Finally, I ate the real Spanish cow tail. It was amazing.

Now we are in Portugal but tomorrow we are heading back to Spain.

Gas is extremely expensive in Europe, even more so than in Canada.

Meanwhile, how is everybody doing? Am I missing any big news?

Get married. Seriously, do. Let me explain.

Why do women not have a fulfilling sex life? Because they try to get something in exchange for sex. This is fulfilling for a very small number of women with a very specific disorder. The rest don’t have the capacity physically to enjoy transactional sex. Unlike men, they have the capacity to engage in sex without desiring it but nobody would call such sex acts fulfilling.

What is transactional sex? It isn’t only sex for money, which is something that most women don’t do. But it also includes having sex to get something other than sexual enjoyment out of it. To be in a relationship, to feel desired, to have something to tell your girlfriends, to get gifts, to have somebody to spend the holidays, to feel pretty, to please, not to feel like a loser, or, like we’ve seen in the recently discussed article about Neil Gaiman, to purchase a fantasy of a secure, comfortable existence. Read the article for very clear, if extreme, examples of women engaging in transactional sex and feeling terrible as a result.

If you are married, though, you already have everything on the above list. You don’t need to offer sex to get this stuff out of dudes. You’ll already have a relationship, the status it confers, and the benefits it offers. Now you can relax and figure out what works sexually. Which – and I know this tends to provoke great anger – for women tends to take time and effort.

While emotional life is easier for women, practical daily life is easier for men. I’m following the artistic journey of a writer who spent several years of his youth backpacking it around the country, riding trains with hobos, dumpster diving for food, sleeping rough, and gaining the kind of experience that now infuses his art. None of this is possible for a woman unless she travels with a man. Forget sleeping rough, only this morning I needed my husband to lug my suitcase downstairs. It’s a suitcase he wouldn’t need to bring on a trip of this duration because he doesn’t need as much stuff as I do. Plus, he got me a free Uber because he has a meeting and can’t drive me to the airport, and free access to a lounge where I can eat diabetic-friendly, and a voucher for a massage at the layover, and a stack of gift cards to use at the hotel to pay for food. Yes, I could have done it for myself. And I wouldn’t engage in transactional sex to get a man to do it for me. But many women would.

So yeah, get married. Totally recommended for women and men alike.

There’s a debate raging on X regarding economic opportunities. One side argues that they are fantastic while the other isn’t feeling upbeat about the economic prospects of the younger generations.

I’m observing the debate with sadness because we keep reinventing the wheel instead of using the existing knowledge to move ahead. The erosion of the middle class and the lumpenization of a large portion of what used to be the middle class is a fact of objective reality in every country that was developed enough to have a middle class. This has been studied to death. Moreover, this was predicted by the best thinkers of our era 30 years ago. We have the best Humanities and social sciences in the world, and yes, they often produce exuberant woke crap. But they also create extraordinary value. Let’s use that value.

It doesn’t matter whether there is an Assistant Manager job at Panda Express in Tulsa. Or that there is a type of fish that can change sex. These are blips that don’t change the reality of either sexual bimorphism or the evisceration of, first, the working class and now the white-collar class by the dominant economic and social / psychological trends. Many names have been given to this phenomenon. Uberization of daily life is one. Precarization is another. Post-Fordism. Neoliberalism is the name I use. So many names have been given to this phenomenon because it is very real. The fact that Chris Rufo won the post-Fordist lottery doesn’t negate the fact that a vanishingly small number of people can win it.

Let’s stop trying to diagnose a condition that was diagnosed exhaustively a long time ago and move to the stage of finding a treatment. The incapacity to rely on the knowledge that has already been found and the need to be a very special cookie who single-handedly achieves a victory over everything is part of the disease. And this symptom also was diagnosed and described years ago.

The only voice notes I listen to are work-related because I have no choice. Otherwise, they are rude and inconvenient. I have to be in a place where I can turn on sound which is almost never. They aren’t searchable, so I have to either annotate or re-listen. In a communication between boss and a secretary, they are fine, but among equals they aren’t.

North Korean soldiers are proving to be extremely effective. They are even effective against FPV drones. North Koreans come out against the drones in groups of 3, where one of the soldiers acts as bait to let the other two destroy the drone.

They are stoic and indifferent to losses. Once wounded, they blow themselves up, blow their comrades up to avoid being taken prisoners. Zero interest in recovering and burying the bodies of their fallen.

They are getting live training, live experience, and they’ll go back to pass it on.

This is a description of the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 from WB Maxwell’s Victorian novel Vivien:

Another round of #MeTootery was unleashed on the unsuspecting public regarding a writer called Neil Gaiman.

The writer who is being #MeTooted sounds like a right bastard. The women accusing him go straight from “It was consensual (and wonderful)!” (a direct quote) to “It was rape!” All of the ingredients of the story are as they always are. A sleazy rich and famous man, overheated groupies eager to pleasure him in most disgusting ways, the accuser who pursues the male star aggressively for years but then is “pressured — from very diverse, mostly older women in her community — to take action that she wasn’t sure she felt comfortable taking.”

These are all icky people, and the story published about the in New York Magazine is badly written, rambling, and filled with very disgusting details of the affairs between Gaiman and the groupies. The reason why I’m even mentioning this is as follows. Gaiman is into BDSM. Liberals have spent years trying to convince us that it’s not a paraphilia but a variation on the norm. And it’s not. BDSM entails getting off on the pain and humiliation of others. The idea that this process has some sort of ironclad rules established by an utterly imaginary entity called “the BDSM community” is ridiculous. Here’s the author of the article, continuing in this vein to make BDSM sound tame and unobjectionable:

BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms, the most important of which is that all parties must eagerly and clearly consent to the overall dynamic as well as to each act before they engage in it. This, as many practitioners, including sex educators like Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy who wrote some of the defining texts of the subculture, have stressed over decades, is the defining line that separates BDSM from abuse.

Yes, the defining texts, totally. Sexual sadists are totally abiding by the “texts” written by sex educators. Marquis de Sade himself never veered from the rules set down by “practitioner Dossie.” It’s a mystery why the practice is even called after him instead of being named Dossieism.

“Consent” can’t guide our entire idea of sexual morality. And of you don’t like the word “morality”, take your objections to the New York Magazine, which is arguing sophomorically that there is good and bad BDSM, with the “good” variety being very arbitrarily defined by the article’s author.

What Gaiman did to the eager young groupie is disgusting and dehumanizing in spite of the fact that she enthusiastically consented, including in writing, many times. That she participated is also disgusting (read the article before you argue with my use of the word ‘disgusting.’ Or don’t because it really is.) She knew it and it weighed heavily with her because this pervy behavior wasn’t natural to her. She only engaged in it because she wanted a rich boyfriend.

First, liberals turned “consent” into a sacred cow, as if people didn’t consent all the time to things that are horrible for them. Now we have to witness their agonies of trying to untangle how this worship of consent leaves many people feeling abused, degraded, and broken.

As more AI-written texts flood the public space, people will feel an increasingly strong need to be certain that the texts they spend their time reading are written by actual humans. They will withhold trust and interest unless they are completely certain that they are reading human texts.

What people will look for is what we have here on the blog: the certainty that these are actual humans. And I don’t mean just me. It’s everybody who participates. Right now it seems like no big deal but soon enough it will be a mega big deal. Because all of a sudden we just won’t know. This will erode the social trust that is already at a low ebb.

Almost everything I saw on the woke left that I hated — the lemming-like groupthink, the embrace and promotion of weird conspiracies, the endless waxing and waning and birthing and rebirthing of moral panics, the refusal to leave the warm embrace of the echo chamber, the collective and ramshackle rationalizations, the cognitive rigidity, the refusal to even try to understand the actual(as opposed to imagined) motivations of people on the opposing side, the constant and deliberate abuse of language and terms with specific and accepted meanings to slur opponents who do not meet the definition of those terms, the revision of history so that it conforms to current belief systems and political goals, the cartoonish stereotypes of people in the out-group, the creepy ideas about gender and sex roles, the pressure on dissenters, the repetition of memes and the copy and pasting of boilerplate as a substitute for actual thought, the primitive tribalism, the authoritarian impulses, the psychological projection, the cults of personality, the resistance to the idea of a public university as an entity that champions truly free speech and open discourse, the tolerance for and refusal to criticize extreme actors in the in-group, the development of cults of personality, the social media childishness and tantrums, the auto-formation of opinions by reflexively forming one’s views on issues by simply taking the opposite position of one’s “enemies”, the informal enforcement on group unanimity, the ideologically-motivated selective interest and disinterest in scientific findings and statistical data, the elevation to prominence of the stupidest and most toxic figures, the astonishing and depressing illiteracy on what “free speech” means in a democratic society (both as it relates to 1A and as it doesn’t relate to 1A), the questioning of the legitimacy of long-standing important institutions when they take the “wrong” position, the enthusiastic support for morally bankrupt politicians, the open and unapologetic and explicit contempt for democracy, the hypocrisy and on and on — I now see on the antiwoke right.

https://x.com/eyeslasho/status/1878815376370548979?t=rIE_wEQOiMjuk5NwhSEGEQ&s=19

Yeah, but the antiwoke right doesn’t run the Canadian Cancer Society, every institution of higher ed in the West, the FBI, Disney, etc. It runs absolutely nothing whatsoever except some social media accounts. An alt-right dude can insult me online but he can’t insult me at the doctor’s office. Or at work. He hasn’t passed any state laws that require my ritual humiliation in the workplace as a condition of me being able to make a living.

This guy I quoted is one of the best accounts on X but he doesn’t seem to understand a crucial thing. The problem isn’t what people believe. Everybody should believe what they want, including very lunatic things. If leftist people simply believed that it’s necessary to call a cervix a front hole, that would be a million times fine with me. This is America! People should expand intellectually to the very fringes of mega weirdness. If people want to get together and discuss how Putin is the savior of the West, the Holocaust never happened, and everybody who didn’t get exactly 37 COVID boosters will die immediately, they should. And if they want to call me names online for not believing all this, that’s fine, too.

Take Joyce Maynard. It’s become painfully obvious to everybody that her approach to life is the opposite of mine. But I very much want her to continue writing. She writes, I poke vicious fun, it’s all good. It’s America! What I don’t want is to be forced to proclaim at work that Joyce Maynard’s books are great or not great while my contingent workers’ contracts are held hostage.

Stereotypes, creepy ideas, insults and everything else he lists are perfectly fine. No, they are more than that. They are necessary. They are fine and even necessary as long as nobody is forced to listen, conform, and repeat. The woke left isn’t bad because it believes insane things. Everybody believes something other people find insane. There are people who think onion rings are tasty, and if that isn’t messed up, then I don’t know what is. The reason why the woke left is bad is because it’s been ramming their onion rings down everybody’s gullet with a hammer.

As I keep saying, avoid analogies. They almost never work. Except for the one with the onion rings. That one is brilliant.

When I saw the image, I thought it was St Louis. It’s always that empty. Hasn’t started booming yet because there’s nobody to boom. It’s just kind of dead.

NYC honking was iconic and a measure of how full of life the city was.

Also, I’ve got to say, $9 a day is not painful in every income category.