Assisted dying has been legal since 2016. And then, in March of 2021, it expanded so that you no longer needed what was called a reasonably foreseeable natural death. . . In March of 2023 patients with only a mental disorder as the basis of their suffering can request and receive [assisted death] if they meet all the eligibility criteria.

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/11/1142141146/canada-is-expanding-categories-for-medically-assisted-death

I think we should go ahead and throw off a cliff everybody who isn’t completely healthy, happy and 100% productive all the time. Also, everybody who is imperfect in some way.

The Argentinean dictator Juan Domingo Perón easily changed his beliefs from rightist to leftist and back but he never departed from insisting that everything in the country should revolve around his name and his persona. You couldn’t engage in any act of public life, be it academic, professional, religious, athletic, or of any other kind, without simultaneously engaging with the image of Perón. Literary critic Carlos Granés calls this “symbolic jail” or “a jail of symbols.” You have the freedom of physical movement but your consciousness is imprisoned by the peronist imagery.

Today we live in the jail of far-left symbols. We have to work hard to create a tiny place we can crawl in to take a little respite from them. We have to devise strategies to hide our children, protect our livelihoods, and enjoy life. And the absolutely maddening thing is that it’s all done for the benefit of the tiniest slivers of the population. Juan Domingo Perón, at least, appealed to the masses. Millions of people sincerely worshipped him. Dumb they might have been but they existed. The “anti-police nonbinary drag artist” from yesterday’s White House ceremony, on the other hand, does not have majority support. I’m sure that Biden himself is convinced that “the artist” belongs in a bar and not at a serious event. I mean, imagine being 80 years old, finally becoming POTUS, and then having to pretend your role in life is to promote a guy whose job is to jump up and down in a dress singing “Show Me Your Dick.”

Neither we nor Biden have a choice, though. We can avoid coming across all kinds of art but we cannot avoid the dick artist unless we make extraordinary efforts to avoid all news, all screens, and all humans.

It’s normal and good to come together over the symbols we share and that have relevance to us. We are all about to come together over the shared symbolism of Christmas, which is a celebration of the very foundation of our civilization. But when every mother suddenly starts devising strategies to talk to her kids about puberty blockers – which are not a foundation of anything and haven’t even existed until 3 seconds ago – there’s something wrong here.

Why is it that a computer problem that plagued me for weeks resolves immediately and spontaneously the moment I hear the words, “the IT guy is on the way and will be here in five”?

It truly feels as if the computer were trying to give the IT guy a chance to laugh at me.

In a hilarious development, you now have to pay to attend the wokest event on campus. Tickets are $50 a pop, which immediately prices out students and staff who have better ways of spending hard-earned $50 than listening to woke speeches for 3 hours.

Since academic departments and programs have received exactly zero dollars and zero cents for the fiscal year that started on July 1, 2022 and can no longer buy even a pack of printer paper without a lengthy bureaucratic process, it’s impossible to buy the tickets with institutional funds.

As a result, the event will become a showcase of who on campus is really scared of losing their job. Nothing but abject fear of demotion or redundancy can motivate people to fork over their own money to be lectured on how evil and oppressive they are.

No, I’m obviously not going. I have marketable skills and great ideas for what to do with my $50.

The NYTimes is as despicable as ever:

Russia targets absolutely everything on Ukrainian soil. This isn’t news. It isn’t “raising stakes” because it’s been happening for 10 months.

Please note how eager both the NYTimes and Tucker Carlson are to make sure Ukraine doesn’t win. And they use the same arguments about “escalation” in the same dishonest way.