Love Burma, wish the very best for Burma, but, honestly, how do these “scholarships for young people struggling for freedom”, whatever that even means, achieve any useful goal whatsoever?

If the Burmese tend towards dictatorial regimes, that’s their business. Nobody ever thanked us for nudging, invading, manipulating, bribing, or bullying them into freedom and democracy. To the contrary, people deeply resent us for it. And guess what? Why shouldn’t they? We know best what’s great for us, and they know best what’s great for them. If the Burmese want freedom, they’ll fight for it. And if they don’t, that’s fine, too.

It’s the height of hubris and contempt towards others to think everybody should be exactly like us. These American scholarships are destroying genuine journalism and research in poorer countries. Instead of covering the events in their countries, journalists write endless pieces about how US Republicans are bad and Democrats are good. Because that’s what pays and nothing at home can compete with the amounts of generous American funding. I’m seeing this in Ukraine where these grants and handouts have caused enormous damage. Only today I heard two major publishers, one journalist, one college professor, and two members of Ukrainian parliament say that they are overjoyed USAID grants will be cancelled. I wouldn’t have been able to understand this even a year ago but having published a book in Ukraine and participated in the media space, I now know exactly what it means.

I’m sorry, I know everybody hates long quotes but I have to post this one:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: “Today, over 100 members of Congress support a bill to fund Ozempic with Medicare at $1,500 a month. Most of these members have taken money from the manufacturer of that product, a European company called Novo Nordisk. As everyone knows, once a drug is approved for Medicare, it goes to Medicaid.”

“And there is a push to recommend Ozempic for Americans as young as six over a condition, obesity, that is completely preventable and barely even existed 100 years ago. Since 74% of Americans are obese, the cost of all of them, if they take their Ozempic prescriptions, will be $3 trillion a year. This is a drug that has made Novo Nordisk the biggest company in Europe.”

“It’s a Danish company, but the Danish government does not recommend it. It recommends a change in diet to treat obesity and exercise. Virtually Novo Nordisk’s entire value is based upon its projections of what Ozempic is going to sell to Americans. For half the price of Ozempic, we could purchase regeneratively raised organic agriculture, organic food for every American three meals a day and gym membership for every obese American.”

I’m now completely in favor of RFK being confirmed. What he’s describing is an absolute disgrace, and it’s more of a disgrace that nobody else is talking about it.

It’s curious how this happened without the famous “bipartisan border security bill” that we were told was so crucial to stop the flow of migrants. It’s even more curious how not a single person who bought into the lies about the “bipartisan border security bill” will notice and learn anything from this experience.

Ooh, imperialism, scary. We must immediately reach for our smelling salts because imperialism is supposed to be bad.

Never mind that I am where I am (and loving it) thanks to imperialism. I’m supposed to make a mournful face and pretend that imperialism is always wrong. Even when there’s no cannibalism on this continent thanks to it, it’s to wrong because… Well, nobody really knows why.

I may be an outlier but I have always found these “men who like women” to be very off-putting. The only woman whose company I need my husband to prefer is me. I definitely don’t need him to engage in performative gestures of how “women are more interesting than men.”

We had to beg Biden for every one of these, beg him, and hear all sorts of excuses about how it was absolutely impossible.

Trump becomes president, suddenly everything is possible. The entire Ukrainian segment of the social media exists in the “wait, what?” mode. Except for the part that is doing the “I told you so” thing.

P.S. By the way, Israel acted despicably throughout the transfer, and only the recent serious pressure from the WH managed to resolve everything. It’s quite shocking that Israel would have the gall to try to mandate what the US does with the weapons it so kindly provided to the defense of Israel.

Another stupid question in the same survey:

What does this even mean? How do you “identify with a country”? It’s beyond nuts to ask such a question.

Incidentally, the list of countries they provide doesn’t even include the USSR, which is the country where I was born. Maybe pay attention to history instead of torturing words with the goal of extracting some particularly neoliberal essence out of them?

According to this, I’m a late-career academic:

This makes me feel ancient but it’s also dumb because even if I retire at the dot of turning 65, I still have more years to work than I have worked so far.

This really hurt my feelings.

This reminded me of how my sister and I were renting a car in Madrid to drive to Portugal, and the guy at the rental company tried to upsell us. He was young, and hadn’t figured out yet that you don’t sell to women like you do to men.

“This Citroën is small,” he said. “The engine is weak. I could get you something larger and more potent for a surcharge.”

My sister and I started at him blankly. What he was saying meant nothing to us.

As a teenager, my sister worked at Avis, and she found out that the best way to upsell to men is to offer them a PT Cruiser. 90% get very upset and are willing to pay extra to get something larger.

For women, the magical words aren’t “large” and “potent.” What kind of a weirdo woman wants to be large? Instead, it’s “safe, comfortable, elegant, beautiful, chic.”

“Give women huge tax breaks for having kids” is somewhere right there with “get something larger” as a sales technique for female customers.