My due date has been changed to September 11. I couldn’t say no because I passionately love the number 11. Also, the combination of 9 + 11 + 13 mesmerizes me.

The poor baby will have one weird Mama.

I just scrolled down my blogroll and my Facebook feed and discovered something very disturbing. In the discussions of the NSA scandal, the words “Edward Snowden” appear about 100 times more often than the words “US Constitution.”

I really hope we don’t see this crucial issue get reduced, in the customary American way, to a dime-a-dozen story about a Lone Ranger’s heroic battle with evil forces. It is so frustrating to see every political issue in this country reduced to personalities. It’s like people can’t discuss laws, politics, economy, their rights, or anything whatsoever unless they have imagined the issue as a Hollywood movie.

This reminds me of those endless and endlessly inane discussions of how a candidate for a crucial political office treated his dog and whether another candidate bought a puppy. It is as if people’s brains refused to process anything but puppy-related pablum.

The whole NSA debacle is turning into yet another round of “Julian Assange Against the World.” Remember how the whole issue of the Wikileaks degenerated into a Hollywood-like story of evil feminists who were also spies who were also CIA employees? Everybody (except me, of course) agreed that the leaks revealed hugely important information. Yet nobody (except me, of course) wanted to discuss that supposedly important information. It was all about the minutia of one person’s life.

I know I will now start getting outraged comments of the “How can we not talk about Snowden if it’s only thanks to him that. . .” variety. It’s easier to get into this fake frenzy than to notice that I don’t object to discussing Snowden. I object to discussing nothing but him.

My prediction is that this entire scandal will result in absolutely nothing. Except a Hollywood flick or two, of course.

 

Did he really say that? What a piece of work. And I’m not referring to Franklin, in case anybody is confused.

I mean, is Obama seriously promising us 100% security if we put up with this minor inconvenience of having our civil rights taken away? Because I don’t think even God can promise 100% security because there is supposed to be free will and stuff.

And how do you like that bit about us having to make choices as a society? Yes, I’d love for that to happen. As long as “we make choices as a society” doesn’t mean the Obama administration makes choices for everybody and then tells us to shut our collective pie holes.

I also invite everybody to ponder the difference in the intellectual depth of the two quotes. Franklin and his Enlightened colleagues believed in progress and in the perfectibility of human beings and societies. I believe in them, too. And then I encounter these words from Obama and I’m not sure any longer.

We’re taught from childhood how important it is to explain how we feel and to always justify our actions.

Really? Are people actually getting taught that?

I mean I have 5 scholarly degrees and speak several languages, yet I’m incapable of processing this command. It looks like a meaningless jumble of words. How can one “always justify one’s actions”? I just used the toilet, sorry for the TMI. Am I now supposed to go knock on a neighbor’s door and justify that action? Or should I justify it right here on the blog? I could do that, of course, but in the 10 minutes that have passed since that action, I have engaged in about 50 more. Should I justify them all?

And who should be the recipient of my explanations as to how I feel? Other than my doctor, I can’t imagine anybody all that interested in constant updates on how I feel and what I’ve been doing about it.

This is just a small example of why generalizations suck. The linked blogger could have written a much more interesting post had s/he started it with “I was raised by a bunch of very eccentric folks who taught me these ridiculous things I will now tell you about.”

P.S. I will save you time and tell you what that long and boring post is about. Its message is that students are very inarticulate. I know, this must come as a total shock. Especially after such a highly articulate beginning to a post that discusses the issue.

University of Notre Dame Press, you suck. If you believe that you should be exempt from quoting sources in a way that isn’t completely sloppy, then you doubly suck.

This is the first time I see an academic volume where quotes are only attributed to an author without any hint as to which particular work by this author is being referenced and what is the number of the page where the quote is located.

I now have to scour the universe for works by somebody with an extraordinarily unusual name of Richards. And given the sloppiness of the critic who quoted this Richards, it might not even be his last name.

The problem is that this mysterious Richards seems to have said something I find to be very important and I want to consider his ideas further. And the careless academic who doesn’t know how to quote is getting in my way.

So when messages from hateful places like University of Phoenix appear in my Facebook news feed, why does that happen? I obviously didn’t subscribe to be their friend. Is Facebook sticking their messages in people’s news feeds for money?

Also, when a message appears in Facebook news feed saying that “Your friend (real name of a friend) used this product and wants you to try it out” and the friend in question says she has nothing to do with the message or the product, is Facebook sending out these obvious lies in exchange for payments? But why be so heavy-handed about it?

I must be naive but all this seems kind of shocking. There is so much ad content on my Facebook page that I can barely see any legitimate messages from actual people.

So Obama says that it’s time to end the War on Terror yet keeps expanding the NSA powers in the same breath?

Have you noticed how he always uses this neat little trick: says something that will melt every Liberal heart in matter of seconds and while everybody adores him for his brave words and swoons over his beautiful speeches, he does something that shows his actual intentions to be the exact opposite of the declared ones?

And here is what I really dig. When Bush Jr. did exactly what Obama is doing but to a lesser extent and defended this course of action publicly and openly, everybody hated him. We are not as quick to hate Obama, though, because he always says what we want to hear. So what does this mean? Do we hate Bush for. . . being honest? Politicians can do whatever they want as long as they are smart enough to put a pretty spin on their actions?

Just think about it. “Let’s start the War on Terror!” means expanded powers for the NSA. “Let’s stop the War on Terror!” means even more expanded powers for the NSA. The only real, tangible difference between the two is that the latter offers more powers to the NSA.  Still, some idiots are celebrating the end of the War on Terror. Only last night I saw an article in The Nation where a journalist was taking this declaration on Obama’s part seriously.

So did you know that the state of California spends more money per year to keep one prisoner incarcerated than it pays in salary to a college professor of my rank? Given the outrageous numbers of non-violent, non-dangerous people kept behind bars on drug possession charges, imagine how easily the dying system of higher education in California could be saved if all these inmates were asked to go home and pay their own upkeep.

I’ve seen many explanations of who profits from this massive incarceration of people who should not be taking up $52,000 per year in taxpayer money just to prevent them from smoking weed or sniffing heroin. I haven’t, however, found a reasonable one.

For now, the only explanation that sounds at least somewhat reasonable is that this is a result of law enforcement agencies and prosecutor offices trying to drum up numbers that would testify to high performance. They must also have performance reports to fill like all of us, and the only way of demonstrating that they are more effective with every passing year is by inventing “crimes” that are super easy to investigate and prosecute. As the bureaucratic obsession with showing good numbers on paper grows, more  people get incarcerated to get the reports padded.

I’m not seeing any other explanation behind the issue. Do you? Other than “evil members of the political party I do not support being their usual evil selves,” of course. That one I’ve heard, and it bores me to tears.

Reader Tim says,

 I too have noticed increased social limitations in some IT folks. I can’t cite s study, but it seems to be that this depends on the size of the IT/Programming/Network department they work in. As a rule of thumb, the larger the department, the more inept they are. I have met programmers from 5 person companies who were social wunderkinder and programmers from huge programming mills who pretty much spend their entire life among other IT folks.

Social limitations are a nice way to put it. 🙂

I remember how my father’s second favorite programmer had to come by my house to test something on my computer. I was told it would take 10 minutes at most.

I brought her to the study where the computer was and left, closing the door. One hour 10 minutes later I was already fuming because I had my own work to do and the programmer wasn’t coming out of the study. So I went there to ask when she was going to be done.

In the room, I found the programmer sitting completely still and staring at a dark screen.

“Erm. . . are you OK?” I asked.

“Yes. . .” she said in a slow and completely indifferent voice. “This computer isn’t on.”

I approached the monitor and pressed a button. The monitor turned on.

“Ah. . .” the programmer said.

I have discovered that the best thing to do is never to get off the Seinfeld Chain for any reason. I was on one for almost 3 months in the spring, and after about a month it became as easy and natural to write every day as it is to brush my teeth. Then I went off it to go on vacation, and now it’s a struggle to start a new chain.

I’m now thinking that my plan to stop working on August 1 and not do any work at all until the end of my maternity leave is an idiotic idea. My sister said that when she tried to stop working a month before her due date, she started feeling every single symptom of being in her third trimester very vividly. She says that when you have nothing to distract you from the symptoms, your whole life becomes about the symptoms. So she worked almost straight until the due date, and in an office, too.

I’m extremely lucky in that I don’t have to heave my huge belly to an office in order to work. I can work while lying in bed, and I never need anything like 8 hours a day to be productive. Just the opposite, if I tried to write for 8 hours, I’d be incapable of doing any more research for at least a week.

Don’t mind me, I’m just thinking aloud to figure this stuff out.