If you think I spend too much time saying how much I hate Mexican food, do you understand how many wonderful, kind, generous Mexican people surround me and always try very sweetly and generously to treat me to their food?

These days I have a great excuse because of my diabetes, which I probably developed on purpose never to have to deal with the invention of the malignant spirit called tamales.

Notice that I say nothing bad about Chinese food because I don’t know any Chinese people and haven’t spent years pretending to like their food out of kindness.

To be honest, my only experience with food masking as Chinese was last week when I was forced to go to Panda Express and have broccoli beef. It was indescribably better than anything Mexican I ever tried and very kind to my blood sugars.

Yes, I know it’s not real Chinese food. But whatever it was, I’d rather have that than anything Mexican.

Actress and podcaster Jennifer Welch says White Trump voters shouldn’t be allowed to eat at Mexican or Chinese restaurants and should only go to Cracker Barrel pic.twitter.com/upSTDmyABz

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 10, 2025

I love Mexican literature, and I adore Mexican slang, and I deeply appreciate Mexican soaps.

After this disclaimer, I absolutely insist that the only edible version of Mexican food is made by very white people with no relationship to Mexico.

The only thing worse than Mexican food is Central American food. I have a deep suspicion that people who flee the region are escaping the food.

South American food, on the other hand, is almost always amazing.

As for the woman in the video, is she herself Chinese or did the plastic surgeon perform the equivalent of Mexican food on her?

If you want a glimpse into the deepest recesses of the leftist mind, you can’t do better than read Bruce Holsinger’s novel Culpability. Noah, the main character, is completely subservient to his girl-boss wife Lorelei. It’s fascinating that the same people who always tell us that it’s horrible when a wife turns herself into her husband’s silent, obedient maid think it’s just peachy when a husband says he’s the pedestal for his wife to step on as she marches towards glory.

Poor Noah is so cucked it’s painful to read about his self-abasement. He’s a successful man who makes an excellent living but he convinced himself that Lorelei is a genius while he’s stupid, and there’s no humiliation at her hands that he doesn’t eagerly accept. Their children also treat him like garbage, and it never occurs to Noah that he deserves some respect from them. Noah’s eldest son, an 18-year-old high-school graduate, learns the lessons of debased masculinity from his father and lets first his sister and then a girlfriend get him into a lot of trouble. Male weakness has become a sad legacy that father passes down to his son.

In the USSR we also had inverted gender roles. Noah is very similar to the Soviet model of masculinity. But there is one huge difference. In the USSR, women took the roles that had been abandoned by men. They became strong, resilient, stoic, and leaders of the family. In Culpability, this doesn’t happen. Lorelei is a neurotic basket case. She’s a tender flower who has a nervous breakdown if plates aren’t arranged just so in the kitchen cabinet and has hysterics over sad stories on TV.

In this vacuum of leadership, Noah tries to step in and act like a man but Lorelei humiliates him every time when he emerges from his browbeaten stupor. Unsurprisingly, their three children suffer because neither parent is a figure of authority.

There’s a lot of AI stuff sprinkled into the narrative because AI is a safe, PC subject that brings an aura of coolness to a story. Against the background of the clown show that is Noah’s and Lorelei’s family dynamic, however, AI doesn’t sound all that scary.

People see what they want to see and are eager to confirm their biases.

Still, there is a kernel of truth in this observation. Very brilliant people who ace school and college often never learn to grind. They exhaust the opportunities they can access on sheer giftedness and fade once serious, backbreaking work becomes necessary. Failure is unfamiliar to them, so the first time they fail, it becomes an existential crisis. Those of us who are more modestly gifted know from the get-go things will be hard. So we aren’t destroyed by our many failures.

I often sigh over not having an IQ ten points higher but maybe if I did, I’d never achieve anything. Today I felt my intellectual limitations acutely as I struggled with a paragraph that was not happening. I’m still completely stumped but I’ll try again tomorrow. And the day after. And so on until I figure it out. It’s always like this, so it’s fine.

I have been struggling for two days to remember something I vaguely recollected Sartre having said. I knew it was going to be helpful to my argument but I couldn’t recall enough of the quote to search.

To distract myself, I started to read a random bestselling novel. And guess what? One of the characters quotes that exact sentence from Sartre I couldn’t dredge up.

This kind of thing happens frequently. I’d be looking for something, a quote, a piece of information, and it suddenly appears from the most unexpected direction.

there are people on the ai boyfriend subreddit who are comparing their relationships to queer relationships and calling themselves a marginalized community

— lilly pulitzer prize (@eviIcherub) August 10, 2025

They are much more marginalized, in fact. And rightfully so. A gay relationship is a relationship while an AI boyfriend is not.

Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 percent.

Students resist choosing majors with the highest employability, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I get every one of the very few students who want to get a student license placed into a full-time teaching job well before graduation. It’s a career that gives guaranteed employment. But we attract very few takers. Nobody wants to teach in Illinois and Missouri. Instead, students want to go overseas, be it with Peace Corps or some other temp gig.

The Spanish writer Miguel Ángel Hernández grew up in a small village in Murcia and always wanted to escape the provincial life. He felt cornered and constrained by the gossipy life of the village, where everything was everybody’s business, and where you couldn’t take a step without having to explain to neighbors where you were going and why.

Hernández left the village, established himself in a small city, and finally had everything to experience the freedom of anonymity. Strangely, he found that this freedom led him to document every step he takes on social media. The only thing that changed is that he is now narrating and explaining his life to strangers.

Briefly, my conclusion is that there’s zero proof of this conspiracy and a lot that disproves it. At the same time, the Macrons have done everything to feed the conspiracy.

I took my first course on Latin American literature in 1999 and was confused when I discovered that the first novel we were going to read was Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Since then I found out that contemporary Latin American novel is largely a rewriting of Faulkner’s masterpiece.

A quarter of a century passed, and Latin American authors are still trying to write their own Absalom, Absalom! Guillermo Arriaga’s new novel El hombre is the most recent 600-page retelling of Faulkner. To spice up the plot that has been exhausted by decades of rewritings, Arriaga adds graphic descriptions of brutality and sexual perversions. I listened to El hombre on Audible, and the exceptionally talented work of the actors helped me to get through the repetitive scenes of torture, murder, incest, and sexual abuse. If I read the book on paper, I’d probably skip many pages.

Faulkner’s plotline that Latin American writers can’t get over features an extremely cruel man of obscure origins and burdened by tragic mysteries. He arrives in Mississippi with the goal of making a fortune and starting a great dynasty. His dream is thwarted by complicated racial relations. The novel jumps backwards and forwards in time and is narrated by different characters.

This is exactly what Arriaga’s new novel is like except his character arrives in Alabama.

What El hombre adds to the plot inherited from Faulkner is the description of the events of 2024 when the descendants of the obscure cruel man. They are spoiled rich bastards who are woke as a joke and plot to install Democrat politicians to keep bringing over masses of illegal immigrants.

El hombre is not a bad novel if you are fine with every single character but two being a disgusting freak. The two characters (a college professor and the main character’s wife) who are not disgusting freaks are clinical morons, so the novel offers a mix of crazy bastards and congenital idiots.

I have no doubt that this novel will be translated into English. It has a lot about slavery and the US Civil War. And there’s a Trump-like character in the parts set in 2024. Stupid people can easily mistake the novel for an endorsement of the standard leftist slogans. It’s actually the exact opposite but you need a working brain to catch it.