Even though I’m on sabbatical, I’m still helping the sorority I curate with their paperwork, budgets, etc. I don’t have to do it but I like them and don’t mind doing it, especially since they understand that I will have to do everything from home until September.

The women in the sorority work very hard to be as self-sufficient as possible, and I have no complaints about them. But the campus bureaucracy is driving us all nuts. Today, for instance, we’ve had to redo the entire bunch of paperwork for an event the sorority is organizing because Student Services cut our budget by $4 (FOUR) dollars. I would maybe even somewhat understand the need to redo the whole thing if we were getting extra $4. But I see no reason to waste the time of 5 people (one of whom is a tenured professor) to redo the paperwork over the four bucks we are not getting.

Often, it seems like Student Services are buggering around with these senseless subtractions and additions of four bucks to create semblance of working. And a bunch of busy, hard-working people is humoring them. 

People tend to recreate traumatic moments in their lives and replay them endlessly, hoping to reach a different outcome.

The reason why we see so many people forever stuck at around the ages of 12-14, that’s because this is a uniformly traumatic age when hormonal changes coincide with new socialization needs and the final stage of psychological separation from one’s parents.

Another bunch of overfed, spoiled rich brats is raising hell on yet another ultra expensive campus over being traumatized by somebody writing “Trump 2016” on the sidewalk. It’s become prestigious among rich snowflakes to claim trauma, so they are on the lookout for any excuse to pretend to be victimized. This particular pretense is as dumb as any other their colleagues in self-pity have used.

Read the link; it’s hilarious. What’s less hilarious is that the protesters have convinced the administration to persecute and prosecute the sidewalk artists who traumatized them so badly by writing Trump’s name.

To be honest, it’s weird that nothing like this happened in Belgium earlier. The country has been going in a bad direction for a while. Everybody I know who traveled there said that Belgium had the worst kind of alienation and dislike between different ethnic communities and between locals and immigrants. I’ve heard people say, “If you want to travel to Europe, go anywhere but Belgium” on several occasions.

There are people who belong to the school of “you need to hold the baby all the time!” And there are those who belong to the school of “you need to hold the baby as little as possible.”

When you suggest that there is also the possibility of holding or not holding the baby whenever you and she feel like it, both groups get very agitated and start quoting bibliographies at you.

Human beings are capable of spoiling even the most enjoyable experience for themselves.

God, people, did you see the horror in Brussels?

Of course, I only caught about two seconds of coverage because the networks immediate switched to Obama’s useless speech in stupid Cuba.

Whenever I stayed at a hotel in Cuba, I discovered that speaking Spanish put me at a disadvantage. Cubans despise themselves so much that anybody they identify as being a fellow Spanish-speaker gets treated like shit. I was forced to address the hotel staff in English because even though nobody understood a word I was saying, there was a chance of getting my meaning across through gesticulation and a slow repetition of separate words. Switching to Spanish, on the other hand, guaranteed that any request of mine would be ignored.

People who can be visually identified as “Hispanic non-white” were in an even worse situation because that merited them utter contempt on the part of self-hating Cubans.

This is a very Soviet thing: everything that is even remotely similar to “us” is despised. Everything completely foreign is worshipped for escaping from the taint of “us.”

The reason why Cuba is a hell hole in the same way as the Soviet Union was a hell hole is not that it’s poor, consumer goods can only be bought at the black market at enormous prices, medical care and education are ridiculously bad, and the standards of hygiene are abysmally low.

All of this is insignificant compared to the real tragedy of Cuba (inherited, I remind you, from the USSR). The people’s soul had been murdered. All normal human instincts, impulses, values and connections have been broken. There is nothing but cynicism, cruelty, and indifference. Poverty can be overcome but how do you escape from the reality where doctors torture patients as a matter of course because it’s fun to do and where people are casually and mindlessly cruel to each other all day long just because they can?

There is nothing anybody can do except feel sorrow for the mindless destruction of what used to be a valuable, productive culture.

“Hillary Clinton was praised by Kissinger! Kissinger!” Bernie Sanders fusses on MSNBC.

Of course, Kissinger, in his turn, was praised by Mao Zedong who said he preferred to deal with Kissinger and Nixon over any Leftist because they were always honest. So this probably means that Kissinger – and by extension Clinton – are Maoists.

I turn on the news for the first time in days and what do I see?

“BREAKING NEWS! Trump attacks Iran deal!”

Seriously? That’s breaking news? Haven’t we been hearing all sorts of rantings against the deal all throughout the campaign? What’s so new about this?

And Trump has suddenly found himself loving Israel? I’m glad he could fit that in between his loving moments with the KKK and his many anti-Semitic outbursts.

Does anybody have more interesting news for me?