Even our student newspaper has reposted the stupid lie that Trump promised a bloodbath if he loses the election.

The information age, you know? Anybody could go and watch what he actually said at any time. It would take all of 30 seconds. But why do that if you can be lied to and manipulated instead?

These are students, they aren’t supposed to care which old dude wins some boring election at all. They should be rebellious and care about stuff oldsters don’t know exist. Instead, they are being subservient and meek. It’s all very sad.

There’s this video game called 2248. You create strings of numbers by multiplying them by 2. I had no idea this could be such a deeply enjoyable activity. I’m up to 274 billion in my current game.

I guess it exercises some dormant part of the brain, and the brain is grateful for it.

Here’s a great article on why so many people around the world so eagerly and easily believe the clearly idiotic narrative about a Palestinian genocide at the hands of Israel:

The Soviet Union and subsequently the current Russian regime have developed and propagated a fabricated narrative and recruited, trained, planted, and supported a network of agents to carry out a wide-reaching campaign of deception and ideological subversion with the intent to advance their geopolitical interests in the Middle East and beyond — and that this Russian effort is at the heart of modern day global antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment.

https://profound.af/the-invisible-weapon-acade58e7c3f

Everything that includes the “decolonization” narrative has roots in the Soviet propaganda of the Cold War era.

In what concerns Israel, Stalin helped create it but then was mortally wounded when Israel aligned itself with the US. He started a massive anti-Israel campaign which continued after his death:

In 1964, as a brilliant counter to a strengthening state of Israel, the KGB created the PLO, mirroring other guerrilla Marxist-Leninist “liberation” movements the Soviets were supporting or launching elsewhere to expand global influence and control and to counter the US.

Russia has taken over where the USSR left off:

The global mindshare of the “Palestinian liberation” movement is an extremely valuable Russian political asset, utilized as a mechanism for leverage not only against Israel, but in the greater Middle East and even the West as a strategy in their fight against US dominance.

In its support of Hamas, Russian propagandists use the same methods as they did during the BLM riots:

“Russian operatives created hundreds of fake personas on social media platforms and then posted thousands of advertisements and messages that sought to promote racial divisions in the United States. This was a coordinated propaganda effort.” — Virtual Hatred: How Russia Tried to Start a Race War in the United States, William J. Aceves

Obviously, there are enough useful fools right here in the US (and other Western countries) who chant woke slogans of their own free will. But they didn’t spontaneously arise out of ether. They were trained up by Western institutions infested by Soviet agents since 1930s.

Read more at the link.

Scholarship in the UK is in the deepest, ugliest anal cavity imaginable. Today I listened to a 40-minute talk of a British scholar about how wonderful and free Cuba is. She told us that there’s no censorship in Cuba and repeated the old, hoary lies about the success of the Cuban literacy program. The worst part was that the talk was given to an audience of Ukrainian hispanists. The absolute tone-deafness of praising Cuba to people who are at this very moment under assault by troops that Cubans joined and support was shocking.

The British scholar is so utterly ignorant that she said that the de-colonization discourse is the opposite of Soviet ideology. In reality, of course, the post colonial discourse was heavily controlled and promoted by the USSR during the Cold War. Today, Russia is using it to justify its war against Ukraine. This discourse states that colonialism is what developed countries do to underdeveloped countries. The colonial presence in Ukraine, according to this line of thought, is what the US is “doing to Ukraine”, while Russia is trying to “liberate” Ukraine from the US colonialism. “Decolonization” equals anti-Western, anti-US mentality. This is why we keep hearing about “decolonizing” the classroom and “decolonizing” knowledge, which simply means discarding modern science and all Western civilizational achievements.

My blood pressure went up a mile while I listened to this propagandistic garbage. This was the third presentation by a UK scholar that I’ve attended as part of this program, and they aren’t simply woke. They are the most primitive, inane kind of woke. It’s very sad.

I’m participating in another British conference next week, and I have a feeling I’ll need heavy blood pressure meds to sit through it.

The cover of the book has been released:

It’s so cool, and the color scheme is perfect. We managed to stay under 400 pages without cutting any content.

I hope to hold a physical copy in my hands for my birthday.

That’s what the cheap and mega successful US presence in Afghanistan managed to avoid for 20 years. It was an extremely effective operation but the story we told ourselves about it turned it into a humiliating defeat. We have been so habituated to hearing how America sucks that we bought into an utterly erroneous explanation.

The result was a botched and unnecessary withdrawal from Afghanistan that entertained our enemies, made Putin comfortable to start a full-scale invasion, and is destroying the balance of power around the already complicated Pakistan.

This is why it matters what we tell ourselves about events that happen. You can take the biggest win and talk yourself into seeing it as a loss. And vice versa, obviously.

I took a break from the news for a couple of days but when I went back I discovered that there was yet another completely manufactured “Trump said he was going to murder everybody” controversy raging on.

I laughed until I got hoarse.

Lisa Gardner is a bestselling author of murder mysteries, and her 3 most recent novels are about Frankie Elkin, a recovering alcoholic who has a hobby of investigating cold case disappearances. Frankie is the perfect neoliberal subject, addictive, with an inflated ego, and incapable of staying put. She’s happy to belong to a “group of vagabonds circling the globe, picking up jobs here, there, and everywhere, and the more they move around, the happier they are, especially in the company of other people from nowhere.”

Frankie destroys her marriage because stability terrifies her. She spends her life traipsing around the country, working for minimum wage, and telling everybody how superior this lifestyle is to a life of boring responsibilities that tie you down. She’s the perfect embodiment of “you’ll own nothing and will be happy.” When Frankie meets other minimum-wage nomads, they exchange their pronouns and make speeches about evil white people at each other.

There is an actual mystery in Still See You Everywhere but it’s not remotely as interesting as the state of mind of the people who think it’s a good idea to pollute even murder mysteries with this propaganda.

The hardest thing to overcome in students isn’t even the woke sloganeering but the general ultra-liberal sensibility. I gently and patiently steer them away from believing that:

– immigration is always the best thing a person can do. It has no negative consequences, and every obstacle to it should be removed

– making any efforts to preserve a marriage is wrong. People should be completely free to abandon any relationship the moment it becomes uncomfortable

– it’s best to be single and never seek permanent relationships because then you can travel a lot*

And so on.

How does all this come up? you’ll ask. I supervise student research projects, and students endlessly try to massage a work of literature into confirming these bizarre beliefs. Even when a work of literature says the exact opposite, young people’s need to disgorge yet another neoliberal platitude is too strong for them to notice it.

This isn’t something that can be reversed through administrative decisions. Somebody has got to talk to these young people and help them out of this maze of self-defeating beliefs. We let them be consumed by propaganda, and now it will not be easy to bring them back.

* This and the previous point always come from young women. I never had a male student say anything like it. But who’s going to suffer more as a result of adopting this worldview? Obviously, women.

And the title of the idiot of the week goes to John Kerry. Here’s what he came up with on the subject of the most destructive war in Europe since 1945:

“I believe that Russia has the ability to be able to make enormous changes if it really wanted to,” Kerry continued. “I mean, if Russia has the ability to wage a war illegally and invade another country, they ought to be able to find the effort to be responsible on the climate issue.” 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/this-may-be-the-dumbest-thing-john-kerry-has-ever-said/

How did it happen that we put so many unintelligent, incoherent people in positions of power?