Every day, I look up what cancer my mother died of and then immediately forget its name. This is obviously psychological. It’s getting so I’m about to ask my AI agent to remember it for me and then bring it up on demand.
Yesterday, I located it after three Google searches, and today I don’t remember what it is yet again.
My father died of advanced myeloid leukemia. It’s three words instead of one, and I remember it easily. Plus, he died a few days after the diagnosis. Still, that I remember.
Tucker Carlson says correctly that Ronald Reagan was an early proponent of legalizing abortion in his state. He also says incorrectly that Reagan signed a large immigration amnesty because he was tired of being called a racist in the press. The reason for both of Reagan’s positions is the same: he was a neoliberal. In fact, he was one of the earliest major politicians who were neoliberals.
Neoliberals are, of course, a variety of liberals. This is why the next big American neoliberal after Reagan was Bill Clinton, who shipped American manufacturing to China. Neoliberals do not like the concept of a country because this concept constrains freedom of movement.
It isn’t the freedom of human beings, however, that interests neoliberals. They will lock you down in a flash if it serves their only real purpose, which is to ensure freedom of movement for flows of money. The direction in which they want the money to be moving is upwards. If it serves that goal to drag large groups of the population across national borders or, alternatively, lock people down in their homes, they will gladly do both.
I asked AI to create a color-coded chart of my readings since 2008. I haven’t digitized the rest of the list, so it had to be past 18 years only. There is a couple of small errors in writers’ names but overall I think it’s really cool:
AI ponderously concluded that it doesn’t look like I’m a casual reader but more of a professional literary critic.
In WB Maxwell’s Mrs Thompson (1911), there’s this beautiful description of how a woman discovers that she missed her period:
As she lay in bed one morning after a night of dreamless sleep, a chance word dropped by Yates set her lazily thinking of the last date on which she had suffered from those normal and not accidental fluctuations of energy that are produced by periodically recurrent causes.
And then when she suspects that she might be pregnant:
Her heart was overflowing with a joy such as she had thought she could never feel again. And with the warm stream of bliss there were gushing fountains of gratitude. She will forgive her husband everything, because he has crowned her life with this ineffable glory. . . Even in the brightly coloured dreams from which realities had so rudely awakened her, she was not advancing towards so triumphant an apotheosis.
Yes, it’s very bombastic and massively wordy. But it’s also quite touching.
Said this about Russell Brand earlier this year, and feel even more strongly about it now about the David Walliams allegations: there should be a staggered age of consent.
Someone in their thirties has no business having sex with a teenager, even if they’re ‘legal’!
https://x.com/AyoCaesar/status/2120193233867112868?a=rQYlWdoPP24DUy8NLOE&s=19
This approach would have deprived me of my nephew and niece, whose parents met when my sister was 19 and my future brother-in-law was 31. There was never anything remotely icky about it. He wanted nothing but a committed relationship from the start and proposed within a couple of years.
People met, fell in love, formed a family, and had children. Everybody should be so lucky. There are no similarities between this wholesome, normal story and whatever Brand and his accusers engaged in. And everybody knows this. We all instinctively find the activities of the Cornell Seven and Jane Doe disgusting, even though they are all the same age. It’s not the age difference, but the activity that is repellent.
It’s not the age difference, but the nature of the relationship that bothers people, but we have been conditioned to be utterly unable to say this. Once you allow yourself to admit that consensual doesn’t mean good, moral, or acceptable, everything becomes much clearer. And we do admit it in every other sort of relationship except for the sexual. It’s only in the realm of sex that we twist ourselves into pretzels, trying to fit our very normal and good moral outrage into the Procrustean bed of consent.
I’m helping out at the school book fair today. Klara is only ten, so she was very happy to see me there. She came over to me, gave me a hug, and then engaged me in conversations with her group of friends.
It’s not going to be like this for long. She’s coming to the stage where she will pretend I don’t exist at this type of events. This is a very important and necessary stage because without it, you end up with a perennially single 40-year-old who says that her mom is her best friend.
The other mom who was helping is the mother of a boy who has liked Klara since kindergarten. I made enormous efforts to impress her in a positive way, because who knows? She might end up being the mother of the groom at my daughter’s wedding. People will find it hard to believe, but I’m extremely fun if I make an effort. Which I almost never do because I find it exhausting.
When you’re celebrating Native Heritage Month, if you’re not including the contributions, efforts & struggles of Afro-Indigenous/Freedmen relatives then you’re anti-Black. Simple as that.
https://x.com/oodhamboi/status/2120260235038540237?a=uAs938tZ1AqF-uEMGXk&s=19
The new iteration of woke is as tiresome as the previous ones.
ICE agents arrested Ann Lawani, a nurse and professor who has lived in Lodi for the last 13 years, during a “targeted enforcement operation” in September
I have no idea how it is possible for somebody who’s in the country illegally and has had a final order of removal since the Obama administration to keep working as a professor. When I was hired at my university, I was told very directly by the university’s immigration office that it was up to me to find a lawyer, pay the lawyer, and get a green card on time if I wanted to continue in my employment after the NAFTA visa that the university had gotten for me ran out.
“Don’t worry about paperwork and this expensive, complicated legal process because you can always work for us as an illegal,” was never suggested. Forget professorships. We don’t even start the paperwork for hiring for the smallest, most insignificant positions until people provide the paperwork attesting to their legal status in the country. My department pays for obligatory background checks for every employee that we attempt to hire. We couldn’t offer such a contract even if we really wanted to, because there is no pathway in the system to do that. If we don’t upload the files containing the valid visa or a green card, we can’t click “Send.”
We once had a person who did try to mislead us about their immigration status, and this is exactly what happened: no paperwork, no clicking on “send.”
I took a test of what type of faces one finds attractive and it says my type is pale-skinned older men with a finance bro look and a prominent nose.
And the men I find unattractive are young, baby-faced, warm, approachable with button noses.
The ethnicities I find attractive are East Slavic, East Slavic (yes, twice), Nordic and Germanic.
I find the test to be very precise.
Can people explain why they downvoted the halal sosiski post? Even if you don’t speak the language, which almost nobody on here does, you’ve got to be able to perceive that the word “sosiski” is funny, right? The word “halal” is also funny. Both words together are really funny. Ha ha. Funny.
People are very touchy for no reason.
A conservative literary critic and college professor
LOL, how one feels with a new crew ;-D https://midwestchick.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/900067490_1117518930975448_7182681009549841429_n.jpg
Those two decisions are obviously wrong headed: abortion may be safe, but it sure as Hell is not rare; and…
Thank you so much for this comment. You have no idea how much it helped. I was trying to make…
There is indeed such a Romeo and Juliet exception in Italy’s age of consent law.
That is so beautiful, and beautifully put. Neoliberal Love cannot come out too soon if it is written with as…
It looks like he resigned from Nvidia.
Everybody’s projecting their own bizarre hang-ups on this dude, when in reality, all of this is about economic competition. I’ve…
I feel the presence of God even more acutely when I’m around the disabled people I know. We should not…
Ah! The classic “if God doesn’t live up to my personal standards that I just invented and give me everything…
IKR? I hope he at least has family who will still love him when he’s not young and spry anymore.
He has been a proponent of selling his chips to China and this made a lot of China hawks unhappy,…
Hey, Anonymous–I’m not entirely unsympathetic to your cause, but I’d suggest it’s time to let this one go for now.…
Parents are not God. You’re pouting at God like you would at a neighbor who borrowed $3 from you and…
I knew there was something shady behind all of these sudden revelation s. I don’t understand why people react like…
You’re not that great of a mind reader. What would you call a parent who purposefully injures their child to…
Jensen is a big proponent of Western open-source models and has made many enemies in Anthropic; Anthropic has a lot…
Tangentially related to this, what is happening with the hysteria around the CEO of Nvidia? I kind of understand the…
LOL ;-D
LOL, should not would – old pharts need the ability to edit ;-D
Hmmm, a male suitor older than his suitor would not be unusual – examine any of the female literature of…
The most ridiculous part is that anybody can become disabled at any moment. I became diabetic in my late 40s.…
It’s a lot better to be physically disabled than to be a moral invalid. I work closely with disabled people.…
I’m sorry that you find yourself unable to love people with disabilities. God can help you with that, if you…
Indeed, and in the process willed my niece out of existence. I will never understand the mindset that puts the…
After crapping all over my niece and nephew, our anonymous friend has proceeded to wish disabled people out of existence.…
I’m glad that your god willed every disabled human into being with great love and care and made sure they…
Some of us believe that children who exist, far from being random accidents of biology, were instead lovingly, individually, made…
The idea that a quality may be necessary but not–or far from–sufficient escapes people, though some still understand it once…
It wasn’t exactly subtle.
That’s a very important point, that business people don’t always need to understand economics, but to be a successful manager…
I don’t know if it is actually a provision of law in some jurisdictions, or just a common practice, but…
Precisely. “If you couldn’t have these ones, there’s always a better, shinier model to purchase elsewhere.” And the worst part…
“why these aren’t normal comments” Very neoliberal though… people are just accessories.
It’s so bizarre. These are children that I love. They aren’t a pair of shoes that I bought on sale.…
“How is it tactless?” Blithely fantasizing that it might be better if certain people (that a person loves) didn’t exist…
Yes, I’m all hot and bothered thinking of random sperm cells meeting random egg cells. Can you come up with…
I don’t know what happened in your life that led you to this point of needing publicly to fantasize about…
You are an outstanding reader, my friend. The whole point of the novel is that an overheated, sex-deprived 45yo woman…
It must be some male/female thing. Can you run my comments by your husband and ask him what he thinks?…
“bombastic and massively wordy” That’s not all it is… “overflowing with a joy” “the warm stream of bliss” “gushing fountains…
