Who said atheists have no morality? My morality is the only thing preventing me from becoming a priest and making money off your ignorance.

Putin decided to show the world that he is a true Western leader and also introduced sanctions against Russia.

And a fresh joke from Ukraine:

If you enjoy giving unsolicited advice, you need to enjoy going to fuck yourself.

And another one from Russia:

Our enemies are too stupid. They think we are the enemy when it’s obvious they are.

I think I finished my tenure dossier. On Friday I heard that the administration’s position is, “We don’t care about your narratives, we just care about numbers,” so I stopped futzing with my narratives, made a bunch of colorful graphs, attached a mile-long bibliography on how numbers and graphs rule, and decided it was time to move on to more fun tasks. If people see my record of publications and my student evaluations and are still not convinced, it’s their misfortune.

I also wrote my sabbatical application and prepared the syllabi. And now I’m ready for my summer holidays. They will only last one week this year, but that’s better than nothing. My plan for the holiday week is:

1. Go to the gym every day because after everything I’ve had to do this summer, the gym is a place where I go to rest.

2. Go to the Indian buffet every day. And don’t even dare to suggest I don’t deserve this little indulgence. I’ll go there straight from the gym.

3. Sleep during the day.

4. Read only for fun.

And now N and I are watching our favorite Russian TV show which we haven’t had time to watch since May. The show’s host has made us happy with a spontaneous and completely serious admission that “Here in Russia were are not like those folks in the Netherlands or whatever. We don’t rely on our brains. We have feelings instead.” And this was a perfect beginning to my summer holidays.

People kept telling me that I absolutely have to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley because it’s crucial reading for anybody who lives in the US. It is constantly assigned to students, and I see them reading it on campus every day. I researched Malcolm X online before reading the book and discovered that he is considered one of the most influential (or simply, THE most influential) African-American thinkers and a champion of the civil rights in the 1960s.

So now I’ve read the book and I’m kind of confused. This Malcolm fellow is a rabid woman-hater, a vicious anti-Semite, and a pathological narcissist. The book is valuable as a study in the mechanisms of narcissism but, outside of that, I’m not sure why anybody would want to read it or assign it in class. 

Malcolm Little makes a show of being bothered by racism but it’s obvious that racism is not what he really cares about. He becomes embarrassingly obsequious with the white people who make him feel important and reserves his greatest hatred for African-Americans who dare to attract more attention than he did. Malcolm detests Martin Luther King Jr but is very careful never to mention Dr. King’s name among all the vitriol he heaps on him. The very idea that somebody else’s name should be known is intolerable to Malcolm. 

Malcolm’s denunciations of the Civil Rights movement are classic narcissism. The movement is stupid, he says, because it concentrates on the Southern blacks. But the Southern blacks don’t even have things that bad! Malcolm exclaims. And if you need any proof of that, it’s right here: “Me!” Malcolm says. Malcolm is from Michigan and never lived in the South. That is supposed to be all the proof anybody ever needs that things in the Northern states are worse than in the South. Because, obviously, Malcolm’s suffering is bigger than anybody else’s and is the measure of all things everywhere. He dismisses the plight of the Southern blacks by saying that Southern whites “paternalistically help them.”

As any narcissist, Malcolm is completely unaware of his condition. He goes on and on for hundreds of pages, talking himself up in an embarrassing show of extreme self-aggrandizement, only to come out with the hilarious, “And this was the first time in 12 years that I thought of myself.”

The whole book is a litany of people and institutions that recognized Malcolm’s importance. Whenever somebody stops offering recognition and ego strokes, Malcolm discards them like used Kleenex. For instance, there is Malcolm’s brother who supported him when he was in jail, came to visit him all the time, and – in Malcolm’s own words – saved his life. Then the brother succumbs to mental disease (which runs in the family for generations) and Malcolm simply dismisses him. He reckons that the sick brother’s only purpose was to help out Malcolm, and once that task was achieved, the brother lost all importance. This isn’t my reading, folks. This is what Malcolm actually says. 

In order to make himself look as good as possible, Malcolm heaps as much opprobrium as he can (and he can a lot) on other African-Americans. He uses the nastiest racist stereotypes as if they were “a truth universally acknowledged.” I suspect the book might be very popular with white supremacists who have got to enjoy the stories about blacks who are all “like animals” and the Jews who are guilty of the Holocaust. I’m sure that the endless discussions of how women need to be slapped around and controlled for their own good are also hugely popular among the Aryan Brotherhood.

The book is valuable in that it offers a glimpse into how narcissists think. Other than this very clinical use, I don’t see a huge value in it. If you are still planning to read the book, I won’t spoil it for you or tell you the ending. Suffice it to say, that people who are forced to spend many years by Malcolm’s side finally freak and react in a way that victims of particularly vicious narcissists sometimes do.

If you have a family member, a co-worker or a close friend who is a narcissist, please seek help as soon as possible.

OK, what is it with the weirdly spelled names on female journalists? Megyn, Alisyn – are they changing their names to sound “unique” or are they collectively from families with strange spelling practices?

What I don’t get is why all the reports on ISIS are so weird. Commentators describe them as this super-efficient, well- organized terrorist group but every story is accompanied by videos of goofy, silly youngsters who say childish things like, “We will put our flag on the White House” while grinning in a very non-scary ways.

I have no idea what point the reports are trying to make through the incongruity of what is said and what is shown.

“This is weird,” the cashier said, picking up the first of the items I had placed on the counter. “Why does it say “rabbit” here?”

“Because it is,” I explained.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a rabbit.”

“Like, an actual rabbit?” the cashier asked. When I nodded, she started making gagging sounds.

“My parents tried to palm one off on me about 40 years ago when I was a little kid but I knew at once it wasn’t chicken. Bleh!” the cashier shared.

I looked at the rest of my purchases, saw gooseberries, fresh tiger figs, Kevita, grapeseed oil, chicken livers, pluots and daikon and realized this was going to be another long checkout.

What I find very curious is that Egypt is aligning itself with Israel against Hamas. People who are geographically close to Hamas don’t seem as kindly disposed towards it as those who are far away.

What Hamas is doing at this point is completely incomprehensible. What is the point of breaking the most recent cease-fire? To defeat Israel militarily? Obviously there is no chance of that. Then what? Persist until the indolent Western Europeans decide to put their money where their mouths are? The idea is risible.

I’m not into conspiracy theories or I’d start suspecting that some of the Hamas’s leaders are working for Israel.

I wasn’t going to write about Iraq, but I just saw Wolf Blitzer on TV asking, in a voice of a naive 5-year-old, “Is it possible that our American airstrikes might kill innocent civilians?”

People are so stupid they don’t even know what a war is.

I don’t know much about Iraq and can’t form an opinion on the US delivering air strikes there.

I do know, however, that these airstrikes have made an official and open invasion of Ukraine by Russia inevitable.

Putin can’t tolerate being left behind by Americans. If Obama goes to war, Putin will have to do the same.

I can only speak to what I know but if you have informed opinions on the airstrikes on Iraq, please share.