When I was in the last two grades of high school, we didn’t have separate changing rooms for boys and girls for PT. The weird thing is that when we were 11-12, we did have separate rooms. But when we arrived at ages 16-17, separate changing rooms were no longer necessary. None of the adults found anything strange in the situation. Poor boys suffered terribly while the girls made sure the suffering was as intense as possible.

This was right after the collapse of the USSR but all the Soviet structures were still in place. (They mostly are even now, although I have no idea if the changing room situation is any different.)

Today’s article on Syria in the NYTIMES  by Jimmy Carter is as vacuous as the one published by Kissinger last week.

It is starting to become clear why the 1970s were such a fiasco in terms of foreign policy.

One of these state requirements that is not entirely useless is the mandatory affirmative consent training. (Once again, we do not mandate anything. It’s a state thing. The student registration system shuts down and doesn’t let students register for any courses next semester until they do the online training. Professors have zero control over this process.)

I’ve looked at the mandatory consent training, and it seems pretty innocuous. To me, everything it teaches one about sex is extremely basic. But given the low sexual literacy among the young people, I’m sure much of the training can be quite a revelation to some of the students.

Of course, the whole issue of a university being charged with supervising students’ sex lives is pretty icky. Besides, one has got to wonder how the young people who don’t go to college fit into this picture. Should they and the college students never have any sexual encounters with each other? This is all very weird. But at least this particular state requirement might have some useful effects.

Every day I get up to 40 emails from different bureaucratic branches of my university that I delete without reading. Everybody I know in academia has the same experience. When I think about the enormous wasted work of all these people who keep creating and sending out flyers, brochures, notifications, lists, queries, quizzes, projects, plans, announcements, etc. that nobody even opens, let alone uses, I feel sad.

Obviously, the university doesn’t create these ridiculous bureaucratic departments because it’s fun to have them around. We are simply following the endless and endlessly stupid requirements of the federal and state regulators. That’s the same state, by the way, that hasn’t given us a broken dime worth of funding for a quite a while and is actually stealing the money we pay into our insurance program. We get to slash every academic program on campus to pay for the exploding cast of bureaucrats, their secretaries, and the secretaries of their secretaries.

The names of the offices that send out this useless stream of paperwork are very telling. Office for Promotion of Multiculturalism, Office for Diversity and Inclusion, Rape and Sexual Assault Prevention Office, Career Advancement Center, Spirituality Center, etc. It’s like a really crazy game we are all playing where we try to create the image of ourselves as multicultured, inclusive, spiritual, advanced, and diverse, as if that were something you become by creating reams of paperwork repeating the words “diversity,” “culture” and “spirituality.”

The Prime Minister of Ukraine has announced that 42% of the management of the country’s equivalent of the INS will be fired. In Ukraine, this organization mostly occupies itself with the customs control of imports and exports. It is known to be incredibly corrupt, making it next to impossible to conduct honest business in Ukraine.

The same number of high-ranking officials in control of the Ukrainian IRS will be fired as well.

Gosh, if this had been done back in the 1990s or early 2000s, Ukraine would be a peach of a country by now.

This fascinating discussion of the social class of the people who ride bicycles made me wonder.

I always instinctively associated bicycles with comfortably middle-class people. One reason was that everybody I know who rides a bicycle is what I call “rich” and you call middle-class.

Another reason is that having a bicycle implies a certain lifestyle that I don’t identify with poverty. First, you need money to buy the bicycle and the paraphernalia. Then, you need to be prepared to lose that investment because bicycles get stolen a lot.

You need to have the leisure of tending to it and of transporting yourself at its slow pace.

You need to have no dependents and be physically fit. This could describe a young person, but where does a young person get money to buy and the space to store? If this is not a very young person, then it’s got to be somebody who can invest in good food, medical care, a gym, and psychological supports that allow them not to smoke or use drugs.

You also need the kind of wardrobe that accommodates biking.

The author of the linked piece sees non-white people on bicycles and assumes they are poor because of their race. That’s a silly assumption, though.

What do you think? Is a bicycle a habitual means of transportation for poor people where you live?

Since the topic of ISIS proved so popular, here is my explanation of why it matters to people so much.

At this particular moment in time it is extremely inconvenient for everybody to remember that the compact between a citizen and a nation-state is conditional. Neither the nation-state nor the citizens want to be reminded of their obligations to each other. Yet each party is convinced that the other will absolutely keep up its end of the bargain.

The reason why people get so passionate about the need to preserve the citizenship of these ISIS runners doesn’t have much to do with ISIS. It has to do with their need to know that “their” nation-state will for certain take care of them, no matter what. Even though they are no longer interested in doing anything whatsoever for it.

But it won’t. “Our” nation-state has already revoked our symbolic citizenship right after we symbolically repudiated it.

Back in graduate school, the especially pompous among us would say things like “I travel with a British passport” instead of “I’m British.” Those same people were exceptionally angry about the disappearance of welfare programs in the countries which, during the moments of indignance, would magically transform into “my country.” But a nation-state is not a consumer product that can be discarded whenever it’s convenient. And no amount of invocations will bring it back now that we have all chosen to kick it aside.

People down the road have really fantastic decorations. One house has an enormous spider on the wall, and the spider has flashing eyes and moves. I almost had a heart attack the first time I saw it. The spider is so big that it occupies half the outer wall!

The best Halloween decoration, though, is a wire pumpkin that is filled with little lights. From a distance, it looks like a ball of fire. I’ll buy one the moment I find it but for now, my Halloween decorations can be seen above. The most beautiful decoration is obviously the nature.

The idiots who run away to join ISIS were a bone of contention in the recent Canadian election. Quite a few of these fools discovered that ISIS was not as entertaining as they thought and decided to return to Canada. The question arose as to what to do with them.

The Conservatives suggested stripping them of Canadian citizenship. This seems extremely reasonable because people get stripped of citizenship all the time, and for things far less serious than participating in a terrorist organization that engages in crimes against humanity. If I, for instance, was stripped of my Ukrainian citizenship for joining the Canadian state, it doesn’t seem out of place to remove the citizenship of those who join the Islamic State.

This idea, however, seemed unacceptable to the Liberals, and the voters ultimately supported them. Once again, nobody stopped to think how it would impact the rights of Canadian women to have running around a bunch of crazed criminals who have been members of an organization notorious for its record of raping and torturing women. It seems like this entire Canadian election was one big “Fuck you, women.”

What say you, readers? Should people who go to great lengths to join ISIS and who engage in God knows what kind of horrible acts on its behalf be allowed to come back and resume the citizenship of the countries they abandoned in favor of ISIS?

N and I went for a walk in the upper-class neighborhood across the road tonight. It was dark, and the streets were empty, so we were surprised to see a man carrying a child in his arms. The man looked unsure of where he was going but we didn’t think to interfere, which in hindsight turned out to be a mistake.

About half an hour later we came across a young man who told us his Dad had taken his little sister and disappeared with her. Now the brother, the mother and an elder sister were running around the neighborhood, looking for the child.

We pointed the young man in the direction where we’d last seen the father. It turned out that the man was a heavy drinker, which is why everybody was so worried about the little girl he’d taken away.

Now we feel guilty for failing to interfere when we first saw the man and the child.