“The US Ambassador to the UN” is a completely useless, ridiculous position that has no relevance to anything. Like the UN itself.

I can’t believe how actively this non-issue is being discussed on the news and the blogs. 

​The left has stopped even trying to do anything on the economy, so it keeps fighting and re-fighting the culture wars that it already won. The result is invariably ugly. SJWs are a symptom of the Liberals’ complete impotence and even reluctance to achieve anything economically. 

Reader matt, if you have any more questions about Russia, please read this article. It’s by a fellow whose political views are very close to yours and, as much as I detest him, he’s right in what he says. Maybe he’ll be convincing where I wasn’t.

I just signed the contract for the book. I know these are great problems to have and I sound ungrateful bitching about the need to do all this paperwork but I’m a very limited person. Outside of physiological necessities  (of which blogging is one), literally all I want to do is spend time with my family and work on my research. I feel resentful when I’m forced to do anything other than that.

First, I was told that I should be seeking copyright permissions for every text from which I cumulatively quote more than 500 words. So I did. Now it turns out it has to be everything that’s over 300 words. 

Thank goodness I can still use the word “and” without seeking copyright permission.

I know I’m like a broken record but it’s deranged. I am doing these authors a favor by quoting their work. I’m not seeking any monetary gain. I’m not preventing them from selling their work, just the opposite. But every publisher (except for a small independent poetry press) is making me jump through endless hoops get these permissions. 

So damn annoying.

In under two years it will become clear that Trump won’t bring the [non-existent] industrial jobs back but people won’t care because he’ll distract everybody’s attention by starting some idiotic war with whomever the Russians tell him to attack: Iran, the Saudis, etc. Everybody will burn with patriotic enthusiasm, and the economy will be forgotten. And then, after Trump and his cronies steal everything there is to steal, we will have a global economic crisis.

Yes, it happened already, in very recent memory. But people tend to repeat the same dumb mistakes as many times as possible.

Another part of the recipe for “how not to win Iowa” is doing things like adding whenever Tim Kaine’s name is mentioned an invariable “although he’s not great on choice.” 

Save for marching around in a T-shirt saying “Abortion Is Grand”, Kaine did everything, violated every principle of his denomination to be supportive of choice. And still many Liberals were making faces and criticizing. What message does it send to people who are pro-choice but not pro-abortion, people who used to have reservations but no longer do, people who are still trying to figure it out? 

And this is just one example. 

Constant spectacles of policing each other’s orthodoxy (or “calling out”) should be discontinued immediately. They scare people off. And the word “privilege” should be forgotten. It will never win any elections bigger than an election of the president of the Society for Spoiled Rich Brats.

National governments are being displaces from power and relevance by supranational corporations anyway. Here in the US, we stopped pretending and handed the presidency directly to such a corporation.

Hey, folks, did you see this website listing professors who spread liberal propaganda?

In all fairness, the listed professors do sound very cuckoo.

People, great news. The English translation of Rafael Chirbes’s On the Edge finally came out. Of course, a translation is always just that, a translation, but this is a work of art that deserves to be read and reread. This is what great literature is about. The novel is absolutely devastating. It’s one of those reading experiences that stay with you for the rest of your life. For as long as I live, I will not forget when and where I was while reading the novel.

If you read the novel and don’t get it, please don’t tell me. I don’t want to be disappointed.

You can find the book here.