The moment I left town, the intolerable endless summer ended and a frost advisory was issued.

Of course, the moment I come back, the summer will return, and I will be greeted by obnoxious heat and hateful sun.

We arrived in DC when it was too late to do anything but eat and try to locate the White House. After jumping on 15 different buildings with excited yelps of, “Is this it?” and making it abundantly clear that we were total country bumpkins, we finally found it.

The White House turned out to be a lot smaller than we’d imagined from seeing it on TV. We didn’t get a chance to take a good, long look, though, because one of the people taking photos of the building had a brilliant idea to leave a weirdly shaped bag lying unattended on the pavement.

“I hope it’s not a bomb!” I told N.

A security guard noticed the bag, too, and started getting nervous.

“Whose bag is this?” he started asking the visitors.

The bag’s owner (who later turned out to be a very rude and vulgar young person) stood there gawking and failing to claim the bag.

The security guards really freaked at that point and began to clear the area. The bag’s owner finally claimed it, looking very put upon and trying to get as obnoxious as possible. After that, the guards obviously didn’t let anybody approach.

The Atlantic has released an ebook titled Race and the American Idea: 155 Years of Writings from The Atlantic. It contains 750 pages full of crucial texts on race in the US. I’m super excited about this book.

I had no idea that this journal had been founded by abolitionists.

President Obama has announced that the US troops are not leaving Afghanistan. And that’s the right thing to do. You can’t mess things up, and then run away at the first sign of trouble, leaving your allies to die because you’ve grown bored with them.

As we discussed earlier today, the US military is a lot less good at fighting* than it is at making important symbolic gestures with its presence or absence. The symbolism of leaving Afghanistan right now would be worse than the symbolism of staying. 

* Not being good at warfare is actually a good sign. It means that life in the country is good and the value of human existence is high. The best fighters are those who prefer death to going back home to their horrible lives or those who still are just beginning to construct their nation-state.

Cultural conditioning, heavy lifting, horrible oppression, women’s work, blah blah, and some more blah.

The truth, however, is that everybody who is able and willing to write a book and publish an article is doing just that. And everybody else goes from one silly excuse of a committee or a suffering student to another, moaning about how much they would be publishing if the horrible oppression didn’t prevent them from doing so.

I hate the weepy, whiny, woman-hating posts like the linked one with a passion of a million suns.

“Remade under Putin, Russia’s Military Forces Show Might not Seen in the Post-Soviet Era” tells us a headline in the New York Times.

This is too funny given that Ukrainians whooped this military’s might all the way to the village of Maryinka, and that’s in the absence of an actual army of its own.

It’s both hilarious and sad that Americans can get so easily scared of an untrained, unmotivated bunch of underfed soldiers armed with weaponry that has a tendency to fall apart in many spectacular ways right in the midst of not only combat situations but of actual military parades witnessed by Putin.

Not that Americans were ever known for having a military that ever won any conflict over any serious contender (the decrepit Spanish Empire of 1898 doesn’t really count, and neither do the wars where others do the work for you before you finally show up after every decisive battle has been fought), but this terror of the grievously unsuccessful Russian army is very misplaced.

Can you spot the baby in this photo?

If you can, you might be psychotic. Researchers at the Universities of Cardiff and Cambridge found that people who showed early signs of psychosis were much better at recognizing the baby than a group of those who did not have psychosis.

I’m happy to report that I don’t see it.

The original photo is here.

Poor Russians are still pathetically trying to get “the cool kids” to notice them. Putin has asked the White House to meet with his representatives in order to discuss how best to fight ISIS in Syria. The offer was, of course, rejected. The facile fellow lives in a world of his own. He believes that he will finally make the Americans notice him and treat him as an equal but nothing is working.

The really sad part is that there is no likelihood that Putin will abandon this goal. He will keep acting in ever more outlandish and aggressive ways, trying to get noticed. And his acting out always consists of killing innocent bystanders. 

This is a very bad situation because the more Putin is thwarted, the more desperate he gets, and the more violent his acting out becomes. 

In order to understand what he is doing, it is crucial to remember that this is a man obsessed who is being thwarted in his life goal. 

Urban Outfitters has asked salaried workers at the company’s home office to “volunteer” for extra weekend shifts at a new fulfillment center. In an email, the company asked for weekend workers to “pick, pack and prepare packages for shipment.”. . .

We had this kind of thing back in the USSR all the time! It was considered volunteering, just like at Urban Outfitters, but in reality people didn’t have a choice.

It is fascinating how easily all huge companies slip into the Soviet model of huge, unwieldy, dehumanized, and totalitarian exploiters.

 

A famous Russian actor – a really wonderful, intellectual, ultra-refined fellow who is not in the least a Putinoid – is talking to a journalist about a recent trip he made to the US.

“There is this really wonderful small town,” he shares. “There are no black people there at all! There are only good, intellectual high-earning folks.”

Chances that this fellow even spent any time around black people in his life are non-existent. Still, he somehow knows that their absence is to be celebrated.

And hey, this is not specifically a Russian thing. Ukrainians are this way, too.

It will take a very long time to integrate us all into the civilized world.