Folks, did you see what’s happening in Peru? My Peruvian relatives are in a state of panic. The presidential election is between a crazy Marxist guy controlled by Cubans and Venezuelan Chavistas and Keiko Fujimori, a corrupt daughter of the former dictator Fujimori.

And a week ago there was a massacre in Peru that was possibly organized by the Sendero Luminoso, the Maoist terrorist group that was very active in the 1980s but never really went away.

The Peruvian relatives say there will be a civil war if the crazed Marxist plant wins. I’m very worried. I can’t believe Latin America is going back to the destructive, ridiculous fantasies of the 1970s that destroyed the region. I mean, yes, I absolutely can believe it. I’ve been teaching about the likelihood of this happening for several years. I don’t want to believe it, though.

Yes, let’s repeat 2008, shall we? Then China will be ready to release the next virus, and we can just go in circles into infinity.

And? Do “we” have ties to this “work abroad”?

Might it make sense to investigate and find out?

Time for my daily rant about Canadian lunacy. I’m in the conference in Canada that I talked about before. Today we have a keynote speaker from Mexico. A fascinating speaker! Great topic! Everybody is excited. He begins to speak and 10 minutes into the talk the moderator decides to turn off everybody’s cameras. The speaker is clearly thrown off by this. All of a sudden, he’s staring at a sea of black squares. If anybody tried this, it’s a soul-crushing experience, especially when you were not prepared for it.

The whole talk is organized as a talk. The speaker isn’t reading a paper. He’s trying to engage in a conversation. Those of you who have done public speaking know that being able to see the audience’s faces is key. You can gauge whether the listeners are responding, if a point needs to be clarified, if you are going off on an unnecessary tangent, etc.

Finally, the speaker interrupts the talk and starts begging the moderator to let him see human faces.

It’s pathetic. The whole conference is organized in this totalitarian way. I couldn’t take it anymore and left. This is my fifth online conference, and it’s the most totalitarian of all by far.

Public education is being turned into crap on purpose. It’s an austerity measure. People who care about their kids and have the slightest means to do so will find an alternative option to educate them. This is a brilliant way to introduce austerity without using the word or betraying your real purpose.

So if you wonder why first-graders are being taught that there are 50 genders, why good books are removed from the curriculum and substituted with unreadable crap, and why future teachers get less and less training in their disciplines – this is why. The public option becomes so low-quality that you are forced to use your own resources to substitute.

#FauciDump is a much bigger scandal than, say, Watergate. It’s a really, really big deal. But it’s not going to be reported and nobody is going to know. The people who are paying attention will be forever seen as conspiracy theorists and crazies if we ever mention any of the information in the Fauci emails.

This is a result of gullibility and incapacity to think for oneself that are common among people in Western countries. And it’s a bloody shame. An institution in the US was complicit in conducting dangerous experiments without bothering to ensure any safety protocols. A pandemic was created as a result. People died. Lives were destroyed. And nobody will suffer any consequences whatsoever. To the contrary, the people who organized this whole debacle are being elevated and idolized.

It is particularly offensive that the organization sponsoring coronavirus research is the National Institute of Health. The word “national” in its name really slaughters.

Folks, did you see the Fauci email dump? I was right about everything this whole time. The virus did come from a lab, it was engineered and modified on purpose, it was done as part of a research project paid for by the NIH under Fauci’s supervision, masks don’t work, etc.

This is one of many emails. Look up the rest if you are interested.

We’ve been massively had. And there’s still no effort to find out what other viruses are being cooked up in that Wuhan lab and what the chances are of their release.

I know Zac Bissonnette from his brilliant COVID reporting, so when he said that writing about the Beanie Babies craze helped him understand the roots of COVID mania, I decided to read The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute. I mean, just the title itself is brilliant.

I had no idea about the Beanie Baby bubble before reading the book. To me, Beanie Babies are cute plushie toys that Klara loves. I didn’t know that back in the 1990s people collected these plushies and paid hundreds, or even thousands of dollars for $5 beanies.

Bissonnette’s book explains how the craze came to be and what drove the prices for the extremely cheap toys so high. It’s a fascinating story. And it does explain a lot – and I mean A LOT – about the mentality of people who fall for these hoaxes, be they plush toy or COVID-related.

What I didn’t like about an otherwise stellar book is that Bissonnette really hates Ty Warner, the inventor of the Beanies, and gives too much credence to a jilted girlfriend who, like all spited exes, detested Warner.

I see no reason to blame Warner for anything. He did invent a great product, and the book explains in detail how what he did was really innovative. He didn’t consciously start the bubble but once the bubble was there, of course he enjoyed the profits. Who wouldn’t? If any of us made a $5 product that people suddenly started reselling to each other at $500 and hoarding, would we say no to billions in profit?

After the bubble popped, Ty Warner went into real estate and made some good money there. He didn’t lose everything in crazy speculations or turn into a drug addict. Save for some tax evasion issues, there’s nothing anybody can blame him for. As much as Bissonnette tries to portray Ty Warner as the devil, it is unconvincing.

A great book, though. I’ll never see another beanie baby the same way. And did you know that all the main manufacturers of plushies had really shitty childhoods? They would also get attached to their products in very intense ways. It’s precisely this maniacal love for tiny plushies that made Ty Warner accidentally stumble into one of the greatest bubbles of all times.

Between my two marriages, I dated a lot. A LOT. Nine years of dating. But if somebody told me at the beginning of those nine years that in 2007 I was going to meet my next husband and the love of my life, I would have happily locked myself at home and stayed there reading books and not accepting a single date.

This riddle is really bugging me:

“Yes, but if we assume that there is a 10 at the top and 5 and 4 before 3, then the result is different.”

Why do you have to be assuming anything at all? That’s why I always sucked at math. I don’t have the imagination for it. In literary criticism we work with what there is. Nobody says, “but assume Jane Eyre eventually dumped Mr Rochester, built a spaceship, and traveled to another galaxy. Then it would be a completely different genre!”