Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds is hardcore good. It’s the best I have read by him so far. I often say that Trollope does an amazing study of character but he’s not big on plot. The Eustace Diamonds, however, is not remotely lacking in the plot department. There’s a crime, a police investigation, and even a bit of courtroom drama. It’s an edge-of-your-seat novel that is a joy to read.

The novel is built on the contrast between the penniless, homely and saintly Lucy Morris and wealthy, lying and pretty Lizzie Eustace. Lucy is so saintly that Trollope is clearly bored with her and describes the flawed Lizzie with much greater gusto. Lizzie is a fascinating character. She is cognitively incapable of fully understanding what’s happening around her. She lives in an intellectual fog, confused by much of what’s happening around her. To avoid having to unravel the complexities of her domestic economy and the relationships of people who surround her, Lizzie swaps the bits of reality that befuddle her for comforting stories she invents. This always leads to trouble because reality cannot be changed with words.

The only people who can read a novel by Trollope are those with an IQ way above Lizzie’s retardation level. When they meet a Lizzie, they find such a person impossible to comprehend. Why is she lying in such obvious ways and for no visible gain? Why is she mismanaging her life to such an extent? In The Eustace Diamonds, we get a chance to peek into the mind of a low-intelligence fantasist and understand her better.

The novel also takes a look at a very dark subject in its exploration of the suffering of a young girl who is pushed into adult sexuality for which she is not ready and which terrifies her. Lucinda Roanoke is 18, and her aunt Mrs Carbuncle is forcing her to marry an older man. Lucinda is so petrified by the expectation that she will have to be physically intimate with a man that her suffering would melt a stone. Still, everybody around her looks with indifference at the agony of a teenager who is simply not ready for an adult sex life.

We no longer have families forcing young girls to marry against their will but our age witnesses an identical suffering of many modern Lucindas. We can see them in the videos of falling-down-drunk young girls in the streets of London or New York as they try to anaesthesize themselves with alcohol into a compliance with the myth that their sexuality should faithfully imitate that of their male peers. There is no exploitative aunt forcing them into it because they have taken that duty fully upon themselves.

Many things changed since Trollope’s times but his plots and characters read as mega relevant today. He’s an extraordinary writer, and I highly recommend his books.

Can somebody explain what happened regarding a squirrel? I got distracted for a few hours, and now all of a sudden nobody wants to talk about anything else.

It’s really hard to be a pundit round here because the newsfeed is torrentially fast.

One easy thing you can do to improve your teaching is to get students to move. I’m not talking elementary and middle-schoolers who should be moving a lot more than sitting but even college-age adults. Find a pretext to have them get up and move around, and you’ll see a completely different level of engagement after that.

Example. I needed to do an overview of formal and informal commands. I could have brought worksheets and bored everybody to death. Instead, I told students to break up into teams, walk around the department and translate the numerous announcements and notices we have posted around the place. The team that translates the most and with the best quality wins. Immediately, everybody started running around, looking for notices and announcements, laughing, enjoying themselves. In the meantime, I came up to each team and practiced with them individually. “So how would you say “don’t bring beverages to the lab?” How do you say it formally? How about informally? How about in the plural? And in the singular?” This way I identify everybody’s individual weakness – which can be completely different from one person to another – and help them in a targeted way.

As a result, everybody practiced without even noticing, received individual attention, and had an opportunity to move and oxygenate their brain. This was yesterday, and the engagement on Friday mornings is usually not great. But with this activity literally zero people snoozed in the corner while others pored over worksheets.

Under every post in Russian about the floods in Spain, there’s an explosion of posts filled with venomous hatred. One would think, what can Russians possibly have against Spain? But Spain is Western, and they passionately desire the destruction of the West.

It would be nothing, if course, if West didn’t contain a vein of self-destructiveness. The terrible lies spread by foreigners who hate us are taught in schools and proclaimed on the election stage.

A major factor for why Ukraine was NOT overrun by Russia is the Starlink support I provided, at great risk to @SpaceX cyber & physical attack by Russian military forces.

Starlink is the BACKBONE of Ukrainian military communications at the front lines, because everything else has been blown up or jammed by Russia.

In the words of @ZelenskyyUa:
x.com/zelenskyyua/st…

And Vice PM of Ukraine confirms that I am an ally.

-Elon Musk

It’s true. Musk has been amazing to Ukraine. I regularly remember him in my prayers for this. What he’s done for Ukraine has been life-saving.

I had a taping with this American show where I was recently invited. It will air tomorrow morning. It’s in Russian, so I’m not sure if I should post a link or not. But these are wonderful people, very profound, very professional. They’ll link to this blog, so we might have new readers eager to discover us.

They also want to invite me to the live election coverage on the 5th, making my dream of punditry come completely true.

Maybe other readers will be more helpful on this subject because I don’t use textbooks. We have an official textbook that is called Viva, if I’m not mistaken, but I never as much as opened it. I teach with my own original materials and I tailor them to every group, remaking the course anew every time. I explain the grammar myself without any texts. I had a very talented grammarian teach me Spanish grammar and I can explain any tense or mood in such uncomplicated, easy way that you get it immediately. The grammarian in talking about actually taught me preterite / imperfect in 2 words and the entire subjunctive in one sentence. I never made a mistake since.

I never used any textbooks myself to learn either.

If anybody has good recommendations, please share because I’m useless.

Very true. And you can test it yourselves. Try to explain disparate impact to a normie. I’ve tried many times. They think you are inventing, exaggerating, you must have misunderstood something because surely it can’t be, no, it absolutely can’t, come on, ha ha, what makes you think, nah, it’s impossible.

When you start offering evidence, people go into shock and stop absorbing information altogether. It’s the same process every time, on every subject. Euthanasia, immigration, trans issues, BLM – nobody believes what’s happening is really happening.

It’s exactly what I wrote yesterday. The real liberal agenda can’t be revealed. It’s so unnatural, weird and abnormal that a human brain struggles to process it.

JD Vance says on Rogan he thought Trump was killed when he saw the vid of him being shot in Butler, PA.

Says he went into “fight or flight mode,” left the mini-golf place where he was with his kids, went home, loaded all his guns, and stood “like a sentry” at his front door.

And AOC thought she was going to get raped and murdered on J6 in spite of not being there.

These massive snowflakes are identical. Dramatic, self-aggrandizing, and weak. I’m so not looking forward to this new generation of politicians.

“The West wanted Zelensky to write a video testament before February 24, 2022”, — Kuleba.

▪️The partners assumed that Zelensky would be killed.

▪️Kamala Harris then advised Zelensky to prepare for the creation of a government in exile, as well as to look for military solutions to prepare Ukraine for a guerrilla war.

There are no lows to which this horrible hag wouldn’t stoop.

Looks like winner projections are pretty definitive if they are known across the Atlantic.