Just when I was warming up to Elizabeth Warren, she reminded why I always detested her:

Warren slammed Stumpf for failing to fire any senior executives linked to the scandal, while Wells Fargo’s aggressive sales tactics helped pump up the bank’s stock price…

“You squeezed your employees to the breaking point so they would cheat customers and you could drive up the value of your stock and put hundreds of millions of dollars in your own pocket,” Warren said.

This is not only ridiculous but disgusting. Nobody forced these horrible bank clerks to cheat people. If my Dean or whomever sets enormous, impossible, unachievable publication requirements and I decide to meet them by plagiarizing, it will not be the Dean’s fault. It will only be mine. 

Gosh, I come from a place where everybody constantly cheats, bribes, behaves dishonestly but nobody is ever to blame. It’s always the evil authorities, the nasty elites, the dishonest police, the grabby doctors, the mean teachers, and the general unfairness of human existence that “squeezed them to the breaking point so that they would cheat.”

It wasn’t Putin who threw fake ballots into the ballot boxes on Sunday. Without the actions of thousands of irresponsible, dishonest people, it would not be possible to falsify the election. 

Or as they say in Spain, the Franco dictatorship existed but there seems not to have been a single Franco supporter. Franco did everything entirely on his own while 40 million people were victimized by him. 

When we started the BLM movement on campus, the idea was that we, the professors, will show students that it’s OK to be part of the movement and then we would step back and the students would do whatever they feel is needed with the movement. Because the goal is not to have a bunch of white professors order about black students to prove that black lives matter.

It all went according to plan. Professors did their thing, stepped away, and the students stepped in to conduct some really cool activities.

But then – surprise, surprise! – the Diversity Office has overtaken the movement. It is now organizing a BLM conference. I am willing to give it every benefit of the doubt, which is why I registered to attend in spite of not having any time at all for it. I am very curious to see what an institutional version of BLM looks like. Until now, our BLM has been fantastic and very productive. 

In retaliation for the bombing of Assad’s troops by the US, Russians attacked a UN convoy that was trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Aleppo. As a result, the convoy is destroyed and the UN will not be sending any more convoys at the moment. 

Merkel is about to fall, and Russians will use any excuse to ratchet up pressure and make sure she doesn’t remain in power. 

Once again, the US and the EU are getting played by Russia. See my previous post and ask yourself how pathetic it is to be played by somebody this primitive. 

Of course, the Russians falsified the election. And it was done in a very obvious, shameless way. It is as if the folks who are stuffing the ballot boxes with fake ballots were posing for the cameras, making sure that what they are doing gets recorded as clearly as possible. 

There was no need to falsify anything. Most people didn’t come out to vote, and those who did all voted for Putin’s party and its satellites. So why falsify an election you have no chance of losing?

The goal of the endlessly falsified elections is to plant the idea that democracy is rubbish in people’s heads. Cynical, disillusioned people are precisely what corrupt oligarchies need to keep functioning. 

N and I tried to watch Parenthood because everybody I know loves it. But N says he can’t watch it because everybody in the show is weird and creepy. 

“In this show?” I ask. “In House of Cards, 24, Blacklist, The Killing, Prison Break, Breaking Bad, The Bandits of St. Petersburg, etc people are not weird and creepy but this show about normal, regular folks is weird and creepy?” 

Soviet legacy, people. It warps your mind in a major way.

N is reading a book on how to save money (for Klara’s college) and every suggestion in there angers me. 

“You can save money but eating at home instead of eating out! Hanging the clothes out to dry on a string instead of using the dryer! Not using the dry cleaner’s and instead using substitute dry cleaning methods at home! Get rid of one of the cars!”

I say, let’s also save some cash on not letting the poor fool (who will do all this housework) go to the dentist’s, not buy her clothes or shoes, and lock her up at home to avoid any money being spent on her needs. 

It ain’t “saving” if somebody has got to pay for it with their time and effort. 

Two seconds after the ceasefire in Syria, American Airlines forces bombed Assad’s troops, probably killing several Russians as well. Russians are angry as hell but Americans claim it was a mistake.

Knowing how inept the US military can be, I can actually believe it might have been a mistake. It’s nice to imagine it wasn’t, though. 

When I had Kick and returned to work people would see me on the street and ask, “Where the baby?” It took everything in my body not to respond OH HOLY SHIT. THE BABY. WHERE IS SHE? DID I LEAVE HER IN STARBUCKS? BABY?! WHERE ARE YOOOOOOOOOOOOOU?! THANK GOD YOU NOTICED. IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN DAYS BEFORE I LOOKED FOR HER.

Oh yes. I love it when this happens. Somebody actually came into my office, asked where Klara was, and looked around the office. Like I was hiding her under the desk or in a drawer during class hours.  

What I wondered when I read this novel by Roth is whether there will even be a writer in the 21st century who will write Jewishness they way Roth did back in the 1990s and still residually today. Will there be this kind of Jewishness in existence for somebody to write about? Or has it already been washed away by the tides of fluidity?

Indignation couldn’t have been written about this century. And not because it mentions the Korean War. Wars abound, so that’s not what makes the events of the novel so firmly rooted in the past. And it’s not the quaint old words like “co-eds” or “Dean of Men.” The undoubtedly Jewish way of being of a boy who dies for the cause of atheism childishly embraced is what feels outdated. 

If you cut off your roots in search of freedom, will you find it or will you wither and die? Now that we have shed our oppressive, restrictive familial and cultural bonds, has fluidity given us anything in return? Or are we, like the novel’s protagonist, floating around in limbo, incapable of making a connection with anybody?

Great writer, great novel. And I’m sure the movie has turned it into some tawdry romance flick.

Students are running this initiative where they match an international student with an American one so that they could do a language exchange, hang out, share knowledge about their cultures, etc. 

Neither our Diversity Office nor our International Student Affairs are giving a dime towards this initiative. They don’t even offer $10 a month for a pizza or whatever. 

This initiative does a lot more to promote diversity than all of their dumb leaflets and idiotic diversity statements. But they don’t care. Because they only exist to make the very idea of diversity annoying to everybody.