When I lecture about Islam, students often come up to me to ask, “Are you Muslim? Because you seem really passionate about this.”

When I lecture about Judaism, students often come up to me to ask, “Are you Jewish? Because you seem really passionate about this.”

When I lecture about Catholicism, students often come up to me to say, “I’m Catholic, too! It’s great to see a professor who shares my faith.”

When I lecture about Protestantism, students often say, “Wow, that’s so cool. Why don’t we have anybody who practices this great religion here? Is it a Ukrainian thing?”

I even manage to make the religious practices of the Aztecs sound super cool, and it’s not easy given that they included ripping hearts out of living people.

[Other religions are not hugely relevant to my courses on Hispanic civilization, so they don’t make it into the lectures.]

And when I talk about the great Western atheist tradition, I get even the most religious students to experience interest and admiration.

In the meanwhile, my own religious beliefs are left out of the lectures entirely because I manage to keep in mind that my job is to teach students about the world and not turn them into hostages of my inner life.

It would be great if more people remembered that their inner life is of no interest to anybody but their closest relatives (and even that, only if they are hugely lucky) and should not be stuck in people’s faces.

Native speakers of English, help me out here. Am I right in believing that the following sentence is not correct according to the rules of English grammar?

By having the 6-year old crested macaque declared the image’s legal owner, it can be used to raise money for animal welfare.

I keep seeing this sentence structure everywhere, including in academic sources, and I now wonder whether I’m insane and whether everyone else thinks this sentence makes sense.

Do you have any sources to support your opinion?

Clint McCormack knows that some people don’t think gay couples should be allowed to foster or adopt children. But it still stung when he called a religious adoption agency in Michigan and asked whether it would help him foster a child together with his partner, Bryan. “She was very rude, she basically hung up on me,” McCormack told me.

OK, and why did he have to call a religious agency, precisely? Because he really wants to adopt or because he is trying to prove a point? Do abandoned, traumatized children need to be used as a pretext in the ideological battles of adults?

The idea that instead of cakes and marriage licenses, children will be used in the battle over who is more self-righteous and victimized is deeply disturbing. The children, also known as “the trash that the straight people don’t want anymore”, become a club that both sides wave around, trying to hit the opponent.

If anybody really cared about the children here and put their interests first, such situations would not arise. Shame on everybody involved.

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.

I fell asleep and woke up in a beautiful world where Scott Walker dropped out of the race. I was really afraid of this one, people. His face of a stubborn, clueless fanatic kept reminding me of Dubya in a disturbing way. He’d get this inward – looking expression that you see in people who have lost contact with reality, and that freaked me our every single time.

This is real democracy, my friends. Everything is so beautifully unpredictable. Just a few months ago everybody  (me included) were certain he was a major possibility, and now he’s out.

This is a great development.