For Christmas Eve dinner, I made the worst turkey known to humanity and the glompiest mashed potatoes in existence. Which is why I won’t post the photos of this culinary horror of my own making and will instead share this image of a happy family enjoying a meal that did work out.
And for a bit of humor on this festive evening:
It would be great if the people who kept linking to Politico as a source of news instead of comedy could recognize their mistake but it’s OK. I know they know.
Merry Christmas, a holiday which, to the surprise of many, has something to do with Christianity.
What a great, lovely question. Whoever left it wanted to do something kind for me on Christmas and I really appreciate it. All I want is to talk about books. And I’ll do it now by offering the penultimate book review of this year.
The novel I finished today is the most recent installment in Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley series titled A Slowly Dying Cause. I’ve been disappointed with some of the books in the series but this one was very enjoyable. George finally decided to move away from trying to depict “diverse communities” that FGM and rape each other all over the place (but only for extremely good reasons, of course). This novel is very non-diverse and much the better for it.
I’m sure this wasn’t by design but the many stories which converge in the novel all depict the ugliness of people who destroy family life because of their incapacity to school their egos into any sort of order. This is a crucial question of modernity. Why should a person not follow every passing whim and stomp over people’s heads in the process? One example in the novel is policewoman Bea Hanaford. She abandons a good, loving, faithful husband and a teenage son because… being by herself “makes her feel more like herself”, whatever that means. Bea is not religious. The only philosophy of life she ever learned is that human whims are more important than anything. She abandons husband and child not to do anything special but to sit at home alone over a styrofoam box of takeout curry.
Bea’s case is not the most egregious one in the novel. Other characters destroy relationships and throw away friendships over a passing caprice, too. We keep hearing that one doesn’t need religion to be moral because one can develop an inner code of ethical behavior. But that’s all empty blabber. What George depicts is real. Inner ethics always accommodates the selfish, covetous bastard one tends to be without external limits.
Let’s all think this over as we prepare to celebrate Christmas.
Anhedonia is an inability to feel pleasure in a normal way. People who have anhedonia are usually completely unaware they have this condition. As a result, they don’t do anything to resolve it.
It’s easier to catch anhedonia around holidays, which is why I’m posting this now. People with anhedonia over-shop, over-eat and over-party around the holidays. They know they are supposed to enjoy the season but they don’t feel the pleasure they know should be there. They chase the elusive joy by inflating every holiday-related activity. It doesn’t work because joy comes from the inside. You can’t shop and party your way into it.
People with anhedonia see the same reality as everyone but they can’t connect with it through pleasure. It’s as if they lived in a glass cube, never really feeling what other people do.
On one of my Uber rides here in Canada, the driver spent the entire ride listening on loudspeaker to a woman going about her day. She was doing the dishes, coughing, breathing, humming a tune, walking. She was clearly alone. I have no idea if she knew that he was spying on her.
I was transporting my mother from her first immunotherapy round (hence the Uber) and didn’t want any aggravation but we were both very creeped out.
Who can guess what the driver’s name was and why it wasn’t either Jack or Jacques?
Today I found out that my child, an American child in year 2025, doesn’t know the word racism. I’m the best parent in the fucking universe.
A children’s bookstore in Montreal features these books at $36CAD a pop:
The best thing is that the books have very little text. Here’s a random page:
This is the perfect embodiment of the boutique leftist philosophy of life. It’s expensive, pompous but completely empty.
This again? Is the economy that bad?
We are going in circles and it’s sad to watch.
All people are divided into those who think the rights of lobsters are a nutty idea and those who don’t.
This is why I keep saying that we need to step away from the word rights because it’s become meaningless. It’s clearly not the lobsters who have rights but the people who want to lay claim to an exotic sensibility. This is the right to be a condescending git that’s codified in this new rule.
A new exciting way of saying “let’s lose every election from here into eternity” is brought to you courtesy of Kash Patel:
This is the guy who leads the agency that failed at apprehending the Brown mass shooter and turned out to be less intelligent than a homeless guy who ended up identifying the murderer. But at least Patel has his priorities straight.
At least, he didn’t say “Americans must wake up and prioritize Ukraine.” Thank Lord Jesus in heaven for small mercies.
A conservative literary critic and college professor
RPMC boot camp, really ;-D
As a said earlier, moving to New Jersey was the best thing to happen to my family. My parents’ families…
This is why I like to say that the best thing my parents ever did was move to the New…
Actually assimilation is not complete until they intermarry, there was considerable resistance amongst many ethnic groups in western Canada until…
True. People who have assimilated will not prefer to hire from their immigrant group. At an office party, they will…
Arg. CCP=PRC
The Viet Kieu I have known all my life assimilated remarkably well. 1st gen are obviously not Americans, but tend…
There’s a common idea even on the more “racist” right that east Asian immigrants assimilate unusually well. They seem to…
Exactly. There’s some sort of weird parental anxiety involved. Like if the child steps out of the hustle for a…
Free, unstructured time when kids loiter around aimlessly is the most developmentally crucial and useful. People want to turn kids…
Bykov is extremely talented as a poet. But in what concerns his prose, he’s nowhere near Veller.
Shoot, not just resume padding. I’ve watched way too many parents regard any lacunae in their little kids’ time as……
“perception is that you can’t be a just a good student who otherwise enjoys his friends, free time” They’re not…
“nobody has to be intentionally diverted every second of the day” I am soooo glad I finished school before the…
only writer of value writing in Russian today” What about Bykov?
There’s this panic among parents (and it causes a lot of stress to the kids) that you have to have…
He is also the only writer of value writing in Russian today. Meaning serious literature. There is good entertainment lit…
And then they wonder why people no longer trust MSM.
“Since then the share of foreign born population has gone up and up, even while crime fell and fell.” I…
No, I guessed because he’s the only Russian speaking “famous writer” who would make such a comment. I mean, I’m…
Like: I don’t think people– adults OR kids– understand that nobody has to be intentionally diverted every second of the…
So much of the deliberate parenting strategy (it’s mostly accidental, but you know, the part where we actually have a…
I get it. He is very funny. But in my misspent youth the libertarian stuff sounded a lot better than…
What gets me most here is the absolute total mindblowing stupidity of the “guns baaaaad” “criminals… meh whatever: just give…
Or perhaps Kipling’s prophetic reference to the growing ideology of feminism: “On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the…
This chart https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-foreign-born-share-of-the-u-s-population-1850-2024/ shows that the percent of us population that was foreign born was at its lowest ever in…
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with…
Even the leftist media openly state that well over a half of ICE detentions are of people with criminal records.…
I think it’s waning a lot. It was mostly a boomer thing, and they are gradually shuffling offstage.
How many murders by foreign criminals is acceptable? And why are guns a problem when murder rates are drastically down?…
Here is a chart, compiled in this article https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/us/murder-rate-drop-report.html, of US murder rates going back to 1900. It shows that…
The Reagan worship on the Right seems ridiculously unjustified. Dude really went all crazy with bringing in mass migration. He…
Please don’t tell me he mentioned my peasant face elsewhere.
Thank you, my friend, I really appreciate it. Some days are harder than others.
Was it Veller?
https://peterhalligan.substack.com/p/sweden-shootings-down-80-and-no-shootings So apparently, just like in the US, Sweden deported a bunch of foreign gangbangers and– like magic– violent crime…
Town vs. country was one of the biggest divides in SA politics. The term Boer literally means farmer but more…
“have to earn the right to vote through national service” Earning the right to vote through some kind of national…
methylethyl Some of his writing is humour; some is insight. He does both very, very well ;-D “Women and cats…
Yes. It is a bit funny to see how hypocritical the left gets when anti-racism and defending a murderess conflict,…
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