We have a group of wealthy people in the community who want to support our program. Asbestos claims lawyers, good money. They decided to give out scholarships in the amount of $1,500 (one thousand five hundred American dollars, just to be completely clear), no strings attached, to students in our program. Very eager to just give away money. All that the students had to do was write a 1-page essay about why they decided to go into our program.

Now, as adults who all have an OK living, how do you feel about $1,500? I might be a total weirdo here but I think it’s good money. I wouldn’t scoff at it. Tell me where I can pick up $1,500 for a one-page piece of writing, and I’m first in line.

Not so our students. Most refused even to try. They are too busy, and writing is hard. Out of those who agreed, one used AI, another made an extraordinary number of spelling mistakes , including IN THE NAME OF OUR BLOODY PROGRAM, and yet another quit after one paragraph without even finishing it.  The last sentence kind of fizzled out before actually ending.

The lawyers are confused. They wanted to give away money. They deposited the money into our scholarship account and arrived today to discuss the applications. They, busy, successful people, could be bothered to come and give money. But nobody could be bothered to take it.

Our students aren’t remotely rich. This is really not a privileged crowd in any way, shape, or form. So what is it?

It’s not just the scholarship. I’m going to fire my lab GA who will lose not only the salary but her tuition waiver. This means she’s out $15,000 just like that, and even this can’t motivate her to send me the correct spreadsheet with exactly 5 lines in it 4 weeks in a row.

I’m not saying they are all like that. But very many are. Way too many. And as God is my witness, I can’t explain it.

Do you know how children sometimes do things veeery sloooowly precisely when you could do with putting a move on it?

Or how they endlessly lose the little gew-gaws that are very important to them at this moment? And life turns into one interminable search party for every tiny lost object?

It’s almost like they do it on purpose.

Because they do. Not consciously, of course, but there is a great and crucial purpose behind this behavior.

Let me explain.

One of the main tasks of parenting is to contain the children and gradually teach them to contain themselves. When they are very little, for example, there are rivers, oceans of saliva coming out of them, and parents have to stem the flow with bibs and whatnot. And then the saliva stops coming out. It’s done, the child has learned to self-contain. Emotional self-containment takes a lot longer, of course.

The child knows that it’s a slow process and wants to make sure the parents get it and will wait for their self-containment to mature. The little lost gew-gaws and the slow-motion movement are their love letter to the parents where they ask, “Mommy, will you still love me while I’m learning this? Daddy, will you be patient for as long as I need to learn to self-contain?”

We can respond to this love letter with one of the biggest gifts a parent can give to a child. This gift is the sentence, “Take your time, I’m not rushing you.” This has to be said from the place of complete inner peace. If irritability overcomes, practice breathing, meditation, deep focus, whatever. How are you going to teach self-containment if you are not self-containing successfully?

The incomprehensible importance of the little lost gew-gaws is not in the gew-gaws themselves. The point is to see if the parent will eagerly and patiently engage in the search for the misplaced item and do it as many times as needed. By losing the gew-gaw, the child asks, “will you still love me even though I’m imperfect?” And with every search you respond, “yes, of course, I will.” It really helps to avoid feeling annoyed if you remember that it’s your way of responding to a child’s plea for love.

We use the word “rights” a lot but we no longer think about what it means. We treat rights like the sun that comes up every morning and is just there. But rights aren’t just there and, unlike the sun, they haven’t existed long before the human civilization. They are a concept invented historically very recently by a specific culture for this culture’s internal, situational uses.

For “rights” to exist, somebody has to a) grant them and b) guarantee them. In the deeply Christian worldview that gave us the idea of universal human rights, God is the entity that grants rights. Once we’ve accepted that God created us in his likeness and endowed us with rights simply because we are human, somebody will have to actually provide these rights and defend them. The US was created specifically for the purpose of guaranteeing these God-given rights.

What happens, though, when we take God out of the equation? What happens when we leave behind the idea that rights are given by God to whom we owe many onerous duties in return?

What happens is that we begin to invent rights. Interest groups battle each other to make the rights that each group invents at a rapid clip reign supreme.

Philosopher John Gray, the author of The New Leviathans, says that our reliance on a poorly understood concept of rights is creating unsolvable problems. Does the right of a man to be called Susan trump my right not to call him that? Does the right of a fetus to come into existence as a person trump the right of a woman to control her own body? Does the right of a female convict not to be raped by a male prisoner who claims he’s a woman trump the right of a female-looking convict not to be raped by male prisoners? Does the right to choose where you live trump the right of other people to a meaningful concept of citizenship? Does the right to education or healthcare automatically negate other people’s right not to pay for your education and healthcare?

Every individual has an answer to these questions based on their own understanding of what matters. But there’s no way to come up with an answer that will be acceptable to everybody. As a result, we have doomed ourselves to an endless struggle to cram our understanding of rights down other people’s gullets.

The whole idea of rights that can mushroom into infinity is flawed. Rights cannot be the most important thing that defines our life in society, says John Gray. In the West, we are so trapped by this concept of rights that we are dismantling everything that works in our civilization and dooming ourselves to impoverishment and insignificance.

After multiple futile attempts to remove this criminal from the US, he participated in a shootout with other illegals, killing a toddler:

He has a history of arrests in the US but somehow it was utterly impossible to remove him from this country.

The really funny part is that El Salvador, the homeland of these gangsters, is finally managing to control their violence. Here in the US we like to pout over El Salvador’s crime-fighting success which means we’ll have to prepare ourselves for more violence.

I’m so glad I came across Eric Rickstad’s police procedurals. He’s very talented. Yes, there’s wokeness but it’s outweighed by this author’s excellent writing. Also, he’s very good at describing family life. Normal, healthy family life. He really, really gets family life, and that makes his characters sound like human beings and not walking cliches.

There’s a sad trend among authors of murder mysteries to depict the policewoman protagonist as a sort of a lousy caricature of a male. These female characters drink themselves into a stupor, have sex with everything that moves, and are terrified of intimacy because of some dark secret in their past. These female characters are so identical that one can’t tell them apart.

Rickstad finally breaks the monotonous chain of these literary policewomen. The main character of Lie in Wait is a mother of two who’s trying for a third baby with her very good husband whom she loves very much. Her very attractive home life creates a great backdrop to the perverted behavior of the criminals she pursues. I have no idea why it took so long for somebody to come up with a female detective who is not a gender-fluid weirdo having sex in public toilets on every other page.

I liked this novel much more than the first book in the series because there are no gruesome scenes and the wokeness is minimal. The novel even arrives at a very Christian message at the end.

Good, good writer.

It is as if people collectively lost their minds. From an article suggested by my browser at work:

Is the author of this piece insane (aside from a very bad writer)? Nobody checks chromosomes “at birth.” When the baby is born, one can see what sex it is by observing its sex organs. With eyes. That are located on our faces for a reason. However, science allows us not to determine anything “at birth” anymore. I knew I was having a girl at 12 weeks of pregnancy back in 2015. I’m sure since then science has advanced to where you can know even earlier.

Leaving that aside, though, how does this journalist imagine a baby’s birth? “Honey, did you see her chromosomes?” a happy mother exclaims. “I now know she’s a girl!”

Of course, any discussion of chromosomes these days leads to the same place:

Jennifer Graves, a geneticist from La Trobe University told NPR, “I don’t think that one can assume that just because [Y chromosomes] are there and they do something useful they’ll be there forever and ever. A small accident could tip it over the edge, or the evolution of a new sex-determining system that works better.”

The Y chromosome is disappearing. Here’s what it means for men (msn.com)

Color me downright shocked that “sex determination at birth” led to “a new sex-determining system” within a few paragraphs.

For the first time since polling on the topic began, a majority supports the construction of a border wall on the border with Mexico.

The previously fringe idea, popularized as a campaign pledge by former President Donald Trump, has gained traction amid a spiraling crisis at the border, with record numbers of immigrants crossing daily. According to a new Monmouth University poll, 53% supports the construction of a border wall, compared to just 46% who oppose it.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/immigration/2885760/majority-construction-border-wall-first-time/?utm_source=ground.news&utm_medium=referral

Give it a bit more time, and 90% will support it, which will change exactly nothing because politicians on both Left and Right desperately want immigration to grow.

Academics like to be original. And DEI has become boring, so people are losing interest.

This is the problem with both Biden and Trump. Both speak to a very narrow base whose interests are simply incomprehensible to most voters. I understand trying to secure the base before appealing to the general public but the base, in both situations, is so far removed from everybody else that the chasm is impossible to bridge.

At this point, I find both candidates to be living in a different universe from my interests as a voter.

Yes, AI will replace certain human beings. We now know exactly whose jobs are at risk, and I, for one, can’t say I mind:

All this effort to create artificial intelligence, and it turned out to be mighty stupid.