If people really wanted to resist they’d 

A) become active in local elections;

B) refuse to read, listen or watch any more stories about Trump’s tweets, celebrities who refuse to attend inauguration, what Meryl Streep said and Trump responded, and all this sort of crap. We already pissed away an election on this garbage. Enough already. It’s all distraction tactics. Time to stop.

One of the organizers of the women’s anti-Trump protests said protesters will march because “women carry the family on our backs” and then ranted against sexist stereotypes. 

This would all be less awkward if the protesters had any idea what goal they want to achieve with their protest.

After liberating parts of Mosul, Iraqi soldiers found passports belonging to terrorists who came from other countries to join ISIS. Most of them were, of course, from Russia. And not just from Chechnya and Dagestan but from the European part of Russia.

Somebody knows how to play a long game. And that somebody hasn’t been American for a long time. The best this country has had in terms of geopolitical strategy was Kissinger, and he was fucking horrible. 

It’s very sad to see a novel that’s so bad that its own author realizes it and tries to explain its meaning in a postscript. Rosa Montero is not one of my favorite writers but I didn’t expect something quite as lousy from her.

The novel’s protagonist is a 60-year-old Soledad, the whiniest, most superficial and entitled character I’ve encountered in a while. I’ll give just one example to illustrate the caliber of this human being. Soledad’s neighbor, a young single mother loses her job and can’t pay her bills. When she shares with Soledad that her electricity has been cut off, the well-off Soledad concludes that the dramas of the unemployed during the economic crisis are nothing compared to the hardship she experiences as a result of being dumped by yet another casual boyfriend. 

Montero didn’t even bother doing research for the book. The male prostitute in her book is Russian but he couldn’t behave less Russian if he tried. He doesn’t celebrate New Year’s, speaks several languages fluently in spite of having no education and having been raised in a Russian orphanage, and is desperate to marry a black woman and adopt her child. If this is normal behavior in a Russian electrician / prostitute, I’m Montserrat Caballe. 

God, what a shitty, shitty novel.

There’s been an episode of Dr Phil about a lawyer who was convicted of “hypnotizing” his clients and sexually abusing him. It happened in Ohio, but still, it’s bizarre that there should be a whole courthouse full of people who believe in “hypnosis.”

If the fellow in question really had the power to switch off people’s consciousness like that, why would he waste it on getting sex from old, fat, sad divorcees instead of becoming ultra rich and powerful? 

Hey, everybody, thanks for the suggestions on the table foods. I’ve tried a few out, and they work great. Today, for instance, I gave her some blueberries, and it worked. I’d feared she’d gag on them (because that’s what happened with a piece of apple two months ago) but no, she realized that she needs to “chew” them up. What I should have kept in mind is that babies develop fast, and if she wasn’t ready 2 months ago, that doesn’t mean she still isn’t. 

We’ll go to the store to look for cheerios tomorrow. 

Chasing an 11-month-old around the house changed my definition of going to the gym from “the gym is exhausting” to “let me go have some rest at the gym.”

The religions that existed before the rise of protestantism were an obstacle to the formation of capitalist mentality. Capitalism is all about placing the satisfaction of human needs above all, and the dietary, sartorial, amorous, etc restrictions placed by religion stood in the way. Religious institutions were competing for power with capital, arguing that there is an authority that’s higher than the God of human “I want.”

The liberation from religious strictures first by protestantism and then by the Enlightenment forgot to ask the question “what is the end goal of this liberation?” The tyranny of religion was swapped for the tyranny of capital but the paradox is that people see the compulsion to buy – be it objects, identities, body parts, family members, or anything else- as the greatest freedom of all. 

Rebellions against this tyranny are puny and pathetic. People who rant against “cultural appropriation”, for instance, desperately want to believe that there is something that is not entirely for sale. The same goes for people like me who are opposed to wombs for hire and to buying children. But these rebellions will fail until we dare to question the entire concept of the primacy of human whims over absolutely everything else.

 

María Lejárraga was born in Spain in 1874. She wanted to be a writer but . . . she was born in Spain in 1874, so she got married instead. As all writers, though, she couldn’t help herself and went on writing. Her lazy layabout husband who couldn’t write worth a damn published her plays under his name.

The plays became famous, and the loser husband started his own theater company in order to get actresses to sleep with him in exchange for parts. The arrangement worked: Lejárraga wrote, the husband has his own harem of actresses plus international fame (the plays were even used in Hollywood), and starlets knew what to do to get parts.

Finally, the husband settled down with one leading actress and started an illegitimate family with her. The actress wasn’t happy because having children out of wedlock wasn’t super prestigious back then but she knew he couldn’t leave Lejárraga. The fellow couldn’t write a postcard to an ailing grandma without her help, let alone a play.

Lejárraga, in the meanwhile, kept reading, writing, and thinking. Eventually, she realized that something wasn’t right in the arrangement where she did all the writing but the only fame she got was that of an idiot wife cheated on very publicly.

Lejárraga started writing passionate feminist treatises about the exploitation of women, and the loser husband went on signing them.

It is only in the 1950s, years after the husband’s death, that Lejárraga wrote an autobiography admitting her authorship. There were people who tried to deny it but it was useless because everybody in the theater had known plus the husband himself had admitted he couldn’t write.