The degree of supervision is often a more eloquent class indicator than mere income, which suggests that the whole class system is more a recognition of the value of freedom than a proclamation of the value of sheer cash. The degree to which your work is overseen by a superior suggests your real classes more accurately than the amount you take home from it.

Paul Fussell, Class

There’s definitely an enormous difference between getting up at 5 am because you have an early shift assigned to you and getting up at the same early hour because your self-imposed productivity schedule demands it. The difference is rooted in the fact that it’s a lot harder to choose it anew every day than to accept the externally imposed reality. What a society values is what’s rare.

The capacity to contain and discipline the self is the highest class marker today because it’s becoming a rare quality.

It is among members of the upper class that you have to refrain from making compliments, which are taken to be rude… The paying of compliments is a middle-class convention, for this class needs the assurance compliments provide. In the upper class there’s never any doubt of one’s value, and it all goes without saying.

Paul Fussell, Class

The CNN recognizes that a majority of voters, including immigrants, prefer Trump to Biden on immigration:

A growing number of Americans are dissatisfied with the level of immigration into the country, and a growing number wants it decreased.

Nearly 80% of voters want an increased effort-presence at the southern border to stop illegal immigration, according to a September Marquette poll. This includes a majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents… Many voters – immigrants among them – are, at a minimum, willing to look past Trump’s rhetoric. They believe Trump is more likely than Biden to do what they prefer when it comes to immigration and the border.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/22/politics/analysis-trump-biden-immigrants/index.html

The strategy of media blitzes about how “Trump said a racism / sexism / Hitlerism” doesn’t work any more. We’ve been hearing how Trump said something scandalous since 2015. It’s become boring. People want a dramatic reduction in sky-high immigration levels. And at least a recognition that the punishing inflation is real. Whoever is advising the non-existent Biden campaign that voters can be satisfied on both of these very pressing issues with stories about how Trump is Hitler and the economy is fantastic is making a gigantic mistake. Even the CNN is seeing it.

There is a plot that appears obsessively in a multitude of novels in English. Six 14-year-old friends (three boys and three girls) spend a summer together. It thwarts their development forever, and they dedicate the rest of their lives to moping over that one mega-important summer. The only variety that Colin Walsh brings to this plot is that the characters of Kala speak with Irish accents and spend most of the novel boozing it up. We’ve all heard the stereotype that the Irish drink but Walsh wants to make sure that the belief in an irrepressible Irish alcoholism is hammered into every reader’s head.

Out of the 6 former teenage friends, two are drinking themselves into a stupor on every page, one became a woke drone who makes even the most sober of readers think longingly about a large bottle of rye, two escaped both alcoholism and wokeness by sagely meeting an early death, and one grew up and became normal, which makes her an absolute freak to the other characters.

For 400 booze-and-snot-covered pages, we follow the characters through long and painful hangovers during which they try to squeeze out of their addled brains who was a bigger douche at age 14.

For the life of me, I’ll never understand this fixation on the teenage years. I find adulthood much more fun. I finished Kara because I had started it on the day before I became sick, and I had no energy to select a different book once the symptoms started. It’s not badly written, except that one of the characters addresses himself as “you” and uses “ye” when talking about himself and his group of friends. This kept reminding me of Kanye, especially since the character is an infantile and addled rock star.

The resolution is appropriately woke plus there are many somewhat garbled musings on how important it is to “be like a river and flow” and “not put up walls”. Usually, in a mystery you really want to find out who murdered the victim. In Kala, however, all I wondered is why the murderer didn’t get rid of all these mopey alkies at once and spare us the pain of reading about their war on liver health.

The new owners of N’s company raised his salary by 18%, gave him a bonus in the amount of 50% of his annual salary, and gave everybody a paid vacation until January 2.

He’s getting fired, isn’t he?

“Please, please, take us back into the oppression Olympics! Pweeese!”

The whole thing is beyond distasteful. Whatever Claudine Gay says or does has zero power to “heal the wounds” of October 7. The rift on the American left is a boring parochial issue that has no bearing on anything of any import to the victims. Also, who exactly persecuted black people for millennia? I’d really like to hear a specific description of that evildoer. In addition, it would be interesting to see the list of ethnic groups that don’t “share a deep spirit of perseverance and survival”.

Folks, this is too funny. Claudine Gay plagiarized even the acknowledgement section of her dissertation. She copied somebody else’s words of gratitude because she couldn’t be bothered to write her own.

This is really funny. The President of Harvard can’t even write her own Acknowledgements.

Biden is on TV saying that Putin’s puppet in Venezuela, the Socialist dictator Maduro, is good at holding “free elections.” Is Biden trying to be funny on purpose? In view of the steps Colorado took yesterday towards Maduro-style elections, these comments sound a little too on the nose.

This letter from the Deans of Columbia makes me want to vomit:

Events of extraordinary geopolitical importance are taking place, and these egomaniacs have turned them into a sloberfest and an exercise in verbal masturbation around their hurt fee-fees. The result is “the fear that makes people fearful” and other dumb linguistic contortions instead of telling these mega babies on both sides to suck it up and go do something useful with their lives.

Biden could right now, today issue an executive order to discontinue all processing of migration cases at the border for a year and easily win the election. It would cost no money and would be mega popular.

But nothing remotely similar is being done.

Let’s ponder what it is that overrides political expediency and popular will so easily. Biden will rather lose than keep filling up detention facilities at the border. This is something so powerful that it obliterates every argument, every fact, everything.

Trump didn’t do it, either, by the way. This isn’t an issue of personalities. It’s much stronger than all that childish “good guys / bad guys” stuff.