Numbers that, standing alone, you likely immediately recognize the significance of:

1984
007
666
13/54
69
33 1/3
3.14159

Any others?

— i/o (@avidseries) October 12, 2025

I’m blanking on 33 1/3. Does it mean anything beyond the obvious?

The Hurleys owed nearly $38,000 – close to a quarter of their income – in medical costs after the delivery and NICU stays of their twins, despite having private insurance.

“I’m going to have to file bankruptcy,” Jessica Hurley told @NBCNews. https://t.co/8x4MCmt6ZY

— NBC News (@NBCNews) October 11, 2025

A terrible story.

Who do you think pays these costs for illegal migrants? They give birth in the same way, experience complications in the same way, have all sorts of medical conditions. Who pays? The five million (by the most conservative count) brought in by Joe Biden—who is paying for their healthcare?

Adult people who listen and nod when the TV tells them that there’s no free healthcare for migrants should be ashamed of their gullibility.

Open borders and welfare do not coexist. It’s not a possibility. Infinity migration always means crime, trash everywhere, slumification of many neighborhoods, rising traffic mortality, endless waits in emergency rooms, proliferation of scams and harassment, and absence of the institutions of state who should do something about all this. Because the nation-state is the only form of state that cares about this stuff. The post-nation state only cares to send police to shut you up when you complain about it.

There’s a couple at work who have been living together for many years. In his absence, she refers to him as “my husband.” He refers to her as “my girlfriend.”

I always wonder if they know this about each other.

I only know one woman like that, and in her case, it’s done for a very clear purpose of career advancement. There’s a quarter-mil salary with a 5-hour workday riding on it. The woman comes from dire poverty and has an elderly mom, three complicated siblings, and two small children to drag through life. Who’d blame her, honestly?

How come you meet so many of them when I’m in academia and only every encountered one? I’m hearing this is now a working class phenomenon but I refuse to believe it.

The murderers, rapists, arsonists, bombers, and kidnappers of the 1970s won. They won everything they could have dreamed of. Today, every public and non-denominational private school teaches their beliefs like the absolute truth. Every conference in the Humanities does little else but repeat their slogans. The government spent billions on indoctrinating residents of every country in the world into the beliefs of rapist Eldridge Cleaver and murderer Assata Shakur. Terrorist Bill Ayers put his protegee Barack Obama into the White House.

The shocking thing in Days of Rage isn’t that domestic terrorism existed. It’s that it won so decisively. Even the author of the book believes much of what the terrorists wanted us to believe. It’s instinctive, unthinking, and completely unselfconscious. We breathe air. We agree with Assata Shakur.

But it gets worse. We not only rewarded these criminals by adopting their ideology. We took their ideas much further, reaching the depths of leftist absorption that Dohrn and Levasseur couldn’t imagine. We gave them everything they wanted. And then we gave a lot more.

As bad as the events of 1975 were, they dissolve into nothingness in comparison with their consequences.

“There was a sense that these guys might go on doing this, the bombings, literally forever,” a retired FBI officer told Burrough. Back then, I’m sure, it felt like the worst case scenario. Small groups of radicals lashing out violently against a society that didn’t accept their beliefs. Now we know that what’s much worse is when these radicals don’t need to live underground and rob banks to pay for food and dynamite. Because they are in charge and whoever disagrees with them becomes a marginal loser. They dynamite our institutions from within and do a mich better job of it than Weathermen or FALN.

And that’s a real shame.

The extraordinary smugness of people who know nothing but slogans is again on full view:

Somebody posted an old Soviet joke in response and it’s a perfect illustration of how leftist ignorance about the world never changes:

Brezhnev calls in a team of Kosmonauts into the Kremlin.

“Comrades, I have a mission of grave importance for you. The American imperialist capitalists have landed on the moon. This cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged. The Party has therefore decreed you will fly to the sun!”

This announcement caused understandable consternation among the Kosmonauts.

“But Comrade General Secretary, we’ll be incinerated!”

“Worry not, Comrades,” said Brezhnev cheerfully. “We’re not fools. The Party has thought of everything. You will obviously fly at night.”

A colleague has been writing me endless messages with questions about how to organize her teaching, coming into my office with the regularity of a metronome, and sharing detailed updates regarding her health. She seeks me out in every nook and cranny where I attempt to hide from human contact. I was resting in the lounge with the door closed but the colleague found another door, one that hadn’t been used in 20 years, and crashed through it like somebody on a quest for the Holy Grail.

Reading social cues is not my forte, so it took me until now to figure out that the colleague isn’t trying to annoy me on purpose. She’s trying to befriend me. And the funny part is that I was actually planning to befriend her myself. I even put it on my calendar: “July 6, 2026. Befriend Elza.” I can’t before then because a) I’m very busy and b) I’m department Chair and not interested in additional social obligations until I quit that role.

The only problem is that I don’t know how to transmit the message that I’m interested in being friends but not before July 6.

Iris Stalzer, the mayor of Herdecke, Germany, adopted two African teenagers. They tortured her for hours in extremely brutal ways. The likelihood that either of them will serve time for the crime is nil.

The 1970s leftist fanatics are different from today’s in that they didn’t skip on their chance to have children. As soon as thirties appeared on their horizon, they’d start popping out kids like crazy. They were, in fact, nuts but not so nuts that they’d avoid childbearing.

If you are a Spanish speaker and want to give yourself a cracking good time, please listen to the Audible version of the novel La tregua by Mario Benedetti. The voice actor, Ernesto Alterio, delivers it in such a spot-on, brilliant way that you’ve got to be dead and buried not to enjoy it.

I don’t even like Benedetti, and I’m almost in tears from how glorious this book is.

Maybe I was wrongly prejudiced about Benedetti. I read him back in college but all I remember was that I deeply disliked the writing. This is unusual for me as I would read anything, including candy wrappers, as long as it’s in Spanish.

Please start listening now. I can’t bear the thought that time is passing by, and people who could be reveling in the voice rendition of this excellent book are not doing it.

Also, please recommend to your students. Alterio speaks very slowly to transmit the vacillating, uncertain personality of the narrator, and it makes the novel perfect even for lower intermediate students.

Folks, did you hear? Matt Walsh got Exantus, the Kentucky murderer of a 6-year-old boy, arrested. Exantus was found not guilty of the murder by reason of insanity but guilty for attacking the boy’s family members. He was released on parole recently after serving just a few years. Matt has been speaking about this injustice for days.

As a result, Florida authorities discovered Exantus in their state where he was breaking the conditions of his parole. He was arrested and returned to Kentucky to finish our his sentence. Walsh actually saved the bastard’s life because the father of the slain boy had vowed to murder Exantus. Now Matt will be on the lookout to prevent the Kentucky authorities from wantonly releasing him again.

This is why I listen to Matt. Dude gets results. He’s actually doing things that are of great use to the public.

I’m very glad to see justice served.