Just saw on the news that a 78-year-old man is being charged with rape for having sex with his wife who has Alzheimer’s. In the meanwhile, a woman who got teenagers drunk, engaged them in a bizarre orgy and then had sex with them is not being charged with anything but “contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

The esteemed audience I’d clamoring for the photos of the hair. Please prepare yourselves because it’s some crazy hair:

Sorry, no makeup today. I still haven’t managed to get myself together.

I love how it reflects the sun.

What many people miss about the Putin regime is how sensitive it actually is to public opinion, despite its authoritarian tendencies.

Sweet Jesus on the cross. What “public opinion” can there be in a country where the media are owned by the state and even online expression is increasingly policed by said state? Putin hates being criticized. But Putin is not the regime and the regime is not Putin. His personal quirks and foibles should not be conflated with the regime at large.

Getting the economy on a more even keel and improving living conditions for the silent majority is high on the list of priorities for the Kremlin.

You’ve got to be every shade of fool to believe that the Kremlin wants to improve the living conditions of the majority. In 2011-12, the Kremlin saw pretty much the entire (small) middle class of Russia march against the regime. People who achieve a higher standard of living tend to develop a series of needs that go beyond getting food and shelter (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, hello?). If there are more people who have the resources and the leisure to think about politics, travel, see the world, get their information from any other source than Putinoid TV, the likelihood that there will be discontent with the regime increases.

As I told you a couple of days ago, the massive forest fires in Russia that are devastating entire regions in Siberia are barely getting a footnote in the Russian media. The victims were told by the authorities not to expect any aid. This information is extremely easy to find online. Yet a silly bit of fluff who considers himself a reporter sweeps the facts aside and relies, instead, on the stupid lies Putin offered in his lying press conference that only the congenitally dumb take seriously even in Russia.

Everybody is joyfully and dumbly quoting the following bit of idiocy:

Moreso than any time in the past, today there are huge numbers of students flocking to college who have zero ability to succeed there. Universities of course want to retain these students, and in order to do so they have to create a massive bureaucracy of support services. Any skill tangentially related to completing college level work now has a lavishly staffed support center devoted to it on campus. A writing center, a study skills program, tutoring services, a math helpdesk, a massive bureaucracy devoted to the shockingly large share of students diagnosed with various disabilities, and anything else you can imagine.

It’s true that an enormous number of underprepared students come to college. This is especially true for public universities that cater to people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. And it is true that a lot of remedial teaching has to be done to get students to the point where their writing and reading skills would at least somewhat approach a normal adult level. 

But this crucial work is not done by the semi-literate paper-pushers. It’s done by professors. For free. There is no “massive bureaucracy” at the math help desk or the writing center. Just think about it, how would a bureaucrat manage to help a student with math? The whole idea is bizarre.

I’m heading over to campus in a bit to dedicate the time that is my own to helping precisely such underprepared students. I get it that I will never be compensated for this work. But at least I’d like to see an acknowledgment that this is the work that professors do.

Author: David Becerra Mayor
Title: La guerra civil como moda literaria
Year of publication: 2015
My rating: 10 out of 10

People keep saying that nobody reads books by scholars of literature but that’s not true. I read them both for work and for fun, and Becerra Mayor’s study of the Civil War novel was most definitely both.

Everybody who works in the field thinks it would be super cool to have somebody find all these novels, count them, list all of their editions, create graphs showing when the genre spiked in popularity and offer an analysis of the graphs. Obviously, everybody is hoping that somebody else would do it because the work is massive.

Becerra Mayor is my hero right now because he did the work. This book of his will be extremely useful to those who want to have a comprehensive review of the field.

This, however, is just a tiny part of what the book does. Graphs and lists appear at the very end of the 456-page volume. The bulk of the study offers a heavily Marxist analysis of the reasons why the genre is so fashionable. The author does tend towards the repetitiveness and heavy-handedness at times but it’s still an extremely useful study.

P.S. My enjoyment and ratings of books have zero connection to whether I agree with their authors. It will be a sad moment when I start to read just to hear my own thoughts mirrored back at me.