A homemade bomb exploded at a bus stop in Moscow. Three women were injured.

80% of people who go to rehab fail to kick the habit. Yet ~10 sessions with a psychoanalyst can eradicate a long-term addiction with no masochistic “willpower” efforts required.

The best place to meditate is Home Depot (a huge hardware chain store). There are very few people, the place is enormous, there is a whole large section that smells of fresh wood planks and another section that has live seasonal plants, Christmas carols play in the background, the selection of goods is all about improving and decorating one’s living space, walking around the store provides a form of gentle exercise. 

I go to Home Depot for an hour and emerge feeling more refreshed than after 3 hours at a spa.  I’d do a bookstore, of course, but ours is not huge and too crowded.

The most important wars in today’s fluid world are information wars. If there is any cause you care about, the best thing to do is get educated in the methods of fighting these wars.

Look at Planned Parenthood. This is an organization that had (and still has) everything to win the PR war. Yet it’s losing in a disastrous and shocking way. 

One sign that you are going to lose is when you start from a defensive position and make your message about your opponent’s strength and not your own (“these videos were doctored!” “Bush lied!”).

We have a bomb threat on campus. Right in my building. The Secretary of State Bomb Squad Unit is investigating using, among other things, bomb-sniffing dogs. They say the actual threat is low.

We are starting the final exams, so all bomb threats and such are not as credible as they would be at a different time. But still, who knows any more?

I liked Obama’s speech on terrorism. People are criticizing him for not offering any concrete steps to defeat the Islamic State but the truth is that there are no concrete steps he could offer. Even if Obama decided to send tens of thousands troops to Syria and even if those comparatively unmotivated troops could defeat the organization of passionate fanatics, so what? Tomorrow, a new Islamic State would spring up someplace else.

You can’t defeat an idea until the idea defeats itself. Tomorrow and the day after there will be more Farooks, Maliks and Jihadi Toliks (that’s the nickname of the Russian ISIS head chopper) whether Syria even exists or not.

I also liked Obama’s call to Muslims to start doing something about this whole mess. Since the San Bernardino massacre, I read 4 articles by people who identified as Muslims. All articles were pouty in tone and transmitted the same boring message of “But why do we have to.” What purpose the authors think these pieces served other than letting them feel self-righteous is a mystery.

During Russia’s war in Ukraine, I sought out every opportunity to speak, explain, cajole, convince, and try to make the story reach people. If Ukrainians started organizing mass murders all over the world, I wouldn’t think it beneath myself to provide analysis, offer insights, and explain, explain, explain while apologizing at every turn. So Obama is right, the Muslim community is not managing to win the information war. And from the recent Ukrainian experience, I know that it’s not that hard to win it if everyone puts their mind to it.

Overall, it was a good, calm speech that is so unlike the Creepy Lizard’s fantasies about dropping nuclear bombs on Syria.

And people who want concrete solutions should stop waiting for the Nanny State to solve this problem for them. The Nanny State has left the building. This is now for all of us to figure out.

There is an absolutely horrifying article in The New York Times Magazine titled “White Debt” by one Eula Biss. The article documents calculated and relentless instances of psychological torture inflicted on a 4 – year-old boy by a mother who bullies the child and makes him feel guilty for. . . being white.

The article is absolutely heartbreaking in its first-person depiction of emotional abuse. Guilt is the favorite tool of all manipulators. Once you manage to make somebody feel guilty for something they didn’t choose and can’t change, you’ll own them forever.

The horror of the situation is that this Eula Biss creep knows enough faddy terminology to bamboozle those who are dumb enough to believe she cares about racism. The truth, however, is that her fake preoccupation with racism is just a way to torture a sad little boy.

People often ask me what I mean when I talk about erosion of borders. Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik are a great example. Islamic State got at them without anybody really needing to cross borders. It can just as easily get at somebody who never left the US at all.

Those Russian guys who were in ISIS’S gruesome head-chopping scene I told you about pledged allegiance to Islamic State before leaving Russia. And no borders stopped them from getting there, first psychologically,  and then physically.

Indoctrination happens in a space where national borders are irrelevant, and there’s nothing anybody can do about this.

The otherness of immigrants* is often exploited to channel the anxieties generated by the contradictions of the capitalist economy into a direction that will pose no danger to the preservation of this system of economic relations. An immigrant is imagined as a tireless worker bee who, instead of feeling disconcerted by the liquid flows of capital, interacts, gladly and easily, with the fluidity and exploits it for his or her own advantage.

Instead of questioning the economic system that expects workers to renounce any sort of rootedness and connectedness in favor of a constant displacement in search of employment, members of the growing precariat aim their anger at immigrants. The desperation that forces immigrants to accept subpar working conditions is easy to mistake for complicity with the system that insists on a constant increase in productivity amidst the erosion of the last vestiges of stability. 

At the core of the fear of an unknowable stranger leas the terror of an opaque and incomprehensible future in a rapidly changing world.

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* It’s very crucial to see the differences between a refugee and an immigrant because otherwise this particular discussion becomes confusing.

Among people who really scare me are those who are insistently turning the discussion of the San Bernardino massacre into a debate on gun control. I have nothing whatsoever against gun control or an outright ban on all objects that can shoot a bullet (as I said, this is not my issue at all.) But these people scare me because they practice Orwellian amnesia to a very disturbing degree. 

Not a month ago we saw a far deadlier terror attack in Paris conducted by people associated with the same organization to which the San Bernardino killers pledged allegiance. The terrorists used Kalashnikovs in a country where buying a Kalashnikov is illegal. As we all know, that did not prevent the massacre. 

Surely, it is not possible for people to have forgotten this so soon. Yet they keep repeating “gun control would have prevented the massacre, gun control would have prevented the massacre” in a way that, frankly, sounds deranged. There were bombs at the scene, indicating that the killers would have just blown the place to bits if that were their only option. There was nothing to have prevented them from creating an extremely powerful explosive device even if no guns existed on this planet at all. 

Once again, yes, let’s discuss gun control but I’d prefer to see it done in a way that is less insane than “the weather is nasty today, the NRA must be to blame.” 

People’s brains are so lazy that all they can do is reach for some familiar, comforting narrative whenever anything happens. If, at least, their repertoire of narratives were a bit more varied, but no, usually it’s just one or two broken records than are being put on for everybody else’s enjoyment.

This is why my blog is so popular even in the age when blogging is losing out to Facebooking and Tweeting. Readers who are desperate for something other than the robotic narratives delivered everywhere else and want something more intellectually challenging flock here.