Opinions, art, debate
Yes, I’m sure all those Russian-speaking Jews in Brighton Beach walked right across the long border that the US has with Russia.
It’s become fashionable to be militantly stupid and feel no embarrassment.
Yes, yes, it’s on both sides. Right-wingers have a prattly Mexican congresswoman who recently decided that Orthodox Christianity was banned in Ukraine.
We are surrounded by absolute idjits.
Dems are having a normal one, celebrating and mocking the Texas flood where, among other victims, over two dozen little girls were killed or went missing at a Christian summer camp.
As somebody who once bought a faux-leather wallet for 36 million, I happen to know that making everybody on Earth billionaires is not a great plan.
That’s why I keep saying that if she doesn’t intensely desire you physically, the best decision is to run away at once:
I feel equally bad for Chris and his wife.
Current annual investment by USAID in Laos now approaches $50 million, “spread across health, education, disability inclusion, environmental legacy, and governance”. This is what the US has bought with all this money in Laos:
I asked AI what exactly USAID has been funding in Laos, and it gave me a list longer than my arm. I won’t copy it here to avoid crowding the blog, but it’s kind of really crazy.
Whatever cuts have been imposed on USAID are insufficient. The whole program needs to be scrapped.
Sophie Hannah’s new standalone novel is a love letter to England. The book will be confusing and weird to anybody who has not been steeped in the English culture. But for those of us who grew up reading and dreaming about the quaint English villages that gave rise to the most amazing civilization on Earth, the novel is irresistible. The characters are delightfully non-diverse. They are crazy about dogs and houses. They take their gardens and their Agatha Christie book clubs extremely seriously. Most importantly, they live as if Miss Marple’s England were still there.
No One Would Do What the Lamberts Have Done is a strange book. It’s an invitation to a club that only those who truly understand and love England can join. I’ve been reading Sophie Hannah for pretty much as long as she’s been writing, and this novel is both very much hers and quite unusual for her.
The 4th of July celebrations were puny like never before in my town. We had maybe 1/5 of what we usually do in people setting fireworks. Almost no flags. No grill parties in my neighborhood. No block party. No neighborhood parades. It’s not the weather. Yes, it is hot but we had hotter weather on this day in previous years, and that didn’t impact the celebrations.
We went out to walk around and see the fireworks last night. Instead of dressed up crowds mulling around and celebrating, we were mostly alone in empty streets. Please understand that I’ve been going out to see the fireworks for 16 years in these streets, and if I see a contrast, there surely is one.
People think that weekly anti-American protests don’t have an impact but they do. They depress the mood in a town that holds them, and everything ends up being sadder and drabber. People have talked themselves into thinking that this is a terrible country and can’t even get themselves to take a day off this fake drama.
The only way to cure American colleges from their addiction to large, shiny, utterly unnecessary buildings and large, well-staffed utterly unnecessary “services” is to cap both student aid and student loans.
Tuition skyrocketed in the past 30 years. In the same time period, the number of professors plummeted and class sizes increased. Libraries got stripped of books and academic journals. Student debt soared. The whole setup has been vitiated.
To give a single example, my university has a large and very generously staffed “career service.” The university itself is supposed to be a career service but instead of concentrating on the actual teaching, we take money away from the teaching and pour it into funding groups of fussy ladies who do weird, fussy things of zero value to students.
Any money that higher education gets will be immediately redirected into unnecessary buildings and “services.” Higher education doesn’t need money. It needs to go back to the place where teaching and research were the entire business of a college.
Much of the leftist discourse is simply a dislike for white people:
This slogan is an excellent encapsulation of the ideas that USAID spread around the world. This is why I laugh when I hear the oft-repeated mantra that USAID helped consolidate the “soft power” of the US. All that USAID programs did with a dedication of a crazed woodpecker was rubbish the US, stoke racial grievances, and explain to the recipients of USAID why they needed to detest the givers.
Also, I deeply detest the expressions “the right side of history” and “make the world a better place.” These saccharine clichés betray a lazy mind that is soaked in propaganda.
Your daily reminder that rich people don’t need countries. They find the concept stupid and tiresome:
I am certain that he very sincerely doesn’t get it. But it’s not just one person. The entire wealthy class (and the people the wealthy class controls informationally) very sincerely don’t understand what the problem is.
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