Owen Smith has said the UK could apply to rejoin the EU if Labour wins power under his leadership – even if it means signing up to the euro and fully open borders.

What are they trying to do, make sure Tories stay in power forever? On what planet do they see joining the Eurozone as a popular plan among the voters? 

 In an effort to give their students the best education possible, the McKinney (Texas) School District is building a $70 million football stadium.

OK, let me try to come up with an even more absurd statement. 

In an effort to give his son a toy railroad, Peter ate a pretzel.

In an effort to finish her article, Martha burned down the library.

In an effort to comprehend this insane statement, I made some borscht.

No, I give up. 

If the video of Hillary fainting in NYC today is legit, we are fucked. 

I very much hope it’s a fake of the kind today’s date tends to bring forward. Because if not, I feel scared. 

It always strikes me as odd when people are so in thrall to somebody else’s culture that they are eager to flush down the toilet everything of their own that is tons better and miles more advanced than in the culture they so admire. 

Sánchez-Cuenca is a Spanish professor of poli-sci who wrote a fun, crabby book whose tone is reminiscent of my own “vile freakazoids” posts. In Intellectual Stupidity he mocks Spanish writers and public intellectuals for the stupid things they have written a propos of everything in the world. This would be great but for one problem: Sánchez-Cuenca deplores (will you ever be able to hear this word and not think of Hillary’s baskets of deplorables?) the participation of the country’s intellectuals in public life. 

I believe that said participation is actually the best thing about Spanish culture because Spain’s writers, professors, philosophers, film-makers, etc don’t lock themselves up in an ivory tower and, instead, engage actively with current events. They write articles for the leading newspapers, you know all about their opinions on pressing topics, they are passionately involved in discussing the elections, terrorism, education, abortion, and even driving rules.

Do you know what the leading American writers think about anything other than their own importance for world literature? I highly doubt so. This is why their writing is so divorced from the experiences of normal people. 

Sánchez-Cuenca, however, is so in thrall to the word “Anglo” that he wants Spain to ditch its rich tradition of intellectual engagement and adopt the Anglo practice of allowing the public space to be colonized by the likes of stupid Ross Douthat and incoherent David Brooks. And that’s too self-defeating even to be contemplated. 

Yes, a talented novelist or a famous poet might get too enamored of a beautiful metaphor and get confused on the facts. But their lack of literary talent doesn’t prevent the Douthats and the Brookses of the world from regaling their audiences with one arrant show of idiocy after another.

My news feed is filled with people moaning that their tender fee-fees were hurt beyond belief by the word “deplorable.” 

Maybe they should have been offered a trigger warning and a safe space to protect them from the scary, traumatizing word.

Inès Madani, Sarah Hervouët, Ornella Gilligman and Amel Sakaou, aged, respectively, 19, 23, 29 and 39, were caught in France in an attempt to blow up Notre Dame de Paris and a subway station. A bunch of completely stupid, useless broads who were trying to make themselves feel important. 

Ornella and Amel had a bunch of kids each. Sarah lived in a crappy little apartment with her mother. What that life must have been like we can only guess from the result: Sarah donned a burqa and started trawling the Internet offering herself up to one crazed terrorist after another. 

You need to try really hard to squeeze religion into the story of these useless idiots. 

Spaniards are considering whether it makes sense to spend another  €160,000,000 to hold election attempt #3. To elect the same government they’ve been trying to elect since December of 2015. 

What’s really curious, though, is that the country’s incapacity to elect a government has had no real impact on anything. The situation is ridiculous but it’s not that big of a deal. [I’ll omit a discussion of the growing irrelevance of nation-state trappings because everybody on this blog already knows all this.]

Maybe the current election in the US is such a joke because people intuit that nation-states matter less than they ever did. 

Just that you don’t think that idiocy is limited to any one place. A leading Spanish thinker and author decided to speak out in defense of bullfighting. 

“We have 6,000,000 unemployed in this country!” he exclaimed. “Would any of them refuse to live in the beautiful conditions these bulls enjoy in return of dying somewhat sooner?” 

Klara has figured out the connection between the remote and the TV. She is fascinated with the remote, and whenever I give it to her, she pokes it with her little finger and looks at the TV screen.

In the conflict over the Napalm Girl Photo, I’m on the side of Facebook (‘s original decision.) I’m sick and tired of seeing the poor naked, traumatized girl whose name everybody is too bored to learn get exploited to make some dumb point. War is bad! Here is a photo that proves it! Oh really? We had no idea whatsoever before you pointed it out. 

And since I’m at it, I’m equally annoyed with the habit of sticking Holocaust photos into posts on Putin’s badness. Yes, he’s bad but he didn’t organize the Holocaust. Stop milking historical tragedies that have nothing to do with you.