People who are hand-wringing about Biden’s pardon of his son, please ask yourselves if Trump wouldn’t do exactly the same.

Of course, he would. Anybody would. Even Pete Hegseth’s mother probably would.

“But he lied!”

Trump also didn’t end the Russian war in 24 hours after being elected, which everybody with a functioning brain understands was an electoral figure of speech aimed at the congenitally simple among us and should not be taken literally.

We all need to grow up and stop relating to politicians like they are our parents. It’s icky and immature.

Traveling is great but there’s nothing like coming back home to beautiful America.

What you see in the distance is Chicago.

Since I’m at it, here’s a reply to the most recent Q&A:

Putin’s goal is to sow chaos in the US. This has been said very openly and often. Vindman’s actions did exactly that. He used a completely fake story to rubbish both the US and Ukraine. He did enormous damage to Ukraine and inflicted harm on the US, as well. And who benefits from turmoil in the US and from an intense dislike towards Ukraine many Americans came to feel as a result of Vindman’s shenanigans? It’s not hard to guess who the beneficiary is.

I also must add that post-Soviet emigré Jews perceive themselves as Russian by language and culture irrespective of where they are from. They tend to feel profound hatred for Ukraine. Exceptions are extremely few. My father ended an inordinate number of friendships among post-Soviet Jews because they were venomously anti-Ukrainian which really came to light after 2014.

I’m not repeating anything after anybody, by the way. I have despised Vindman for years. I don’t know if he’s consciously servicing Russia or if it’s his subconscious acting out but he’s giving aid and succor to our sworn enemy. And I oppose that because see the beginning of this post.

See? Canadians are still at it:

The Canadian government is still doing a Kamala Harris, telling citizens that they are delusional for noticing the bad economy and the growing crime. “It’s not real,” politicians keep saying. “It’s just a vibe.” We all know how this worked for Harris, so it’s unclear what Trudeau is counting on with his embrace of her loser strategy.

Definitely not doña and not lo siento. I’d say “disculpe usted.”

Avoid doña completely unless you are trying to be funny. As for “lo siento”, use it when you actually feel sorry. For instance, somebody says, “my cat died”, and you respond with “lo siento.”

“Disculpe” is more like “excuse me”, so it works when you are trying to attract attention. If you want to be more casual, you can simply say “oiga”.

For German speakers, it’s like the difference between “es tut mir leid” and “entschuldigung”. Would you say “es tut mir leid, Frau” if somebody drops something?

Euthanasia is an inevitable result of socialized medicine in neoliberal times. It’s easier to get rid of the unproductive than treat them. And of course, it’s all coached on the vocabulary of choice, a word that has been wielded to unleash the most inhuman practices.

So having on your side 90% of media, academia, secondary education, and business isn’t enough? That wasn’t decisive but a dozen more influencers will be?

What will it take for the Dems to accept that the problem isn’t that the vehicle of delivery is flawed but that the ideas they are trying to deliver are bad?

That’s what I voted for:

Hit Russia while it’s down. What’s not to like?

If the email from Pete Hegseth’s mom is real, my heart goes out to him. A toxic, unloving, terrible parent is a heavy burden. That he’s even functional, let alone successful, and not lying under a bridge strung out on heroin is a testimony to his great strength of character.

Does anybody know who leaked the email? How did it become public?

How does a childless marriage remain a marriage? What makes and unmakes it? These are the questions Rock Paper Scissors ponders under the guise of a mystery novel. The mystery is great but the way the novel traces a collapse of a childless marriage is even more fascinating.

What I find particularly interesting is that the husband removes himself completely from the management of his own emotional life. He’s a ragdoll that active, pushy women shuffle from bed to bed. He’s a very successful man, earning a great living but he’s completely absent from any decision-making capacity in the emotional realm of his existence. As we have seen in our discussion of novels by Anthony Trollope, this isn’t “just how men are.” This is how men and women have become but by no means is this a baseline.

It’s particularly curious that the women who push around the successful husband don’t amount to much by themselves. Childless, sociophobic, petty, with nothing going on professionally and socially, they turn the marriage into both their child and job with the inevitable result that the marriage withers from being overly tended to.

The husband in Rock Paper Scissors suffers from an extreme case of face blindness. He can’t recognize his own wife and is completely dependent on her to tell him the names of any people he interacts with. Prosopagnosia is, of course, a metaphor for his utter helplessness in the social realm. What gave rise to our widely held belief that women need to manage the emotional side of relationships is a fascinating question, and Feeney’s novel shows how ugly the results of this phenomenon are.

The new video dropped! The brick wall is right there. And I look shockingly good to the point where I kept getting distracted while I talked by my own appearance.

The show is about Canada, and it’s really frustrating that every time I come here, I don’t manage to see almost any actual Canada. I’m with kids, with grandmas, working, etc but not actually experiencing Canada. On the other hand, yesterday we sat in traffic for an hour, so maybe I’m fine with not experiencing Canada.

Ideally, I’d rent a cabin somewhere in the Laurentides for a month to write my book on Canadian literature. Not now, but in 1,5 years. At this point, I have no idea what the book is even going to be like.