Clarissa's Blog

People with more refined sensibilities and higher intellectual capacity perceive themselves as such. And they want to be recognized as smart, refined people.

But if they live in a culture where there’s a gigantic taboo on recognizing that more refined sensibilities and higher IQs exist, what will they do? They’ll try to attract attention to their very exceptional refinement by being more outraged than anybody else by the idea that refinement and intellect exist.

I mean, good. Or whatever.

Can somebody explain why the travails of the Daarood clan should be of this momentous importance to Minneapolis?

First of all, there’s always a small chance this is physical. Please make sure to bring this up to your GP.

If it’s not physical (and it probably isn’t), you will find the reason by answering the following questions:

What does this behavior allow you to do?

What does it allow you to avoid doing?

Who is the audience of the behavior?

To give an example, my mother suffered from horrific migraines for twenty years. The medical science was impotent to find a cause, let alone to offer relief. My mother’s very last migraine happened on the day before her youngest child moved out. Then she was cured. It’s a medical miracle.

The audience left, and the behavior was no longer needed. Mind you, this doesn’t mean the migraines weren’t real. They were very, very real. And so was the gain they brought her, outweighing the costs of the terrible suffering they inflicted.

With the accidents, you are either addressing somebody else or yourself. There’s something in your current situation that you want to change in the direction allowed to you by the accidents. Only you know what it is. When I advise people to remove themselves from the proximity of the sufferer, it’s not to be cruel. To the contrary, it might be very helpful to the sufferer to have the audience leave the theater.

everyone who travels a lot knows

it's because Airbnbs are consistently worse than hotels https://t.co/ebnXwooQXl

— James Ivings (@JamesIvings) November 6, 2025

For young, single, healthy people hotels are fine. But if you travel with a child and need to be able to eat healthy without going broke, Airbnb is the obvious choice.

It’s not a vacation if parents have to sleep in the same room with the child. What do you do, turn off the lights at 8 pm and sit there in complete silence? Never have any intimacy or even a conversation with your spouse? That sounds fun. Not.

It’s also not a vacation if whenever the child is hungry – which they tend to be at unpredictable times – you have to get dressed and trudge to a restaurant that is in no way guaranteed to have the food the child will actually eat.

And I’m not even talking about people like me who have to eat often, in small portions, and within a very limited range of possibilities. Yes, you can do room service, which brings me back to the point about going broke.

I stayed at an Airbnb in Madrid last week, and it was blissful not to have to go to restaurants at all. I was in complete control of my food supply and spent a ridiculously low amount of money cooking all of my own meals. My blood sugar remained perfect throughout the trip.

The Republican Party has nothing to offer downwardly mobile voters with graduate degrees. Just completely (economically, culturally) out of touch with this demographic.

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) November 5, 2025

Neither party offers or even tries to offer such people anything to slow down, let alone reverse, their economic downslide. But Democrats compensate the economic despoliation to which they subject the most high-IQ people by offering them endless possibilities to feel morally superior. This way, the smart crowd can still feel upper-class. It finds the economic trappings of upper-class life increasingly out of reach but at least it can lay claim to the refined sensibilities of the well-heeled.

Republicans don’t make a play for this group at all.

Which state do you, people, think would suit me best? Where do you imagine me being completely in my element?

I watched a fascinating interview today with the wife of Yigal Amir, the murderer of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Her name is Larissa Trimbobler, and when she met Amir she was married to another man with whom she had four children. Larissa and her husband met Yigal Amir when they visited him in jail where he was serving a life sentence for assassinating Rabin.

Larissa dropped her husband and the father of her children and embarked on a long saga of trying to marry the jailed assassin. Then, she tried to get pregnant by him, which involved Amir trying to smuggle ziplock bags of sperm out of the jail. She did get pregnant and gave birth to Amir’s child at the age of forty. And she’s been waiting for him to get released (which isn’t too likely) ever since then.

Isn’t it a crazy story? If it were a novel, people would dismiss it as being too over the top but it’s completely real.

To the surprise of exactly nobody, the DSA is supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

This is what loses elections, and rightfully so:

Delayed homeownership means delayed childbirth. It means fewer or no children. This is a catastrophe for regular people. And prattling moronically how we are in the Golden Age of the US economy sounds like a cruel joke to pretty much everybody who is not wealthy. 82% of women under 30 and 68% of men in the same age group in NYC voted for Mamdani. And yes, he’s a nepo baby fraud. But he got these young people’s support by taking these very serious issues seriously. Because nobody else is doing it.

Trump announced the other day that “grocery prices are way down.” Why, in the name of everything normal, would they be down? This is delusional and is precisely the kind of stuff that loses elections, as it well should. We mocked Biden for exactly this kind of ridiculous lying.

Instead of exercising pressure on our elected leaders to abandon the la la land of this utter fantasy, the Right is mired in whiny complaints about microaggressions and inclusivity and who said what to whom that hurt their everloving fee-fees. Lonely Matt Walsh is begging people to get their heads out of their Israel-obsessed anal cavities and start paying attention to what is happening in our country.

This is very embarrassing and very self-defeating.