In the meantime, my university is on the news because it’s getting sued for free speech violations. A program director bullied a graduate student because she didn’t like her political beliefs. The student was banned from communicating with several other graduate students, which in a tiny program creates an impossible burden for a student. Emails were sent to potential employers, maligning this young woman as “oppressive” and “harmful.” Professors and administrators joined in on the bullying.

I hope that the student wins her lawsuit. Maybe somebody will learn something, although I’m not too hopeful. It’s an absolute disgrace that people have let themselves go to the point where they gang up on students and don’t see a problem with such behavior. This isn’t even about the freedom of speech. It’s a complete vacuum of professionalism.

The understanding of world affairs that is dominant in the US is very Marxist. I don’t use this word as a term of abuse but strictly in its scholarly sense. Marxism sees the economy as the basis for everything. “At the root of everything that happens lie economic reasons,” say classical Marxists. This is imposible to prove because it’s untrue, so neo-Marxists have modified this rigid adherence to the economic causes of everything.

But the US government is a lot less flexible than even the Marxists who aren’t exactly famous for their openness to new ideas. Every administration since Reagan has conducted its foreign policy in rigidly Marxist terms. Time and again, the US government tries to solve political, military, and cultural problems through economic means. And every single time it fails. Because the economy is important. But it’s not everything.

China didn’t become democratic once it was included in the global economy. Russia didn’t develop anything resembling democratic institutions once its economy was fully neoliberalized. Four decades of economic sanctions didn’t make Iran’s military industry any less of a threat. “Markets” don’t create political institutions. They don’t change totalitarian mentality. They don’t win on the battlefield. They are powerful in many ways but not in every way.

I fell behind in the writing I had planned for the academic year, and as a result, will have to spend the summer stressing out about it and trying to catch up.

This was, above all, an error of arithmetic. I always calculate how much I will be able to write based on past performance. But I forgot to take into account that this year I’m writing mostly in Spanish which takes me about 1,5 times longer than writing in English.

I also put in no time allowance for emergencies. And this is precisely the year when every emergency happened. I was counting on the months of March and May, which are usually my heavy writing months, but for obvious reasons I couldn’t work in those months. Plus, I suddenly found myself saddled with a large translation project.

When it’s all done, it will be great. Five publications in very serious places created within a single year. But the process will be stressful and unpleasant when it didn’t need to be.

This is only one of the nightmare scenarios where the lie about depression-causing chemical imbalances leads.

Russians got very scared when the genocide in Bucha and Irpin became widely known. They were ready to negotiate, ready to start powering down the invasion. But then they saw that there were going to be no consequences. Nobody was going to punish them in any way. The world would say, “oh, how bad” and move on. Russians get emboldened with every new mass grave that gets discovered with zero consequences for the perpetrators.

I finally figured out why my plan to bring somebody from Ukraine to teach Russian at my university collapsed. I thought everybody knew that Russian is spoken not only in Russia. When I request an Arabic instructor, I get people from many different countries. Bahrain, Israel, Kuwait. So why shouldn’t a list of Russian teachers include people from Ukraine, Belarus or Moldova?

But it turns out that there are different departments within the organization that work separately and don’t intersect. Ukraine is part of the European department. But Russia isn’t. It’s on the list for Asian countries. As a result, it’s impossible to have a list of instructors that are from Ukraine and Russia. It’s either one or the other.

I should have remembered that Russia isn’t considered a European country from back in my grad school days. I needed to take classes in an additional foreign language. I suggested Russian but was told that my program was in European languages, and Russian didn’t count. I ended up taking English lit because English is a foreign language to me.

In short, it’s all my own fault.

I was doing a quiz on national flags with my niece and discovered that if I hear the name of a country, it’s easier for me to remember what the flag is than to see a flag and associate it with a country. I can go from a word to an image a lot more easily than I can from an image to a word.

For instance, I didn’t recognize the Mexican flag. But right now, I say “Mexican flag” and I can see it perfectly in my mind’s eye.

I have no idea if I told this story before. If you already read it on this blog, please disregard this post. But I discovered that people are unaware of the story and even find it hard to believe, so I want to share it.

After Nazi Germany was defeated, the British government decided to give a gift to Stalin. The gift consisted of 30,000 kossack soldiers who had fought against the Soviets in the 1920s and then found refuge in Europe. The British government just handed them over, like they were unwanted furniture. The wives and the kids were handed over, too Stalin sent them to the concentration camps. Almost all of them died. You can read the story in detail in Solzhenitsyn, for example.

In any case, some of these cossacks knew what was coming. They knew that Stalin had a long memory and that the Brits would hand them off easily. So they ran. A bunch of them ended up in Canada, in the North of Quebec under the theory that nobody would look for them here, in the wilderness. They were right. Those who reached Quebec survived. They founded the little wooden church you can see in the picture. There’s a little cemetery next to the church. My father is now buried here, and there are all the graves of these cossacks. “A graduate of the Odessa law school, class of 1914,” proudly says a headstone of one of them, born in 1891 and dead in 1965.

Why my father would have wanted to be buried next to the cossacks, who knows? But it’s a very restful, beautiful place.

I now have two plans for retirement. Both are expensive, and I’m not saying I’ll be able to afford them. I’m saying both look equally attractive, that’s all.

One plan is to retire to Naples, Florida. I’m going to feel chic all the time, so that’s good.

The other plan is to retire to Rawdon, Quebec. I will feel the opposite of chic but it’s very woodsy and almost as cold as I need it to be.

So the choice is between beautiful nature and beautiful shopping opportunities.

For the past 6 years, Russian mercenary troops have been active in 18 countries of Subsaharan Africa. They engage in violence, create chaos, disrupt elections, and conduct targeted killings. Russian military presence in Africa keeps growing.

This started right after President Obama allowed the Russian conquest of the Crimea (which was NOT conducted “without a single shot fired”; you’ve been lied to) to take place. And right after the New York Times assured us that there’s a civil war, not an invasion, happening in Ukraine and Ukrainians are all Nazis anyway.

So why are Russians are so active in Africa? What’s the point? There are three crucial goals to this engagement.

1. Africa has natural resources that are important for modern technology. Controlling them is lucrative.

2. Creating chaos in Africa and preventing Subsaharan countries from enjoying peace and living better lives sends streams of desperate migrants to Europe. This keeps Europe occupied and too weak and busy to notice much else.

But these are marginal benefits. The most important goal is always and only:

3. To be more important in the world than Americans. Or anybody else. That’s the nature of the narcissistic injury I keep talking about. Nothing is ever enough. Nothing satisfies. Killing Ukrainians, torturing Africans, starving Venezuelans – it’s all good fun but it’s never enough.

There’s something really malignant and ominous happening in the world. But we never hear about it. We never hear about the really important stuff. I wonder why that is.