This is the perfect language-learning situation. Absolutely perfect. I’m so happy for you because you’ve struck language-learning gold.

Get an app where both of you can get the basics, and then do a language exchange starting with 10 minutes a day. For 5 minutes you speak your language, then the next 5 minutes, the other person’s. Then, gradually expand to 15 minutes, then 20.

The important part is it’s got to be every day or at least every other day. It’s a 20-minute time investment. 10 minutes on the app and 10 speaking to each other.

I learned Spanish through this kind of language exchange, and I started by listening to conversations and understanding maybe 3% of what was being said. Language exchange is the #1 way to learn.

The AI that’s training me in German conversation keeps suggesting that I use “danke” and “bitte” more often. I don’t know how to explain to the AI that I know the words but I’m rude. I don’t want to erase my personality. I want to be my rude, cranky self but in German.

The famous video of Trump “looking lost, confused, and frozen” was carelessly and obviously edited. But Kamala is retweeting it, so faithful followers are taking it completely at face value, even though it would take under 30 seconds to find the original.

I went to see my new doctor who informed me brightly that he has a Ukrainian nurse whom I absolutely must meet.

The Ukrainian nurse showed up, chirped moronically that she is from Kherson but always felt “more Russian” and asked if I know “any other Russians in the area.”

“That’s strange,” the doctor said. “Your blood pressure shot up after you talked to Irina. Are you feeling stressed about anything?”

We only have Harris/Walz signs in town (high property taxes) but once you drive into the countryside, it’s all Trump/Vance, one sign after another. I’ve never seen anything like this. I now understand why Dem voters I know walk around with tragic faces.

To their shock, liberals are discovering that blacks and Hispanics don’t like women, gays, or each other. Nobody in the diversity coalition likes each other that much. Diversity is always a liability that requires serious mitigation.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look up Obama’s finger-wagging at black people for not wanting to vote for a woman.

Kamala Harris on Columbus Day:

"European explorers ushered in a wave of devastation, violence, stealing land, and widespread disease" pic.twitter.com/3XijDf5Ldo

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 14, 2024

They also stopped people eating other people and cutting babies’ hearts out to please the gods, so there’s that.

Happy Columbus Day! Let’s never stop celebrating the greatness of human achievement.

Equity is everyone deserves to have — right? — and be treated equal. But equity understands that not everybody starts out on the same base. So, if you’re giving everybody an equal amount but they’re starting out on different bases, are they really going to have the opportunity to compete and achieve?

-Kamala Harris

The whole purpose of the USSR was to give the historically disadvantaged a level playing field. For this purpose, the historically advantaged were murdered, imprisoned and expelled from the country. Well into the 1930s, every workplace had DEI-style audits where every employee had to explain their entire family tree, abjectly apologizing for every great-uncle who happened to be a priest, a doctor, or an owner of two cows and four goats. There was no visual criterion to discover who was historically advantaged, thank goodness, and that’s why many people managed to survive the DEI audits by concealing their origins. Let’s hope nobody ever comes up with the advantaged/disadvantaged scale where the advantaged oppressors can be easily identified based on how they look.

The newly equitably empowered in the USSR were incapable of producing science, running the military, or making things work. Foreign engineers were invited in droves to paper over the IQ gap. Some of the formerly advantaged high-IQ oppressors were imprisoned and forced to produce ideas and inventions in jail. Some were allowed to stay free and help run things while living in constant terror of annihilation. Look up Mikhail Tukhachevsky or Mikhail Bakhtin for some examples.

The results of that gigantic equity experiment are well known. Even the outright removal of the entire socially and economically advantaged class did not make the disadvantaged richer or happier. Today their great-grandchildren are still miserable, angry, and threatening to destroy the countries that still incomprehensibly live better.

Giving people a leg up because they started behind others has been tried and tried and tried. The most aggressive means of providing the leg up were attempted. The result is always terrible. The greatest culprit of the Soviet tragedy is the belief that it’s unfair that some people get more than others at birth. The sincere pain of the revolutionaries who were hurt by observing this inequality created one of the worst horrors humanity ever produced. That horror is still alive and bombing cities in Ukraine. The mass rape, torture and atrocities the great-grandchildren of the disadvantaged are identical to what their ancestors had unleashed on aristocrats, bankers, priests, restauranteurs, and the owners of two cows and four goats.

From the same novel:

Then she grabbed a Clif bar and a Diet Dr Pepper for breakfast.

The “she” in question is my age and in a high-pressure, high-earning profession. I’d already be dead three times over if I had such breakfasts as she routinely has.

Not that I would want anything this chemical in the morning.

Do you, folks, think it’s product placement? Normal people don’t eat like that, so why write it that way if not for a fee?

In a courtroom drama I’m reading, a female district attorney is woken up in the middle of the night by a phone call about a suspect getting arrested. She dresses formally in a business suit and is “out the door within five minutes.” That’s how you know that the author is male because otherwise he’d know that a business suit goes with a bra and tights, and hair needs to be brushed, and at least some makeup needs to go on. Nobody is going anywhere in under 5 minutes.

This author makes his female district attorney an emotional wreck so that she’s more believable as a female character. It’s a frequent mistake where people exaggerate clichés about gender and disregard its practicalities.