Humans are different from animals because we are capable of transcendence. This means that we value things that are outside of the realm of physical necessity.

We make sacrifices and sometimes die for abstract concepts.

We worship God.

We experience pleasure when listening to music, reading books, or watching sunsets.

We value beauty outside of any utilitarian motive.

Not all humans are equally capable of transcendence. Each person is a diffuse light but only some can turn their light into a potent beam that connects them to the skies.

To be capable of transcendent experience we need to give shape to our naturally amorphous humanity and put it in a corset of duty. The most internally organized people are the most capable of reaching transcendent moments.

True. Biden is worse than Obama and Carter combined in what concerns foreign policy. Keeping the massively incompetent Jack Sullivan around is an enormous mistake. Overall, finding the most incompetent people for responsible roles is the great talent of this administration. From Kamala Harris to Sullivan, we are at the mercy of egregiously stupid, bumbling individuals.

Folks, I keep complaining about how egregiously dishonest US news programs are but on Friday I prepared an in-class activity based on a Spanish newscast, and American news are a beacon of impartiality and honesty in comparison. Not even Hamas itself would be able to construct such an effective piece of pro-Hamas propaganda.

There were several pro-Hamas segments in the newscast. All news items that were actually about Spain were extremely trivial and geared to make an impression that what happens locally is boring.

I quit watching because I already saw all this crap back in the USSR. Spaniards keep self-congrarulating that they are free from the Franco dictatorship. I watched many Franco-era newsreels. They were more honest and informative that whatever garbage Spain’s free press offers. Mind you, I’m not suggesting they were honest. The dictatorship sucked. But at least everybody knew it was a dictatorship. Now people think they are free but they are fed such Jew-hating drivel that Franco himself never dared to speak aloud.

I’m seeing the Spain that expelled my ancestors in 1492. I never thought I’d see it but it’s come back.

Yes, and he’s telling us to “consider” the economy good, Americans racist, zero Patriots and F-16 serious assistance, and men women. It’s all make-believe with our president.

He’s right. We put people in college who don’t have the intellectual capacity for university studies. It happens because state investment into higher education dropped off a cliff. So what do you do with the people, the buildings, the labs, everything? Fire everybody and bulldoze down the facilities because there is no more money for the upkeep? Nobody would make such a decision.

The only alternative is to bring to college people who aren’t capable of being college students and bully professors into passing them by declaring that failing a student is racist. DEI is a financial necessity. State funding keeps dropping, so we need more and more students who are incapable of learning at that level. Such students need a battery of professional services – tutoring, counseling, clerks to explain how life works in every area, DEI functionaries to make everybody accept what’s happening – and that necessitates more money.

Tuition grows, student debt grows, but there’s no end in sight because it’s a self-perpetuating model. And it all started when the state turned away and said, “fend for yourselves.” Yes, there’s absolutely too much higher education on every level. There’s a massive overproduction of useless PhDs, Master’s, Bachelor’s. In order to create this overproduction we are embracing unscientific, bizarre superstitions, such as that everybody is equally capable of all kinds of intellectual operations.

Libs of TikTok was a great account that mysteriously went to the absolute dogs for no discernible reason. Here’s a recent example:

No, she didn’t “threaten.” Just like Trump didn’t “confess to rape.” They both ran their mouths stupidly. Big deal.

16 felonies? For saying something dumb? And the same people will complain about inflated court cases against Trump. And bitch about liberal snowflakes who are genocided by misgendering.

This has been the case throughout the past 2 years. Biden promises a lot and then forgets to deliver anything. And people don’t know because they trust the news sources telling them that it’s the fault of Republicans in Congress.

Biden’s support for Ukraine is the equivalent of BLM. Under the slogans of supporting Ukraine (or helping African Americans), Democrats introduce policies that destroy both. It’s the same old “truth is lies” and “men are women” that the Left so loves. Look at their support for Palestinians. Everything they have done for decades has kept actual Palestinians hostage to HAMAS terrorists.

Laura Nowlin is a writer from St Louis whose two-book series “If Only” is mega popular among the teenage #BookTok crowd. The books read easily and invest teenage experience with such importance and coolness that it’s understandable why kids love them.

The world Nowlin creates in the series is worth talking about because it presents some things as normal that I didn’t necessarily expect. Here are some of them:

Fathers

The world of “Is Only” is a world of single mothers. Dads are either dead or evil. This is an upper-middle-class environment of people with trust funds and trips to Europe, so the absence of fathers in the literary universe does not correspond to the reality of the social class that’s depicted and will read the books. The single mothers of the books are portrayed as amazing but it’s unclear how such wonderful women are so incapable of keeping a man around.

Politics

The books insist that all good people are left-wing because being on the Left is the same as being kind. There’s no framework for kindness and abnegation, and these qualities are tinged as political because of that lack.

Abortion

Abortion is a possibility that lies outside of moral concerns but the books veritably glorify teenage pregnancy. The second book in the series, in particular, lays it on so thick one immediately wants to go back in time and get pregnant as a teenager. Again, these books won’t be read by any teens who are likely to get pregnant before the age of 28. Those girls who are don’t read. So it’s interesting that there’s such a detailed foray into the pleasures of teenage single motherhood where babies are raised by all-female communities of manless women.

Sex

The series’ understanding of love is what I found to be the most bizarre. It posits that you can deeply, genuinely and seriously love several people at the same time and have sex with all of them. There are gradations in these “loves”, with some being more important than others but all these liaisons come under the label of love. Adult romance is a lot more monogamous, and one struggles to imagine a situation where adult female readers would find it satisfactory for a romantic idol character to inform his beloved that she’s one of a small harem but he prefers her a tad more.

Pills

The books are heavily into the medicalization of normal life. They posit that depression is something that just happens to people randomly and it’s normal to become a life-long pill-taker at a very young age. The novels also normalize heavy alcohol intake by very young children. It gets quite tiresome to read page after page about how everybody got extremely drunk.

In short, the world described in the novels is one where women should be happy to be chosen as one of the seraglio of mini-loves by a romantic idol and then prepare themselves for lonesome child-raring and pill-popping in the company of other discarded, pill-popping women. Of course, money and magically materializing “careers” will appear out of nowhere to reward you but you’ll still pill up and booze up to bear such a life.

This is classic projection. Trump is a strongman like I’m a dainty wallflower. But people with authoritarian tendencies project their defects on him.

Americans aren’t listening because they have found a new George Floyd and are eagerly debating whether a new round of georgefloyding is necessary. Plus, I’m sure Trump said something that needs to be pored over until he says something else.