This is step one on the journey to “my husband doesn’t help me with our kid,” “I feel like a single mother of two”, “I’m exhausted because he rarely does anything with our kid, and it’s all on me.”

Time and again, women engineer these sad architectures of paternal exclusion for the dubious payoff of feeding their ego in the first couple of months of the child’s life. The result is always the same and so is their absolute shock that it happened.

So, I’m sick with COVID. Bad symptoms, both respiratory and gastrointestinal. Plus, very unpleasant muscle spasms and fear of food.

But I found a cure. Maybe it only works on me but who knows? It doesn’t hurt to try.

The cure is alcohol-free Blue Moon beer. Maybe alcoholic beer works, too, but I didn’t try it. I drank a can, and it’s extraordinary. I feel quite human.

The human body is truly fascinating.

Why I don’t like sci-fi is because there’s never any logic to it. In Dune, high-tech cultures of nukes, interstellar travel, and long-range fire weaponry all have their soldiers drag around swords and machetes and engage in knife fights. Nobody knows why. They just do.

Oh, that’s a good one. Ideally, I’d go up North. Alaska, or Northwest Territories if it has to be Canada. As far up North as possible would be great for me. I checked out Yellowstone, and they have very attractive temperatures.

Unfortunately, N doesn’t want to go that close to the Arctic Circle, so I’ve been eyeing Minot, North Dakota.

It’s all between the US and Canada because I wouldn’t consider living anywhere else at this point. Smallish towns with large wooded areas and tons of snow. Yes, it’s all about the weather and the quiet at this point. There’s too much happening on the inside to be able to put up with outside noise.

Please, everybody, participate. If you could live anywhere (else), where would it be?

I’ve got COVID, people. It’s about 80% as bad as it was when I had it the first time 3 years ago. Does anybody have recent experiences, recommendations, funny jokes?

How many days after symptoms start is it OK to go to a farmer’s market, you think?

If you have kids, then neither. If not, then both.

I never heard of her, to my shame. I’m not a movie person, unfortunately. But I’ll check her out for sure. Thank you for the recommendation!

They finally learned to speak Ukrainian just when I had forgotten how to do it.

I was always way too sensitive, a snowflake, to live among my native countrymen. I still am, so that hasn’t changed. People started to drink a lot of coffee and talk often about it. Even in Kharkiv where coffee was never a thing.

In 2010 Sailer wrote the following words that explain the current unpleasantness experienced by US Jews:

Jewish leaders typically exhort Jews with one of three arguments, all based around feelings of communal self-pity:
1. “We Jews have suffered, so we should be acutely sensitive to others’ suffering…”;
2. “As God liberated the Jews from captivity in Egypt, … we have a religious obligation as Jews to help the oppressed”;
3. “Jews should be aware of our collective vulnerability, historical and continuing, and therefore for our own good always take the other side of the kinds of groups, movements and individuals who have victimized us in the past, and who could threaten us again in the future.”

The problem with this positioning, says Sailer, is that, with 35% of Forbes 400 list being Jewish, 50% of the Atlantic 50 most influential pundits being ditto, and all major film studios run by Jewish men,* nobody buys into the “sad, marginalized Jew” narrative. It only annoys people. And then when the wolf you kept crying for decades finally shows up, nobody takes you seriously anymore.

But that’s not the worst part. An elite group that doesn’t perceive itself as such will not work for the preservation of the society that allowed it to reach this elite status. Instead, it will try to smash such a society and the (utterly invented) oppressions this groups imagines itself to suffer in it:

American Jews should start thinking of themselves less as oppressed outcasts who need to go for whatever they can get while the getting is good, and start more accurately thinking of themselves as belonging to the best-connected inner circle of the contemporary American Establishment. American Jews should realize that, like the Protestant elite of yore, their privileged position as a de facto leadership caste bestows upon themselves corresponding duties to conserve the long-term well-being of the United States…

A group self-image of victimization, combined with a penchant for ideological intensity and powerful ethnocentric lobbies, can lead to bizarre political manifestations-such as the dominant Jewish assumption that proper veneration of their Ellis Island ancestors requires opposition to immigration restriction today.

This is as true of groups as it is of individuals. Victim thinking clouds people’s minds. An enormous amount of Jewish energy in America has gone into the destruction of the very institutions that made it possible for US Jews to thrive. Universities are one example. “We are sad and pathetic just like those actual sad pathetics,” Jewish intellectuals declaimed for 60 years. Finally, the actual sad pathetics turned around and said, “No, you aren’t, dude. You have everything that we want and we’ll take it now, thanks a bunch.”

Daily pleas** by Jewish intellectuals on social media – “we fought for your rights, why do you hurt us now?” – remind me of the academic quit-lit genre from a decade ago. They are embarrassingly cringe because their authors deny any agency in their own lives. Given that these authors are invariably very successful people, it’s impossible to take their complaints seriously. “But why, why did he do it to me?” is a perennial plea of a dumped girlfriend, and this unenviable role is nothing I would recommend in a moment of crisis.

* At the time of the article’s publication, of course.

** The most recent one I saw is from yesterday.

Now that I’m back from my travels, I’ll have time to finish my copy of Noticing in peace. Here’s an interesting tidbit that everybody suspects but doesn’t have the full stats:

By any means of counting, there are quite a number of countries where Jews make up a remarkable percentage of native-born Nobel laureates. For example, among American natives, [there are] 200 prizewinners through 2009 (leaving aside the peace prize as non-intellectual). Jews made up 62 or 31%. Since Jews comprised about 3% of the adult population in the U.S.
in the middle of the last century, this gives American Jews an Achievement Quotient for Nobel laureates of just over ten. And the American AQ is fairly low by international standards. In places with very few Jews, AQs can be stratospheric, such as Switzerland (3 Jewish laureates out of 17 total laureates for an AQ of 60), Latin America (2 out of 8 for an AQ of 220) and Italy (4 out of 17 for a 320).

It’s not all Jews, of course. Nobody has explained the divergence between Ashkenazis and Sephardics but I’d be very interested to find out.

Ashkenazi Jews (ones with Yiddish-speaking ancestors) average about ten points higher than non-Hispanic white gentiles, or 110 on a scale where white Americans and Brits average 100. That would put the median Ashkenazi Jew at about the 75th percentile among whites. IQ testing in Israel suggests that the other Jewish communities trail the Ashkenazi… Sephardim score about two points less than white gentiles, or 98. The Mizrahim (Jews from the Arab world) average
around 91.

So what is the explanation for the 70% illegitimacy rates among black Americans? Does anybody know?

The idea that this is a result of some welfare program is dumb. You can’t erase the prestige value of having a dude in your life with some paltry handout. Millennia of social conditioning have taught women that having the father of your children around is good and not having him is bad. I can’t think of anything that would lower your prestige among the female peer group more than having the co-author of your pregnancy evaporate the moment that pregnancy happens.

Middle-class divorced white people, please don’t project this onto yourselves. Your ex-husband who would rather die than not see his children, divorce or no divorce, is a completely different story.

We are watching Dune II, and I wonder if it’s in the original books that all the good dudes are “people of color” while the evildoers are all so white that even fireworks on their planet have zero color. Beyond white, obviously. Was it meant to be about a conflict between skinhead Nordic Nazi types and sub-Saharan types? Because, sheesh, how tedious.

We are halfway through the movie, and, God, is this second part ever so boring. The first part was good but the sequel just drags and drags.

No spoilers, please. I’m still hopeful it will pick up in the second half.