They’re all liars

Last week, Elon Musk tweeted (you know, the usual forum for high-level diplomacy) a “peace plan” for Ukraine that was simply total surrender and concession to all of Putin’s demands and then some. Then it was revealed that Musk had had a recent phone call with Putin, which I could believe — he’s not a very bright guy, and simply parrots whatever the last person who spoke to him said. Now he denies the phone call, and I can believe that, too. Musk is the kind of ego-driven guy who would claim to have inside info on the plans of powerful people.

Elon Musk has denied the claim he spoke to Vladimir Putin before tweeting a peace plan for the war in Ukraine.

The Tesla CEO’s peace suggestion included Ukrainian territory being handed over to Russia.

Eurasia Group subscribers were sent a report in which Ian Bremmer wrote that Mr Musk told him that the Russian president was “prepared to negotiate” if the Crimean peninsula remained in Russian hands, Vice reported.

Other conditions included that Ukraine retains permanent neutrality and that Ukraine recognises the Russian annexation of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.

Mr Bremmer reports that Mr Musk said that Mr Putin told him that these targets would be reached “no matter what”.

Basically, I can shrug and believe he said things that have little basis in reality, because he is a glad-handing liar. Once you accept that, you can understand the motivation behind all the noise that comes out of his mouth.

I’ll also easily believe that Putin is a liar. The people who have the most experience with Russian neighborliness will tell you that.

Baltic leaders have long argued that Western sanctions adopted in 2014 after Putin illegally annexed Crimea showed the West’s lack of resolve in confronting the Russian president over his land grab. European leaders seemed to think the Baltics were so traumatized by Soviet occupation that they could not be objective.

“Jokingly, you know, we call this ‘West-splaining,’” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said. The West’s message, he said, was that “after 50 years of occupation, it’s understandable that you would have trust issues with a country that occupied you.”

“For us in the Baltics, it all boils down to this notion of appeasement: that basically we can appease Russia,” Landsbergis continued. “For us, it was always very clear, black and white. If a country is eager to cross another country’s border, they’re an aggressor and they will do that again, if they’re not stopped. And they have not been stopped.”

“That notion is quite pervasive, this notion of peaceful settlement with an aggressor,” he added. “I’m really hopeful that it’s now waning.”

Don’t trust imperialist countries. It’s that simple.

I think Central and South America are all clear on that, too.

You’ll never rope me into the grift this way

Oh boy, I get email.

I’m reaching out one last time about featuring your brand in influencer-generated gift guides for the upcoming holiday shopping season.

I have 20 fabulous influencers who are doing holiday gift guides and they have a combined reach of over 3 million consumers who are eager to hear about your brand.

I’m running a special where I will feature your brand in all 20 gift guides for $4,000. It’s a one-time fee and it covers the influencers’ fees.

Gift guides are the most impactful way to get the word out about your brand to consumers who are looking for gifting ideas. This is the 4th year that I’ve run this campaign because every year, my clients get fantastic results.

Spaces in these gift guides are filling up fast and I don’t want you to miss this great opportunity!

Please feel free to reply to this email if you have any questions and/or if you would like to be part of this campaign.

Look, you’ll never persuade me with a tease that features the words “brand” and “influencer”. That’s a great way to get me running in the opposite direction.

I notice also that I am expected to cough up $4,000 to be mentioned in these “gift guides” from 20 different “influencers” who have almost certainly never even heard of me, while the “influencers” are getting paid. Seems a little unfair? I think I’ll pass.

Racists are still upset about the Little Mermaid

You want to see some raging, flaming, over-the-top, old-school racism? No, you don’t, but I’m gonna show it to you anyway.

OK, I hear you wondering…who the heck is Jared Taylor? Here’s what Amazon has to say.

Jared Taylor has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Yale University and a master’s degree in international economics from l’Institut d’ Etudes Politiques de Paris.

He has worked as an international lending office for a major New York bank and as a consultant to companies doing business in Japan. For three years he was the West Coast Editor of PC (Personal Computing) Magazine, and has published articles and essays in the following publications:

Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Washington Star, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, National Review, Chronicles.

Since 1994, Jared Taylor has been the president of New Century Foundation, which publishes the American Renaissance website (AmRen.com).

Amazon used to sell all of his books, but in March, 2019, it banned the following titles written or edited by Jared Taylor:

A Race Against Time: Racial Heresies for the 21st Century, 2003, New Century Books, 331 pp.

White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century, 2011, New Century Books, 344 pp.

Face to Face With Race, 2014, New Century Books, 211 pp.

If We Do Nothing: Essays and Reviews from 25 Years of White Advocacy, 2017, New Century Books, 254 pp.

Jared Taylor lives with his family in northern Virginia near Washington, DC.

It starts off fairly normally (I had no idea he was an editor for PC Magazine), and then gets around to mentioning the New Century Foundation — a prominent funding source for all kinds of hate — and the American Renaissance, where Michelle Malkin and Pat Buchanan are still welcome contributors.

I know — I didn’t know Pat Buchanan was still alive. He is.

And then we get around to his racist books, which Amazon has banned. Cancel culture! But they really are terrible, stupid books as the video above shows.

Jared Taylor still gets invited to give talks. The latest was at ASU, where he was invited by the College Republicans. Republicans don’t mind associating with notorious racists, I guess.

He’s comically racist. He thinks the white race is going to miscegenate ourselves into extinction because…

There are just too darned many mixed-race couples in TV ads! Yeah, he seems like the kind of guy who sits up late watching Fox News and getting mad at all the pharmaceutical commercials because they’re just not white enough.

These people actually exist. It shocks me every time.

Another reason to regret an upcoming flight

I’m going to have to get on an airplane this weekend. I’m not happy about it, and Sun Country (which had the cheapest, low budget flight to Seattle) is not reassuring me.

Masks are now optional for all passengers and crew members onboard Sun Country flights within the United States. For international flights, masks are optional for Sun Country customers and employees, except where required by applicable governments for international travel. Please continue to bring a mask with you as required for international travel.
At Sun Country Airlines, safety is our number one priority, and we remain committed to maintaining a clean, healthy environment on board.

Why do they do this? They announce safety is our number one priority, while stripping all the health safety requirements from the flight. Isn’t it obvious that safety is not their number one priority? Is anyone fooled by this double-speak?

I’ll be wearing an N95 the whole way there and back.

Y’all know he’s just an ugly-minded ol’ bigot, right?

Being a terrible human being hasn’t been an obstacle to making good, or even just interesting, music. Kanye West is just a Jerry Lee Lewis for the 21st century. But making popular music shouldn’t be a defense against repudiation. Kanye West is finding that out.

The rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, sent an Instagram post Friday suggesting fellow musician Sean “Diddy” Combs was controlled by Jewish people — a common antisemitic trope. Within hours, Instagram had removed the post and locked his account.

That sent Ye to Twitter, where he was publicly welcomed back by Elon Musk, who may soon take ownership of the company. Within hours, however, Ye had posted a separate antisemitic tweet that he would go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” Twitter, like Instagram, was quick to block the post and lock his account.

Unforgivable. That is Nazi shit, and it doesn’t matter that it’s coming out of a black man’s mouth. Actually, it may matter a great deal: conservative free-speech warriors are using it as an excuse to lay the groundwork for permitting antisemites and racists to freely promote their rotten ideas. They want to be able to shriek antisemitic jargon on the internet; they want to normalize it so that newspapers can freely post editorials blaming a Jewish cabal for every problem; they want it to get so familiar that they can sneak debates about “the Jewish question” into school rooms. That’s the future we should dread.

But a conservative-led movement to rein in what some see as “censorship” by Silicon Valley giants is poised to alter how they approach such decisions. Between a growing field of state laws that seek to restrict content moderation and Elon Musk’s determination to loosen Twitter’s policies, posts such as Ye’s could soon become more prevalent online.

A law passed by Texas last year, which could become a model for other Republican-led states if upheld by the courts, prohibits large online platforms from censoring users or limiting their posts based on the political views they express. Legal experts told The Washington Post that such laws would make it much riskier for social media companies such as Meta, which owns Instagram, and Twitter to moderate even blatantly antisemitic posts such as Ye’s.

And Musk has said that one of his goals for Twitter, should he complete a $44 billion deal to purchase the company and take it private, is to provide a forum for legal speech of all kinds. “If the citizens want something banned, then pass a law to do so, otherwise it should be allowed,” he tweeted in May.

I guess death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE is a kind of political statement, but it’s also something much more. It’s hate speech. It’s a threat of violence against people for the crime of being born to a certain set of parents. It’s a promise of cultural annihilation, the eradication of a people’s traditions and ideas. What’s also disturbing is that conservatives seem perfectly willing to equate those kinds of eliminationist views with their own political philosophy.

Offensive posts are nothing new on social media, of course. But the largest platforms, including Meta, Twitter, Google’s YouTube and ByteDance’s TikTok, have become much more active in recent years in developing and enforcing rules that restrict posts deemed threatening or hateful toward other users or groups of people. Those efforts have at times drawn backlash from prominent conservatives, from former president Donald Trump to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to Musk, who argue tech companies have gone too far in suppressing conservative voices.

So, telling people that they can’t go around threatening to murder other people is “suppressing conservative voices”? That’s a confession. Apparently, killing people who are different in some way has now become a conservative value.

I’m all in favor of suppressing conservatives then, just as I’m in favor of suppressing the KKK.

Ask me questions on Thursday!

I was contemplating my crowded daily calendar, and I noticed a gap — there’s an unfilled time slot on Thursday afternoon! This cannot stand. Therefore, I’ll fill it with an Open Q&A session from my office at the University of Minnesota Morris, and invite you all to stop by and pester me with questions and comments and complaints. Let’s try it and see how it goes.

Oops. And then I remembered there was a one-time temporary change to my teaching schedule for just this one day. Rescheduled slightly to start at 10:30am Central.

Can we at least try to be better people? Just for today, at least?

It’s Indigenous People’s Day! I hope everyone takes a moment to think about the people who were here in the Americas first.

You know what weirds me out, that I find terribly troubling about humanity? That in 1492 an intelligent man made a long, difficult journey from Europe to the Caribbean, where he met the Taíno people and their sophisticated culture, and he decided that the appropriate thing to do was to use guns and swords to enslave, rape, mutilate, and murder people to steal their labor and wealth. I don’t understand that at all. It’s certainly not how I would respond to discovering a new civilization, even if it was militarily weaker than mine. This would be an opportunity to learn new ideas and, even if I was a capitalist at heart, establish new trade networks of mutual benefit.

Fortunately, to feed my cynicism and learn how that could be, all I have to do is open today’s newspaper.

There’s Trump, baiting audiences with an opportunity to use a racial slur.

Surrounded by his adoring flock, Trump bellowed, “You know Putin mentioned the n-word. Do you know what the n-word is?”

Plenty of people shouted the answer they thought Trump was looking for — because there is only one answer. Hardly surprised by the response to his purposefully provocative question, Trump jumped in and said, “No, no, no, it’s the ‘nuclear’ word.”

There’s Tommy Tuberville, inciting racists with his claim that the Democrats want to support reparations because, in his mind, the victims of slavery are synonymous with the perpetrators of crimes. Hey, Tommy, the criminals were the ones who kidnapped people and then made them work in cane and tobacco and cotton fields. But as one of the dumbest people in the Senate, you wouldn’t know that.

Tuberville, appearing with Trump in a rural area of Nevada in support of those candidates, first told the crowd that the Democratic Party is “pro-crime, they want crime.” Then he exclaimed, “They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have.” What that means is hard to say, but GOP leaders know their base well, so telling the audience that Democrats want to steal what you have was the message Tuberville believes will animate some Republican voters.

Tuberville’s comment that caused such a backlash must also be viewed in the same light. Raising his voice in anger, the senator shouted, “They want reparations, because they think the people that do the crime are owed that! Bullsh**!” That line drew big cheers from the audience, with Tuberville adding, “They are not owed that.”

Then you see right-wing radio hosts blaming the Holocaust on LGBTQ people.

Do you know that part of the Weimer Republic was social degeneracy Europe had never seen before? Do you know, the whole LGBTQ thing? Do you know, that was going wild in places like Berlin at this time? And do you know that there were so many Germans, Jew-hatred or not, so many Germans who were willing to accept anything to make that degeneracy stop? They wanted it stopped. This is actually part – I’m glad you brought this up. This is part of why I’ve been warning time and time and time again – not cheering for – warning.

We’re still finding the bodies of dead Indian children at boarding schools.

Between 1869 and the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were removed from their homes and families and placed in boarding schools operated by the federal government and the churches. Though we don’t know how many children were taken in total, by 1900 there were 20,000 children in Indian boarding schools, and by 1925 that number had more than tripled. The U.S. Native children that were voluntarily or forcibly removed from their homes, families, and communities during this time were taken to schools far away where they were punished for speaking their native language, banned from acting in any way that might be seen to represent traditional or cultural practices, stripped of traditional clothing, hair and personal belongings and behaviors reflective of their native culture. They suffered physical, sexual, cultural and spiritual abuse and neglect, and experienced treatment that in many cases constituted torture for speaking their Native languages. Many children never returned home and their fates have yet to be accounted for by the U.S. government.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at what that jerk Columbus did when he found new people — he exploited them.

I suggest a taxonomic revision. No longer “Homo sapiens,” because boy, that is a misnomer, and instead classify us as “Homo culus,” because we’re naturally assholes.

I’ll miss the Pacific Ocean

Wait, no, I won’t. I’ll be long gone. I expect the human species will be extinct by then. This is entirely predictable, that thanks to ongoing plate tectonics, eventually the continents will collide into a super-continent, Amasia.

It won’t actually be named that, of course, since the hyper-intelligent spiders that evolve to replace us won’t be using English.

Biology will get interesting, though.

Surrounded by a new superocean, the newly formed supercontinent will also have decreased biodiversity.

“Earth as we know it will be drastically different when Amasia forms. The sea level is expected to be lower, and the vast interior of the supercontinent will be very arid with high daily temperature ranges,” Li said. “Currently, Earth consists of seven continents with widely different ecosystems and human cultures, so it would be fascinating to think what the world might look like in 200 million to 300 million years’ time.”

It’ll be a harsher world in many ways, but at least it won’t have Homo sapiens screwing it up further. Also, you might want to start getting on the good side of the hyper-intelligent spiders.

The prize for coolness under pressure goes to…

Ariel Elias, a comedian who was doing a comedy set in front of a few MAGA rednecks who didn’t like what she was saying and threw a whole can of beer with great force at her. She scooped it up and drank it while mocking them. I was impressed.

It’s got to be tough to be doing comedy in a bar attended by deplorables. I did notice, though, that when she called for support, the overwhelming majority of the crowd cheered in her favor — the few MAGAts must be feeling isolated and alone, which is good.

Also good: the beer-flinger is being prosecuted for his actions.