The Illinois Department of Public Health has now started to harass me via text message to get vaccinated for COVID because their “records show” I’m unvaccinated.

My husband is actually unvaccinated but he claims not to have received any such text messages.

We are in a severe budget crisis, yet this is what public money is being spent on.

I just had to sit through a 15-minute talk by a Polish colleague who is shocked that Ukrainian refugees are welcomed in Poland while Syrian or Afghani refugees aren’t.

I keep wondering, are people sincerely that stupid or are they faking it for purposes of self-promotion?

No, the next thing they’ll go after is our right to work, learn, and travel without getting medicated against our will.

Oh, wait…

How is it humanly possible to be this cynical? Pritzker was one of the leading COVID maniacs in the country. He’s going to lecture us about privacy now?

Today I finished the 4th of the research articles I had idiotically and insanely proposed myself to write within a single year. I’m really proud and kind of shocked. And it sucks because I don’t have anybody who I’d tell this and they’d know how crazy and unusual it is for somebody in my field. It’s 30,000 words, ready for publication. Three of the articles already on production. Three out of four on Spanish, which makes everything slower and harder.

I’m a freaking beast is what I am.

I have one more article to finish before the year runs out in August.

I think I’m probably an idiot instead of a beast.

Darren Bailey won the Illinois GOP primary nomination for governor. I’m fine with that. I didn’t want Irvin because he’s a RINO who followed every COVID restriction in existence. And Sullivan is probably completely neoliberal, and what’s the point of having another neoliberal, to be honest?

Bailey was very anti-lockdown, so that’s good. Other than that, I don’t know much about him but I’d vote for a doorknob if that helped unseat Pritzker. He’s a horrible, fat cat corrupt brat. What he’s been doing to our K-12 system is an absolute disgrace. Endless emergency orders. An incapacity to respect the legislature. Pervy relatives. Whatever Bailey is, it will hard for him to be any worse than Pritzker.

Clearly, they weren’t measuring the Russians. I told N about my interview with the Russian teacher, and he asked if she saw the large Ukrainian flag in my email signature. It’s impossible not to see because it’s larger than most texts of emails I send.

“But then why didn’t she try to conceal her Putinoid beliefs?” he asked.

Because she can’t help being who she is, that’s why. If that’s all that there is at your core, that’s what you’ll show to people.

IQ is very important and completely immutable. But it’s powerless to do anything when emotions are at work.

Yesterday, water started dripping from the ceiling in our ground floor. N and I, beaten into complete intellectual impotence by the grueling heat wave, forgot that we have a whole other floor over the ground floor and a bathtub right on top of the leak.

We stared stupidly at the dripping water. Then N ambled outside to see if it was raining, which of course it wasn’t. He returned and we stared stupidly at each other. Then he ambled outside to look for the rain again. Then I did. No rain was occurring. Then we stared stupidly some more. Then N decided to climb up onto the roof to see if it was leaking. I stared at him dumbly and said it was a good idea.

Thankfully, at that moment, Klara dropped something upstairs, awakening us to the reality of the second floor’s existence.

I’ve had my first encounter with our new Russian instructor. Lord have mercy, this will be harder than I thought. N was certain she would be apolitical (or pretend to be apolitical) but he was wrong. She’s a fanatic who “can’t wait to bring the light of the truth to Americans who have been brainwashed by lying online articles.” This is a direct quote, by the way.

In terms of brain power, she’s miles ahead of what I usually experience with our Fulbright scholars. Seriously on a different level. Many things that it takes me a long time to teach and explain, she figured them all out by herself. My workload with her has been cut by about 80% of what I do for the other instructors.

These are not stupid people. In fact, these are very bright, clearly high-IQ people. The woman is not a scholar. She’s a middle-school teacher from a modest background. She’s not from the intelligentsia but what in Russia would be called “a simple person.”

That’s what is so frustrating about Russians. They have everything they need to achieve a lot. Really, a lot. The IQ is one thing you can’t buy, develop or improve with hard work or willpower. And they’ve got it. Even after purposefully murdering and exiling the entire intellectual class between 1917 and 1940, they’ve still got it. But instead of using it to live better, they go and genocide others, century after bloody century.

I don’t get it. I really don’t get it.

I’m fascinated by the TV show The Real Housewives of Dubai. It features very successful, very professional and talented women who, for some unfathomable reason, pretend to be moronic, helpless bimbos. I’m more used to helpless morons pretending to be brilliant, successful people, so this reality is new to me.

My sister has a friend in Canada. He’s very wealthy, very successful, has a great family. His relatives’ two small children have been orphaned. The friend, of course, wants to adopt the children. He loves them, his family loves them. This could be a good solution for children in a tragic situation.

But no, the government takes the kids and puts them in foster care. You’d think the government would be happy to save some money and give the kids to the wealthy relatives who desperately want to take them. There is a complication, though. The children have some Native heritage. And the wealthy relatives don’t. So instead of letting the kids go to uncle’s familiar house, they are shipped off to a reservation where they’d never been and where they know nobody. Because “a white man will not be able to preserve their Native culture.”

This is one-drop theory of race, and it’s as disgusting today as it was when it was invented by slaveowners. Behind all of the words about culture and decolonization is the reality that kids with “one drop of non-white blood” are being shipped off somewhere out of sight of the new elite.