Clarissa's Blog

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. 

I started driving to the Immigration and within the first 3 minutes almost crashed the car twice. Totally my fault both times. 

Yes, I’ve only been driving for 3 years, but this shit doesn’t happen to me, folks. I’ve been a very careful driver, drove to St Louis and back when I was pregnant many times and never had any trouble other than the time when a student brushed against me in the parking lot (and I was found to be blameless in that case.) But today it’s like I’m possessed by the spirit of a lousy driver. 

The first time, I got into a wrong lane in a narrow residential road and when a fellow in a pickup truck appeared, I accelerated into him and only managed to brake a hair’s breadth before crashing into him. The fellow was super nice (I tend to have that effect on fellows.) He got out of the truck and was all, “Are you OK? Can I help you? Is there anything I can do? Are you sure you’ll be fine?” 

After he left, I parked, got out of the car, took a breather, calmed down, got back in the car and. . . almost crashed into a van. The fellow driving it was also super nice but I realized I shouldn’t be driving if I don’t want to arrive at Immigration in a body bag. 

So I called Uber and now yet another super nice fellow is taking me there. 

N got Klara up and took her to daycare today to let me sleep, so I’m supposed to be well-rested. But clearly, I’m not. 

It seems there were only 4 casualties in the US attack on Syria, and they are all military. This means that the attack was meant to be purely symbolic. The only thing that a symbolic attack can achieve is signal that this administration wants to continue the policy of the previous one, which can be resumed as “We’ll participate just enough to ensure that the conflict simmers forever.” 

What Obama did was maintain several foci of conflicts around the world that were simmering yet never boiling towards a conclusion. There is a whole philosophy around this centered on the idea that a large-scale military conflict can be avoided if global steam is released through the smallish conflicts in places that nobody of any import cares about. This has very clearly been the philosophy that guided the US foreign policy under Obama. Now we are seeing that Trump hasn’t come with a new philosophy, not that anybody expected him to find advisers brilliant enough to do that. 

As we discussed on this blog many times, the global capitalist economy is undergoing a profound change that is introducing a new form of statehood. Historically, such transformations are accompanied by a massive, long and painful war that devastates the participants. The “letting off steam” approach is an attempt to obviate this prospect that was designed back in the 1990s by White House experts and hasn’t been replaced by anything else since then.