These pitcher-looking parts trap and eat insects. How cool is that?

With all due respect for the evolutionary-minded, but the more I Iook at the variety of our planet’s plant life, the more I keep thinking that only someone with a wicked sense of humor could have come up with all this.

They have recreated the tropical climate here, with the plants, birds, fishes, and even waterfalls.

I have finally made it to the famous Missouri Botanical Gardens. It smells really beautiful here, and the plants are gorgeous.

I think it’s a great thing that President Obama has promised to remain neutral on the Falklands drama. It’s high-time we stop meddling in the ridiculous spats of others and turn to our own problems.

The Falklands have been used by both the UK and Argentina to create a rallying point for their waning nationalisms. Both countries need for the conflict to fester in perpetuity (or until one of them manages to find another nationalist drama). Meddling in that will be as productive as messing with the conflict between Israel and Palestine, a conflict that both parties treasure for similar nationalist reasons.

I’m reading an article in Harper’s that was written by Lewis L. Lapham, the magazine’s editor emeritus who is now in his late seventies.

How well he writes, people! Why don’t we see this kind of amazing journalism more often? I could read Lapham day and night, yet all we see in today’s journalism is an army of semi-literate Douthats who are proud of their extreme ignorance.

Here is a quote from Lapham’s article “Ignorance of Things Past”: “It is the ignorance of the past that invites the despairing of the present, which in turn leads to the marketing of dead-end politics with ad campaigns for a lost golden age. As often as not the nostalgic sales pitch os the contrivance of a reactionary status quo floating the speculation on a redeeming tomorrow with subprime borrowings from an imaginary yesterday.”

Not only is the article beautifully written, it also transmits a message we all need to hear: the apocalyptic whinings about how everything has gone to the dogs and how today is so much worse than some completely fictitious moment in the past only serve the goals of the most reactionary forces in our society.

These images of the prelapsarian eden of our past do not reflect anything but our fantasies about what the past should have been like: “As with the snapshots sent home to Mom and Dad from a winter vacation in Hawaii, the postcards from an illusory American past – the innocent Arcadia over the rainbow of the mid-XIXth-century Western frontier, the classless society that is the root of fair-minded free enterprise and all things innovative and entrepreneurial – don’t mention any unpleasantness or inconvenience.”

This reminds me of the egregiously annoying opening sequence from Michael Moore’s movie Capitalism: The Love Story. As a progressive activist, Moore should be aware of how bad the 1950s were for women and the minorities. Yet, he paints a picture of an idyllic decade where everything was perfect because each worker of a GM factory could afford a trip to Washington and an eager-to-please housewife with a robotic smile.

Lapham points out that the current outrage of many over the supposedly recent division of the US into a fiercely class-based society is completely misplaced. There were always economic and social classes in American society. As this brilliant journalist aptly puts it: “At no point in its history has this country not been nailed to a cross of gold.”

The blindness to history that so many of us willingly practice makes it next to impossible to articulate serious political goals that consist of anything better than pining for the Norman Rockwell images of an America that never even existed. Just last weekend, there was a long discussion on my blog where good, intelligent, progressive people seriously advocated the return to the economy of the 1950s because, for them, the fact that women did not share in the distribution of wealth at all somehow fell completely outside the realm of the economy.

There is a lot (and, I mean, a real lot) more to Lapham’s brilliant article. I highly recommend it to people who are fed up with the shoddy journalism of today that attempts to hide the grievous ignorance of intellectually impotent authors behind the endless “as everybody knows” and “most people realize.”

It turns out that students have been speculating about my place of origin. I mentioned from the start that I wasn’t a native speaker of Spanish in order to inspire them but said nothing beyond that.

“We think you are from Sweden! ” a student shared.
“No, I’m Ukrainian. ”
“But you’ve got to be from Sweden! ” another student chimed in. “The name, the hair,  the eyes …”
“What about my last name? ” I asked. “It’s obviously Slavic. ”
“We figured it was your husband’s name, ” students explained.
“No, it’s mine.”
“Why didn’t you take your husband’s last name? ”
“I have 5 degrees and many publications under this name, I couldn’t give that up” I started to explain.
“It’s because you are somebody, ” one student said quietly.

After I grew desperate with The Nation, I decided to turn to that journalistic bastion of feminism that is Ms. Magazine. And what do I find on page 3? The following quote from somebody called Margaret Cho: “You criticize a woman’s body – and young girls see it, you murder us all inside. You are responsible for our slow genocide.”

The quote appears in a section called “Lest We Forget” and there is no indication that it’s meant to be facetious.

Just observe how the quote insists that it’s a woman’s body – not her intellect, her strength, her career, her education or her finances, but specifically, the body – that shouldn’t be criticized. What can we deduce from that? A woman is her body and absolutely nothing else. You express a criticism of that body, and you have destroyed the woman because there is nothing else to her. Just her figure. What an incredibly feminist approach.

I’m glad that “feminists” of this caliber haven’t managed to convince me that all there is to me is my body. Otherwise, I would have already killed myself against a wall after reading the messages of all the trolls who decided to reveal to me the fascinating news that I’m fat.

I’ve got to wonder, why would anybody give others so much power over her life by reacting to comments about her body like they really have genocidal value? So somebody doesn’t like your body. Unless you are specifically interested in having sex with that person, why would you even care?

I have a mountain of objections to Obama’s second term as President of the country that is now my country, too. There is one argument in favor, though, and it’s a really huge one: the Supreme Court.

The next President will have a chance to seat one and maybe even two Supreme Justices (some people say three, but I don’t think that’s realistic). When I imagine that SCOTUS can get even more conservative than it is now, I get terrified.

So my suggestion is as follows: when you are about to vote, repeat to yourself 3 times “the Citizens United decision” and then decide how you want to cast your ballot.

My university had an honorable mention in the New York Times today. I can’t link because I’m walking in St. Louis as I write this but it’s true.

All of those people who said mean things about my university: in your face, ignoramuses. We are just getting started, too. Before long, we will become a lot more famous, and all the negativity-mongers will have to bite their useless tongues.

I get so annoyed with the shoddy writing, careless arguments, and unreliable research of mainstream journalists that I’ve been canceling my subscriptions left and right (pun intended). The only two EngIish-language subscriptions I have left now are The London Review of Books and The Nation.

Today, I open The Nation and try to accompany a raspberry mocha with the perusal of some interesting political commentary. And what do I find on Page 1? The following profound insight regarding Sandra Fluke’s Congressional testimony: “For most women, it is the economy, not contraception, that is the paramount concern.”

Headdesk, headdesk, headdesk.

It is only in the confused mind of this journalist that the recent discussions about contraception and the state of the economy have somehow ended up as completely different and even competing concerns. Everybody else (if we are going to generalize anyways, then I’m entitled to my generalizations) has managed to notice that the issue is precisely whether women with limited financial means will have access to contraception through their employers’ insurance.

Contraception is and always was indissolubly linked to the economy. A certain segment of the population will always be able to buy contraceptives, no matter how expensive they get and travel to an abortion clinic that is located in another state or even abroad. The war on contraception does not affect us all equally, which is why choosing whether we care more about the economy OR the contraception is completely useless.

While contraception is linked to the economy, the connection works the other way round, too. For women, the only way to acquire the simple capacity to compete in the market is to have constant and reliable access to contraception. Undermining women’s access to contraception equals removing women as valid competitors for jobs and resources. As a woman, you can’t care about the economy without caring about contraception. It’s physiologically impossible.