TikTok is dead. The youngs are all on Snapchat right now. TikTok has become the embarrassing mom space.

It was clear TikTok wasn’t going to survive the dancing nurses of the 2020 and the freaking out moms of the 2021-22. What kind of a clinically uncool youngster wants to be associated with something like that?

A 25-year-old Stanford University employee was arrested Wednesday and charged with felony perjury for allegedly lying about being raped twice last year on campus, authorities said.

https://apnews.com/article/stanford-rape-claims-woman-charged-d769a7912f7bb9b04910c8698f82d383

The employee is called Jennifer Anne Gries, and she perpetrated the rape hoax to take revenge on a guy who refused her sexual advances. Her lies were so egregious that the hoax was soon exposed.

A false rape accusation wasn’t the first strategy Gries undertook to punish the man for spurning her. Months earlier she falsely accused him of sexual harassment that, she claimed, had resulted in her getting pregnant with twins and then miscarrying. None of this proved to be true.

In short, Gries sexually harassed this male colleague for months, concocting bizarre fantasies about him, and trying to make his life a living hell, as she openly admitted to a friend at the time.

Students at Stanford are already in an overly sensitive emotional state due to their lives lacking in hardship, excitement, or anything that can be called meaning. They became pleasurably aroused by the news of rapists roaming the campus and started protesting, demanding, and howling at the moon. Here’s one example:

Rape, rape, rape, rape, rape, rape. I almost didn’t write this piece, because wasn’t there an Opinion piece about sexual assault published in The Daily just last month? Is it too repetitive to talk about it again and again, and will it somehow lose its meaning if it is discussed too much? I caught myself wondering, do I talk about, think about rape too much? But what is “too much?” And is this constant “rape anxiety” not a core tenet of womanhood?

https://stanforddaily.com/2022/08/22/from-the-community-sexual-assault-at-stanford-is-more-common-than-it-seems/

As we can see from Jennifer Anne Gries’ experience, the line between a fantasy and an accusation is often very thin. I feel deep compassion for the man who was harassed by Gries but it’s also kind of funny to imagine a campus full of rich wankers eagerly wanking to a rape fantasy concocted by a sexually frustrated harasser.

Here’s my little reader. I couldn’t be happier. Her backpack weighs a ton because she drags these heavy books everywhere and reads them aloud to classmates during the “quiet time.”

Excellent news, my friends! Children still hide under their blankets with flashlights to read paper books.

The world is in good hands.

I’ve been reading in Spanish and Ukrainian but nothing in English for a while. Is there anything cool going on in English-language literature? Something people want me to read and review? Is there any buzz about any books at the moment?

Please recommend. Both fiction and non-fiction are acceptable.

Carmen Mola is a pseudonym of three Spanish male writers who have published several novels in a series about an elite police corps in Madrid investigating exceptionally gruesome sex crimes. It’s pretty much like Law & Order: SVU but the ick factor is several orders of magnitude higher. I have now read all 4 novels that have appeared in the series so far and can talk about the general thrust of the series which I find curious.

Several of the detectives in the elite squad depicted in the series are very rich. And I mean, really rich. Serious old money. They all lead extremely disordered sex lives and despise traditional lifestyles, religion, and small-town living. The youngest of the detectives is “gender fluid.” Two of them have children, and that is depicted as the source of absolute horror. By horror I don’t mean their kids throw tantrums and do too much screen time. I mean rape, dismemberment, and cannibalism, all portrayed in minute detail. One character falls in love and attempts to have a serious relationship, which also turns into a nightmare.

The writers clearly side with these characters who are the heroes of the series. But the really interesting thing is that these detectives and the lifestyles they lead are often the source of the horror in the novels. Their disordered sexualities are a sort of a conduit that unleashes dark sexual forces into daily reality. Several of the more gruesome plots would simply not happen if these characters were a little less fluid and tried to contain themselves a bit.

The main takeaway from the series – which the authors undoubtedly didn’t intend – is that mega rich people with their unconstrained sex lives usher extreme dysfunction into the world that then they have to battle heroically. Of course, we know that in reality police officers aren’t wealthy. But it’s fascinating that the authors of the series unwittingly come up with such a curious diagnosis.

It’s hard to capture this with just one or two novels but the more books you read from the series, the clearer it becomes that something very strange is happening.

A survey of people in different regions on why, in their opinion, the US is helping Ukraine:

Defending Western dominance is a brilliant idea. Let’s not be fooled into adopting the woke disgust with the West. Yes, the West has problems. In comparison with the rest of the world, though, those problems are insignificant little pinpricks.

Even though I’m from Ukraine, I can tell you honestly that it wouldn’t make sense for the US to go all in (or even partially in) on some regional conflict somewhere far away. I want the US to remain the world leader because any conceivable alternative would be worse. This doesn’t mean the US is perfect. It means it’s vastly better than anything else on offer.

You can’t be first in a group of one. “America First” presupposes that there’s somebody who’s second, third, and fifty-ninth. It also presupposes that you have enough of an impact on the surrounding reality to stand up for your interests. You can’t put your interests first if somebody else is writing the agenda.

Leadership’s doesn’t just happen. You have to defend it with action every day. Why would we voluntarily give up our leadership and join the vast club of the pouty irrelevants?

The post-WWII world order is collapsing and the new one is coming into existence as we speak. Whether we become insignificant little pawns in this new order is completely up to us. I invite everyone to read up on what happened to the insignificant little pawns in the previous world order and ask themselves if they like that picture.

There are key words that crop up in the vocabulary of immature people and that always give them away.

Among them are “trust / lies / promise”. We all have the experience of hearing a 4-year-old wail “But you promised, mommy!” The kid wants a predictable, easy-to-understand world, and the complexity of “yes, I did promise we’d go to the park but I meant we’d do it unless it were pouring rain” is confusing. Kids are completely dependent, so it’s crucial to them that everybody around them should be dependable. Adults make their own reality, so being able to place complete trust in anybody isn’t that important.

Remember the slogan “Bush lied, kids died”? I detested Bush then and I do now but, God, what a stupid slogan. It’s not an accident that “lied” is followed by “kids.” This is the childish attitude of the sloganeers that breaks through.

I’m not disputing that Bush lied, by the way. He’s a politician. It’s in the job description.

Sadly, it looks like DeSantis decided to take Trump’s bait and fight him for the affections of the pouty MAGA crowd. He’ll never pry them away from Trump, so I don’t see the point. Trying to be an alternative Trump is a bad strategy. You can never out-Trump Trump.

It’s disappointing that DeSantis is chickening out of challenging Trump head on. Trump clearly has no such scruples (see earlier post).

OK, I heard Youngkin might run. Let’s see if he manages to keep his balls from shriveling at the sight of Trump.

Sweet Lord in heaven:

The next step is to praise Obama and endorse Biden.