You’d think this photo was taken at a store that sells tea but these are actually the teas we keep at home. They didn’t all fit into the frame but you get the idea.

We all know how much I dislike the Russian government. However, I think the Russian Parliament’s decision to ban US adoptions of Russian children is a great idea. This decision was made to punish the US for its Magnitsky Act and that motivation is crap. The result, however, is very good.

These international and especially intercontinental adoptions are hugely problematic. A decision to emigrate is a very very complex one. It is a decision that transforms one’s life, a decision that always carries a wealth of consequences. As a two-time immigrant, I can tell you that an emigration that involves moving for good to a country that speaks a different language and has a different culture is one of the most traumatic events of one’s life. Of course, the concept of trauma does not have to be negative in every case, yet this is not something that people should inflict on somebody else out of a whim.

A child adopted from Russia will lose its language, culture, and probably never will get a chance to meet its biological family. (Or know that in its native language it is perfectly acceptable to use the word “it” to refer to a child because nouns have 3 genders.) The kind of people who would take a child away from all that simply because it took their fancy to buy a toy overseas are not to be trusted. There are crowds of miserable, abandoned, unwanted children right here in the US. If you feel so eager to be a parent, why not foster one or even several?

I hope that in response to this post people don’t start telling me that these adopters take the plight of Russian orphans to heart and try to save them. Anybody who cares about the orphans helps them without removing them from their environment, their culture, the contact with their relatives.

It is deeply disturbing to me that people should be able to purchase human beings and transform their lives completely without asking for their informed consent just because they have money. And I’m not even talking about all the cases where these adopted children are turned into sex slaves, punching bags, and domestic servants.

Everybody has probably seen this meme already but I just discovered it on my sister’s Facebook page (more on me and Facebook later) and decided to share it anyways:

 

My 4 words are: talented, loyal, dramatic, impatient, and they describe me perfectly. Especially the last two.

Which words are yours?

I just bought a ticket for March 1 to this place:

I will also go here:

Here:

And here:

Gérard Depardieu is one of the greatest actors of the XXth century. Hollywood in its entirety has less talent than Depardieu’s toenail. So it is understandable that the great actor got offended when Jean-Marc Ayrault, France’s Prime Minister, referred to him as pathetic. Ayraults and Hollandes come and go, yet Depardieu’s amazing talent will keep making France proud for decades to come. 

This entire scandal happened when Depardieu declared that he was fed up with having to pay 85% in taxes and was moving to Belgium. In response, Ayrault, who has deluded himself into thinking that he and Hollande are more valuable to France than people of Depardieu’s caliber, has insulted the actor.

I happen to agree with Depardieu that 85% taxation rate is nothing short of robbery. This is not what interests me the most about the story, however. It is a lot more curious to observe the gall of some dime-a-dozen politicians who consider themselves entitled to judge who is and who isn’t French enough. It’s a good thing that Molière, Racine, and Balzac are dead. We can’t guess what their response to Hollande’s tax plan would be and it isn’t like France is in a good position to reject its entire pantheon of great artists at this point when it isn’t producing any new ones.

If you are a speaker of French, read Depardieu’s letter to Ayrault here.

I have had to take N to the optometrist today. I have turned into one of those wives who have to drag husbands to the doctors’ because the husbands were brought up to believe their health doesn’t matter and wouldn’t see a medical professional even if they are bleeding on the sidewalk. (Parents of boys, please do something about this because convincing adult men that if they wriggle in pain it might make sense to see a doctor gets very daunting. And don’t even get me started on the story of a man I know who suffered a stroke yet concealed the symptoms for a week to avoid looking like a cry-baby.)

The optometrist discovered that N’s vision had slightly deteriorated in the past 3 years.

“You must be a very smart person,” the doctor declared brightly. “Near-sightedness is an illness of people from higher social classes, the overachievers, ones who always read, learn, and try to make themselves better.”

With my perfect vision, I immediately felt like a low-class underachiever who wouldn’t know a book from her elbow.

People love identities so much that they can construct one out of anything.

I hate out-of-control political correctness, folks. It’s stupid and counter-productive. Let me just give you one example. My department used to be called “Department of Foreign Languages.” I like this name very much because it’s clear, self-explanatory, and easy to find in the course catalogue.

However, out of a misplaced sense of politeness, people have set out to eradicate the word “foreign.” We, the actual foreigners, are supposed to feel hurt whenever the fact of our foreignness is mentioned. As a foreigner, I don’t see absolutely anything wrong or upsetting about my foreign condition. In fact, I even cherish it because it is a huge part of who I am. Still, in order to avoid hurting the feelings of foreigners (who never mentioned being bothered in the least), we will be renaming the department. It will now be called “Department of World Languages and Cultures.”

I cannot begin to tell you how much I hate this stupid appellation. How come we are “world languages” while the Department of English is not? Is English not a world language? And how are students supposed to find us in a catalogue? It would have never occurred to me when I was a student to look for Spanish under W. Will anybody manage to register for our courses?

I love working for my university but the idea of working at a “Department of World Languages and Cultures” is extremely unappealing.

 

A massive projection-extravaganza has started as a result of Sandy Hook mass murder. Traumatic moments often allow people to expel what bothers them by projecting it on others. Here is a brilliant example of such a projection:

Until the 1980s, when semi-random spree murders “inexplicably” became the province of young white men, there was no need for young white men to resort to this kind of thing. Whatever happened in society, they would be the winners. These days, it’s still not the worst thing to be a white male — not by a long shot — but it’s not nearly as cushy as it used to be. Women’s rights have grown by leaps and bounds in the last 30 years. Marriage has become more advantageous to women than men since no-fault divorce and custody policy favoring women have become the norm.

The author of this text seems completely oblivious to his own anti-women resentment. He believes that women’s rights turn men into losers and make men’s lives less cushy. It doesn’t even begin to occur to him that liberation from oppressive gender norms favors both women and men and that the easy dissolution of miserable marriages is good for all of the participants, irrespective of their gender. The existence of men who work for, promote and welcome women’s rights escapes his notice.

Of course, this author realizes that hating women is not a nice sentiment. This is why he disavows it by projecting it onto other men. As usually happens in cases of projection, however, his own writing betrays him and demonstrates that the male resentment he so passionately denounces is his own.

Melissa at Shakesville* verbalized something that has been bothering me about the way the Newtown shooting is being discussed:

What other discussion there has been on the topic of Doing Something has largely centered around “mental illness,” a vague term that public commentators are broadly applying to everything from depression to developmental disabilities to personality disorders to the neuroatypical spectrum. The inexactitude of the language is complemented by the pretense that access to comprehensive mental healthcare will somehow “solve” this problem, eliding key realities of some psychological disabilities.

I’m also getting fed up with seeing endless posts and articles that diagnoze Lanza in absentia with some unidentified “mental disease.” Unless you are not only a psychiatrist but Lanza’s psychiatrist who treated him in person, it is not your place to decide that he was ill. I know it’s easy to allay the anxiety produced by something as horrible as this mass shooting by convincing yourself that the criminal must have been “crazy” but this is an attitude of an ostrich that hides its head in the sand.

Only too often complex realities get dismissed and concealed from view by attaching some meaningless diagnosis to them, a diagnosis that explains absolutely nothing. More and more non-existent “disorders” crop up and the particularly brainless folks embrace them with glee.

What we know for sure about Adam Lanza is that he is a mass murderer. Tragically, murderers exist. They make a decision to kill people for whatever reason. But not every bad choice has to be a product of an illness.

* Other than this quote, the linked post is really bad. Don’t read it if you are impressionable and get traumatized by the “men are the root of all evil” mentality.

I have not repented of my decision to read Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People. Here are some quotes from the text that I find very enlightening:

“The Puritans did not exactly insist that poverty was a sign of wickedness. But there was a general assumption that the godly flourished and that if a man persistently failed to prosper—or if financial catastrophe suddenly struck him—it was because he did not, for some reason, enjoy God’s favor. This idea was very potent and passed into the mainstream of American social consciousness.”

I have no idea how correct this is, but it is the best explanation I have found this far to the mystery of Jesus as Regan’s sidekick.

And the following quote, while not unexpected, reminds us of the deep roots of the trade in mail-order brides (this outdated term should be changed to online-purchase brides):

“The year 1619 was significant for three reasons. In order to make the Virginia colony more attractive to settlers, the company sent out a ship carrying ninety young, unmarried women. Any of the bachelor colonists could purchase one as a wife simply by paying her cost of transportation, set at 125 pounds of tobacco.”

Jokes aside, the following is a very interesting insight:

“The financing, however, was right: this was a speculative company investment, in which individuals put their cash into a joint stock to furnish and equip the expedition, and reinforce it. The crown had nothing to do with the money side to begin with. Over the years, this method of financing plantations turned out to be the best one and is one reason why the English colonies in America proved eventually so successful and created such a numerous and solidly based community: capitalism, financed by private individuals and the competitive money-market, was there from the start.”

Of course, no other field of knowledge is as heavy on ideology as history. Every history textbook I have ever seen forces the reader to dig for hours to find a few scraps of actual information under the mountains of the author’s ideological pronouncements. This is precisely why I will be reading both a deeply Conservative and a heavily Liberal accounts. Paul Johnson, at least, recognizes from the start that he speaks from a certain political platform and doesn’t try to conceal that fact.

This is fun already, folks!