We all need to spread the word that people should stop using AI to write cover letters when looking for jobs.

Today, I received 6 cover letters from applicants, and they are all lengthy, unreadable mush. I have no idea what any of them say. I’m not even going to respond. They call me “dear hiring manager” and promise to “do my best work for your highly esteemed unit”. My “unit”, can you believe it? I’m a nameless manager running a unit.

And yes, of course, my job ad had my name, title, and department.

One of the most unpleasant things at today’s Palestinian talk was how happy everybody in the audience was to hear the phrase “almost everything bad that ever happened in the world came from Europe”. I think this self-hatred is at the heart of every problem here in America.

You say “Native Americans”, and everybody goes googly-eyes because Native Americans are supposed to be creatures of unblemished perfection. But everything that’s their own culture must be evil, horrible, worthless.

Klara never trick-or-treated. We always go but she’s too shy to actually come up to anybody and say “trick-or-treat”. It’s a heavy burden to be shy and end up excluded from things by that unfortunate trait. I know that only too well.

Finally, today,* in year 7 of attempted trick-or-treating, I found a way to get her over the hump and into the land of successful, enjoyable trick-or-treating.

She told me this morning that she probably won’t trick-or-treat because she’s feeling shy. In response, I whipped out a 5-pound bag of candy and dropped it in front of her.

“Here,” I said. “This is all for you. You don’t need to trick-or-treat. This is enough candy to last you two years. You can go ahead and be shy. It’s a wonderful quality which gets you all this great candy.”

This removed the pressure, and she trick-or-treated up a storm.

“This is not a great house,” she’d say pensively. “They gave me a handful of candy but paid no attention to me. The house across the street, on the other hand, gave me a lot of nice attention.”

It took me years but I found a working method.

* We trick-or-treated on the 30th because my town is weird.

Since we started talking about great-grandparents, I want to share a story about my other Jewish great-grandmother, Grandma Rosa.

On that side of the family, nobody was fancy. Nobody had their own airplane or a pot to piss in. Grandma Rosa never even fully figured out the phone. She treated it like a postcard.

I’d call her and say, “Hi Grandma!”

And she’d respond with, “Hello my beautiful flower! We are fine. Grandpa’s leg is acting up a bit but we still go for walks. The weather is lovely, so we can spend time outside. We had zrazy for breakfast today. They turned out very nice. I’ll make you some the next time you come over. Give my best to mom and dad. I love you and miss you, tons of kisses from your Grandma Rosa.”

Then she’d hang up.

When we went over to her place, it was very similar. She’d talk at us very cheerfully while stuffing us with food and ignoring all our attempts to respond, and then would say, “Oh, you have to leave already? It was so great seeing you. Come back soon. Bye!”

Now that I’m telling this story I’m realizing how similar this is to my own strategies of sociability.

Canada is far, far gone:

18 months of lockdowns where people were badgered by loudspeakers all day to stay inside and then the nutty campaign about the imaginary indigenous children murdered by the Catholic Church – all this turned people’s brains inside out.

Since we are back to Daddy wars on this blog, I’ll tell this story again.

My great-grandmother’s second husband raised three generations of children in my family, including me. And he wasn’t even really her husband. They lived together for almost 60 years but great-grandma refused to marry him.

Great-grandma was very severe. She was a fancy career woman, and she never had time for her only daughter. By the time I came around, she reconsidered and was the best great-grandma. But with her daughter Klara, she was hardly ever there.

Klara was raised by the stepdad. He never had any kids of his own, and he easily could have passed Klara off as his daughter. This was almost 100 years ago, and the manliness thing was huge. Raising somebody else’s kid with a woman who wouldn’t even marry you because you weren’t good enough couldn’t have been great for the ego. Great-grandma would have been fine with pretending that Klara wasn’t her first husband’s daughter. She wanted to exclude Klara’s real father from her life completely. Nobody was allowed to mention his name in her presence.

But Klara’s stepdad cared not about his status and what others thought of him. He cared about Klara. For years, he secretly took her to see her real Dad. And then he secretly took Klara’s son to see his real grandpa. Great-grandma, as I said, was severe. She hit him. Even in old age she did it. I saw it many times. Plus, she worked for the KGB and, unlike her husband, was a member of the Communist Party. She was not a woman you wanted to cross. And he still defied her for decades to make sure his stepdaughter had her real Dad in her life.

This was all during Stalinism. Think about what the guy was risking by defying a woman who had her own airplane to take her to top-secret military installations she was building in Siberia. What can possibly motivate a person to take the kid he’s raising to see her real Dad in these circumstances? Many people can’t be assed to do it without Stalin, Siberia and all the rest of it hanging over them.

It’s love. This is what you do when you love a child. You don’t use a child to feed your ego, prop up your relationship status, or prove anything to others.

This is the kind of love with which I was raised. This is the love that feeds me my whole life. A child deserves to be loved like this and not to serve as supporting cast in a parent’s performance of a flattering, self-serving fairy-tale.

Meantime, in Chicago:

It must be very confusing to be on the Left right now. These are all people of color but which group is more of color and hence the real victim?

The Jew-hating crowd in Mahachkala, Russia found no Jews at the airport. But it did find families of non-Jews who were coming back from Israel where their kids were being treated for serious illnesses by… yes, Jews.

The crowd got upset by the absence of actual Jews that could be beaten and killed and started attacking a police vehicle:

I hope everybody understands that there’s no such thing as a spontaneous mob action in Russia. This kind of thing happens when there are orders for it to happen.

I didn’t believe the rumors that Putin died on Thursday, and didn’t even mention them here. And maybe he didn’t die but something did happen to give the orders to let the mobs run free.

They even looked for Jews in the plane’s engine, for just in case.

Given that the most popular boy’s name in Moscow is Mohammed, there’s not a whole lot that stands between Moscow Jews and door-to-door pogroms.

Open borders, mass migration, defending by military means its right to keep the borders open – Russia has been doing that for over 30 years.