A simple test to determine whether you have truly lost your mind (and assess the extent of the reversible damage)

It's as tempting to give up on the flood of insanity as it is to try keep pace with it

I feel as if I haven’t written anything in a few weeks. Reviewing other people’s work involves generating words and ideas, but requires almost no creativity and is just an elaborate form of reacting. And the material I’m reacting to in the official running media has become so lazy, inaccurate, and otherwise self-immolating that most of it is indistinguishable from uninspired satire. But like a YouTuber who substitutes reacting for independent thinking, this habit lets me churn out posts, some of which are perhaps entertaining. And when I’m writing about distance running, there’s only so much clamor this can cause no matter how churlish or derogatory the tone or content, as only an estimated 726 to 771 people worldwide now even regard distance running as a sporting enterprise rather than a “scene” to be populated with privileged, clueless crybabies.

In a good way, I’ve been busier in recent months during the week than I had been for a while, so I have a little less time to devote to more thoughtful pieces. But I’ve also been consciously avoiding getting deeper into topics of broader interest, because I’m as tempted as anyone else to question why I should even bother continuing to remark on the absurdities, lies, and cruelties of powerful people who are no longer really hiding any of their aims or strategies from even their own supporters, be those supporters leftists, “liberals,” conservatives, or heterodox in sociopolitical orientation.

Maybe I will start writing again soon. Perhaps this post will serve as a catalyst for that, even if what’s below is just more kicking the stuff deep in the can a few more meters up the road while trying to avoid the unhelpful shouting, sorting, and categorizing of everyday individuals.

I do have a test of sorts to offer, though.

Tucker Carlson is a longtime journalist who was fired last year from the conservative propaganda outlet Fox News for being overly honest about the level of corruption of the people ultimately paying his salary. Toward the end, he had lost all of his major advertisers, but his primetime Fox News show was by far the most-viewed program on cable television. When he was sacked without notice or explanation, the other two major American cable-television propaganda outlets, CNN and MSNBC, and their dwindling pool of acolytes giddily blamed this on whatever personal factors they found most convenient, usually defaulting to unsupported allegations of racism and sexism.

Carlson started his own show on the antisocial-media platform now known as X, which I strongly encourage everyone to abandon. While I post many images from that site here myself, these uniformly result from someone sending me links to posts, and it’s been close to a year since I’ve been interactive there. Elon Musk is as ultimately both as diabolical and as malleable as everyone else with his financial heft, and his supplicating fanboys are as deluded about his motives, bravery, and intellect as any other batch of plebes in need of an icon who’s that one exception to the rule about ultra-wealthy humans in an age when the World Health Organization and its public-relations arm, the World Economic Forum, exert as much or control than national governments.

Maybe you know where this is going. Carlson interviewed Russian president Vladimir Putin on February 6 at the Kremlin in Moscow (or Moskva, to you commies).

Although the U.S. is not at war with Russia and despite a long American tradition of interviewing foreign leaders of ill repute within the U.S. citizenry, the establishment went absolutely berserk even by its own spittle-spraying, paranoia-belching standards. Some pundits, including Bill Kristol, called for Carlson to be banned from returning to the U.S. Kristol and his warmongering pals are the ones who should be booted from the country and shot if they try to re-enter by any means with exception of the Texas-Mexico border, now understood to be a quaint relic of an era where national sovereignty and all that went with this mattered to the American government.

I doubt I have to explain the reasons that the act of Carlson’s interview was itself by definition benign. No matter what you think of him or Putin personally, this is just obvious to anyone who still values intellectual honesty. As a result, I shouldn’t have to explain the true reasons that members of the mainstream media and other blithering, stinking assholes and rotboxes—led, naturally, by Hillary Clinton’s furiously fuming anovaginal apparatus—were enraged about this event.

I watched the interview. Most of you probably already have too. My sense is that the two did not warm up to each other, meaning that I was impressed with Carlson spending the last fifteen or so minutes of his time imploring Putin to release Wall Street Journal reporter and U.S. citizen Evan Gershkovitch, who has been detained by Russia as a political prisoner since last March.

But my “take” isn’t what matters. What I’m hoping is that the number of people willing to be fooled by the hysterical, censorious, debased nonsense coming from the people in charge of what is left of the country is shrinking or at least stable. I’m hoping that not many people reading this believe, or even could be convinced, that someone interviewing Vladimir Putin is an immoral, or be any definition improper, act. If you think Carlson was wrong to do what he did, your mind has been hijacked and you should be asking yourself how this happened.

This is only one facet of the burgeoning international spectacle that captivated and mortified the citizenry late in the week. Special counsel Robert Hur released a report on Thursday of President Joe Biden Junior’s mishandling of classified documents. Hur explicitly recommended not punishing an old man whose brain had clearly turned to mush, noting that a jury was likely to see the same picture.

Hur, who is of course a member of Biden’s own Department of Justice, did not delve into why such a person should be able to remain president of the United States or even someone who checks membership IDs at a health club. But one does not include details like these in a report unless he or she is trying to convey a message that should be shouted though a megaphone in the equivalent of a frantic whispered aside:

For whatever clownworld-inspired reason, the White House decided it would be a good idea for Biden to hold a press conference defending his own memory and mental clarity. I cannot stand Biden, but you’d have to be a sadist to truly find the results of this escapade funny.

I was amazed that the reporters actually behaved like reporters; maybe the fact that Biden will obviously be replaced as the Democratic nominee in the 2024 presidential election by someone like Michelle Obama or Gavin Newsom compelled the editors in charge of these reporters to go for blood, because these stenographers and simp-alongs never act like journalists unless ordered to—and often not even then because they lack the basic skills to impersonate the curious.

It was not that long ago that I was being told by vestigial Democrats who haven’t figured out the deal that Biden merely has a stuttering problem. That was an unmoored judgment then, but I doubt even the most committed remaining earnest Joe Biden supporters—whoever they are—would say this now.

Perhaps the fact that most of U.S. Congress is also come combination of pants-crappingly senile, wet-brained, and battered by serial cerebrovascular events has helped Americans open their eyes.

Why do they insist on holding on to their seats for so long? The information below, courtesy of Unusual Whales, could offer one clue:

Anyway, assuming you failed the other test and think Tucker Carlson is the anti-American zealot, try this one: Do you think Joe Biden is fit to remain in office? Never mind the fact that evidence exists of his taking of massive bribes, even if most Dems don’t know about this or refuse to confront the fact. Actually, pretend he started his term as the best national leader in global history. Do you think he has the wherewithal to be president now?

Avoiding or reversing the kind of brainwashing that leads to agreeing with people like Clinton, Kristol, and virtually anyone allowed to serve as a cable-“news” personality means avoiding getting your “information” from corporate media outlets—television, online, and print (or “print”). It’s not possible to keep these assholes from trying to ruin everything left for commoners with lies, greed, and astonishingly bad judgment and consequent annihilation-based recklessness hither and yon. It’s possible to not treat it as legitimate or, just as bad, as good-faith errors.

These people despise us, and they recognize that more of us are starting to realize how truly hateful and contemptuous of us they are. Even if the “border deal” bill is D.O.A., what other that the threat of imprisonment would even motivate American citizens to pay their tax bills at this stage, let alone vote in elections?

That emerging recognition on the part of the ruling class—that even dimwits and the strongly partisan are beginning to view this busted-up version of America through not merely dismal but convergently dismal lenses—could make things dangerous for freedom-lovers and uninhibited “bloggers” in a hurry, even for those of us living in one of the only two countries on Earth that the United States is unlikely to bomb within the month.