So hey, remember how I keep saying that Governor Rauner of Illinois doesn’t allow the health insurance premiums we keep paying to go towards paying our health care bills?

That’s ’cause he has a better use for this money:

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner’s administration had arranged to pay a new deputy governor out of an employee health care account that is more than $4 billion behind on its bills due to the state’s budget crisis, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. . .

Half of Leslie Munger’s $138,000 salary was scheduled to come from a pool of insurance premiums.

The rabid piece of useless garbage hired yet another overpaid bureaucrat and. .  . stole our healthcare premiums to pay for the joy of having this useless moocher around. 

If you go to the link, you’ll see that Rauner does this kind of shit all the time. And if you follow my blog, you might remember that this is the very first thing he did when he got elected: he placed a bunch of friends and relatives in invented governmental jobs with crazy high salaries paid with by public funds. Then, the public finds started running short and he couldn’t keep hiring all of his cronies and their useless mistresses and children. So he froze the budget. 

People, I give you the party of small government. 

And this is the kind of lawmakers we get here in Illinois. Worse than insects they are. 

Harvard is aware that the profession of law needs to change in the face of the approaching robotization.

A very good article on Trump’s new executive order on immigration. I find it disgusting how people pretend that Trump is doing something radically new when this all has been going on forever and nobody cared. 

And in the dumbest statements of the week, see this: “Middlebury should not have to hire out to find someone who can speak with them about the white working class or conservative ideals; there are quite a few people who bear one or both of those labels and I imagine that a number of them may even want to go to college.” This kind of shit bugs me because somebody made precisely this criticism of my book: why do we need to read books about the crisis when we can ask the unemployed and the evicted to talk about their experiences? Drives me nuts.

Feminism has truly won if women have nothing better to do than participate in this kind of inane quarrels.

 This is why I didn’t sign the organ donation card.

 Never return calls from these area codes! 

A Nokia for Mr. Trump. 

The hysteria over the confederate flag has gone way too far. Hey, I show photos of Hitler in class. Let’s fire me immediately. 

The Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram could have been rescued a long time ago. 

This is how we’ll all live in a couple more decades of global warming. It’s in Russian but see the photos. 

Berkeley is forced to delete publicly available content in the name of.  . . inclusivity. Whenever I hear this nasty word, I know something disgusting is about to happen.

 This only happens to teachers who really care and go the extra mile for their students.

Pharma companies keep up their efforts to poison more people by claiming that opioids are not addictive. 

I read an article today blasting female academics for not doing reviews of academic books. The article gave a dozen (truly ridiculous) reasons why the author thinks this is the case. 

I’m one of those female academics who don’t review books. The reason is simple: I don’t know how to get anybody to ask me to review. Nobody seems to accept unsolicited reviews, so I guess people need to get asked. I’d love to be a reviewer. It’s worth nothing on a CV but I think it would be an enjoyable thing to do. Does anyone know how to become a reviewer? 

I’m sometimes asked to review articles for publication but never books. 

It’s so enjoyable to observe Klara, folks. We were on the verandah and she wanted to pull herself up to grab the edge of the table. But the table is too high and she couldn’t grab it. So she looked around, saw a chair on the other side of the table, crawled to it, pulled herself up and then could reach the table. 

It’s amazing how she can make a plan and follow through. 

It’s also a wonder to observe her when she shows me how to do things. For instance, if she wants me to make a toy squeak, she puts it in my hand and squeezes to show what I need to do. 

“Maybe she’ll become a teacher,” N says. 

“No!” I scream. “Anything but!”

She also loves to rummage around in my mouth, so I’m hoping she’ll become interested in dentistry. 

Something good might come out of the Trump administration: it’s possible that Trump might liberate Kansas from Brownback. And foist him on us all federally but that doesn’t matter since national politics has lost all importance. 

I’m now hoping that Trump would take Rauner back to the mother ship, too.  

1. Had my Annual Conference with the departmental Chair. 

2. Cleaned the office.

3. Prepared my literature of crisis class for the next 2 weeks. 

4. Had an appointment with the doctor. 

5. Took Klara shopping. 

6. Cooked fregola.

7. Worked on the edited volume abstract. It’s only 250 words but it still needs work.

8. Helped Klara practice walking on the verandah.

9. Played building blocks with Klara and taught her to say “apple.”

10. Reading: Dr. Thorne and Rosa Montero.

11. Success: finally cleaned my workspace at home. 

“Look, here’s Daddy!” I tell Klara. 

“Papa!” she says. 

“No, he’s Daddy,” I explain. 

“Papa! Papa! Papa!” she chants. 

I don’t know where she could have possibly gotten this but she calls N “papa” or “papeh” and completely disregards my exhortations to say “Daddy.” 

I swear to God, one of these days I’ll find her reading a volume of Pushkin. 

The news from Springfield is that there won’t be any budget until the next election. Which will take place in November of 2018. So if the people of Illinois will manage to get over their puppy love for dumb, greedy and lazy millionaires and decide not to return Rauner, we might get a budget in the winter of 2019.

It’s by no means certain, though, that Rauner won’t be returned. Because – get that – most people around here have no idea we have no budget in the state. They are convinced that Rauner is working hard on their behalf. 

Here is what I will ask you to do if you live in Illinois. Please, please try to tell at least one new person a week the truth about Rauner. I’m the most unsocial person in the universe but I’m telling people at the grocery checkout, in the line at the post-office, in the gym’s locker room. The point I keep making is, “Rauner is too lazy to do any work and we have no budget as a result.”

A good trick to start a conversation is to look at your phone, sigh loudly, say, “Ay ay ay!”, lift your eyes, catch somebody’s stare and ask, “Have you heard the news about Governor Rauner?” As of now, there hasn’t been a single person who refused to listen or didn’t participate in the conversation.

Here is a great article on the heroin epidemic in the US that results in many more overdoses than the crack epidemic of the 1980s.

The mental health field is so useless at dealing with addiction that directors of mental health programs send out lists of “correct” terminology to describe addiction:

We are not supposed to say “drug abuse”; use “substance use disorder” instead. To say that an addict’s urine sample is “clean” is to use “words that wound”; better to say he had a “negative drug test.” “Binge drinking” is out—“heavy alcohol use” is what you should say. Bizarrely, “attempted suicide” is deemed unacceptable; we need to call it an “unsuccessful suicide.”

Fuss about language is all they can do, it seems. 

Heroin, it turns out, kills 4 times more people each year than gun homicide. The attention it gets, however, is incomparable with the attention paid to gun violence. 

This wave of drug overdoses is a real tragedy, a real horror. The surplus people with whom the specter of uselessness has caught up are being eliminated through addiction. There are not nearly enough conversations about this. 

The State Department is being dismantled. Putin hates the State Department.