Has anybody here used Windows 10? Is it worse, the same as or not as bad as Windows 8?

Windows 8 was the worst computing experience I have has in my entire life. I’d rather go back to the screechy, slow modems of 1995 than use Windows 8 again. Is Windows 10 an improvement on that hellacious experience?

I’m sure it’s a total coincidence and has nothing whatsoever to do with hating women that every single middle-aged Liberal man in my blogroll virulently detests Hillary.

Cruz is spending a whopping six times more than Trump on Super Tuesday ads. And we all know what their respective numbers are.

If this isn’t proof that “big money in politics” is a non-issue, then I don’t know what is. We are getting caught up in our own consumerist mentality that becomes a dark labyrinth where the light of reason doesn’t penetrate. Consumers need to believe that everything is for sale, and they will keep trying to buy things that nobody is trying to sell.

I’m back at work, people! 

Of course, I didn’t actually go anywhere, I’m working from my home office while the baby sleeps next to my office chair. This is a very weird experience. Everything is exactly like it has been since May but there is suddenly a baby added to the scene. Weirdness.

My profession is great for baby care. I don’t have to be back on campus until late August when Klara will be 6,5 months old. And even then, I will only be teaching 2 days a week for the next academic year. Everybody suspects that I timed the pregnancy on purpose so that I would go straight from a sabbatical to  maternity leave to the summer break but, honestly, who has the kind of health and fertility at the age of 39 to make such precise planning possible? 

Still, I already had 3 people ask me how I managed to plan everything so perfectly. 

Who is Hillary Clinton?

is a fascinating time-lapse depiction of the leading Democratic presidential candidate as seen from the left. But it is also much more than that. A carefully-edited anthology of The Nation’s coverage of Clinton’s career, it’s a rigorous and painstaking study of one our most enigmatic public figures.

Enigmatic? Seriously? Do people just throw around stupid clichés without thinking or do they actually consider Hillary enigmatic? Because I’m not sure which is more pathetic.

Spain’s greatest living writer Juan Goytisolo says that Putin keeps winning in Syria because he knows exactly what he wants to achieve there, and Americans are losing because they only know what they don’t want to happen. Obama doesn’t want to be embroiled in another endless Iraq/Afghanistan type of conflict. But there is no proactive, concrete vision of what the US does want to happen in Syria. Putin, on the other hand, has a very specific goal: to position Russia as a superpower and get the US to forget about the sanctions.

You can’t exist without a specific, detailed and clear foreign policy. If all you have is strictly reactive, you’ll keep ending up in situations where you hemorrhage resources and achieve nothing.

But even the most educated, intelligent Americans don’t care about foreign policy. And elected officials have no reason to fashion a foreign policy agenda. Which means that we have many Afghanistans and Syrias in our future.

A colleague and her daughter came to see Klara and brought a mountain of gifts and food. When I first saw them, I thought they were moving in, with all the stuff they were carrying.

“Guys, you didn’t have to bring all of this,” I said modestly.

“Yes, we did,” the colleague replied. “Because we are Americans. We bring things.”

One of the reasons for the Russians’ deep-seated animosity towards the US is the belief that Americans want to steal Russia’s precious oil and gas. The country’s leaders are convinced that Madeleine Albright came up with the idea to annex Russia’s Siberia and Far East, and the subsequent US leaders are carrying out Albright’s plan. How did Russians arrive at the conclusion that Albright was planning to invade? Here is how:

Albright’s thinking on the matter, it turns out, was originally “unearthed” by a former KGB general who had worked for the organization’s special paranormal studies bureau. In 2006, the elderly general claimed on TV that his unit had telepathically connected with Albright’s thoughts in 1999—by carefully studying photographs of her—and found that she pathologically hates all Slavs, and had designs on Russia’s mineral wealth.

Insanity is contagious, especially when the delusional system it feeds on is flattering to one’s sense of importance. I have personally talked to two Russians who are absolutely convinced that Obama is trying to put in place Albright’s annexation scheme and is somehow using Ukraine to do that. The logistics of using Ukraine to annex the Far East will befuddle anybody who has ever found oneself in the vicinity of a map but this argument never seems to make an impression on the believers in the annexation myth.

People told me that having an infant led to tons of television watching but I could never imagine how much television watching. We are wearing out our Netflix subscription like never before.

Come to think of it, what else can one do between feedings and diaper changes? One’s brain is still on the fritz, so reading is not happening. So television it is.

It’s a good thing a new season of House of Cards is approaching.

And now that Hillary slaughtered in SC, the poor, sad MSNBC journalists still don’t quit.

“A win like this for Sanders. . . sorry, for Clinton,” one says with a hangdog look.

“But there are still the emails! The FBI might still bring charges!” another one ventures hopefully.