Does anybody have any interesting topics to suggest? I’m traveling, and so I read little and think less. But I’m eager to opine if only I could settle on the subject of opining.

In his last days in office, Biden started changing the US Constitution by means of social media posts:

I’m putting this hear because people will forget the moment Trump is sworn in that there is now precedent for this, and the Democrats started it.

Last night Russians attacked the beautiful Zaporizhzhia cathedral:

And here is how our hotel in Aveiro interpreted our oft-repeated request for 2 beds:

My sister and I are close but not in a physical way.

Finally, I ate the real Spanish cow tail. It was amazing.

Now we are in Portugal but tomorrow we are heading back to Spain.

Gas is extremely expensive in Europe, even more so than in Canada.

Meanwhile, how is everybody doing? Am I missing any big news?

Get married. Seriously, do. Let me explain.

Why do women not have a fulfilling sex life? Because they try to get something in exchange for sex. This is fulfilling for a very small number of women with a very specific disorder. The rest don’t have the capacity physically to enjoy transactional sex. Unlike men, they have the capacity to engage in sex without desiring it but nobody would call such sex acts fulfilling.

What is transactional sex? It isn’t only sex for money, which is something that most women don’t do. But it also includes having sex to get something other than sexual enjoyment out of it. To be in a relationship, to feel desired, to have something to tell your girlfriends, to get gifts, to have somebody to spend the holidays, to feel pretty, to please, not to feel like a loser, or, like we’ve seen in the recently discussed article about Neil Gaiman, to purchase a fantasy of a secure, comfortable existence. Read the article for very clear, if extreme, examples of women engaging in transactional sex and feeling terrible as a result.

If you are married, though, you already have everything on the above list. You don’t need to offer sex to get this stuff out of dudes. You’ll already have a relationship, the status it confers, and the benefits it offers. Now you can relax and figure out what works sexually. Which – and I know this tends to provoke great anger – for women tends to take time and effort.

While emotional life is easier for women, practical daily life is easier for men. I’m following the artistic journey of a writer who spent several years of his youth backpacking it around the country, riding trains with hobos, dumpster diving for food, sleeping rough, and gaining the kind of experience that now infuses his art. None of this is possible for a woman unless she travels with a man. Forget sleeping rough, only this morning I needed my husband to lug my suitcase downstairs. It’s a suitcase he wouldn’t need to bring on a trip of this duration because he doesn’t need as much stuff as I do. Plus, he got me a free Uber because he has a meeting and can’t drive me to the airport, and free access to a lounge where I can eat diabetic-friendly, and a voucher for a massage at the layover, and a stack of gift cards to use at the hotel to pay for food. Yes, I could have done it for myself. And I wouldn’t engage in transactional sex to get a man to do it for me. But many women would.

So yeah, get married. Totally recommended for women and men alike.

There’s a debate raging on X regarding economic opportunities. One side argues that they are fantastic while the other isn’t feeling upbeat about the economic prospects of the younger generations.

I’m observing the debate with sadness because we keep reinventing the wheel instead of using the existing knowledge to move ahead. The erosion of the middle class and the lumpenization of a large portion of what used to be the middle class is a fact of objective reality in every country that was developed enough to have a middle class. This has been studied to death. Moreover, this was predicted by the best thinkers of our era 30 years ago. We have the best Humanities and social sciences in the world, and yes, they often produce exuberant woke crap. But they also create extraordinary value. Let’s use that value.

It doesn’t matter whether there is an Assistant Manager job at Panda Express in Tulsa. Or that there is a type of fish that can change sex. These are blips that don’t change the reality of either sexual bimorphism or the evisceration of, first, the working class and now the white-collar class by the dominant economic and social / psychological trends. Many names have been given to this phenomenon. Uberization of daily life is one. Precarization is another. Post-Fordism. Neoliberalism is the name I use. So many names have been given to this phenomenon because it is very real. The fact that Chris Rufo won the post-Fordist lottery doesn’t negate the fact that a vanishingly small number of people can win it.

Let’s stop trying to diagnose a condition that was diagnosed exhaustively a long time ago and move to the stage of finding a treatment. The incapacity to rely on the knowledge that has already been found and the need to be a very special cookie who single-handedly achieves a victory over everything is part of the disease. And this symptom also was diagnosed and described years ago.

The only voice notes I listen to are work-related because I have no choice. Otherwise, they are rude and inconvenient. I have to be in a place where I can turn on sound which is almost never. They aren’t searchable, so I have to either annotate or re-listen. In a communication between boss and a secretary, they are fine, but among equals they aren’t.

North Korean soldiers are proving to be extremely effective. They are even effective against FPV drones. North Koreans come out against the drones in groups of 3, where one of the soldiers acts as bait to let the other two destroy the drone.

They are stoic and indifferent to losses. Once wounded, they blow themselves up, blow their comrades up to avoid being taken prisoners. Zero interest in recovering and burying the bodies of their fallen.

They are getting live training, live experience, and they’ll go back to pass it on.

This is a description of the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 from WB Maxwell’s Victorian novel Vivien: