Clarissa's Blog

At the university event that I’m attending with Klara, our table was placed next to Sex Studies. The entire organizing idea of Sex Studies is that there is no sex, so their table looks like it threw up trans flags.

Thankfully, nobody is approaching them, so they have no opportunity to deliver their promotional speech in front of my child.

Klara’s school had no class on Thursday and Friday.

On Thursday, I took her to work with me in the morning, and then N took over because I had a budget meeting. It’s mega hot, so no outdoor activities are possible. He took her to an entertainment center and the bookstore.

On Friday, we played dolly hotel, cooked together, and then I took her to the library and the kids’ gym. Then we played balloon volleyball. N finished working and joined the dolly hotel festivities.

Today, I have an event at work, so we are going to the farmer’s market, then to my event, and then to the book fair in town. After that, we will come home and clean together. In the evening, we are going to the Y.

Tomorrow we have a visiting priest at church for the Sunday service. Then we have the Fall church picnic. After that, I have my livestream, and N will be entertaining Klara at the trampoline park.

Of course, it would all be easier if we didn’t have to hide indoors from the heat. In the endless summer months that last well into November, we have to come up with indoors activities daily, and that does become daunting.

Those Netflix shows are garbage but they aren’t what’s causing the trouble. Or rather, the reason why they have such an importance to children isn’t that Netflix cunningly ties them to a device. No child with more fun options will choose to stare at screens.

I’m still listening to Days of Rage and it’s making me angry. It turns out that all of this already happened. There was a BLM (called BLA) back in the 1970s. People weren’t allowed to say openly that it was violent and terrible. Everybody had to pretend that running around murdering people was a normal reaction to invented racist abuses. The Left glorified cop killers. NYTimes ran cover for them.

I understand why the Left needs an ever-growing supply of immigrants. It needs a fresh audience to put on the same boring play. That they’ve been singing the same song for fifty years, and we are all sitting here, listening to it, scared to interrupt, it’s a real letdown.

Today we talked about the Des Moines superintendent who turned out to be even shadier we initially thought.

I’m being ravaged by a major heatwave but I did all I could to sound alive.

We are doing a live stream on Sunday, too, because the media group is celebrating its 30th anniversary.

Thirty years ago, I thought today I’d be a professional translator of fiction in America and my wonderful husband would drive me around in a white car. I’m not a translator but close enough, the husband is as wonderful as planned but his car is sea-wave blue-green, and I actually learned to drive myself (which was never the plan).

“Today, like five years ago, a controversial man has been transformed overnight into a one-dimensional saint, marshaled in a culture war that precludes measured thought. Once again, Americans are being asked to genuflect before an idol.” pic.twitter.com/CC1d8FG1Ll

— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) October 2, 2025

I guess it’s progress that the libs have started to acknowledge that George Floyd was “controversial.” But equating a violent criminal with law-abiding and non-violent people like Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska is precisely why I always say that analogy is a tool of an impotent brain. Some analogies work but most are an expression of a weak, flailing brain that can’t process complexity.

It’s funny that this author accuses others of being incapable of “measured thought” in a piece where he demonstrates childish levels of intellectual sophistication.

Human safari continues:

Russians continue to post videos about their "fun" of having safari on civilians in my hometown of Kherson. this city has suffered enormously after liberation from Russians in 2022, 2/3s left the city to difficult conditions of life under shelling or after losing home. Around a… pic.twitter.com/CxpZUgIVM1

— Iuliia Mendel (@IuliiaMendel) October 3, 2025

I could post these videos daily because there are so many of them. The subservient cucks who were throwing fits about the Russian soldier hunted by a Ukrainian drone are studiously avoiding this information.

I checked and this doesn’t seem to be a comedy sketch:

This is absolutely bizarre. A local councillors tells a TV interviewer that she was "born and bred here", then checks herself as if she has said something terrible, and then the interviewer weighs in against her for saying it. Truly extraordinary. pic.twitter.com/yGOvirwqMy

— Paul Embery (@PaulEmbery) October 3, 2025

I have no idea what happened to these people. They are in the grip of intense collective madness.

I have the weirdest brain. Today, the Chancellor was giving a budget talk and I really wanted to listen and understand what he was saying. So I read short stories in German and answered questions about them in German in my mind while I listened to the talk. Then I saw that the Provost noticed that I was reading the whole time and was giving me dirty looks. I don’t blame her because it is truly weird that I need to be doing German exercises in order to hear a budget talk in English. Otherwise, I’d get tragically distracted and not hear a word.

People often think I’m being rude when I’m trying to do the exact opposite.

I’m freaked out by being this way as much as anybody else.

I decided to listen to Tucker Carlson’s video about Israel to understand his perspective. Ten minutes in, he started repeating like an unhinged parrot that, “I don’t blame the government of Israel for any of it. The real villain is the United States.” Truly, this guy hasn’t found any situation or occurrence for which he doesn’t blame the United States. It seems he’s not doing anything any more except blaming the United States.

We used to call such people leftists, and I don’t understand why we no longer do.

As I’m reading Days of Rage, I want to introduce everybody to my 2013 review of a book by Weatherman Bill Ayers.

I still vividly remember from the book how these mega rich people employed the services of a psychoanalyst who was something crazy famous like Jung’s disciple, or something. They’d have their every whim catered to while they played at being working class revolutionaries.

As a student from Bolivia said today in class, “In South America, all of the rich people are right-wing. But here in the US, the richer they are, the more they are to the left.”

Another thing I remember from the book is what an absolute soul-crushing ogre Ayers’s wife Bernardine Dohrn was in his portrayal. I think she probably abused him because he sounded completely beaten down by her. Mind you, he doesn’t complain. To the contrary, he behaves like a typical abused wife, protesting how hugely important and wonderful Bernardine is in a shrill, terrified tone.

Ayers and Dohrn were such African-American wannabes that they called their very white children Zayd and Malik. Both sons turned out well, though, because the rich parents bought a gigantic amount of psychological help for them.

I usually forget everything I can’t use for work immediately after reading it. That I retained so much from a book read over a decade ago is a sign that Ayers is a talented author. The writing was just so gosh-darn upbeat. Nice, nice book.