Las Vegas tourism is sinking — and younger Americans could be to blame https://t.co/MazVOCvRjA pic.twitter.com/Gqfb8EWFW0

— New York Post (@nypost) August 5, 2025

The problem with Las Vegas is that everybody who is not rich has been priced out. The shows, the restaurants, the shopping – everything has become extremely expensive. An older couple at church used to go every year but they stopped. They are comfortable but not rich. Now they go to Destin instead. Destin is still too expensive by my standards but it’s not completely unaffordable for normal people.

And rich people don’t go to Las Vegas because it’s too low-class for them. They don’t travel domestically that much at all unless it’s fancy places like Aspen. People who want fancy cuisine, which was unnecessarily unleashed on Las Vegas, will go to Europe. Las Vegas lost its regular middle-class clientele and picked up none of their aspirational demographic.

I’m seeing this on a small scale in my town. We had a very popular and great-quality seafood restaurant. The owners of their building decided to raise the rent to something sky-high. The restaurant couldn’t afford to pay that much and left. And the space has been standing empty for close on a year. There’s nobody in town who can afford the sky-high rent or food at a restaurant that would have to raise prices to swing it.

Denial of reality is the costliest mistake you can make.

Everything keeps getting better and better. In the olden days we had to get into our car, drive to the nearest video store, look through the (usually limited) available inventory, hope to find something we liked (often impossible if you had non-mainstream tastes), wait in line to pay for it, drive home, hope that the videotape wasn’t busted or too worn out or the DVD wasn’t glitchy, and after watching the movie, drive it back to the store to return it within a set number of days or face a fine.

I have zero nostalgia for these stores.

https://x.com/avidseries/status/1952814619564650812?t=T032oqbZUE6Qzxb4v2wWWw&s=19

I have great nostalgia for them. N and I were poor. We rarely could afford to go out. Trips to Blockbuster were our festive outings. I have beautiful memories from that time. It’s one of the most magical times of my life.

You bring yourself into every experience. It’s you who makes it what it is.

I watched Candace Owens interview Milo today and they arrived at the conclusion that Islam is a religion of peace and Americans deserve Muslim terror attacks because they’ve murdered millions of Muslims for fun.

I’ve heard all this from my Communist professor in Montreal in 2001, and I’m laughing so hard, I’m afraid I’ll wake the neighbors.

I’m not calling the professor names. He was a proud lifelong Communist who has the same opinions on everything as Candace and Milo. This will never be not entertaining.

On a serious note, can we get a political movement that doesn’t hate this country and blame it for everything? Is that a possibility at all?

‘Tis the season for mandatory trainings on how to hire, conduct the tenure process and award promotion. The trainings feel like mockery because nobody is getting hired, which means nobody is getting tenured or promoted.

It’s like we get together and put on plays about what academic life used to be.

I’m really enjoying Candace Owens’ series on Harvey Weinstein. At least in the first three episodes that I’ve watched, Candace blessedly keeps her commentary to a minimum and simply reads court testimony and evidence.

The women of whose rapes Weinstein was convicted pursued him aggressively both before and for years after the alleged rapes. They sent him unsolicited, lovingly worded messages, addressed him with loving names, and kept suggesting going out for dates. One “rape victim” wanted to introduce his mother to Weinstein and reached out to come over and get moral support for a breakup. All this after the alleged rape.

Weinstein is a scumbag. I despise people like him. But he couldn’t have raped anybody much after 1991 because, as one of the “rape victims” wrote to a friend, he didn’t have much by way of a penis after a flesh-eating infection and subsequent surgery in the 1990s. While describing the encounter with Weinstein’s non-penis in a letter to a friend, this victim didn’t even hint at anything non-consensual leading to that knowledge.

One of the “victims” claimed that Weinstein raped her for 5 years. In every of these “rapes”, she sought him out. All this is documented extensively in the “victims'” emails and text messages the “victims” themselves provided.

Of course, only a total scumbag would accept sexual favors from these women, knowing that they were prostituting themselves for jobs. But putting Weinstein in jail for rape with a 20+ -year term is shocking.

My grandmother Klara could twist her tongue in a tube from both sides. I’ve never seen anybody else do that and I can’t twist my tongue like that even a bit.

The only person I know who does it exactly like my grandmother Klara is my daughter Klara. Who never met her great-grandmother.

A real fundraising text by a Democrat candidate in Massachusetts:

Forget the neologisms for a moment. Look at how many times “I’m” appears in this very short text. Five I’m and an additional I. There’s an extraordinary amount of unnecessary information, some of it repeated twice but nothing at all about what the candidate plans to do for the voters.

“I’m not good with children, I don’t like children, so maybe I shouldn’t have any” is not a smart thing to say. You aren’t good with other people’s children. This is a category of being that exists on an entirely different plane from your own children.

I’m great with babies and very young toddlers. As soon as they start to walk, I begin to find them tiresome and boring. But they are other people’s children. This has nothing to do with how I feel about my own.

My father was the best father in the world after N. And he was notorious for his deep dislike of children. People in general weren’t his thing but other people’s children specifically he found very disappointing. He supported people having as many kids as they wanted, of course, but he would not willingly seek the company of a child. But with his own children he wanted to spend all the time possible.

It’s very, very different with your own, I promise.

The saddest thing I’ve seen today:

Grok imagine collaboration with my 6 year old daughter.

Prompt: A green dragon flying a rocket ship to mars to meet Elon Musk. He’s in space and there are a bunch of stars that look like robots. He’s gonna make an invention where you can golf on the moon without the balls… pic.twitter.com/9ZIYCUd4f5

— Penny2x (@imPenny2x) August 4, 2025

A 6-year-old child should be drawing her own pictures, not staring stupidly at a screen.

Why do people do this to their own kids? They have a lifetime of sitting in front of a screen ahead of them. Why is any of this necessary at 6?

I’m not even asking why a 6-year-old needs to know who Elon Musk is.

I set a 10,000 step goal in early May, and I only broke the streak once when I was really unwell.

At first, it felt undoable, especially since it’s been viciously hot outside. But since then it turned into a lifestyle. I complete my 10,000 steps without even noticing it much. I simply started doing things on my feet that I used to do sitting or lying down. My German exercises, listening to my books or to videos. It’s great. I’m planning to get to 15,000 a day and stay there permanently.

By the way, today I listened to Candace Owens’ interview of her husband, and it’s very funny. He read Theology at Oxford and uses words like “hermeneutics” and she thinks that Marie-Claude is a suspicious name and that you must be part of a conspiracy if you’ve listened to Chopin. A bigger case of opposites attracting can’t be found.