A Form of Austerity

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

An adult illegal migrant is enrolled in a Virginia high school. He’s been sexually assaulting schoolgirls there, some as young as 13 years of age. The public school system is refusing to do anything about it. The prosecutor doesn’t want him jailed. The county sheriff is refusing to honor ICE’s order of deportation against the rapey illegal. He is currently in jail thanks solely to Judge Dipti Pidikiti-Smith who refused the prosecutor’s request to release the criminal on bail. Once he is released, the public school system is promising to let him back in, even though he is an adult.

More details here.

The result of all this is that everybody who has any other option at all with remove their children from public schools. Which is the whole point. People who care about their children will have to take a financial hit. It will be harder for them to join or remain in the middle class.

A Necessary Break

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Taking a week completely off work really helped. I’m mega energized and see my way forward clearly. I volunteered to teach outside my program after my sabbatical, which has been a long-standing dream. I hope to go into International Studies or something related to Political Science. They have courses on the books that I can adapt completely to my needs without going through the ridiculously lengthy and onerous process of opening a new course.

I also volunteered as a reviewer for two new journals and found an edited volume I want to contribute to.

All of this happened since this morning. Breaks are good.

DEI Loyalty

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

To complete yearly merit reporting, I used to have to write two mini-essays on how I promoted DEI goals in the past year. Now I have to write three. A new one was added this year. This is just my own merit reporting. Three DEI essays for only me.

This, of course, is one of many activities that require oaths of loyalty to DEI. I have to write a DEI statement when requesting permission to hire. We are no longer allowed to ask candidates to provide DEI statements. But nobody took away my obligation to write one for every single position. I have to write a DEI statement whenever I propose to convert a temporary instructorship into a permanent one, open a new course, add a general education designation to a course, support a colleague’s promotion. I could go on and on.

I was recently reproached by a reader for not caring about some anti-DEI measure in Florida. I want to give that person the benefit of the doubt. They probably don’t know what we have to deal with pretty much daily. This can’t be eradicated peace-meal. There’s too much of it. You ban the requirement for candidates to provide DEI oaths, and it all comes back from the side of the hirer where you can’t have a search committee without a DEI apparatchik on it. None of this is covered in the press because it’s assumed as a default. Any challenge to this default is screamed down as an outrage.

What Changed

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

The market. The market changed. Obedient, nose-to-the-grindstone, rote workers are no longer necessary. The only chance to make good money and have a decent standard of living lies in developing a very strong personality that does not require outside discipline.

Our children either learn to self-regulate and self-discipline, or they’ll be guinea pigs for cruel experiments.

At Home

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

I’ll never understand why immigrants are so obsessed with seeking out people from their own country of origin. The priest’s wife pleaded with me to sit at the table with Russian-speaking parishioners. I did, and it was not pleasant. They are lovely people, I’m sure, but I have nothing in common with them. I don’t understand their jokes, I have no idea what they are saying. I sat there, silent and bored. Finally, an Anglo parishioner sat down next to me, and within seconds we were hooting with laughter over jicama and Honduras.

Impossible Illness

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

The temperature here is in the eighties Fahrenheit. Overnight, it will drop to below freezing. On Wednesday it will be back up to high eighties.

The new priest is having trouble adapting to the temperature swings. He’s having hypertensive episodes. A local doctor prescribed him something for them but when the priest went to collect the prescription, it turned out to be for an antidepressant.

“I’m not depressed,” the priest tried to explain to the doctor. “I’m religious. I’m a servant of God. Depression is an impossibility for me. I want something for my blood pressure, that’s all.”

It hasn’t worked so far.

A Tucker Development

~ Clarissa ~ 17 Comments

There’s a fascinating development in the Tucker Carlson story. It looks like Trump accepted Tucker in the White House on the eve of the war with Iran and appeared persuadable (as Tucker said several times on his show) in order to lure Tucker into transmitting the message to the ayatollah regime. Is that why the Iranian leadership gathered all in one place? Because they were led to believe that the attack wasn’t coming? Was Tucker the human version of a Hezbollah pager?

Tucker recognized openly today that the CIA is investigating him for passing messages to the Iranian regime.

Running Dry

~ Clarissa ~ 1 Comment

The moment USAID money dries up, Latin American elections start looking very different.

Different Consequences

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Yes, Ian Carroll is a grifter. But the difference is that his lying led to no real-world results. The mainstream media, on the other hand, created George Floyd pogroms, COVID lunacy, and a million other things that led to real death and destruction.