Here’s the new video. Canadian liberals sacrifice the queen, Trump’s comments about Greenland, demographic wars in the UK, the humiliation of the West, and the first 100 days of the new presidency:

Roy Larner, the man who fought off machete-wielding terrorists on the London Bridge in 2017, was celebrated as the hero that he was by the British public.

The three terrorists killed 8 people and injured 38 more but Larner bravely rushed to stop them, getting wounded in the process.

But the British authorities didn’t appreciate Larner’s actions. They put him on a terror watchlist and forced him to attend de-radicalization classes in case his experience of being stabbed by Muslim terrorists made him have bad thoughts about them. We all know that bad thoughts about the government’s immigration policy are the true terrorism.

Later on, Larner was denounced as a racist and brought up on charges of saying something racist to protesters in his neighborhood.

As Larner rushed, barehanded, at armed terrorists, he yelled, “I’m Millwall!” This is the name of the soccer club he supports. It’s great he didn’t say “I’m Christian” or “I’m British” because then he’d be punished worse than the terrorists themselves. Supporting a sports team is still a tolerated form of community for people like Larner.

Here is a quote from Maynard’s memoir The Best of Us that describes her dating life in her late fifties:

He always paid for dinner, and it’s a sorry truth that I noticed and liked this behavior.

As a woman who dated extensively for 9 years and never, not once, in absolutely no circumstances allowed any man to pay for me anywhere, I find the behavior Maynard describes to be embarrassing. Whether you let men (or women, or relatives, or rich friends) pay for you is a matter of great indifference to me. Be whoever you are but just be honest about it. If you like men to pay, yippee for you. If you don’t, also yippee. But pretending that you don’t when in reality you do at the not-so-juvenile age of 57 is really pathetic.

First, you cudgel a guy over the head with how you are a hugely independent feminist, and then judge him for believing you and trying not to insult you with offers of paying. I understand if you are 17 but at 57 it’s way too late for these games.

I understand people wanting to close everything down when 3 millimeters of snow are anticipated. But can the closures be announced before 9:30 pm on the previous day?

The forecast has been unchanged for a week: 42 snowflakes will reach the ground on Friday. I understand that this is perceived as a great calamity. “An impending precipitation event” as people refer to it. But I’ve been on vacation and then on a weather lockdown for weeks, and I’m going on another vacation on Wednesday, so it would be nice to know that tomorrow is also vacation. So that I can prepare for all this vacationing.

Kids at Klara’s school watched the Carter funeral today for a whole class period. Is it an American tradition with which I’m unfamiliar? Should I be more respectful towards presidential funerals? I honestly had no idea it meant that much to people.

It’s not a bad thing because now my kid knows the names of all the living presidents. Except for Obama. Somehow, instead of Obama she inserted Ronald Reagan between Bush and Trump. We had a spirited discussion of American presidents at dinner today.

Anton Chekhov has a wonderful short story about a woman called Olga Semyonovna who keeps attaching herself to men and adopting their interests, way of speaking and worldview as her own. Here’s the link to an English translation. The story’s title is clumsily translated as “The Darling” but I’d translate it as “Fluff.” Olga is warm and fuzzy towards her men but also insignificant and never fully adult. She is an imprint of whichever pair of pants appears on her horizon. Such women exist, and we all know at least one. Such men exist, too, and that’s just as sad.

In any case, this brilliantly observed character helped me figure out which of Joyce Maynard’s books are worth reading. She is very much like Chekhov’s Olga, adopting the beliefs of the man to whom she happens to be attached. At the age of 60, she married “an extremely progressive” (in her own words) man and then married him. It’s kind of funny because Maynard originally became famous because she published a long article at age 18 that was quaintly conservative for somebody so young. At that time, of course, Maynard was under the influence of her father. Then, she met JD Salinger and started aping his love of homeopathy and raw eating.

After falling in love with the far-left Jim, Maynard embraced progressivism. This means one can rely on everything she wrote before 2011 (the year she met Jim) as being very good. I read her 2013 novel After Her ages ago, and I don’t remember much but my records show that I detested it with an uncommon passion. Under the Influence from 2016 is excellent but it predates the TDS stage that exacerbated Maynard’s leftism.

I’m very glad to be able to provide this service to the community. By the way, have I inspired anybody to start reading Maynard yet? She is very good. I’m loving her books. Salinger was right when he prophesied that she’d never become a real writer and he was spot on as to why. Still, even though Maynard’s books aren’t art, they are very enjoyable.

For those who will watch tomorrow’s show, I promise I didn’t dress in green because I knew I’d be asked about Greenland. It’s a coincidence.

Also, I’ll probably be invited to a different show to talk about literature on a regular basis. Need to get reading!

Zuckerberg not only recognized yesterday that there is censorship on Facebook and that this censorship has been detrimental, he has now vowed to remove it.

The responsibility for this positive development lies in equal measure with FB’s loss of popularity and the Trump election.

Facebook censorship was still there this morning. For instance, you still can’t share the NYPost article about the rapid enrichment of the BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors-Khan. Let’s see how fast Zuckerberg manages to get rid of FB’s notoriously rabid censors.

Speaking on the subject of the horrific fires raging in California, the Mayor of LA informs city residents that they can find help at URL:

“Right now, if you need help, emergency information, resources, and shelter is available.

All of this can be found at URL.

Los Angeles, together is how we will get through this.”

https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1877180303648702552?t=LrnJFy54KiOdPiXPagix1Q&s=19

Firefighting was defunded in LA. The leadership was DEI-ed. As a result, the Mayor is telling people to go to URL, and that’s all because they didn’t tell her to go to hell while they still had a chance.

It’s quite fitting that people should be told that help and shelter can only be found in the virtual reality, and even there an exact URL is a secret.

Joyce Maynard’s autobiography At Home in the World is like a thriller. You hang on every word, waiting for the author to get some insight into her own life. A chance to say “and then I finally understood, learned, figured out, grew up, realized” is why the genre of autobiography exists. If you start recounting the events of your life, it must be because you found a common thread that binds them, learned a lesson, discovered something worth sharing.

Maynard discovered nothing and clearly never even suspected that anything could be discovered. Her conclusion about her life is that she has spent it among unreasonable people of whom she has been a victim. Even the laziest of readers can’t avoid noticing, for example, that Maynard is one of those women who sees men solely as a conduit to getting babies, and that men tend to react negatively to being instrumentalized in that manner. Maynard, however, heroically ignores the insight that not only stares her in the face but howls like an unfed coyote. Not for her is the task of analyzing or wondering. She seems aware that the persona of “a prim know-it-all” (as she puts it) was hers at the very beginning of her writing career. That it accompanied her well into her middle age doesn’t seem to occur to her.

The autobiography is exceptionally well-written. It’s engrossing to the point where I breezed through it in a day and a half. Maynard did not have an easy life. She was sexually molested for years by her own mother. She tells about this honestly and explicitly in the book, yet never wonders whether this experience might have had any impact on, for example, her severe sexual problems in adulthood. Or her anorexia. Or her unhealthy relationship with her own daughter.

At the age of 18, Maynard started a relationship of sorts with JD Salinger and quit college to cohabit with the writer. Their relationship was never fully sexual and quite unsatisfactory in most every way, yet Maynard was stunned when Salinger decided to end it. As a person incapable of any degree of insight, she then spent the next quarter of a century trying to figure out why the relationship had ended. There’s a scene in the book where 25 years after the breakup, Maynard barges into the house where a 78-year-old Salinger lives with his wife. She ignores the wife and starts interrogating the elderly author about their long-ago dalliance. Salinger is horrified (and who wouldn’t be if a paramour from a quarter century earlier materialized in their living room and started making a scene?), and again, Maynard doesn’t have the slightest suspicion that her own actions might be causing Salinger’s negative reaction to her appearance.

At some point, Maynard gets in trouble with the law, but once again, there’s no realization that her assumed childishness is not endearing in a middle-aged woman and that the police is absolutely right to pursue the matter.

It’s hard for me to understand how a person can be as interested as Maynard in the minutiae of her life – what she cooked for specific occasions, what she wore, who she pouted at at any given moment – but remain so stonily indifferent to her own motivations. She has the self-awareness of a house pet, and observing a human being who is completely devoid of the need to understand herself is a large part of the book’s attraction.

This is the most enjoyable autobiography I have read in years. There’s not a boring sentence in it, and I’m very grateful to the author for the entertainment this book provided.