Thanks to the Reader Who Bought Extra Strength Horny Goat Weed Extract with Muira Puama, Maca Root, and L Arginine — All Natural Boost for Men and Women!

Heh.

Maybe I'll pick up a couple of bottles for myself, lol.

At Amazon, Extra Strength Horny Goat Weed Extract with Muira Puama, Maca Root, L Arginine, 1000mg Epimedium, Icariins - for Men & Women - All Natural Boost (Havasu Nutrition).

Thanks again!

And thanks to all of my readers who're shopping through my Amazon links.

As you know, I don't blog for money, but I'm having more fun than ever blogging about books, and linking my great finds through the Amazon webpage. All your purchases fund an associate's commission, at no extra cost to yourself.

It's really appreciated!

Sean Hannity: Democrats and Leftist Media Seek to Delegitimize and Destroy President Trump (VIDEO)

I don't check these things, but I'll bet Hannity's ratings are through the roof. I do know leftists tune in. I mentioned it the other day.

In any case, here's last night's monologue, at Fox News, "Hannity: Real collusion is between Democrats and the media (VIDEO)."

Michael A. Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War

At Amazon, Michael A. Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security, 1919–1941.

Akira Iriye, Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific

At Amazon, Akira Iriye, The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific.

Edward Vose Gulick, Europe's Classical Balance of Power

At Amazon, Edward Vose Gulick, Europe's Classical Balance of Power: A Case History of the Theory and Practice of One of the Great Concepts of European Statecraft.

Evelyn Taft's Heat Advisory Forecast

That high pressure's coming on strong this weekend.

It'll be pushing 90 degrees in the L.A./O.C. metro areas, and double-digits in the valleys. Palm Spring's expecting 113 degrees.

So, stay cool if you're in the area.

Here's the lovely Ms. Evelyn, who's looking great!

For CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Martin Gilbert, The First World War

At Amazon, Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History.

Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms

At the time, back in 1994, this book was considered one of the best ever published on the war.

At Amazon, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II.

Nina Agdal's Vajazzle (VIDEO)

Via Theo Spark:

New Demi Rose Bikini Pics

She's really spectacular.

At London's Daily Mail, "Busty Demi Rose Mawby leaves VERY little to the imagination as she flaunts her assets and eye-popping derriere in a scanty bikini while sunning in Ibiza."

Also, "Sun's out, buns out! Demi Rose Mawby flaunts her eye-popping peachy derriere in skimpy thong-cut swimsuit during Ibiza getaway."

She calls Ibiza her "second home."

BONUS: At the Sun U.K., "GOD DEM! Demi Rose and glamour model Abigail Ratchford go topless in VERY racy underwear in sizzling new photo shoot: Glamour model shows off her incredible bum in sexy undies and suspenders in mansion shoot with her equally sexy American pal."

Duke University Historian Nancy MacLean Lashes Out at Critics of Her Book, Democracy in Chains

I blogged about the book a couple of weeks ago, when I noticed it was catching quite a buzz, "Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains." Now Professor MacLean's catching a lot of flak for her seriously shoddy scholarship.

Instapundit's been on the case for a while now. See, "NANCY MACLEAN’S DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS: Yet another devastating critique," and "IF YOU CAN’T CRITICIZE LIBERTARIANS WITHOUT LYING ABOUT THEM, MAYBE YOU CAN’T CRITICIZE THEM AT ALL: Some dubious claims in Nancy MacLean’s ‘Democracy in Chains,’ continued." (Check Glenn's search for "Nancy MacLean" for even more hits.)

And here's Inside Higher Ed from a couple of days ago, "Stealth Attack on Liberal Scholar?" She's not "liberal," of course. She'a radical leftist.

And a little blog literature review of the debate, at Cafe Hayek, "Nancy MacLean Unraveled."

Finally, even leftists have taken issue with MacLean. See Henry Farrell and Steven Teles, at Vox, "Even the intellectual left is drawn to conspiracy theories about the right. Resist them" (safe link):

A deep, historical study of public choice would be welcome, and [James] Buchanan’s role in the development of the thought and organizational infrastructure of the right has generally been overlooked. Unfortunately, the book is an example of precisely the kind of work on the right that we do not need, and the intellectuals of the left who have praised it are doing their side no favors...

Ouch.

I'm sure there'll be more outrage surrounding this story, so expect updates.

Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I.

David Fromkin, Europe's Last Summer

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, David Fromkin, Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?

'I'm Bored'

It was the funniest thing: Early this morning, checking Twitter, I see this NBC fake news piece in my feed, "Former Soviet Counter Intelligence Officer at Meeting With Donald Trump Jr. and Russian Lawyer," and then all of a sudden I start singing Iggy Pop's "I'm Bored" in my head, lol.

That's a safe link at Memeorandum. No need to give the idiots at NBC any traffic from my blog.

I'm really bored with the Russia fake news story.

In any case, "I'm Bored" appeared as Track 4, on Side 1, of Iggy's 1979 album "New Values." I saw him in concert at least twice, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and at the Hollywood Palladium. He's everything that you've ever heard about him. I think some of his teeth were knocked out at the time. So fun.

'Smooth'

From yesterday afternoon, when I was out to CVS and the bagel shop.

Santana, at the Sound L.A.:

Jungle Love
Steve Miller Band
2:35 PM

Rock'n Me
Steve Miller Band
2:32 PM

Abracadabra
Steve Miller Band
2:29 PM

Tush
ZZ Top
2:26 PM

Sharp Dressed Man
ZZ Top
2:22 PM

Legs (Edit Version)
ZZ Top
2:18 PM

Smooth
Santana
2:07 PM

Black Magic Woman / Gypsy Queen
Santana
2:02 PM

Evil Ways
Santana
1:58 PM

Bye Bye Love
The Cars
1:54 PM

Let's Go
The Cars
1:51 PM

Just What I Needed
The Cars
1:47 PM

Good Times Bad Times
Led Zeppelin
1:37 PM

Rock and Roll
Led Zeppelin
1:33 PM

D'yer Mak'er
Led Zeppelin
1:29 PM

Purple Haze
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
1:26 PM

All Along the Watchtower
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
1:22 PM

Fire
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
1:20 PM

Eric Raymond, 'Gramscian Damage'

Glenn Reynolds links to this post every now and then, and since I've been blogging about cultural Marxism today, now's as good a time as any to post it. At Raymond's "Armed and Dangerous" blog, "Gramscian Damage":

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithet. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.

We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions. Yes, the Nazis did this, through organizations like the “German-American Bund” that was outlawed when World War II went hot. Today, the Islamists are having some success at manipulating our politics through fairly transparent front organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

But it was the Soviet Union, in its day, that was the master of this game. They made dezinformatsiya (disinformation) a central weapon of their war against “the main adversary”, the U.S. They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.


The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya. A classic example is the rumor that AIDS was the result of research aimed at building a ‘race bomb’ that would selectively kill black people.

On a different level, in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist Party of the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote non-representational art so that the US’s public spaces would become arid and ugly.

Americans hearing that last one tend to laugh. But the Soviets, following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover. The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism.

Accordingly, the Soviet espionage apparat actually ran two different kinds of network: one of spies, and one of agents of influence. The agents of influence had the minor function of recruiting spies (as, for example, when Kim Philby was brought in by one of his tutors at Cambridge), but their major function was to spread dezinformatsiya, to launch memetic weapons that would damage and weaken the West.

In a previous post on Suicidalism, I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons. Here is that list again:

* There is no truth, only competing agendas.
* All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
* There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
* The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
* Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
* The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
* For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
* When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions...

Keep reading.

PREVIOUSLY: "How Deep is the Left's System of Ideological Indoctrination?", and "Linda Kimball, 'Exposing America's Enemies: The Social Justice Seeking Communist Left'."

Jackie Johnson's Hot Weekend Forecast

It was very mild today, about average temperatures for the L.A./O.C. metro areas, but it's warming up. There's a high pressure system pushing westward that's going to beat back the monsoonal moisture that's been keeping it cool these last couple of days.

As usual, I'm just chillin'. Been reading Fritz Fischer and ordering a few more books on Amazon. I'll start Omar El Akkad, American War, over the weekend.

In any case, here's the lovely Ms. Jackie. You can barely see her baby bump in that beautiful yellow dress. I'm so happy for her!

VIDEO: President Trump Teases Emmanuel Macron on French Security: 'You'd better do a good job...'

President Trump is killing it in Paris!

Watch:



And at Free Beacon, "Trump Teases Macron on Security of France: ‘You’d Better Do a Good Job’."

Mark Hewitson, Germany and the Causes of the First World War

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Mark Hewitson, Germany and the Causes of the First World War.

Emily Ratajkowski St. Lucia (VIDEO)

Following-up from Tuesday, "Emily Ratajkowski for Harper's Bazaar Australia: 'My boobs are too big...'"

At Sports Illustrated: