An absolutely gut-wrenching investigative report on the nursing home deaths in Quebec during the first COVID wave. I cried reading it. There are no words.

Please don’t read if you are at a low point in your day. I don’t normally issue trigger warnings but trust me.

I’m sure she means well. But God, to a child this sounds like “you were a mistake and I regret your existence.”

Also, children aren’t a way vicariously to live the life you’ve never had and wish you did. As Klara says, “mommy, you and I are completely different people.”

People constantly ask me how come I haven’t put her in any language classes when I speak a boatload of languages myself but I see no connection. I speak languages but she’ll decide if she wants to. I’m not invested into this in any way.

And one more thing. “Make sure you have a career and travel” is as much of a needless pressure as “make sure you get married.” What if the kid just isn’t into it? Some people – I’d guess most – are really not into living abroad.

Joe Massey is selling prints of his photography here. Whoever guesses which one I ordered gets a prize.

Massey is living in penury after a brutal cancellation a couple years ago. His dignity and strength in the face of this horror are an inspiration. He is also very talented. I’m happy he started selling his photography because I’ve admired it for a while and bought a print the moment it became possible.

I’m reading what “school” means in dystopian hell holes like NYC – kids are told not to talk and have to stare straight ahead at lunch, they are yelled at for touching a friend, they are not allowed to approach anybody, play or talk – and it confirms to me that the only place to live is in a small town in deep-red country.

There’s already a deep divide by political party. Imagine what it’s going to be like when the kids who had a normal childhood playing tag, eating lunch with friends, drawing maps and looking for treasures, licking the same lollipop with a bunch of best buddies, and having neighborhood barbecues grow up and have to share the country with the kids who had to stare straight ahead and sing songs about masks. Even within the same state, it’s all about how your zip code votes. I’m in Illinois but we are a deep-red dot, and this is what gives our children a happy, normal childhood.

I was always against violence. But then I saw this and changed my mind:

This isn’t from my child’s school, obviously.

It’s actually a very interesting question of which immigrant groups can transmit culture and / or wealth to the next generations.

Russian-speaking immigrants can transmit wealth but not culture.

German immigrants can’t transmit their culture. I live in a historically German area. Everybody has a German last name. We have exactly zero German restaurants. And zero ethnic Germans supporting our German program. The local Oktoberfest is held by WASPS and features Bud Light and hot dogs.

Italians, on the other hand, are great at transmitting culture. The richest program at my department is Italian, even though we have very scarce interest from students. There’s a bunch of third generation Italians who don’t speak a word of the language but donate money to our program and hassle me endlessly as to what else they can do to spread the love for their culture and language. I have more scholarships and awards in Italian than actual students.

In Spanish, by the way, the only scholarship we have was established by a non-Hispanic American. We have a growing Hispanic community but they have no wealth to share and no interest. Chicano writers in the US are completely Anglo. The way they write, the way they think is as Anglo as it gets.

I’m not saying this by way of criticism. It’s simply the way it is. Russian-speaking immigrants make gigantic efforts to transmit their culture to their children and fail every single time. These are people who almost never assimilate culturally because they are in love with their culture and don’t want to let it go. But the children want nothing to do with it.

In what concerns California recall, it was obvious, folks. Non-Cuban Hispanics and Asians don’t vote for anything but the left. Asians, it’s obvious why, and Hispanics are in love with socialism in the classical meaning of the word. They’ll burn themselves – and you if you let them – on this funeral pyre many times over.

And the children / grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants lean even more to the left. They have a very low capacity to transmit their culture generationally after immigration. This is coupled with a non-existent capacity to transmit wealth. What can the result possibly be? It’s obvious, isn’t it? Identity politics. And which side offers endless identity wars plus identity-based payouts?

Thank grandpa Reagan, Republicans. He came up with this scheme.

“I know a bad word, Mommy,” Klara announced mysteriously.

“What is it?” I asked, thinking “I’ll murder everybody at that school is this why I’m paying for a religious school dirty rotten bastards.”

“I can’t tell you,” she said. “It’s bad.”

“It’s OK,” I said. “You can tell me.”

“Pathetic!” she said with a shy giggle.

“Yeah, that’s a bad one,” I said, cancelling my plans for a mass murder at school.