If I could ban one word from early childhood education, it’s “gifted.” A child gains nothing from being labeled gifted. The label exists to please a certain category of parents and create employment for a bunch of education scammers.

“Yes, but my kid is so gifted she gets bored in a classroom with less gifted children.”

First of all, how smart is the kid if she can’t entertain herself? Second, what’s so bad about boredom? Welcome to human existence where you aren’t supposed to be entertained 24/7. Boredom is a road to invention and creativity, as even ancient Greeks knew.

The main task for elementary school kids is to learn to self-regulate, self-manage, and exist alongside others. Nobody can be too advanced to interact with peers.

Also, special-cookiness is cute at 5, annoying at 15, disturbing at 25, and repugnant at 35.

On my campus, a black student accused two students of racially motivated hate crimes. Police investigated. The accusations turned out to be fake. The accuser was charged.

The university administration issued a statement about the importance of due process and fairness.

In response, the faculty union is holding a protest “in support of black students” who are supposedly traumatized by hearing the words “due process and fairness”. The faculty members making these claims are, of course, white.

Every time I post these stories I want to start swearing that I’m not making this up. I’m really not making this up! It is absolutely that insane. It’s now considered normal and progressive openly to claim that black people hate fairness and due process. These were the actual words that were used.

Americans. Oh, Americans. The whole world stands in awe of due process. People dream about maybe their grandchildren one day living in a society that practices this concept. And you are throwing it away because of the ludicrous and offensive myth that it upsets black people. Which it does not, you incredible dummies.

Congratulations, Canada! It gets easier after a province pushes back against madness. Here in the US, every state won because Florida refused to go nuts. Like in a dysfunctional family, if one person seeks help and becomes healthy, other people don’t get magically cured but the shared nuttiness goes down a notch. Nobody is as much of a lunatic in the presence of the healthy relative.

Klara woke me up at 3 am to ask me a profound philosophical question. Is it true that if yesterday was her last Monday as a 5-year-old, then today will be her last Tuesday as a 5-year-old?

After I confirmed, she fell asleep, but I didn’t. As a result I feel completely and utterly useless today. I’ll probably go home and sleep as soon as I summon enough energy to drag myself to the car.

While I tried to stay awake in the office, I played Russian Wordle about five million times. (Russian Wordle lets you play as much as you want. If you speak Russian, you are probably not much for rules and tend to be kind of obsessive, so it makes sense.) The Russian Wordle is the hardest because there aren’t that many 5-letter words, so it’s not easy to come up with good guess words. Of course, I still beat it but at least it wasn’t easy.

Since it’s humanly impossible to lose at English Wordle, I started playing it in Spanish and Russian, too. Turns out, they are equally impossible to lose.

The trucker protest in Ottawa is slowly turning into a real Maidan. And the Maidan, as you might remember, won. It is the only form of 21st-century protest that has proven to be effective. Very, very effective.

And it’s also taking place in winter in a very cold country. This is important because the willingness to keep protesting in an inhospitable weather shows that the protesters are serious. When people come to a protest and then leave a couple of hours later, that’s a complete fail. That’s why the anti-Putin protests of 2012 in Russia failed. People went home, so there was no reason to take them seriously.

Another complete fail is a protest that has no specific, clear demands, no well-defined addressee, and no way to measure success. This was the problem with the Spanish Indignados and all the many #Occupy shindigs. “Cancel greed” is childish mewling, not a serious demand. Who is supposed to grant this request? God? Then go to church and pray.

The Spanish Indignados protests had superfun slogans but the problem was that these slogans described the existing reality. They never pointed to a future the protesters wanted to bring about. It’s not enough to name the problem. You need to suggest a solution. “This is not a crisis, this is a scam!” Yes, totally, but what do you propose? And to whom? Unfortunately, since there were no measures of success, many of the protesters haven’t figured out in all the time that passed since 2012 that their protest failed. They asked for nothing, they got nothing, so maybe it’s a win? (Not really, but who’s going to tell the difference?) They get quite pissy when you tell them that they wasted their time.

Beyond these practical matters, the Maidan is a specific feeling. It’s people saying “unity and togetherness” every 3 seconds. It’s dancing and singing. It’s spontaneously organized concerts, comedy routines, and kids’ activities. It’s people who have never participated in anything political in their lives making a pot of soup and lugging it to the protest because “it feels right.” It’s strangers embracing in the streets because they suddenly feel so close. That’s how it was in Ukraine in 2013, and now it seems to be happening in Canada in 2022. Fingers majorly crossed because a Maidan only succeeds if people make it absolutely clear they aren’t leaving until their demands are met.

I’m still reading Rafael Chirbes’s diaries, which aren’t diaries at all. They are more edited, planned, and organized than any regular novel. These diaries are a novel! Every fake entry is so strategically placed into the steel framework of a structure that this can only be a novel.

Every page is like, you bastard! This is a novel! You did it on purpose!

What an amazing writer Chirbes was to be able to do this to readers from the grave. I’m overcome with wonder at the indomitable nature of the human spirit.

I swear to God I only now realized why some people have syringes in their Twitter and FB bios. And I didn’t even actually realize it. Somebody told me.

I’m rubbish at analyzing images. Words are my thing.

Klara’s school is telling us to send kids to school tomorrow in snow gear. Given that it snows exactly once every three years around here, what’s the likelihood of people owning snow gear or stores carrying it? Obviously, it’s negligible. I couldn’t even find a pair of waterproof mittens at the 4 stores I visited. Because it never snows!

People think that all of Illinois is like Chicago but this is a large state. Where I am is very far from the lakes and right by the Mississippi.

Yesterday I was at an indoor event with about 40-45 people. Only two wore a mask. Everybody was kind to them.

We still have a mandate but people have stopped caring. This is the only way to end the insanity: stop caring and live like it doesn’t exist. And by insanity, I mean all of it, not just the COVID-related stuff.