Category: Uncategorized

“Klarochka, tomorrow do you prefer to go to church or to the farm to look at ponies, and little chicks, and baby goats, and then we could have a picnic…”

“Church!”

“At the farm, there’s a really big sandbox, and there are bicycles and toy excavators and…”

“Church!!”

“And there’s a butterfly garden…”

“Church!!!! We haven’t been to church for a very long time because we’ve been away on vacation. I need to go to church, Mommy!”

People here have been hinting that I’m making her go but she turned out to be a very Midwestern kid. She loves farming but church comes first.

There’s Uber in Minsk, folks. Uber in Minsk! This gives me a lot of hope for Minsk. If you know anything about the situation in Belarus, you’ll understand me.

We had our Belarus friends over today and they told us. They have the cutest accents.

This is the table before the food was served.

Want to attend a tech conference? Agree to get monitored everywhere and at all times, including in the toilet and in bed.

The saddest part is that almost everybody will put on the bracelets and accept the surveillance. If everybody said no, that would be it. But these are techie folks. They don’t tend to have the balls to stand up to this kind of thing.

What I really don’t get is the utterly insane practice of counting high school courses as college courses. Students come out of high school with two years of college already “done” when in reality they’ve done nothing but attend high school. We are supposed to take these two completely fake years of college seriously and let them graduate in two years. This is completely crazy.

I don’t know of any other country that allows two last years if high school to count as college. In Canada, there’s CEGEP but you do that after graduating high school.

We had a presentation by the admissions office people yesterday, and the numbers are crazy. This fake college credit is being assigned to crowds of students. As we were told, it’s normal to graduate high school with an Associate degree. What’s next, then? Counting kindergarten towards the PhD?

Why can’t everything count for itself? High school is high school. College is college. The worst part is that these high school courses we are forced take seriously and give college credit for are total shit. They are nothing like an actual college course.

So. The Office of Diversity and Inclusion asked me to give an hour-long talk titled “Hispanic History, Culture, Art, and Values.”

One. Hour. Long.

There’s truly nobody who despises other cultures more than lovers of diversity. Honestly, folks. How’d you feel about an hour-long talk titled “History, Culture, Art, and Values of the English-speaking World”?

This hurts my feelings. I’ve spent the last 20 years studying “Hispanic History, Culture, Art, and Values,” I’ve lived and breathed this stuff for two decades and my knowledge is still minuscule, microbic, speck-like compared to what there is. This is a beautiful, enormous, majestic culture. It spans continents and centuries. Just the variety of language alone is a subject one could discuss for hours, days, months. These are many countries, many different time periods, artists, events, are you fucking kidding me?

Hey, have you read the Bible? Can you retell it in a couple of sentences?

I just can’t even. These people.

Found this over at Mike’s blog:

Watching the returns come in from that Floridian hotel room, alone, with no bars open that I could get to, is one of the gloomiest memories I have.

And what I wouldn’t give now to have a hapless rascal like W back.

— Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) August 16, 2019

I’m as frustrated with these idiot dumbasses as Mike. Iraq war vs nasty tweets? You gotta be kidding me.

Why is it so hard for so many people to dislike Trump in a way that doesn’t turn them into babbling fools? I recently saw somebody go on and on about how Trump is into violence while Obama was kind, gentle, and a saint. If the poster had stopped before making the ridiculous comparison and wording it this way, that would be one thing. But these people can never stop.

From the NYTimes:

Discuss a recent instance of police brutality in your community. Read op-eds arguing for and against legal status for unauthorized immigrants. Compare and contrast border conditions in the Palestinian territories and Mexico. Those are some of the lesson plans suggested in a draft of California’s newly proposed ethnic studies curriculum for K-12 public schools. The documents have led to bitter debate in recent weeks over whether they veer into left-wing propaganda.

Yes, what a mystery. Is “critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism and other forms of power and oppression” left-wing propaganda? Hmmm, how can I possibly answer this. Let’s debate some more.

We all know how I feel about homeschooling, but seeing this, I can’t condemn anybody who’d choose that option. It’s easy not to care when you can pay for private but what if you can’t and still want to preserve some dignity?

Because let me tell you as somebody who was educated this way in the USSR. This kind of contemptuous brainwashing doesn’t make you stupid or convince you of anything. But it destroys your dignity. You just don’t feel about yourself the same way as you would without it.

This is even more humiliating and offensive in the US than it was in the USSR because you, folks, work like dogs compared to how we lived. You work and work and pay taxes, so for you to get shat on in this way is more painful.

Why you put up with this is a mystery.