The Big Balls Family

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

Wow, people, did you hear that Big Balls, the heroic guy who took on a gang of criminals to defend a lady in DC the other day, was the grandson of this dude with also gigantic balls:

Valery Martynov was a double agent working as a Soviet KGB officer as well as an intelligence asset for the US. While serving as a Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB, he was stationed in 1980 at the Soviet official offices in Washington, D.C. By 1982, he had become a double agent and was passing intelligence to the CIA and FBI under the code name “Gentile”. He was executed in Moscow on May 28, 1987, at the age of 41.

It truly runs in the family.

Subservient AI

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

If you don’t have enough subservience in your life, ask AI to tell you about yourself based on your searches. I did and it slobbered all over me, praising me in the most saccharine and exaggerated ways over the most trivial of things.

“You care deeply about family and parenting because you asked about seating policy on Southwest Airlines.”

Yes, I’m the mother of the year, step away everybody who didn’t wonder about airline seating.

That many people use this for “therapy” is a very bad idea. It’s going to make things so much worse for them.

Textbook Case

~ Clarissa ~ 14 Comments

Oral stage trauma stays with such a person and finds another way to self-medicate. In this particular situation, the guy also clearly has an addiction to secrecy, to feeling guilty and secretive about the guilt he himself manufactures. He’s not recovering from anything. He’s in the grip of the same problem as always.

This happens because of failures of mother-child bonding during pregnancy and in the first year of life. It’s so typical it could be in a textbook.

Safety Concerns

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

The authorities in the province of Nova Scotia in Canada banned people from hiking or camping in the woods. Or going to the woods at all for any purpose. Because it’s unsafe.

The authorities in the city of London, Great Britain, painted lilac stripes on pavements to prevent bikers from robbing passersby. Pedestrians are supposed to use the lilac stripes as reminders that roving gangs of criminals ride around with impunity.

It’s curious how safety has come to mean that activities of law-abiding people should be curtailed. Authorities don’t want to combat crime. They want to constrain people who don’t do any crime.

Queers for Islam

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

That both the Left and the Right have their own “queers for Islam” faction will never stop being highly entertaining.

Of course, the Left created its first and the Right, as usual, is conserving the Left’s yesterday’s fad.

Out of Touch

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

Yeah, right, aha. Where exactly on campus do they hide looking like this?

People are losing all touch with reality.

I sit through commencement twice a year and …. no.

Eat the Consequences

~ Clarissa ~ 1 Comment

We posted our minimum-wage job at the lab and got … 89 applications. We had to take the posting down, and now students are writing to ask where the posting went and can they still apply.

This is a result of the state-mandated increase in minimum wage. We have to pay each worker more but the total amount we get didn’t increase. Consequently, the number of jobs decreased dramatically. Students now have to fight it out over a fraction of the job pool we used to have.

I predicted exactly this when the announcement about the minimum wage increase first came out. We were cushioned from the consequences for a couple of years by COVID money but now we are left alone to eat the consequences.

Comrade Stalin at Plaza Frontenac

~ Clarissa ~ 1 Comment

I went to a very fancy department store on business. I missed my feeding time and needed to eat something immediately but this fancy mall only had a fancy taco place. I abhor tacos and everything related to Mexican food but beggars can’t be choosers. It was either this or a hypoglycemic coma, so I accepted the tacos.

This was the right choice because those tacos had nothing Mexican about them. They were little works of art.

As we used to say, Comrade Stalin is a great chemist. He can turn any great man into a piece of shit and any piece of shit into a great man.

Other People’s History

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

I wrote about this concerning Spain. You can’t make your history matter to people who are not related to it and don’t perceive it as their own. I care about WW2 because my grandfather fought in it. The war between Peru and Ecuador, on the other hand, means nothing to me. I still wouldn’t deface the monuments if I visited those countries, of course, but then I’m cultured in a way that most people on the planet will never be.

The Las Vegas Problem

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

The problem with Las Vegas is that everybody who is not rich has been priced out. The shows, the restaurants, the shopping – everything has become extremely expensive. An older couple at church used to go every year but they stopped. They are comfortable but not rich. Now they go to Destin instead. Destin is still too expensive by my standards but it’s not completely unaffordable for normal people.

And rich people don’t go to Las Vegas because it’s too low-class for them. They don’t travel domestically that much at all unless it’s fancy places like Aspen. People who want fancy cuisine, which was unnecessarily unleashed on Las Vegas, will go to Europe. Las Vegas lost its regular middle-class clientele and picked up none of their aspirational demographic.

I’m seeing this on a small scale in my town. We had a very popular and great-quality seafood restaurant. The owners of their building decided to raise the rent to something sky-high. The restaurant couldn’t afford to pay that much and left. And the space has been standing empty for close on a year. There’s nobody in town who can afford the sky-high rent or food at a restaurant that would have to raise prices to swing it.

Denial of reality is the costliest mistake you can make.