Good news! “In the October 2014 Heartland Monitor, just 38 percent of adults said they expected their finances to improve over the next year. That rose to 44 percent in the February 2015 poll, and inched up further to 47 percent in the latest survey. . . The share of adults expecting their finances to improve over the next year has increased 7 percentage points among whites, 10 points among nonwhites.” And before you start rolling your eyes as usual, please remember that if a Republican president achieved this kind of thing (which never happens, as we all know), his base would know how to promote and celebrate it and not yes-but it to death.

The owner of a “relentlessly gay” yard is asked to make it less gay by a “Christian” neighbor.

Idiots abound: “If the United States arms Ukraine—and announces that the policy is an explicit effort to kill more Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine—its impact on Russian public opinion is likely to be the opposite of what advocates say they intend. Indeed, it could transform the war there from a popular but essentially optional effort to help separatist forces and civilians in eastern Ukraine into a necessary conflict against a hostile American proxy.” Of course, Russians already believe that they are fighting against Americans in Ukraine and Putin has been telling them this for months. But hey, when did ignorance ever prevent any blabberer from blabing?

“Most of us in higher education would give vital organs to never again hear a student say “I’m just not a math person.” Nobody is. Math is a set of skills and a way of thinking, and it can be developed through sustained practice. But that means accepting the possibility of having to work hard to get it. It means having faith that not getting it the first time doesn’t mean that you never will.” Hear, hear!

“We don’t need another president who merely holds the top spot among the pampered elites of Washington,” said Jeb Bush in his speech. Seriously, what makes a guy say something that opens him so wide for ridicule?

“Sometimes I wonder if people have actually read the Bible they claim to be following. Jesus got angry—a lot. Sometimes getting angry is the only right thing to do! There are things in this world that should make us all very angry indeed.” Very true.

A weird author weirdly auto-censors.

Gymnasts in burqas.

And Quebec continues doing weird things. Of course, the province is bursting at the seams with money, so I guess its officials believe they can afford to engage in stupid nitpicking.

And our favorite brainiac Scott Walker has antagonized the UK’s David Cameron. This is the kind of blabby fool that some people see as our president. Seriously, people.

In the meanwhile, the UK is busily creating even more special snowflakes: “Homework could be abolished at one of Britain’s leading independent schools as part of reforms to stem an “epidemic” of teenage mental illness.”

Laura Kipnis is still defending herself from weird allegations by weird people.

Montreal city workers water shrubs while it rains. Who cares about the critical depletion of the planet’s aquifers when there is a bureaucratic quota to fulfill?

[Spanish] Kids who go to daycare before the age of 3, do significantly better in school.

“A majority of Germans (58 percent), French (53 percent) and Italians (51 percent) say their country should not use military force to defend a NATO ally if attacked by Russia, the survey found. At the same time, the survey found that 68 percent of Europeans were confident that the United States would come to their aid should the need arise.” I don’t even know what to say about this show of complete loserdom. Americans have spoiled Western Europeans rotten and it has got to stop.

Have you heard about bibliotherapy? It’s a cute, if probably quite useless, concept.

“We are told that sex — excuse me, that sex with cis men — is a scarce commodity that we must work very, very hard to earn.” Really??? Sex is hard to get for women? Where? In what society? Jeez, where do these bizarre people even come from? I can’t even imagine what it would look like for a woman to “work hard to earn sex.”

Mothers are all different: “A mother was unhappy with the $3 knit crop top her daughter purchased on Amazon, and put the garment on the family cat instead.” My mother actually forced me into a much, much, MUCH more revealing knit piece that you can see at the link causing me all kinds of trauma.

Everybody is shocked that Bernie Sanders is drawing huge crowds. Bernie is also stunned.

But hey, is it really that surprising? Is there anybody who doesn’t feel like an idiot when imagining a Clinton / Bush election? Everybody is tired to death of these names and is desperate to hear something different.

Remember what the Internet was like back in 1995-7? You enter the url and then go get a cup of coffee, make a snack, read a few pages in a book while the website loads. The younger people have no idea how much time we all spent waiting for Web pages to load.

This is how my Charter Internet connection works this week. It’s super annoying. Maybe I should switch to the AT&T U-verse. I have AT&T on my phone and it never disappoints.

Does any one of you have U-verse? What’s the experience like? We have the most expensive Internet package that Charter offers, and it sucks royally. Should we just kick it?

The realm of politics has been so degraded that people don’t even seem to notice how bizarre the following “opinion poll” is:

A survey conducted by the Democratic-leaning firm Public Policy Polling found that 67 percent of respondents who voted for Romney in 2012 said they had a higher opinion of the family made famous by TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting.” Just 12 percent of Romney voters said they had a higher opinion of the President than the Duggars.

By contrast, 87 percent of respondents who voted for Obama in 2012 said they had a higher opinion of the President than the Duggars. Only 5 percent of Obama voters said they had a higher opinion of the ultra-conservative Christian reality TV family.

What kind of an “opinion” can place a president and a bunch of TV personalities on the same field for comparison purposes? This is like asking if I have a higher opinion of the Beatles or sunflowers.

The word “opinion” is the most overused of all these days. I can’t tell you how many times I have to say to students, “No, it isn’t just your “opinion” that Columbus traveled to the New World in 1356. This is not an issue on which you can have opinions.” They get extremely sulky when they hear that they can’t have opinions about some things.

It’s very disturbing how easily people responded to the entirely idiotic question in the quoted poll without stopping to ask what this “opinion” was supposed to be based on.

My analyst says that I’m unusual in my 100% reliance on the logical and the rational. For me, everything needs to have a logical explanation, or it just bugs me. The intuitive part of my psyche is so beaten down that it never makes an appearance. (The way to address is that is to do things with your hands, like cooking or gardening, and pursue some creative activity, by the way.) 

So it just drives me nuts when I see inexplicable things happening. For instance, there is the mystery of the Walter Scott post. For days, this has been the most popular of my posts, even though there are no backlinks to it and the post contains nothing. This is what I see every day on the stats page these days:

 

I’m beginning to think people like the post so much because it’s as short as a tweet. And that’s a disturbing thought.

I will never become American enough to understand why everybody is so obsessed with Rachel Dolezal. To me, this is such a non-story. None of us can possibly know what’s in her DNA analysis. Anybody who’s ever seen a DNA analysis knows that drawing conclusions about people’s race or ethnicity is a waste of time. We all have a crazy amount of ancestry mixed in there.

And even if she does a DNA test and it is somehow deduced that she has no African ancestry at all, so what? What’s the big deal?

It seems like these vapid overblown scandals are growing in number. The recession must really be over if people are getting so overwrought about these trivial stories.

So have you met these creepy families with a son and a daughter where the mother is obsessed with the son, and the daughter is this mousy little creature with no personal life, and both mother and sister are total handmaidens to the boy? Obviously, the boy grows up messed up like all hell by all this, as well.

I have seen this family structure a few times, and it’s always very creepy.

The Illinois House of Representatives rejected Governor Rauner’s (a.k.a Big Government Rauner) state budget. Now Rauner is trying to pressure the state representatives by taking out TV ads where he accuses them of refusing to combat the state’s dysfunction.

Right now, Rauner is valiantly battling the state’s budget problems by hiring, on the taxpayer dime, $100,000 secretaries for his wife and an army of $150,000 – $170,000 secretaries for himself. I’m hearing that Rauner has many more relatives he needs to provide with expensive secretaries, so the state better pony up some cash for this noble purpose.

I am not aware of any country that has such a robust genre of “Country X As a Huge, Unsolvable Problem” as Spain. The “mystery of Spain” has had a scary number of huge volumes dedicated to it. And there is nothing to indicate that the genre is on the wane. 

These books are obviously part of a nation-building process, and I have been a huge fan of the genre for years. Now that I’m on sabbatical, I can indulge my bizarre passion for these books.

José Álvarez Junco is a famous historian, and his 2002 book Mater dolorosa is a 700 page volume that tries to answer the question of why the “Spain as a problem” genre is so crazy popular while actually contributing (in a very conscious way) to the genre. The book is lovely, it’s filled with insights, and though I obviously disagree with some of the things the author says, I took many pages of notes and enjoyed the volume thoroughly.

Álvarez Junco argues that Spain’s nation-building efforts in the XIXth century were deficient when compared with those of other Western European countries. There is still a lot of nation-building that needs to be done today and it has to be done fast or the antsy Catalonians are leaving. As Álvarez Junco points out, the XIXth-ventury nationalism was all about bringing territories together and creating bigger countries, while today, nationalism is about creating ever-tinier nations. There seems to be a collective failure of imagination as we are rejecting the very possibility of imagining a community that is not very small.

Author: José Álvarez Junco

Title: Mater Dolorosa. La idea de España en el siglo XIX.

Year: 2002.

My rating: 10 out of 10.