Children hate to answer strings of questions. More than one, or at most two, questions, and they become upset and resentful.

The reason is that children need predictable, well-defined roles. A child wants everybody to play their expected role to reduce the anxiety children feel when coming into contact with a complicated, confusing world.

In the adult-child interaction, the role of the adult is to answer questions and explain how everything works. Once an adult reverts the positions and starts firing off questions, the child perceives this as a betrayal. All of a sudden, you have flipped the roles and turned yourself into a questioning kid, pushing the child into the role of an adult. And the child doesn’t want that role.

As a child grows up, he will start trying out the role of “the person who has the answers”. This experimentation will probably be limited to a single sphere (a favorite activity or sport) and has to be initiated by the child.

Short version: they aren’t trying to be annoying when they go mute and resentful in response to your questions. They are trying to help you go back to being an adult.

The calls to stop the violence and spare the civilians in Israel are so dishonest it beggars belief people are making them. There is no conflict without the participation of two different sides. What’s the point of calling for a ceasefire when only a few days ago Hamas murdered 2,000 civilians, showing it’s not planning to cease anything and has a particular enmity towards civilians?

It’s exactly like the calls to deescalate and seek peace with Russia. How one is supposed to deescalate unilaterally and seek peace where none is offered or remotely desired is never explained.

These “pro-peace” utterances are nothing but virtue-signaling. “I’m against war! Look at how noble I am!” Everybody is against war, you absolute snowflake, until a bomb hits their building and an armed savage shows up on their doorstep.

I just found out that last year’s Nobel Prize winner was cancelled by the IMF for stating that there’s no climate emergency.

The part that interests me in this is the IMF. Back when we had the “climate strikes” on campuses, the people who participate thought they were rebellious, countercultural and cool. And in reality they gave their time and effort to the IMF. For free.

This is really funny. I mean, earnest progressives doing grunt work for the IMF. You gotta love this.

At the risk of being deeply unoriginal, I hate bureaucracy. I found an extremely elegant, easy, money-saving solution for the problem of our Arabic course that suddenly lost its instructor. But the administration forbade me to proceed because, and I quote, “we’ve never done it this way”.

Well, obviously, we’ve never done this. It’s an extraordinary situation and I’m trying to solve it inventively. They aren’t offering any solutions of their own, so I tried to be creative. But no. Everybody is paralyzed with fear of innovation and creativity.

As I keep saying, it’s all lies about the corporatization of higher education. In a business setting, I’d be getting a bonus for figuring this out on my own and requesting zero additional money. We are given zero space for innovation. Everybody just stares at me with big, terrified eyes like the mouse in an old Soviet joke* and intones, “but we’ve never done it this way!”

* The joke goes as follows:

An elephant is walking through a jungle at night and sees a pair of gigantic eyes staring at him.

“Who is this?” he asks, terrified.

“I’m a mouse”, the owner of the eyes responds in a tiny voice.

“But why are your eyes so huge?” asks the elephant.

“I’m pooping”, says the mouse.

Welcome to my reality. I’ve been repeating like a trained parrot since 2014 that nobody wants, expects or asks for US soldiers to go fight in Ukraine. Nobody proposes, suggests or desires it. But this strawman refuses to die.

Living with a Russian, it always gets to this:

During the past week, woke has suffered its biggest blow so far. It’s a self-inflicted blow, and it’s very severe. Woke is losing the Jews. Greeting terror attacks in Israel with glee at worst and “yes but” at best is causing a mass disillusionment of the most active and productive faction of the left.

Once the Jews are gone, what’s left on the far left (pardon the pun) will be massively ineffectual and useless.

Now is a great time not to antagonize these suddenly politically homeless Jews by saying anything deeply moronic.

People keep complaining about Musk’s Twitter but I don’t get the complaints because it’s become dramatically better.

“Community notes” are an excellent feature.

There is tons less censorship from the platform itself. I can write a lot more freely when before I was constantly banned or moderated for anti-Russian speech.

The algorithm is so much better because it isn’t constantly trying to show me stuff I don’t want and need. Recommendations are relevant for the first time since I started using the platform.

The capacity to watch long video shows on the platform grew in front of our eyes, it was amazing.

I’m using it a lot more now that the platform stopped trying to expand my horizons by sticking woke content into my feed. I can now go for weeks without getting any stuff I don’t want to see.

With everything happening, I almost forgot to say congratulations to Australians. Nice to see a whole continent finally grow a pair.

Good for you, Australians. Welcome on the other side. It’s all going to be better from now on.

[For those who don’t know, 60% of Australians rejected woke amendments to the constitution in a referendum that the MSM, celebrities and corporate overlords tried to ram down people’s gullets. If even the long-suffering Australians have had enough, wokeness it’s well and truly dead].