Russian authorities banned P🚫rnHub and other p🚫rn sites. Instead, they suggest, people should, and I quote, “meet somebody in real life.” 

This is confusing because last week the same authorities appointed to the post of the National Advocate for Children’s Rights a woman who believes that every sex partner a woman has leaves a trace of himself on her uterus causing her eventual children to have DNA traces from all her partners. Leaving aside the issue of how well-endowed this lady’s partners have been to reach all the way into the uterus and the issue of whether, according to this theory, a woman who uses vibrators can expect to give birth to broods of tiny vibrators, one wonders how the “meet somebody for sex in RL” and “beware the uterine memory” theories that are simultaneously advanced by the Russian government can coexist.

And this is the country whose leadership we are invited to admire. 

Our exchange students from Germany and France say they wish they hadn’t come here because it turned out that being a student in the US entails a lot of work.

This is why the argument of “but higher ed is free in Europe” is meaningless. 

It’s called the same but their higher ed and our higher ed are too different to compare. 

I have noticed the following interesting phenomenon. Professors who graduated from not-so-prestigious programs keep saying things like “We get inferior-quality students here. If only we got the kind of students that they get at Harvard / Princeton / MIT, then it would be really easy to teach. We need to ride their asses to show them what it means to have high standards.” 

On the other hand, professors who graduated from Stanford / Johns Hopkins/ Brown, etc say “Our students are exactly the same as students at Stanford / Cornell / Princeton, etc. Students are the same everywhere.  There is no point in being all ‘two absences and you fail the course!’ or “an A is 90%. 89,99% is a B!'”

Works every single time. 

It’s raining and many of the traffic lights in town stopped functioning. But the Midwestern drivers are so extraordinarily polite that we all sit forever at every crossing, trying to cede way to everybody else. Even I, whose driving persona can be described as “inconsiderate jerk”, feel peer-pressured into extreme politeness. I can practically sense other drivers wriggle in mute “no, you first, no, please, I insist” behind the wheel. 

All women know that the most annoying category of men is the ones who beg for sex. All of these PUAs and other perennial rejects who whine, moan, and debase themselves, begging for sex which they never get. After a while of observing them, it becomes clear that what they are actually begging for is not sex. It’s rejection.

PUAs are replaying the traumatic situation they kept experiencing in their childhood. They are not begging women for sex. They are begging Mommy to love them. The role of the women is to reject them, reinforcing the comforting feeling of familiarity. “Mommy is still here, she is as cold and uncaring as ever and she will remain unchanged.”

These poor, damaged characters reserve their greatest hatred for the women who didn’t reject them. A refusal to play strict, cold Mommy to their whining, begging little boy is seen as an attempt to take away what they prize most: living in a predictable world where everybody plays the role they are supposed to play.

The same kind of trauma motivates the people who go to blogs where they know they will be humiliated and ridiculed. They crave being treated this way (usually by a woman who reminds them of Mom) and feel disappointed or even angry when the mother substitute doesn’t play her role and beat them up verbally.

And then there is the category of people who keep choosing a job / a pursuit / a goal that will invariably defeat them. These are the ones who are playing the game of “You have disappointed Daddy again, you loser.” They need to “keep disappointing Daddy”, even if Daddy has been dead for half a century, and will keep replaying the situation of defeat over and over again because they derive comfort from it.

OK, this shit is creepy. I just got an email from Barack Obama with the subject line “Are you ready to win?” 

I know I have people who vote Republican read my blog. Please satisfy a long-standing curiosity. When you get money solicitations from your candidates are they also always desperate, tragic, and have subject lines like “All is lost”, “The end”, “We failed”, etc? 

Is it a party thing or is the doom and gloom bipartisan?

I’ve started to hate the sight of my mailbox. It’s filled with so many desperate pleas that I’m getting an anxiety attack. Honestly, I’d be a lot more responsive to subject lines like “We can do it!”, “We shall win”, “Victory is imminent.” Why do they think everybody is into negative motivation?

The Math department seems to have its own bug bear. Their equivalent of Google Translator- aka the greatest enemy of the learning process – is something they call “a graphing calculator.” I grew up in a simpler time and built all my graphs by hand, memorizing all the formulae. But today’s mathematicians have endless stories of shooing students away from the evil calculator. 

Bad news on Myanmar! Obama wants to lift all sanctions. Even though the persecution of the Rohyngia minority continues. 

I don’t understand why it’s so necessary to prove some dumb point to China by betraying the interests of the Rohyngia. Who is going to be on their side, huh? 

And by the way, the sanctions were working. Myanmar’s military was slowly ceding control to civilian institutions. Of course, now it will have no reason to keep doing it. Shit.

A Russian colonel was hiding $120,000,000 in his office. Yes, one hundred and twenty million. Yes, dollars. Yes, in cash. Yes, a colonel. 

Now imagine what kind of spare change generals and admirals keep on hand.