My Arabic faculty member in Kuwait sent me a huge duffel bag of treats and souvenirs. (And this, by the way, is how I found out what a duffel bag is). The treats were manufactured in places like “Shahrazad Roundabout in Al-Safat.” Everything is decorated with Kuwaiti flags. Even the shredded paper that protects the goods from breaking during flight is the colors of the flag. And there are QR codes attached to everything where you can listen to Kuwaiti music to accompany the eating of the Kuwaiti sweets. And little notes in English explaining the importance of each gift to the Kuwaiti culture.

These are people who really love their country. Actually, all people from everywhere really love their countries. It’s not because Kuwait is rich. Mention Honduras to a hondureño, and prepare for a 30-minute passionate monologue extolling the greatest country on Earth that is the poor, miserable, gang-infested Honduras. It’s only here that it’s unfashionable and even suspicious to express patriotic feelings.

I have read a whole flyer distributed by a scholarly association and written in the vein of “lxs autorxs contactadxs por nosotrxs.” There is no better example of colonial subservience than this. Stupid Anglo wokes think your language is inferior to theirs, and you eagerly celebrate their ignorance and prejudice.

Poor underfunded scholars from third-world Hispanic countries are willing to do anything to get Massa to smile kindly in their direction. So they parrot the “lxs autorxs cxmx Cxrvantxs” because God forbid they grow some balls and say, “hey, bastard, you haven’t invaded us enough and installed vicious dictatorships enough? Now you want to teach me how to speak my language?”

I’ll be giving a talk on the ethical aspects of US-Latin America relations to the local Ethics Society, and I’m not going to have any shortage of material.

And here’s a little gift for the good folks who supported Elizabeth Warren:

If you know Californians who support the recall (and I do), the naked cynicism of calling them “extreme right wing” is astounding. Most of those people are simply desperate parents who can’t watch their kids suffer in Zoom school any more and small business owners who have lost their livelihood. To rag on them after you’ve robbed them blind and harmed their children, you’ve really got to be a disgusting human being.

On the positive side, there’s no need to bemoan Bernie’s and Warren’s loss anymore. They are lying corporate evildoers. Screw them from here to hell.

It’s not all bad, though. Like the Russian invasion helped Ukrainians finally feel some national pride and solidarity and start rebuilding the country to stick it to the invaders, the assault on the concept of biological sex pushed feminists to find a real cause to fight for.

The feminist on Tucker’s show said that officially accepting that there’s no biological sex and everybody is the “gender” they say they are will have gigantic consequences. Imagine what it would do to crime statistics, for instance. There are already baffling reports from other countries about a woman who raped three women or a female daycare worker who sexually assaulted a kid. After a lot of digging, you find out that these “women” are huge, scary dudes.

Several battered woman shelters have already had to close down because they refused to admit men. These are serious, serious issues. It’s not some ridiculous drama of the #MeToo type.

Imagine what it will do to medical research. How can you conduct research on health issues if you aren’t allowed to notice that these issues can be very different based on biological sex. And there’s a lot of stuff like that. And finally I’m seeing a lot of women wake up from a stupor and say, “wait, what?” It’s really good.

Who could have possibly thought that the only place on TV where a hard-core feminist would be able to talk about the need to protect the sex-based rights for women and girls would be the Tucker Carlson show? And the host would gush about how important and brilliant she is.

It was such a breath of fresh air to hear the feminist (unfortunately, I didn’t catch the name) on Tucker’s show. Unlike the media-approved “feminists,” she wasn’t a weepy wilting flower endlessly bleating about her “trauma” but a normal person.

The right is now the home to feminists, anti-war folks, and people who distrust the Big Pharma and criticize corporate abuses. It’s also the only place where you can discuss labor rights.

People’s heads have been messed with in a crazy way.

“We are going to have barbecues, sit outside and watch the stream,” I tell my sister, trying to make her planned visit sound enticing.

“You aren’t afraid?” she asks in a small voice. “What if somebody sees and reports you? Won’t you get fined?”

Several months in a police state that Quebec has become, and instead of warm, fuzzy feelings, the words “family barbecue next to a stream” cause fear and anxiety.