Turns out I really like baby care. It’s very meditative and good for one’s psychological health. I’m very lucky in that I have a high tolerance for sleep disruption. It doesn’t bother me at all if I don’t get to sleep a whole lot. What I do mind is the disruption of my feeding schedules but Klara sleeps a lot during the day, so that doesn’t happen.

“Have you noticed how desperate Klara gets if we don’t feed her the moment she needs it?” I asked N. “How she gets all red in the face and screams like a little ambulance?  That’s exactly how I feel if I don’t get fed on time.”

“That explains a lot,” he said.

The only thing I don’t like about baby care is the car seat. Klara is very good-natured and puts up with my clumsy fumbling as I stuff her into it without protest. But I still hate having to lug this heavy, unwieldy thing around.

The activity Klara detests, on the other hand, is diaper changes. I suspect they male her feel cold, and she doesn’t like that.

And the activity we both like the most is when I take her for walks in the pram. The streets in our residential area are completely empty during the day. I walk in complete silence, feeling peaceful, carefree and safe. It’s almost a trance – like state that I enjoy more than I can describe. And judging by Klara ‘ s deep slerp, she loves the walks just as much.

State governments have reduced the funding they give to public universities to puny little amounts. State funds now rarely cover more than 10-20% of public colleges’ needs. In return for these shrinking amounts, state governments demand increasing governmental control over who gets hired or fired, what gets taught, what research is conducted, etc. These Big Government policies are, of course, especially rampant in Republican states.

It begins to look like the most reasonable thing to do is to let the very concept of public universities die. If the public doesn’t need them and keeps voting for people who introduce these policies, then maybe the public should be humored and given what it wants. The time has come for public universities to ditch the public, raise tuitions, and tell the state governments to go stuff it.

It is ridiculous that people think giving up on fast food in favor of cooking from scratch and using fresh seasonal ingredients from the perimeter of a grocery store can actually save money.

Eating this way is something people in need of saving money can’t afford. Not only are fresh produce and meat enormously more expensive than the dollar menu at McDonald’s, but cooking them also requires a collection of spices and condiments plus pans and other cooking instruments.

This is like suggesting that instead of buying cheap clothes at Walmart that will fall apart into months, poor people get their personal tailor fashion a wardrobe that will suit their individual needs.

Just to illustrate everything said previously, here is a completely idiotic article arguing at length that Sanders is a racist because some supporters of his used some Twitter hash tags or whatever and something, something, screeenshots, hash tags, somebody shoot me now because I’m perishing of boredom.

Yet the candidate’s truly outrageous statements about Russia, China or Cuba receive no coverage whatsoever. People want to blather on about hash tags instead. So whom should we blame for our foreign policy being as whackadoodle as our obsession with hash tags and our indifference to the world?

I applied for a research grant at my university a few years ago. The application was rejected by my fellow professors in the Humanities with the comment that I will never forget.

“It is unclear why we should care about and spend money on studying the literary output of another country,” professors wrote.

This was before our budget problems and at a time when our research money was actually running at a surplus. Not a single administrator was on that committee and not a single professor from outside our Humanities fields. I was shocked by this militant parochialism  then but I no longer am.

It’s widely thought in the foreign-policy community that Secretary Clinton’s views are more hawkish on foreign policy than those of the President she once served.

This “more hawkish” cliché that is repeated ad nauseam by the more intellectually limited among us simply means that Hillary is at least somewhat interested in what happens in the world unlike Obama who just wants the entirety of foreign affairs to go away and stop forcing him to have an opinion.

It is truly shameful how acceptable it is in this country  to be egregiously ignorant about the world. People are even proud and ostentatious of their dumb refusal to find out anything about the rest of the planet. When a presidential candidate says the equivalent of “North Korea has made great advances in the art of gourmet cooking” and nobody has any comment to make about this insane statement on the next day, we’ve got nobody but ourselves to blame for a deranged foreign policy.

In case you are not aware of the Eurovision drama currently taking place,  here is an update. Ukraine will be represented at the 2016 Eurovision by the singer Jamala who’ll perform a song about the 1944 deportation of Crimean Tatars. The entire 250,000 population of Crimean Tatars was deported by Stalin in an act of ethnic cleansing that led to the deaths of over 100,000 of the Tatars. Jamala’s song is about this genocide perpetrated by Stalin.

As you can imagine, Russians are outraged by the song. Even though it doesn’t mention Stalin, the idea that any form of criticism of their idol will be made in public makes Russians very angry. They tried to get the song banned on the grounds that it constitutes political speech. The European Broadcasting Union, however, demured and let the song stay in the contest. The singer’s family had been among the deported, and preventing Jamala from singing about her family’s tragic experience to please Russians would be too bizarre.

Well, at least this Eurovision scandal is more meaningful than the one with the bearded woman.

OK, why is the debate in Spanish? How did I arrive in my dream universe all of a sudden?

And the fellow signing the anthem is dressed like a bullfighter.

20:38 – and Bernie just promised to resettle all of Honduras in the US. I wonder why it’s Honduras and not Nicaragua, Guatemala, the DR, Salvador, and everybody else. And there’s no need to stop there. We can resettle the whole planet here. Except for Denmark because it’s perfect as it is.

21:03 – this is the stupidest debate ever. The questions are idiotic in the extreme. Emails, Goldman Sachs speeches, Benghazi, some weepy madre resufrida – this sucks. And Bernie never sounded more Tea Party than today.

21:14 – what I don’t understand is why Bernie doesn’t just go ahead and promise to give everybody $50,000 in “free money.” The voters will love the idea. There’s literally no downside to making the promise.

21:21 – and now they put on some lying broad who says she’ll have to take out a loan to do a PhD. Which is clearly a load of steamy, malodorous BS. Is the goal of this debate to foster negative stereotypes about Hispanics?

21:46 – Bernie has now announced that Cuba has made great advances in medicine and education. Sweet Jesus on the cross. Militant ignorance is not cute.

. . . for any purposes other than entertainment:

The National Republican Senatorial Committee tweeted Tuesday that Illinois Senate Democratic candidate Tammy Duckworth, who lost both her legs while serving in the Iraq War, “has a sad record of not standing up for our veterans.”

We can all agree, I’m sure, that tweeting has brought nothing positive to our already quite bastardized political space.

Does anyone understand why people use television and cell phones to trick their very small children into eating? Isn’t it clear that learning to stuff yourself mindlessly with food in front of a screen is pretty much the worst eating practice anybody could imagine?

The likelihood that a toddler is going to starve in front of huge quantities of food is nil. So why the rush to force tiny tots to eat? They obviously know their nutritional needs better than adults who live in a world of dieting, overeating, eating disorders, obesity, and diseased body images.

I’m one of those children whom everybody tried to entice into eating throughout my childhood. And telling me stories to distract me and stealthily stick food into my mouth was the preferred strategy. The result? I can’t eat without reading something mindlessly and end up overeating massively and becoming overweight. This is the only result that can be achieved by breaking a child’s natural mechanism of regulating his or her food intake and replacing it with a dysfunctional mechanism beloved by controlling adults.