It is unequivocally clear beyond reasonable doubt that the Trump admin did not know and still do not know how to end the war in Ukraine.

— WarMonitor🇺🇦🇬🇧 (@WarMonitor3) April 23, 2025

Nobody does. I will repeat once again that 30 years of grievous mishandling of the results of the Cold War by every US administration since 1990 cannot be undone in a month or a year. Especially since nobody has the guts to say what actually happened: the US, which supposedly won the Cold War, behaved like a defeated foe paying tribute to the assumed loser of the conflict.

Economically, ideologically, politically and militarily, the US behaved like it lost the Cold War. Now we are seeing the results. When a culture despises itself, the result is always bad.

I’m fascinated, absolutely fascinated to know how the media will spin this as a bad thing:

FDA Commissioner Dr Marty Makary announced the agency will phase out the use of eight artificial food dyes in America’s food supply within the next two years. . . The Trump administartion will set a plan for food companies to follow in order to adequately phase out the use of Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, Blue 2, and Green 3 by the end of 2026 and start using natural alternatives, which the FDA will approve or deny first.

Of course, this is amazing and an absolute dream but I wonder how this measure will be turned into the most Nazi thing ever on the news.

“Family life changed as parents tried to produce the sort of children who could get into selective colleges. Over time, America developed two entirely different approaches to parenting. Working-class parents still practice what the sociologist Annette Lareau, in her book Unequal Childhoods, called ‘natural growth’ parenting. They let kids be kids, allowing them to wander and explore. College-educated parents, in contrast, practice ‘concerted cultivation,’ ferrying their kids from one supervised skill-building, résumé-enhancing activity to another. It turns out that if you put parents in a highly competitive status race, they will go completely bonkers trying to hone their kids into little avatars of success,” writes David Brooks.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/meritocracy-college-admissions-social-economic-segregation

Yeah, this “concerted cultivation” crowd consists of either very recently college-educated (meaning, first generation) or immigrants. Among the extensively educated, the fashionable thing to do is precisely to leave the child in peace. Immigrant children are dragged to Kumon while the children of the crowd that goes to the opera for enjoyment are all at the playground or in the park.

The hardest skill and the biggest premium on the job market is the capacity for deep focus. The second one is knowing your mind and having initiative. Both skills are actively destroyed in most extracurriculars. Brooks is talking about something that existed in 2005 but has changed dramatically since then.

My university will now charge international students the same very low tuition fee that we charge in-state students. We have no admissions criteria, which means that everybody who applies is accepted. Some people who don’t apply are also accepted.

This is a bizarre measure to adopt in the midst of a budget crisis of such proportions that programs need to be eliminated and people fired. I have no explanation for this project other than that it’s an immigration scam.

.@joerogan is absolutely right. It may seem fine to blow up due process for Abrego Garcia and others now. But if that's the new normal, how you going to feel when a president is elected with whom you DON'T agree? And all the safeguards are gone?
Is that the America we want? https://t.co/Bu9KaGQG9Z

— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) April 20, 2025

Are these people trying to be funny? What safeguards? There are zero safeguards protecting anybody on the conservative side. Forget that. There are zero safeguards protecting anybody on any side, including people who took no side and people who aren’t aware that sides exist. There are zero safeguards protecting anybody whom the leftist machine wants to chew down and spit out.

“What if the Dems win the next election and start persecuting us?” Have these folks been asleep for the past 20 years? The Dems already did all that, persecuted, cancelled, arrested, and destroyed. Women were getting raped by male rapists placed in female jails. Elderly people died because COVID patients were placed in old-age homes. Fourteen-year-old girls had their breasts cut off. Two dozen people, including several children, are dead because BLM needed to rage in the streets. David Dorn bled out on the floor of a pawnshop in St Louis. What safeguards?

Klara’s school is closed again, which seems to be the rule this semester, so I’m intensively mothering and working at the same time. I will respond to the excellent comments in the thread on the importance of cultural discernment and the preservation of the canon when I get a moment to myself but in the meantime, here is a quote from Renaud Camus’s novella Ørop:

To erase all heritage, impose the perpetual present, and guarantee that history not return because there would be no more history, no more past, no more centuries, the ideal of equality proved itself to be of matchless efficiency. The taste for the arts, the love of literature, the appetite for knowledge, the aspiration towards the examined life, all became deeply suspect over time. These dispositions of mind, which in the past had been highly esteemed and honored, were now regarded as affectations, superstitions, attempts at a dubious social magic, as the great wits of the capital put it: so many shameful attempts to reestablish or maintain hierarchies relating to duration, and that were to be dismissed as such. Since aspirations of this type were suspected of being linked with heritage, with lineages, with the slow work of families (or, worse yet, just some of them) to become intimately acquainted with beauty and intelligence, they were accused of representing a challenge to equality, an illicit privilege, indeed an expression of contempt on the part of those once privileged by fate vis-à-vis those who would today lay claim to its favor. Therefore, due to the presumed relationship between these inclinations and the accident of birth, and thus the past, and thus reviled history, they were criticized as a humiliation for those who did not profess them.

Camus, Renaud. Ørop (p. 9). Vauban Books.

A judge had to resign after an illegal migrant from Venezuela was arrested at his home:

Doña Ana County Magistrate Judge Joel Cano has resigned from the bench where he has sat since 2011.

Although his resignation letter, dated March 3, did not state his reason for stepping down, it followed shortly after a man awaiting deportation proceedings, accused by federal law enforcement of being affiliated with a Venezuelan gang, was arrested at Cano’s home.

https://www.abqjournal.com/news/article_47926b51-d481-4aa9-8d76-5de8cc13809b.html

It’s very obvious what party the weird judge belongs to but there’s no explanation why a 60-year-old judge would be sheltering a 23-year-old Venezuelan arms runner. It’s all exceptionally bizarre.

Why is it not OK to say that Cervantes is superior to Oprah’s bestsellers and that Beethoven is superior to Cardi B? Why do people get invariably upset when I say that this or that book is art while another one isn’t?

Because most people are incapable of reading Cervantes and Trollope and listening to Beethoven. And it makes them feel bad to have this pointed out. We must not make anybody feel bad because that would be not inclusive and anti-democratic.

The idea that everything is equivalent to everything else and that every choice is equally valid and equally independent from anything traps us in a situation where we have no words to explain why Amanda Gorman is ridiculously talentless and why the empty churches of Europe are a tragedy.

Some intellects are stronger than others. Some sensibilities are more refined. Some creative work is vastly superior to other. Recognizing all this doesn’t immediately lead us to genociding those who can’t listen to anything beyond Megan Thee Stallion. It doesn’t lead to anything bad at all but we act like it would be the second coming of Hitler.

The end of the academic year is always very hard. This time, it’s particularly heavy because we are preparing to have our department disbanded. I have twice the number of meetings I normally have. And to me, every meeting is an unnecessary meeting.

Years ago, I came up with a system of challenges that help me stay afloat during the end-of-year rush. On Sunday, I write out the challenge for the next week. It consists of 3 things I must do every day. These must be enjoyable things. Painting, reading one of my right-wing philosophers, walking in the gardens, doing a face mask, staring motionlessly at a candle, reading a story in German, decorating my planner, driving through the neighborhood that is my place of power.

In order to complete the challenge, I have to squeeze all these activities between the meetings and the rest of the work stuff. This re-orients me from thinking about the meetings to thinking about the fun challenges. April becomes not the month of boring administrative stuff but the month of the enjoyable challenge.