The main reason why there is such a flareup of Russian aggression in Ukraine is the Biden administration. Biden’s energy policy reversed Trump’s trajectory towards energy independence and led to record-high energy prices. This gave Russia enough money to ramp up the invasion and enough sway over Europe to make it feasible.

It would be great if the extraordinary unintelligent people who shriek about global warming thought about the actual tragedies they cause with their need to feel important. Obviously, the Biden administration has destroyed the US energy independence and raised global fuel prices for a completely different reason but the facile fools who “care about climate” made it easier.

In a similar way, the Biden administration isn’t increasing crime rates that kill predominantly black people out of racism. It’s simply easier to punish the blacks before everybody else’s turn comes.

Now, why is this all being done? A major goal is to create an environment of fear and insecurity. It’s easier to rob people who are terrified. Of climate change, crime, racism, a virus, a nuclear war with Russia. What we are experiencing is an economic phenomenon.

All of it – COVID, climate alarmism, BLM, foreign policy, crime rates – exists to complete an enormous capital transfer and permanently immiserate the people who consider themselves middle class.

We keep missing this because we still operate with outdated concepts. “US this, Russia that, Canada something else.” But the people who are robbing us don’t think like that anymore. They aren’t national agents. They are class agents.

Beyond the sheer lunacy of the ideas expressed here, this person doesn’t even speak correct English.

This is so poorly written that it’s embarrassing. Look at the highlighted sentence. Which isn’t even a sentence but a weird fragment.

Well, at least the article works great as an illustration of the cognitive problems I anticipate for the majority of the population.

I’m sure everybody heard by now that the CDC has dramatically lowered the early speech development expectations in children. What children used to be expected to be able to do at 24 months now isn’t expected until 30 months. This was done, of course, to hide the catastrophic speech delays suffered by a whole generation of children due to two years of unnecessary masking.

Speech development is linked to the development of every intellectual, psychological, and emotional capacity in small children. One of the most crucial needs of babies and toddlers is to see smiling, talking faces that they try to imitate.

The result of the mask idiocy is that all this will add to the cognitive inequality that is being manufactured at a rapid clip. There are kids whose parents have the intellectual sophistication to know all this and the interest / leisure / competence to obviate the dangers. And then there’s the majority who has zero understanding of any of this and hasn’t done anything. We aren’t simply talking about how many words a kid speaks by a certain age. This is a difference in when a secure sense of self begins to form as a child observes the faces of others and slowly figures out that they are different people. Different from each other and from the child.

Yes, there has always been cognitive inequality created by nature. But it’s being exacerbated with such intensity that one can only conclude this is done purposefully. First, it was portable screens, now it’s masks, isolation, Zoom school, cancellation of sports and activities for some kids, etc.

That’s exactly what I was talking about yesterday. The next stage in the battle to ‘keep us safe’ from life will be tying us to our beds and feeding us through tubes. It’s a short distance from there to realize that the only thing that would keep us securely and clearly safe for ever and ever is if we didn’t live at all.

This is all, of course, a projection. The people who are ‘trying to keep us safe’ perceive us as a source of danger to them. They have a massive agenda, and we are endangering it with our endless whining about our rights, our needs, our children, our faces, our bodies.

What’s happening with Tucker? I tried watching today but he was clumsily crushing on AOC and it became embarrassing to watch. He’s going to get her elected president, for our sins.

The anti-puberty (aka the hormonal explosion that snuffs out the process that starts with puberty) will come for all of us and it won’t be pretty. It’s not supposed to be pretty. But we should always try to keep it dignified and, ideally, private.

In comparison to the fire he put into a discussion of AOC’s makeup routines, the following segment on Canadian trucker protests was so half-hearted, I started dozing off and almost fell from the sofa.

We are reading this novel for my book club. Even though I read it before, I retained absolutely nothing, so it’s like reading a completely new book.

What I don’t like about Austen is that she wrote thesis novels. She’d take a thesis (which is almost invariably that moderation in everything is best) and set out to prove it in the book. The thesis is kind of obvious and deeply non-controversial, and the novels never live up to their full potential because they are subjected to this need to teach a lesson. Austen’s sensibilities are that of the Enlightenment era, and for her art always has to be didactic. It goes in cycles, and today we are back to valuing art that describes reality not as it is but as it should be according to our moral code. Read the article I linked yesterday about sensitivity readers to see what I mean.

Austen’s literary successors – the Romantics – abandoned didacticism (think Brontes) and chose to emote instead of lecturing. Then realists came and started manipulating and teaching moral lessons. Then modernists canned didactic in art for a long time. And now it’s coming back again.

Persuasion shows us the limits of the didactic literary style. The characters, the stories, and the plot lines appear almost identical to the ones we see in Austen’s other novels. It’s all very predictable, superficial but gossipy and easy to read. Structurally, the novel is weaker than Austen’s other work. Cutting the last twenty pages would have improved the novel dramatically.

But hey, without Austen we wouldn’t have Liane Moriarty and the entire genre of mommy lit, so I can’t complain. Enlightenment authors didn’t write much fiction, preferring didactic treatises but what they did write had a gigantic impact on the trajectory of fiction for centuries to come.

Of course, now that people got in the habit of locking down on a whim, everything locks down at the slightest pretext.

Today, there was a bit of slushy, wet snow in the streets. Immediately, the whole town shut down. Tomorrow we are expecting sunny weather, 40°F, and no snow. But there was some slush today, so it’s necessary to close everything down tomorrow. Just to be completely safe. It’s gotten so, I break out in hives whenever I hear the word ‘safe.’

I swear, it would have never occurred to anybody to close not only every school but every store in existence for a minor inconvenience like these few sad puddles we had today.

In the entire twenty-first century, there wasn’t a single month in the US when the number of black homicide victims would be over 1,000. Then, in May of 2020, that changed. Every remaining month of 2020 saw more than 1,000 black victims. In July of 2020, the number spiked to over 1,400. That’s twice what it was just a few months before in February 2020. I don’t think anybody would disagree that this is a dramatic and scary change. And it’s not a fluke but a trend that continued unabated.

Of course, there’s absolutely no explanation what could have caused this horrible spike starting in May 2020. This mystery will remain unsolved.

An absolutely shocking article about “sensitivity readers” – or simply put, censors – who do a Soviet-style culling of English-language books.

Reading the article almost immediately after I finished Chirbes’s diaries is a disturbing experience. There’s not a single word in the diaries that these censors would allow. Thankfully, Chirbes will never hear about “sensitivity readers” because he died before English speakers managed to export this Soviet throwback everywhere else.

I hold no grudges against people I know but I have intense, very long, unrelenting fits of rage against being mistreated by authority.

For instance, today I went all out to help a colleague who’s been nothing but shit to me for years. I sincerely don’t care that he’s lousy to me. It’s on him. I can’t be bothered to notice.

I discovered that somebody at work hates me and is spreading really crazy, vile rumors about me. This piece of news bores me so much I keep forgetting it. It gets comical when I meet the hater in the hallway, vaguely remember that I recently heard something about her and make an exaggeratedly happy face to conceal that I don’t remember what it was. Then I notice her outraged gaze and remember that what I recently heard was that she detests me.

However, that one single time when I had to wear a mask in the classroom – I’ll hold that grudge close to my heart forever. On my dying bed I will burn with indignation over it. Because it was done to me against my will.

There’s no chance I’m ever getting over a single lie I heard on the news, the “anti-racist books” we were forced to read against our will, the COVID lies. Twenty lifetimes are not enough to get over it.

Often, people are the other way round. They obsess over a single unintentional snub from a friend or an ignored text message from a relative but have no anger to spare over having to walk around in a face diaper for two years or having to inject some weird crap to be able to eat at a restaurant.

We should be kinder to each other and a lot less kind to institutions, organizations, agencies, and authorities.