Hillary made an inhuman effort and forced out a condemnation of Keystone XL. She is, of course, in favor but knows she has to say she isn’t to win the primary. This is, after all, the primary of who outdoes the opponents in populist screeds.

Dr Phil is not airing because somebody has decided that everybody needs to be forced to watch the stupid arrival of the stupid Pope live.

I thought this kind of crap only happened in Putin’s Russia where people are regularly inconvenienced by the idiotic events of the idiotic Orthodox Church that are pushed in their faces. I thought we had separation of church and state in this country, yet everybody has to be exposed to the disgraceful spectacle of our political leaders smooching some boring old wanker.

This is so obnoxious.

Back in 1999, a politician said,

It is wrong to blame all of our problems on the West and the United States. They are not causing everything that’s wrong here. We are causing our own problems. Only we are to blame for everything that doesn’t work in our own country.

This politician was called Vladimir Putin.

As we all know, today he is passionately defending the opposite point of view. And it’s not that he changed his opinion. He’s a politician, so he’s not in the business of having opinions. He simply realized that “we are responsible for ourselves” is not a message that his people want to hear. So he changed the message. Russia didn’t turn into a cesspit of ethnic and racial hatred because of Putin. It did so because that’s what the people of Russia want their country to be like.

And it’s the same with Obama’s “weak” response on foreign affairs. It is only weak because he knows that voters want it that way. There is zero support among his voters for any engagement overseas. So he gives them what they want.

Paraphrasing Putin,

It is wrong to blame all of our problems on our political leaders. They are not causing everything that’s wrong here. We are causing our own problems. Only we are to blame for everything that doesn’t work in our own country.

It turns out that Russia and Syria aren’t responding to American gestures of goodwill and conciliation by restraint and retreat. Rather, they are coordinating efforts in Syria to frustrate American objectives.

Yet again, Americans discover that other human beings are, indeed, human and pursue their own interests as they see fit. They don’t lick your hand and wag their tails gratefully when you pet them to show goodwill. How extremely shocking.

A fellow academic writes:

In my department, we can often manage to schedule our teaching for four days a week, which gives us one “non-teaching” day to grade and do prep with fewer interruptions.

Wow, I really get to appreciate my university when I hear this kind of thing. We always get 2 days of teaching scheduled in one semester and 3 days scheduled in the next semester. Plus, I get a semester with a single teaching day every three years. This is how I manage to do as much research as I do.

We are considered a teaching institution but college-level teaching that is not based on an active and busy research agenda is not serious teaching. It’s a scam.

Last week in Montréal, people who identify as Russian organized a big alcohol-fueled, Putin’s portrait-waving bash. Everybody ate, drank, and toasted Putin for hours.

In the meanwhile, the city’s Ukrainian community under the leadership of my Jewish father held a conference on Ukrainian literature and culture at one of Montréal’s universities. There was no alcohol and no glorification of politicians.

And so it is. While some folks express their drunken Putinomania, others live the life of the mind.