I decided not to be parochial and started investigating the riots in France. The first thing I discovered is that the rioters are burning libraries:

I have zero interest now in what they are protesting against. These people are absolute scum. And the government that can’t stop this from happening… is not a government at all.

For shame, when on the other side of Europe people are dying to protect the Western civilization, the French are pissing it away for fun.

For a reason I can’t fathom, I decided to engage in self-defeating behavior and agreed to have pupil dilation during my eye exam. Nobody warned me that I’d lose my eyesight for hours after that dog of a procedure.

Being completely ignorant of the aftereffects of this so-called medical test, I left the doctor’s office and found myself in hell. It’s very sunny outside, and everything had an infernal glare. I was functionally blind, and the doctor said it would last for hours.

Obviously, I realized there was no way I’d be able to drive myself back to work. I somehow managed to type a message to my secretary – or at least, I think I sent it to the secretary – telling her I’m not coming back and to cancel my meetings. I’m sure everybody knows me well enough to understand that no kind of medical emergency would induce me to make a phone call instead of writing a message.

It’s been 6 hours, and I’m better now. I still have to hide inside in heavily curtained places but at least I can read without too much pain. It also so happened that I had to write an unavoidable text today, and I did but it was like writing drunk when you have to squint to see straight.

This was all for nothing, people. I’m perfectly fine and there was never any reason to suspect I needed any testing. What, what possessed me to do this? I still feel like a wreck after all this. A whole day of reading lost. And I’m not back to normal even now.

Let this be a lesson of “if it ain’t broken, don’t dilate it”.

Many of us have a friend or a relative who is a wonderful person with a heart of gold but who’s obsessed with some tinfoil hat conspiracy theory or has a weird, embarrassing hobby. For instance, I know somebody who’s the sweetest, loveliest human you can imagine but is obsessively into urotherapy. Yes, it’s the thing where people drink their own pee because it’s supposed to be very healthy.

The worst thing about such people is that they always seek to convert others to their faith and get very monomaniacal about it. Anything can set them off, and you have to be very careful around them to avoid provoking them into a rant on how you’ll die a terrible death if you don’t immediately go drink yourself some urine.

Americans are like that about race. They are the most wonderful, kind people ever. But race is their tinfoil urotherapy. Once something sets them off on this favorite subject, there’s no helping it. They can’t be reasonable about it and they can’t resist the urge to convert the world to their faith. It’s best to accept that they are not ready to stop drinking their own urine for now and just leave them to it. There’s no other solution.

But they are great, beautiful people aside from this unfortunate fixation.

On the funnier side of the Affirmative Action decision, yesterday I received four (4) official repudiations of the decision from different levels of administrative at my university. Each started with “Although our university does not use affirmative action in its admissions process…”

We never received four whole edicts all at once for any event, holiday, commemoration or happening. Dobbs got zero. Jan 6 got two, and they were spaced out. Afghanistan withdrawal got zero. War in Ukraine – zero. Juneteenth – two. Even George Floyd only got three, and they weren’t all on one day.

There was also an edict once condemning DeSantis but I don’t remember why. It seemed very random to condemn a governor of a completely different state

One of the stories in Peter Pomerantsev’s book is about a young man who was a member of a neofascist government group and worked to create the image of “superhero Putin”:

He first made his name by drawing a really rather good manga cartoon that showed the President as superhero doing battle against zombie protesters and evil monster anticorruption bloggers: a nice example of the Surkovian tactic of co-opting hipster language to its own ends, trying to get the “cool” people on the Kremlin’s side.

The cartoon was so successful Kalenik was introduced to senior government officials, and his career as a young spin doctor was launched.

“Politics is the ability to use any situation to advance your own status,” Sergey told me with a smile.

“How do you define your political views?” I asked him.

He looked at me like I was a fool to ask, then smiled: “I’m a liberal . . . it can mean anything!”

Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible