There is a report in The Free Press about Professor Joe Gow and his wife, Carmen Wilson, and their pornography side hustle. The Professor and his wife have been married 10 years, and most of that time have been filming themselves in flagrante delicto. According to The Free Press, up until last fall, these videos have been for private consumption. But, as Professor Gow was planning on leaving his position (apparently one of several) as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, he thought, “What the heck,” and decided to post these videos online. From The Free Press report, it is unclear whether the couple had an Only Fans account before the “what the heck” moment but, at any rate, that was the means by which ten thousand subscribers could pay —

$7.99 [to] see the couple pretending to house-hunt with India Summer, Adult Video News’ two-time “MILF Performer of the Year,” who seduces both of them in the master bedroom. For slightly more—$9.99—one can purchase a compilation of the money shots.

There is one thing that really amazes me — it’s not corporate America’s top-down lock-step craziness, not Trump’s political and legal persecutions, not Global Warming, nor cancellation or de-banking;  not the popular approval of restricting freedom of speech, the so-called Intelligence Community’s anti-American machinations, or even those who propose the propriety and support the legality of killing babies at or after the moment of birth. The one thing that truly amazes me — that it could ever happen — is that people actually say and expect people to take them seriously that … a man with a penis can be a woman, and the word “woman” can no longer be defined. And that this is accepted by a large portion of everyday Americans.  The irrationality and the popularity of this truly blows my mind.

The closest I’ve come to any understanding of this is that current Leftist extremism is not a Marxist philosophy or a religion; it is a pathology.  Mass Formation seems to me to be too vague; and things like, say, Munchausens-by-Proxy seem too specific.  But the idea of bad parenting does seem to have something to do with it and seems to have an increasingly strong current cultural presence.

Our wedding anniversary (number 45 this weekend) is the same date as the birthday of Robert McNamara, which I continue to find annoying. McNamara was the paradigm of almost all that has become wrong with America.

McNamara was extremely intelligent.  He excelled at UC Berkeley and impressed at Harvard where he got an MBA. Before Harvard, he was an Army number cruncher in WWII, analyzing bombing efficiency. (I thought of him when watching AppleTV’s Masters of the Air as the airmen complained about being sent on virtual suicide missions that some planner thought vital.)

Missionary Harry Caldwell didn’t go to China to hunt tigers. But people were being eaten by them in the Fujian province. He could hardly refuse to help.

Harry Caldwell was originally from eastern Tennessee. He loved the outdoors, observing the wildlife around him closely, and became an enthusiastic amateur naturalist. He was also an avid hunter, which was not considered a contradictory pursuit at that time. After college and a stint in the insurance business, he felt a call to spread the gospel of Christianity. He became a Methodist Missionary in Fujian Province, southern China, arriving there in 1899 where he continued for 50 years. He seems like a dedicated individual who applied himself completely to whatever he did. His son John Caldwell wrote, “He gave up hunting, fishing, baseball, bird study — all the pleasures and hobbies of his boyhood.” But before long Harry’s health began to decline; he was burning himself out.

Male survivors of the Jewish Holocaust lived longer than peers of the same age who escaped Europe before the war.

The research, published by the U.S.-based Public Library of Science, compares the lives of 55,000 Polish Jews who emigrated to Israel before and after the war.

During the last few years, my intellectual and emotional energy has been devoted to three areas—the first involved pickleball. There was a group of players on public courts not far from me who cheerfully whacked the plastic ball across the net and expressed considerable joy and excitement at the results. I thought, “This looks like fun.”

Perhaps because this was at the beginning of the great Covid lockdowns, I also began to explore new intellectual areas of interest. I discovered “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs” at songs.com where Andrew Hickey analyzed the history of rock and roll which was very much the soundtrack of my youth.

Pollster Doug Schoen says reactions to the Trump conviction will not be dispositive of the November elections. Most voters’ attitudes about the candidates are baked, including opinions about the array of accusations against Trump.

Good news: He says that the voters are far more focused on the economy and the border and that the Biden White House is “tone deaf” to polling data. They still seem to think that “felon” and “insurrection” are winning themes.

There is a proposal in Texas to require statewide offices to win the popular vote in a majority of Texas counties. Sort of an “electoral college” for the state. Personally, I think this is genius. It balances out the interests of the rural and urban populations. Urban populations can always tax themselves for urban needs, pass rules of local application. So why should rural populations be subject to those taxes and rules with remote benefits and application?

It also reduces (at the state level) one risk of open borders: flooding cities with illegal aliens who are then somehow able to vote and influence state policies. For the illegal aliens to have the same impact under the Texas proposal, they would have to be distributed throughout the state and not simply concentrated in metropolitan areas.

“Le Pont de Saint Bénézet,” Dano/Flickr

On my recent tour of the South of France, just outside the walled city of Avignon, our tour guide pointed to an old stone bridge that extended only halfway across the Rhone River and said, “This bridge was built in the early 1200s.  Unfortunately, it was not well designed or constructed, thus was expensive to maintain.  Sections kept getting washed away, and they kept rebuilding it.  Until they finally decided it wasn’t worth the effort.  So they just left it.  Now it is known as the famous ‘Bridge to Nowhere.’”