This is one of the stupidest ideas ever devised. Kids are too smart, too headstrong, to learn from a robot. Only people who've never taught in a classroom setting think that AI-bot-directed education will survive more than three days. https://t.co/8ulg0SbdoH

— Luther R. Abel (@lutherabel1) March 26, 2026

People are not getting it. Melania brought out a robot for visual effect. Nobody is going to send robots into classrooms. The robots will be on a screen. That the kids will watch at home. While jobless mom and dad are zonked out with their own screens right there next to them. And school buildings will house data centers.

My sister is part of a large global organization of entrepreneurs. They have a program where you gather a small group of entrepreneurs, and they become your life long buddies. A group holds monthly meetings where they share everything about their lives. Not just business but what happens in their private lives, too. They help each other grow as professionals, parents, husbands and wives, friends, etc. The organization sponsors trips where they do activities to advance their psychological health. The goal is to develop as a human being, not just a business person, within a small group of very close friends for life.

I have the deepest admiration, and not a small dose of envy, for this practice. I have to do all of this completely by myself, and I feel great yearning for this kind of collective experience of supported growth.

As I keep saying, I am deeply in love with Paul Kingsnorth’s book Against the Machine even though I disagree with much of it. In this post, I want to talk about one of the things with which I disagree. And it’s his foundational idea and not a minor quibble.

Kingsnorth says that the West deserves to die. It shouldn’t be saved. To the contrary, it should perish altogether. This is not my interpretation. He says this verbatim. The reason why Kingsnorth has given up on the West is that his understanding of it is very different from my own that I described here.

Kingsnorth believes that the driving force of the Western civilization is the idea of revolutionary change. Everything must be destroyed to create something new. Then this new thing must be destroyed to create an even newer thing. And so on. The West will end up destroying humanity unless the West falls apart completely. When that happens, Kingsnorth hopes, we will be able to go back to the pre-modern society of small villages and artisanal guilds living happily in communion with nature.

This prospect does not appeal to me. I know the numbers on infant mortality and women’s mortality in childbirth before the twentieth century. No amount of small villages and artisanal guilds can make the prospect of going back there attractive to me. I like modernity. I really like capitalism, which is another thing Kingsnorth despises.

Kingsnorth says that the West is colonialist by nature, and that this is bad. He would happily have continued being a leftie if the Left hadn’t gone corporate and statist. I don’t want this to put you off from reading the book. It’s a wonderful book. Kingsnorth has an amazing sense of humor. The book is beautifully written and very easy to follow. Just read it already. It’s totally good.

The United Nations General Assembly has voted to recognise the slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity”…

The resolution – proposed by Ghana – called for this designation, while also urging UN member states to consider apologising for the slave trade and contributing to a reparations fund. It does not mention a specific amount of money.

The proposal was adopted with 123 votes in favour and three against – the United States, Israel and Argentina.

Fifty-two countries abstained, including the United Kingdom and European Union member states.

Well, at least the EU abstained, that’s something. What an incredibly stupid organization UN is. We should stop funding it or participating in its lunacy in any way.

I’m amazed by my Associate Dean. He is a man of truly infinite patience and kindness. Not remotely a pushover. The expression “balls of steel” was created for this guy. Machiavellian in his plotting capacity. But his reserves of patience are infinite. He has about 70 times more absolute walnuts total morons wonderful people and great intellectuals working under him than I do. Yet he never loses his patience. To give just one example, there’s a form several of us have to sign digitally. We’ve signed these forms for years, yet there’s been an endless exchange of emails about the form because we are just not managing to do it. Instead of telling us all to bite it, he filled the form himself and emailed it to us.

How does he do it? OK, he’s religious. But so am I! And it’s not helping. I told the priest at confession about my irritability. He started giving me instruction, and I immediately got annoyed. So that’s a work in progress.

I’m good when I have time to react. I meditate a lot by way of decorating my notebook. But my instantaneous in-person reaction is too fast. I have the words “wow, what an incredible moron you are” pulsating on my face like a huge neon sign before I can get a handle on myself.

By the way, there are two people on this planet who don’t know about my short fuse, moodiness, and congenital judgmentalism. And they don’t believe me when I tell them. These people are my husband and child. They think I’m the most even-tempered ray of sunshine that ever existed. So I’m not completely hopeless.

I just don’t love people enough, that’s the problem.

We have two courses that have been severely under enrolled both times we offered them. They don’t go towards any degree requirement. As a result, the Dean’s office decided not to offer them in the Fall. The people teaching these courses are understandably upset. They are not tenured, and the absence of these courses means they make less money. They started pressuring me to open these sections. I explained to them that this is not a decision I am authorized to make. There’s no procedure by which I can open any courses without the signature of the Associate Dean. I promised the colleagues to argue their case to the Dean. I immediately did exactly that and sent all of the paperwork. The Dean’s office informed me that they have taken the issue under consideration and will let us know the decision soon. I communicated that information to the colleagues involved.

Immediately after that, the colleagues organized a pressure campaign on me from the students. I started receiving dozens of messages, spamming my inbox. Teary delegations of students started showing up at my office and classroom and interrupting my teaching.

I wrote a very kind message to the colleagues involved, explaining once again that there’s nothing more I can do and kindly asking them to stop. As we all know, I have a bit of a temper. It took a lot of self-control to write a kind, polite message. This is the busiest time of the academic year. I’m drowning in paperwork and email. But I overcame my deep desire to call these colleagues absolute walnuts and egregious numbskulls. In response, they told the students to badger me harder. The obvious result is that I’m not motivated to do any favors to these colleagues at all.

My question is, under what theory of the mind do such people operate? These are both very middle-aged people, not excitable kids. They should have found out by now that the only way to interact with somebody on whose goodwill you depend for many different things is by making yourself agreeable. I have gotten an enormous lot of good stuff for my colleagues at the department by cultivating goodwill among the administration and support staff. I’ve smiled, I’ve been patient, I’ve thanked for every little bit. People are stunned by how much I managed to wrangle out of the cold, steely jaws of the administration. I’m naturally not given to any of these behaviors. I’m naturally grumpy, cantankerous, and with a tragically short fuse. But I overcome these inclinations because if I gave free reign to them, my department would be where the Physics department is now. Which is not in existence.

It is not my decision whether to open these sections. But it is 100% my decision whether to make the position of one these colleagues permanent. The next Chair is a very close friend of mine which is widely known. Am I extremely motivated to inflict the colleague who is being an absolute walnut and acting like a total brat on my own close friend as a permanent hire? Clearly, not. Why is she tanking her chances for a permanent job over something that cannot bring any gain? There’s got to be some reasoning behind it but I can’t figure out what it is.

Today, Russia carried out targeted strikes on a Catholic church in Lviv and a maternity hospital in Ivano-Frankivsk. I’m still waiting for my friend in Lviv to confirm that he is ok.

As God is my witness, I can’t understand how anybody can support this.

What does progress want? asks Paul Kingsnorth in his book Against the Machine. This is the most important question asked by the English philosopher in his magnum opus, and I’ve never seen anybody put it so bluntly before. Formulating the question is half the job of any inquiry. Kingsnorth hits it out of the park with this way of putting it.

What is the purpose of the progressivist project? We can see that it motivates people to make great sacrifices, to lay down their lives, even. There must be some great purpose behind this. Something so big that all of the upheaval the project creates would be justified.

And there is. This great, enormous goal is to move transcendence from the spiritual to the material realm. The project aims to turn humans into gods. It abolishes the otherworldly realm and endows human beings with the powers formerly attributed to God.

Why not? one might ask. Why do we even need God? Why can’t we establish our own moral framework and set our own goals? What’s so wrong with seeking transcendence our own way without involving the supernatural?

My answer—and please remember that I disagree with Kingsnorth on more than I agree with him—is that we, humans, can’t come up on our own with anything except the most crude forms of self-indulgent pleasure that rots our bodies and minds. On our own, we don’t transcend what’s low about us to go higher. To the contrary, we transcend what’s middling to go into the absolute gutter. We don’t do well without fear. Fear of God, illness, poverty. If we are liberated from all those fears, we won’t enter Golden Age. We’ll enter the deepest misery.

More later.

If I retire at the earliest possible date, which would be when I turn 55, my monthly retirement payment will be $3,860.

This is for a job where I only began working at the age of 33. I mean, I won’t say no to the money but isn’t it weird to expect a public education system to produce this outcome in perpetuity? Shouldn’t people work for a bit more than 22 years to get retirement? Or at least past 60? We aren’t working in the salt mines, so the job is neither physically demanding nor onerous.

I’m not turning 55 or planning to retire at all for the foreseeable future. I had to contact the retirement people for paperwork purposes and used the opportunity to have them calculate my benefits just out of curiosity.

The following components went into the creation of the miracle of the Western civilization:

1. The understanding that God is one;
2. The admiration for the powers of the human intellect and the habit of introspection that ancient Greeks discovered;
3. The knowledge that in the beginning was the Word;
4. The realization that the kingdom of God is within you.

When these things come together, you have the Western civilization. Science, art, medicine, technology, rights, literary criticism, high-trust societies of complete strangers, universities, nuclear family, representative democracy. They all come out of this mix.