If you don’t suffer from a narcissistic injury and can deal with people not seeing you as perfect all the time, you might find practicing some form of strategic incompetence quite helpful:

In office jobs, there’s one foolproof way to avoid being burdened with certain time-consuming tasks: develop a reputation for being rubbish at them. Act baffled and panicked around the coffee machine, or a jammed printer, and you’ll soon find nobody asks you to deal with it next time around.

In the same vein, I don’t know how to clean, iron, vacuum or wash floors. This is why I never do any of these things. As they say, the reason why monkeys don’t learn to speak is to avoid being forced to work.

People soon get used to the idea that one is simply not good at certain things and stop expecting it. Of course, one doesn’t want to deploy strategic incompetence trivially or excessively but it can be a useful tool when used sparingly.

Finally, got to turn on the TV and caught the tail of the Democratic debate. A question about Detroit ‘ s school system was being asked. Hillary answered with a very specific list of measures to help the schools that was so detailed that it sounded like she’d spent the last 3 years thinking about schools in Detroit.

And then Bernie interrupted with “My campaign is not about thinking small; it’s about thinking big!” And spoke about taxing billionaires.

What else can I say?

P.S. The question a bugged – eyed lady asked of Hillary as to whom she prays to is wildly inappropriate. WTF is CNN doing, giving floor to outright crazies?

The baby is out for her first walk around the neighborhood. I’m very happy that I will finally be able to take her out for walks because after being immobilized in the house for 3 weeks, I started having nosebleeds and high blood pressure.

Caitlyn Jenner has been testing the patience of the LGBT community ever since she came out—as a Republican. But now, she really might have done of it. In an interview with “The Advocate,” the athlete turned bafflingly famous person voiced her support for Senator Ted Cruz, saying she’d like to be his “trans ambassador.”

Maybe this will help people finally to understand that identifying with the dramas of the very rich is a dumb thing to do. Their primary allegiance is always to their money. Idolizing them is beyond stupid.

Whenever I catch a glimpse of the Republican primaries, I realize that I’m rooting for Trump. Because the greasy lizard is even worse.

I don’t like what this has done to me.

The American novel is dying, and Conroy’s South of Broad enacts its agony. Conroy is one of those Southern writers who know how to write magnificently. The problem, however, is that there doesn’t seem to be anything for American writers – even those as gifted as Conroy – to write about.

Conroy’s characters  (just like Franzen’s, Roth’s, or anybody else’s in American letters) are dying of boredom amidst the wealth they inhabit. All that Conroy can do to lend some interest to their sated lives is visit all kinds of sexual abuses on them. As a result, the novel reads as a list of sexual perversions that are rattled off in a perfunctory and often mechanical manner. The writer tries too hard to awaken the jaded sensibilities of his readers with tales of sexual outrage, and in the end the sheer number of sexual violations in the novel makes them mundane and boring.

This is not a bad book. I quite enjoyed reading it. I’m very glad, however, that I don’t specialize in contemporary American novel. I don’t want to be like one of those people who used to be told, “You specialize in Soviet satire? Wow, it must be fascinating to study something that doesn’t exist.”

Today in Moscow a billboard appeared with a picture of Stalin and the caption “That one died, this one will die, too.” I’m sure we all understand who “this one” is.

Obama’s presidency advanced a great number of liberal causes. Economy, healthcare reform, foreign policy, Cuba, Iran. Even gay marriage is now reality.

One area of human existence, however, saw no liberal advances whatsoever during the Obama years. To the contrary, it suffered one major blow after another. That area of life is women’s rights. Reproductive rights are in the toilet, parental leave is not on anybody’s radar, things for women have been getting worse during the presidency of our most liberal leader so far.

As the example of every country with strong achievements on women’s rights demonstrates, the only way to get pro-women policies in place is by electing a large number of women. Women always defend everybody else’s rights but nobody ever stands up for women’s rights except women.

Women, we need to vote for Hillary. Enough with trying to service men and responding to the unquenchable male needs. Enough with being apologetic for our needs. It’s the twenty-first century and it’s time to put ourselves first.

When the baby is hungry, she doesn’t cry or scream. She opens her mouth and looks around, expecting food to arrive in her mouth. The confidence which inspires her knowledge that food can’t fail to arrive is very touching.

We all come to this world expecting the best and knowing that things have to turn out just right. This knowledge gradually gets eroded in the process of living. Only a few of us are lucky to retain the certainty that good things can’t fail to come. And for those people, good things do materialize all the time.

The US spent the entire 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s trying to prevent the countries of Central and South America from experimenting with socialism. In the process, the US embroiled itself in ridiculous scandals, sponsored brutal dictatorships, wasted a ton of resources and lost face more times than anybody can count.

Then the US got tired of this silly game and let South Americans play out their socialist fantasy. Of course, that fantasy soon revealed itself to be completely bankrupt on every level. It had only persisted for so long because the US worked so hard to stave it off. The whole stupid thing could have died decades ago if it has been allowed to run its natural course.

The only reason why the South American socialist fantasy managed to exist for so long is, paradoxically, that the US believed that socialism could actually work. Had the US been true to its declared belief that socialism was doomed to fail, it would have let it fizzle out on its own much sooner.