No matter how exhausted I feel during the day, at 8 pm on the dot a huge gust of energy lifts me up, and I have to struggle hard to put out the fire of frenetic activity and get myself into bed.

Life is unfair to nighttime people.

Are these people mental?

Or do you think organic brain damage? Because if two adults need 4 hours to get a toddler to pick up a carrot, the only excuse they have is if they are severely retarded. Or sadists.

Then everybody goes, “they were such a normal family. It’s incomprehensible why the kid became a heroin addict / shot up a school.  It must be completely random.”

Propaganda switches off people’s knowledge about the world.

“ICE detains people without warrants! This is illegal and unprecedented!”

We’ve all seen about a trillion police shows where representatives of every possible enforcement agency constantly arrest people without warrants. The police observe somebody committing a crime. Do they stop and send for a warrant while the suspect escapes? Of course, not.

“ICE agents mask their appearance! This is illegal and unprecedented!”

Plainclothes police mask their appearance. Undercover officers change their look. It’s completely legal for police to lie to suspects. We know all this. But it says on TV that this is unprecedented and illegal, and that erases everything we’ve known until now.

“Nobody is obligated to step out of their vehicle if stopped by law enforcement!”

Dude, do you drive? Have you ever been stopped? Or observed anybody being stopped? Have you troubled yourself to find out what you are supposed to be doing in this situation? If you managed to be a driver for a few years, I assume you figured it out.

Repeating these propagandistic inventions is dangerous because people end up believing them and put themselves in danger unnecessarily. Don’t attack officers. Don’t try to flee if you are getting detained. Even if you are completely innocent, becoming belligerent and trying to escape is not the way to go about it.

The people on TV who are peddling these lies aren’t putting themselves at risk. They put you at risk because that generates stories and they make money from the stories. They are selling your risk for profit. Have you heard of risk society? Externalizing risk and privatizing the profit is one of its top strategies. Some people play this game very intelligently at the expense of those who don’t know there is a game.

It’s the first day of class. I’m in the bathroom and hear somebody in the hallway say loudly, “Research, research!” That is the first time in years I’ve heard anybody at work reference research.

Here’s to a whole semester full of research to those of us who care.

And talking about impulse control, it’s the best guarantee of marriage longevity and family happiness. There is a temperamental factor which makes it harder for some people than others, and the paradox is that temperamental people are more valuable as partners because they are more sexual, entertaining, and stimulating.

If a temperamental person learns impulse control, it’s a recipe for an excellent marriage.

What makes IQ almost entirely dismissible for me is it doesn't measure social intelligence, writing ability, creativity, or musical talent.

Massive components of human experience thrown out as not quantifiable, and therefore, not real.

— Dr Kareem Carr (@kareem_carr) January 10, 2026

There’s a reason why most anti-social, violent behavior is carried out by people in the lowest IQ groups. Low IQ means you can’t appreciate or predict consequences. It means you don’t know how to create mechanisms to keep impulsivity in check or that you don’t even know why it’s necessary to do that. It means you can’t comprehend the perspective of other people or figure out that it exists and that it’s different from yours.

Low IQ means experiencing a constant, daily, grinding frustration because people around you keep saying and doing things that you just don’t understand. If you ever traveled to a foreign country where you don’t speak the language, that’s how a low-IQ person feels always. Like you are in a group where everybody understands the in joke except for you. Living like this eats up so much energy that very little is left to control the already very weak system of checks over one’s impulsivity.

A low IQ is not anybody’s fault exactly like one’s height or eye color aren’t. It’s not a moral flaw. It’s a physical reality and denying it doesn’t help. It’s not kind to pretend that people don’t exist who under no circumstances will be able to perform the cognitive operations that we carry out without noticing.

The only real kindness is to recognize that this is real, it’s not anybody’s fault, and we need to help low-IQ people to handle their largest problem which is impulsivity. There are many completely physical factors that weaken impulse control. Processed food, sugary beverages, light pollution, certain types of medications, disordered living. Interestingly, people who have pretty excellent impulse control avoid all of this on their own initiative.

The saccharine pieties of the quoted tweet are completely counterproductive. Because we collectively refuse to accept the physiological reality of intelligence, we make things a lot worse than they need to be. Think about the students who have been told their whole lives that you can only flunk out of college if you don’t try hard enough. They try their hardest and still have absolutely no idea what the textbook is saying. They end up feeling terrible when this whole time they had as much change of understanding the textbook as I have of reaching the top shelf of my kitchen cabinet without climbing on a chair. These are people who get into debt to acquire an education they will never be able to complete. We are defrauding them. I recently saw the statistics for people with college debt and no degree. It should be criminal to do this to people.

The guy who can get it up for this has the potency of a herd of young bulls:

Can you imagine being married to this person? pic.twitter.com/xstQWrZkw6

— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) January 8, 2026

Or maybe he’s extremely hard of hearing and perceives her as a cute little monkey jumping up and down randomly.

Somebody asked for a link to my old review of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom because the old link is broken. It’s a great review, and I’m happy to oblige.

Here’s part 1.

Here’s part 2.

A hundred years from now, the planet has been ravaged by natural disasters and nuclear wars. Most of what used to be England is submerged under water. The rest is inhabited by “brown people” (this is not my language, of course, but the way it’s put in the novel). The world is mostly ruled by Nigeria, and it’s a miserable, degraded existence. White people are a tiny minority, abused by the “we are honey, we are golden” brown people (again, this is a direct quote from the book. I have nothing to do with it.)

Most of the brown people exist in a state of bovine indifference to the lost civilization. A few, however, do understand that something precious perished. They try to imitate the literary and scholarly life of the departed world in a clumsy glass-bead game type of fumbling. But they simply lack the capacity to understand what a life of the mind is. Their efforts to make contact with the intellectually and culturally rich life of 2014 fail. All they manage to uncover from the past is a long, self-serving narrative by a whorish, narcissistic woman from a century before their time whose smug stupidity and utter immorality mirrors their own.

What We Can Know has two parts. The first one is narrated by a “scholar” of literature in 2120 who is obsessed by a poet’s wife from 2014. The second part is narrated by that wife. The novel plays a bit of a trick on the readers. Primitive minds with no knowledge of how to read a literary text will look at the text from the same limited perspective as the fake “scholar” from the future. They will take first-person narratives of the scholar from the future and the poet’s wife from the past completely literally. To people who do have a bit more of an understanding of how literature works, McEwan’s novel offers great surprises.

I’m not sure if I can recommend What We Can Know because McEwan takes quite a gamble, dedicating the whole first half of the novel to the painfully earnest mewlings of the future “scholar”. I barely got through it, to be honest. But once you hit the 50% mark and the story switches into the poet’s wife’s narrative, it gets good and you start figuring out what the point of everything is. But only if you have the capacity to figure it out, as I said before.

I don’t like futuristic dystopian narratives but What We Can Know isn’t really about the future. It’s about the need to appreciate art and intellectual pursuits because most people are tragically incapable of either, and if you are blessed with the rare capacity to do it, make sure you treasure it. Also, if you are not a vapid whore, treasure that, as well.

During the Biden administration, the FBI shot dead in his home a disabled elderly man for posting offensive messages about Biden on Facebook. Curiously, his name didn’t become widely known and nobody has expressed much interest in how justified the FBI was in claiming they were threatened by him. Clearly, some expansions of federal powers are more acceptable than others.