And the prize in egregious dumbassery goes to Harvard College’s Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.

I don’t know if people have the slightest idea how little money goes, even in the Ivies, towards actual academics as opposed to the enormous sums invested in these dumb bureaucrats who torture everybody with their bizarre inventions.

I’m not that sorry for Harvard because that’s a school which can afford this idiocy. But think about state universities like mine. We are stretched paper thin, resources-wise, yet we have to have our own Diversity and Inclusion offices (and all the rest of them). They take up the best buildings, suck up cash, and waste everybody’s time like they are paid to do it. Because they are paid to do it.

This is really, really the last one on Putin’s press conference today, I promise. When asked whether Russia’s military presence in Syria was something that the country could afford, Putin said,

“This is the best kind of military training for us. We can train our military in Syria for a very long time without incurring high costs.”

Got it? Syria is training ground for the  Russian military. Now ask yourself what the Russians are training for.

Remember that the Russian training in Syria consists mostly of bombing the Syrian Turkmen and the anti-Assad Syrians.

And one last post on the subject of Russia for today, I promise. From reader NG, here is a link on Putin’s love of Trump:

Russian President Vladimir Putin had kind words for his “stablemate” Donald Trump during an annual end-of-the-year Q&A session in Moscow.

“He’s a really brilliant and talented person, without any doubt,” Putin told reporters, according to a translation by Interfax. “It’s not our job to judge his qualities, that’s a job for American voters, but he’s the absolute leader in the presidential race.”

The GOP front-runner has been blunt about his plans for defrosting U.S. relations with Russia should he be elected president.

“I would get along with him,” Trump previously said of Putin, adding, “I would get along with a lot of the world leaders that this country is not getting along with.”

At Thursday’s press conference, Putin seemed to support Trump’s claim.

“He says he wants to move on to a new, more substantial relationship, a deeper relationship with Russia, how can we not welcome that?” he said. “Of course we welcome that.”

I’m glad finally to have a link in English because everything I had on the subject before was in Russian and people didn’t believe me. Remember what I always say: Putin always declares exactly what he wants with extreme honesty and clarity. We just need to listen. Putin’s advisors and analysts have been singing embarrassingly exuberant praise of Trump for months. I can’t turn on the Russian TV without hearing how fantastic Trump is.

Putin did amazingly well the last time a Republican was in the White House. He hates Democrats, hates everything they stand for, detests Obama, loves flamboyant oligarchs, feels it easy to relate to anybody who is also a billionaire. None of this is surprising.

And since we are on the subject of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the poor freaks from Donbass who ran away to Russia because they believed the lying propaganda about the horrible persecution they were about to undergo in Ukraine because of speaking Russian are now finding themselves in a really bad situation.

Russian authorities stuck them in temporary housing all over Russia (to prevent them from forming communities, obviously.) After the refugees served their propagandistic purposes, they became unnecessary. Now, they are being thrown out into the streets with small kids and ailing elderly parents. Where these confused, undocumented people will go in the midst of a harsh Russian winter is of interest to no one.

The refugees can’t go home because their houses and apartments were either destroyed or occupied by the Russian invaders and their gang of criminals.

The reason why I keep posting all these stories is that sometimes it is really good to open oneself up to events that have no bearing on one’s own life. It gives one a less self-involved, skewed worldview.

Today Putin officially recognized that Russian military is present in Ukraine’s Donbass region. A while ago, he recognized that he was planning to deploy nuclear weapons if his attempt to annex the Crimea was thwarted.

I wish that out of all the people who came here to the blog in 2013-14 to argue and say uninformed things about Russia’s war in Ukraine, at least one single person had the maturity and the honesty to tell me, “Hey, you were right this whole time. Sorry!”

But no, that never happens. What’s more, those same folks who were calling me a fascist and ranting about a CIA-sponsored coup that was persecuting “ethnic Russians” in Ukraine will now say that they always knew Russia had invaded Ukraine and this is no news at all.

People have an amazing capacity of an uncritical acceptance of their own ignorance and ugliness. It’s not a result of a healthy self-esteem, however. It’s the exact opposite.

The main motivating fear of the Russian political establishment is that the country will fall apart.

The territory is enormous and sparsely populated. It’s inhabited by people of different races, ethnicities, languages, and cultures who don’t have much in common and tend to dislike each other. People who live in the humongous greater Moscow despise everybody else and everybody else despises them. There is no discourse of shared values that would be meaningful to everybody.

None of this sounds like a working nation-state, does it?

It’s impossible to bind such a heterogeneous group together with its meaningless, recently adopted symbols of nationalism and no time or resources to manufacture a shared history and artistic legacy.

So what do such wannabe nation-states do to stay afloat? They cultivate a sense of togetherness by spilling the blood of a shared enemy. Blood ties them together but if no other means of cohesion are found, more blood will be needed.

Is it clear what I’m saying? Nobody can provoke Russia into violence right now. Russia is acting out violently in pursuit of national cohesion, i.e. a completely internal need that has nothing to do with you or anybody else.

In London, a 46-year-old Saudi millionaire was pronounced not guilty of raping a teenager after claiming he accidently tripped and fell on her. He claimed his penis was hanging out when he walked past her, so when he tripped, it went in.

A London jury believed him and deliberated for all of 30 minutes before acquitting the vicious little toad (there are pictures of him online. Look them up if you don’t believe this description.)

A hilarious case of a denizen of a deeply consumerist society projecting his trivial, childish preoccupations on the world:

The purpose of terrorism is not to kill or maim or destroy. For the attackers, such crimes are merely tactics, on the way to a different goal, which is to terrorize. The strategic ambition is to use attacks and atrocities to change people’s emotions and arouse their fears. The aim is to make strong societies feel desperate and helpless

.

This sheltered individual cannot imagine anything more horrible than having a few unpleasant emotions for two minutes. The goal of every evildoer on the planet has just got to be to “change” his emotional state and “make” him feel something he did not order.

The possibility that there might be cultures where nobody is as fixated on their tender fee-fees never occurs to this overgrown baby.

It’s fascinating to observe people fantasize about “terrorists.” They never say anything of value about terrorism but they reveal a lot about themselves.

Voters on yesterday’s debate:

Verbatim quotes about Christie: “He’s absolutely on point and he makes me feel safe.”

This sort of self-infantilization is creepier than the everlasting fuck. And it is very similar to the ways in which Russians describe their deification of Putin.

People over the age of 14 normally know that feelings have an internal locus of control and that the role of politicians is not to help voters emote.

As Zygmunt Bauman said, the sloppy, sappy private has devastated the public space like a tsunami.

Hey, folks, did you see this absolutely hideous story of a female photographer engaging a crowd of other women in outlandish displays of misogyny?

I hope Child Protective Services develop an interest in what is being done to these poor kids to entertain their brainless mommas.