When students in my Spanish courses address me as señora, it really bugs me. These are non-native students, of course.
But when the French students say “bonjour, madame”, I find it charming.
Category: Uncategorized
The Art of a Bad Deal
These are the “Russian dissidents” Biden got from Putin in exchange for assassins and spies:
Three minutes out of captivity, and already working on behalf of the Putin regime. What a great deal. Importing Russian propagandists will definitely show those other Russian propagandists how opposed we are to Russian propagandists.
Here’s another so-called dissident busily fellating Putin immediately upon US-organized release:
These “dissidents” found no other topic of discussion than rubbishing the US for its supposed unfairness against Russia. We’ve got crowds of our own citizen bitching incessantly about America. What was the urgent need to bring in more?
Tide Has Turned
Taffy Brodesser-Ackner is the author of one of the most exuberantly woke novels I ever read. It was published in 2020, and I wasn’t going to give this writer a second chance. When her new book came out last month, though, I decided to try it. And guess what? Brodesser-Ackner is now poking fun at the wokesters she worshipped only 4 years ago.
Here’s her description of a militant left-winger who is trying to impose ideological conformity on a Hollywood movie studio:
She was eager to “disrupt” even the most well-planned ongoing storylines and general, viewer-loved plot points with every social issue she could think of: sexual violence, sexual freedom, sexual terrorism, feminism, racial tension, voting rights, sex positivity, period positivity, pronoun use. Anya had created what she called a “Diversity Worksheet,” a veritable bingo board of these issues that each production should aim to include three of in each season: suicide, mental illness, guns, healthcare for all, “grooming,” border walls, segregation in schools, redlining, roofies, endometriosis, body positivity, Donald Trump’s tax returns, homophobia, Islamophobia, Islamophilia, juicing, “the refugee situation,” voter suppression, the prevalence of HPV. Plus there were five different kinds of abortion—second-term, back-alley, legal, accidental (!), third-term—that she wanted the shows to address. Anya could not get enough of the various ways there were to abort a pregnancy.
Long Island Compromise
Brodesser-Ackner writes about and for wealthy people. And it looks like they’ve tired from the earnestness of “social justice” and are ready to poke fun at it.
Weird Soviet Foods
The weirdest Soviet foods I remember are as follows:
A. Boiled potato sandwiches. You slice boiled potatoes and place them on bread with some salt and pepper on top.
B. Watermelon rind jam. It was not at all bad-tasting, by the way. In the same family is candy made out of sugared orange peel.
C. Canned pasta. People were so into canning that when there was nothing else to can, they’d can cooked pasta in some weird liquid. It was like Chef Boyardee but in glass jars. Disgusting, both visually and taste-wise.
D. Of course, there’s also the famous Olivier salad that was a rendering of the signature dish of a French chef in cheap Soviet ingredients. The Olivier salad is such an atrocious mix of ingredients that even Spanish cuisine pales in comparison. I adore it, though, even knowing how exceptionally unhealthy it is.
E. Pasta with sugar. My family never reached such levels of poverty but among the even less fortunate it was popular to eat cooked pasta with a generous sprinkling of sugar. Nobody heard of pasta sauce. Cheese and butter were a distant dream, so this was a way to make the sad, grey-colored and very sticky Soviet pasta slide in better.
Change in Narrative
The great theorists of neoliberal subjectivity formation, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval said that destroying symbolic forms brings about mass psychosis. They also called the need to normalize all forms of exotically transgressive behaviors a clinical perversion. They were equally harsh with the belief that going through sex partners like Kleenex is in any way liberating. And the idea that you can change sex through medical procedures evoked deep derision from them
That very left-wing thinkers spoke like this as recently as 2009 is truly something to ponder.
Situational Thinking
Scholz is extremely hard to pressure. This means that very extensive work was put into pressuring him, and for what? To get a release for a bunch of Russians Putin jailed? To motivate him to jail more?
The Kremlin assassins and spies were greeted with extraordinary pomp and circumstance by Putin. This is a mega victory for the Kremlin because tiny potatoes were swapped for huge fish.
Nobody’s thinking beyond instant gratification. There’s no long-term vision, no strategy. Everything is completely situational.
Work Stuff
Hey, I’m yet to meet one person who works an office job at the office and does it. I definitely don’t do it.
Nor is anybody supposed to, by the way.
The Purpose of the Frenzy
This is why there could be no primaries for Kamala. This is not a bad moment. She’s always like this when she’s not reading from a teleprompter. This is why the Democrats resisted replacing Biden with her for so long.
Every effort is being made right now to whip up enough of a frenzy among the base that Kamala’s… special qualities pass unnoticed. And people are such lemmings that they participate eagerly.
Sublime
I have traveled, written books, received degrees, awards and medals, spoken to large audiences, and experienced intense joys of art appreciation. But I have not found an occupation more sublimely delightful than getting up at 7 am to make vegetable soup for my daughter’s breakfast.
Yes, she likes soup for breakfast.
Faint Praise
I’m sorry, people, it’s too funny, I simply must leave it here:
Look at the account posting this gem. They beamed it proudly to their millions of followers. “Marco Rubio says he doesn’t remember minding her too much! Let’s tell everybody!”
This gives a whole new definition to the word “needy”.
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