The Washington Post reported that the organizers put the attendance at up to half a million. They had hoped for less than half that. It was surreal how similar this all felt, and my Russian friends on social media confirmed it: “Totally Bolotnaya,” one of them wrote.

I most sincerely hope this protest was not another Bolotnaya. Because the anti -Putin protest on Bolotnaya resulted in an explosion of authoritarianism in Russia, an invasion of Ukraine, an invasion of Syria, and the eventual heartfelt embrace by most of the opposition of Putinism. Most of those who marched against Putin in 2012 are very sincerely singing his praise today. He gave them nationalism, and they were seduced. So no, let’s not compare yesterday’s protest to that colossal fiasco.

Maybe I caught Klara’s bug because I feel terrible. I’m not vomiting or anything but I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck. It can’t be lack of sleep because I never react strongly to that. 

The strangest thing is that I’m not eating. We made a great barbecue today but I’m indifferent. Whenever I go to our local hospital – which is the same one where Eric was born – I stop eating for a week and lose 10 lbs. It’s clearly psychological. It’s a huge hospital but they just had to place the emergency right next to the women’s pavilion.

Solitude must be managed. I love this post because as a great fan of solitude I have realized that if I don’t control it, it will find a way to make me miserable. But if I do, it will be extremely enjoyable. See also the entire series to which this post belongs. They are very good.

“Open source protests are nearly unstoppable.  Once a protest like this gets going here, it won’t stop until it drives Trump out of office, just like it ousted the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and Libya.” Leaving aside the attractiveness of becoming Syria or Libya, what makes Mike Pence so much more attractive than Trump?

How Democrats assured the swift confirmation of Trump’s cabinet. Is there anything these clowns haven’t mismanaged?

Former admirers are awkwardly trying to distance themselves from Assange. Give them two minutes, and the same will happen with Snowden.

Do you, folks, believe in self-driving cars? The whole thing sound way too complicated and expensive and with very little gain.

The webpage that has been selling child rape is finally being investigated by the authorities. But this pathetic piece of human detritus that dares call itself a feminist defends the right of sex traffickers to sell rape. Of course, she pretends that it’s all completely consensual in an act of such inhuman hypocrisy that I’m stunned such horrible people even exist.

I don’t know if to laugh or cry at the sheer cluelessness of the rich prick who wrote this idiotic article on the guaranteed basic income. Nobody does the job of popularizing the ideology of liquid capital better than Salon.

Social workers claim in court that they had no idea lying was wrong and are not guilty.

Xykademiqz wrote a great post about leadership, and it reminded me of my quite unpleasant attempt at occupying a small leadership role. There are three types of leaders:

1.Natural leaders. They have charisma and manage to motivate people to do things just on the strength of their own charm and personal power. 

2. People who don’t want to exist in a state of endless warfare with others and just do most of the work on their own. This was the kind of leader I was. I felt so embarrassed for people when they invented pathetic excuses about how the dog ate their homework and they couldn’t do their part of the assignment that I did almost everything myself and stewed in my resentment for weeks afterwards. This isn’t really leadership at all because no leading managed to occur.

3. People who realize it’s unfair for them to do everything on their own but lack the natural gift of getting others to jump through hoops for them. They wage an endless battle against everybody else in an effort to make people do their fair share. They also run the risk of growing bitter and disillusioned.

To conclude, leadership sucks.

We spent the night at the ER because Klara was throwing up in a very scary way. It’s not easy to get help for her because she’s so curious and good-natured that she was smiling and beaming and making cute faces at the nurses and doctors in between the bouts of puking that nobody believed she was in great distress. It turned out she has a stomach bug and needs to take the weirdest concoction known to humanity called Pedialite. 

And of course she woke up at her usual time of 8:30, as happy and boisterous as ever. We are lucky her usual waking time isn’t 6 am at least. 

What’s really weird is that people’s awareness of ISIS – and by awareness I mean a glimmer of recognition when they hear the word – is shrinking. If 2 years ago about 70% of people had at least heard this acronym, today it’s under 30%. 

Departmental meetings are encounters where faculty members with grown children torture people with small children and people with short fuses. I uses to belong just to the short fuse category but now I’m in both. 

The funny thing, by the way, is that N has no idea how impatient and bad-tempered I am because he never sees this side of me. 

The campus is downright funereal. Some students organized a dick-smashing ceremony to alleviate the tension. I’m not usually into the carnavalesque but today I’m grateful for this because it’s getting to sad to be here. 

I never even watch the Oscars, so obviously I’m not wasting any time on the inauguration. But of course it’s on every screen at the gym, so it’s hard to avoid. I kept my eyes on my Kindle but there was a couple on treadmills right behind me, and the woman kept chattering loudly and annoyingly about how horrible Obama was, and how nasty the immigrants are, and how much she loved Reagan, and how she adores Trump. I’m not sure what the value is of a workout that allows you to talk this much and this loudly but people are weird. 

What was especially funny is that her companion – a man in his fifties in the tiniest shorts I have seen on anybody past the age of 4 – was checking me out so insistently that he kept losing the thread of the woman’s argument and had to repeat helplessly time and again, “Ah? What? I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

As for the possible elimination of the NEH, I unfortunately know how and to whom governmental scholarships in the Humanities are awarded here and in Canada and how they are spent. So in my opinion, good riddance. People have gone completely nuts trying to invent reasons why Humanities need massive influxes of cash but it’s all lies and waste. 

For as long as these scholarships – that are entirely inaccessible to most of us – exist, they can be used to persecute any one of us for not wasting our lives on hopelessly pursuing them. I’ll lose nothing but stress and annoyance once they are gone, so I have no reason to bemoan their disappearance. 

We need to stop buying into the lie that Humanities die without capital. No, we die once we give ourselves over to capital.