The tour guides at Lincoln’s hut village, the tomb and his family house were great. The stories they told were not at all political, and I appreciated that. For instance, we found out that Lincoln bought his small sons a toy that, adjusted for inflation and cost of living, would cost $900 today. A 19th-century iPad of sorts! It was a contraption to project images, so the analogy works.

Also, Lincoln’s wife Mary cooked on an open fire for years. Only a year before Lincoln became president did they get a stove. I have no idea what you can cook on an open fire beyond soup.

The only tour guide I didn’t like was at the Old State Capitol. She was obsessed with slavery. Didn’t want to talk about anything else, boring everybody to tears. We also had slavery where I’m from, and nobody cares on the least. I don’t see the gain from turning it into a sacred cult object.

Lincoln had 3 great-grandchildren. And none of them had children of their own. I’m shocked by this. All these people had to do was continue the famous bloodline but they let it die. How can people be so dumb?

All three lived to old age. So it’s not like they died before they could procreate. Useless, wasted lives of utter uselessness. Unbelievable.

We are visiting Lincoln’s New Salem State Historic Site with Klara’s class. I’ve gone on a lot of these field trips with my mother’s class back in the USSR, and, yes, cultural differences are very real. The capacity for calmness and attention among American fourth-graders is vastly superior. Everybody is polite, kind, and helpful. People who can focus and control themselves like this at 10 will do great things.

This is an extraordinary country, people. Let’s not piss it away.

Klara is in bed, singing a song she composed:

I love Mommy and Dada

And God

And Jesus, our redeemer

I love the world

And animals who play in the fields

We are going on a class trip to the Lincoln Museum tomorrow.

I’m finding out fascinating things about the life of Francisco Franco from his biography by Stanley G. Payne and Jesús Palacios. For instance, it turns out that Franco’s father Nicolás was a left-liberal who abandoned Franco’s pious mother Pilar for a life of dissipation in Madrid. He was also a raging pedo who impregnated and abandoned a 14-year-girl at the age of 33. Nicolás was really upset when his son became the right-wing dictator of Spain.

In a rejection of his father’s life journey, Franco became a chaste, faithful family man in adulthood.

That the Department of State would ever issue a statement worded like this was unimaginable:

Last week, the United States refused to participate in the UN’s review of the Global Compact on Migration.

The United States objects to the Global Compact on Migration and UN efforts to facilitate replacement migration to the United States and our Western allies.

— Department of State (@StateDept) May 11, 2026

The words and the action behind them are urgently necessary. As they say on X, all this and you are blackpilling?

I was asked to comment on the interview Iulia Mendel gave to Tucker Carlson. It so happens that I know Iulia and I know the back story. I don’t want to betray any confidences, so I’ll just say that “hell has no fury like a woman scorned.” Sometimes, being a faithful husband and wanting to honor your marriage vows comes at a price.

And to close out the day on a spot of good news from a reader:

This is brilliant, and I support this strategy completely. We need to play these bastards like a violin because they are neoliberal and annoying.

Here’s an article about the terrible loneliness of single, childless women in middle age:

Gen X women are the loneliest generation of adults right now because they’re the first group who were promised friendship would be enough

https://www.bolde.com/gen-x-women-are-the-loneliest-generation-of-adults-right-now-because-theyre-the-first-group-who-were-promised-friendship-would-be-enough/

I’m glad the article exists but the framing is strange. The passive voice is doing a lot of work in the title. “They were promised”, by whom? Who does this kind of promising? Who takes such promises seriously?

An adult person is fully responsible for their life strategy. If you make a decision to stay single, you own the decision. The article is right in that a single, childless life is different at its core from the life of a married parent. And it’s not about people remembering your appointments or having names to put on the emergency contact form. Here’s how the article puts it, and it’s completely mistaken:

What partnership gives is something different: the person who knows how Monday went because they were in the next room for it, who asks about the appointment without being reminded there was one, who witnesses the ordinary days and not just the significant ones.

Seeing things this way is a tragic, tragic mistake, and I don’t use this word lightly. You can’t treat people like objects, like consumer goods that are supposed to give, give, give. It’s not about what people can give you. It’s about what you can give them. As a wife, a husband, a parent, or an unmarried friend, the whole point is the enjoyment of giving. If you made a decision to organize your life outside of the regular arrangement of marriage and parenthood, it is your task to conceptualize your own life.

The article never abandons its stance of pouty, aggrieved passivity. Here’s another example:

What they’re starting to let themselves want isn’t complicated or dramatic. It’s mostly the ordinary things a primary relationship provides quietly—someone to come home to, someone who asks, someone who is just there for the ordinary version of them and not only the version that shows up when there’s something to get through. They were told they didn’t need those things, that wanting them was something they’d outgrown or never needed in the first place.

Again, here’s the idea that “a primary relationship”, which is a clunky way of saying “marriage”, is supposed to “provide.” Again, there’s the passivity of “they were told” by some unnamed forces that, seemingly, control these supposedly independent women to an extraordinary degree.

A small child is a raging maw of need. There is never enough love, attention, and care that you can give them. There is always room for more. You fill your child with love like a seemingly bottomless vessel. It is only gradually that a child accumulates enough of this fuel to start to learn to enjoy giving. An adult who sees their role primarily as somebody who needs to be given instead of somebody who gives will not be happy whether they are married or single. Because such person is not really an adult.

Female liberation somehow turned into being liberated from adulthood. I observe this in fiction, and we can clearly see it in this article. Friendships are the most important thing in life to a child between toddlerhood and adulthood. What the article describes are extremely infantile women. Singlehood is not the cause. It’s an effect. Mind you, I’m not saying this about all single people. I am speaking specifically about the type of women described in this article.

The article discusses an existing phenomenon. It fails, however, because the author is incapable of locating the real reason for what she describes.

this is an argument i will never get. "it's deserved" i didn't do shit to get born here. it's not deserved. it's luck. and most people are unlucky as hell pic.twitter.com/hw8rf1vNXG

— taoki (@justalexoki) May 11, 2026

People see themselves as completely alienated from their bloodline, heritage, culture, and history. They believe that they are mass-produced and interchangeable widgets. No wonder they have all these mental health issues. This is an approach that guarantees great psychological discomfort.