Author: Clarissa

Crime Is Defeated

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

That’s great! Crime has been defeated thanks to the Biden administration. If only everything were so easy.

But who knows, maybe it is.

BREAKING: Another huge Donald Trump lie explodes as new statistics from the FBI show a dramatic decline in violent crimes this past year — despite MAGA claims of an imaginary crime wave.

And it gets even better…

According to the data, murder and non-negligent manslaughter plummeted by close to 12% between 2022 and 2023, a drop that constitutes the largest in decades.

Rapes dropped by over 9% and violent crime overall dropped by 3%. Property crime dropped by 2.4%.

Yes, it definitely gets better and better.

In Demand

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

I have so many talks that I often have no time to look up the topic until an hour before the actual talk. Sometimes, the talk begins and the listeners say they’d rather do Q&A, which I welcome.

I’m not complaining. It’s good to be in demand.

Q&A about Borscht

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

The only “green borscht” I know of is the Russian soup called щи. I never made it but I do know that the original recipe is very complicated. You must use pickled cabbage, then freeze the whole thing and thaw it 3 days later. I don’t put pickled cabbage in soups, and the whole thing sounds weird to me.

A real borscht must have beets, cabbage, and potatoes. Anything else is not a borscht, and I insist on this statement. It’s like “vegan Schnitzel” or “meatless pot roast.” A true abomination, in my view.

Inspirational Thought of the Day

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

For when you feel defeated and tell yourself that something is impossible:

Q&A: Amorous Accounting

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

Here’s the thing.

Who’s doing the counting and for what purpose?

You know what’s in your heart. Are you living in the marriage of your dreams? Clearly not if the question comes up.

What counts, what doesn’t count are childish questions. An adult would ask, why isn’t my personal life working? How can I improve the situation? Where am I failing and why? That you even formulated the question this way is a huge red flag. This is not how adults think about themselves.

I highly recommend looking into what keeps you trapped in the childish persona. That is probably the root of the problems, be they personal or professional.

There is a connection between these “emotional affairs” and psychological immaturity. The participants need to feel that they have transgressed the mandate of a strict adult. It’s a teenage rebellion of sorts. There’s no strict parent any more but they still need the dynamic because they don’t know how to manage their lives as adults, without fear of punishment and occasional clandestine sorties into the freedom they see as forbidden fruit.

Laughing in Another Language

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

This is one of the most fascinating things I’ve seen all week. A short video showing how Voldemort’s laugh was dubbed in different languages:

https://twitter.com/Arteymas_/status/1837841230350139766?t=DXv7-mgRsRzNh1R7Bz3Ndg&s=19

Listening to the video confirmed that I’m a native speaker of Russian because that’s the laugh that sounded the most natural to me.

I’ve detested my native language since childhood, which has resulted in me choosing my profession and trying to escape into other languages.

Being a linguistically minded person who’s really into language but who feels animosity towards their own is quite an experience, let me tell you. I’m not saying it’s all bad because, hey, it makes me a living and it’s really cool to be multilingual. Most people have no idea what it’s like to be near-native in several languages. But I have no idea what it’s like to feel towards my own language like I feel towards Spanish or English.

The Captive Audience

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

Harris’s favorability increased dramatically due to absolute nothing she did besides becoming a Dem candidate through no effort of her own. The media told the public they must love her, and the public obediently did.

Nobody who remembers the COVID era can be surprised. There’s a significant part of the population that will saw off its own arm if the  TV tells them to.

Most curiously, these are always the people who love the dumb cliché “critical thinking.”

The Curse of Wordiness

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

I’m reading this Spanish dissertation, and I’m thinking that my thesis advisor would have rightfully murdered and dismembered me if I’d produced such a wordy, repetitive 520-page-long tome. Would have been acquitted, too, in all probability.

The dissertation is not bad, actually, even though the author is far far FAR left. But it is ever so repetitive, God, I read the exact same sentence about how “we don’t live in the best of possible worlds” at least 6 times already.

Spanish-speakers, have you considered that everybody prefers to read Anglo authors not because of “cultural hegemony” but because you can’t get to the goshdarn point?

Sleepover Curiosity

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

We are hosting a mini sleepover for a child of a MAGA Dad and a pro-Harris BLM Mom. I don’t hover (to put it mildly) but I’m very curious how a political discussion with this guest might go.