Something bizarre is happening with journalism. Look at this article in Chicago Tribune:
This woman, who is supposed to symbolize the dire poverty of illegal migrants, is wearing a $400 Apple watch. Was it so hard to find a picture of a person who uses Medicaid and who isn’t decked out in expensive technology?
And it’s every photo these days. Every photo I come across in the mainstream press has some large gaffe. Obese victims of starvation, indigent mothers in fancy wearables. The journalists aren’t even trying any more.
Also, it’s curious how all of a sudden the narrative that illegal migrants don’t use welfare has been abandoned. What’s next, we’ll finally discover that there aren’t 11 million of them in the country but several times more?
This is Russian drone manufacturing. Look at the size of the drones:
They unleash hundreds of these on civilians every night.
I’m very glad that Trump finally understood that these people don’t want peace. It’s absolute nuttery to expect them to stop killing of their own free will.
The young women today who are upset that men don’t approach them aren’t the same women who decided any approach was harassment in 2015. We don’t all attend an annual bitch conference.
— Cartoons Hate Her! (@CartoonsHateHer) July 19, 2025
With all due respect, how come I, a very middle-aged, not particularly slender woman who looks every minute of her age, keep getting approached, complimented, and engaged with by flirtatious men in all age groups while these young women complain that this doesn’t happen anymore?
Have they stopped to consider that if they don’t get approached it’s not because all women have that problem but because it’s they specifically who don’t get approached?
Throughout human history there have been women who might look fantastic but can’t get a date in the midst of a male prison. We’ve all known such women. It’s not a societal issue but a stupidly physiological one.
Klara and I overheard a conversation where a woman expressed a wish to have been born male.
“I don’t get it,” I told Klara. “Being a woman is the best. We never have to carry any heavy stuff, and we can give birth to babies. Plus, we get the best clothes. And we don’t have to shave our faces every day. Or ever.”
“Yes,” said Klara with a passionate conviction. “And we don’t have to stand in a group and spit on the ground to see if our spit freezes before reaching soil and compete in whose spit freezes faster.”
I thought this sounded a little too specific but it turns out that this is what boys do on the playground in winter.
The number of rapes in England and Wales went from a little over 8,000 in year 2000 to over 70,000 in 2024.
One would assume that such horror would be a major topic of study, discussion, and public policy efforts. And that the whole society would come together to see what’s causing the sudden rape epidemic.
Curiously, ChatGPT vehemently denies that this is true. But if you ask for the numbers, it gives these actual numbers. I feel like I’m trying to rape the poor AI bot with my efforts to pry the truth out of its leftist jaws.
A little while ago, we had a discussion here on the blog of why one should mind the presence of millions illegal migrants in the country. “But it doesn’t hurt anybody!” people said. “What’s the harm?”
The idea that other people’s choices cannot be criticized or constrained is present in many other aspects of our shared lives. People are imagined as free-floating islands that don’t come into contact with each other. “But what is it to you? Why should you care?” one keeps hearing.
We aren’t islands, though. We are all connected, and things we do impact others. Here’s a particularly egregious example:
A 3-year-old girl was referred to our pediatric outpatient clinic with breast development and vaginal discharge over a period of 6 months. The [gender affirming hormone therapy] of her transgender father was estradiol spray 6.12 mg applied to both forearms daily. After 6 months this was changed to estradiol gel 3.75 mg daily for 7 months. The gel was manually applied to the chest, abdomen, shoulders, and thighs. The father reported skin to skin contact on a daily basis. A physical examination of the girl revealed a Tanner stage III for breast and Tanner stage I for pubic hair development.”
This man did terrible physical damage to his daughter because of his choice to pose as a woman. The psychological damage he caused to this poor child cannot be quantified but he also hurt her physically.
We would all be happier if we moved away from worshipping our whims (aka choices) and concentrated more on such things as duty.
I know somebody who used this book and said it was great:
I recommend that you start a couple of weeks earlier to be more advanced and be able to offer guidance to your child.
Also, I highly recommend finding a list of famous Latin expressions and using them as an entry point into the language. They usually have a little story attached to them that you can explore and play out.
For instance, quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi can give tons of material for debate and sharing of stories. You can play it with toys, you can do all sorts of things.
It feels like there’s an influx of polyglots on the blog, which is a welcome development.
Our Dean lost his secretary and won’t be allowed to hire a new one. I was the only person who felt compassion towards him over it. I think I might have even posted about it here.
My compassion brought typically neoliberal results. The Dean decided to take my secretary away. There are 50 others to choose from but he homed in on mine.
I never voiced my compassion to him. This works on a different plane than any direct tit-for-tat. But compassionate suckers who leak emotions invariably get punished. It’s how the system works.
Clive James, a wonderful literary critic and a polyglot, has excellent suggestions for you, my friend.
Read Borges.
His dialogues and essays can be recommended as an easy way into Spanish, a language which every student of literature should hold in prospect, to the extent of an elementary reading knowledge at least.
2. It’s best to choose essays as your first serious reading matter in the language.
Memo to any student making a raid on the culture of another language: essays are always the easiest way in.
3. Here’s the actual method:
Read an essay a day, underline every word you don’t know, keep going for as long as you get the sense, look up the hard words afterwards.
If you aren’t ready to tackle actual essays, there are collections of very simple stories you can get on Kindle. Get one and start from the most basic story, using the method outlined above. You learn to speak by speaking and to read by reading. If you goal is to read in a language, then read a bit every day.
And one more quote from James because it’s very beautiful:
When you are learning a new language, there is a blissful moment when, from not knowing how to, you pass to not knowing how not to. The second phase is the dangerous one, because it leads to sophistication, and one of the marks of sophistication is a tendency to forget what it was like to be naive. But it was when we were still naive that we knew most intimately the lust of discovery, a feeling as concentrated and powerful as amorous longing, with the advantage that we never had to fear rejection.
Art will always want us. It finds us infinitely desirable.
Muchísima suerte y que lo pases bien en el proceso, compañero.
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