The reason why the footage is old is that Russians raped the Texan dude to death.

The 4 Russian soldiers who did it were sentenced to jail time and then immediately released and sent to the front lines again.

The story is very symbolic of all pro-Russian Americans. Russians don’t care if you are on their side. If you are American, they hate you.

Why was she annoyed, though? I wouldn’t be annoyed. I would be mega happy for my husband getting some positive reinforcement at a doctor’s visit.

People are way too touchy about things. The dude is in his late 70s! He should enjoy all the compliments he can get at this stage in life.

The husband of the new department chair is a judge. Meaning, he is very busy at work. But he came early to campus this morning and found somebody to unlock the department for him to leave a bouquet of flowers and a sheaf of patriotic balloons to mark his wife’s first day as department chair. He is a Republican, and she is Venezuelan hence the patriotic balloons.

These people have been married for over 25 years and have three children. And they still have such a romantic, beautiful marriage. I’m not saying that this is because they are Republicans, of course. My closest friend at the department is far left and also in an extremely loving marriage with a bunch of happy children. He lights up like a Christmas tree whenever anybody mentions his wife, even in passing.

It’s beautiful. It makes me so happy to observe these wonderful, profound, long-lasting marriages.

Matt Walshes of the past were completely right about the Hart-Celler Act, Reagan’s amnesty, and every amnesty in between and after. So I’m not sure what point this dude is trying to make.

People often forget that in order to argue productively against somebody’s position, it first makes sense to find out what that position is. This is a standard problem in the debates between the left and the right. The right is very familiar with the left’s position because it’s the official one, transmitted through every public institution for decades. People on the Left, and I was one of them until roughly 2016, are utterly unfamiliar with the narratives of the Right because it’s necessary to go digging in order actually to find them. I was stunned when I actually discovered what it is that right-wingers believe. It bore no resemblance to what I had been told by the left that the right believed.

I highly recommend to the well-meaning people on the left, who are the absolute majority, because these are good, kind, well-meaning people, not to assume that you know. Ask questions, have conversations, and you will discover things that you were never told even existed.

A reader’s life often travels along confusing paths. In Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, which was the very first novel I read in German, the characters discuss Henrik Ibsen’s play “The Wild Duck”. Of course, I had to re-read “The Wild Duck” in order better to understand Bernhard’s novel. After doing that, I started wondering if other authors had been inspired by the play in their own work. This is how I came across the Norwegian writer Dag Solstad and his novel Shyness and Dignity.

It is an excellent novel. The main character is a 53-year-old high school teacher of Norwegian literature named Elias Rukla. At the beginning of the novel, he tries to share with his students his original new reading of Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck.” The students are completely indifferent to his efforts, and Rukla ends up having a massive freak out right in front of the students. As he walks home after this debacle, the teacher thinks about the events in his life that led him to this point.

Shyness and Dignity is a short novel. It’s one of those breathless, very European narratives that offer a glimpse into the mind of an everyday neurotic. If you’re into this kind of writing and like to follow all of the little psychological clues that the author drops throughout the novel, then the seemingly mundane ending of the book will strike you as absolutely explosive. If, however, you do not believe that the daily life of everyday people is the most fascinating thing imaginable, then you will find the novel boring. The book starts slow as the readers get to experience the tedium of a failed class in Norwegian literature that Elias Rukla is teaching, but after that the novel really picks up the pace and becomes downright addictive.

I loved Shyness and Dignity. It is hard to say based on only one novel, but it is possible that I have found a new favorite writer.

THEO VON: “Was there anybody who was immune to COVID-19?”

DR. MCCULLOUGH: “There’s one adult group. You’re going to laugh.”

[Theo Von listens closely for the reveal]

DR. MCCULLOUGH: “Smokers… They got very mild cases. And they don’t get long COVID.”

THEO VON: “Why?”

MCCULLOUGH: “Because smokers maintain a level of nicotine in the bloodstream… Smoking blocks the spike protein. It’s amazing. I thought smokers were going to go down.”

It’s true. I am extremely fortunate in that I was following all of the research very closely at the time. When I got Covid and things started getting really bad, instead of going to the hospital to be put on a ventilator and probably not survive, I headed over to the nearest gas station and bought a pack of cigarettes. The symptoms started clearing up so fast that it was like a miracle.

This was all known to scientists pretty early in the pandemic. I could cure myself because I read the research.

A colleague who was my strongest supporter before she retired emailed me this morning to say, “Six hours and 40 minutes left. Congratulations on the freedom.”

I do have a bit of a countdown going in my head until this last day of my term as department chair runs down. Of course, even though I stop being chair, I continue being me, so I already scheduled two meetings for tomorrow. One is to get to know our new Ukrainian Fulbrighter, and another is to advance the hiring process I’ve led until now.

For the first time in six years, I will no longer have to file absence permission slips. It feels really weird. All the freedom! So I don’t mind the two meetings I opted into tomorrow because they all happened out of freedom.

The social media are smoldering with the disappointment of the right-wing commentariat. I understand the feeling. I’m also not happy about the decision, although it was a foregone conclusion that SCOTUS would win against the administration’s request.

However, there have been some really great, helpful decisions recently. Overall, Trump’s second administration is at a whole other level compared with the first. We are very fortunate. Things are imperfect, and it will take a long time to unravel the decades of leftist lunacy in every area of life. But today we’re experiencing positive momentum in a good direction. When were things ever more hopeful at any time this century? When did we get as much good news and as many important wins as we are getting now?

As we are preparing to celebrate the 250th birthday of our country, let’s ponder these many blessings and not concentrate too much on the real, yet not decisive, setbacks.

Chinese and Americans reacted to lower birth rates in opposite ways. In Chinese people, this provoked a collective desire to wring every ounce of utility from the few children they do have, turning them into little productivity machines since daycare. Americans went in the opposite direction of over-coddling each child and raising precious little princesses of both sexes who often believe that editing down their endless whims is a terrible imposition

The contrast is clear in Lenora Chu’s book Little Soldiers. Both systems are ugly because they go to extremes. A child edited down by parents and teachers to the point where he is a cog with barely any individuality is as ugly as a child who never had to self-edit at all.

One of the most striking chapters in the book is the one where Chu describes a math lesson in a Chinese school and at a school in Massachusetts. In the former, the teacher behaves like a prison guard, while in the latter, she literally crawls on the ground like a worm in subservience to her students. It’s interesting that both these school systems are a reaction to the same phenomenon of dropping birth rates. And they both stink.

Somebody should make this prick switch homes every 3 to 4 days for a couple of years.

If anything, the children should stay in the same house, and the parents should switch in and out with all their stuff, etc., to prevent disruption for the children.

Obviously, I don’t support either strategy. A 50/50 custody is a dumb idea.