Before the Russian invasion it was 72% opposed on the EU and 83% opposed on NATO.

Let’s not be like the characters of 1984 and get our memories erased overnight.

The neoliberal love for dragging around large groups of people never wanes. What’s the point of depopulating Eastern Ukraine and shifting a hundred thousand Asians there? Three hundred thousand Russians were killed in the process. All to relocate these Asian people to an area that’s completely new and deeply uninteresting to them.

This is not new, of course. Russia has been wiping out Russians and dragging over Central Asians and the Chinese to take their place for 20 years. As I wrote years ago, there’s no group Putin hates more than Russian men. They’ll go extinct before he’s done with them.

This is neoliberalism, people. It’s all about moving people around, and the resulting death, suffering and societal breakdown are not only acceptable but actively desired.

Reader Avi wondered why Carmen Laforet’s mediocre novel Nada is the second most widely read Spanish novel in the world. This is a great question that I want to answer.

Yes, the novel is not that great. Laforet wrote it when she was in her early twenties, and it’s good for somebody very young, inexperienced, and very self-involved. It’s deathly tedious to readers outside of that category. But the novel’s success is mostly due to two big misunderstandings.

When Nada first came out, it was the post-war time in Spain. People wanted to talk about the civil war. It was a terrible thing they had just experienced, and of course they wanted to discuss it. But there was censorship. Everybody was scared. Nobody knew how to broach the subject. When Laforet’s novel about a messed-up family came out, people chose to believe that Laforet was trying to say that the family was messed up because of the war. But what she actually wanted to talk about was family dysfunction that was entirely apolitical. People kept trying to squeeze some political statements out of Laforet but she didn’t give in. Her subsequent writing made it clear that she was interested in what makes a family collapse not as a result of any political upheavals but because of internal dynamics. There was an enormous pressure on Laforet to play the role of “the voice of the young generation that has something crucial to say about the current moment”, and she hated that.

Then something even more ridiculous happened. In 1951, a famous American Hispanist Gerald Brennan read Nada and Laforet’s second novel and attached a woke explanation to them. He published an article in the NYTimes where he said that Laforet’s novels had done “more for the liberation of Spanish women than the entire last 50 years of history.” Laforet at that time was a deeply religious Catholic pregnant with her fourth child but who cares about reality when the NYTimes says something different? Laforet’s Nada became assigned reading in every Spanish course on every US campus. It still is, and each new generation of Spanish professors struggles to massage the novel into some far-left mold that its very conservative author couldn’t have begun to imagine.

I don’t assign it to my students.

Turns out that my unusual headache wasn’t caused by sitting on a throne while listening to a land acknowledgement. I’d had my blood taken at the doctor’s office earlier today and the nurse put a very tight bandage over the vein. For some reason, it gave me a severe headache. I don’t know medicine, so I have no idea how this works but the moment I managed to pry off the bandage the headache immediately disappeared.

I wish we all knew more about the functioning of the human body. I suffered majorly for hours and had no idea this was because something was squeezing my vein.

Why it is necessary to wrap one in a huge, thick bandage for a tiny needle prick is a mystery.

Why, why did I agree to go to the small talk event? I now have a massive headache and I never get headaches.

At the beginning of the event, the invited guests had to sit on chairs with their names facing the audience. Everybody got a normal chair except for me. I got a throne. It was a huge, high affair that I had to climb on and then sit there, towering over everybody else like a sad old giraffe. The organizer really loves me, so I ended up with the throne. My feet were dangling in the air, it was so high.

Then the sociability began, and it was torture. Students who were being tested on their sociability skills clearly think that making small talk means you have to approach a person and stare at her with big, scared eyes. I ended up making 100% of the small talk, and we can all imagine the joy this caused me.

Finally, I disentangled myself from the throng of silent teenagers and went to get some food. And it was at that moment that one student decided to make small talk by saying, “I see that you really like sausage” and giving me an angry stare.

I have absolutely no idea whose brilliant decision it was to offer sociability as a college course but aside from the sausage that was quite good, this was not a raging success. Now these students are going to have a course on non-verbal communication, and I’m hoping that one will go better.

He is one of several dozen Russian businessmen who died in strange circumstances since 2022. There is a running list here.

These are very rich people. Some were billionaires. Many of them were young and vigorous. And they apparently managed to find no method to avoid being picked off one by one.

The extraordinary helplessness of these people is truly something to observe.

It always feels weird when a doctor’s receptionist at a regular wellness check asks me for my “list of medications”. I’m not so ancient I’m supposed to be on a bunch of meds, am I?

My other personal favorite is when a nurse asks, “what do you take for your pain?” What pain? Why am I supposed to be in pain? It’s a regular, routine visit. Why does anybody assume I’m medicated for pain?

The sparklage us due to having two events today, one of which consists of me grading students on their sociability. Somebody will need pain meds after that but I hope it won’t be me.

I saw a segment about high-school debate competitions on a recent Matt Walsh show, and, people, my blood ran cold. I’m in academia, so I hear outlandishly woke stuff daily. But what I heard and saw in these high-schoolers is beyond what even I was prepared for. The far-left sense of grievance cultivated in them turns into something downright scary in conjunction with the undeveloped teenage brain and a body in the state of a hormonal transformation. This is 1920s Komsomol type of scary.

The kids will either grow up and calm down or self-destruct with “mental illness” and drugs but before nature and nurture take their course, they can be sicced successfully on all manner of “enemies of the people.”

Our trusty “austere religious scholar” is back, my friends! NYTimes continues its tradition of inventive headlines. See this one:

So what has this “Palestinian author” authored? Here’s an example of a text she authored:

I mean, it’s not like the NYTimes headline is literally untrue. This is a text of the woman’s authorship, so she’s definitely an author. But it’s clear where the sympathies of NYTimes lie. Please remember this when you are tempted to trust its coverage of anything.

Biden has had to make a painful electoral choice between losing his rich Jewish donors or antagonizing the young, the African Americans, and the far left. For now, he chose the money and supported Israel.

I don’t blame him for making these calculations, by the way. That’s what a politician is supposed to do.

It’s funny, though. Democrats are a coalition of the aggrieved. And it worked until the aggrieved made it clear that their biggest grievances are against each other. Now Dad had to side with one aggrieved sibling over a bunch of others, and it’s not pretty.