A campaign is underway in Spain to get a million people to fly the national flag simultaneously. They only have the population of 40 million, so it’s a big number. 

I don’t need to explain to my regular readers why this is an important gesture. 

People on Facebook are saying that it’s humanly impossible to avoid googling one’s exes. 

I’ve never done something like this, though, and had no idea it was such a popular pastime. For me, all of my exes, including my first husband, fell off the face of the earth the moment I lost interest in the relationship. 

I haved a depleted emotional range and am incapable of caring about former love interests. Maybe I should go sit in my tent some more. 

As Foucault famously pointed out, the modern state earns the subjects’ loyalty by at least to some degree promoting their prosperity and security. When the state steps away from those obligations (ask I, not Foucault), how does it earn the citizens’ loyalty? 

That’s actually quite easy. It becomes an Oprah. And everybody loves Oprah. The draw of somebody like Oprah is twofold:

1. She entertains

2. She soothes the anxieties awakened by the liquefaction of existence and the erosion of sociality by peddling the image of a self-sufficient neoliberal subject who can achieve success through a skillful management of self-help techniques. 

Entertaining and soothing. And every once in a decade giving a free car to a dozen lucky schmucks. That’s the recipe. 

Look at the current US government and tell me it’s not exactly like this. 

I was goimg to read Democracy in Chains, but it turned out the author is a either dishonest person or a complete illiterate. And I’m not sure which is worse. 

I finally found time to rearrange my drawers and discovered that I have an insane number of T-shirts, testifying to years of sporadic and short-lived bursts of enthusiasm for physical activity. 

I was on Mika’s and Joe’s side in the bleeding face debacle, until Mika started responding with infantile tweets and the networks made a news event out of it. Now all I can say is that they are all worthy of each other and this muck they are so happily rolling in.

It’s incredible to me that even today, after all of the information that’s been made available, good, well-meaning people still cling to the most ridiculous aspects of Putinoid propaganda. 

Folks, it’s truly inexcusable at this point. I get it (kind of) that people believed this rubbish back in 2013. But today? After everything that’s happened? 

Either don’t opine at all on the subject or try to get informed. Read, ask questions. Look what’s happened in our politics as a result of people being too lazy to verify what they hear. 

I put up one of these kids’ tents with a tunnel attached to it for Klara. She loves playing in it. But when I got into the tunnel to play with her, God, I enjoyed being in it so much that it’s weird. Just being in this tiny, boxed in space was beyond pleasant. I didn’t want to come out. 

And yes, obviously, the tunnel is symbolic of the birth canal. 

I’m weird.