My cousin’s husband was shot by terrorists in Donetsk but survived the wound. Another family friend was beaten and robbed by the terrorists. Neither man had participated in the hostilities in any capacity.

In case this has already been forgotten and a fresh round of idiotic questions is about to crop up: I still don’t like these people. And I still don’t want to see them dead or harmed in any way. And if for you emigrating means wishing death on everybody who remained in your country of origin, there is something seriously wrong with you.

And an example of losers and freaks discussed in the previous post:

We cannot assume that the repression in the former USSR under Lenin and Stalin was simply a collection of baseless show-trials and megalomaniacal repression when even liberal scholars such as J. Arch Getty (who is recognized as one of the most important academic scholars on the former Soviet Union) have demonstrated that there were actual conspiracies to destroy socialism.

This silly little thing actually teaches students at a university in Toronto. The freak masturbates to his pathetic fantasies of Stalin’s genocide for one simple reason: he is a useless misfit and a life-long loser. So he identifies with Stalin and slaughters millions of people in his fantasies to feel important.

I’ve been thinking that jihadism and narcoterrorism are the only alternatives to capitalism left for wanyone who chafes under the established order in a post-communist world. Capitalism triumphed a generation ago, communism is dead, but what remains is deeply unsatisfactory to much of the world, especially after the 2007-2008 economic collapse — yet there appears to be no alternative.

Yes, the Communist dream was embraced by all sorts of misfits, criminals, and losers. But let’s not worry about them too much. They will always find an excuse to continue being misfits, criminals, and losers. 

I’m sure that by now everybody has seen the video of Kajieme Powell being shot by police in St. Louis. It is very clear from the video that the police did not at any time even consider doing anything but killing him. Readers tell me that police are trained only to shoot to kill and nothing else. But does anybody know why that is?

All I can think of are economic reasons: nobody wants to have to pay the pension or workers’ comp in case something happens to a police. I’m hearing these pensions are not insignificant. So it’s cheaper just to train police to shoot to kill.

If anybody has better explanations, please share.

As a beginning homeowner (and a person who never lived in a house before), I’m constantly expecting horrible things to start happening. So, of course, when I heard strange rumbling, I immediately thought, ‘Pipes!’

So I started running around the house like a scared hippopotamus, looking for the source of pipe breakage and not finding it.

Then a rustling sound joined the rumbling.

The scared hippopotamus started running faster and panicking harder.

In the end, it turned out that the rustling and the rumbling were rain and thunder.

Philip Bobbitt says that the death of the nation-state will be accompanied by the death of one of its most ambitious and valuable projects: the obligatory primary and secondary education of all citizens provided by the state free of charge. I would absolutely hate to see that happen and so would Bobbitt. But it’s going on already.

I haven’t had cable TV at home for several years. Now I switched it on again and one thing that I’m noticing is how aggressive, shameless and I’d say even angry the advertisement for online schooling (meaning, no schooling at all) of K-12 kids is. 

The curious thing is that the destruction of the compulsory education is not (yet) being promoted by the worshipers of free markets. They obviously will participate with glee in the project but for now it is an affliction that people are happily inflicting on themselves. Here is, for instance, an example of the so-called “unschooling.” It makes my hair stand on end precisely because I know what an enormous civilization achievement was the creation of a compulsory, free, inclusive system of education. It took our  civilization millennia to get there. I’m now fearing it will take all of two seconds to destroy it.

Today, I was talking to students about the Roman Empire and the Caliphate of Córdoba. The constant refrain of the lecture was, “And then – as tends to happen all of the time – barbarians came and destroyed this great civilization.” I don’t want to be saying this about us twenty years from now.

And then again, I might not even have any students to say it to if things continue this way.

I know I haven’t posted anything interesting for a few days and I’m sorry! Classes have begun and I need to get used to the new schedule and figure out my routine. Since I had no actual vacations, I have trouble staying awake long enough to teach my 4 courses.

My classes run one after another this semester, with only 15-minute breaks between them. I don’t mind because they are all in Spanish. It’s hard for me to switch from Spanish to English and back but this semster I don’t have anything in English.

All of the courses are higher-level which is also great. I’m very happy with the students this year because they are very enthusiastic, engaged, and very advanced. I will have to change half of the activities I prepared because these students are too advanced for them.

I promise to post something profound as soon as I can think of it.

I have a very unspoiled husband. When he saw the sofa below, he said it was pretty because it made him think of cake:

There was a fashion show of young designers in Moscow the other day. One of the collections featured kid models who were dressed in outfits made out of Russian, Ukrainian and American flags.

The child model dressed in the Ukrainian flag walked onto the catwalk with a gun and started pointing it at other “countries” and then turned it on herself. After enacting this ritualistic suicide, “Ukraine” was saved by the model wearing the Russian flag.

Only really sick fucks can make a child enact suicide on stage to make some ridiculous political point.

Another person was shot dead today in St. Louis. It seems that the only thing these police know how to do is kill people. They probably think a great way to make their jobs easier is to mow down as much population as possible.