What?? There will be no more House of Cards because Kevin Spacey might have bumped into somebody back in 1988? 

Why not cancel all Hollywood movies instead since Weinstein is a proven dick and all of Hollywood was complicit? Why cancel a good show instead?

Is this simply an excuse and the show is cancelled because of Trump?

The union leader says the strike is the last resort and nobody wants to strike. And I’m like, hey, I totally want to strike. I’ve never struck and I want the experience. I don’t know why people are so afraid of striking. Especially in an egregious situation like ours. 

So yesterday was the first time I went trick-or-treating. It wasn’t supposed to be done yesterday. We went out for a walk and got swept up in the general excitement. Klara absolutely loved it. She doesn’t understand the concept of candy yet but she enjoyed seeing so many people out in the streets. “More people!” she’d say whenever we found ourselves in a less busy street. “More again! More again people!” It’s very strange to think that N and I produced a sociable child. 

I discovered that Halloween is a male thing. Men put portable fire pits outside and sit next to them with candy for the kids and beer for themselves. Some have buddies over, roll out huge screens, and watch sports or news. Even crusty old bachelors do it, which is very cute. 

All Klara wanted to do this morning was to talk about trick-or-treaters. She will be in the school parade today and then they’ll have a party. What a great holiday.

Kids in this country are amazing. Whenever they approached our house to trick-or-treat and saw I was holding a toddler, they’d remove their scary masks and other spooky parts of their costumes in order to avoid scaring her. Then I’d ask them to put it all back because Klara is too little to get scared and she loves all of the Halloween stuff, especially zombies and scary clowns.

The point, though, is that they’d know that it’s important not to scare the toddler and would make an effort to be kind. I come from a place where kids and adults would invariably do the exact opposite and go out of their way to be mean. 

I forgot to add that what I discussed in the previous post is a response to Trump’s tightening of the H1B reqs. Universities don’t want to risk hiring somebody only to find out, in the middle of the academic year, that their paperwork didn’t come through. Before, college professors’ H1Bs were expedited, so you had the paperwork before starting work. So I’m not blaming these schools in any way. 

Also, I need to add that as somebody who had a close personal experience with H1B, I don’t in the least mind people who think that in difficult times you protect your own and that these jobs should be for citizens first. What I do mind are the idiots who claim that such measures exist to help the H1B applicants themselves because having the H1B would somehow lead to their exploitation. No, it won’t help these folks to be deported against their will. It will help those who will face fewer competitors on the job market. 

I prefer honest protectionism to mealy-mouthed, insincere “I’m doing it for your good, you dummy” pronouncements. No, these measures don’t help immigrants. They help locals. And that’s ok as long as everybody is honest about it. I hate, hate, hate the people who want to use Trump to clear the field of competition while faking outrage over Trump’s position.

I also detest folks who are outraged by the border wall yet are all in favor of dramatically reducing the H1B. Their hypocrisy is extremely off-putting.

For the first time, some universities are warning job applicants for Assistant Professor positions that they won’t be helping them get H1B visas. This effectively means that immigrants without green cards shouldn’t apply. 

Knowing what the job market is for people entering the profession, I can’t even blame such universities.

Somehow Klara has already figured out that papa and mama require entirely different strategies of handling. When I come into her room in the morning, I hear that no, she doesn’t want any milk, and she doesn’t want to get dressed, and she really doesn’t want to get changed, and all she wants is night-night, but no, she doesn’t want any night-night, she wants Baby, no, she wants monkey, no, she doesn’t want them, she wants books, no, she doesn’t want books, etc. 

When N is the one to get her up in the morning, she cheerfully accepts the bottle, the change, the toothbrush, the clothes, and everything else. And when I ask N, “So how did it go? Was it exhausting?”, he says that it went perfectly and he has no idea what I’m complaining about.

It’s a conspiracy to make me feel inadequate.

The way propaganda works is that you tell people what they want to hear and casually slip in one or two little things that you want them to hear. 

Let’s say you want to turn public opinion against the union at University X. What you do is join discussions that have nothing to do with the union and whose participants don’t know much and don’t care about it. And then you begin to agree with them, trying to imitate their speech patterns as much as possible.

“You are absolutely right! Trump is such a disaster for this country. And that extremely corrupt family of his? Gosh, it feels like it’s posoning the whole country with its rot. There’s this union at University X – and by the way, I’m completely a union person, and always have been – but this union, it’s completely corrupt in the worst Trumpian manner. And hey, did you see that he’s completely dismantling EPA?”

And then you do the same thing among people discussing the political situation in France, the economy of Indiana, and the results of the recent football game. 

The second time people hear of your union, they will already have a warm and fuzzy memory of a person who has really convincing beliefs and original, valuable ideas telling them the truth about this horrible union. 

I saw this unfold when the war in Ukraine started. Good, wonderful, well-meaning people were reciting outlandish propaganda at me. They had nothing against Ukraine but they were completely convinced by these smart, persuasive folks who told them everything they wanted to hear about things that really mattered to them. Unlike some silly conflict in some boring Ukraine. 

People want to belong. You agree with them on something they care about, and they will gladly repay by agreeing with you on something they don’t see as very important.

Ah, so now it’s the season of “I’m hugely victimized by that time in 1988 when nothing whatsoever happened between me and Kevin Spacey” stories. 

It’s our fault because we all fed these trolls.

I was at a party today at the house of an elementary school teacher and a professor from my school. They have an enormous, beautiful ranch out in the country with incredible views. They are from the area which makes it easier, but still, it’s good to see that a guy who teaches small kids and a woman who works for a state college in a broke state can live so well.

I was invited to the party by people who are not in academia, by the way. Only the couple who invited me and my family weren’t Trump supporters there. Everybody else was. Not that anybody talked about politics. 

Now we are wondering why we didn’t buy a house out in the country. It’s impossibly beautiful there. And we saw cows, which made Klara very happy. I still can’t get over how fat cows are on this continent. Cows back in Ukraine looked very emaciated.