“How do you react to anaesthesia?” the doctor asks.

“I never had any, so I don’t know,” I respond.

The doctor frowns.

“You indicated that you had a tonsillectomy at the age of five,” she says.

“Yes, that was done without anaesthesia.”

The doctor looks very skeptical, “You probably don’t remember.”

“Oh yes, I do remember vividly the doctor putting his fist through my face to prevent me from screaming,” I say.

The doctor looks like she is considering getting a psych evaluation for me, so I explain, “It was in the Soviet Union.”

“Ah!” the doctor responds. “Well, we do things somewhat differently around here.”

Since I’ve been seeing her for years and she has never been rude, mean or cruel to me and always seemed completely sober, I kind of got that message already.

OK, I know the story of the guy Dorner who is being hunted by drones is not supposed to be funny but I haven’t been able to stop laughing for the past 10 minutes.

First of all, did the first criminal ever to be hunted with drones on US soil have to be called Dorner? This in itself is lending a touch of the ridiculous to the story.

Also:

Dorner, who was fired from the LAPD in 2008 for lying about a fellow officer he accused of misconduct, has vowed to wreak revenge by “killing officers and their families”.

Talk about a massive dose of overreacting to somebody’s overreaction.

Yesterday, as a task force of 125 officers, some riding Snowcats in the rugged terrain, continued their search, it was revealed that Dorner has become the first human target for remotely-controlled airborne drones on US soil.

125 officers are incapable of apprehending this one guy. I have a feeling the LAPD should have fired everybody except him. That would have saved some money.

In a chilling, 6,000 word “manifesto” on his Facebook page he has threatened to “bring warfare” to the LAPD and “utilise every bit of small arms training, demolition, ordinance and survival training I’ve been given.” . . . Last night, Brian Levin, a psychologist and professor of criminal justice at Cal State University, San Bernardino, said: “We’re talking about someone who basically perceives that a tremendous injustice has been done to him that took his life and identity. “Now he is, quite literally, at war.”

The guy writes a 6,000-word manifesto saying he is at war. A prof studies it and concludes, “You might be shocked but just hear this out. After a long analysis I have arrived at a conclusion that this guy is at war. He might even not be extremely happy about stuff.”

Three days later, he stole a boat at gunpoint from an 81-year-old man at a yacht club in San Diego, near the Mexican border. He abandoned the boat when he could not get its engine to start.

The least loser-like guy at LAPD is still a loser, it seems.

As the manhunt for him broadened across numerous police jurisdictions, police mistakenly shot and wounded a mother and daughter delivering newspapers in a pick-up truck similar to Dorner’s. That incident, in the LA suburb of Torrance, was astonishingly followed two hours later by another in the same area, when police again opened fire on a pick-up.

I really hope he gets caught before the LAPD kills off half of the state’s population to make the guy stand out more. Go look at the guy’s picture. I don’t know how these mother and daughter looked but one has to have very poor eye-sight to make this mistake.

LAPD police chief Charlie Beck, who has pleaded on TV with Dorner to surrender, accepted he might be “difficult to find”, adding: “He knows what he is doing. We trained him and he was also a member of the armed forces. It is extremely worrisome and scary.”

It seems like he is the only guy who took your training seriously, Chief.

Now that we have looked at how the US pursues its rational self-interest, let’s take a look at other countries. Palestine is surrounded by extremely rich Muslim countries. How easy would it be for those countries to keep Palestinians (who are relatively small in number) well-fed, well-provided for with medical care, clothes, housing, etc..?

How ultra easy would it be for them simply to take the Palestinians in? Of course, I know, Sunnis, Shiites, Wahhabi. But those divisions are surely not more difficult to get over than the ones between Muslims and Jews. Why can’t the richest countries in the world (Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia) build a city each for fellow Muslims from Gaza?

“Ah, Clarissa,” you’ll say. “Now you are just being stupid on purpose. Can’t you see that these are completely unrealistic suggestions?”

Of course, I can and yes, I am doing this on purpose. Countries pursue their self-interest. All countries. Palestinians make very convenient martyrs who can be used for a variety of purposes.

As Rob F aptly put it:

Despite their public rhetoric about “Wiping Israel off the map,” the state of permanent confrontation gives leaders of those countries a convenient enemy to blame their own countries’ problems on. It gives them an excuse to have a vast military an security apparatus, allowing them to suppress dissidents in their own countries and to ignore solving their own countries’ problems.

I hope everybody sees now why I consider the BDS movement to be completely silly. There is nothing even remotely similar between the geopolitical, religious, geographic, etc. situations of South Africa and Palestine. The lazy folks at the BDS despise Palestinians so much that they refuse to see them as actual people and not part of a huge, indifferent, non-white non-Western mass.

I think that Palestinians will definitely achieve independence, if not extremely soon. I come from a country that fought for its independence for centuries, so I understand the power of the Palestinians’ liberatory drive.

In Ukraine, we were so concentrated on the dream of independence that the question of what would happen after it was achieved was never answered in a very realistic way. As a result, we have what we have: a deeply corrupt, extremely poor, mafia-ridden country whose citizens predominantly have a single dream, namely, to move to the former colonial power, Russia. None of this means that the independence was not worth achieving, of course.

So now I suggest we imagine what independent Palestine will look like. I see a piss-poor (no resources, no help from anywhere, ravaged by the decades of war) country, led by a fanatically fundamentalist regime that grows more extreme as the poverty deepens. Do you see any alternative to this scenario? (I mean, realistic alternatives that do not include US and Israel offering financial assistance to Palestine.)

I’m not presenting this scenario to suggest that the independence is not worth having for Palestinians. It is always worth having, no matter what the cost. The only reason why I’m writing all this is to ask: are you still wondering why the US opposes Palestinian independence? Do you believe it would be a rational thing to do for a country that pursues its self-interest to support an emergence in a conflictive region of yet another piss-poor country, led by a fanatically fundamentalist regime?

I see so much naivete in the discussions (among intelligent, extremely well-educated people) of the US foreign policy that it scares me. On the one hand, people will riot if the price of gasoline goes up to the level of what Canadians pay for theirs. On the other hand, those same people – who get into hissy fits of major proportions when I suggest they could give up their cars – insist the US should get out of the Middle East. They probably expect the president of the US to be able to piss gasoline.

And then there are all those folks who detest the security measures at the airports yet are appalled by drone strikes and kill lists. I even heard one well-fed overgrown Momma’s boy complain in a tone of a spoiled brat that the killing of Osama bin Laden was not carried out to his satisfaction and that bin Laden should have been captured alive and brought to trial instead. The hilarious thing is that this same guy and I had had several discussions where he expressed his extreme annoyance at how entitled the lay public felt to criticize the work of college professors without even knowing what that work entailed.

None of us are even remotely willing to sacrifice our self-interest. I am yet to meet any people who are likely to sacrifice their levels of consumption, their feelings of security, their entitlements, their routine, or pretty much anything of value to benefit Syrians, Palestianians, Ukrainians, or even their neighbors down the road in some major way. Yet those same people condemn the very policies that give them their levels of consumption, their feelings of security, their entitlements, and their routine. How is this approach different from that of my former colleague who was a passionate Marxist as well as a factory owner?

I have lived in very different countries and one thing that my fellow progressives share in all of them is this frustrating insistence on the slogan of “let everything be good and nothing be bad” that is infantile, unrealistic, and dangerous. I am shocked at the feelings of self-righteousness all of these Chomskys and Co experience when they condemn the foreign policy of the US while feeling completely entitled to enjoy the fruits of that same policy.

Palestinians fight for their independence because, as rational people, they pursue their self-interest. But the US also does the rational thing by pursuing its self-interest. Hence, the only valuable argument for why the US should not oppose Palestinian independence is to demonstrate how it would benefit the US more than the alternative.

If such an argument exists, I would love to hear it, I seriously would. Everything else is just childish.

I’m watching a Russian TV show on incest. A 22-year-old woman is cohabiting with her father, and they have two children together. The audience is shocked to the point where nobody can say anything. People are too horrified to form complete sentences on the subject.

The young woman, however, is oblivious to everybody’s reaction and sits there beaming.

“But don’t you realize that what you are doing is sinful?” a priest in the audience manages to squeeze out. “This is a horrible sin!”

“Oh no,” the woman reassures him. “This is not a sin.”

“What so you mean, this is not a sin?” asks the priest in a small voice, looking apoplectic.

“It can’t be a sin because I really like it!” the young woman delivers brightly.

It is always sad to see when two groups of equally stupid idiots descend on an educational institution:

Controversy had grown over the past week at the Midwood college, where nearly a fifth of the undergraduate population is Jewish, over the event organized by a student group, Students for Justice in Palestine. The college’s political science department agreed to co-sponsor the speakers along with more than two dozen other groups.

Jewish leaders on and off campus had criticized the college and its president, Karen L. Gould, for sponsoring the talk, which they said helped legitimize the B.D.S. movement, which refers to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Its goal is to pressure Israel to restore disputed territories and grant equal rights to Palestinians.

The unfortunately named BDS movement (are these folks trying to make themselves look ridiculous on purpose?) is, of course, a group of idjets who are incapable of producing even a marginally interesting, insightful analysis of anything. All they can do is try to attract attention to their vaguely worded cause by promoting a series of ahistorical and unintelligent comparisons of things that cannot be compared. I would only go to one of their events if my insomnia got too severe for me to handle in any other manner.

At the same time, people who think it is up to them to decide what other folks should or should not discuss are also idjets. They would be better served taking this intense need to control away from the BDS and straight to the BDSM movement. At least, there they would do their thing in a consensual and civilized way. Their stupid and hysterical actions have lent credibility and respectability to a movement that would have had none otherwise. Smart move, turning a bunch of boring fools into martyrs for the cause of academic freedom.

Just consider how smarter it would have been to issue a statement saying, “We support and respect the right of the BDS to hold their meetings and discussions.” No, they had to go and provide such amazing PR for this traveling circus instead.

This is an illustration of whether Israel feeds off the economic success of the US, which is something we discussed on the blog recently:

Me: Josh, what is this that you handed in? Why is the bibliography not annotated? The syllabus specifies that this has to be an annotated bibliography, there are specific explanations on how to make one in the syllabus, I have sent out 4 reminders, and we spoke about this in person. What happened?

Student: Oh, I see! I’ve been wondering why you keep repeating “annotated bibliography,” “annotated bibliography”! I had no idea you actually meant we had to submit an annotated bibliography.

Seriously.

But of course nobody is going to beat the achievement of that student who asked, looking completely shocked, “Oh, so you meant the composition had to be in Spanish??” in a course titled Intermediate Spanish II.

. . . that when I feel like eating pizza, I boil some potatoes to accompany it.

Since the discussion of Study Abroad programs has proven to be so popular, here is a story a student shared today after returning from a trip to Central America.

“There is so much sexism! I never imagined anything of the kind! The professor told us that we should never express any opinions or any criticisms when men were around and that we should never interrupt men when they are speaking. Even when what they say is total BS! So once we went on a field trip and the driver had no idea where he was driving. I tried to tell him he had taken the wrong turn  but the professor told me to be quiet. She just sat there while he drove around aimlessly, completely lost, for four hours! And do you know what the worst part is?”

“What?” I asked.

“She is a COLLEGE PROFESSOR [said with profound veneration]! And he is just a driver [said with profound contempt]! A PROFESSOR. Afraid to tell a bus driver what to do because he is a man!”