A judge had to resign after an illegal migrant from Venezuela was arrested at his home:

Doña Ana County Magistrate Judge Joel Cano has resigned from the bench where he has sat since 2011.

Although his resignation letter, dated March 3, did not state his reason for stepping down, it followed shortly after a man awaiting deportation proceedings, accused by federal law enforcement of being affiliated with a Venezuelan gang, was arrested at Cano’s home.

https://www.abqjournal.com/news/article_47926b51-d481-4aa9-8d76-5de8cc13809b.html

It’s very obvious what party the weird judge belongs to but there’s no explanation why a 60-year-old judge would be sheltering a 23-year-old Venezuelan arms runner. It’s all exceptionally bizarre.

Why is it not OK to say that Cervantes is superior to Oprah’s bestsellers and that Beethoven is superior to Cardi B? Why do people get invariably upset when I say that this or that book is art while another one isn’t?

Because most people are incapable of reading Cervantes and Trollope and listening to Beethoven. And it makes them feel bad to have this pointed out. We must not make anybody feel bad because that would be not inclusive and anti-democratic.

The idea that everything is equivalent to everything else and that every choice is equally valid and equally independent from anything traps us in a situation where we have no words to explain why Amanda Gorman is ridiculously talentless and why the empty churches of Europe are a tragedy.

Some intellects are stronger than others. Some sensibilities are more refined. Some creative work is vastly superior to other. Recognizing all this doesn’t immediately lead us to genociding those who can’t listen to anything beyond Megan Thee Stallion. It doesn’t lead to anything bad at all but we act like it would be the second coming of Hitler.

The end of the academic year is always very hard. This time, it’s particularly heavy because we are preparing to have our department disbanded. I have twice the number of meetings I normally have. And to me, every meeting is an unnecessary meeting.

Years ago, I came up with a system of challenges that help me stay afloat during the end-of-year rush. On Sunday, I write out the challenge for the next week. It consists of 3 things I must do every day. These must be enjoyable things. Painting, reading one of my right-wing philosophers, walking in the gardens, doing a face mask, staring motionlessly at a candle, reading a story in German, decorating my planner, driving through the neighborhood that is my place of power.

In order to complete the challenge, I have to squeeze all these activities between the meetings and the rest of the work stuff. This re-orients me from thinking about the meetings to thinking about the fun challenges. April becomes not the month of boring administrative stuff but the month of the enjoyable challenge.

Supreme Court blocks new deportations of Venezuelans in Texas under 18th-century wartime law https://t.co/sZlTXL659E pic.twitter.com/pHcsEMxxgp

— New York Post (@nypost) April 19, 2025

It’s impossible even for a very educated brain to understand why it is legal to let all these people cross the border illegally yet it is illegal to return them to their countries.

Antiracist man… comes from nowhere, no past protects him. He begins with himself, with himself now. On a planet ideally without borders, without distinctions of any kind, and without nuances, he’s a traveler without baggage, a poor devil. In a sort of senility of perpetual beginnings, of established infantilism, of star-academic puerility, he invents himself as best he can from one moment to the next. Belonging is only perceived and presented as a burden, a defect, a dead weight.

Renaud Camus, Enemy of the Disaster

This is almost literally what I wrote about neoliberal individuals in my book. The term doesn’t matter. It’s the reality that is being described that is very much there.

Renaud Camus is a writer, thinker, and intellectual. A right-wing one, obviously. He’s not known to run around with a machete, slicing up little girls. He’s not part of a rape gang. To the contrary, his right-wingness consists precisely in his opposition to bringing more machete-wielders and gang rapists to Europe. For that, he’s excluded from crossing the borders that are wide open to the machete crowd.

Trollopian England this definitely ain’t.

I’m going to make two soups today, lentil for Klara and vegetable for myself. N will have both to choose from.

For some unknown reason, my blood sugars react to lentil soup like it’s ice-cream. This is strange because I can eat the much sweeter borscht (beets, potatoes, tomato sauce, cabbage) with no increase in blood sugar.

In any case, making two soups at once is my idea of paradise. Happy Easter weekend to everybody!

We have a weekly anti-Trump protest in our town. It gathers in front of the library every Friday. A former colleague posts weekly footage on Facebook, and what I notice is that all of the protesters are in the retiree age group. I love and respect the retirees but it’s strange to me that they don’t notice that nobody under the age of 70 is interested in joining them. Their unhappiness with the current state of affairs is not shared by younger people. Shouldn’t that give them pause?

They’ve had their turn and can now enjoy the fruits of their labor. Those who haven’t had their turn yet should be left alone to decide how they want things to be. The protest has been going on for weeks. Shouldn’t the utter indifference of the generations who are currently working and raising families serve as a hint?

People become very left-wing because they cannot enjoy the regular stuff of life. Getting up, brushing teeth, making the bed. The daily routine fills them with horror. Is that all there is? There should be more to life. There should be more space, more excitement, more money and more fame to accommodate their ever-expanding egos. They appoint themselves saviors because they can’t tolerate life without some hugely important mission. They fight imaginary oppressions because they can’t explain to themselves why they are so miserable and invent structural inequities to justify their unhappiness.

In Emma Pattee’s novel Tilt, we meet Annie, a 35-year-old woman in the last week of her first pregnancy. Annie lives in Portland, a city which – and this I didn’t know – is considered to be at risk of experiencing a massive earthquake. At the start of the novel, that earthquake comes, and Annie has to trudge across the devastated ruin of the city on foot, in hopes of reuniting with her husband. The scenes of post-quake destruction are harrowing but Annie’s inner life is so bleak that even the worst damage wrought by nature is less scary than the recesses of her mind. Annie and her husband Dom are miserable because they never became rich and famous. They have a marriage, a home, a baby on the way, jobs, safety and comfort but they despise all of that because their youthful dreams of making it big in Hollywood or on Broadway didn’t come true.

As she searches for her husband amidst the wreckage of Portland, Annie doesn’t become a different person. She doesn’t stop being her usual entitled, pouty, lefty self. Tilt would be a crappy novel if it depicted a dramatic, unrealistic transformation. No disaster can bring out of a person things that aren’t already there. But Annie does learn something about the value of life, family, and marriage.

It’s a good novel, not a work of art like Emma Cline’s stuff, but still quite good. It’s not at all politically heavy. There are very few actual political statements, although it is very clear that the characters are far-left.  But the mentality that causes leftism is on full view.

Please don’t tell me that the author is an airhead climate prattler. I know that. One’s capacity to write good books is very unconnected to what kind of person one is. And this is a good novel that makes some important points.