A London, Ont., doctor who assessed a patient with inflammatory bowel disease and a history of mental health issues for MAID outside a Tim Hortons location and later personally drove the man to the place his life was ended has agreed to a minimum six months’ supervision.

https://nationalpost.com/news/ontario-man-dies-of-maid-after-being-assessed-outside-tim-hortons

Ont stands for the Canadian province of Ontario, in case people don’t know. Beyond this, I understand nothing in this news item. Why would the doctor do this? It’s hard enough to see a doctor at a hospital in Canada, let alone have one trudge all the way to a Tim Hortons (a Canadian coffee shop chain) to meet you. Does the doctor have a quota on the number of people he offs? Is he a psychopath who enjoys ending people’s lives?

Speaking of fake things, the proliferation of fakeness makes it next to impossible to read genre fiction. I enjoy the mystery genre, courtroom dramas, and mommy lit. The authors I know and trust to be actual human beings get older and sometimes retire from writing. The roster of authors whose work I follow in genre reading is thinning out. I am not managing to add new names to my list because the mechanisms of finding them are broken.

Amazon reviews are increasingly fake. In the past two days alone I have come across about a dozen books with a solid number of reviews, each of which consists of one or two words only:

– Excellent!
– Fantastic!
– Wonderful!


These are clearly bot-generated. After two decades of building a solid base of reviews, Amazon abandoned that model and started aggressively deleting negative reviews and allowing these fake ultra-positive ones. I now go for weeks without even glancing at the reviews of anything I buy or explore because I know that they are now completely fake.

Previously I could rely on the algorithm to give me suggestions based on my history of readings but the algorithm doesn’t distinguish between real and fake. Two of the five recent suggestions that I received were written by AI and recorded on Audible with a fake AI voice. I’m not out any money because these books were available for free through Audible but I wasted time and feel reluctant to repeat the experiment.

At this point, I have no idea how to discover new authors in genre fiction. My window of possibilities has shrunk dramatically.

People don’t have to argue their case or try to prove their conclusions any longer. They find some staged or AI-generated video and offer it as documentary evidence of something that actually happened. It’s really scary. AI only plays into a problem that is already there. The incapacity to tell facts from fiction, anecdotes from a trend, and correlation from causation is experienced by an overwhelming majority of people.

The only way to have democracy and not degenerate into complete nuttiness is to have a society built upon an acceptance of intellectual hierarchy and authority. People who are incapable of understanding that a staged video they saw online does not represent reality should be made constantly aware that they are morons.

Sadly those who are intellectually equipped to bring this point to cross have deprived themselves of all credibility for ideological reasons.

The same people who spent two weeks wailing that they have no energy to make a sandwich are making fun of this highly successful dude:

This is mental illness. If your personality is composed solely of your sleep stats and macros consumption, then all you’re telling people is that you are pathologically vain and *extremely* boring. This stuff should be heavily stigmatized. https://t.co/Wv05vG3Zzt

— Billy Binion (@billybinion) May 25, 2026

Last week we had a barrage of complaints on X about how crushing, debilitating and downright horrific it was to prepare a lunch for oneself. People experienced profound compassion for themselves. The drama of preparing lunch still hasn’t fully subsided with people complaining that rented apartments don’t have refrigerators and kitchens (which of course they do), thereby forcing them to rely on Doordash in order to stave off horrific and instant starvation.

This week another great hardship dropped:

It’s brutally difficult to simply find children for your children to play with. https://t.co/aSYbAP5hmz

— Joshua Sheats (@JoshuaSheats) May 24, 2026

Brutally difficult, you know? Brutally. The author of the “brutally difficult” post is a man.

The most basic psychological trick that you’d think everybody would know at this point is that if you tell yourself that everything is bad, you will experience everything as bad and will be very miserable. We process reality through words. We perceive things the way we describe them to ourselves. If we describe the most blissful, amazing situation as terrible, we will experience it as terrible. And vice versa, of course.

People get trapped into distorting their reality in negative directions without wanting to. There is a lot of peer pressure that convinces them that enacting misery is the trendy thing to do. They go on social media and see everybody compete in how deprived and persecuted they are. They go to work or to any peer group and, again, observe a misery competition. It’s very tempting to participate and many people do just that. They have no idea why they start feeling sad and depressed. Gratitude rituals are popular because they allow a person to escape into a private bubble from these collective rituals of self-pity.

A friend asked if I enjoyed the Memorial Day picnic at church. It’s strange that anybody would suspect me of being able to enjoy any collective pastime. I am almost physiologically incapable of enjoying something like that. I’m very glad I went because Klara loved it. I do these things for her. I enact normalcy for her benefit. But I myself will never comprehend what people get out of it. I used to wish I could but at this stage of my life I have accepted that I am weird and that I experience things weirdly.

I used to feel a lot of shame about my weirdness but, again, you get jaded even on the shame. I brought my notebook to a church lunch a while ago and sat there decorating it as other women discussed how strange I was. I know because one of them told me. “We were sitting over there,” she said, “discussing what a strange person you are.”

At the Memorial Day picnic I heroically engaged in small talk with four different people. Three of them looked slightly terrified of me. But Klara saw me engage with other people so my goal was accomplished in full.

I have five aunts. The only one I kind of really get is my aunt Natasha. We don’t have any sort of a relationship because she doesn’t want one. Not just with me. Aunt Natasha doesn’t want a relationship, in its literal meaning of relating to another person, with anybody. The reason I like her is because she has a grand purpose to which she is dedicated with the fanaticism of a medieval monk.

Aunt Natasha’s purpose in life is to find money to send to her middle-aged deadbeat eldest daughter Dasha. Aunt’s status in life is what in Spanish we call una arrimada and in Russian приживалка. This is a person who lives in somebody else’s house and fulfills the functions of a companion / domestic servant. Aunt Natasha plays this role in the life of her twin sister. There is no depth of suffering or indignity into which she wouldn’t eagerly sink. Yesterday she had a medical procedure that involved general anesthesia. Pretty much immediately after coming to, Aunt Natasha returned to her slave-like duties. I know what it feels like to wake up from a general anesthesia and go from zero to a hundred without a break, pushing items off a to-do list in service of an overarching goal. I respect this degree of commitment.

Aunt’s life is utterly devoid of dignity but I still like her. She’s like Amy from Gone Girl or Mark Dooher from John Lescroart’s Guilt. These are both very negative characters. But their insane dedication to their purpose is irresistible. Just so you understand, Aunt is pushing 70. Imagine having a purpose in life that is so grandiose that it would drag you off an operating table at this age, ready to go and commit veritable feats in pursuit of your goal. Even a shitty goal, such as coddling an overgrown princess of a daughter, is better than no organizing principle at all. Yes, of course, it’s better to have a more meaningful purpose but at least this is a purpose. How many people just kind of exist without one altogether?

I know somebody who told me, “I don’t understand what my purpose in life is. I have no idea what I am living for.” Two months later this person received a terrible diagnosis. On the positive side, he now has an organizing principle. He has an overarching goal, which is to beat the disease. I keep thinking, though, that it would have been better if he had discovered an organizing purpose before locating one in a terrible illness.

I’m very annoyed by the insistent use of the word “teen” in reports of increased gang activity. Even conservative reporters repeat “teen, teen, teen” like crazed parrots.

🚨 WTF?!! A "teen" was OUT ON BAIL for a firearm crime…

…then went on a STABBING SPREE in Rhode Island during a teen takeover and brutally injured 3 victims because he was set free!

IT HAS TO STOP

Remove and lock up the judge!

"Now, police have 18-year-old Medina in… pic.twitter.com/4x5jK7Oe2M

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 23, 2026

The criminal in question is an adult repeat offender. In all of the videos of gang riots, most of the criminals look very adult.

Whoever invented the term “teen takeover”, with its air of playfulness supported by the use of alliteration, is a skilled propagandist. Let’s not buy into the propaganda and repeat the terminology unthinkingly. These are violent gang riots. We don’t know the age of the gangsters and we shouldn’t care anyway. If it’s not ok to mention the very obvious race of the rioters, it should definitely be out of the question to fixate on their assumed age.

Of course, I couldn’t help myself and went along and re-read Lescroart’s Guilt, the best American legal drama. And here’s what’s funny. I first read the novel sometime in 2005 when I was at the apex of my leftism. The novel stages a confrontation between the conservative and the liberal viewpoints, and even back then my sympathies were completely on the side of the conservative approach. There’s a character named Sam who is a feminist, and I despised her passionately at that first reading. I still feel exactly the same. My entire perception of the novel changed not a whit in the past 20 years.

It was always destined that I’d become a conservative, is what I’m saying.

🚨: Study shows the most unforgettable childhood memories are family vacations between ages 5 to 10. pic.twitter.com/OHvHRH8nUT

— All day Astronomy (@forallcurious) May 22, 2026

Children simply like to be with their parents. Travel is not the crucial factor here. It’s being together in an intentional way that creates the joy. It’s being together as the end goal and not a byproduct.

Of course, I’m talking about normal families which are a huge majority. I hated family vacations as a child because there was no break from the dysfunction. Thankfully for me, in the USSR husbands and wives were rarely given vacations at the same time.