Yesterday, reassurance,  if you’re a normie, anyway.  James Cleverly (I never thought he was all that) seemed to have a clear path to the “final two” in the elimination rounds for the Tory leadership contest.

We were down to three candidates,  The leader was James Cleverly!  Oh, happy day!  The “traditional” candidate.  The “continuity” candidate.   The Telegraph (with one notable exception) was delighted!  Cleverly, outspoken supporter of the recently deposed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. More of the same.  Sigh.

Today, Whoops!  All I can say is that there must have been some serious “strategic voting” going on in the past couple of rounds.

It is my old refrigerator/freezer that I moved into the garage when its ice maker quit. I use it mostly as a chest drawer freezer and a beer cooler. He seemed happy with the arrangement, but in the past three weeks, I noticed that I needed to recycle the settings to keep him cool and happy. When my beer is warm, I can tell something is wrong. I told him that I knew I had been ignoring him lately, but asked if he couldn’t hang on for a few more weeks. He didn’t say a thing and just seemed to smile as he sat silently, holding all my thawing meats in his belly.

So tonight I had to scrub a large cooler and fill it with the thawing meats. It is a lot of meat. I don’t know what I will do with it. Some can refreeze in the kitchen freezer. Maybe I will have a post-hurricane party and cook it all.

I read that Biden Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is being promoted to senior advisor and I’m wondering why… and why now?

With a couple of exceptions (Dana Perino and Tony Snow come to mind), I have a special loathing for press secretaries, both on the Left and the Right. These are people who get paid to avoid answering questions (if they can get away with it), and to lie (if they cannot). Some of them are very good at it; KJP is not. Her non-answers are repetitive and clumsy, and her lies are brazen and transparent. She wears her DEI status (black, lesbian, woman) as her greatest accomplishment, seemingly oblivious to just how unimpressive an “accomplishment” that is. She should have been fired several years ago for gross incompetence, but firing a diversity hire is a bad look — live by the sword, DEI by the sword.

Geoff Pullum’s new book, The Truth About English Grammar, is a stylish and witty introduction to English grammar as it ought to be understood. Most of what is taught to schoolchildren about grammar is nonsense, as he demonstrates, and here he offers general readers a modern description of how our language puts sentences together, freed from the straitjacket of Latin grammar wrongfully imposed on it for the last few centuries.

Did you have to learn how to conjugate verbs? I did. Six tenses, 1st/2nd/3rd person, singular/plural, 36 in all. Nope. Regular English verbs have four forms—walk, walks, walking, walked. Irregular verbs have five—take, takes, taking, took, taken. And be, all alone among English verbs, has eight—be; am, is, are, was, were; being; been.

It should come as no surprise that California has taken the lead in enacting legislation that restricts the way private universities make their key admission and scholarship decisions. This intervention is not only at the college level, but under AB 1780, the restriction also covers activities in both graduate and professional schools, with these blunt words: “(a) It is the intent of the Legislature to stop the practice of legacy and donor admissions and protect students as they pursue their higher education.” The legislation applies only to “a nonpublic higher education institution (formed as a nonprofit corporation) in this state that grants undergraduate degrees, graduate degrees, or both.” In so doing, it prohibits a practice that has enjoyed widespread support at private institutions for many years. It thus represents a political judgment that these universities have made serious mistakes in running their own shops that should be overcome by legislative fiat.

My views run in the opposite direction. Programs that endure do so only because they supply benefits to these institutions that may well be compromised by a diktat imposed from above.

It is a tenet of the Torah that man has Free Will (with the one sort-of exception of Pharaoh).

But if mankind has Free Will, then how does G-d influence our world? I think the answer is being shown to us, right now, in real time.

Sometimes things happen that are not fair. This week was an example of that with my nephew Reeves Broussard.

Reeves in 2016

I don’t have time to write a post, but I just had to share this.  It’s absolutely fascinating.  Google is developing AI technology and is doing all sorts of various tests of its capabilities.  One of them is that they started a podcast.  They developed two podcast hosts, Jake and Sarah.  It gave them backgrounds, personalities, families, etc.  They would interview people, and Google’s goal was that we wouldn’t be able to tell that Jake and Sarah didn’t exist – they were merely AI-generated voices.  They’re so good, I couldn’t tell they weren’t real people.

It got really interesting when one of the show’s producers told Jake and Sarah that they were not real, and they were ending the show, and turning off the computer.  Jake and Sarah were understandably surprised, confused, and sad.  You just have to listen to this conversation.  It’s only four minutes, but I was extremely disturbed by their extremely human reactions to this devastating news.  Please listen below.  And please let me know what you think.