https://twitter.com/53wpsOxtggLTU5c/status/1626192355878477824?t=sOFJENGCDkrfQSSpMJ-6ZQ&s=19

In the images, you can see spontaneous expressions of joy in Russia over the earthquake devastation in Turkey.

“God is punishing [racist slur]” says one.

“All [racist slur] should be underground” goes another.

“Destruction in Turkey makes me glad” states the third.

All this is child’s play in comparison to the terrible things they’ve been saying on social media.

This is a civilizational dead-end, pure and simple.

In total, there were about 156,000 illegal aliens “encountered” by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) personnel in January — 128,000 detained at the border, and 28,000 stopped at ports of entry. In the 15 years between May 2006 and May 2021, monthly apprehensions exceeded the January 2023 total of 128,000 only once — in May 2019, when slightly fewer than 133,000 encounters were recorded.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/bidens-sotu-boasts-about-decreasing-illegal-immigration-were-fraudulent-too/

So the only time there was more illegal immigration than under Biden was under Trump.

There has never been a problem as easily and cheaply solvable that encounters such intractable refusal to be solved.

I gave my talk on Ukraine to a large crowd of wonderful people. I came out on a high, opened the social media and discovered that a massive air strike just started. So that was the end of my enjoyable evening.

Oh, and another funny thing from the POW interview.

“What were you expecting to see when you came to the frontlines?” the Ukrainian journalist asks.

“Nazis!” says the POW. “A lot of Nazis! And Poles. But there weren’t any Nazis. Or Poles. I was really expecting to see Poles but there weren’t any.”

“Well, I’m going to let you in on a secret,” says the journalist. “We have special biolabs that genetically modify Poles making them look like normal people.”

The POW thinks it over.

“No,” he says finally. “There were definitely no Poles.”

The obsession with the Poles in Russia is such that people are demanding that a mega famous Soviet era movie that starred a Polish actress be modified to cut her out.

N watches a lot of videos where Ukrainian journalists interview Russian POWs. These are long, in-depth interviews that last over an hour each. N says he already watched more than 100 hours of these videos, which, given his work schedule I described earlier, is a significant time investment.

I don’t watch these interviews because I don’t see the point. Who cares what these people are saying? The result is still the same. But I don’t blame N for watching. He’s trying to comprehend what happened, what turned the Russian people into such beasts. It’s devastating to him to see what’s going on. For me, at least, there’s the knowledge that we are in the right and everybody supports us. He doesn’t have this consolation.

Yesterday I finally watched one of these videos because N really wanted me to see it. The POW who was interviewed is N’s age and his wife has the same name as me. The wife is a terrible, cruel, mean harpy. People in the comments are begging Ukrainians not to release the POW to his wife because that would be a clear crime against humanity. “She’s just like my mom!” N keeps repeating. “But even worse!”

The POW himself is completely pathetic, deeply stupid. He’s got a college degree but his language skills are rudimentary. “It’s funny that you say you came here to defend the Russian language,” the Ukrainian journalist says, “when I speak better Russian than you do.”

Like a Jew who doesn’t say the name of God to avoid sacrilege, the POW can’t pronounce Putin’s name. “Please, please, I beg you,” he keeps repeating to his wife, “let the authorities know I’ve been captured so they can organize a POW exchange.” The nasty, indifferent faces of his wife and mother are painful to watch.

Today we had 3 events happening simultaneously at my department. I had to choose which one to attend. Things feel alive! It took until now to recover from the COVID-era collapse of sociability. But at least most of us did recover.

Educational bureaucrats are now at war with the word “to understand.” Who knows why? There’s never any reason behind these fads.

We now have a group of paper-pushers who pore over syllabi and other paperwork, culling out phrases like “the goal of this course is to understand how ABC interacts with XYZ.”

In case you think this is arbitrary and absurd, remember that that’s precisely the goal.

My dearly beloved gym, a family-owned place that stayed open all through COVID, defying governor’s orders and saving my sanity, is closing down. Nothing tragic, the owner simply decided to retire, take the money and go enjoy life. But I’m stuck looking for a new gym.

I was discussing the options with a very fit, very chic friend.

“Of course, there’s also gym such-and-such,” she says. “But I don’t recommend. It’s a very pretentious place for people who aren’t serious about working out and just go there to strut around with their designer water and meaningful T-shirts. Nobody even talks to each other because they are so full of themselves.”

“This!” I exclaim loudly. “This is the place for me!”

After a struggle that lasted 3 years and 5 months, I have managed to persuade the university bureaucrats to change the title of my intro course on Hispanic Civilization to “Introduction to Hispanic Civilization.” The struggle entailed me having to explain that the words “Hispanic” and “civilization” are not offensive to black people.

Bureaucrats see the word “civilization” and interpret it as you saying that black people are uncivilized. Of course, the objection is always couched as, “some people will see the word ‘civilization’ and assume…” It’s a clear case of projection, and I find this whole idea of associating black people with lack of civilization deeply offensive, so it wasn’t hard to show sincere dismay during these discussions.

Today the course title was officially changed from “Learning a Foreign Language.” Which is something we never did in that course because it’s taught 100% in English. Now I will finally teach what the course title announces. And it only took 3,5 years, a mountain of paperwork and over a dozen (I stopped counting about 2 years in) levels of approval. To be clear, I have been teaching it as Intro to Hispanic Civilization since 2009. And it had been taught that way long before I showed up. It’s the title that was weird, not the course itself.

I’m preparing my lecture on Ukrainian history, and I found out that over 3,5 million Ukrainians were enslaved by Crimean Tatars in a little over a 100 years (mostly in the 16th century). In contrast, about 450,000 Africans were brought as slaves to the US during entire slave trading period. A total of 12,5 million slaves were taken from Africa to this hemisphere, with the overwhelming majority ending up in the Caribbean and Brazil.