A reader sent me the following terrifying article:

The antidepressant class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are among the most frequently prescribed drugs for autism.

Although none are specifically approved for the treatment of autism, it’s estimated that up to one-third of autistic children receive the drugs, often to treat the repetitive behaviors like tapping or head banging that are frequently observed in those with the condition.

A new analysis by researchers from Yale and the University of Michigan has now revealed that serious study biases have been occurring; while published research appears to show the drugs have a modest benefit in patients, in reality they have little or no benefit at all.

People who use every opportunity to pump poor small children full of horrible, dangerous drugs with a multitude of side effects in order to turn these  kids into convenient, zombified little robots are criminals.

The article starts well by identifying the reasons why drugs so often get overprescribed and misrepresented (corruption, of course) but then goes into the usual let’s “manage this illness” by avoiding vaccines, milk, artificial sweeteners, and home-cleaning products. Every time autism is mentioned in the media by a non-autistic I cringe because I already anticipate the offensive tone the article will adopt, the nasty terminology, and the general tactlessness of discussing autistics as if we were a bunch of freaks who need to be “managed” through all kinds of weird methods.

From a student evaluation: “Thanks to Professor Clarissa I found out that there are countries not only in North America but in South America and elsewhere.”

I’m guessing that the student was trying to say “there are Spanish-speaking countries.” Or maybe s/he really just discovered that there are countries on other continents, who knows.

If somebody told me a story of a person who owned a photographic camera for 6 years before discovering that the big and very visible picture of a film camera on top of it meant that the camera could actually shoot motion film, I’d think they were exaggerating.

If they told me that the camera’s owner would only discover its capacity to shoot motion film after accidentally pressing the button and then staring at the recording in mute amazement for 20 minutes, I’d discard the story as unrealistic.

If they added that this person had a PhD and was considered very smart by their students and colleagues, I’d think this was a conspiracy to denigrate academics.

If they added that it was a woman, I’d decide that these were anti-woman ideologues who promote the idea that women are useless with technology.

If they said that this person was a Ukrainian, I’d dismiss the story as yet another attempt to present Ukrainians as simple-minded country yokels.

In short, I would have never believed the story if it hadn’t happened to me.

A growing, vibrant university has a great impact on a town. My older colleagues still remember how there were no clothing or grocery stores in the area and one had to drive forever to go shopping.

Now that our university is flourishing, we get new civilizational advances grace our tiny town on a regular basis. On this photo, you can see a coffee-shop that opened right next to my house. This is a very modern place where over 20 varieties of teas are brewed. I haven’t tried their snacks yet but from the description, they sound healthy and interesting.

Who needs Montreal when I can go to a real cafe with my book right here? The absence of coffee-shops where one could just hang out reading and blogging without having to travel all the way to some mall is what always bugged me here in the Midwest, especially in tiny towns. And now we have ourselves some real civilization, too!

The cafe looks empty on the photo but actually it’s surprisingly full for a place that just opened. I had to wait for a chance to take a picture without bothering any customers.

For some reason, this true story is very popular with people. In the past few weeks, I’ve told it half a dozen times and keep getting requests for a repeat performance. So I decided to publish it on the blog and then direct everybody who wants to hear about this to the published version.

Among the many “New Russian” millionaires and billionaires, there was this one guy who owned a chain of banks. He was extremely rich in spite of his fairly young age (the guy is a couple of years younger than I am.) His wealth is not surprising, however, given that his Daddy held a high rank with the KGB during the Soviet era.

So one day the banker millionaire was driving down the street in his Maybach. Of course, just like any other self-respecting New Russian oligarch, he was accompanied by a cortège of vehicles carrying his bodyguards. As the Maybach was proceeding on its way, a battered old BMW (with no cortège) overtook it.

The New Russian banker was outraged. How come some insignificant little BMW was going to overtake him, an important business leader?

The banker’s posse stopped the BMW, dragged out the driver, and gave him a beating.

What the banker didn’t know, however, is that, even though the driver of the dinky little BMW didn’t have an entourage of bodyguards, he had something better. He had a girlfriend called Katya. And Katya had a father called Vladimir Putin.

Katya told her Daddy about the mean banker who beat her boyfriend and, of course, the doting father took care of the situation.

The banker is in jail now. All of his property, including the chain of banks and the Maybach, has been requisitioned for the benefit of the state.

The moral of the story: even people in dinky little BMWs can turn out to have important connections.

“The real holidays have started for me,” I informed N. yesterday. “I have 14 weeks of not having to work ahead of me this summer. Oh, I love not having to work! Take today, for example. I wrote 1,5 pages of my manuscript and did major revisions on 4 more pages. I also translated 10 pages instead of the 5 I’d planned. Then, I moderated the comments students had left on the course blog. I also looked up some secondary sources for my research. Not working is the best!”

N. gave me a very puzzled look. I think that, from now on, I should specify that “not working” for me means not having to socialize. Everything else is not work.

You know what annoys me? OK, yes, many things. One of such things is being constantly asked to teach Russian, organize a Russian Club, or start a Department of Russian at our university. I keep explaining to people that I’m a Hispanist but they remain stuck on this Russian obsession.

The only engagement with Russian that I speak it. If you think that this must qualify me to do any of the things I listed here, you must probably believe that every single English-speaker you have met is prepared to start English Departments at universities.

I read a lot less in Russian than I do in Spanish and English. I have very little interest in the Russian-speaking culture (or what’s left of it.) As for the language, I’m completely unfamiliar with the grammar, so teaching is out of the question. It just annoys me that while nobody would consider that the profession of an English-speaking mathematician or biologist is interchangeable with that of a teacher of English, it isn’t as easy to convince people that a Russian-speaking Hispanist is still a Hispanist.

Another thing that gets to me (I said there were many, didn’t I?) is the endless questioning about when I plan to travel to Ukraine. People seem to be convinced that all immigrants experience a profound need to visit on a regular basis the countries they emigrated from. I’m in no way being critical of immigrants who do go back regularly but I’m not one of them. I didn’t leave Ukraine because I couldn’t make a living there or experienced bad economic conditions. I wasn’t escaping from an oppressive political system. None of that was true for me.

I left because I disliked living in the place intensely. So why would I want to go back? I haven’t been back once since I left almost 14 years ago and I’m definitely not planning on going. I know what would happen if I went. People would be extremely mean to me, I’d be exposed to the level of aggression that I don’t know how to deal with any more, I’d rediscover how alien I am to the culture where I grew up and how obnoxious the reigning materialism and cynicism are. Yeah, that would be one lousy trip.

I guess it would help if people realized that some immigrants are not forced to leave their countries of origin but choose to do so because they dislike their cultures and really admire and love the culture of the country where they move. Seriously, what are the chances that you would accidentally be born into the culture that suits you best? I wasn’t lucky in that respect, so I made an effort to correct the situation.

This blogger has summed up my disappointment with both presidential election campaigns. Both campaigns have turned into senseless reality TV shows. As for the crucial issues, I’m still not sure where either candidate stands. This will be yet another “anybody but. . .” round of voting.

Politicians’ genitals: private or public parts?

If you are an academic, here are some great suggestions on how to have a productive summer.

“Quebec’s New Anti-Protest Law Could Shut Down Campus Student Associations for Years.”

Internal time: debunking the myth that early risers are more virtuous than late risers.

Crazed, sex-deprived Mommies assault teenagers for having fun. Talk about going mad with envy!

“I’ve been hanging out on the Twitter and just saw the most terrifying thing someone retweeted: a woman praising her husband for doing the dishes “the first time since we were married.” But before that? She said, “I caved.”” Women who tweet their coy pride in this type of husband are a mystery to me. It’s like they are proud to serve as maids to overgrown infantile idiots.

“Whenever I leave my little corner of the web and venture over to one of the big Democratic cheerleading sites, I’m told that we’re in the middle of a slow but steady economic recovery. Strange, I think to myself, because it sure doesn’t look that way from where I’m sitting. . . In the real economy, the one that matters to most people, things are not getting better. They’re still getting worse. And neither one of the two major parties is going to do a damn thing about it.”

Urban decay in Tel Aviv. Very good photos.

No vile woman-hating macho pig is capable of insulting and degrading women as much as this sort of pseudo-feminist. Some people seem to confuse hatred of women with feminism. I believe it’s some form of a psychiatric disorder where people mask their own vicious self-hatred as political activism. And if you believe it’s wrong to diagnose, take into account that the vile thing who wrote this nasty piece of trash insulted me and every woman as well, so it deserves whatever I wish to call it in return.

The government of Quebec hastily takes away the civil liberties of the Quebecois people. The people themselves continue snoozing in a contented stupor.

Romney and NATO.

Religious barbarity in Romania: “The top priority of the Orthodox Church right now is building a cathedral called Romanian People’s Salvation Cathedral — placed in Bucharest in the courtyard of Ceausescu’s enormous House of the People. Building the cathedral is estimated to cost something between 200 and 400 million Euros. It is hard to understand why this is top priority in a poor country with some 20,000 churches already but with less than 5,000 schools and less than 500 hospitals.” This is happening in many post-Soviet countries where the Church that collaborated gleefully with the secret service during the Communist era is now stinky rich. This must be some sort of a compensation for victimizing the religious people of these countries for decades.

On Christian patriarchy and body ownership.

PhD poverty.

Informed consumerism while femme. A lovely post.

And the post of the week by an academic writer who always manages to write exactly the post I need to read at each given moment.

No feminist site will ever link to my blog because I don’t see myself as a victim of anything and I don’t believe that “society conditions” me to do anything.

No academic website will ever link to my blog because I don’t consider my students to be stupid, my colleagues to be envious, and my job to be miserable.

No progressive website will link to me because I believe in individual responsibility.

Other people won’t link to me because I’m a progressive feminist academic which, for them, is the same as the devil incarnate.

But in spite of an almost complete absence of links to my blog, it’s very popular. This must mean that, deep inside, people like me and feel there is something to my contrarian opinions.

One good method of dealing with guilt-trippers and manipulators that I discovered recently is the following. Say, the manipulator starts telling you in a tragic voice how “once I’m dead, you will feel sorry that you refused to do this little thing for me.” As soon as s/he does that, start laughing as loudly as you can, saying, “You are too funny! I love it how you always make me laugh. Wow, you are such a hoot!”

The important thing is not to allow wailing, weeping, and guilt-tripping to distract you from the selected course of action. Remember that all of these sighs, tears and fake depressions are nothing but the manipulator’s tool in the service of enslaving you. The moment s/he sees that this particular mechanism produces no result, the manipulator will lay it aside.