If you have kids, then neither. If not, then both.

I never heard of her, to my shame. I’m not a movie person, unfortunately. But I’ll check her out for sure. Thank you for the recommendation!

They finally learned to speak Ukrainian just when I had forgotten how to do it.

I was always way too sensitive, a snowflake, to live among my native countrymen. I still am, so that hasn’t changed. People started to drink a lot of coffee and talk often about it. Even in Kharkiv where coffee was never a thing.

In 2010 Sailer wrote the following words that explain the current unpleasantness experienced by US Jews:

Jewish leaders typically exhort Jews with one of three arguments, all based around feelings of communal self-pity:
1. “We Jews have suffered, so we should be acutely sensitive to others’ suffering…”;
2. “As God liberated the Jews from captivity in Egypt, … we have a religious obligation as Jews to help the oppressed”;
3. “Jews should be aware of our collective vulnerability, historical and continuing, and therefore for our own good always take the other side of the kinds of groups, movements and individuals who have victimized us in the past, and who could threaten us again in the future.”

The problem with this positioning, says Sailer, is that, with 35% of Forbes 400 list being Jewish, 50% of the Atlantic 50 most influential pundits being ditto, and all major film studios run by Jewish men,* nobody buys into the “sad, marginalized Jew” narrative. It only annoys people. And then when the wolf you kept crying for decades finally shows up, nobody takes you seriously anymore.

But that’s not the worst part. An elite group that doesn’t perceive itself as such will not work for the preservation of the society that allowed it to reach this elite status. Instead, it will try to smash such a society and the (utterly invented) oppressions this groups imagines itself to suffer in it:

American Jews should start thinking of themselves less as oppressed outcasts who need to go for whatever they can get while the getting is good, and start more accurately thinking of themselves as belonging to the best-connected inner circle of the contemporary American Establishment. American Jews should realize that, like the Protestant elite of yore, their privileged position as a de facto leadership caste bestows upon themselves corresponding duties to conserve the long-term well-being of the United States…

A group self-image of victimization, combined with a penchant for ideological intensity and powerful ethnocentric lobbies, can lead to bizarre political manifestations-such as the dominant Jewish assumption that proper veneration of their Ellis Island ancestors requires opposition to immigration restriction today.

This is as true of groups as it is of individuals. Victim thinking clouds people’s minds. An enormous amount of Jewish energy in America has gone into the destruction of the very institutions that made it possible for US Jews to thrive. Universities are one example. “We are sad and pathetic just like those actual sad pathetics,” Jewish intellectuals declaimed for 60 years. Finally, the actual sad pathetics turned around and said, “No, you aren’t, dude. You have everything that we want and we’ll take it now, thanks a bunch.”

Daily pleas** by Jewish intellectuals on social media – “we fought for your rights, why do you hurt us now?” – remind me of the academic quit-lit genre from a decade ago. They are embarrassingly cringe because their authors deny any agency in their own lives. Given that these authors are invariably very successful people, it’s impossible to take their complaints seriously. “But why, why did he do it to me?” is a perennial plea of a dumped girlfriend, and this unenviable role is nothing I would recommend in a moment of crisis.

* At the time of the article’s publication, of course.

** The most recent one I saw is from yesterday.

Now that I’m back from my travels, I’ll have time to finish my copy of Noticing in peace. Here’s an interesting tidbit that everybody suspects but doesn’t have the full stats:

By any means of counting, there are quite a number of countries where Jews make up a remarkable percentage of native-born Nobel laureates. For example, among American natives, [there are] 200 prizewinners through 2009 (leaving aside the peace prize as non-intellectual). Jews made up 62 or 31%. Since Jews comprised about 3% of the adult population in the U.S.
in the middle of the last century, this gives American Jews an Achievement Quotient for Nobel laureates of just over ten. And the American AQ is fairly low by international standards. In places with very few Jews, AQs can be stratospheric, such as Switzerland (3 Jewish laureates out of 17 total laureates for an AQ of 60), Latin America (2 out of 8 for an AQ of 220) and Italy (4 out of 17 for a 320).

It’s not all Jews, of course. Nobody has explained the divergence between Ashkenazis and Sephardics but I’d be very interested to find out.

Ashkenazi Jews (ones with Yiddish-speaking ancestors) average about ten points higher than non-Hispanic white gentiles, or 110 on a scale where white Americans and Brits average 100. That would put the median Ashkenazi Jew at about the 75th percentile among whites. IQ testing in Israel suggests that the other Jewish communities trail the Ashkenazi… Sephardim score about two points less than white gentiles, or 98. The Mizrahim (Jews from the Arab world) average
around 91.

So what is the explanation for the 70% illegitimacy rates among black Americans? Does anybody know?

The idea that this is a result of some welfare program is dumb. You can’t erase the prestige value of having a dude in your life with some paltry handout. Millennia of social conditioning have taught women that having the father of your children around is good and not having him is bad. I can’t think of anything that would lower your prestige among the female peer group more than having the co-author of your pregnancy evaporate the moment that pregnancy happens.

Middle-class divorced white people, please don’t project this onto yourselves. Your ex-husband who would rather die than not see his children, divorce or no divorce, is a completely different story.

We are watching Dune II, and I wonder if it’s in the original books that all the good dudes are “people of color” while the evildoers are all so white that even fireworks on their planet have zero color. Beyond white, obviously. Was it meant to be about a conflict between skinhead Nordic Nazi types and sub-Saharan types? Because, sheesh, how tedious.

We are halfway through the movie, and, God, is this second part ever so boring. The first part was good but the sequel just drags and drags.

No spoilers, please. I’m still hopeful it will pick up in the second half.

In my Duolingo, I have reached the point of “ich heiße” (“my name is”). I was reciting “ich heiße Frau Merkel. Ich bin Kanzlerin” at work when I realized that the German professor was in his office next door. He probably now thinks I’m completely cracked.

Yes, these are the exercises. I preferred the one with “ich heiße Johann Wolfgang von Goethe” but then we got stuck on Frau Merkel.

When did it become fashionable to pose as a brainless, infantile airhead?

This is painful to watch.

The funny thing, though, is that Spaniards have no idea what to do with their excellent produce. Ordering a salad in Spain makes you lose faith in humanity because the wonderful fresh produce is either drowned in mayo or topped with chunks of canned tuna and pickled veg.

The only edible food in Spain is either ethnic or at the restaurants where you are served a grilled fish with a boiled potato and no additional effort.

Against all odds, Trump seems to have hired somebody with a functioning brain who manages to keep him somewhat quiet at the exact right time:

Trump not making the worst possible hire known to humanity is the most unexpected news item this week.

Went to Europe for two weeks. Ate like I was getting paid to do it. If I ate that amount of charcuterie and carbs at home, I don’t even want to imagine.

Came back and discovered that I’m now the weight I haven’t been since getting pregnant for the first time. (If you give birth after 35, the pregnancy weight doesn’t understand it’s supposed to go away after the pregnancy).

If I said it once, I said it twenty times. There’s something wrong with food in America. And I never buy canned or frozen and cook everything from scratch.

Also, the number of smokers in Spain is out of this world compared to America but life expectancy is higher and nobody is fat.

I really miss those weight-loss charcuteries.