N has left for a conference. As usual, his professional community is smarter than mine and is holding the conference on a beach in Florida. Academics are too mean-spirited to hold conferences anywhere where people might enjoy the sun and the ocean. People in the industry, on the other hand, don’t mind enjoying life and letting colleagues do the same. 

This is the first time I’m left to take care of Klara on my own. 

This is what I don’t get. How come I’m doing a lot more service – and I mean A LOT – now that I have tenure than while being on the tenure track? I’m drowning in service, it’s insane. 

Nobody is making me. I always got the highest marks for service even when I did very little. (I’m Soviet, I can bullshit like nobody’s business). I’m not going for an early Full Professorship  (for reasons of my own that I can reveal in a separate post). I’m not avoiding research because I’m writing an article and it’s going great. 

The only thing I can think of is that I’m overcompansating for having a baby. Which is dumb because nobody cares. And if they did, I’d never notice anyway. 

I need to stop this because it’s eating me alive. 

I don’t like this idea of “Impeach President Bannon.” It suggests that Trump’s ideas are somehow different and it’s only Bannon’s influence that is causing all the problems. 

Trump is not a good little boy who fell under the influence of bad company. His ideas are fully his and he’s fully responsible for them. 

Gosh, I hope this bill passes:

A bill in the Iowa Senate seeks to achieve greater political diversity among professors at the state’s Board of Regents universities. Senate File 288 would institute a hiring freeze until the number of registered Republicans and Democrats on the university faculty fall within 10 percent of each other.

When they are left without any professors at all, they’ll simply have to hire immigrants. 

With everything that’s going on, people believe it’s a good idea to waste their lives on parsing the dumb YouTube videos of some idol of the gerks with an unpronounceable Greek name. 

The idea that Trump has such sky-high approvals among Republicans are a result of protests, pussyhats, and “resistance” is ridiculous. Trump is giving Republican voters exactly what they want and is not doing anything they find objectionable. 

What is needed now is for this idea to sink in for the purposes of action and not finger-wagging. For instance, let’s stop wasting time on being outraged over Trump’s anti-media rants. For a variety of reasons, professional journalism in the US has gone to the dogs. Everybody knows this. There is no widespread outrage to be garnered about statements that insult these journalists. 

Since Saturday, by the way, Russian TV has been filled with endless reports about the horrors of immigrants in Sweden. Not in Germany, France, the Netherlands, or anywhere else but specifically Sweden. 

Riots have been taking place in Stockholm overnight. Apparently, they’ve been provoked by a drug-related arrest in an immigrant area. I have no doubt this will in no way affect the smug shrimp eaters we discussed on the blog yesterday. 

It’s interesting that Trump knew about the riots in advance, isn’t it? It’s not shocking or unexpected. Just mildly curious. 

Because it’s inhuman cruelty under the guise of caring. 

Nearly half of all prime working-age male labor-force dropouts—an army now totaling roughly 7 million men—currently take pain medication on a daily basis. . . In our mind’s eye we can now picture many millions of un-working men in the prime of life, out of work and not looking for jobs, sitting in front of screens—stoned.

Of course, it’s so easy not to notice any of this and instead self-congratulate and preen. 

And yes, there already is guaranteed basic income in the US:

Of the entire un-working prime-age male Anglo population in 2013, nearly three-fifths (57 percent) were reportedly collecting disability benefits from one or more government disability program in 2013. 

What’s really funny is that the tweet in the previous post was written to ridicule Trump’s comment about mass immigration problems in Sweden when the tweet itself is a perfect demonstration of why Swedish authorities are desperate to bring in immigrants. 

The tweet’s author is sincerely and simple-mindedly convinced that the whole world is eager for the details of her consumption and that there is no political and social issues that can’t be subsumed by the list of products she devours. A society like that will not procreate at replacement levels and will stagnate with only high suicide rates to break the monotony. Yes, there are people like this Ida everywhere, but in the US there are enough people with religion and enough recent immigrants to counteract the inertia of consumerism.