The famous Ukraine aid over which there’s been incessant bickering in the Senate constitutes under 0,3 % of the total US budget.

The specific amount of aid over which the bickering is happening would finance the US government expenditures for 27 minutes.

It’s an absolute non-issue in economic terms. So ask yourself, why is such a puny, insignificant amount provoking so much rhetoric from people who readily signed off on gargantuan sums to all sorts of special interests? Might this be precisely because they signed off on those gargantuan sums?

Of course, the people who are capable of understanding this already have. And the eager fools who take the moaning of JD Vance and Co seriously don’t have the brain power to understand what I’m talking about. They probably think this is a post about Ukraine instead of their eternal, sad gullibility.

The new world order has no place for nation-states, families, national languages or cultures. It aspires to see everywhere the same smooth plane of the global market without limits, where men are stateless consumers, English-speaking and rootless, passive and undifferentiated, neutered, unisex and lacking in agency.

Diego Fusaro, The New Erotic Order

I took Klara to what supposed to be a Fall festival in a local park but it turned out that this was a “diversity, equity and inclusion event” where people set up booths to advertise their paraphilias. It was painfully boring because all they had were tracts titled “Why Pronouns Matter” and books like “Gender Fluidity Explained”.

The event was somewhat enlivened by a Christian couple that brought a pet goat and let the kids pet it while handing out their own tracts.

This is what I always observe in these woke gatherings. The organizers don’t think that they need to attract people, get them interested. They don’t work for it. The privilege of listening to them preach is supposed to be the reward.

My dislike for this guy is notorious but here he’s correct. Other than angry tweets and speeches and a single riot that inconvenienced zero civilians, nobody can find a single thing that Trump did that negatively impacted their lives. Or the Right. What did the Right actually do that anybody can name as having affected their lives?

I had to grab my 4-year-old and run away from a riot moving in my direction, and that riot was not organized by the Right.

I’m always scared at work. Fear is the backdrop of everything I do. I conceal my beliefs, my thoughts, my opinions. It isn’t the Right I’m afraid of. The Right never scared me at all.

Instead of feeling unclouded joy that I wrote my first book in Ukrainian, I’m scared that somebody will find out and I’ll be vilified for it by my colleagues. It is not the right-wing colleagues I fear might do this.

I was extorted into a medical procedure against my will. My body was invaded, my body integrity was breached using extreme coercion. That wasn’t done by the Right.

We have lost 5 out of 11 of our tenure lines for good. They are gone. It was done under left-wing slogans. Zero austerity measures at my university were done under right-wing slogans. And it wasn’t pretense. Our administrators are fanatically left-wing.

Every negative thing that affected me in recent years was done by the Left. Even people who are completely on the Left know it’s true for them, too. They, too, are afraid of being cancelled, “called out”, publicly pilloried. They, too, avoid areas that BLM turned into war zones. They hate the constant preaching of their bosses who wave progressive banners as they make working conditions worse. They, too, feel like idiots when they are told that men in skirts are women. They have been bamboozled into believing that 1/6, which touched their actual lives not a whit, matters more than the real, actual fear that lives in the pit of their stomach, but deep down they know the truth.

They know.

On the heels of Ibram Kendi’s disgrace, people started to speak about the terrible cost of the BLM:

I know people who participated in the BLM protests. They did it with very good intentions. They sincerely wanted to do good. But the result was that a large number of black people died, lost their lives because of these well-intentioned protests. This is hard for the well-intentioned to accept but that’s the only way. The consequences are too serious to keep pretending this didn’t happen.

If you can put up with COVID preaching on every page, condemnations of Trump every 10 pages, and BLM slogans every 50, it’s an excellent book. I’m not being sarcastic. It is an excellent book.

There’s no paranormal here, thank goodness. The horror resides not in demons or spirits but in very human evil. Holly is not a whodunnit, either. Readers know from the start who the serial killers are and what motivates them. The interest lies in the personalities of the killers, of the victims, and of the private detective, a 55-year-old, mildly autistic, frumpy, chain-smoking COVID fanatic named Holly. Because of her autism, Holly works alone, and some readers have complained about having to read about a lonesome character. But Holly’s aloneness lets the author show us exactly how she thinks and how she arrives at her conclusions.

There’s a larger idea behind the novel, and it has to do with the different ways in which elderly people can make sense of their aging and relate to young people. King is getting older, and he’s putting his experiences with old age to good use. The novel is very tightly plotted, unputdownable, and so engaging that I even interrupted my new Cormoran Strike for it.

I’m glad I rediscovered King many years after abandoning him over the intense boredom of his 1990s doorstop Needful Things. My eyes still glaze over when I remember it. But the writer clearly came back since then.

I very much recommend Holly but be warned, it’s COVID-nuts.

Remember, absolutely no funding is needed for the border crisis. All that’s needed is to move the processing of immigration applications to embassies and consulates. No processing of applications at the border or on the territory of the US should occur.

This is not a money problem, just like the abysmal state of public education is not a money problem. The border crisis can be solved with no additional financial outlay tomorrow.

This simple, cheap and instantaneous solution is not being discussed by either Democrats or Republicans because they don’t want to solve the border crisis. They are lying to us. Let’s stop getting caught by these lies. There’s zero political will in the US to stop illegal immigration. Zero. Which is why it only grows.

Stephen King’s Holly is the second COVID novel I know of by a mega bestselling author. The first was Prom Mom by Laura Lippman. Both are very good and will have an enormous readership.

This means that our story of COVID isn’t getting told. What’s preserved for posterity is the other side’s version.

King and Lippman are gifted. COVID is not the story in their novels. It’s a backdrop for excellent plots about something completely different. We have nobody to do this for us. Nobody to get our story out in this talented way. Nobody to sneak it into people’s beach reads or Friday night reading binges.

For the annual Ethics Training! These are always fun, and each year brings something new.

This time, we’ve been regaled with the following gem of a question from our Ethics Trainers:

Have you ever wondered why billboards along Illinois highways rarely boast photographs of certain officials and members of the General Assembly?

Because nobody wants to look at their skanky mugs? I mean, I’ve been wondering for years. It’s really preyed on my mind.

The training further informs us that “even something that appears to be an obvious disability may not be a disability as defined by law”. And don’t we know it! Forcing people to sit through endless compliance trainings appears to be an obvious disability but strangely doesn’t count as one.

Then there is the multiple-choice test to evaluate our ethics. Here is what one of the situations we are supposed to evaluate as ethical or not: “The director turned from their desk, and using a nickname typically used to denote race, summoned the administrative assistant to help with a computer problem.” I’m now very curious as to what that nickname is. Most importantly, this situation sounds extremely realistic. Even more so than the idea that people wonder about the absence of billboards with “photos of certain officials”.

The next problem is this: “The alleged workplace sexual harassment included a supervisor calling the employee derogatory female slang on a daily basis.” And then these masters of the written word wonder why nobody hangs their pictures by the highway.

On the other hand, I need to get out more because the test is making me feel like an ignorant prude. Here is an activity that is considered sexual harassment: “Making sexual gestures with hands or through body movements”. I must be very sheltered because I can’t begin to imagine “a sexual gesture with hands”.

There’s also a category of sexual harassment defined as “looking a person up and down”. And by the way, concerning what we discussed yesterday, “unwanted requests for dates” are considered sexual harassment. Of course, the only way to know that a request for a date is unwelcome is to make it, right? They should have simply outlawed dating among colleagues to make things easier.

I know this is running a bit long but I can’t help sharing this enlightening definition of race: “Race includes traits associated with race, including but not limited to, hair texture and protective hairstyles such as braids, locks and twists.” Oh, the beauty and the power of the English language! Race includes race including race. Such poetry! Plus, consider the implications of the message here. If I braid my hair right now, what race will I be? And more importantly, what “nickname typically used to denote race” would then be associated with me and my race braids?

Another fun quote from Stephen King’s new novel:

At the Reynolds Library, Holly gets both Edith Brookings (“Call me Edie”) and Margaret Brenner, another of the assistant librarians Penny mentioned. Edie is womaning the main desk, but says they can go in the reading room.

Stephen King, Holly

I was taken aback at first, trying to imagine how exactly poor Edie was “womaning” the desk but then I figured it out and wished I never had.

I’m quite alarmed at the author’s use of the word “mentioned”, though. Shouldn’t it be “womentioned”?