I was at a budget meeting today, and some numbers blew my mind. For instance, our dining services suffer greatly because the prices have skyrocketed for the items we regularly purchase up to 68% to a whopping 157%. Some of the items are red grapes, bacon bits for salad, and vinyl gloves for cooks and servers.

Also, taking into account inflation over 20 years, our overall university budget decreased by 53 million dollars per year. It’s about 46% of the budget.

There’s this hilarious scene in Daniel Gascón’s novel about a left-wing snowflake in the Spanish countryside. The snowflake arrives in a small village and begins to lecture the villagers about the heteropatriarchal nature of the henhouse and the toxic masculinity of an old man who “manspreads” on a bench. Finally, the villagers feel too annoyed to put up with the incessant lecturing and paint the words “Idiot outsider” on a wall.

The left-wing snowflake assumes that the graffiti describes Mohammed, the only immigrant in the village, and angrily hectors villagers about the evils of Islamophobia and immigrant-hatred. But the only person in the village who assumes that “idiot outsider” refers to Mohammed is the left-wing snowflake himself.

This is exactly what happened to the author of the linked Tweet. He assumes things about his opponents, and that assumption says a lot more about him than about them.

Please read Kamil Galeev. There’s no better-informed analyst on Russia at this point. Also, please remember that an analyst who isn’t a native speaker of the language is worthless. You have to be part of the cultural space to have any insight worth hearing.

Galeev makes a crucial point in the linked thread that everybody who is part of the cultural space knows and understands but that is practically unknown outside of it. Russians feel extremely humiliated by the fact that “stupid Americans” have a higher standard of living and are more important internationally in every way. Culturally, linguistically, politically, economically, militarily, you name it. They know they are superior but nothing in the surrounding reality reflects that superiority. This is the narcissistic injury I keep talking about. It always generates a lot of rage, both in our private lives and collectively.

Back in the early 1990s, one of the most popular stand-up comedians in Russia changed his whole comedy routine to talking exclusively about idiot Americans who were complete morons compared to Russians. There is no Russian-speaker who was alive then who hasn’t heard his comedy routines. And this is one thing in a million. There are books, movies, TV series, etc, all on this one endlessly fascinating subject. This sense of superiority is very seductive and at this point in time it’s deeply ingrained. I shared before how I bought into it, too, 20 years ago.

Have you ever been passed over at work or in dating life for people who were clearly less qualified / intelligent / good-looking, etc? How did that feel? Now imagine feeling like that on an existential level. Imagine always feeling like that. How long until the pain and the sense of injustice become unbearable? Maybe you personally have mechanisms that help you deal with it with peace and dignity. But many people don’t.

If Chuck Schumer gets charged with inciting people to assault and harass Supreme Court justices, then yes. Otherwise, no. If “encouraging” is now a crime, it should be a crime for everybody.

It’s funny to see the words “Navy” and “safe” in the same sentence. One would think that if a person decided to join the Navy, safety from words wouldn’t be much of a concern.

This looks like not that big of a deal but it leads to women prisoners being put into very real danger of being raped.

Here’s a great article by Matt Taibbi on the court case in California in which female inmates sue after being housed with male sex offenders. As usual, no #MeTooter has any objection to this horror. Female prisoners aren’t rich and fancy, so their rape and molestation is OK. Feminists who speak out against this horror (like Kara Dansky) are denounced as fascists by everybody, including family members. People who stand up for the inmates are deplatformed and have their capacity to make a living taken away.

Many people don’t know that this is happening because there’s a terrible media blackout about the issue. Taibbi says that there are indications that the tide is turning. But it will only ever truly happen if enough people know and care. We should all do our part and speak to the normies we know about this.

The movie is a great disappointment, my friends, because not only doesn’t it prove that the 2020 election was falsified, it never even attempts to do that.

2,000 Mules demonstrates that ballot-harvesting was probably used in several battleground states where it’s illegal. I’m against ballot-harvesting. I don’t remember who was president in 2020 and what exactly he did to protect the electoral process from this illegal practice. Whatever it was he did, it apparently didn’t work, and ballot-harvesting continued to exist. As the movie helpfully explains, there’s a perfectly innocent reason for the practice. Many people find it hard to drive to the polling place and need help casting their ballot. I personally think that’s baloney but all of this is purely academic and has no bearing on the subject of whether election results should be trusted.

The problem with the movie’s narrative is that even if ballots were delivered to the ballot boxes in an illegal way, it doesn’t mean the ballots were fraudulent. We have absolutely no idea who the people casting them voted for. Maybe they all voted for Trump. Maybe they voted 50/50. Maybe they were all Biden votes but so what?

One remark in the movie struck me as indicative of the problem. “While Republicans concentrated on the campaign,” one interviewee says, “Democrats concentrated on how to get every single Dem vote to the ballot box.” Excuse me, I thought, which campaign did Republicans concentrate on? Does anybody remember any campaign? Because I don’t. Trump held rallies that preached to a small group of the already converted and sent out outlandishly off-putting mailers. Where the campaign funds went is still a mystery.

Instead of this inane, childish pouting, we should look at the mistakes that were made. No legal challenges were mounted to the blanket mailing of ballots to voters who never requested them. No effort was made to safeguard the voting process that was being dismantled under the guise of COVID. None of the crucial promises of the 2016 campaign had been kept. Nothing was done to stop the BLM riots. Nothing was done to stop COVID lunacy. And the COVID mitigation measures that caused today’s inflation were started under Trump. (Then Biden happily continued them but that’s beyond the point).

Don’t get me wrong, Trump is still enormously better that Biden for obvious reasons. But that was a poorly run, haphazard, ridiculous campaign. And this is a poorly made, dishonest movie.