My flight to Spain was cancelled but it’s OK, I’m rebooked, it will be fine. The observation I want to make is that I’ve been mulling around the JFK airport and the airport hotel, and it’s become clear to me that immigration levels in this country are utterly unsustainable.

There needs to be an immediate pause in any form of immigration until those who are already here get absorbed. People take a long time to integrate. They don’t know how things work in the new country. Unless they are surrounded by the overwhelming majority of locals who model the accepted behavior, they’ll never find out and the existing behavioral models of gentility, politeness and kindness that make America America will disappear. I had no idea how to behave as an American either when I first arrived. It took years to absorb the norms.

For the first time in all my years in America, the orderly disembarkation from a flight yesterday was broken by people unwilling to wait for their turn, trampling over passengers in front of them, shoving aside elderly passengers. Not in an aggressive way but with a beaming smile of people who sincerely have no idea that this is not how things are done. Women in hijabs and saris were waving American passports and acting in ways no native-born American would act. A Dominican guy driving everybody up a wall, conducting a conversation over loudspeaker on a small airport shuttle. A Colombian woman cutting into the front of the line and becoming aggressive when the receptionist explained that you have to wait for your turn. Native-borns are too polite to say anything to stop this behavior, so they suffer stoically, which feels very symbolic of the entire situation.

Wow, friends, I found the saucer picture!

I was pregnant with Kara here. And I’ve gone back to my natural hair color since then. Everything else is also very different. But I actually wore that dress yesterday. That didn’t change.

Here’s what happened. My university decided to close my department. I received order number four to put in paperwork to close the French program. And the German. And Chinese. As all preceding times, I ignored the order.

We were slated to be eliminated together with another department. That department is now gone. Mine remains in place and undamaged. We haven’t lost any languages, nobody was let go, no changes at all were made.

I have a strategy that I won’t reveal for now because I’m still playing it. I will continue playing it, and the department will be undamaged, for as long as I’m department Chair. My second term ends on June 30, 2026, and our statutes don’t allow for a third term. Not that I want a third term because I’m tired. But it’s kind of shocking that I kept French alive after all the faculty in French retired and the administration was raring to cancel it. Instead I actually managed to hire into the program in the midst of a hiring freeze.

This academic year we are proceeding exactly as always, with all the languages and programs intact, and people who know the situation keep asking, “BUT HOW IS IT POSSIBLE??”

The Chair of the other department slated for closing played a different strategy and lost. He went for immediate gratification, and that’s never going to lead to success.

I will now serve out my term calmly without any unnecessary upheaval. After that, it’s out of my hands.

Roca Barea’s book Fracasología, a title that I’d translate as The Science of Being a Loser, talks about the tendency of Spanish intellectuals to see their own country as perennially defective, backwards, and third-rate.

The historian is right. It’s been like this in Spain for at least 300 years. What bothers me, though, is that her book is written from the same loserish perspective. She goes on and on about how France “ain’t all that” and how nobody in France sees the country’s gigantic mistakes as reasons to feel inferior. However, here are no intellectuals in France obsessed with proving that Spain also “ain’t all that.” Once you start obsessing over your competition with people who don’t notice your existence, you’ve already lost.

Another issue is that Spain’s sovereignty today is not under threat from France and Great Britain, Roca Barea’s biggest bugbears. Exactly zero of Spain’s many problems are caused by these countries. I fully support the goal of strengthening Spain’s (and everybody else’s nationalism). And I’m definitely in favor of rescuing history from raging liberalism. But the lure of defeatism and loserishness need to be avoided. Not only by Spaniards but by all of this. Let’s stop apologizing and start doing.

I’m boarding one of my many planes over the next two days, so I’ll continue after I land in North Carolina.

OK, it’s not that many. It’s only three planes total. But still.

Please, everybody, don’t disappear. People tend to disappear from the blog when I travel which leaves me lonely given that i don’t hang out with others when I travel.

I only know what Longhouse is in the conservative context, so when Kara told me they learned about the longhouse at school, I was puzzled.

Zohran: "A key reason we have to make the bus free is it reduces assauIts" pic.twitter.com/Wmmuv8TOWs

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 16, 2025

Yes, and providing everybody a free prostitute reduces rape.

People who are willing to vote for this greasy mutant deserve everything that’s coming to them.

María Elvira Roca Barea is the favorite historian of Spanish right-wingers. She writes about the importance of national pride and how we shouldn’t equate liberal with good and conservative with bad.

What I find extraordinary in her very erudite and brilliantly researched books is how identical what Roca Barea says is to what my self-avowed Communist professor taught us when I was in college. Down to the smallest details, the names, the titles, the facts, twenty years ago it was OK even on the far left to know history and teach it. The early Spanish Enlightenment of the Novatores, Romea y Tapia, the nationalist work of Böhl de Faber, the importance of leaving behind the post-colonial indigenist pouting of Latin America and choose the road of pan-Hispanic solidarity. Twenty years ago, this was not far right. It was normal. In 2002, my Communist professor received a whopping $600,000 grant—an unheard-of sum in the Humanities where there are zero costs to conduct research—from the Canadian government to conduct the research that today is considered fascist Nazi far-right heresy.

I’m reading Roca Barea not to learn anything new. I’ve already been lucky enough to get educated twenty years ago, and I know all this stuff. I’m reading for nostalgic reasons. The text brings me back to my youth when everything was fresh, new, and sparkling. It’s extraordinary, though, that Roca Barea’s books are huge bestsellers and people buy them to be edgy and protest the treacly floods of wokism that engulf the country. But none of this was forbidden knowledge even just a couple of decades ago.

Two teenagers who jumped former DOGE staffer Edward “Big Balls” Coristine avoided jail time after pleading guilty to simple assault in a Washington, DC, court Tuesday.

https://nypost.com/2025/10/15/us-news/teens-who-jumped-ex-doge-staffer-edward-big-balls-coristine-avoid-jail-sentenced-to-probation/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=nypost

They beat him atrociously because he interrupted their assault on a woman. Now they are free because he’s white, they are black, and so is the judge.

The other attackers were never apprehended at all because why bother?

Then people wonder why Trump had to bring in the National Guard to stop endless crime in DC.

Speaking about group chats, what kind of a hellish invention are they? Of course, I don’t mean the ones where you are planning an outing with a couple of friends, although I have never and will never engage in those myself. I’m talking about work-related running conversations that don’t have a scheduled end. There were a couple of times at my job where people tried to include me. I have ignored, banned, and deleted. And will never forgive the individuals who added me.

Even the word chat is annoying. I don’t want to be chatting. If there’s a task I need to do, let me know, and buzz the extreme ef off in silence.

Please observe in the case of Young Republicans how easy it is to use these gigantic, endless chats to destroy people. Once you are added, you become responsible for anything anybody in the chat says at any time. Why would you want to participate and put yourself at risk of persecution?

People do the weirdest things to pursue perverted forms of sociability.

Nobody has yet provided a compelling reason why modern women vote so consistently against their own interests across the entire Western world, and continue to do so in spite of compelling evidence that’s exactly what they’re doing. https://t.co/UwTTspX7Tx

— RAW EGG NATIONALIST (@Babygravy9) October 14, 2025

It’s this weird psychological mechanism where positioning yourself as a kindly benefactor to a man whom you fear makes the fear less intense. In your mind, he becomes a sort of a child, and you can’t really be angry with a child, no matter what he does.

What we call “toxic empathy” is not really empathy. It’s a power play. Let’s say, you tell somebody regarding a colleague at work, “Poor Peter. I feel so bad for him. That poor, miserable dude. Let’s be nice to him because he has so few things going for him.” Are you being empathetic towards Peter? Of course, not. You are using him to establish a hierarchy with yourself on top. Those who can pity stand above those who deserve pity. “Poor Peter” translates as “not poor me.”

We need to see these displays of fake empathy for what they really are, a power play.