has done wonders for Hannah’s contemporary novels.

The characters in this novel are absolutely horrid, the mystery is really cozy, the ending is great. What I really enjoy is that the victim and the victimizer are total bitches from hell. There are no good guys here. Everybody is either a pathetic weakling or a vicious narcissist. So much fun! Highly recommended.

Does anybody on here watch Ozark? In the new season, they completely validated the Dominion voting machines narrative. The word “dominion” isn’t used but there’s a plot arc about a tech company allied with a corrupt politician from Chicago that manufactures voting machines that can falsify election results. A German engineer tries to blow the whistle, and they murder him.

I don’t believe in the Dominion narrative, by the way. To me, the 2020 election was falsified through mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting, and social media censorship. Still, it’s interesting that the narrative appears in a rabidly leftist TV show.

As COVID recedes, the bio-tech totalitarianism becomes ever more coercive and rabid. GoFundMe has slandered and robbed the Canadian protesters. Spotify is deleting Joe Rogan’s episodes by the dozen. Twitter is banning moderate teachers. Airbnb is banning the relatives of customers whose views it doesn’t approve. And these are the events of just a single day. All of this happened yesterday. All of this is only the beginning.

I have no words.

Why didn’t Trump do the same thing with the BLM money? Why is this always so one-sided? If it’s ok to steal the opposition’s money and give it to your own supporters, everybody should do it.

N started shoveling out the driveway but I begged him to let me do it. I love shoveling out driveways. I’m not very good at it but the activity gives me the illusion of living in a cold and snowy place. Also, I’m going stir-crazy and I’m in need of some physical activity. At work I’m always on my feet (I read while I walk. I also can’t talk on the phone unless I’m on the move. And I never sit down when I teach.)

Finally, N ceded the shovel and I headed out. But it wasn’t meant to be. After two shovelfuls, several men with scandalized facial expressions descended on the driveway and started going at it. Obviously, I wasn’t going to get rude and start explaining about physical activity and all that. They shoveled it all out in five minutes.

I’m very grateful and touched (chivalry is not dead!) but I’m afraid they will now go post on social media about terrible husbands who force their wives to shovel our driveways.

This is quite stunning because these are teachers with the mildest, most mainstream positions anybody could imagine. And not that many followers.

The only explanation I have is that they were banned for not being raging lunatics. I always read @GoingGodward for her calm, sweet, non-polemic “peace, love, bubble gum” takes.

The teacher Twitter is being culled down very aggressively. More aggressively than most other fields. It’s quite disturbing.

If you are a teacher who tweets about the wonderfulness of sexualizing 5-year-olds, you are never banned. But if you tweet about helping at-risk kids succeed and school (like Going Godward did), you are gone. Apparently, the only acceptable kind of teacher anymore is a mentally ill, child-hating Maoist.

Today I discovered that there’s now a translation of the expression “cancel culture” into Russian. It’s an ugly, stupid calque that sounds extremely tortured (“культура отмены.” Brrr, ridiculous. Each word means something different than the English original, and together they simply don’t work.)

In the past 10 years (the decade that passed since the massive anti-Putin protests that were organized on social media), the formerly great Russian-speaking online space has been destroyed. Livejournal was eviscerated, and people had to move to Facebook. Of course, Facebook censors anybody who makes the tiniest anti-Putin peep. As a result, only the type of idiot who is into all these stupid American fads – the cancel culture, the #MeTooting, the vaxx fanaticism – were allowed to keep their social media presence.

It’s so sad. The Russian-speaking internet space in 2012 was what the Anglo online space had been in 2002. And now it’s all a bunch of terrified robots, reciting their pro-vaccine pro-cancel culture mantras. And badly translated ones, at that.

When I was organizing my home library today, Klara loved it that I was grouping the books by author.

“Here go my Anthony Trollops. And this is a spot for my Sophie Hannahs,” I’d say.

“Talk like that some more, Mommy,” she exclaimed. “I love hearing it!”

You never know what little humans will find impressive.