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Here’s another great quote from I Married a Communist. A father is explaining to his son why it’s important that Republicans don’t win the White House:

You despise big business, Nathan? You despise ‘the Big Boys from Wall Street’? Well, you don’t know what it is when the party of big business has its foot in the face of ordinary people. I do. I know poverty and I know hardship in ways you and your brother have been spared, thank God.”

That’s exactly what I would say today to convince a person not to vote for the Democrats.

In Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist, a kid gets mesmerized by the freedom we the which the leftist crowd expresses itself:

In his conversation, as in his brother’s, there was no invisible line of propriety observed and there were no conventional taboos. . . There was something marvelously bracing about it, a different and dangerous world, demanding, straightforward, aggressive, freed from the need to please.

Things have really changed, eh? Today’s leftism isn’t just different. It’s the exact opposite. It’s all about simpering, limited propriety.

In the meantime, the Q crowd is glowing. Things are great and about to get even greater. Everything is going according to plan. The loss of the presidency and the Senate is a small, insignificant blip. Everything points to amazing wins in the nearest future.

Delusional? Absolutely. But the delusions of happy people are a lot less dangerous than those of the desperate and the enraged.

From yesterday’s Washington Post:

A longtime Post subscriber in Virginia, one of my regular correspondents, had something to say about that in a recent email about the appointment: “Does she understand — really understand — that . . . the United States is on track to become functionally an authoritarian White Christian nationalist state in the very near future? And if the answer is ‘Yes,’ what is she prepared to do about it?” “Right now,” he added, “nothing else signifies.”

It isn’t just some crank in Virginia. The people who have all the power in the world – the Bezoses, the Wall Street, all of them – this is their animating emotion.

If you go to any place where progressives congregate online, you’ll see that they are downright desperate. Their mood is very dark. The tenor of the vast majority of conversations is that they are two seconds away from permanent Nazism. This mood of fear and desperation is being stoked by the oligarchy-owned media, as you can see in the example above.

You think they won the election and should be at least somewhat content. But to them, the existence of a single person who thinks differently is a complete loss. It’s truly a totalitarian mentality. A single dissident means they are on the verge of losing everything.

My Jewish great-granfather had a brother who emigrated after the revolution of 1917 and ended up in Peru.

Now his Peruvian great-granddaughter keeps borrowing keys from me in the online game we are both playing, and this absolutely blows my mind.

Tonight I went out on the town and finally tried the famous shrimp and grits that I keep hearing about on foodie TV shows. I’m familiar with the shrimp, of course. It’s the grits part that was mysterious to me.

Turns out grits are the same dish that was a staple of Soviet cuisine known as пшенная каша. I love it and still have tender memories of the clumpy burnt version of the dish that was served in Soviet cafeteria.

Nothing is ever really new.

I had no idea that the neighbors across the street had a kid. It turns out that she’s mentally disabled. Now that she’s entering her teens, they can no longer keep her inside. She runs up and down the street all day, dancing, laughing, and listening to something on her headphones. She looks so happy that it’s impossible to see her and not feel some of her happiness.

I had a colleague who once went to a restaurant but tried getting in through the wrong door. People at the restaurant asked him if he was there to make a delivery.

“It’s because I’m Mexican!” the colleague ranted. They see a Mexican face and assume I can only come to a fancy restaurant to make a delivery. It doesn’t occur to them I can be a college professor!”

The guy’s “Mexican face” is whiter than mine but leaving that aside, what’s so humiliating about being a delivery person? Nobody gets upset to be mistaken for a doctor. It’s pure snobbery that masquerades as political grievance.

This happened to me a bunch of times. I didn’t get upset because I don’t think it’s insulting to be taken for a service worker. Service workers aren’t inferior to professors or physicians.

The last time it happened was at Macy’s, and it was an older black woman who thought I was the store assistant. I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t work here. I think the assistant is over there, let’s go ask her.” Then we had a nice little chat about what we were shopping for.

It’s sad to see physicians in such a tenuous psychological state.

I’m going to hold my very first garage sale. Or yard sale, as it’s known in other places.

Does anybody have any tips? How to go about organizing it? What are the most common mistakes?