What the Ivies have tended towards for generations now are “super conformers” — straight As and spent all their time in adult run extra-curriculars. People who spent all their time doing what authority wants. But in the past, they did seek out a few of the very smartest, too.
But, with the triumphal fall of the USSR and the “End of History” the Ivies decided that the system no longer needed smart people and stopped looking for them, they wanted nothing but super-conformers. But every system needs some smart people who aren’t entirely conformist.
This was anecdotal but fit everything I was seeing. Now here’s another data point:
This tracks my interactions with Ivy League grads exactly. Some of the older ones are brilliant, but anyone younger than their later 40s is a drone. Perhaps an intelligent drone, but a drone nonetheless.
People who are super conformers can’t actually be good analysts or creatives, because they can’t think original thoughts or challenge consensus views. And if you can’t do that, you can’t do paradigm changing real things or say “uh, boss, what we’re doing won’t work.”
American elites didn’t want any non-conformists any more. They wanted smart yes-men. So they lost Russia and sold their military, technological and industrial lead to China. They got filthy rich in exchange, in dollars that in 20 years won’t buy anything that matters internationally, leaving them as the equivalent of rich Indians in 1990. Yeah, you have servants and gold toilets and a mansion, but you run a country that doesn’t actually matter, and outside your gilded circle your society is a garbage dump. (If you visited India in those years you know that’s barely a metaphor. It’s just a description.)
What I have seen over and over again thru my adult life is that being right against the consensus is a career killer. (It sure did nothing for my career, but I’ve seen it in plenty of cases so this isn’t just “Ian is a bitter failure!” Heh.) I remember a study looking at media pundits who got the Iraq war right: people in the system already—fired, laid off or never promoted again. Pundits who got it wrong, but with the consensus? Their careers did well, thanks.
Incentives like this are picked up on quickly. You want everyone to be wrong with the elite consensus? You’ll get it! (See Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein for the centrist pundit versions.)
And this is just as true in most corporations. Look at all the morons jumping on the AI train. Spending trillions rather than just waiting and buying the tech once it’s clear which models work (and probably just using a Chinese open source model.)
Now, of course, this “be wrong with the crowd” incentive has always been most of the case in the sense that being wrong against the crowd would get you fired, and being wrong with the crowd wouldn’t usually hurt your career. But there was a time when the mavericks who were right against the crowd were rewarded and glorified, and that mattered.
Post collapse of the USSR and during the “End of History” era (Fukuyama is the poster boy for “got everything wrong but said what elites wanted to hear so was rewarded far beyond his merits”) elites didn’t want to hear anything but how everything they produced, including their shit, smelled like roses. There was no competition, so they didn’t have to be competent or care about results.
Or so they thought. Turns out that Russia wasn’t down permanently, just for a generation or two, and that China was real competition, but being smart they followed Deng’s prescription “Hide your strength, bide your time” and sucked up to American elites, whispering “send us your industry and we’ll make you rich and you won’t have to put up with uppity American workers and unions!”
American elites got what they wanted. The pure peace of being able to smash anyone who contradicted them, the joy of forcing workers to work for less and less and shut the fuck up about wanting to share in profits, vast wealth, plus two generations of courtiers who were entirely yes men, telling them how wonderful they were. “Oh no my lord, your shit smells like lilacs! Yes my lord, I’d love to lick it up, it tastes like bacon!”
China got what it wanted: the tech and industrial lead and the end of American hegemony.
No leader worth his salt doesn’t have a few people around him saying “you know, Jack, I don’t think this is a good idea.”
It’s been a long time since America had any leaders worth their salt.
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spud
most bad stuff before 1993 was reversible, after 1993, its not reversible, at least by conventional means.
when you have leadership like this, don’t think that the rest of the upper tier of your country will not follow, they will.
bill clinton ok’ed our producer of magnets, to get bought out by the chinese, then then moved the factory to china.
the smell of money is to much for the sick with greed elites to pass up.
https://www.seacoastonline.com/story/news/politics/2008/05/01/clinton-leaves-key-details-out/52429993007/
“Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., and Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-Ind., said the move would leave the United States without a significant domestic source of rare-earth magnets used in smart bombs. The Valparaiso plant made about 80 percent of the magnets bought by the Pentagon, they said.
The administration didn’t block the move.
The Clinton campaign said she doesn’t mention the role her husband played in the sale because it wasn’t relevant.
“In 1995, when this group bought Magnequench, there were assurances made that production would stay in the United States,” said Clinton campaign spokesman Jonathan Swain.
“The important thing is that in 1995, there was no indication that this production would leave the United States. Based on the information at the time this was reviewed, there was no indication that there was some risk to national security because these jobs would stay in the United States.”
Asked why the administration wasn’t concerned when the Chinese operators opened a factory in China, he said the real problem arose during the Bush administration when U.S. production was shut down.”
——————
and of course more brilliant moves that satisfied the moneyed elites.
https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/98-485.html
The Clinton administration authorized the sale of a Loral-made satellite to China in February 1998, despite concerns from Justice Department prosecutors about potential violations of export law. This sale was part of a broader controversy regarding the transfer of missile technology and national security implications related to U.S.-China relations. Wikipedia EveryCRSReport
Overview of Satellite Sales to China During the Clinton Administration
The Clinton administration was involved in several significant satellite sales to China, which raised national security concerns.
Key Events
Date Event Description
February 1998 President Clinton authorized the sale of a Loral-made satellite to China, despite Justice Department opposition due to ongoing investigations.
October 1998 Clinton signed legislation returning control of satellite exports from the Commerce Department to the State Department, citing national security concerns.
1996 The administration shifted satellite export control to the Commerce Department, aiming to boost commercial interests. This decision faced criticism after allegations of unauthorized technology transfers emerged.
National Security Concerns
Investigations revealed that U.S. companies, particularly Loral Space & Communications and Hughes Electronics, may have provided unauthorized assistance to China, potentially aiding its missile technology development.
The Cox Report, released in 1999, detailed China’s espionage activities and the implications of U.S. technology transfers on national security.
Legislative Actions
In response to these concerns, Congress took steps to tighten export controls, reflecting a growing apprehension about the implications of satellite sales on U.S. security.
The combination of commercial interests and national security risks led to a complex and controversial relationship regarding satellite sales to China during this period.
EveryCRSReport Wikipedia
Daniil Adamov
Musa al-Gharbi has a lot on American university conformism on his Substack (and, I assume, in his books). It seems considerably in excess to what I’ve seen of Russian university conformism (though the latter may have gotten a bit worse since then, now that there are somewhat clearer standards of what one should conform to, on some topics; when, as was the case in Russia a decade or two ago, no one knows what you’re supposed to think, it’s hard to conform and a lot of people just end up thinking for themselves for lack of better options).
Jan Wiklund
It isn’t just US, it is “The Quad” as we called it when we, in the 90s, opposed the globalization stuff. The Quad was US, EU, Japan and Canada, the powers that twisted the arms of other countries to make them accept the global ban on industrial policies and the neo-liberal agenda in general.
Europe and Japan are out in the swamp quite as much as the US, but it seems that Canada is slowly awakening?
Feral Finster
AFAICT: the unspoken goal underlying Ivy admissions policies is to admit Asians, but not too many Asians.
StewartM
Spud
most bad stuff before 1993 was reversible, after 1993, its not reversible, at least by conventional means.
I know you seem to be hell-bent on blaming all of the US’s problems on Bill Clinton (avoiding Reagan, and Nixon, and even JFK-LBJ whose 1964 tax cut I believe to be the start of America’s downfall). But it probably wasn’t reversible in 1993 either.
There were Democratic alternatives to Clinton who might have aligned better with your views but Democratic voters didn’t want them. Clinton didn’t win in any landslide by any means so it’s doubtful even a progressive economic populist would have won in 1992. In short, by blaming Clinton you’re absolving American voters (especially working class voters most directly hurt by neoliberalism) of the responsibility the damage that was done to their own lives by their choices, choices largely driven by the Democrats supporting Civil Rights for black people (and others).
Remember Clinton’s Sister Souljah moment? That won him creds. From Wikipedia:
“Prior to his appearance, Clinton’s campaign staff had conducted an intense debate about how far he should go in distancing himself from Jesse Jackson, who was unpopular with moderate voters. When Souljah was invited to speak at the conference, Clinton’s advisors saw their chance. In an essay for The New York Review of Books, Joan Didion, who covered Clinton’s campaign, wrote, “a number of reporters had apparently been told in advance by Clinton aides that Governor Clinton would use his Rainbow speech to demonstrate his ‘independence’ from Jesse Jackson, and the very quotable intemperance of Sister Souljah provided the most logical possible focus for such a demonstration.” Later in the essay, Didion argued that the Sister Souljah incident had been favorably viewed by the media as “a Clinton call for ‘an end to division’ that had at once served to distance him from Jackson and to demonstrate that he was ‘the guy in charge,’ capable of dominating, or ‘standing up to,’ a kind of black anger that many white voters prefer to see as the basis for this country’s racial division.””
Turns out the ubiquity of cell phone cameras later proved that what black people told whites and were disbelieved (i.e., that police planted evidence) was actually true!
Purple Library Guy
@Jan Wiklund I’m not sure Canada is awakening much at all. Canada is turning against Trump specifically and MAGA. But our elites seem very much committed along with the EU to trying to create a “Pre-Trump US-oriented international order without the US”. So, keep on with corporate-oriented free trade and general neoliberal status quo (except without the US), keep on with being enemies with Russia and China (except without the US) and so on. If we could, I think we’d back US dollar hegemony (except without the US).
StewartM
Higher education in America is a mess, for all the reasons you say plus another: higher ed has become exclusively about getting “that job” instead of making one a better, more well-rounded, human being. You have mentioned this, Ian, by your remarks from Jane Jacobs that in the 1930s colleges stopped being centers of education and started to become centers of accreditation.
At my university, I had a passing interest in music. Not that I actually played any instrument well, but playing any instrument is not necessary to compose music. However, all the music composition courses were walled-off against everyone but music majors. The only thing that non-music majors could take was a lame-ass “music appreciation course”, which a music major friend told me “you would know most of that already”.
Why this completely artificial exclusion? All I think it shows is the notion that “college = career/job preparation”. But vocational training is best done by workplaces, not universities. There is no way that a university education, yes, even one at Stanford or MIT can make you an excellent scientist or engineer. One of the reasons for the decline in US science has been that industries have outsourced much of their R&D to industries, and get their R&D work done cheap because of free grad student labor, but that’s also free AMATEUR grad student labor who make mistakes that a professional skilled in the art would not make. The “10,000 hours of practice to achieve excellence” rule applies here as well, and those grad students, no matter how smart they are, don’t have anywhere close to 10,000 hours in anything.
As per an example, there has been an effort to measure blood sugar levels by near-infrared spectroscopy directly on the skin to avoid having to draw blood samples. That’s worthwhile for sure, and multiple universities have done such studies showing the feasibility (each one differing in approach) but attempts to port them over to real-life applications fail because of either limitations in the methods and/or the datasets used. On LinkedIn I followed a discussion by an academic who insisted that such methods were suitable for use versus an expert practitioner with many years experience who tried to explain the reasons why these university-created calibration models had always failed when attempts were made to use them with real-life data.
If we really want excellent science again, we fund and expand the national labs. Universities can play a small role in this, but that would be being assigned small chunks of a project better suited for the limited skills of grad students.
Carborundum
The difference from the past isn’t so much that the system is trying to punish those who are against consensus – it’s that the current incarnation of it is heavily weighted towards rewarding those who are the most diligent and connected self-promoters and it’s a lot easier to self-promote to the highest levels swimming with the current rather than against it. One can have quite a nice little career being serially correct outside consensus without self promotion, but it will be a *little* career. Those cutting cheques aren’t going to hand you additional people and resources to work with – so unless you own the shop, the scope is limited. (Of course, the nice thing about this type of little career is that you don’t have to manage, the tedious self-promoters avoid it, and if they’re smart, the bosses learn to leave you alone to produce.)
I think one unmentioned factor with elite US education is that they repositioned themselves as a luxury good, jacking their price at 2-3X inflation and emphasizing their ability to select and place “complete, well-rounded” products into lucrative positions. This was more than just changing admissions criteria. They changed what they do – without really admitting it to themselves – shifting from educational institution to high level placement agency. Fortunately, from what I’ve seen, this is mainly a US development and it doesn’t appear to have so significantly affected Canadian or UK education.
bruce wilder
Centralization and consolidation and network dependency are social diseases.
Joan
I’ve worked clerical jobs at universities for years and one of them was an admissions processor (not at an Ivy). One thing I kept bringing up in meetings was that we shouldn’t go test optional (though my input didn’t move the needle).
Having the ACT or SAT required is a key way to guard against grade inflation in high schools. I’ve seen students have a 4.0 GPA and get an 11/36 on the ACT. That’s not good. Now maybe that kid just has test anxiety, but it does point out that their As in math classes might not mean they can actually do the math on the ACT.
The reverse situation happened a few times: a student had low grades like a 2.8 GPA, but a 34 or 35 on the ACT. That shows they actually know the concepts, and whatever situation they have going on at home or at school is sabotaging their grades. I made sure to notice that and forward it to my manager that they should be admitted anyway.
The actual AP/IB tests are another guard against grade inflation. If you took AP Calc *and* got a 5/5 on the test, then we know you know the concepts, and your GPA is not a result of grade inflation at your high school.
The homeschoolers occasionally produced a genius. I saw kids in Grade 9 (~age 14) already going to a four-year university on their school district’s dime and taking Calc 4 (differential equations) and such. Overall though, there were a lot of huge red flags among the homeschool situations, like parents who couldn’t even format a transcript in Microsoft Word. Our stats on how homeschoolers did, dropout rates and stuff were insane. They got scholarships because they nearly always were awarded all As by their parents, but then they’d dropout because they weren’t actually ready.
mago
Kind of surprised that no one is commenting on the Susie Wiles Vanity Fair interviews that are burning up the internet. Far be it for me to begin that conversation.
Dig it while it lasts.
KT Chong
Relevant:
Death by Meritocracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU_8fJjtGxA
“We like to believe that a meritocracy is the best way to pick society’s winners and losers. In this Friday, September 12, 2025 lecture to his Beijing high school students Professor Jiang Xueqin argues that the meritocracy is destroying America.”
“He argues that Harvard created the meritocracy for its own benefit. Harvard’s endowment has skyrocketed at the expense of American democracy, social mobility, and political unity. ”
The one-hour lecture is in English. Jiang himself is a Yale alumni.
ibaien
as someone who came of age at an ivy pipeline high school in the 90s, i can attest that of the top 10 students 7 were asian, and they were all the most tedious, grade-grubbing losers. the only original thought would have concerned how to cheat on a test. i’m also sure most of their parents were paying full freight for college tuition. if your university had to choose between admitting some spergy genius scholarship kid or a chaebol scion coughing up $70k a year for a piece of paper…
bruce wilder
Re: AI LLM and search
AI search has become very, very good at summarizing consensus. If you are a member of the elite, dues fully paid up, it is cheaper than ever to find out what the consensus is, without much intellectual effort.
I am not sure how I distinguish my own reasoning from my own mimicry of rhetoric I have found impressive. But, if I do not have to think at all to produce a consensus script, then what?
spud
excellent!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tJJv6rLdBg
Venezuela Proved America is FINISHED I Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr. Warns
spud
StewartM,
it was not the support for civil rights that wiped out the democrats in the south, it was free trade.
clinton ran as a segregationist and a overt racist. he opened his campaign at stone mountain georgia, with mostly black prisoners held in custody.
https://jacobin.com/2016/09/stone-mountain-kkk-white-supremacy-simmons/
even then he just barely made it into the presidency, because a populist outed clinton for what he was.
it was so so easy for trump to take over the GOP. he stood up on the national stage and outed reagan, the bushes, and the cheneys for what they were, and what they had done, and in one night, completely wiped out the country club republicans running the party.
then went on to win by pointing out what bill clinton did to us. stunning the democrats who cannot understand, what they did, and refuse to take the blame.
round two, biden says he will be another FDR, then governs just like bill clinton and started another war for free trade, mucked up school loans reform, which he and bill created, and do not move one inch towards medicare for all, and surprise surprise, trump won again.
sherrod brown understands the situation, he heard about it in 2024 when he lost his bid for re-election.
31 years later, brown kept hearing about bill clintons sellout, nafta.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/16/sherrod-brown-democrats-00189956
By Eugene Daniels11/16/2024 04:00 PM EST
“No, I think it’s national. The national Democratic brand has suffered, again, starting with NAFTA. My first term in the House when NAFTA was voted on. I led the freshman class of 160 Democrats, 40 Republicans, give or take, in opposition to NAFTA. I was in all the strategy meetings, all the vote counts. So, more Democrats voted against NAFTA than for it. More Republicans voted for it than against it. But it was seen [as a mark against Democrats], because we had a Democratic president, even though it was negotiated by a Republican, but that’s all background noise now.
But what really mattered is: I still heard in the Mahoning Valley, in the Miami Valley, I still heard during the campaign about NAFTA.
I’ve seen that erosion of American jobs and I’ve seen the middle class shrink. People have to blame someone. And it’s been Democrats. We are more to blame for it because we have historically been the party of [workers]. They expect Republicans to sell out to their corporate friends and to support the rich. But we don’t expect that from my party — and that’s my future in this party — to focus on helping the Democratic Party and my colleagues understand how important it is that we talk to workers and we make decisions with workers at the table.”
and bernie blew it, not once, but twice. first time on the stage with a person on the stage representing what bill clinton did, and just droned on about the rich, instead of doing what trump did, and said who made the rich so much richer and powerful.
he would have been unstoppable.
then he missed his chance again four years later.
trump just repeated 2016 and won.
today the dim wits are attempting to re-rehabilitate rahm emmanual, and harris says she is going to run again.
even if they win by the skin of their teeth, they will inherit the results of bill clintons policies, and will ride the crash down because they do not believe or understand what they did.
https://www.salon.com/2016/10/02/own-up-to-nafta-democrats-trump-is-right-that-the-terrible-trade-pact-was-bill-clintons-baby/
Own up to NAFTA, Democrats: Trump is right that the terrible trade pact was Bill Clinton’s baby
If the Democrats want to reclaim a progressive identity, they must own up to the dreadful mistakes of the past
By Paul Rosenberg
—————-
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-nafta-lost-democrats-the-south
How NAFTA Lost Democrats the South
By Gavin Wright
Sep 15, 2020
“For thirty years after the Civil Rights Act, a sizable share of white Southerners still voted Democrat. That changed when the party embraced trade deals that hurt American workers. ”
“If this characterization of the two-party South is accurate, the obvious question is why the region’s voters moved so decisively to the right from the mid-1990s onward. In the extensive literature discussing this question, it seems to have escaped attention that much of the South experienced wrenching economic dislocation at precisely this time, as the manufacturing industries that had formed the core of the regional economy began their historic descent in response to import competition. In southern politics, trade policy was front and center.
One highly visible object was NAFTA, enacted in November 1993 with vigorous backing from President Clinton, and implemented on January 1, 1994. Although supported by some parts of the industry, NAFTA was strongly opposed by workers and unions in textile areas (as well as the industrial Midwest). The origins of the pact were bipartisan, but Clinton took most of the blame, and Democrats voting in favor suffered badly at the polls in 1994.
Of perhaps even greater regional significance was the 1994 Agreement on Textile and Clothing, negotiated as part of the WTO’s Uruguay Round. The agreement phased out the import quotas of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) over the ten-year period 1994-2004. The demise of the MFA precipitated rapid growth of imports of textiles and apparel from many countries, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia and Canada. The expansion of Chinese imports after 2001 added another inflection point to the downward spiral, helping to explain why early projections underestimated the speed of change so severely.
This account should not be understood as a suggestion that switching party allegiance was a rational response to economic distress, nor that displaced textile workers were the cutting edge of southern Republicanism. The argument instead is that the political-economic basis for a biracial coalition was undermined by deindustrialization.
Ruy Texeira and Alan Abramowitz show that Democratic identification among lower socioeconomic white southerners fell sharply in the 1990s, and even more dramatically thereafter. In an update to their 2006 book, Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston acknowledge a post-2000 Republican shift among low-income southern white voters, “the people who for forty years rejected the new southern Republican party.”
Eric Anderson
Interesting timing, this.
I just had a talk with my 8yr old last night, who, no surprise, is reading way above grade level. But, he’s not reading anything of substance. Pap “graphic novels” and shit like that. Thinks he’s accomplished just because the books he’s reading have some number on them telling the “reading level.”
Well, he got the “conformist” talk. That, if his goal in life is to be average like everyone else, then keep listening his teachers who are teaching to the lowest common denominator. Told him about my experiences growing up pouring through National Geographics, reading newspapers, and pulling every book I could off my parents’ shelves because I wanted to know what the adults knew and I knew the answers were in those books.
I was a consistent B student because I didn’t do homework. I read voraciously instead. Today? Everyone I know in those AP classes are so stupid and conformist it stings.
Feral Finster
Purple Library Guy is correct:
Canada is not turning against the empire at all, just against Trump. In fact, nothing would delight the catamites in europe and canada more than an American Empire, but with someone at bit less clownish in charge of it.
StewartM
Bruce Wilder
AI search has become very, very good at summarizing consensus. If you are a member of the elite, dues fully paid up, it is cheaper than ever to find out what the consensus is, without much intellectual effort.
Once I was looking for a source (Rolf-Dieter Muller) for a book on German preparation for Barbarossa in 1941. Muller’s book, based on German sources, also details the military discussions between Nazi Germany and Poland from 1935-1939 (up to a few months before the German attack on Poland!) of a joint invasion by the two countries of the USSR. The invasion talks broke down because Poland wanted both Ukraine and Lithuania as its reward (in essence, re-creating medieval Greater Poland) while Germany also wanted the Ukraine.
BUT, Google’s AI response was that (paraphrasing) “No, the poor innocent Poles did no such thing” despite the indisputable evidence that they actually did.
On current events, when I tried Googling “US citizens being deported by ICE” the AI answer was that “No, ICE does not deport US citizens” despite by simply going to a Wikipedia article you can see a list (with discussion) of US citizens who have been deported (including military veterans). Google’s AI answer seems almost completely generated by Trumpian Homeland Security DouplePlusGood Newsspeak.
bruce wilder
StewartM: My position is that we live in an information vacuum. Every effort to arrive at a political judgment or coherent view is fatally undermined by the loss of journalistic integrity and the voluntary silo’ing of partisans.
With the right follow-up prompts, I think you can nudge the major LLMs into agreeing with you on pretty much any subject. They can summarize the approved dogma of whatever faction you reveal you have enlisted with. As for Wikipedia, any topic can fall into a disputatious sewer without notice. The CIA appears to edit whatever concerns them. I myself am fighting the good fight on a couple of esoteric economics topics.
Many people invested in political disputation online are also invested in patented narratives and they cannot or will not expose their narrative to critical review, or inconvenient facts. Just today I have been confronted online by folks denying that Robert E Lee was a traitor, because his mythos was key to national reconciliation or something. I am deeply steeped in the facts, but that doesn’t matter to any one. I got to see a clip of Ben Shapiro celebrating Its a Wonderful Life (but Ben added that Potter was the real hero because he was the only sensible banker. You can’t make these things up. 🤨) The topper has been the Brown University shooting. Was the Brown U professor a Jew? Was the MIT Portuguese physicist? Narrative hunger demands answers. And doubt apparently.
The modern elite habits of mind and strategies for personal self-esteem confuse narrative with fact, never mind “truth”. They fill the “training sets” with their drivel and voila! the AI goddess validates their thesis, whatever it may be. The earth is flat and the sun revolves around something, something.
bruce wilder
The Robert E Lee issue might be a good one to meditate on. Erecting statues of him was a path to white reconciliation near the peak of Jim Crow (~1900-1930) A lot of human braincells were expended the old-fashioned way formulating rhetoric to thread that needle.
Getting some people to see that we failed to “reconcile” the slaves and their descendants adequately or in a timely fashion until much later or even that, as a creedal nation-state we needed to, is another issue. Even more delicate an issue at this moment is the problem of the amoral political cynicism of “the black misleadership class” which is the product of betrayed national ideals.
That is the moral and political territory AI LLM is traversing, attempting to formulate authoritative rhetorical “consensus”. These are political minefields for human “intelligence” and we imagine AI will self-drive a path to “consensus” without collisions or corpses? Hah!
Poland, the Nazi’s and the Soviets, circa 1938-9, I imagine is similar “moral” political territory, even now that the fall of the Soviet Union has left us at the Curzon Line. (Stalin: “Am I less Russian than Lord Curzon?”)
Bob
For various reasons I have a deep mistrust of doctors and it occurred to me they all have to be goody goody rule followers to get through their schooling. So the medical field completetely filters out anyone who has a functioning mind.
@Spud that video is interesting but feels like an AI thing. Very very weird. It does look like a man speaking but my AI sensor is beeping.