When I was an undergraduate student in Canada in early 2000s, I had a professor who was an Italian Communist. A tall, very handsome, very gay far-left dude. Brilliant but mega annoying with his leftism. I was fresh from the USSR, and most lectures consisted of me and the professor yelling at each other to the great enjoyment of other students. This was the leftism of 25 years ago, and who knows, maybe the professor has traveled in the direction of Paul Kingsnorth since then. I haven’t kept in touch.

The Italian Communist professor’s whole schtick was that the Western civilization is too cerebral, logical, and obsessed with rationality and correctness. The professor accused the West of demolishing the indigenous ways of knowing which, in contrast, are intuitive, more natural, and less obsessed with noxious things like punctuality, attention to detail and rules of social behavior.

When I listened to Iain Mcgilchrist’s Ways of Attending, I immediately recognized the ideas I first heard from the Italian Communist. Mcgilchrist adds the word “hemisphere” to the argument and coaches it in terms of his studio of brain functioning. In everything else, his theory is identical to that earlier leftism of the 2000s. Like Paul Kingsnorth, he’s one of those old-school leftists who are upset with the consequences of their own philosophy. They are horrified that liberalism has gone all neoliberal all the time and are trying to carve out a niche for themselves on the Right. I found out about Mcgilchrist from Kingsnorth’s book Against the Machine because Mcgilchrist is a huge influence on Kingsnorth, and now it’s clear why.

Kingsnorth and Mcgilchrist are both extremely intelligent, brilliant men. But they deeply dislike the entirety of the Western civilization which is the animating force of the leftist project. They can coach their repulsion towards the West in the terminology of brain science, ecologism or newfound religiosity. But the foundation of their thinking is the same. They simply don’t like the West. This is very different from the position of a standard right-winger who believes that the West is the best and that all of the problems we are experiencing are caused by the West losing the self-assurance of being the best that humanity has been able to offer. Kingsnorth and Co want to undo the West completely. Right-wingers, on the other hand, want to restore it to its glory.

People are mocking this old headline without understanding that it was absolutely correct:

Zelensky won 74% of the vote in 2019 because he was extremely pro-Russian. He’s not ethnically Ukrainian and not a Ukrainian nationalist. He was a Russian lackey who made his money by mocking Ukrainians for the entertainment of Russian audiences. This is why he was elected. Voters wanted him to make nice with Russia. And he did. He all but crawled on his stomach to please Putin. Which is why I hated him back then.

But it didn’t work. Russia’s war is 100% internally motivated. You can’t do anything from the outside to stop it. That there are literally zero people in the US capable of explaining this to the public is very disturbing. Imagine how many other issues there are where we are being misled by morons.

Most people’s brains can’t tolerate complexity and they seek jingles and stock phrases to believe the pressure of complexity against their untrained, weak neural connection.

We have a big award ceremony every year where students get prizes for academic achievement. I usually manage to award 8-9 students from my department. This year I’m only awarding two. Not because we don’t have great students but because the university decided to change the entire system of award management at the exact time when there’s a hiring freeze and a historically low number of employees.

To say that this is a flustercuck does not begin to cover the issue. The scholarships are endowed by donors, and I have a bunch of very irate donors on my hands who don’t understand why we aren’t managing to give their money away if they already donated it.

It’s the craziest situation. I have the money. Lots of money. I have deserving students. I have donors who gave the money and want it to go to the students. A large banquet hall was reserved. The catering is paid for. And we can’t award. It’s not just me. Everybody has the same problem. That I managed to drag at least two students across the finish line of unhinged austere bureaucracy is already a miracle.

Have you ever tried explaining to an elderly widow who endowed an award in the name of her late husband of 62 years that this year his name won’t be read from the stage at the awards ceremony? And she can’t come to the event? Although she comes every year and it’s a big highlight of her life?

“But why can’t I come?” the widow asks in a shaky voice. “I love this event. It’s so good to spend time with young people. I tell them about my husband and how much he loved languages. Are you sure I can’t come?”

And I feel like the shittiest shit known to humanity.

A French priest tried to repeat the plot of Victor Hugot’s Les Misérables but today’s Bishop Myriel didn’t find a modern Jean Valjean capable of redemption. He found his own murderer.

He was given the keys to the Cathedral by the priests. They put him in charge of locking up and gave him verger duties. After he set it on fire, destroying the organ and organ loft, Fr Maire offered him a safe haven in his home to await trial.

He proceeded to murder Fr Maire. https://t.co/e0aRVDraVS

— Wanjiru Njoya (@WanjiruNjoya) March 27, 2026

I was very fortunate in that I found a Catholic clinic for my high-high-risk pregnancy with Klara. The personnel there consisted of truly pro-life people who all behaved like what I was doing was the most normal and admirable thing imaginable. But not everybody’s reaction outside of the clinic was positive. I heard comments of extraordinary nastiness regarding how stupid it was to risk my life this way. Even after my child was born, her first pediatrician suggested that it was irresponsible to give birth to a child who was destined to be severely unwell with a host of diseases that, as we now know, never actually transpired. She said that in the presence of a beautiful, healthy infant who was already there. To a mother who had just gone through a nightmarish pregnancy.

I was a 39-year-old, weather-beaten woman, and none of this could divert me from my purpose. But I can easily imagine a younger, less self-assured woman without access to the mental health support I could afford who would “choose” to abort under the pressure. That choice would, to a large extent, be a result of the environment around her.

What I believe must happen is that a civilized society should be like that Catholic clinic. We should surround physically “imperfect” people with love and support. We should channel our thinking completely away from the question of how we can put an end to this inconvenient person or this inconvenient pregnancy and towards how we can contribute to life and happiness. When you know that something is simply not an option, it becomes so much easier for your brain to find other solutions. Euthanasia should not be an option because its very existence is a barrier to the creation of solutions.

Candace Owens is now the favorite speaker of the Russian Pravda network, and it’s just too funny. The Russians found their new Angela Davis who says the exact same things to them several generations later. And they put the new Angela Davis on the same Pravda outlet as the original Angela Davis.

These are very boring, repetitive people.

My department almost got disbanded because we are a shitty, bad department of irredeemably clueless people. The Physics department got disbanded because they are worse. Of course, there’s austerity and there are our neoliberal administrators, that’s all true. But I can’t pretend that we don’t bear a large share of responsibility for this.

Yesterday, my colleagues engaged in a campaign of harassment against the new secretary, Julie, over textbook orders. Julie is a dream of a secretary. She is competent, efficient, experienced, and cheerful. There is a shortage of secretaries, and if she asks to be reassigned, other departments will snap her up in a flash. Julie told me that she’d worked for 4 other departments and there was nothing resembling this level of entitlement there. She didn’t put it that way because she’s not rude but the implication is clear. And I know she’s right. People were behaving like absolute shits towards her. For no reason and no gain. I spent the whole day reaching out to them individually and begging them to stop but to no avail.

Folks, this wasn’t one or two people who behaved this way. It was almost everybody.

“Why the hell are you asking me to assign a textbook for this course when I’m not teaching it?” ranted one colleague at Julie.

I got involved and very politely responded to him that, yes, he is, indeed, teaching this course. He insisted on teaching it. Which is why it’s in the schedule. That was published two months ago. And which he could have consulted before going off on Julie.

Do you think he apologized? Nope. “Ah, I forgot,” was his only response.

And on and on it went with people practically competing for the title of the most obnoxious pest in existence. Sending sheets and sheets of completely unreasonable demands that they know Julie isn’t authorized to meet.

This isn’t new. They were like this with the previous secretary, and I begged them for years to understand that we’ll be left without a secretary because nobody is obligated to put up with such attitude. I ended up prohibiting them from contacting the secretary at all and mandated that they send all communications for her to me instead. But my term as Chair is almost over and I can’t prohibit anything at this point, so they tore into Julie.

This doesn’t happen at other departments. I stopped sharing my stories with other Chairs because they don’t believe me when I tell them. They don’t have these problems with their faculty and think I’m inventing this. I can see it in the looks of polite withdrawal they give me, and I don’t blame them. To give a single example among a trillion, I allowed one colleague to work remotely because of her personal circumstances. I went against university regulations to do it. The Associate Dean turns a blind eye to this situation out of goodwill towards me personally. This goodwill is something I worked like a plantation slave to generate and never use to get special consideration for myself. I only use it to benefit others, like the remote working colleague.

But guess what? This remote colleague is throwing regular fits about not knowing what we discuss at faculty meetings. Which she chooses not to attend against every regulation. She lives 30 minutes away. She could attend them. She chooses not to, and I protect her from the consequences because she’s a mother and I just can’t avoid trying to be nice. I send her all of the documents I share at the meetings. She refuses to read them and then freaks out at me because she doesn’t know what’s in the documents. This person teaches severely underenrolled courses that are costing the university money, so it’s not like this is a hugely valuable specialist who can afford to be a nuisance.

A year doesn’t pass without somebody at the department threatening lawsuits against the university over something utterly ridiculous that they themselves caused. Is it that shocking that the administration wants to get rid of us?

The reason I’m sharing all this, besides needing to rant and lighten my emotional burden, is that there’s always agency. Austerity is real but we ran towards it like a professional track team and made it unavoidable that austerity will come for us first. If bad things are happening to you, is there any chance you could have caused some of them? That’s always an important question to ask. I clearly caused the situation with the entitled remote worker. It’s on me and my need to feel good about respecting her motherhood.

I don’t like this time of year because I’m in a state of constant busyness but nothing of value gets done. It’s endless bird-dropping tasks, emails, bickering with co-workers who get extremely particular about the most trivial things. Messages, messages, messages. Parsecs of emails. And if you don’t think emails are measured in parsecs, you haven’t seen my Outlook. People are storming my office. Everybody wants something. I barely have time to write. Weather changes are extreme, which is energy-sapping. The cat is obese (not our fault, we got her this way) and her mealtimes need attention. My aunt ended up at the hospital, and I’m getting updates every two hours. I have laundry that has waited to be folded for almost a week. It stares at me with mute reproach. All I want to do, in the meantime, is hide somewhere with a book.

OK, rant over. I have 30 minutes before I have ve to zonk out and I still haven’t done my daily Bible readings.

The owner of my YouTube channel says, “We need a positive title for the next show. People want positivity, good news, something upbeat. We need to come up with something like that.”

Two minutes before the taping, he sends me an image for the header. It says, “An illegal brutally murdered a student in Chicago.”

We, Russian-speakers are a grim, grim bunch.

Noelia Castillo Ramos, the Spanish rape victim euthanized because her rape made her disabled, was sold for organs before the euthanasia. Noelia was told she couldn’t change her mind on the euthanasia because her organs were needed by others.

It doesn’t look like Noelia’s rapists were punished in any way. They are free to rape more girls who can then also be sold for parts.