I predict that the fifth season of House of Cards will flop. The characters look like timid goody-two-shoes types fresh out of a career of saving homeless kitties compared with what’s really sitting in the White House. 

Seriously, the Underwoods look quaintly classy and cutely intellectual in comparison. Who could have thought the show would turn into an idealized depiction of an impossibly good White House. 

But hey, the maligned Tuvel is just as freaky as her persecutors. This is how she defines her research:

My research lies at the intersection of critical race, feminist and animal ethics. Throughout my research, I have considered several ways in which animals, women and racially subordinated groups are oppressed.

Just wow. 

Who are these freakazoids?

Folks, if you want to have a good laugh, head over here to read about a bunch of philosophers making a total asses of themselves.

 Just to give you a small taste, an actual professor of philosophy who seems to be employed somewhere for some incomprehensible reason complains about a scholarly article she didn’t like:

Tuvel enacts violence and perpetuates harm in numerous ways throughout her essay.

Yes, somebody hired this person for an actual job. 

There can’t possibly be any shortage of tenure track positions if people of this intellectual caliber are employed. 

Thank you so much, you group of brainless dicks, for making all academics look like total twats by association. Would it be so hard to keep the dumb statements about violence-enacting essays between yourselves and your psychiatrists?

N asked if there is an equivalent of Shark Tank in Russia. 

The answer is that no, there can’t be anything like that. If the Russian equivalent of Mark Cuban and Kevin O’Leary* saw a small business they liked, they’d simply take it and the owner would have to be grateful to stay in one piece. 

This is why nobody starts businesses in Russia. It’s an oligopoly where everything belongs to the oligarchs in some form. And the drug addiction rates among young people are insane because there’s nothing else to do. 

* There can’t be a Russian Lori Grenier, of course, because she is a woman.

For those of us who can’t eat bread any longer, this is a great, super easy to make, low calorie alternative. 

You need parchment paper muffin liners, or they’ll stick. 

Place your favorite veggies in the muffin liners. I put plum tomatoes, spinach and shredded kale. 

For 12 mini muffins , mix 2 cups of garbanzo flour with a little over 2 cups of water. Add a bit if salt, a teaspoon of baking powder, and your favorite seasoning. Pour the batter into the veggies and bake for 30 minutes. And that’s It!

They are totally like real bread. I should have put more tomatoes because the muffins turned out a bit too bready for me. 

Let’s see if Klara likes them. 

Poor dumb Russians are still debating if it’s time to bury Lenin. I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean literally. Lenin’s mummified corpse is lying in a building in the Red Square, and the idiot fuckers have been unable to decide if it’s OK to lay the fellow to rest.

This has got to be decided soon because the Russians who were born after 1991 have no idea who Lenin is, so if he’s not buried now, younger generations wouldn’t know what to do with an identified, confusing dead body.

It’s very symbolic that at the center of Russia there is an unburied corpse.

We are very fortunate because our Klara sleeps from 8 pm to 8 am every night. Plus, she does 2 naps, 1,5 hour each during the day when she’s at home (daycare only has 1 nap). Of course, I wear her out during the day: art project, walking practice, music and dancing, manners lesson, English lesson, reading, toy cart pushing, exploring nature when weather permits. 

Even an academic can delegate quite a few things to free herself up for research and intellectual growth. 

There is a mountain of empty verbiage on our professional websites, but never any good, practical advice of the kind I routinely get on Inc.com. One such piece of advice is to find 3 tasks I can delegate each week. It’s 7:30 am on Monday, and I already found 2 out of 3. 

One can also delegate very well at home, by the way.

The really sad thing about Tartt is that she can write. There are some very strong pages in this endless novel. She writes in a poignant and sincere way about the hopelessness of the post-bubble landscapes. She could write valuable stuff about the suffering of the economic downturn. 

But there is a problem that keeps tripping Tartt up and preventing her from developing into a passable author. She is obsessed with writing in a voice of a young man who is an alcoholic and / or a drug addict and who goes on for hundreds of extremely repetitive pages, narrating how he gets drunk and high. 

Tartt’s fixation on describing alcoholic stupor in interminable detail betrays some sort of a personal issue with booze and drugs that the writer unleashes onto her readers instead of onto a therapist. Readers end up paying to witness the spectacle of a traumatized writer obsessively baring her trauma in a way that is unlikely to bring her any true relief. Tartt has made a lucrative career out of her dysfunction, which tells us a lot about the readers who feed her popularity. 

I’m not similarly afflicted, which is why I will not be giving this writer another chance. 

McGuigan doesn’t work within the framework of the nation-state erosion, which makes his work very interesting to me because it adds a completely different dimension.

His account of what we are seeing is that capitalism had to adopt some welfare arrangements to make itself more palatable to people after the excesses of the wild capitalist stage of the 19th century and the resulting social upheavals. 

Then, capitalism found another way to seduce people into allegiance and there was no more need to placate anybody with welfare. So the welfare protections are being rolled back. The seductive strategies of “cool capitalism” are what McGuigan studies.