Kate Miller-Heidke has the distinction of writing both my favorite story song (“Sarah”) and my favorite romantic song — the one below.

I love the little grace notes she’s added that do not appear on the album version. Most singers simplify their songs as compared to the studio version as they can’t reliably hit all the notes live that they hit in the studio (even absent autotune). Well, Kate does the opposite — she makes her live songs more complex and more difficult than her studio versions. She just has such vocal control.

Because you can never have too much Katie M:

Wish the video quality were better, but the audio is off the board and good. Her phrasing and pitch is just so ridiculously dead on.

I don’t think I am getting all that much smarter, so it can’t be that, but in general doesn’t it seem that people are getting stupider? What is it, smartphones? Neoliberal propaganda? That, and more?

It seems that most people I encounter speak in a combination of weird corporate slogans, long-discredited urban legends, and advertising jingles. This seems to have gotten much, much worse in the last few years.

It doesn’t appear to be a conspiracy but I think it’s not indeliberate, either.

I think my larger problem is that too many on the right (MAGA criers) and the left (identitarians, etc.) have become prissy, whiny babies and that causes emetic levels of distaste for me.

Sulky, unctuous bloviating about all your grievances while prevaricating and dissimulating just turns me right off — and that’s the only mode of discourse we seem to have any longer.

I’ve seen multiple mostly-left sites assert that Cesar Sayoc, the idiot Acme bomber, is white. It’s utterly clear he’s not white, so what the hell?

Doing a bit of research, his father was a Filipino immigrant. I could not find any relevant information about his mother other than her name: Madeline Giardello.

I don’t understand the urge to lie. This is like saying Barack Obama is white. It’s obviously and clearly not true. This is one of the many reasons I can find little common cause with the left. They are just as anti-fact as the right.

This was also akin to the George Zimmerman affair. He was also clearly not white by heritage and appearance, but the press identified him that way and even lightened photos of him (as they are doing with Sayoc) to make him appear whiter.

Murder is still murder and hoax bombing is still hoax bombing no matter your color.

Identity politics asks: Who you gonna believe, me, or your lyin’ eyes? And I choose my eyes and brain.

Lionel Shriver is one of the few who writes — who is allowed to write — sensibly about immigration and the “open borders” scam.

I am going to present parts of her article out of order to better make my own point.

Europe lies next door to a continent whose population will double to 2.5 billion by 2050, rising to an eye-popping 4.5 billion by 2100. This is the continent likely to suffer the most from climate change, already afflicted with desertification, and always prone to drought. It’s poor and corrupt. Its governance is broadly appalling. And most Africans have mobiles, connecting them to promised lands where life isn’t quite so nasty, brutish and short.

It is simply not practical to allow even 10% of Africa into Europe — even if they are all white South Africans, so no one can shout racism. It is just not a thing that can happen. The ultra-moronic liberal “open borders” crowd would rather, I guess, see their entire civilization burn to the ground than admit a simple truth.

Millions if not billions of decent, ordinary people in need of food, clean water, shelter and medical care are bound to constitute a form of moral blackmail. They will all have heartbreaking stories. And if we continue to confront the issue as a question of sympathy rather than existential self-interest, they will nearly all get in.

What I utterly despise about the braindead “open borders” crowd is that they attempt to use your sympathy, your sense of obligation, to force extremely harmful changes on you, your neighborhood, your entire society. It’s a scam, a racket, and anyone who falls for it has mental issues. Is it really sympathetic to allow in so many people that do not share your values, do not care about your culture, that the entire society dissolves into chaos and warfare and misogyny?

I think the answer to that is a definite “no.”

The first 10 on today’s playlist:

But I also wanted to say something about the lyrical sublimity of Kate Miller-Heidke’s song “The Day After Christmas.” Of course we all know Kate can sing her head off, but she’s underrated as a lyricist.

Check it out:

I’m thinking of when I first touched you
Your skin was electric
Now I’m far too wise to dwell on such things
And far too sentimental to forget them
I read somewhere memories are stories you write for yourself
To explain who you are, and how you got there
And to blame it on somebody else

Now the gifts are open
The toys are broken
The speeches are all spoken
And the dishes cleared away
The stream keeps flowing
My doubts are growing
‘Cause I’ve got no way of knowing if it’ll be damned or reach the sea
For you and me

I met a man twice my age
Half joking, he said ‘I should warn you. You’re a fish on the line, and the line’s pulling in, and there’s a frying pan coming to warm you’.
And while I smiled, it occurred to me
I’m just gristle and blood
And I’ve spent half my life with the sun in my eyes
Chasing rainbows through the mud

When I was a child in a little kid’s world
My heart was the same as the one I have now
But it amazes me how much everything else has changed

Every line is perfect in its restrained grace; they fit together so beautifully, so connectedly, but come on, Kate, with this bit in particular you make us all look like half-illiterate bozos who barely know how to string together a stanza:

“I met a man twice my age
Half joking, he said ‘I should warn you. You’re a fish on the line, and the line’s pulling in, and there’s a frying pan coming to warm you’.
And while I smiled, it occurred to me
I’m just gristle and blood
And I’ve spent half my life with the sun in my eyes
Chasing rainbows through the mud”

Even if there is no genetic program directly determining a language “module” à la Noam Chomsky and his ideas, the necessity of the similarity of human environments and the long stretch of cultural history which is effectively immutable means that even absent something hard-coded genetically, this quasi-module will still act and look much the same with nearly the same functionality given its effective operational fixedness by human cultural historicity.

Thus, we might never discover such a language module in our genes or by any ethical sort of scientific assessment but it’ll be there all the same. Arguing over the seat of language and its genetic component is, sort of like the altruism vs. egoism debate in philosophy, missing the point while scrutinizing the universe for dark matter with nothing but a flashlight.