Day: April 29, 2018

If that’s not corruption, then I don’t know what is:

Chancellor Carlo Montemagno’s daughter and son-in-law were hired for university jobs created for them, that they never formally applied for and that were never advertised, documents show.
While the chancellor proposes campus-wide cuts, his daughter, Melissa Germain, and her husband, Jeffrey Germain, began working in newly created positions.

By the way, this Chancellor is the fellow who is planning to hire unpaid professors. Cute, eh?

Of course, being a 46-year-old graduate student of English in Nebraska must be a huge blow to a person’s mental health but, gosh, with this kind of allies, who needs enemies?

Russian Twitter bots tried to swing general election for Jeremy Corbyn

Robot accounts rooted for Labour and attacked Tories

How not surprising. For the corrupt neoliberal oligarchy that uses Russia as its base of operations, Corbyn is a gift from heaven. This is all obvious to the point of boredom.

What I do find funny is how the same people outside the UK rant about the way Trump was helped out during the election by Russia while simultaneously supporting Corbyn.

A lot more is at stake right now, and in the next election, Russians will work to promote Corbyn much more actively. I’m curious to see how many brave anti-Trump resisters will help them do that.

We have a big beautiful statue of a cougar with a long curved tail on campus. Klara first approached the statue from the tail side.

“Elephant!” she exclaimed. “Hello, elephant! Whatcha doing? Look, mommy, elephant!”

Then she walked to the cougar’s front side.

“Why does elephant have a face on his tushie, mommy?” she asked.

Ellen Kahn, the director of the Children, Youth & Families Program at the Human Rights Campaign, said the gender binary that underlies “mother” and “father” doesn’t jibe with some parents’ self-understanding and self-presentation: “For queer parents who don’t think of themselves as gender conforming, ‘mommy’ and ‘daddy’ may be a little discordant with the way they think about themselves.”

Well, they’ll have to lump it because the kid will call them whatever the other kids call their mommies and daddies. I wanted Klara to call me Mamma because that sounds more natural to me. But she heard other kids say “mommy” and that was the end of the “call me Mamma” project. And obviously I’m not going to force her to do it my way because it’s not her role in life to service my hangups, identities, and quirks.

Note how many times the word “self” is used in this very short quote. The biggest lesson every new parent learns is that your precious self takes not just a backseat but the very last seat on the bus when you have a kid. And it’s not easy for anybody. I once tried explaining to my 10-month-old infant that I can’t pick her up right now because my back really hurts. And then I realized I was being ridiculous, laughed and picked her up. It hurt like a motherfucker but it couldn’t have been as bad as what an infant feels when mommy can’t get over herself and be mommy.

And it’s actually a good feeling to have something bigger and more important than the self even if it does kill your back – or interrupt your identitarian explorations.