The reason why Russia is able to continue the war against Ukraine is not that Trump is a Russian spy, as leftist prattlers think. And it’s not that Ukraine doesn’t want peace, as their rightist counterparts believe.

The real reason is that Russia’s warmongering has been aggressively and consistently funded by the EU. Europe has been buying enormous quantities of Russian oil and natural gas while sending large yet still smaller quantities to help Ukraine. So basically, the EU has been funding both sides of the largest European war in decades. Nobody is conspiring to make that happen on purpose. It’s simply what the EU is like.

Well, it looks like Trump finally found a way to have the EU buy US oil instead of the Russian. That the war was allowed to go for 3,5 years without anybody doing this shocks every sensibility.

By the way, in the early stages of the war, the EU did try to end its dependency on Russian natural gas and begged Canada to sell theirs to Europe. Trudeau said “there’s no business case for it” because he was suddenly very into business. The EU had to go back to Russia for its energy needs, and the war continued.

Later, Mike Johnson begged Biden to let US producers to sell oil to the EU. Biden refused. The EU had to go back to Russia for its energy needs, and the war.  .  . yes, it continued. So let’s not blame the EU alone for this. Europeans spent years trying to solve the problem, and nobody wanted to assist them.

This is truly a great achievement for Trump and an excellent deal for both the US and the EU. Very impressive.

I’m shocked, veritably shocked that somebody actually has something true to say about dating:

Every species has mating rituals. If those rituals are not disrupted, they will mate. If they are disrupted, they will not mate.

This is why a cattery run by a middle aged housewife in her own home can breed Occicats, Russian Blues, or Bengals, but the best zoos in the world can’t make two pandas into three pandas.

The basic mating ritual of human beings does not begin with a man cold approaching a strange woman.

It begins with a woman covertly signalling a willingness to be approached, either to a specific man, or in general. Only then is the man supposed to respond with an overt approach.

And the most important part:

Women want men they like to approach them, but they have no idea that it’s their responsibility to make this happen.

https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1949169427062173810?t=dsORlSSLX9vXo2pigzu56g&s=19

Another problem is that many people are deeply dishonest with themselves about what it is they want to be approached for. Almost the entirety of #MeToo was the product of this dishonesty.

I can’t stop before exploring every aspect of an issue, which is why I read the book that inspired Candace Owens’ series about Brigitte Macron. I was hoping that Xavier Poussard would not suffer from the same degree of retardation as Candace and could at least explain what inspires the conspiracy.

On the positive side, Poussard is not a clinical moron. The English translation of the book (created by AI) does often make him sound like one but he’s not. At least, he doesn’t believe that Marie-Claude is a suspicious name, which is a welcome development.

Still, the conspiracists have absolutely nothing. They believe that the person we see on TV as Brigitte Macron is actually her brother, Jean-Michel Trogneau. The problem with this belief is that Jean-Michel Trogneau is currently living under his own name at his regular address. He is pushing eighty, so he’s retired but he appears in public. There’s video footage of him at both of Macron’s inaugurations, being chatted up and hugged by Macron.

The other problem is that it’s impossible to deny that Brigitte was a real person at least until her thirties. Her life is documented, and she gave birth to three children who are now adults. The conspiracists have no explanation for what they believe happened to the real Brigitte. For the brother to have taken her place, she must have willingly relinquished her children to him. And the children had to agree. The conspiracists aren’t even trying to explain this away.

In short, both the stupid Candace and the somewhat less unintelligent Poussard can’t make their own conspiracy sound plausible. The book is not a complete waste of time, though. It gives a glimpse into the origins of the conspiracy when Poussard lists the leading figures of the political left in France.

Monsieur Such and Such, advocate for open borders, refugee rights, and the return of jihadis. Convictions for incest and child pornography.

Monsieur This and That, defender of LGBT rights, open borders, women’s rights. Five arrests for child rape, child trafficking, pedophilia.

Monsieur Here and There, advocate for transgender youth, UBI, open borders. Convictions for child pornography, accusations of pedophilia and torture of children.

It goes on and on and on. The sheer number of pedophilia scandals that have plagued French politics for 30 years is quite stunning. Time and again, the French courts find that an 11-year-old child consented to sex with an adult.

So when Brigitte Macron gets slobbered over by the press for raping her 14-year-old student, for some people it’s intolerable but they don’t know how to make that point. It’s become normalized that even 11-year-olds want and aggressively seek out sex with adults. It’s not enough to say “she had sex with a child.” Nobody cares about such things any more. And people who still care don’t know how to explain even to themselves why they do. So they start to exaggerate. “She’s not only a pedo but a fraud. She stole her sister’s identity. She’s a he. She’s lying about everything.” If Poussard could make people care about pedophilia, I don’t think he’d ever have gotten into the conspiracy part.

The singing is bad in this movie. I have to get this off my chest before I say anything else. Ariana Grande’s singing is of middling, mostly passable quality but the actress who plays the green witch is an atrocious singer. It’s a mystery why she was cast in this part. Truly, there’s no shortage of talented black singers. The African American community has not been known for falling behind in musical talent. If the producers wanted to find a talented black female singer, honestly , that should be easier than finding water in a flood. Yet they chose an actress with no talent. It’s interesting that DEI always promotes the black people who clearly have no place in the roles for which they are promoted. Talented black people, in the meantime, are almost aggressively thrown aside.

As for everything else, the movie is clearly addressed to a much older audience than the one it will get. For adults (who will never watch Wicked of their own free will), it could be an interesting movie. If it weren’t about witches, magic, and the Wizard of Oz, the portrayal of a person who is a bad human being but doesn’t know this about herself and believes she is a victim when she’s simply a trash person could be interesting. The idea that bad people don’t know this about themselves is kind of deepfor a Hollywood movie but it’s not an idea that can be fruitfully explored in a movie for kids. Klara is very advanced, but this part went right over her head.

At 9,5, my daughter is already at the older age of the audience. And the movie’s visual range, together with some elements of the plot, is very inappropriate even for her. Remembering that the viewers are in the ages 4 to 11 category, it’s bizarre that the movie is so adult. There are some frankly lewd scenes. The actors who play first-year college students are all middle-aged, and look old for the age they actually are. There are constantly non-binary men in the background, behaving in ways that are appropriate at a rave but not in normal life. The main plotline is that the green witch is a product of an extramarital affair. My kid doesn’t know yet that children can be born that way. I’ll have to have a conversation about that with her before the second part of the movie drops to the theaters. And I already had to have a talk with her explaining about eating disorders because I can’t leave her under the impression that it’s normal for people to look like Ariana Grande does.

The movie ends up being quite atrociously bad. It feels like the creators of the movie were victimized by a gang of pedophiles in childhood, and as a result, a significant part of their brain remained stunted while other aspects got way over-developed. Whoever wrote the film understands evil on a deep level but feels completely impotent to oppose it in any way. This is also a person who is strangely hypersexualized in unhealthy ways. He’s not a pedo himself. The movie doesn’t read like the creation of a pedo. It definitely does come off like the work of a sad and confused pedo victim.

If anybody else was obligated to watch, please make yourself known and we’ll discuss.

JUST IN – UK Home Office to assemble an elite team of police officers to monitor social media for "anti-migrant sentiment" in a new investigations unit to "flag early signs of potential civil unrest" — Telegraph

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) July 26, 2025

In neoliberalism, the state doesn’t disappear. It switches sides. Instead of helping, protecting and supporting the citizens, it turns against them. The state no longer derives its legitimacy from the citizens and doesn’t need to be nice to them anymore. It now begins aggressively to dispossess the citizens and its main function becomes to keep them beaten down enough so that they don’t rebel.

If you grow up in a country where everything always works, you don’t have to waste any energy on bending every aspect of uncomfortable reality to your will all the time. Then you have more energy for creative pursuits or for personal growth.

On the negative side, this experience can make you think that this is what life is naturally like. And it’s not. Everywhere else outside of your bubble of high civilizational advances it’s a constant battle against things, relationships, institutions, and social structures that are indifferent, hostile, and very uncomfortable.

This is why, instead of giving daily praises to life for placing them into a rare ultra-civilized pocket of reality that is hospitable and sweet, people act carelessly towards this inherited haven, destroying it for the future generations.

For the first time, I have in my hands a book that was translated by AI. There’s nothing in the publishing information about a translator of any sort, but I teach translation, and in class we explore the uses of AI for translating texts.

As expected, the quality of the translation is abysmally poor. It’s not that it contains mistakes but that not a single sentence is translated correctly. It’s a mockery of both languages.

This is not a work of fiction but they time will soon come when efforts to save on hiring a translator will lead to the brutalization even of literary books.

Comedian and author Tony Hawks explains why he isn't leaving his son anything in his will. pic.twitter.com/b8GI2NCkPZ

— BBC Sheffield (@BBCSheffield) July 20, 2025

I don’t know what kind of an actor this man is but that he’s a sociopath is a given. I feel for his children. Not because of money but because having a dad who calls you “an accident of birth” is a heavy burden.

What an excellent question.

You are absolutely right. I’m very neoliberal. Forget fluid borders, the whole texture of my life is neoliberal. I use the Forest app to track my productivity. I use Duolingo to learn German when I have no actual need to do that, and I have not broken my streak even on the day I had surgery. Or when I traveled internationally. Or on the day when I could barely speak after dental surgery. I’ll probably still be keeping the streak on the day of my funeral. This gives me great joy, and you won’t understand it if you aren’t completely neoliberal yourself.

I’m obsessed with my morning and evening routines, I have five trillion planners, I have a steps streak that is a whole performance. I have read every neoliberal self-help book and can wax poetic on deep focus for hours. I pursue several careers at the same time and change my opinions on everything regularly. What I don’t know about personal branding is not worth knowing.

Yes, I am neoliberal. I played against a much more ferocious form of neoliberalism than the one that has appeared so far in North America, and I won. Not only am I good at this shit, I love it. It is because I know and understand it so well that I say that for most people it’s the absolute death. Yes, you can win in the neoliberal game. But you need to be a very specific type of person with very specific kind of neuroses. Everybody else loses. Not because they are worse. Or better. But because that’s how this system works. Those 2,5 million nice, well-meaning, trusting people who watched the Candace Owens videos and took them seriously will not do well in it. Neoliberalism will chew them up and spit them out.

I personally am fine, though, yes.

Hulk Hogan, a famous wrestler and media personality, died a couple of days ago, and I wanted to share the story of his struggle against the scandalous website Gawker because maybe people don’t know, and it’s a truly shocking story.

Gawker published a sex tape with Hulk Hogan and refused to take it down. Hogan was broke and didn’t have money to fund a protracted legal battle with the website.

Billionaire Peter Thiel also hated Gawker because they had outed him as gay when he wasn’t ready to come out. It’s not ok to out gay people unless they hold political views that you don’t like. This is standard journalistic morality these days.

Thiel offered to fund Hulk Hogan’s legal battle against Gawker. After years of lawsuits, Hogan won an enormous amount from the website and from the CEO personally. Gawker went bankrupt, and deservedly so. When news appeared of Hogan’s death, the former Gawker journalists engaged in the most disgusting exhibitions of joy. To demonstrate the moral caliber of these members of the press, I want to post this little excerpt from the testimony given in court by the Gawker journalist who published Hogan’s sex tape:

It’s not surprising that people turn to the likes of Candace Owens for their news because, whatever her faults, she’s a huge improvement on these types of people.

RIP Hulk Hogan who, although not my kind of athlete, brought a lot of joy to people.