The CNN is stupid, of course, but sometimes it invites interesting people to utter a couple of sentences. On Sunday, there was this gentleman with the unfortunate last name of Gopnik who spoke very well about the Humanities.

Gopnik said that Obama’s tiresome spiel about not everybody needing a college degree because for some folks learning mechanical skills will be enough to make a living is profoundly classist.

“This will place everybody in their own box, like streamline everything,” Fareed Zakaria whelped happily. “Like in Germany where everybody is in their own class and there is no unemployment as a result.”

The intelligent Gopnik fellow whose last name tells us that his family line benefited enormously from the cocnept of social mobility explained that locking some people into a box where nothing but their physical strength and their stomachs will ever be utilized is hardly fair.

It is, indeed, curious that people who assure us that one can do perfectly well in life based on nothing more than mechanical skills all go to Harvard, live in mansions, and wouldn’t know a hammer from their elbow. Something tells me that Obama is not making the same “not everybody needs college” speeches to his daughters.

I really hope Rebecca Schuman doesn’t mind me quoting her Facebook post here but I just had to share. I will remove it if the author objects and I don’t plan on posting anything from her Facebook here again.

Schuman started a status update with the words, “My husband’s Saturn. . .”

My instant reaction was, “Oh Got, not astrology, I can’t take this crap any longer. And here I thought she was an intellectual.”

And then I read some more and realized she was talking about a car.

I really should stop watching so much Russian television* or I will start seeing astrologists everywhere.

* FSU countries have been indulging an obsession with all kinds of occult, superstitious garbage since the late 1980s.

There is no “brown threat” in Ukraine. However, quite a few political forces and private individuals are interested in persuading the world that Ukrainians are Jew-hating neo-Nazis whose main goal in overthrowing the corrupt government was to get a chance to slaughter Jews.

Putin’s propaganda machine spreads these lies to justify the possible annexation of parts of the country. Putin is used to justifying his invasions into other countries by claiming that he only does so to protect somebody. Thus, a group in need of protection will be manufactured.

At the same time, Israeli organizations are also stoking the fears with the goal of trapping the few Jews who remain in Ukraine into making the mistake of their lives and moving to Israel.

The third group that is interested in creating an image of anti-Semitic Ukraine are, of course, anti-Semites. What better way to pretend that one is not an anti-Semite than by projecting the unacceptable quality onto a group of strangers?

This blog’s reader gave me a link to the following article from Al Jazeera, a news outlet that I always despised and now despise even more:

My sources point to a calm, adamant, confident Kremlin that will act to protect the millions of Ukrainians and Russian citizens who are at risk from the fascists and anarchists in general. The Jews are part of the population that Moscow will move to protect. My sources indicate that Russia will move to reinforce the military installations in Crimea and then prepare adequate means to help other regions where Russian citizens are concentrated, like Odessa.

Just as I’m saying: Putin will “protect” Ukrainians by invading their country, and the idiot Westerners will stand around, cheering this as a victory over fascism.

And on page 116 of Lamont’s book I realized that she is an irredeemable idiot. See the following quote:

A more aggressive masculine style may have been more acceptable a generation ago.

So Michele Lamont, if you ever chance upon this post, I want you to know that:

You are a brainless idiots who has zero intelligence and who perpetuates idiotic gender stereotypes because you have nothing of value to offer to the world. All you can produce is stupid gossip and ridiculous opinions of an uneducated semi-literate fool. 

Is my style aggressive and masculine enough for you, you stupid piece of chauvinistic garbage? If not, there is a lot more “masculine” aggression within me, so just ask.

Sincerely yours,

Clarissa who is sick to death of brainless broads who keep telling her that her way of being makes her a man.

And please, whatever you do, spare me the argument that “but it isn’t Lamont’s fault if aggression is perceived as a masculine trait.” In the quoted statement, the person doing the perceiving is Lamont. And she never signals any disagreement with this perception. Is it OK to say, “A greedy Jewish style may have been. . .”? Or “this Ukrainian-style laziness is outdated”? Or “the lecherously Mexican style is out of fashion”? No? Why not? Because it promotes a nasty stereotype while presenting it as something the author doesn’t dispute? Well, that’s my objection to Lamont’s text.