Readers have complained that the archives on this WordPress platform of the blog are inconvenient to use. This is why I have placed a calendar on the right-hand panel. If you bring your cursor to any date on the calendar, you will see a box with the titles of posts published on that day. I hope this will make it easier for people to navigate the blog. You can press on the date that interests you and that will take you to the posts published on that day.

I hope people find this helpful!

And now, dear readers, allow me to present to you, a really fantastic new invention, a stupidometer. A stupidometer is great because it shows you how much money some really stupid people are willing to pledge to make their sheer and utter stupidity known to the world.

Here is how this great new device looks:

 This is how stupidometer is described at the website where I found it:

The Truthometer shows the reward that will go to the first person to provide verifiable and irrefutable proof that Sarah Palin gave birth to Trig Paxon Van Palin on April 18, 2008, at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center, as she claims. Individuals may pledge money to the Truthometer reward. By doing so, they agree to pay the pledged amount should proof be provided. An attorney will judge if any submitted proof meets the requirements of being verifiable and irrefutable. If no such proof is ever provided, pledgers pay nothing. 

To add to the pledge amount, send your name and postal address to brad.scharlott@gmail.com. 

Of course, an obsession with other people’s uteri is a sign of profound psychological problems and it isn’t nice to make fun of mentally disturbed individuals. But the stupidometer is so hilarious that I couldn’t deprive my readers of the joy of seeing it.

So in-between teaching,  holding meetings with 2 students, blogging and answering comments, I just packed up my entire office.

I have had to pack and unpack so many times in my life that I have come to hate packing with a passion. But I’m also now very good, fast and effective at it. So I just whizzed through the entire thing in exactly 2,5 hours. It’s truly best to do the unpleasant stuff as fast as possible rather than drag it out.

I’m now really happy with myself.

I have also noticed how adversity and hardship (in my case, having to pack the office) make one kinder to others. I don’t think I’d ever been as nice to my students as I was today. Maybe we should institute a regular packing exercise for all faculty to mellow us out. (This is just a silly joke, in case any of my school’s administrators are reading this.)

Look what I just read at J.’s blog:

Interesting…when someone’s sitting in a room, and someone else comes into the room, who speaks first?

If there is a clear divide in status, who speaks first? The “higher” or “lower” status individual?

What happens if the two individuals come from different cultural realities (not ethnicities per se, but just sort of “how one was brought up”), and in the culture of the higher-status person it is the lower-status who socially is obliged to speak first, and in the culture of the lower-status person it is obliged of that person to not speak to the higher-status person until spoken to?

After the awkward silence, I mean.

(Just had one of those moments. I am currently the lower-status person, and I am trained that, in such a moment, one waits to speak until addressed by the other. )

Is this true? Is it impolite to start talking first to a person of higher status? Because I do that all the time and I never had the slightest idea I was being rude. Are there any cultural differences in this area that anybody has observed?

I keep wanting to ask the new bus driver if he’s from Montreal because he drives the bus in a truly Montreal style. Endless rapid jerks, stops and speed accelerations make passengers almost fly around in the bus. Even if you are sitting, like I am doing right now, it’s a struggle not to pop out of the seat and roll on the floor.

And here goes another crazy bump.

Oh, I miss home. OK, I need to stop blogging now and hold on for dear life.

Since there is so much talk about the need for a fairer system of taxation here in the US, I wanted to ask my blog’s readers: what percentage of their income do you think it would be fair to ask people who make over a million per year to pay in taxes?

From what I understand, they are now taxed at 30%. In my opinion, this is completely fair and asking such people to pay more makes no sense. What do you think?

Now, there is also the whole issue of hedge fund managers who, reportedly, pay the tax rate of about 15% on their investments. As far as I know, the entire number of hedge funds in this country is between 7,000 and 12,000. Most of them are “boutique” hedge funds that manage less than a dozen million of other folks’ money. This means that what the owners of these hedge funds get isn’t all that huge of a sum (in relative terms, of course). In any case, the idea that hedge fund managers routinely and massively make “billions of dollars”, which many people like to believe, is preposterous. So even if the hedge fund managers get taxed at 30 or even 60%, this will be an absolute drop in the bucket for the federal budget.

Of course, “let’s tax the rich to feed the poor” is a great populist slogan. What does it mean in practical terms, though? What kind of taxation system would make better sense than the one we have right now?

What is it with this new “Let’s pity the Russian women” trend? Seriously, folks? Is it because of this stupid show about “Russian” immigrants that started airing recently? Or what?

Look what I just stumbled across:

In Russia, women get a pittance by agreeing to the sale of foetal tissue from pregnancies that they can’t afford to continue, to be over marketed to rich western women as injectable beauty treatments.

The person who wrote this would have had a conniption had they known how much Russian women spend on beauty treatments. As for “pregnancies that they can’t afford to continue”, this is complete and total rubbish. The Russian government pays women to have babies because of its racist belief that the white Russians are about to be displaced by “brown hordes.” With free medical care, long maternity leaves, and free daycare, it is a lot more affordable to have a child in Russia than, say, in the US or Canada.

Also, the attitude towards abortion is profoundly different in Russia, so there is no need to sob hysterically over the supposed tragedy of selling foetal tissue.

Come on, folks, just try to stick to talking about the realities you do understand. If there is anybody who needs your pity around the world, you won’t find that person among Russian women. Try to boost your self-esteem in some other way and just leave us the hell alone with your Western Liberal bleeding-heart clap-trap.

A father in Toronto is protesting against a certain kind of dates being included into his small son’s student planner:

A father in Toronto, Canada is appalled that the school district chose to insert days of significance into students planners (including his 6 year old son) which, god forbid, highlight hugely problematic, dire, and largely unaddressed social justice issues. He is particularly offended by the inclusion of Transgender Day of Remembrance, Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, LGBTQ Pride Week and World AIDS Day along with a few other “shocking” reminders that most people don’t actually benefit from a white-western-male-cis-straight privilege and have to negotiate marginalization and violence on a daily basis.  He felt that his son was too young to be “exposed” to such issues saying to the Toronto Sun, “He’s six. I want him to enjoy being six.” The father voiced his concerns to the Toronto District School Board and was assured that the issue would be investigated.

This is a situation where everybody is being a blethering idiot.  People who put “remembrance”, “transphobia” and “LGBTQ” on day planners for 6-year-olds sound like they have been hired to give a bad name to progressives and make us all look like zealous idiots. Seriously, have you seen a small kid capable of understanding what violence against sex workers implies? Or caring about World AIDS Day? Or even reading all these long words? Zero-Tolerance on Female Genital Cutting/Mutilation? International Sexual and Reproductive Health Day? Huh? It’s a handful even for me to pronounce.

The father in this case is also not acting in the best interests of the child. It is completely obvious that a kid is never going to read this convoluted stuff. So why make a huge fuss about it? Tearing pages out of the diary and giving interviews about the entire thing is the best way to get a child to notice that something weird is going on. A normal parent who is not hungry for fame and isn’t willing to sacrifice his kid for the sake of promoting his political beliefs would have chuckled over the planner’s stupidity and let the incident slide. Now, of course, there is little chance that his child will not become very aware of the entire story.

It is so sad to see people use children as a field of ideological battles.