Clarissa's Blog

Just when I congratulated myself on Klara’s not knowing how to remove her hat, she immediately learned to remove it. 

I love it when she masters new skills because she does it with a very casual, matter-of-fact look. 

Obama care premiums will rise by 22%. So why did everybody rag on Bill Clinton for saying that Obama care is a mess?

Bill Clinton, by the way, is the only person on the political scene who is not offering up lies about returning back to the nation-state model. He isn’t running for anything and he lets useful, honest things slip out. I dislike him profoundly but he’s worth listening to. 

Everybody else is pandering and lying because voters don’t want the truth. It’s shocking that Bill Clinton is suddenly the most honest person around. 

I call this genius gif “working alone vs working on a committee.”

Joe Biden appeared on Law and Order: SVU back in September? And nobody told me???

I watched that episode on Amazon today and thought I’d gone nuts because of sleep deprivation. 

The first record I bought for my beautiful new turntable is The Christmas Songs by Nat King Cole. I also want to buy a record by Billie Holiday because that woman was a genius. 

Now a question for turntable pros: when I enter “Billie Holiday record” in the search box at Amazon, what I get is a list of things tagged as “vinyl.” Is that what I need? Back in the USSR, vinyl meant very thin blue records that were like sheets of paper. But I don’t think this turntable will play something like that. 

I’m very ignorant about these things. 

Students didn’t show up for my 3 pm class. And I can’t say I’m entirely sure that, in an attack of sleeplessness, I didn’t send them an email saying they don’t need to show up.

Am I losing it or am I really losing it? 

After chairing a work-intensive committee for two months, I have this to say: if only students knew how often professors forget their homework, claim ailing grandmas or assignment-eating dogs, forget to show up, etc., they’d feel much better about themselves.

The environmentalist discourse is failing so badly because it is promoted by the people whose political convictions are based on

1. The idea that there is nothing more important in the universe than individual choice and individual desire, and
2. The idea that the greatest tragedy that can befall a people is not seeing an endless improvement in their standard of material well-being from one generation to another.

Both ideas directly lead to the destruction of the environment. When you simultaneously moan that you are devastated by the impossibility of having even more cars and even bigger houses than your parents and that the environment is being destroyed by excessive consumption, that will never manage to impress anybody.