If you are wondering why I make time to attack aggressively the trolls who come to my blog, here is why:

It’s concerted, focused, and deliberate, the effort to silence people, especially women, but not always, as I can attest, and particularly feminists, though again, not always, as I can attest, online. The readers, the consumers, the fans, may not always notice it because people are silent about it. Because this is the strategy that has been adopted, to not feed the trolls, to grin and bear it, to shut up, to put your best foot forward and rise above it.

I don’t believe in being silent when attacked. A bully – be it an online or a real-life bully – needs to know that whenever s/he tries to get aggressive with people, they will push right back. Sitting there, taking aggression silently, and trying to be nice and martyr-like about it is not my style. Bullies and trolls need to be insulted and humiliated because that is what they deserve.

“Oh, you just make them more vicious when you attack them,” people say.

No. This is simply not true. I don’t make them anything. The trolls are vicious because this is the kind of shitty people they are. And if trolls are looking for silent patient victims of their bullying, they will have to look someplace else. Because here they will hear in great detail exactly what kind of nasty vile freaks they are. After which they will be shut up and sent to the trash bin for good.

Here is more from Mike on this subject. I agree with him wholeheartedly.

Rick Perry looked like a really viable Republican candidate for a while. He had a good lead and seemed like the only candidate who could threaten Obama’s chances for a reelection.

And then something happened, and Perry’s ratings evaporated. Now, we are back to Romney as the leading candidate. (Cain’s recent popularity is a fluke, in my opinion.)

I admit that I kind of snoozed in September and stopped following the election drama. Does anybody know what Perry did to destroy such a good lead so fast?

I was taking my regular walk last night when I saw the following Halloween decoration. The wind moves the sheets of the ghosts and it feels like they are dancing and holding hands.

What a brilliant idea for a Halloween setup! It is actually quite scary and very original.

Against all hope, I wanted to believe that the @Occupy protests did not congregate on Wall St. or in the financial districts because the mostly upper middle-class participants expected to get a handout from the reviled banksters.

But now that the discourse of “compassion” seems to have overrun the protest movement, I’m afraid that we all have to accept the sad reality that the entire #Occupy Movement is simply about well-off white Americans begging the even richer white Americans for a more sizeable handout.

Here you can see a post defending the right of the upper middle class people with expensive hairdos to get their share of “compassion” from the slightly richer folks. And this photo of a compassion-seeker with a beatific smile is now pretty much everywhere.

It is starting to seem like the only kind of protests that are viable in this country nowadays are the demand of the $1000K+ folks for compassion and the insistence of the $20K+ crowd on curtailing abortion rights and gay rights.

Reader Kinjal was traveling in Honduras when he snapped the following photo that he was kind enough to send to me:

“Clarisa” with one “s” is a very common Latin American name (see Isabel Allende’s work, for example.) What is surprising here is that the Americanized double “s” version of Clarissa appears here at a diner in Honduras.

As I mentioned before, ‘Clarissa’ is a nickname I chose for this blog to commemorate my grandmother who was one of the greatest female influences on my life. In a translation of a novel dedicated to her, I decided to transcribe her name as ‘Klarissa.’

Cyrillic characters obviously differ greatly from Latin characters.