It’s not at all surprising that European soccer players are forced to kneel down to BLM before every game. BLM stands for austerity. The athletes are enacting how Europe has been brought to its knees by neoliberal austerity. It all makes sense.

In Philip Roth’s 1998 novel I Married a Communist, a young woke student brings a professor a play he wrote. And this is what the professor says about it:

This play of yours is crap. It’s awful. It’s infuriating. It is crude, primitive, simple-minded, propagandistic crap. It blurs the world with words. And it reeks to high heaven of your virtue. Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than an artist’s desire to prove that he’s good. . . Start preaching and taking positions, start seeing your own perspective as superior, and you’re worthless as an artist, worthless and ludicrous. Why do you write these proclamations? Because you look around and you’re ‘shocked’? Because you look around and you’re ‘moved’? People give up too easily and fake their feelings. They want to have feelings right away, and so ‘shocked’ and ‘moved’ are the easiest. The stupidest. Except for the rare case, Mr. Zuckerman, shock is always fake. Proclamations. Art has no use for proclamations! Get your lovable shit out of this office, please.

There’s truly nothing to add.

This is the most important thread one can read today. It tells us of how an ownership class is being transformed into a permanent renter class.

As I keep saying, we are witnessing the largest wealth transfer in decades. We are experiencing it right now and this should be all that we are talking about. The linked thread talks about a single aspect of this wealth transfer (also known as The Great Reset). But there are many other aspects.

According to this I’m a libertarian feminist. I never expected myself to be a libertarian anything, so this is a surprise.

A dream of a lifetime has come true. I now have a climbing vine growing upwards on a wall of my house. I can’t take a picture because we have a huge clump of greenery hiding it. But I know it’s there, and it makes me feel good.

I didn’t plant it or anything. And nobody in the area has one. It came out of nowhere because it knew it was going to be loved.

One thing that was a lot better in the USSR – and we all know how I hate the USSR, so this is really true – was bread. I have not tasted in North America anything remotely resembling the little Soviet 7-kopeck loaf. Or the big black 22-kopeck loaf. Or the round golden loaf.

And I’m not talking gas station bread. I’ve been to all sorts of fancy bakeries in the US. And it’s all trash compared to what we had in the USSR.

Germany has great bread, so it’s not like the USSR had some secret recipe.

A colleague has a son who’s a little younger than me. Married, two small children. He had a numbness at the top of his spine. Went to the hospital and was told that it’s either terminal cancer or a stress-induced inflammation. And to come back in 3 months when they hope to be able to know for sure.

Where I come from, doctors would never say something like this. They’d conceal a terminal diagnosis from a patient until the very last because a terrified patient is less likely to have the energy to battle the disease. In the next three months, my colleague’s son will eat his heart out, worrying about whether he’s dying. His wife and children will suffer. The 70-year-old mom with a heart condition will suffer. Why do something like this? What’s the medical rationale for terrorizing a person like this? Whatever the man’s life expectancy is, these doctors have needlessly robbed him of 3 months of normal life.

And if it turns out to be nothing, what are the chances this guy will go get checked out in the future if he feels ill?

This all happens because the medical establishment in this country doesn’t accept that there’s any connection between psychological and physical sides of human beings. As if the body and the soul (psyche, nervous system, whatever you call it) living in it never communicated.

I also want to add that the passionate unanimity on how the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 was a terrible tragedy has been substituted with a passionate unanimity that it was a wonderful miracle. At yesterday’s debate, both speakers differed as to the degree of the miraculous wonderfulness, with each claiming it was more wonderful than the opponent was saying.

I find both attitudes to be painfully boring. How about we stop looking for good guys and bad guys in history and accept that, like that Facebook status says, “it’s complicated.” I understand being emotionally invested into recent history. But this was 1,300 years ago. There’s really no need to cheer on the participants.

As I watched two Spaniards hotly debate yesterday what year 711 meant for their culture, I realized that it’s not possible for my people. We didn’t have much culture going at that time.

In 1605, when Cervantes published the first part of Don Quijote, we didn’t have anybody who published anything.

The CDC has called an emergency meeting on side effects (heart damage) of the COVID “vaccine” in teenagers. Who are at no risk from COVID.

And this is just immediate side effects. Now let’s wait for the long-term effects of this particular medical experiment whose only benefit is a record profit for Pfizer and Moderna.

Before anybody quotes NYTimes at me saying that these side effects are unimportant, please remember that I’m not the one who called this emergency meeting. It was the CDC.