I can’t get over the fact that this is how she looked at 75:

Twenty-five years ago, Margaret Thatcher, then-75, issued a shocking warning about Putin.

Since then, successive American presidents—Bush, Obama, Biden, and initially Trump—have been played by Putin.

Watch Baroness Thatcher's remarkably clear-sighted warning: pic.twitter.com/nLPhLDtxES

— JP Lindsley | Journalist (@JPLindsley) July 14, 2025

And yes, she saw through that KGB prick when other Western leaders were completely bamboozled.

What an extraordinary woman.

Traditional resorts are still enormously better than Airbnb where you are practically taken hostage until you complete a series of bizarre and dimeaning quests before being able to leave. One of the worst quests I’ve had to complete was to emerge from an apartment in Madrid, lock the door, crawl into a strange little space behind lines of drying laundry, and throw the key back into the apartment through a small window so that it would land in a spot that the instructions described in a long-winded and pompous way. You only got one chance at landing the key correctly since you couldn’t get back into the apartment and redo the exercise.

At the same (very pricey and extraordinarily well-appointed) apartment in Madrid, there was a dishwasher that gave me a neurosis. Every use of the dishwasher would short-circuit the stove, necessitating the owner to come and lie under the stove for an hour with a hairdryer in his hand to dry it out. This gave me paroxysms of guilt, especially since the owner tried to be an extremely good sport about it and tell me in detail how he absolutely didn’t mind spending his Saturday night under a stove.

“Why didn’t you stop using the dishwasher, then?” you’ll ask, thinking that by “using the dishwasher” I necessarily mean “turning it on to wash dishes.” But no, as I found in complete desperation, dripping a couple of water drops on it from the dishes one washed in the sink has the same nefarious effect, resulting in the elegantly dressed owner lying under the stove again with a cheerful explanation of how he didn’t mind spending both Saturday and Sunday drying appliances with a hairdryer.

Is it true that you shouldn’t boil water twice? For example, if you boiled a kettle of water and used it to make tea, then should you pour the water you didn’t use out?

I always reboil many times until the pot is empty. Has anybody heard any wisdom on the subject? N says his Grandma was adamant that water should never be reboiled but is anybody else aware of this?

This is very frequent. It’s so frequent that more people do it than don’t. The only way out is to train yourself out of it. Every time it starts to happen, stop yourself and do something calming. If you are tactile, carry a little object in your pocket that has the texture that grounds you. If you are olfactory, use a little piece of cloth with the scent that you find soothing. If you are verbal, recite your favorite poem to yourself, slowly and with gusto.

Another method is to rub your fingertips against each other while breathing deep and clearing your mind of everything. Some people imagine that they are floating in a swimming pool, with sun caressing their forehead. Others repeat in their head, “inner peace, inner peace.” On “inner” you breathe in, on “peace” you breathe out.

At the end of the activity, imagine that you get in a car, slam the door behind you, and drive away from these people. “Bye bye! You can’t have me!” Let a wave of relief that you escaped wash over you.

It takes time but the method works. Only today I received news that the Dean is retaliating against me. The need to address passionate inner monologues at this bastard was strong. But I beat it because I’m on vacation and don’t want to waste it on him.

Does anybody understand what this means?

White people be like “let’s grab some lunch”

— , (@Zvbear) July 14, 2025

I ask in complete sincerity. There must be something very cultural going on here that I don’t get.

I read the comments, and they seem very aggressive.

Does anybody get this?

All Putin needed to do was a token ceasefire concession over bombing Kyiv without changing much else in Russia's operations and the push in DC to move Trump toward Ukraine would have fizzled.

Putin was too fanatical and deluded to take advantage of a huge opportuniity for Russia https://t.co/iQrSgLFT48

— Alexander Clarkson  (@APHClarkson) July 14, 2025

This is a stupid tweet. And everybody who expected anything but extreme escalation from Russia is stupid. This is why we need the Humanities. We need people who specialize in regions and countries. We need experts.

“Expert” has become a dirty word because of COVID, and this is massively unfair because throughout COVID actual experts were doing extraordinary work. All of my early knowledge about COVID came from scientific research I was reading daily. For instance, experts knew and put it in writing that children neither suffered from nor transmitted COVID by May of 2020. All of the bashing of experts was done by people who can’t tell an expert from a WashPo journalist.

In any case, there used to be highly educated, intelligent people advising US presidents. Philip Bobbitt is one such person. I found out about the impending destruction of the nation-state from one of his books. He knew and was advising several presidents in a row about it.

Then, the whole concept of inviting knowledgeable people to explain how things work somehow disappeared. And as a result, we ended up divorced from reality and subsumed in the most bizarre and groundless fantasies.

And yes, Humanities betrayed their purpose by turning themselves into a cudgel of political partisanship. We are all suffering as a result. But that’s exactly why real experts should be supported, encouraged, and listened to.

This “all Putin needed” at the beginning of the tweet above is so moronically dumb that one’s blood goes cold. Yet this utter misunderstanding of Russia’s behavior and motivation is widespread. As a result, we have the president wasting months in humiliating discussions of ceasefires that feed the Russians’ ego and achieve absolutely nothing else.

Somebody flagged my old book reviews on Amazon as containing harassment, and all of my reviews were deleted as a result. Here’s the link to a review that triggered this. I have no particular need to post reviews on Amazon but these insane accusations of “hateful conduct” reminded me of the reality we inhabited prior to January 21 of this year.

Trump is wildly imperfect and often mega annoying. But, people, I’d much rather have Trump than live in the musty censorship of pre-Trump. Today it exists on stupid platforms like Amazon that nobody cares about. Without Trump, our whole lives would have been eaten by the prissy censors of the leftist regime.

Horacio Castellanos Moya is El Salvador’s Balzac. He is writing a multi-novel saga where he traces the lives of the Aragón family members from 1940s to our times. If you thought that nobody wrote any longer like Trollope or Balzac, you are wrong. Castellanos Moya has created a rich and complicated literary world where each new novel adds a new piece to the puzzle of the familiar characters.

The preceding two novels in the Aragón saga, Moronga and A Tamed Man, were absolute masterpieces. They were set in 2010s, and show what mass migration and neoliberalism have done to Salvadorans. They are hilarious but also extremely dark. Outstanding and devastating literary feats.

With the new book in the series titled Cornamenta, Castellanos Moya steps back in time but also in intensity. The novel describes the closing days in the life of Clemen Aragón, the father of the Tamed Man Erasmo. It is set in 1972, and the historical backdrop is quaint and not extremely interesting for anybody but the most hardcore fans of the series. Clemen is as comically horny as his son, the protagonist of several of the Aragón novels. You get some useful background and meet a few of the familiar characters (Vikingo is one of them). But I found it hard to connect with the novel because after the heights of artistic mastery Castellanos Moya had reached in Moronga and A Tamed Man, this novel was a letdown.

Please don’t get me wrong. Castellanos Moya is one level extra beyond any of the most talented authors you can think of. His not-so-great book is still a masterpiece that other writers could only dream of writing. But I was hoping for something at the level of Moronga and A Tamed Man, and I definitely didn’t get that in Cornamenta.

One change that I find disturbing here in SW Florida is the proliferation of offensive language in store names, menu offerings, brand labeling, and product advertisement in local establishment. I never had to worry about that kind of stuff here in America, and now I suddenly face the need to steer my child from a litany of fucks, asses, jerks, and worse.

As somewhat of an aside, if you decide to read Sarma’s memoir, please be forewarned that she overuses the f-word to an extraordinary degree. I’m a literary critic and no vocabulary in literature bothers me. But when it’s used randomly and repetitively for no purpose, that is simply bad writing.

Wait, what?

Is he suffering from heatstroke or did something happen that I missed?

Truly, one can’t get distracted for a day in this timeline.