My fever starting climbing up again in the evening. My favorite way of treating illness is massive immersion in the news cycle. For some reason, watching and reading the news (simultaneously) makes me feel better.

So I’m lying in bed, listening to a report about Khorasan, more Khorasan, and even more Khorasan. After an hour of that, I decided to make dinner, got out one of the new grain mixes that I recently bought, and discovered the word “Khorasan” printed on the grain mix in large letters.

For a person running a fever, this was a little bit too much. Of course, since then I Googled it and discovered that there is a type of wheat called Khorasan.

I really hope I don’t find a condiment called “ISIS” in my pantry next.

Here is a very interesting analysis of foreign policy:

The slaughter of more than 3,000 civilians and Ukrainian soldiers and a growing toll of Russian mercenaries and conscripts in southeast Ukraine can hardly compete with ISIS’s (or ISIL’s, if you like) grisly You-Tube beheadings, but the potential risk posed by Russia’s War of Southeast Ukraine exceeds those emanating from the ISIS threat.

As I said before, the problem with Obama’s foreign policy is that it is purely reactive and is not guided by any consistent philosophy. So it’s all “Let’s remove Assad! No, let’s not remove Assad, especially if Putin asks us not to! Now let’s pretend we are against Putin! No, let’s actually support Putin! And now let’s go defeat Assad’s enemies! Leave Iraq! Go back to Iraq! No, let’s go into Syria instead!” 

The linked article says that Putin has pretty much won his war in Ukraine right now, owing to the complete indifference with which the West greeted his open invasion of the neighboring country in August. I don’t think Putin is a greater direct threat to our daily lives than ISIS. However, when Putin destroys NATO (as the linked piece suggests), this will make fighting ISIS a lot harder. Plus, Putin has serious problems with wahhabism in his own country. He might be very interested in turning his homegrown Wahhabi in the direction of the West (which is something he has been very successfully trying out in Ukraine.)

Ukraine is fighting on its own with little or no help from its feckless allies. Those who stand next in the line of victims understand the urgency of the situation. Others do not, if Obama’s remark at a recent fund raiser is accurate: “Geopolitically…what happens in Ukraine does not pose a threat to us.” That remark may go down in history along with Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” statement.

Read the article, it is shockingly good.

I just read that more than half of all cheese eaten in the world is gouda. And I thought I was so original in my preference for it.

I need a new favorite cheese to stand out more.

The Rude Pundit has written the best article ever. For some reason, the boring-as-stale-pizza-crust state of Kansas keeps inspiring people to come out with works of great brilliance.

I was forwarded these questions from somebody who is writing a book about the division of household chores. Here are my answers:

What is your experience with who does what around the house? – I cook, he cleans. I supervise the handyman, my husband mows the lawn.

Have you and your significant other ever had a big argument when it comes to household chores? – No, we have a happy sex life.

Who has the stronger urge to keep the place clean and tidy – you or your SO? – We both have a happy sex life. With each other.

Do you do more cleaning? – I do none.

Why? – I suck at it. A floor washed by me looks a lot worse than a dirty floor I haven’t messed with.

Have you ever hashed out a “To Do” list? – I’m not sure how to interpret “hashed out” in this context. I constantly try different productivity systems for work. Now I’m into “Have Done” lists kept on paper. My husband is not into lists at all, doesn’t have an agenda or a smartphone.

Are there certain chores that only one of you does? – I cook, he cleans. I supervise the handyman, my husband mows the lawn.

Why? – Because I’m good at cooking and supervising the handyman, and my husband is good at cleaning and mowing the lawn.

Does a messy partner make you feel resentful? – No, I have a happy sex life.

Does it impact your sex life or your feelings towards him or her? – It works the other way round. We have a happy sex life, so we don’t feel resentful or feel bothered by “mess.”

Who wants to bet my answers are not getting into the book because they don’t reinforce the stereotype of women who constantly cook and clean, feeling resentful against their husbands and denying them sex as a result?

Can anybody decipher the following for me:

Logically, I don’t have a problem with going poly–we’re atheists with no real reason to commit to monogamy.

I was born in a country of 200,000,000 atheists and never heard any suggestion that, in our day and age, monogamy requires any sort of religiosity. I’m religious, my husband is a profoundly anti-religious scientist but I can’t say that I’m more monogamous than he is because that would not be humanly possible.

It’s like people are so afraid of having sexual preferences that they keep trying to buttress them with ideology to make them more “respectable.”

Weirdness.