We had another family over for dinner tonight and the Mom asked me what brand of mashed potatoes we were using because they were so good and my daughter was like "….they grew in the yard? They are yard potatoes." *sigh* We've got to work on her marketing. These are local grown,…

— Julie (@JulieLovesFluff) September 24, 2025

Spend two minutes trying to decide the words “brand of mashed potatoes.”

Anything to avoid working on the concluding paragraph of my introduction.

Julie sounds insufferable, by the way.

This is only from Reuters. CNN, ABC and others have been publishing about this for years. There has been over a decade of studies. Which is how I knew. How everybody knew until Trump mentioned it and suddenly it became controversial.

In my first pregnancy, when I had a severe form of PUPPPs, I was in extreme pain for months. Not a single time did I take any brand of acetaminophen because I knew that for pregnant women it’s out of the question. My OB-GYN said, “I know this is torture but please remember you can’t take anything. Try oatmeal baths.” And I said, “Oh, of course, I wouldn’t take anything.”

Oatmeal baths did fuck all other than gunk up my bathtub, by the way. But the point is that it’s nuts to start pretending now that this is controversial knowledge. Besides, nobody really needs Tylenol. It’s not insulin. Tylenol is for mild pain. What’s the big deal with not taking it for a few months? I’ve taken it maybe twice in my life (with no noticeable effect), and I’m somehow surviving. I’ve had four major surgeries without post-op painkillers. Taking a break from acetaminophen for the duration of a pregnancy can’t possibly be a bad idea.

I hate stupid, infantile contrarianism both on the left and on the right. And during pregnancy it’s especially ludicrous. I’d let myself be sliced into ribbons, and I pretty much did do exactly that, to ensure that my baby is fine. Trump, schmump, you have a person inside you. And you are making bloody Tik Tok videos instead of going for a quiet walk, relaxing, and making sure your baby isn’t drowning in adrenaline? Your baby is not a prop for your political opinions.

This whole controversy is very triggering to me for obvious reasons. A healthy, easy pregnancy is a miracle. Which doesn’t mean it’s abnormal. I know I’m an outlier, and almost nobody has it that bad. But if you are pregnant, that should be the absolute focus of your life because you only can have a handful of them at most in your lifetime. Your body is doing the most amazing thing it’s capable of doing. Just bloody let it. Trump can wait.

I believe, by the way, that most women in those videos aren’t really taking Tylenol. They have to be faking it. I also think that the story about the woman who overdosed and is rumored to be dying is fake. But the emotion they are showing in those videos is real. And it’s not healthy for a baby.

I keep hearing that everybody lives in their own ideological bubble. This opinion is advanced by liberal people. They truly do live in an information bubble and think everybody else has a similar experience.

A conservative ideological bubble, however, is utterly impossible. If you have gone to school in the past 50 years, if you have turned on cable TV, streamed a Netflix show, watched a sitcom, used Duolingo, done a Google search, been to the movies, walked into a chain bookstore, visited Amazon’s landing page, patronized a public library—in short, if you live in society and not an Amish village—you receive a constant stream of liberal ideology daily.

You can find conservative ideology if you look for it. You’ll have to put in time and effort. Search through Substack posts and X feeds to find mentions of tiny publishing houses that print conservative thinkers. Liberal ideology doesn’t have to be searched for. It’s always there. It’s the air we breathe.

As of now, the count of far-FAR-left books that I was forced to read against my will at work stands at five. We are a state university. How would I be able to avoid being forced to read this material? How could I manage to inhabit a right-wing bubble? How can anybody avoid knowing every permutation of left-wing dogma?

Something is definitely up with Amazon. I pre-ordered a new release by a Spanish author I follow. On the release date, the book didn’t arrive.

I contacted customer service. One after another, customer service representatives named Anuj, Gowtham, and Snow Machi asked increasingly bizarre questions about the order. It got to the point where I started to doubt whether I had really ordered an innocent autobiography by an author famous for his extremely clean and unobjectionable writing style or had mistakenly pressed a button for some sort of a terrorist manual.

In the end, after endless imprecations for me not to worry (which I didn’t because why should I), Snow Machi pompously agreed to refund the book and let me order again. Which I did. And again the book failed to materialize.

I gave up and ordered it on Google Books but it’s been really weird with Amazon recently.

Ah. Another leftist shooting, I see. The sniper who shot at an ICE facility was a great fan of hammer and sickle imagery.

When will we finally recognize that we have a huge problem with leftist violence? This is now an almost daily occurrence.

Conservatives blamed in 3, 2, 1…

Jokes aside, I mourn both the victims and the shooter. Yes, he’s a terrible person but he was a young man who will now not experience life. He’s dead for nothing. It’s terrible.

On the next day, I set out to find a cross. I was a kid but I wasn’t an idiot. I knew that accosting adults and asking to be provided with a cross was a dangerous thing to do. So I saved my lunch money for weeks and approached the gypsies who always hung out next to my school selling outlandish things like bright red lipstick and chewing gum. I had always heard they had things nobody else did, so it made sense to ask them. I was terrified of the gypsies because they used very bad words but they were my only option.

The gypsies were perplexed to see an 8-year-old clutching a handful of coins and asking for a cross. They told me to come back the next day, and when I got there, they had a cross for me. I couldn’t wear it around my neck because if anybody saw it, my parents would be in a sea of trouble. So I put it in the pocket of my school uniform, right on my chest.

Prayer was harder. How do you find out how to pray? I wracked my brain but came up with nothing. Then my father took me to Moscow to visit a friend who was a dissident. While my father and his friend were chatting in the kitchen, I browsed through a voluminous book collection in the bedroom. Hidden behind a row of books and wrapped in a newspaper, I found a copy of the Bible.

“Hah!” I thought. “There’s got to be instructions in here on how to pray.”

It so happened that when I opened the Bible, it opened directly on the text of the Lord’s prayer. “Our Father, who art in heaven…” It was clearly meant to be that I’d find it.

I knew I had struck the motherload. I copied the prayer on a sheet of paper, memorized it, and destroyed the paper. Since then, I prayed every single day of my life.

Years later, my father revealed to me that he was always secretly Christian and also prayed every day. We prayed in secret from each other to protect each other. That’s what the USSR was.

I don’t tell this story often because it’s a very strange story but it happened to me and it changed the entire course of my life. I don’t know why or how but this is a huge part of my journey.

Some of you already read the story of my mystical experience but I’m happy to repeat it because it’s such a great and a very strange story.

I was a very typical Soviet child in what concerns religion. All I knew about it was that religion is stupid, and the only people who had any use for it were illiterate old babushkas deep in the countryside. Like everybody else at school, I really enjoyed all of the stories we were assigned about the smart little grandkids who found the grandma’s icon of the Virgin Mary and Jesus and chopped it up into little pieces. That was hilarious! We all rooted for the grandkids who were saving the babushka from the darkness of ignorance.

But then I had a mystical experience during which Virgin Mary came to me. I won’t give all the details of what was said because it’s not the Virgin of Fatima situation with a message that’s relevant to all of humanity. This was a message relevant only to me. I didn’t understand much of it but later in life when things started coming true, it was quite an experience.

When 20 years later I read St Teresa of Ávila and St John of the Cross, I finally had a name for what had happened to me in second grade because it was so similar. This is why I hate it when people sexualize St Teresa’s writings. Stupid limited creatures who want to reduce everything to the genital area. I was eight! I wasn’t having any sexual experience. Eeww, freaks.

The Virgin said that I had to find a cross and wear it. I also had to pray daily. I had to remain faithful, and everything would be right in my life because God was watching out for me.

“God is with you always,” she said.

I felt an incredible sense of peace in that dream. I felt that everything was right and exactly the way it needed to be. I felt this luminous presence, it was incredible, people.

In the next post, I will share how I proceeded to find a cross and learn to pray, which in the USSR was not an easy endeavor, to put it mildly.

My brain is as pure as driven snow on this one, my friend. I read nothing, know nothing, have not the slightest inkling of anything.

My faith is probably the only thing in my life that I haven’t intellectualized. I had a mystical experience as a child, and that decided things for me. I accepted that I don’t need to understand. That it’s fine sometimes to bow your head and accept what is.

So I’m useless on this subject but, readers who are less intellectually barren on this subject, please share your sources of reading and inspiration.

I was certain that the video of Trump on a stopped UN escalator was AI. It was impossible to believe that the fat, confused men around the president were Secret Service. They just stood there, looking lost and befuddled. I thought the video had been manufactured as a gag.

It’s impossible to understand how this degree of incompetence is possible. Did anybody even check in advance if the escalator was functional? Was a Secret Service agent stationed next to whoever operated it?

Wealthy leftists have so successfully erased the issue of class from every corner of their consciousness that they sincerely don’t understand that a neighborhood filled with immigrant professors and dentists is different from the kind of immigrant neighborhood that less wealthy Americans get.

I also want to note that “immigrants commit far fewer crimes” is a talking point that does not correspond with reality. These numbers do not exist because nobody was ever allowed to count. There’s literally no way to calculate it in any meaningful manner. For example, I was naturalized in 2016. If I commit a crime, will it count as immigrant crime? Obviously not. Am I still an immigrant? Just as obviously yes.

These are empty, meaningless talking points by people whose understanding of reality is constrained by ideological blinkers. “I don’t know any drug addicts in my very privileged life, so drug addiction must be a myth” would be an equivalent of the quoted take. “I’ve never been to Australia, so it must be invented.”