Grim and Cynical

Wait, so it turns out that this whole time Biden also had a very bad form of cancer? And they still tried to run him?

That’s so grim. And cynical.

Union Betrayal

Whoever said I was dumb to trust the union was right. OK, I know nobody said it in those words but people thought it. And they were right.

The union conspired with my colleagues to exclude me from the bargaining process. They broke the procedure set out in our collective bargaining agreement, so the need to exclude me must have been pretty pressing.

At this point, I have no idea what’s been negotiated because it’s been done behind my back.

This all happened a week ago, and I so don’t care that I didn’t even bother to blog about it. But then I thought that I owe the people who tried to warn me about the duplicity of the union an honest account of the story.

I’m not putting a brave face on it, I promise. I really don’t care. I acted with absolute integrity throughout the process. I sacrificed my interests to protect somebody who had caused me a lot of annoyance because it was morally right. I waged a battle against my baser instincts and won. Plus, I have my writing accelerator next week and who cares about department drama.

True Feelings

Freud urgently needed to decipher the true feelings of the Germans behind this social housing for refugees:

The Abhorrent Reality

This is why I keep saying that the concepts of hate speech and incitement to violence should be abandoned entirely. For as long as they exist, people who describe themselves as “Activist/neuroqueer. Former Lived Experience Worker” (does anybody know what fresh hell that is, by the way?) will declare reality hateful and inciting and persecute anybody who notices it.

Can Britain Come Back?

In the meantime, British schools are having another completely normal one:

One book used in classrooms claims black people built Stonehenge, whilst free resources produced by a subject organisation celebrate the genital mutilation of a slave as a form of ‘gender transition’. . . Written by Atinuke, the Nigerian-born British author, [a history textbook] says that “Britain was a black country for more than 7,000 years before white people came”. . . Research showed that key elements of British history have been dropped by schools as fewer than one in five teach the Battle of Agincourt and only 11 per cent include the Battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/18/schoolchildren-taught-black-people-stonehenge-atinuke/

What do you think, friends? Is Britain done for or can it still come back from this?

What Neoliberalism Rewards

Neoliberalism is feminine by nature. It rewards those who stand up to it and impose their will.

An iron-clad inner structure, a meticulous sense of discipline, a rigid carapace of duty, an unbreakable focus, and a constant process of self-regulation – these are the qualities that neoliberalism does everything to destroy. These are also the qualities that it rewards. The perfect neoliberal subject is emotionally dysregulated, weak-willed, driven by his whims, and convinced that “duty” and “obligation” are dirty words. Neoliberalism repays him for this obedience to its precepts with poverty, illness, and painful internal disorders.

No Passport Needed

Customs officers no longer even look at my passport when I enter Canada from the US and the US from Canada. They look into my eyes and know everything about my citizenship status and other details of my identity.

It’s convenient, for sure, but also creepy.

The Trust Funder Revolution

That’s why I like him:

The extent to which the far-left shift has been driven for decades by the children of those most favored by our society rarely gets discussed. The revolt of the generationally rich is what is destroying us. The boutique sexual fetishes of the wealthy are at war with the middle-class morality we are told us stupid and boring. The value of their trust funds increases if national borders are erased.

DoE Is Dumb

The Department of Education is such a joke.

I was recently at a scholarly talk where a researcher analyzed the entirety of the existing studies on this subject. The conclusion was that fidget toys have a negative effect on focus, concentration and learning. There are many studies, and the overwhelming majority says that these sensory objects have a negative effect.

I happen to know this one little factoid because I chanced upon that talk. Imagine how much other poorly researched, dumb things these bureaucratic accounts publish.

The Symbolism of an Accident

A ship under a huge Mexican flag hit the Brooklyn Bridge.

I’m reading a lot about Mexico these days, trying to figure out why it’s such a mess. And yes, it’s a terrible mess. Lovely literature, though.