And once again im completely uninformed about everything. WTF is happening in Milwaukee? Why will Trump be speechifying about it? 

“Fluidity sweeps away the barriers to increasing stratification.” Who’s the idiot who came up with this clumsy phrase? That would be me.

Buy I’m back to working on my research, which makes me happy.

Klara’s new daycare sends daily reports about everything she did there, how much she ate and at what time, how long she slept and when, diaper changes, the toys she played with. It’s really helpful because if, for instance, her nap times get disrupted, I need to know about that.

If this seems too anal, remember that she is still a very small child. 

P.S. What’s really cute is that every day they explore a new concept in Spanish within the general theme that kids of all ages study this month. Right now, the theme is space travel. I don’t believe babies particularly need Spanish at this point but I like it that the daycare is organized meticulously. Small children don’t thrive amidst chaos.

Remember how Putin came to power? And made himself very popular and beloved by the electorate? And deflected every threat to his power? And got the people to love and support him in the midst of all sorts of failures? 

He has one primitive yet infallible trick called “radical Islamic terrorism.” Whenever there is a chance he won’t get what he wants, he stages a convenient act of terror, blames it on Scary Muslims, and presents himself as the country’s savior from said Scary Muslims.

First, he used this strategy to get everything he wanted domestically. These days, he doesn’t want anything else domestically because he has all he needs. Today, he wants something internationally. He wants the sanctions to be lifted and for the world to recognize that he has the right to do whatever he wants in FSU countries. (That’s for now. The moment he gets this concession, he’ll want more.) 

So the Scary Muslims Stratagem is trotted out again. France made it known that it’s almost ready to lift the sanctions, so France gets hammered by terror attacks where citizens of Russia have an active role.

And then the US made it known it’s ready to remove the sanctions. . . The Scary Muslims (who are not really Muslims) operation has already been tried on US soil. Remember Tsarnaevs? The operation didn’t bring any immediate results because the US wasn’t ready to roll over and play dead just yet. But as a trial run, it went swimmingly.

For those who read in Russian, here is a great article on the subject.

The Kremlin will not easily give up on its opportunity to install a puppet US president. And everybody realizes that a massive act of terror conducted by some convenient Muslims in some iconic American place sometime in October might propel Trump to a win. 

So let’s stop obsessing about yet another meaningless thing Trump said today and start hoping that no convenient Chechens will be found to make this happen.

It seems like horrible things are happening in Louisiana. It’s under water again. And the tragedy isn’t being covered very well by the media. Because it’s so much more important to report that Trump said some dumb thing again.

It’s terribly sad and unfair but when the same tragedy strikes a person, a group, or a place several times, it gets progressively less possible to get people to care with every new iteration of the tragedy. 

There was this woman who was raped, and everybody felt enormous sympathy and tried to help. And then she was raped for the second time, and the sympathy dwindled. People actually started to shun her. Or there was also this fellow who was diagnosed with cancer, beat it, and got diagnosed with a different kind of cancer. The irritated indifference he encountered after the second diagnosis was in a stark contrast to the helpfulness and compassion he got after the first one. 

It’s like people get angry with you if you deny them a chance to reaffirm a happy ending narrative. 

Hogarth Press has asked famous authors to write their own version of a favorite play by Shakespeare. I’m not going to read the entire series but I wanted to check out Margaret Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest. I’m not much of a Shakespeare person but this play I do know well because you can’t do any Latin American studies without being persecuted by The Tempest. It’s like Latin American essayists never read anything else, they bug you so with it.

The word I’d use to describe Atwood’s rewriting of The Tempest is cute.  And if you’ve read any Atwood you should know how uncharacteristic that is. Atwood’s writing is usually anything but cute. This novel, though, is exactly like one of those sappy Hollywood deals where a disillusioned artist / teacher comes to an inner-city school / jail / community college and through an art project he does with his atypical students achieves redemption. I kept waiting for some irony to kick in because Atwood tends to be anything but cheesy and sentimental but no, the sappy thing went on until the novel’s end. 

But hey, it’s not a bad novel. Atwood even write some Shakespeare-inspired raps for it. Yes, as I said, it’s all crazy cute. You can see that she engaged with Shakespeare on a profound level and didn’t just use him as a pretext. I even felt more enthusiastic about Shakespeare than I ever did after reading the novel. Hag-seed could be a good novel to assign to 8-graders.

I was in such a state that the owner of the school asked if I needed medical attention. Klara, on the other hand, seems not to have noticed that I was away at some point. This is a great relief because my contract starts today and I couldn’t continue not to work. 

All the way back home she was singing her baby songs in the back of the car.

I’m not posting because it’s Klara’s first day at daycare and I’m blubbering. There is no rational readonly to blubber but as my analyst used to say, not everything needs to be rational.

I will rejoin the interesting discussions that we are having on the blog after I collect her from the school and feel better. 

On the island of Corsica  (where Napoleon was from), a pregnant woman and 4 others were wounded in a massive clash between Muslim residents and tourists who were accused of trying to photograph burqaed women on the beach. 

The plague on all their houses, I only care about the pregnant lady caught between these hordes of stupid barbarians. The freaks who gawk at women on a beach are dumb. The freaks who go into a “don’t photograph my property” mode are dumb, too.