I finally read “The Addicts Next Door” by Margaret Talbot. It’s a New Yorker piece, so it’s deeply flawed. (The author is very full of herself, she isn’t very interested in addicts and prefers to talk about wealthy people who are shocked by addicts, she is obsessed with listing the material possessions owed by the wealthy people shocked by addicts, she can’t resist the temptation to hint at how progressive and sophisticated she is in comparison to the inescapably racist redneck addicts she describes).

But it’s an important subject and any coverage is better than none. So I do recommend. I even bought the magazine even though it’s one I always avoid. 

I hate this essay by Rebecca Solnit as much as I did all of her previous writing. Solnit is a total anti-me. She has this lisping, cutesy, puckered up writing persona that is all about touchy-feely nebulous shit she takes out of her ass and treats as real. 

In case you don’t know, Solnit made herself famous by claiming that men condescend to her. I forced myself to read 70% of the linked essay and I wonder what she expects when she writes such inane stuff in such a childish voice. 

And by the way, I’m stunned that somebody can pose as a famous feminist while producing such a bizarrely bad reading of Pushkin. Solnit’s feminism is all about forcing everybody to treat the platitudes she offers with respect. It doesn’t go beyond her narcissistic woundedness. 

The Scottish National Party lost a ton of seats. Let’s hope people figured out that nationalist fantasies are not the solution to liquid capital’s triumph over the nation-state. 

Please note how determined nationalist politicians are not to mention any of the stuff about the nation-state we’ve been discussing here. They exploit the anxieties that liquefaction of previously solid institutions creates but they never name its source. 

At night, many people are placed in pods where their memory is completely erased. Then they wake up and produce stuff like this:

Watching the Comey hearing was on the one hand heartening and the other completely infuriating. How wonderful to see a person genuinely stand up for what he believes in. James Comey comes off as a Boy Scout. 

Nothing else can explain such an easy acceptance of the narrative where Comey hands the election to Trump and then 15 minutes later begins to genuinely believe Trump is dangerous and records every word of this suddenly suspicious evildoer. It’s easy to pose as a wonderful, boyscoutish believer when you are surrounded by people who don’t remember anything that happened before today’s breakfast. 

OK, if you really want to laugh about the reception of the Days of Our Comeys soap, here is an FB post suggesting that Trump sexually harassed Comey. Or something. 

From a FB friend, but something I’m seeing echoed across the internet today: 

So much of the Comey-Trump drama will sound familiar to many women:

– a surprise one-on-one meeting when you thought other people would be there 

– being so stunned by inappropriate behavior that an otherwise powerful/outspoken/strong person fails to stand up to it on the spot

– trying to blend in with your surroundings in the false hopes of going unnoticed

– asking others not to leave you alone with a specific person

– having the veracity of your account questioned for no other reason than a delay in reporting it

– being retaliated against for refusing to do something that makes you uncomfortable

It’s almost as if sexual predation is about more than just sex, but hey, all those women were liars right?

I still think it will turn out that Trump is Comey’s secret father. Or maybe he’s pregnant with his baby. 

Today, Comey completed the second part of the assignment he got from his Russian handlers. The first part included sabotaging Hillary Clinton’s chances to be elected last October. 

Elite colleges are planning to stop taking grades into account altogether in the admission process and instead rely on “a list of competencies . . . most of which can be described charitably as character traits or accurately as self-actualization gibberish“.

For instance, instead of reporting a student’s competence in math or English, the new grade-less transcript will show how well he can “exhibit moral courage in confronting unjust situations.” Of course, the definitions of moral courage and unjust situations are highly subjective, but that’s the whole point. There is no better way to bar the hoi polloi from elite colleges than to set as the price of admission the mastery by students, parents and teachers of a social-justicey jargon of the leisure classes. 

It doesn’t really matter how prepared a student is to take college-level courses. All that matters is that she comes from an environment that has mastered the new pseudo-egalitarian language of exclusion.

The second day in a row I get a call from daycare at 11 am telling me that Klara is running a fever and looks listless and uncomfortable. I rush to pick her up and she’s perfectly fine. But obviously, I still take her home. Where she proceeds to be perfectly fine. No fever, happy and chatty.

Is it because I’m leaving tomorrow and she senses it? 

Public transit in Madrid is putting up notices against “manspreading” at the urging of feminist organisations. I wonder what their position on womanspreading is because I do it a lot. 

For language lovers, I’m providing the newly coined Spanish expression for manspreading: ““despatarre masculino”.

After over a decade of no voicemail, I have finally set up a voicemail box. I’m wary of what will happen, though.