Cat Love

Always be kind to cats.

Babies in Public Spaces

How does it occur to anybody that we need fewer kids in public places?

A cute woman with a cute baby. What’s the downside? That more women realize that having babies is not the end of the world?

Book Notes: Florida by Lauren Groff

Remember this iconic tweet?

The collection of short stories Florida by Lauren Groff is the literary equivalent of that tweet.

I do not believe anything else needs to be said about the book.

Trump Gets Feisty

Ooh, Trump is getting feisty. I like:

“As you know Vladimir called me up. He said, ‘Can I help you with Iran?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t need help with Iran. I need help with you.'”

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-putin-iran-deal-ukraine-war-russia-2089972

Putin reacts positively to strength and humiliation. He reacts very negatively to kindness and attempts to reach out.

I don’t know if many people are aware but in 2019, Zelensky won the presidential election as a pro-Russia candidate. He opposed the nationalistic Poroshenko and promised peace and friendship with Russia. That’s why I hated him so much. I thought his pro-Russia schtick was moronic. Please, blog long-timers, confirm that I despised Zelensky. My parents were visiting on the day he won, and I heard them celebrate quietly in the basement while I seethed with anger upstairs. I only changed my mind when he finally embraced the nation-state with his “we are all here” video.

Zelensky spent the first 3 years of his presidency delivering on his promise and reaching out in peace and friendship to Russia. We have all been observing the results of that particular form of a Russia Reset for the past 3,5 years.

You pet them, they bite you. You kick them, they lick your foot. Will somebody finally figure this out, or nah?

A Mysterious Factor

What she is describing can be summarized simply as low libido. These are women with a weakened to non-existent sex drive. If only we could isolate a libido-lowering factor. Maybe a medication of some sort that only women take throughout their mating years. I have no idea what it might be. Hmm…..

Occupied

I don’t know from studies but unless a woman is very busy at work (or with a large number of children), she’ll fuck your brain and no other part of you endlessly, methodically, and insistently. The happiest husbands have very busy wives. Woe be onto a hapless fellow whose wife has turned to managing him in the absence of other things to manage.

You know who doesn’t whine about mental loads and emotional labor? A wife who is very occupied.

I personally have no dog in this fight as I’m happily married but I do need to bring up that s woman is either very busy or is “feeling very sensitive today” every single day.

Back to Reality

This is a version of Trump that I like more than what we’ve seen for the past couple of weeks:

Of course, as I explained in the preceding post, this version lacks one important component: the US knows even less than the actual warring parties about how to solve this conflict. It’s acting exactly like the two students I described earlier today.

We seem to have collectively accepted that biology is real. Good. This is long overdue. Now let’s take another step back into reality and accept that history is real, too.

Trump’s Foreign Policy

Last Fall, I had two students who never showed up for class or manifested their existence in any other way. I emailed, tried to make contact, and involved their advisors but the students didn’t respond.

In November, both students finally got in touch. One of them claimed that some terrible hardship had prevented him from accessing the internet for 2,5 months. “Can I please do some of the missed assignments, so that I can get a good grade in this course?” he asked. With 3 weeks left in a 16-week course, this Johnny-come-lately thought he could come in with zero knowledge and ace the course. He thought he had found a great hack. Why make the effort and come to class 3 times a week when you can show up at the very end and get a great result?

The other missing student wasn’t asking to catch up. He wanted his money back and his GPA not to be affected. Having missed the deadline to drop the course without penalty, he wanted me to rewrite history and free him from the consequences of his actions.

It will come as no surprise to anybody that neither student got what he wanted. There are no shortcuts and there is no erasing history. You can’t show up late in the game and solve everything with “a deal”, or in 24 hours, or in two weeks. That’s neither intelligent nor serious.

You also can’t shed your responsibilities because you have changed your mind or don’t feel like honoring them anymore. In the neoliberal worldview, time has no continuity. It is a collection of discrete segments that can be swapped out and rearranged in any order. Incidentally, neoliberalism feels the same way about body parts. Time is a continuity, though. What you did yesterday is what you are today. Constant pivoting is an impossibility.

There are no magic pills or easy hacks. The only results come from patient, daily grinding. And even that will not be effective if it’s divorced from reality, history, and objectivity.

Preventative PowerPoints

Talking about clinical morons, police in Great Britain is showing presentations to migrants housed in so-called migrant hotels. There have been numerous reports that it’s impossible to find cleaners for the hotels that were turned over to housing migrants because cleaners constantly get raped:

I’m sure a PowerPoint presentation is exactly what was missing. Now that a PowerPoint was shown, the rapes will stop because it’s lack of PowerPoints that causes rapes. That makes a lot of sense.

Old Tricks

It is clear as day that such pieces are paid for by people who want to drag the US into a protracted war with Iran:

The idea is that boots on the ground will be necessary to hunt these “16 trucks.” I hope this trick doesn’t work.