Like with the anonymous questions, I have no idea who sends the messages or from where.

I don’t know how many they are in that family but $1,000 per month for food doesn’t seem very low. I spend more but it’s my own money I spend, not somebody else’s. I don’t buy any of this crap, though. I don’t even recognize half of it. Of course, if there are many children, that’s not enough but who feeds children with this kind of crap?

This is a good question.

Why are land acknowledgements stupid? Everybody lives on land where somebody else lived previously. Go far back enough in history, and you’ll find that it’s all about one group displacing another, then getting displaced in turn, and so on forever. Every group is a settler colonialist. And if everybody is something, then nobody is. We don’t call anybody “a person with one head” because there are no people with two or three. There’s absolutely nothing special or unique about the American native groups because they are only “native” in a very historically narrow sense. The only thing unique about America is that it built a wonderful society after displacing the previous groups. Look at Aztecs. They came from elsewhere and started eating everybody in sight. Yet we are supposed to apologize to them for the Spaniards who, with all their faults, didn’t practice cannibalism for gastronomical reasons. Instead, they founded universities where Aztec medicine was studied and taught with the same respect as the European.

Now let’s look at war. War is a natural state of human beings. It’s terrible. I hate it. But it’s always been there. Philip Bobbitt wrote a great book The Shield of Achilles, demonstrating that every new form of statehood was brought by the need to wage war in a new way. I wouldn’t take it as far as Bobbitt but it’s incontrovertible that the nation-state arose out of the need for a new type of warfare. The idea that the US is more war-mongering than any other country is as ludicrous as the idea that Americans are unique (or uniquely cruel) in displacing other groups. For its size and dominance, the US is extraordinarily peaceful. It’s a country that will try absolutely anything before engaging in warfare. When it does wage war, it does so with the greatest economy of means and human losses than anybody else. Mind you, I’m not comparing it to the imaginary world of sweet, kind peaceniks but to the real world where we actually live.

The habit of curling our noses at America and accusing it of being the worst of the worst is moronic and ungrateful whether you are on the Left or the Right.

This is Churchill on how Britain self-destructed after winning World War I:

Historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs. They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory — “gone with the wind.”

Now the victors are the vanquished, and those who threw down their arms in the field and sued for an armistice are striding on to world mastery. That is the position, that is the terrible transformation that has taken place bit by bit… We should lay aside every hindrance to endeavour by uniting the whole force and spirit of our people to raise again a great British nation standing up before all the world, for such a nation, rising in its ancient vigour, can even at this hour save civilisation.

https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/i-have-watched-this-famous-island.html

This is exactly what happened to the US after 1991. A great victory was supposedly won but the US celebrated the victory by starting on a journey of self-hatred and constant apologies for imaginary crimes.

Churchill was right. It’s not too late. We can all turn this around by learning to feel joy and getting into the habit of laughing at land acknowledgements, Deep State stories, racismsexisms, “forever wars” cliches, etc.

Yes, whoever seriously says “forever wars” is just as unintelligent and un-American as his brother who says “and now let me read a land acknowledgement.”

I followed a reader’s advice and gave Klara a talk about the history of the Jewish people. She’s a happy child, so it had no effect on her but it did have an effect on me. Forty years passed since I received the same talk. There’s no USSR any more, I’m on a different continent, the world has changed. But kids with Jewish ancestry still have to be warned about anti-Semitism and encouraged to “pass”.

Klara asked why I was doing the opposite of passing having decked myself out in Jewish symbolics. And like my father four decades previously, I said that this is my burden to bear and she’ll decide if she wants to pick it up in adulthood.