Small-city life in America is very sweet. I called my periodontist to cancel my appointment because I’m not ambulatory, and it’s not a receptionist who picks up but the doctor himself. We chat about the family and the injury, crack some jokes, everything is very homey and nice.

I can’t enter a store (well, now I physically can’t enter anything but I mean normally) without giving a report on where Klara is and why I’m not bringing her with me and what she likes to do these days.

My niece bought a swimsuit but it still has a security tag on it. Nobody at the store made a hassle. “Do you have the receipt? No? That’s fine, too. Here you go, sorry for the inconvenience.” People are calm and unhurried. Everything is 7 minutes away, so why hurry?

I don’t want to bore everybody to death because people have heard this from me a million times, so I’ll answer briefly.

This is not a question of who but of how. I strongly believe that no immigration applications from people in the country illegally should be processed. In addition, I believe that no immigration applications should be processed at the border. People should apply for immigration through the embassies and consulates in their own countries. This way, people won’t have to cross countries and borders in horrific conditions, putting themselves at the mercy of traffickers and gangsters.

The process is broken. It puts migrants into terrible situations. It devastates the countries through which they march. It creates a permanent underclass in the US and destroys the economies and the communities that these migrants leave. The process must be fixed. This can be done cheaply and easily but absolutely no politician in the US is proposing to fix it.

If you stop trying to operate with primitive, screamy labels for a change, you might notice that my position is enormously more humane and respectful than the horror that currently exists and that you seem to support.

Yes, it’s a good article. Here is the link. I particularly agree with this:

The irony of Donald Trump’s first four years in power were that they seemed anticlimactic. I know this might sound preposterous given the nervous breakdown that the media had between 2016 and 2020. But what substantial lasting changes were achieved? The Trump peace plan seemed weighty at the time but, well — so much for that. The border wall remained unfinished. Operation Warp Speed is the kind of thing that Trump’s supporters are liable to recall with horror. Trump’s ability to conjure up, or simply find himself in, iconic moments never seemed to be translated into major change.

This is very true. Trump is best at being himself. He’s great at grand symbolic gestures. But those gestures don’t do much for me. There was still no wall, nothing remotely similar to the endlessly promised deportations, no executive orders on immigration or anchor babies, no barriers to the BLM, no action against transification.  Some positive action on Ukraine and Israel, OK, great but as we saw later, it was light-years away from being decisive. And it was like that in everything. A timid, vacillating administration that never even attempted to live up to the grandiosity of its rhetoric.

In short, Trump promises a lot of great things and won’t do any of them. Biden promises a lot of bad things and will do all of them.

On the positive side, being bedridden is making me miss the current heatwave.

On an even more positive side, since I can’t cook, the cooking falls to the aunt, which made Klara find out that she likes all sorts of meat. She never agreed to take any meat from my hands but now she’s discovering herself as a carnivore.

On the negative side, I have started to read a 700-page novel that Juan Manuel de Prada published in 2007 and immediately discovered that he published a new 800-page novel a few weeks ago. I am now hopelessly conflicted.

Apparently, Spain won something sport-related, and I didn’t even notice.

Go, Spain! 🇪🇸🇪🇸🇪🇸

Does anybody know anything about the shooter yet beyond the name and age? Has there been a note? Or a manifesto? Was he alone?

Grateful for updates.

I’m avoiding social media because the number of conspiracist jerks is depressing me.

DEI specialists truly have the most insulting opinion of black people:

Forbes, ya know? And the image they chose to illustrate delivers, too.

What absolute garbage is this endless propaganda.

Trump was shot in the head at a rally but he seems alive and quite combative.

This is getting really bad, folks.

Ruling dogma changes every so often, and human beings are encouraged (and often forced) to mold and re-mold themselves into new shapes to hold it. Depth of conviction and strength of character get in the way of the ideal of human fluidity. We need to make ourselves as smooth as possible because any ridge or noticeable wrinkle on our personalities might make it hard for us to pretend tomorrow or next year that we always believed whatever it will be necessary to believe to remain acceptable.

As a result, we avoid having actual personalities. Instead, we have consumer preferences and quirks, lists of afflictions and diagnoses, and bouquets of victimhoods. They aren’t dangerous and don’t tie us to any idea or belief that might become dangerous in the near future.

Smoothness becomes our ideal of beauty. Like those reality shows about home improvement or beauty makeovers, we see the smooth, the identical, and the empty as beautiful. “I want open-concept spaces,” say the participants of these shows in voices that shake with an almost erotic anticipation. “Let’s take down as many walls as possible.”

Immanuel Kang explained that we are so overcome by majestic views of nature because they make us aware of our own incredible depth. But once we train ourselves to have no depth because we worship at the altar of transparency, we want everything around us to imitate the depth-less smoothness of our personalities.

An illegal immigrant from Mexico cut up his wife and children into ribbons:

Victor Manuel Gomez-Acosta, a Mexican illegal immigrant, was charged with two counts of first-degree intentional homicide, attempted first-degree homicide and operating under the influence after being arrested in Abbotsford, Wisconsin… The victims are Gomez-Acosta’s wife and daughters. The children were found in one of their bedrooms. One had been stabbed 16 times and the other 20 times. His wife was reportedly stabbed approximately 17 times, with one of the wounds cutting her vocal cords.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.foxnews.com/politics/mexican-man-charged-killing-two-children-wisconsin-us-illegally.amp

Who should be blamed for this? Hmm… The crazy murder dude came in 2016 and then failed to be deported at an unspecified later date:

Gomez-Acosta entered the U.S. legally in Sept. 2016, via the port of entry in Laredo, Texas. However, according to the agency, he failed to depart at the time specified as part of his entry conditions.

It’s all one gigantic mess with no end in sight.