Many of us have a friend or a relative who is a wonderful person with a heart of gold but who’s obsessed with some tinfoil hat conspiracy theory or has a weird, embarrassing hobby. For instance, I know somebody who’s the sweetest, loveliest human you can imagine but is obsessively into urotherapy. Yes, it’s the thing where people drink their own pee because it’s supposed to be very healthy.

The worst thing about such people is that they always seek to convert others to their faith and get very monomaniacal about it. Anything can set them off, and you have to be very careful around them to avoid provoking them into a rant on how you’ll die a terrible death if you don’t immediately go drink yourself some urine.

Americans are like that about race. They are the most wonderful, kind people ever. But race is their tinfoil urotherapy. Once something sets them off on this favorite subject, there’s no helping it. They can’t be reasonable about it and they can’t resist the urge to convert the world to their faith. It’s best to accept that they are not ready to stop drinking their own urine for now and just leave them to it. There’s no other solution.

But they are great, beautiful people aside from this unfortunate fixation.

On the funnier side of the Affirmative Action decision, yesterday I received four (4) official repudiations of the decision from different levels of administrative at my university. Each started with “Although our university does not use affirmative action in its admissions process…”

We never received four whole edicts all at once for any event, holiday, commemoration or happening. Dobbs got zero. Jan 6 got two, and they were spaced out. Afghanistan withdrawal got zero. War in Ukraine – zero. Juneteenth – two. Even George Floyd only got three, and they weren’t all on one day.

There was also an edict once condemning DeSantis but I don’t remember why. It seemed very random to condemn a governor of a completely different state

One of the stories in Peter Pomerantsev’s book is about a young man who was a member of a neofascist government group and worked to create the image of “superhero Putin”:

He first made his name by drawing a really rather good manga cartoon that showed the President as superhero doing battle against zombie protesters and evil monster anticorruption bloggers: a nice example of the Surkovian tactic of co-opting hipster language to its own ends, trying to get the “cool” people on the Kremlin’s side.

The cartoon was so successful Kalenik was introduced to senior government officials, and his career as a young spin doctor was launched.

“Politics is the ability to use any situation to advance your own status,” Sergey told me with a smile.

“How do you define your political views?” I asked him.

He looked at me like I was a fool to ask, then smiled: “I’m a liberal . . . it can mean anything!”

Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible

Helping people meet books they’ll love is one of the purposes of my life, so I’m happy to write this in response to a reader request for recommendations of entertaining reading in Spanish.

1. First of all, everybody needs to read Isaac Rosa’s Feliz final. It’s a sort of an anatomy of a marriage. A couple is getting divorced and starts tracing their relationship backwards to see where it all went wrong. If you are into relationship minutiae plus you like Zygmunt Bauman, you’ll be in paradise. I know I was.

2. Alicia Giménez Bartlett wrote detective novels but she also wrote a very original, excellent Spanish Civil War novel Donde nadie te encuentre. It’s a story of a very unusual, fascinating guerrilla fighter. Based on true events! Very good.

3. For readers who enjoyed María Dueñas’s Tiempo entre costuras, I highly recommend Julia Navarro’s Dime quién soy. Spanish Civil War, WWII, fascinating adventures. Very long but reads fast.

4. Of course, Civil War adventures abound in the series titled Episodios de una guerra interminable by the recently deceased Almudena Grandes. The best in the series are Inés y la alegría and Tres bodas de Manolita.

5. Going back to family drama, Luis Landero’s Lluvia fina is excellent. It’s also becoming clear that I’m stuck between family sagas and civil war doorstoppers.

6. And I just have to mention Sara Mesa’s Cicatriz because it’s about a guy who expresses his love for a young woman by sending her books. Many books. Just that alone makes it worth reading. But honestly, anything by Sara Mesa is worth reading. She’s very good. Her Un amor – about an antisocial translator falling in love with an even more antisocial topographer – is incredible.

7. And for people who love funny stuff, Daniel Gascón’s hipster novels, about a well-meaning hipster trying to bring progress to the countryside, are a barrel of laughs.

8. And the pinnacle of Spanish entertainment literature in my opinion is Ignacio Martínez de Pisón. He’s written a lot, and it’s all gossipy, enjoyable, and I’m sorry, I got to go read something right now because all this talk about books makes me want to read up a storm. But before I go, I just have to mention

9. Patria by Fernando Aramburu. Families riven apart by Basque terrorism! Very easy to read, a mega bestseller because the story is super touching.

Happy reading, everybody!

Here’s a perfect example of oblivious navel-gazing:

The Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College is the anti-Dobbs… striking down racially conscious college admissions puts an end to the wildly unpopular policy of affirmative action. … If we take the polling on affirmative action at face value, progressives are popularizing an argument for racial discrimination that is anathema to most Americans. The voting public doesn’t like racial discrimination. They do not believe the remedy for discrimination in the past is discrimination today.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-supreme-courts-affirmative-action-decision-is-the-anti-dobbs/

This is the emperor of non-issues. The most ridiculous, contrived, moronic subject in existence.

Do you know the acceptance rate of my university?

It’s officially 98,8%.

This means everybody is accepted. We don’t have and will never afford to have racially conscious or even basic-literacy-conscious admissions. We are at the point of no longer checking the applicants’ vitals for signs of life.

And guess what? That’s everybody. There’s zero problem in the US with getting accepted to college. There’s no hurdle. No barrier. Anybody can go.

Today’s SCOTUS decision is relevant to a tiny ultra-entitled elite that has the gigantic sums of money needed to pay tuition at Harvard and is obsessed with status. What do their concerns have to do with us? How does it help us if these people’s kids go to a slightly more or slightly less prestigious college?

We are being endlessly told that we need to care about the tedious dramas of these spoiled brats. And we keep buying into it. People sincerely don’t know that there is no affirmative action in college admissions almost anywhere because nobody can afford to turn any students away.

“Polling on affirmative action” sounds like a nasty joke. Where’s polling on how people feel about the endless budget cuts at the local public college where their kids will actually go and pay a lot more in tuition? Where’s polling on shit that does affect our lives?

“Ooh, look at this poor Chinese boy who got perfect SATs but wasn’t accepted to Harvard because he’s too Chinese! Let’s all pearl-clutch about the absolute tragedy of this guy going to another fancy college instead of this fancy college. He might even end up at a slightly less fancy college than he thinks he deserves. A fraction of fanciness he deserves might pass him by. What horror!”

These “let them eat cake” aristos are pissing in our faces and we are too far gone even to just turn away. There are some poor clods right now feeling vindicated by this ruling when the people who fight on both sides of it despise them too much to ever breathe the same air with them.

On the subject of Russia’s war-obsessed youth, I recommend this article that reviews a recent book on this subject:

So we meet 19-year-old Alina from the Urals rust belt, whose timeline was once filled with make-up and nail design videos but now contains images of a burning White House in “Fashington DC” and rails against “Ukrofascists” as “rabid dogs”. Then there is Maria, a 14-year-old devotee of Putin’s Youth Army, or Yunarmiya, whose members parade in khaki fatigues and learn how to strip Kalashnikovs and prepare for nuclear attack.

If anything, Russian teenagers are much farther gone on the war than their grandparents because they don’t remember anything from before the war became fashionable. They’ve been trained up to glorify the war of extermination since birth.

The author of the article struggles with accepting this as true, let alone as the dominant phenomenon in today’s Russia. Once you realize it’s what there is – the only thing there is – it gets scary.

We sat on our asses when the country that owns the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet trained up its young to turn into a messianic cult that yearns to burn up the planet in a righteous rage. We are still mostly sitting on our asses, arguing about trivialities and navel-gazing to an extraordinary degree.

Another troubling sign of aging is when women stop doing their nails and hair and stop wearing consume jewelry.

Obviously, there are plenty women who never do any of it, and that’s perfectly fine. Everybody has the right to manage their nails as they wish. But for women who were at the pedicurist like clockwork every 6 weeks for 50 years, it’s disturbing when they suddenly stop because “it’s just a waste of money, and why bother anyway.”

Russian children “who don’t support the war” are posting songs glorifying the mercenaries of the Wagner group on Tik Tok:

https://twitter.com/Margaret4115221/status/1674251579732422656?t=-7v9nXp01DKZs2Zs8RS5FQ&s=19

Wagner is called “a private military company” but, as President Putin confirmed yesterday, they are funded 100% by the government. Wagner is known for recruiting soldiers among inmates serving long sentences for murder, rape, and other violent crimes. These teenagers from Novosibirsk find that admirable.

I can’t tell you, my friends, how much of this crap I’ve seen. Children, teenagers, young adults. War, war, war. Bloodthirsty, angry, rabid. They’ve lived their whole lives – literally, their whole lives – in a militarized society that’s in love with war. When they were babies, their moms dressed them in onesies that look like fatigues and decorated their prams with military insignia. They dressed up as soldiers for kids’ events at 4. They learned military marches in kindergarten. They studied how to put together a Kalashnikov in second grade. They heard how you and I and everybody else in the West wants to murder them every day their whole lives.*

The belief that children in Russia can’t want war comes from a very good place. People who think so are excellent people. They can’t imagine complete depravity because they aren’t depraved. But this is what was done.

Now let’s think about what it will take to undo a lifetime of war-crazed conditioning and bring this generation of Russian children back to some form of normalcy.

* There’s extensive video evidence of all of this and I published quite a lot of it in 2014 and 2015 when nobody took me seriously with my warnings that this was going in a very bad direction.

250 new books are published daily in Spain. 25% of them are works of literature.

It is a great regret of my life that I won’t be able to read all of them.

People are saying there should be a Dem primary because Biden is too old.

OK, but who would the candidates be? You need somebody with a national name recognition or somebody who massively appeals to African Americans. Biden had both, and he barely squeaked out a win.

In this game, it’s a lot less important to be liked than to be recognized.

Personally, I’m voting for whoever offers the best, the fastest and the most aggressive aid to Ukraine. There’s nothing that matters to me on the ballot in the US. I wish there were but nobody cares about anything serious at the domestic level.