Of course, this is nothing but a payout to the dictators ruling those “damaged nations” to keep them in place and preserve the status quo. “Climate” is the excuse that was chosen but it could have been anything else. Colonialism, racism, whatever.

It’s convenient to have words like “climate” that make people emotional whether they are for or against. It’s easy to sneak anything by while everybody goes on about “climate.”

As an extremely unsociable person who is forced to come into contact daily with at least several people who expect verbal contact, I invent little hooks, or small entertaining anecdotes, that I can deliver without much effort. To give an example, my current seasonal hook is “there will be 5 languages spoken around my Thanksgiving table.” I have fed this hook to about half a dozen people today. It works well because I don’t have to come up with a new line for each individual who awaits verbal reinforcement from me. I don’t have to think about what to say at all. I memorize one line, and then people kind of start talking to themselves about it, and all I have to do is make encouraging noises while thinking about something else.

If I’m so unfortunate that I find myself having to go to a party, I prep a hook in advance, and then go from one little group to another, repeating it to each group in turn. It looks like I’m circulating, which gives me an excuse to disappear in the folds of the venue after a while.

People are like hungry birds, constantly needing to be fed with meaningless little chatter. I don’t understand this need but I have learned to pretend to participate.

Friends, rejoice at these good tidings: I have discovered a wonderful and unfairly forgotten author. I came across Elizabeth Taylor’s name (no relation to the actress) in Rafael Chirbes’s diaries. Chirbes speaks of Taylor with such admiration that I had to check her out. Of course, it turned out that Chirbes was absolutely right. Taylor’s writing is superb. Every word in her novel Angel is absolutely delicious.

Angel Deverell, the protagonist of the novel, is a writer of vulgar, verbose, yet very popular novels. Taylor’s own extremely restrained and tasteful writing style offers a hilarious contrast with Angel’s pompous scribblings. A lot more interesting than Angel’s books is her personality. She’s the most absurd, stubborn, and clueless person in existence. The novel traces Angel’s life from adolescence to old age, and in spite of the woman’s narcissism and absurdity, it’s hard not to get attached to her.

Taylor is a mid-twentieth-century British writer. It’s extraordinary that somebody this talented was mostly forgotten. If you have no time, I recommend reading at least a couple of random pages by her. Every word she uses is so precise, so needed that reading becomes pure joy.

I don’t know why everybody is so aflutter regarding what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter. This is very typical neoliberal austerity. It’s exactly what’s happening at my university.

The way it always happens is that there’s a real or manufactured budget crisis, which is invariably blamed on the workers who are told they are guilty of existing. Workers are berated for being lazy, low-quality, racist/sexist/phobic and non-diverse. The strategy is to fire most of them and force the remaining few to do the work of the fired people.

Then things stop working, neoliberals pout, and go wreck something else.

What I find curious is that our far-left university administrator and the somewhat right-wingish Elon are acting in such an identical way. The only difference (which is no difference at all) is that one 🕐 them repeats the word “racism” every 3 seconds.

A family game we really enjoy is guessing a title of a book from an inventive description of its plot. You can ask yes/no questions to get hints.

“A gloomy curmudgeonly animal loses body parts to attract his friends’ attention.”

“A young lady has a complicated but not completely unproductive relationship with mirrors and bunnies.”

What family games do you play?

OK, so was he beaten with a hammer after the police arrived, then? This is making no sense.

I screenshotted because the headline is very likely to be disappeared soon.

I found a perfect Christmas gift for my father. It’s a beautiful new biography of Queen Elizabeth titled The Queen. He was a lifelong admirer of the British monarchy, especially of Queens Victoria and Elizabeth II. I hope the book was delivered to the big library up in the sky where he now lives.

Instead of celebrating that they didn’t lose the midterms quite that badly, Democrats – and I don’t mean the leadership but good, well-meaning folks who vote blue – need to think long and hard about what they are doing to create this environment of fear, especially among the young and the working class people.

I know it was started with the best possible intentions. But it didn’t work. Now is time to dial back. There’s something we can all do to move away from this dead end. Everybody needs to make a conscious decision to stop using words “racism, fascism, authoritarianism, -phobia” outside of scholarly research on fascist Italy, etc or clinical psychology. Stop using the words “hate and hatred.” They’ve been used more than enough. It’s time to give them a rest. Stop using the expression “harmful speech” and “hate speech.” This rhetoric isn’t helping. It’s making us all prisoners of fear.

We already have a generation of permanently scared youngsters on our hands. We have colleges where people exist in fear. Let’s just all step back and it do this any more.

At my university, 56% of administrators and 21% of staff feel free to express their opinions.

Please note that no government agency forced us into this situation. No law, no act of coercion on the part of the government caused this.

The irresistible attraction of sore losers is not to be underappreciated.