I knew in early January of 2020 that COVID was leaked from a lab and wrote it on this blog. It is not my responsibility or my job to know. But I knew. So I have no compassion for people who pretend to be shocked by the realization that the official COVID narrative stank of lying.
Canadian Musk
Canadians are about to step into it hard:
Honestly, Canadians, can you find nothing better than a mini-Musk with his own messed-up child? At least, our Musk is the original. Yours will be a pale copy.
Dem Favorability
Yes, it’s a mystery why men in girls’ changing rooms and women’s jails aren’t wildly popular. And why calling everyone a racist isn’t driving favorability ratings. And why eliminating borders isn’t hugely attractive.
All Democrats do is name-calling and guilt-tripping. That it’s not attracting crowds of supporters isn’t as shocking as we are told to believe.
Those 29% who are still supportive are probably in a drug-induced stupor or completely disengaged. Give them some time to catch on, and Dem favorability will drop to single digits.
P.S. Just saw this:
Strange that this kind of thing isn’t attracting large majorities. Just incomprehensible.
Q&A about Joyce Maynard’s
If you want a nice, gossipy autobiographical book, I recommend At Home in the World. If you want a major tear-jerker that will make you appreciate life, read The Best of Us. I haven’t read anything she published since 2016 because it sounds like pure propaganda, and what’s the point? But these two autobiographical books are lots of fun.
The Meaning of Citizenship
Once citizenship loses all meaning, there won’t be any rights any more, for anybody. Is that clear or do I need to explain this again? This is very, very important. Nothing is probably quite as important, so let’s stay with it for a moment.
There are no abstract “human rights” floating in the air. That’s a myth, a rhetorical device. The only real rights are the ones your nation-state is willing to guarantee to you as a citizen. Once the distinctions between citizen and non-citizen are eroded, it doesn’t mean everybody gets more rights. It means everybody gets fewer. The form of statehood that perceives every citizen as endowed with rights just for existing is very recent. It’s a historical anomaly. It’s not a naturally occurring phenomenon, just like good roads and clean streets aren’t. It can go away very easily.
Now is a very good time to get our emotions under control and concentrate on how we preserve this unique and fragile state form. Talking about “human rights” at this point is almost as embarrassing as using the phrase “global citizen.” The nation-state is wounded. We have turned away from it and put it on the brink of going out of existence. It might still be not too late to undo the damage. We should concentrate on that, on asking ourselves what do we give in exchange for unprecedented rights and unprecedented standard of living to this form of statehood. What do we give to our nation-state that a different form of statehood couldn’t easily coerce out of us while offering nothing in return?
Q&A about Green Card Holders
I feel the deepest compassion for somebody so unable of learning. In the world we inhabit today, it must be very hard to be that way. My heart bleeds for you.
I’ll answer but it’s completely useless since you can’t allow any new information into your brain.
The only rights you have are the ones that your nation-state is willing to grant you. The nation-state of green card holders, or any other non-citizens, is that whose citizenship they hold. They can and should be deported whenever it pleases the host country. They are not citizens. They are here on sufferance. That sufferance can be withdrawn at will. To use a simple metaphor, you don’t have the right to remain in my house against my will. It doesn’t matter why I ask you to leave. It only matters that I do. I can be completely unreasonable and capricious in asking you to leave but that doesn’t matter. My house, my whims.
This being said, I am preoccupied by the aggressive removal of pro-Palestinian protesters. Not because they have “free speech rights” in a country that’s not their own. But because I don’t want the US to be subservient to Israel or any other foreign interest.
Domestic Affairs
Having children is one way of feeling a connection with the human race, and all the other inhabitants of this planet, who—however else their lives may differ from your own—are doing precisely the same thing you are. . . We are adventurers in the same mysterious territory of parenthood.
Joyce Maynard, Domestic Affairs
Yes, I know, more Maynard. They keep putting her books on Kindle Unlimited, and it’s like placing drugs in front of a junkie. I keep grabbing one after another, my eyes glazed and my hands shaking.
Domestic Affairs is a collection of articles from long before Maynard met the woke second husband. And you can see it from this quote where Maynard talks about the beauty and importance of being a parent:
Sometimes at night the thought will strike me: There are three small people here, breathing sweetly in their beds, whose lives are for the moment in our hands. I might as well be at the controls of a moon shot, the mission is so grave and vast.
OK, just one more because I really love it:
It wasn’t until I had children myself that I understood the power of inheritance and the meaning of heritage. Of course I’ve rejected, railed against, and even cursed parts of my heritage, as most daughters have. But in the end, I guess I never for a moment questioned the essential belief my mother possessed (and possesses still): that there could be nothing more worthwhile and challenging than having and raising children. Fashions in raising of children dictate, now, that women leave their little girls more free to choose or reject childbearing. But my mother raised me to be a mother, and (though I’m always quick to say not “when you have children,” but only “if”) the truth is I am probably passing on a good deal of the same pattern to my children too.
I say “when” to my daughter because a mother’s doubt in a girl’s capacity to reproduce is very undermining but these quotes are only from the first 3 pages of the book and already so great. These are the most important questions we can discuss, and they are all here in this book.
I just started reading Domestic Affairs. I will totally understand if people want to leave until I’m done quoting this book but don’t worry, I’m on an 9-hour flight, and I’m sure I’ll finish reading it today.
And by the way, Maynard’s daughter Audrey has four children, two girls and two boys. She heard her mother correctly.
The Options
The UK is about to introduce a two-tier justice system where ethnic minorities will be given more lenient treatment than whites:
Ministers criticise ‘two-tier’ sentencing changes in England and Wales
Sentencing Council plans to make offenders’ ethnic backgrounds a greater factor in deciding whether to jail them.
Ministers have criticised plans to make the ethnic background of offenders a greater factor in determining whether to jail them, saying they amounted to a “two-tier system” of justice. . . Under the change, which would come into force on 1 April, magistrates and judges would be asked to consult a pre-sentence report before determining whether to imprison someone of an ethnic or religious minority.
At my German conference, people kept asking how Americans could have voted for Trump. All they needed to do was look at their own news, and they’d know the answer. The quote above is the answer. We don’t want institutional racism, is the answer. It’s either Trump or what’s in the quote above. Those are the options.
Endearing Images
These are literally the most endearing images of any American president I have ever seen. The campaign to discredit eminently normal things as weird already failed. I’m perfectly fine with liberals continuing it because it helps us win but it’s bizarre that they are so dedicated to it in view of how disastrous it’s been for them.
The second most endearing image is that of Obama letting a little black boy touch his hair. I place it second because Obama didn’t spend much time with the boy. It was a photo-op, not a relationship. But still a mega touching photo-op.
If you see one of the images as endearing and iconic and another as weird, you are getting infected with partisanship and need to step away from the news cycle for a bit. If you are indifferent to both, that’s fine, not everybody is into visual culture. I’m not much into it myself.
Book Notes: John Marrs’ You Killed Me First
John Marrs is the author of The One, a book we discussed recently on this blog. You Killed Me First is very different from The One. This is good because many authors are very repetitive and monochromatic.
There’s nothing science-related, futuristic or socially-minded in this novel. There’s something that can be perceived as vaguely paranormal, or not, if you don’t like that stuff. The novel depicts women being catty to each other. Hundreds of pages of women being catty. I enjoyed it massively. I’m not part of the Mom culture, so I don’t experience this in real life. It was fun to come back to my hotel room in Hamburg after a whole day of academic socializing and listen to a non-demanding story about women calling each other fat every 3 pages, trying to seduce each other’s husbands, and murdering people to keep the plot going. Any sociability, even with people I like as much as I did the colleagues at the conference, depletes my energy, and I need to recover. This book served that purpose beautifully.
John Marrs’ books are all on Kindle Unlimited with a free Audible version, and I’m planning to plough through all of them. I want to see if they are all as different as the first two I read by him.
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