Medical training should be free. Paid 100% by the government. It should also be extremely selective, with both an IQ test and a knowledge test before admission and rigorous knowledge tests every year after.

The reason why this is impossible is the Civil Rights Act. Instead of gatekeeping into the medical profession through IQ tests and knowledge tests, which would violate the Civil Rights Act, we gatekeep through extremely high costs of medical school.

People who decide to take on the exorbitant burden of debt to attend medical school are either supremely confident or mentally unwell. Often, these two groups intersect. We end up with a shortage of doctors because many people don’t want to take on the risk of saddling themselves with gigantic loans without the certainty that they can be successful in the medical profession. The field is attractive to foreigners who finance part of the medical journey overseas at a much lower cost but God knows in what conditions and with what degree of rigor. Many gifted Americans who want to be doctors never try going into the field because their afraid of ruining their lives by taking on huge amounts of debt.

This issue can be solved very easily by adopting the measures I listed above. But it’s not going to be solved because these measures will create disparate impact. We are willing to sacrifice our lives, literally, to avoid disparate impact. That is very, very crazy.

It’s impossible to win a war where one side has a total prohibition on harming the other side’s civilians while its enemy concentrates specifically on inflicting the worst possible civilian losses.

Ukraine and Russia are not fighting the same war.

Several massive explosions have occurred at the Shatura Thermal Power Station in the Moscow Oblast of Western Russia, one of the largest power plants in the Russian Federation, following a large-scale drone strike tonight against Moscow by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/4m8woJkr0E

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) November 23, 2025

Ternopil continues to bury the families that Russians burned alive on November 19 🕯️ pic.twitter.com/NL8O4pHB4b

— Victoria (@victoriaslog) November 23, 2025

Without proportional response, you can’t win. Ukraine is fighting in a way that will please liberal HR ladies in Western countries. The result is 33 Ukrainian civilians burned alive in their beds on November 19. And all of the Ukrainian civilians murdered by Russia with zero proportional losses for 11 years.

These people are such weirdos:

Olivia had written a tabloid-style news story about how “sources in Washington, D.C. and Charleston have been buzzing recently about an unexpected romance: Mark Sanford and Olivia Nuzzi,” who was described as “one of the most famous political reporters in America,” a “blonde beauty” who “gained critical acclaim as a skilled profile writer, gaining access to the powerful and the mysterious and turning it into pure journalistic gold.”

Olivia told me she wrote the fake article as an exercise to think through what might be the worst that could be said publicly if the affair became known, though that didn’t really make sense to me given the piece’s tone.

But hey, after all this, Lizza still forgave Olivia, planned to marry her, and of course, got cheated on again and again.

If true, this is beyond a massive fuck up on the part of both Rubio and Witkoff, allowing this plan – which they claim is not and never was the policy of the Trump Administration – to circulate as long as it did, has likely caused permanent harm to any further negotiations to end… https://t.co/2y7wM6lxKx

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) November 23, 2025

Fuckup or not, it has once again saved Zelensky’s career from a huge corruption scandal. Just as the scandal was heating up… this “28-point plan” was leaked, and nobody cares about the corruption scandal any more.

I’m not saying anybody did this on purpose. I’m saying exactly what I did this morning about the Trump-Mamdani meeting.

Every couple of months something like this happens:

26-y-old Bethany MaGee is fighting for her life in hospital after she was doused in petrol & set on fire by Lawrence Reed while travelling on the L train in Chicago.

The convicted felon Reed has been arrested 72 times

He was released pre-trial just a few weeks before the attack pic.twitter.com/ROjA2h8m4l

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) November 22, 2025

There are no protests, no outcry, no #MeTootery.

Before that, it was Iryna Zarutska. A few months previously, it was Emily Carlson:

COVERUP: The drive-by media suppressed coverage of this Chicago murder back in April. 25-year-old Emily Carlson was murdered after career criminal Willie Holmes spat on her and then plunged a knife into her back, severing her aorta, while she sat on the train station steps dying… pic.twitter.com/xJBbqmwkCR

— @amuse (@amuse) September 9, 2025

Compared to George Floyd, it’s quite remarkable how little attention these law-abiding, completely innocent, productive women get.

In Wallace Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose, the marriages of three different generations fail. The marriage of the Western pioneer geologist and his writer-illustrator wife fail because, if the wife contributes both the children and the income and the husband doesn’t provide, then what is his role? The husband and the wife are both good people but they run into the unanswerable question of what makes a husband if he can’t provide, organize, protect, and shelter.

The youngest generation of the early 1970s fails for a diametrically opposite reason. Here, it’s the women who can’t find a role for themselves. Once a woman contributes nothing womanly—no children, no comfort, no gentleness—what happens? The young woman in the novel gets passed around sexually by her husband like a bothersome receptacle with no purpose. She consents because she can’t find any other role for herself.

The generation in the middle is that of the narrator. His relationship fails, too, but since he’s part of his own story, he can’t understand why. It’s only by the end of the novel that the narrator and the readers start figuring it out.

Thank you for the support for the book reviews! I sometimes think that there are too many of them and it can get boring for people, so encouraging words about the reviews matter a lot.

As for Trump and Mamdani, I don’t think it’s a deliberate, thought-out strategy. I think it’s completely instinctive. But. Didn’t Trump hit on the very best way to discredit Mamdani? Calling him a Muslim Communist cost him zero supporters. But having him smile subserviently while Trump says, “yeah, I’m a fascist, haha” and slaps Mamdani playfully on the back?

Again, I don’t think Trump is playing 4D chess or any of that groupie rubbish. But I do believe he has incredibly good instincts for what works.

Why did Mamdani agree? Because he’s a very immature, very sheltered man. Consider that he never had to pay his bills, never had to wonder how to make a living, never had to clean his room. A 35-year-old (or whatever his age, I can’t be bothered to Google it) man who has always lived the life of a very spoiled little princess. His meeting with Trump is for Mamdani an encounter with a celebrity. And the celebrity was nice to him. So he acted like a little boy who has his baseball signed by a famous player.

Mamdani is not an adult person like you and I are adult people. Imagine if all the strength and growth and strategizing and self-control you have been exercising your whole life to make ends meet, pay the bills, stretch the paycheck, plan for larger purchases, etc never had to be used at all. You’d be a completely different person. I started doing paid translations at 14, and since then I always had to think about making money and covering my needs. I can’t even imagine who I’d be if I had my parents always there to provide everything as if by magic. Honestly, I wouldn’t even want that.

OK, so see the cabañas?

N loves the cabañas. He doesn’t want to travel anywhere that is devoid of the cabañas. But here at our favorite place, they are only available between mid-November and April. In summer, there are only beach chairs with umbrellas, and those are uncomfortable and provide barely any shade.

Does anybody know why there’s a summertime absence of cabañas?

There’s an announcement up saying that the cabañas don’t appear outside of the winter months, so I’m not inventing it. I want to ask the rental guy but I’m not managing to coincide with him.

Why does the idea exist that you can mix together people from different cultures and get great results? Why was the belief that “diversity is our strength” advanced when it’s clearly not true?

Multiculturalism was invented by people who live in a monoculture they mistake for diversity. These are wealthy, hyper educated people who are members of the intellectual and financial elite. They don’t have culture in the either good or bad sense in which regular people have culture. They are completely deracinated, severed from any roots. They have a supporting cast of shrinks, coaches, and shamans to offset the costs of the deracination. It’s a nice life. But it breeds terrible cluelessness as to what happens to the brains and the souls of people who are torn away from their culture, language, food, community, familiar air, etc. Of course, it’s also profitable not to notice.

As the sexual revolution is crashing around him, a crippled middle-aged professor of history Lyman Ward is grappling with the casual abandonment of his freshly liberated wife by researching the life of his talented grandmother.

In the 19th century, Susan Ward, a gifted writer and illustrator, sacrifices her dream of living the life of an East Coast intellectual in order to follow her husband Oliver on his geological ventures in the American West. Oliver has neither Susan’s gifts nor her connections. He’s perennially unlucky and creates endless trouble for Susan and their three children.

As Lyman researches his grandmother, he wonders how Susan’s life, with its self-discipline and sacrifice, compares to that of the liberated women not only of his but of the younger generations. Angle of Repose is truly a great novel, which means that it provides no easy answers.

This is one of the best reading experiences I’ve had all year. Stegner is probably the most important American novelist of the second half of the twentieth century, and this is one of his greatest novels.