Klara refuses to share her teething cookies with me. Instead, she hides them, brings them to daycare, and tries to feed her little friends. Which is not allowed because everybody is afraid of allergies. But it’s still super cute to see how the first thing she does when she arrives at daycare is to try to stuff the cookies into her friends’ little mouths. 

Are people seriously talking about who’ll perform at Trump’s inauguration? And that’s the same people who just lost the election? 

What a great way to make Trump look like the only adult in the situation. 

In practical terms, Obama’s ban on drilling in the Arctic will help Putin a lot more than Trump’s impending removal of sanctions and the appointment of pro-Russian Tillerson. Russian economy isn’t tanking because of the sanctions. Sanctions are nothing. It’s tanking because of the drop in oil prices.

However, practical terms are a lot less important than emotional and psychological factors.  People are impacted not by what is but by what they think is. The realization of “We bent Americans to our will” that Trump provides and that the removal of sanctions will cement will help Russians not even notice what’s happening in their economy. 

Remember when back in 2001 Argentinean government shutdown down the banks and people were stuck unable to withdraw anything from their accounts for a year? Those who knew this was coming even 15 minutes in advance made out like bandits. And the rest were hit hard. 

Sacheri’s novel is about a group of old men who were swindled by a greedy banker during the bank shutdown and who found an inventive way to take revenge. It’s all very cute and endearing but there is one problem with the book: it was very obviously written with the goal of selling movie rights. It’s cinematographic to the point of getting incredibly predictable. But hey, this is precisely the quality that makes it a great choice for a Spanish classroom. It reads very easily, the Argentinean accent is super cute, and overall it’s a sea of cuteness. 

A bunch of French lackeys has nominated Putin for the Nobel Peace Prize. Given that he prevented a war between Russia and NATO by achieving world domination, I wholeheartedly second the nomination.

Two articles in today’s paper leave the same unpleasant aftertaste. One is titled “Democrats Had a Knife, and the G.O.P. Had a Gun” and makes a comparison between the outgoing NC governor McCrory and Obama. The author hopes to defend Democrats in the article, but the McCrory fellow comes out as a fierce, dedicated fighter who never quits and Obama comes out as somebody who quit fighting before the fight even began.

The second article is titled “What’s the Matter With North Carolina?” and it informs us that 

After a vicious governor’s race in which the Democrat, Roy Cooper, squeaked past the incumbent Republican, Pat McCrory, the state General Assembly drew up and passed a series of bills that greatly restrict the power of our incoming chief executive — bills that Mr. McCrory has signed.

The author expects us to be scandalized by McCrory but it’s hard to do so given that few of us would not feel profound relief if Obama managed to do something to “greatly restrict the power of the incoming chief executive” of the entire country. 

Later on in the piece, the author complains that NC Republicans

have operated as thieves in the night, presenting bills crafted in midnight sessions to their Democratic colleagues only a few hours before a vote is to be held.

Again, this is a weird – albeit not an uncharacteristic – way of defending Democrats. Republicans are presented here as intensely driven and hard-working while Democrats are described as pouty slackers who whine that they are made to work too hard.

This is what one always hears as an explanation of Democrats’ failures. It’s because of gerrymandering! It’s because of Comey! It’s because something is the matter with Kansas! It’s because of racists! It’s because nobody understands our profoundness! It’s because we “play by more genteel rules“! It’s because Putin!

And hey, Comey, gerrymandering, racists, Kansas and Putin are all true. But isn’t it time we start gerrymandering, Comeying and Kansasing right back? They had the FBI, OK, but we had the CIA. Why didn’t we make use of that asset? I’m tired of losing and hearing that it’s because we took the high moral ground. All of these “dirty tricks” that the linked articles enumerate are actually what politics is all about. If you believe that working through the night to spring surprise legislation on your opponents is beneath you, get out of politics!

The first MLA in years that I’m attending (just for fun, I’m not speaking or anything) will be buggering about with crap resolutions on boycotting Israeli academics. 

Those evil Israeli academics have been destroying US higher ed for years, cutting funding, saddling public colleges with enormous and expensive cohorts of administrative stuff, eliminating tenure protections, destroying tenure-track jobs. Just in the state of Illinois, evil Israeli academics have been refusing to honor the state’s obligations to its public colleges for two years!

On the international arena, Israeli academics have been completely out of control, hacking US elections, devastating Syria, funding neo-Nazi parties in Europe, sabotaging the EU, and invading Ukraine.

They need to be boycotted immediately because who knows how much more evil they’ll do if the brave, heroic MLA doesn’t stop them. 

Leaders of Austria’s neo-Nazi Freedom Party met with Flynn in the Trump Tower before traveling to meet with Flynn’s and their own joint masters in the Kremlin to sign a “working agreement.” 
Now that the US government is under FSB (former KGB) control, time has come for the Russians to take over the remaining parts of Europe. 

I’m sure Russians are quite surprised at how easy it all has been. I think they expected a bit more of a resistance from the West. 

The Embassy of Kuwait allegedly cancelled a contract with a Washington, D.C. hotel days after the presidential election, citing political pressure to hold its National Day celebration at the Trump International Hotel instead.

Pathetic doesn’t even begin to describe it. That the president of the US would demean himself like this for such a tiny amount of money, like a sad little beggar – the whole world will be laughing. Putin would never make such a spectacle of himself for such peanuts. I never thought that in a competition of “who’s a greater embarrassment to their country” Putin would actually look more decent than his American counterpart. He, at least, wouldn’t humiliate himself for less than a billion. 

The really sad part, though, is that I don’t even think most Americans realize that having their president hustle the Kuwaitis for a price of a hotel suite is demeaning. Like Russians would say, “You spit in their faces, and they think it’s morning dew.”

Another great quote from Bobbitt: EU leaders “cling to the decaying corpse of a European super nation-state with no clue as to what alternative other than breakup and secession there might be.”