Inside Higher Ed published a painfully pathetic letter to Trump. Scroll down to the closing lines if you are not in the mood for lengthy exercises in servility.

But hey, Chronicle of Higher Ed is even worse. See this ridiculous article about Jane Austen and the alt-right.

I hate it when stories about horrible parents are masked as stories about immigration laws. Yes, immigration laws need a lot of work. But no law can give one good parents instead of this sort of freak.

Does food consumption have higher entry barriers than music consumption? I don’t think so but I don’t consume music. 

LiveJournal goes anti-gay. 

If you haven’t seen the first official portrait of our First Lady, you’ve totally got to. I promise, you’ll laugh for an hour. Poor dumb broad. 

The “good tsar” narrative about Trump. 

I never thought I would be interested in reading a long article on Marvel Comics but this one was good and I read the whole thing. 

All of the university libraries in Illinois are suffering because of our lack of state budget. Scholarly books published since 2015 (which are the ones that I need) aren’t getting bought by libraries. So I can’t order them from other university libraries. Our own collection is pathetically tiny but I used to be able to rely  on other college libraries in the state.

When / if we finally get a budget, nobody will give us extra funds to close the gaping hole in the library collections that is being formed right now. Libraries are living organisms. You can’t treat them this way or they begin to die. Which, I’m sure, is not something that a creature like Rauner is capable of understanding.

After the strike on Syria, all of the Russian dissidents immediately and decisively fell in love with Trump. Now I can’t read the Russian-language part of my newsfeed at all.

These people are so facile.

“My doctor told me I have to go back on the low-carb diet,” I told my mother.

“And I’m on the Ukrainian diet,” she said. “It means I eat often and in huge portions.”

Turns out that the Democrats are not doing anything to renew the party and create a fresh vision for it because they are convinced they are guaranteed to win all elections from now on anyway. They believe that if they repeat constantly “OMG, did you hear the horrible things Trump said / did / tweeted today”, that will be enough for them to destroy Republicans forever. 

Of course, the strategy turned to be a failure during the presidential election but they expect it to be a big hit in 2018.

This explains a lot. I thought that everything I’ve been seeing was deranged but no, there turned out to be a simple explanation. Liberals sincerely believe Trump is their ticket to complete domination of national politics because he’s bound to screw up so badly that they will look angelic in comparison. 

There are only 3 positions on bloody foreign comflicts:

1. Let’s try to solve the issue and bring peace at the risk of making the conflict worse. 

2. Let’s do nothing to resolve the conflict but shuffle the victims around the planet as refugees. 

3. Let’s do nothing to resolve the conflict and seal off the conflict area so that nobody can escape as a refugee. 

All positions are deeply flawed. Nobody has a moral high ground here, and it would be good if people were a bit more humble on an issue that is tragic and that has no solution right now. 

If I see one more dense creature make the dumb point of “How can Trump say he cares about Syrian children if he’s against letting in Syrian refugees?”, I’ll kill my Facebook. 

Believing that shuffling people around the globe is not an ideal approach and that it might make more sense to solve the problem that makes them want to flee their homes is not an unreasonable position. The ways of solving that problem might be inadequate, bad, failing, etc. But the position itself is not insane. And since nobody even tried to articulate an alternative, there is zero use in trying to denounce it with such shallow, Facebookish arguments. 

My immigration preparation booklet informed me that the US is a capitalist country where vendors and customers negotiate prices of goods. I’m off to the supermarket to put my new knowledge in practice and try to negotiate the price of tomatoes. 

MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” finished the Week of March 27 as the most-watched show in cable news among the key demographic of adults age 25-54.

Just when I got fed up and stopped watching. I can never run with a trend, it seems. But I couldn’t take any more stale revelations about Russians.