Astrology is idiotic but this image is so true. N is a Taurus and he can never get enough sleep. You, folks, have no idea what it feels like to get up every night for a baby while your partner sleeps comfortably and then hear the endless stories the next day about how exhausted from all this lack of sleep he is. And placing him 2 floors away from the action has zero effect. “Enough sleep” is simply not a concept that exists in his world. 

Started reading Huntington and got unhappy on page 2. He says Russia supported Serbia in the Yugoslavian conflict because of a cultural affinity they share. That’s a very insane statement. No such affinity exists, and there is no Russian person who’d claim there is. And as a Russian-speaker, I find it deeply aggravating when Americans tell me, “Ah, Ukraine! It’s like Serbia, right?” Both Russia and Ukraine are “like Serbia” in the same way we are “like Australia”. We are all humans, so there’s that commonality but nothing much else. 

Then, as now, the only motivation that Russia had was to troll the US. Trolling is an end in itself. Serbia, schmerbia – who cares, as long as you can stick it to Americans? It’s all about that, all the time. 

This is also an answer to the question of why the Russians promoted Trump’s candidacy. To troll, they did it to troll the US. Let’s not look for complexity where there isn’t one. Russia is like a 9-year-old boy who feels an overpowering need to tug on a girl’s braid.

For those who are interested in parenting books: Haim Ginott’s Between Parent and Child is really good. It should have been used during the Cold War to defeat the Soviets.

Forget the arms race and the star wars. All that Americans needed to do to make the USSR collapse was translate this book into Russian, print a few million copies, and make sure the book got into the hands of the Soviet people. Every Soviet person who was a parent or who had a parent would have immediately suffered an apoplexy, and there would be no USSR any more.

I like the book because it makes me think of things I wouldn’t consider on my own. For instance, there is the really great advice to keep the answers to a child’s questions short. I do have a tendency to answer the simplest questions with an hour-long lecture, and I’m realizing that it might be aggravating to a child.

The best thing about the book is that it teaches parents never to succumb to the temptation to see the child as an enemy or as a little tyrant who is victimizing them. The power is always on the side of the parent 100%, and it is crucial to wield this power with great care. Yes, as I said, Soviet people would not survive even the first two pages.

Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and deplorable folks. I don’t agree, because I’ve been there. Let me tell you something else some of you might not agree with, it wasn’t that Donald Trump won the election, it was that the Democratic Party lost the election.

I didn’t say it (this time.) Bernie Sanders did. I should have supported him more than I did because he’s being very courageous in saying this and very principled. 

But I’m also thankful to Hillary for disappearing from public life. I hope she’s done with it for good.

We just got an email telling us that Rauner will make us pay double in healthcare premiums. For the healthcare we are not getting. 

In 26 days I can finally get off the state healthcare plan. Rauner has achieved his goal with me. He wants to make it so intolerable that we’ll all get off this plan, which means taking a big pay cut. But I can’t keep endangering my health and our credit rating. So I give up. Rauner wins. 

The Diversity Office is conducting an activity where participants walk in high heels “to symbolize what it feels like to be a victim of sexual assault.”

Has anybody here read The Clash of Civilizations? I heard such horrible things about it that I never read it or considered doing so but Bauman ends his last book quoting extensively from it and praising it. Have I been foolish in dismissing the book because there is negative talk about it?

It’s fashionable to fantasize about all sorts of campus horrors. I think we all know why such fantasies are increasingly attractive to many people. 

In order to cater to these needs, “data” is manufactured to unleash regular bouts of media frenzy. One of the subjects of college-related horror fantasies is the supposedly high incidence of rape on college campuses. The stats for this brand of fantasizing are manufactured in a particularly shameless way. 

There’s been, for instance, a lot of outrage over the survey that “proves” that 15% of female students at University of Austin have been raped. The makers of the survey went out of their way to expand the definition of rape into the infinity:

This is shameless fishing for a predetermined result, yet the narrative remains popular because there’s demand for it. 

I don’t want to be a nag, but colleagues are fretting on the university email service that some dumb survey we had to fill out on workplace satisfaction only gives “binary gender options.” Not surprisingly, these are the same people who have been ranting against the poor schmucks at the sister institution for being “wasteful” and had not a word of condemnation for Rauner.