So the US chose to reward Al-Qaeda for 9/11 by handing Iraq over to it? And as a result of huge loss of American lives, Al-Qaeda now is occupying half of the country where it hadn’t a hope in hell before?

Fascinating.

I keep hearing that this is a narcissistic culture and people should stop being so narcissistic. I disagree completely. If anything, we need a lot more narcissism. (I’m using the word “narcissism” here in the mass culture / Dr. Phil way of “excessive love of oneself and taking an interest in oneself to the exclusion of everything else.” Obviously, this is not even remotely what narcissism actually is but if that’s how most people choose to use the term, then whatever.)

I strongly believe that people would be happier and healthier, workplaces would be enormously more peaceful, and social relations would improve dramatically if people concentrated on themselves.

One quality that is sorely lacking even in the smartest, most brilliant and educated people is self-awareness. When I hear people say, “I’m the kind of person who. . .” or “My most important qualities are. . .”, I always know that something completely divorced from reality is about to be uttered.

If people stepped back from obsessing over what they imagine somebody thinks or says about them and turned inwards for answers to why these fantasies matter so much to them, they would be happier. If people could just do their work, get paid and then go the fuck home instead of fixating on ridiculous rumors or stupid drama in the workplace, life would be better for everybody.

I sometimes look at people and wonder, “Is what you carry inside yourself so horrible that you need to hide from it in all this hustle, bustle, and endless drama you generate around yourself?”

The incapacity to understand that the reasons for the fifteenth mean and greedy girlfriend (or the eleventh mean and nasty boss or the eighty-fifth mean and envious colleague) lie inside oneself makes people spend their lives – literally, their entire lives – bitching and moaning about the imperfections of the universe and never changing anything.

Narcissism, we need more narcissism! We need for everybody to turn inwards for two seconds and realize that we have all that we need for survival: food, water, shelter, relative health, somebody we love, books, pens, and paper. There is no reason not to feel at peace. There is no reason to freak out over anything because our basic needs are covered.

Protest is not freedom. It is a midpoint between subjection and freedom and lies equally far away from both.

Today I sacrificed myself in an attempt to defend the American flag.

The day was blistering hot and there wasn’t a cloud in sight when suddenly a huge thunderstorm hit the town out of nowhere. My first instinct was to run out and remove the flag lest it be damaged by rain and hail. I didn’t even consider that it would be impossible for me to reach the flag without a stepladder. The moment I ran into the porch, a huge wave of water hit me in the face and soaked me down to my underwear. I tried getting inside but couldn’t even find the door for a couple of minutes.

The flag is fine but my hair is crazier than ever. And what have you done to fulfill your patriotic duty lately?

By the way, the area we moved into is a lot more decent than the one we lived before. What I mean by this is that we go for long walks every day and not a single dog tried to approach me. There are dogs but the good people of the neighborhood have them on leashes and not running around, traumatizing innocent passersby.

And since nobody guessed the answer to my riddle, the question people keep asking when they hear I bought a house is, “So now you will be able to buy a dog, right?” Apparently, the only reason people don’t have dogs is that they can’t keep them in the style the nasty critters supposedly deserve.

There is so much corruption in the upper echelons of Ukrainian government, and especially in the armed forces, that the enormous amounts of money held by the authorities don’t reach Ukrainian soldiers. Regular citizens are collecting donations and arming soldiers on their own. Coordinators of one of such charitable funds are saying that one third of all donations is coming from Russia. Money transfers are accompanied by messages, “Ukrainians, we are sorry! Please forgive us.”

After the city of Slovyansk was liberated from pro-Russian terrorists by the Ukrainian Army, this was what the soldiers found in the separatists’ headquarters:

The Donbass separatists are unhappy with Putin. One of their most notorious leaders, Oleg Tsaryov, made a statement saying (translation is mine), “We don’t need tanks and drones, we need soldiers who will defend peaceful citizens from Kiev aggressors. We need the might of the entire Russian army. . . If all we keep getting are tanks are puny financial resources, we will not be able to defend these cities from fascist forces.”

The problem the separatists are facing is that, even though there are quite a few people in the region who kind of wouldn’t mind becoming part of Russia, none of them are willing to go to actual battle and die for the cause. Even separatist bandits are recognizing that they are trying to give the people of Donbass what these people don’t really want a whole lot.

While I was packing, unpacking, grading, submitting final grades, supervising repairs and making myself at home at Lowe’s, all of the teams I was rooting for at the World Cup were eliminated. And now that I’m all ready to watch some games, there is nobody left I want to support.

I’m discovering a disturbing trend in scholarly writing. One book I read after another (and I read in a variety of fields and languages) starts with something like, “This books aims to court controversy. This study will be very controversial!” And then the book, of course, proceeds to make some extremely trivial and self-evident claims.

What’s disturbing is not only that these books never manage to deliver on their promises of controversy but also the authors’ belief that this sort of warning is necessary whenever a study represents even the most minuscule deviation from “the norm.”

Russia defeated Napoleon in 1812 because it hadn’t yet become a nation-state and didn’t look for legitimacy in the vastness of its territory.

Today, Russia is stuck in the outdated attachment to territorial vastness as the only legitimating factor and any development is out of the question because of this antiquated model.

Russia does tend to be tragically behind everybody else all of the time and resenting the hell out of the rest of the world for it.