N loves me so much, people. I’m watching a Spanish TV series for my research, and he sits next to me while I watch. The show is in Spanish. Which he doesn’t speak. And there are no subtitles. And he hasn’t seen the first 4 episodes. But he just likes spending time together.

Do read it, it’s extremely talented and funny.

Let me preface this by saying that, for me, there is no such thing as too many Hispanic immigrants. I’m hopelessly biased in favor of Hispanic cultures and it’s useless to try to convince me to change my mind. Hispanic immigrants are one of 3 immigrant communities that make the best neighbors (in the wider sense of the word) and who integrate extremely well into new socities.

However – and it breaks my heart even to write this – the immigrant children from Central America at the US border should be sent home.

I know that anybody who hears this feels an instinctive rejection of these words, which is only a sign that she or he is a good, normal person. And it would be great if an American passport were the cure for all ills. It isn’t, though. These children have experienced the worst trauma and betrayal a human psyche can encounter. Their own parents threw them out to be raped or killed. You can’t cure this with all the passports in the world. 

Bill Ayers tells, in his recent book, the story of a boy he and his wife adopted. The boy’s parents decided that murdering people was so much fun that it was worth abandoning their infant boy to engage in that lofty pursuit. Obviously, the boy started exhibiting symptoms of a range of severe psychiatric disorders from early childhood. He was lucky in that both his adoptive parents and his grandparents were extremely rich. They could afford to hire an army of psychoanalysts and pay for every expensive treatment under the sun. And only after 20 years of these efforts undertaken by a team of multimillionaires did the boy get better and became socialized.

It is still unclear why the parents of these immigrant kids throw them out so easily. Silly, overfed Westerners keep chirping about poverty or gang violence, which is an obvious sign they never experienced either. Poor people are not any less capable of loving their children than the rich folks. The very idea is offensive.

A single hint at what might be going on appeared in the newscast that said that many – if not most – of these kids don’t speak Spanish. I’m guessing they come from the pre-modern indigenous cultures where the concept of childhood has not developed. In the Western civilization, the concept is historically very new as well. The Spanish literary classic Lazarillo de Tormes illustrates this very clearly.

Giving these immigrant children American passports would turn them into de facto parents of the very parents who betrayed them so brutally. Their lives will be about doing slave-like labor or engaging in crime with the sole goal of supporting the abusive parents at home or even trying to bring them here. They will serve as sacrificial goats to the needs of some Westerners to wallow in pleasantly warm puddles of muddy guilt.

Unless we can find a family of billionaires willing to adopt each such child and organize its life around the child’s needs, there is absolutely no other help that will make a difference. Chest-thumping and screeching is of no actual assistance to anybody.

It would be great if we could discuss this issue without fits of pseudo-Liberal hysteria whose only purpose is to aggrandize the vociferating hysteric in his or her own eyes.

This was a really fun post on how identity politics prevented biologists from studying wasps.

“Nations come and go but we, the guardians and creators of knowledge, have existed long before the concept of a nation was invented. I need a passport because it makes traveling easy and not as an object of sappy worship. Participating in the game of “My nation is more moral than your nation” is an embarrassing activity I have no use for.” And I still agree with myself completely.

A post from 2011 on the weirdest conference I’ve ever attended.

One of the posts where I ridiculed a whiny creature for dumping on the concept of graduate studies.

“Can you imagine a patriarch telling his teenage daughter, “You have refused to engage in acts of coprophilia that your boyfriend suggested? How could you? Didn’t I spend my entire life teaching you to just say yes? You are no daughter of mine!”” This one was fun to write.

N and I read the book I reviewed in this post a long time ago. But it had such a strong impact on both of us that we are still discussing it on a regular basis.

My encounter with a descendant of the White Russians.

Here are the results of my investigation into mail-order bride websites.

And on a related note, who is the victim in the mail-order bride business?

Only posts such as the linked one can truly remind one how much technology changes our lives every day. It is unbelievable that the post was only written 3 years ago. The way I do this now is completely different and my own description sounds outdated and frumpy to me.

I still feel bad for how horribly this candidate bombed at his job interview.

Nobody agreed when I said that the #Occupy protests were useless. I guess now we can see who was right. And I still believe that #Occupy’s biggest problem was its extreme dishonesty.

The subject of the post may be outdated but I wrote it while having a really great time at the best conference ever and it still makes me feel good to remember that time.

And this story about the University of Manitoba made me realize that Canadian higher ed was doomed.

On the Rush Limbaugh radio station, a commentator is angrily denouncing Obama for not using federal forces to persecute the selling of marijuana in Colorado. Not 10 minutes later the same commentator angrily denounces Obama for not respecting the rights of the states and imposing his will on them on the federal level.

I can respect pretty much any political opinion but this sort of disregard for simple logic drives me nuts.

The West hasn’t been able to bring Russia to its knees.

So Russia is still lying prostrate in the gutter.

Brazilians’ tragedy is that they can’t even console themselves with saying, “At least, we got the Crimea back.”

From Jonathan Mayhew’s blog:

A facebook friend of mine, Robert Archambeau, a very productive scholar, noted recently that advice on how to be productive is useless. What he said was “if you wanted to do it, you’d already be doing it, and if you don’t want to do it, you probably shouldn’t.”

This statement makes a lot of sense to me. My productivity improved greatly thanks to a) Jonathan’s advice and b) psychoanalysis. However, I strongly believe that a research scholar is this very weird human being who lives and breathes for research. There is no external goal and reward that she or he seeks because the process is the reward. Doing research is as natural as eating, drinking, or sleeping to such a person. Just like psychological problems can disrupt the natural eating and sleeping processes (think bulimics and insomniacs, for instance), they can prevent a scholar from doing all he or she can research-wise.

My analyst asked me once, “What would happen if you did as much research as you wanted?”

“I think I wouldn’t be able to handle so much happiness,” I blurted out. “I’d die in a paroxysm of ecstasy.”

The entrepreneurial network I subscribe to keeps publishing endless posts (here is just the most recent one but every week at least a couple is published) on how to coddle the touchy Millennials so that they don’t freak out and stop doing any work at all.

Every news channel is broadcasting the story of the “Hot Car Dad”, the disgusting freakazoid who left his small son to die in a hot car because the kid was cramping his lifestyle. The commentators who are in their 50s and 60s are repeating like broken records that “these kids [meaning the 30-year-old murderer and his freak of a wife] are just so immature” and suggesting that the child-killer doesn’t belong in jail. The commentators in their 30s and 40s look baffled and keep saying, “But he’s an adult. The child died while in his care, shouldn’t he take responsibility?” only to be screamed down by the irate older newscasters.

I’ve been wondering why there is such an intense need to make excuses for the especially spoiled amongst the Millennials, and here is an interesting idea somebody advanced. She says that people who are most annoyed with the drama-queenish Millenials are Generations Xers (like I and she are). The ones who insist that the Millennials need to be pandered to and coddled are the parents of the Millennial generation. They feel guilt for raising useless, eternally immature kids (which obviously doesn’t describe everybody in that generation) and try to make excuses for themselves in such a weird form.

By the way, “Millennialism”, which I define as the excessive emotional fragility and an incapacity to handle the demands of an adult existence, is an international phenomenon. My Ukrainian cousins who never even left Ukraine and who belong to this generation are exhibiting all of the characteristics of the syndrome. And their miserable mother who gets to provide for the adult daughters, their husbands and their kids is making endless excuses for them.

I feel very badly for those among the Millennials who are brave, hard-working and mature (and there are many of them) but who are viewed with annoyance and suspicion because of their over-sensitive and fragile brothers and sisters. They don’t get as much attention in class as they could if the instructor didn’t have to pacify the touchy-feely ones. They see their employment opportunities curtailed because employers are reeling from their recent experiences with their perennially exhausted and eternally underaprecciated peers.

This is one of the guys who came to Ukraine from Russia to fight for the separatist cause posing joyfully in his social network:

Of course, I will now hear that Ukrainians stole his kitten and forced him to get tattooed to save the pet in order to win the propaganda war.