Author: Clarissa

Drug Overdose Deaths Go Down

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

“While the mortality data for 2024 is incomplete and subject to change, Ohio is now in the ninth consecutive month of a historic and unexpected drop in overdose deaths,” said the organization Harm Reduction Ohio in a statement.

Missouri is seeing a similar trend that appears to be accelerating. After dropping by 10 percent last year, preliminary data shows drug deaths in the state have now fallen roughly 34 percent in the second quarter of 2024.

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/18/nx-s1-5107417/overdose-fatal-fentanyl-death-opioid

It’s not just these states. Drug overdose deaths have experienced somewhat of a decline nationwide. They are still sky-high compared to 2019, though:

The COVID damage to the social fabric seems to be healing bit by bit. Of course, it’s also true that there’s a limited number of people capable of dying of a drug overdose, and many of them were wiped out in the preceding few years. The linked article is written in a weirdly gushy tone but there’s a terrible tragedy hiding behind these numbers.

Different POWs

~ Clarissa ~ 22 Comments

Russian POWs look nothing of the kind after returning from captivity in Ukraine.

I’m not posting the really hardcore images to spare people’s sensibilities.

Don’t let childish contrarianism erase the evidence that’s right in front of you. Civilization versus barbarity is a conflict that always existed and it exists in our times, too.

The Woke Campus Preacher

~ Clarissa ~ 29 Comments

I listened to our famous campus preacher today. A protestant preacher, of course. He said, and this is a close quote, “It doesn’t matter if you’ve been baptized. It doesn’t matter if you’ve done any sacraments or even know what they are. It doesn’t matter if you go to church. All that matters is that you know in your heart of hearts that you trust Jesus to save you.”

And this is the entire bloody problem right there. This isn’t about religion and whose is better. It’s about the mentality of the primacy of feelings over everything. “Feelings cannot be wrong! If you feel it, it’s the ultimate truth!”

But it’s bunk. Feelings can be very much wrong. And an individual shouldn’t be a completely closed system where he’s the judge of good and evil based on how he feels. This is a very bad approach.

Campus wokesters have protested the preacher’s presence for years. But they are dumb because he’s doing their job for them. The preacher’s approach is at the heart of the woke mentality. All you need to do is take one little step of excluding this powerless, subservient Jesus from the equation altogether and put your ever important, ever feeling self in his place.

Old Mothers Are Young Women

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

One extremely positive effect of having a child late in life is that your whole life clock moves back many hours. I’m leading the life of somebody 15 years younger, so I don’t get to fret about aging or the next stage of life or whatever. For example, I spent the whole day yesterday chaperoning a field trip. This involved running after a bunch of feisty 8-year-olds across the football field and back in blistering heat while they participated in a multi-stage sporting event. Yes, grandmas chaperone, too, but as grandmas, they get to sit under a tree with coolers of iced tea while moms get to run around, yelling, “Liam! Did anybody see Liam? It’s our turn to go in 2 minutes!” and “Chandra, step away from that ice-cream stand right now! I see you, Chandra!”

For some unfathomable reason, I’m reading one book after another about female aging. Every Fall, for example, I read a book by the Canadian mystery writer Loreth Anne White. Somebody always drowns in an icy lake or perishes in a snow storm in her books, and that’s pleasing to read during our scorching hot autumns. But guess what? This year’s thriller by this author is also about female aging, and its the cruelest one yet. Whatever JD Vance said about post-menopausal women is child’s game compared to what this progressive Canadian writer has to say. But I don’t emotionally connect with the topic because my lifestyle is that of a much younger person. Talking about dried up, useless vaginas (like Loreth Anne White’s characters do) feels very irrelevant to my life.

I don’t recommend waiting until 35 to have children, obviously. If you wait, you might end up with none. But there are definite upsides for those few who can swing it.

Gender-fluid Dogs

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

There are worse indignities inflicted on pets than eating them:

Lively Art

~ Clarissa ~ 43 Comments

I don’t even want to think what this is supposed to be a metaphor of.

It would work as an artistic rendering of the first few years after the Bolshevik revolution. But even Stalin realized it was unsustainable and removed the plebs from the palaces.

Q&A: No Breasts and Eggs

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

I’m very grateful and happy that people prefer to read my analysis of books than those books. Loved this comment. I’m not going to do Japanese literature, though, because I have no feel for it, no frame of reference. I can’t do an interesting reading.

Here’s my only review of a Japanese novel, and I could only swing it because Murakami is so very Westernized.

Also, to the person who asked about Nicolás Gómez Dávila, sorry, I’m unfamiliar. I took a crapton of “literature of ideas” courses but the only authors we ever discussed were left-wing. I’m guessing this thinker was t a leftie if I have no idea who he is.

New Kind of Warfare

~ Clarissa ~ 29 Comments

Let’s hope nobody can hack our cellphones.

Q&A: Welfare and the Nation-state

~ Clarissa ~ 26 Comments

Social security is not my subject. I’m not even entitled to receive it in old age, so my knowledge is non-existent.

What I do know, however, is that there cannot possibly be any welfare (in its broadest sense) without a nation-state. And there can’t be a nation-state without clearly defined, non-porous borders and all of the other attributes of the nation-state. I started talking about it on this blog over a decade ago. Since then, all of my predictions have come true.

You can’t be simultaneously pro-open borders and pro-welfare. Open borders mean a dramatic impoverishment and lumpenization for the overwhelming majority. There cannot be a middle class without the nation-state. We are seeing the erosion of the middle-class everywhere where these policies have been adopted. Dramatic cuts to public education, public healthcare, policing, infrastructure. Austerity in everything. That’s the price for the dismantling of the nation-state. Welcome to the new neoliberal reality.

No Country for All Men

~ Clarissa ~ 16 Comments

Who are “us”, exactly? All of the inhabitants of the planet? What does the word “country” even mean, then?