Wait, what?

Charlie Kirk, a legend in truth telling and fighting evil, has been shot while giving a speech at Utah Valley University (UVU) in Provo Utah. It looks as though he was shot in the neck… still waiting details. pic.twitter.com/d57dzMMXwL

— Rusty Lindquist (@RustyLindquist) September 10, 2025

I hope he survives. This is atrocious.

In good news, Keturah has finally given birth, about 5 months after what she thought was the due date. I’m understandably nervous about early September births, so it’s a great relief that the baby and the mother are fine.

In the meantime, Russia is attacking Poland with suicide drones. The sky over Warsaw is closed. Dutch, Italian, and Polish fighter jets are trying to shoot down the Russian drones.

I’d love to hear what people who like the word “escalation” gave to say.

No, I don’t because they are incapable of thinking with their ossified brains.

Cliff Arroyo, I hope you are safe, please confirm.

There were no Daniel Pennys on the train where Iryna Zarutska was murdered. People sat there indifferently while she bled to death.

Finally, two minutes after the stabbing, when it was already too late to save Iryna’s life, one man and one woman came up to try to stem the flow of blood. Others stood there and filmed. Or walked out indifferently.

The New York Times finally published a story about Iryna. It refers to her as white she her murderer as Black. There’s no honor for the victims even in death.

Here’s the guy filming the death:

I hope somebody identifies him.

Aside from the question on why I want to shoot drug dealers on sight (which I absolutely do not), I’m getting excellent questions these days. Thank you, this is an excellent one.

There was never any language issue in Ukraine. If you heard of one prior to 2022, that was all propaganda. Words can’t describe how utterly indifferent everybody in Ukraine was to what language anybody spoke before February 2022. The overwhelming majority spoke Russian but could switch into Ukrainian whenever they wanted to.

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022, things changed. People have been wounded, lost loved ones, lived under occupation, have been displaced, sat in bomb shelters. They are being told endlessly by Russians that this is done because of the Russian language. It’s not shocking that many people now feel a visceral hatred for this language. Imagine spending your nights in a bomb shelter for 3 years over a language. How’d you feel?

As a result, many formerly Russian-speaking Ukrainians can’t hear the sounds of this language. Everybody who could, switched to Ukrainian. Among those who are under the age of 30, you will not find any Russian speakers.

Of course, not everybody can switch. Imagine if you had to switch to a different language right now. It’s an enormously difficult and painful proposition. Imagine abandoning all of your favorite jokes, snippets of songs, wordplay, movie quotes, idioms. The older you are, the more cultural baggage you carry. Dropping it all and inscribing yourself into a completely different culture, one that even swears in an entirely different way*, is a Herculean endeavor. It’s also very painful. But seeing daily reports of raped toddlers is more painful, so people keep trying to tear themselves out of any connection with the culture capable of such horror.

Curiously, the most Russian-speaking group of non-elderly Ukrainians right now is the soldiers fighting on the front lines. They don’t have to show their patriotism in additional ways, so they are more indifferent to the language they speak.

I don’t think there’s any going back to the young people in Ukraine not hating the Russian language. That all was buried under the rubble of Mariupol and Bakhmut. I think that’s fine because it’s not much of a language to begin with. I say that as a native speaker who spent a lifetime learning other languages because Russian is so flat and inexpressive.

*Russian swearing is sexual while Ukrainian is scatological. Putting it bluntly, they refer to the sexual act in their swearing, while we refer to the process of excretion.

Facing growing political pressure, Texas A&M University President Mark A. Welsh III announced Monday evening that the dean and department head overseeing a children’s literature course at the center of a viral recording were going to be removed, saying they approved plans to teach material inconsistent with the published course description.

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/08/texas-am-video-professor-student-gender-identity-content/

The material that this person was teaching was absolutely inappropriate and wrong but what do the department head and the dean have to do with it? I have absolutely no idea what my faculty members are teaching. Neither does our dean. We aren’t a high school. There are no “approved materials.” I can’t imagine the Dean I currently have approving much of what I say about socialism, US foreign policy, mass migration, etc. But so what? It’s my academic freedom. He wouldn’t dare make a peep about my materials and assigned readings. And that’s good.

The problem here is not with course materials.

From the videos of the incident, it’s clear that the faculty member who taught the course is a crap teacher outside of any ideological considerations. She has no understanding of basic pedagogy and doesn’t know how to engage productively with a student who challenges her politely. We all have students who challenge what we say in class. Knowing how to respond in a way that advances our teaching goals is Pedagogy 101. If you can’t even do that, what can you do?

I love students who contradict me in class. It shows that they are engaged. They care. They want to participate. And I’m not always right. I have apologized on various occasions, saying, “you are absolutely right, my mistake. Thank you for pointing it out.” I love such moments because they are wonderful for establishing trust and rapport with students.

I have had students challenge me aggressively, especially when I was a much younger, early-career academic. Every time, I handled it with dignity, understanding, and kindness. It never occurred to me to throw a student out. In the end, every such student apologized and shared the reasons that drove them to this behavior. I once had a student, strung out on meth, curse me out and threaten me in the classroom. The week after that, she was weeping in my office, telling me how much she appreciated that I didn’t “fuck me up like I fucking deserved for being such a stupid fuck.” I was 24, and this was my first year teaching college. And still, I handled it professionally.

The A&M student who started the hullabaloo is a dream student. She’s polite, articulate, well-spoken. If the Dean and the department head deserve removal, it’s not because of the materials, for which they bear no responsibility, but because they aren’t doing faculty development. Every semester you should be doing something to improve everybody’s pedagogical skills. Including your own. Or you end up with faculty who can’t handle the most basic situations in the classroom.

In one of the videos of the incident, the faculty member (I’m very unconvinced she’s a professor) says “I’m the authority in this classroom.” Dude, only people with zero authority have to say they are the authority. You can’t demand respect. You must generate it. You gain authority by behaving like one.

It’s embarrassing to watch this faculty member flail pathetically like teaching was invented 15 minutes ago and she’s trying to figure it out on the spot. That’s why I don’t think she has tenure. If she does, the university must revise its entire tenure-granting process.

P.S. I googled this “professor”, and I was right. She’s a senior lecturer. Not even an instructor. This is why you want professors, and not a troop of contingent laborers with zero interest in teaching, to work in higher education. Again, none of this is about ideology for me. This is simply an issue of being unqualified for the job.

order your groceries. saves an extra 1-2 hours a week. compounded, thats 50-100 hours a year. a whole week work of work you gain. i promise that time is more important then the $10 delivery fee

— zek (@zekramu) September 4, 2025

This is, of course, a completely neoliberal sentiment. The entire tweet is an exemplary emanation of a neoliberalized subjectivity.

However.

This gentleman is not doing neoliberalism right. If you are going to do it, you need to do it correctly. Or you’ll end up on Ambien + shrooms + a battery of antidepressants.

A neoliberal is, at the same time, a manager and the worker whom this manager manages. He’s the field he tills. The resource he cultivates. A field needs to lie fallow on regular occasions. The split psyche has to be tended to daily to mend the rift.

You are a shit manager if you drive your human resource like a plantation overseer. Especially since you are stuck with this human resource for life. Can’t fire him, can’t swap him out for another.

A good neoliberal doesn’t work all, or even most of, the time. He has a battery of unproductive hobbies. He is into charity, mentorship, spiritual stuff, psychological support. Time spent shopping for groceries, cooking, learning to play the violin, visiting the lonely elderly, etc is not wasted but invested into the inner wholeness of the human resource that is the self. Work is not the goal. It’s the by-product of a lifelong tending to the self.

A four-year-old child was allegedly raped and given an STD by a man who is a career criminal. . . “Mr. Jelks, we have arrested six times over the past six years,” Baton Rouge Police Chief TJ Morse said. “He has everything from firearm charges to domestic violence battery, violation of protective orders, and is currently on probation.”. . .

In June 2024, he was arrested for Illegal possession of a stolen firearm, possession of a firearm or carrying of a concealed weapon by a person convicted of certain felonies, resisting an officer, and battery of a dating partner. For those charges, his bond was set at $15,000, and a probation hold was put into place. . . He was released on parole on June 26, 2025.

On August 1, weeks after his latest release, investigators said he raped a four-year-old and gave her Chlamydia.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wafb.com/2025/09/05/i-team-suspect-accused-raping-4-year-old-was-released-prison-weeks-ago/

Something is extremely wrong with our criminal justice system. Career criminals get caught and almost immediately released, so they proceed to commit even worse crimes.

We need a federal 3-strikes law, like they used to have in California. Most violent crime is recidivist. After the third felony, criminals should automatically get a life sentence. We will avoid a gigantic number of violent crimes if this simple and well-tested practice is adopted. There’s no reason not to do it. You can find an extraordinary number of these crimes where the perpetrator was just released on bond, probation, or even without any limitations at all.

Actually, I mocked him for his appearance and voice but he turned out to be a lot better than I expected. The banning of petroleum-based food dyes and the efforts to remove ultra-processed foods from school lunches, in particular, are great policies. So is the effort to remove poisons like soda from SNAP benefits.

In short, he’s turning out much better than I thought. I haven’t been following closely, though. In any case, he can’t be any worse than the people before him who caused everything we are experiencing, right? Any change is bound to be better at this point.

I have no idea why it is so but today I received the largest number of emails, text messages and phone calls than at any other point in my life. I haven’t finished any of the urgent things at work. The two editors-in-chief of my journal are MIA. Angry authors demand answers, so I’ll have to take over these colleagues’ roles tomorrow. A faculty member had a student leave her flute behind in his classroom, and somehow it’s my problem. Another faculty has a spat with her landlord. Another had a household accident. Klara ate my brain out with a tiny tea spoon for hours. We went to the orthodontist, and the wait was enormous, the office hot, and messages kept coming, making my devices ping, vibrate, and buzz like they were in their death throes. At home, I tried to boil eggs but forgot about them for an hour with predictable results.

The day had started well. I have a new cute dress, and I wore it with my artsy Colombian boots. Did some good writing. The lecture went well. But then I came across a colleague who is misery personified and his cosmic unhappiness hit me like a tidal wave. That’s when the insanity began.

On the positive side, I managed to avoid inflicting any physical harm on myself which always happens when I’m overwhelmed.