Clarissa's Blog

What would the world without humans look like? Researchers have come up with an answer and even a map:

Now researchers have suggested the rest of the world may have enjoyed the same level of biodiversity if it weren’t for us greedy humans. A world without people could have seen elephants and rhinos wandering across northern Europe and even Britain

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Of course, the value of such a planet would be nil.

People are asking if I consider those who cheat on their spouses to be pathetic.

Of course, I do. They are immature loser wimps,  and I find immaturity to be intolerably boring. I would never want to spend any time around a person who plays the game of “you be my Daddy / Mommy and I’ll be your 14-year-old kid” with their spouse. I don’t dispute anybody’s right to infantilize themselves in this manner but I prefer not to have to witness this spectacle.

I can’t imagine ever debasing myself to the point of accepting that anybody other than me has the right to decide what I should do with my body. I live my sexuality openly and freely and I’ll be damned if I ever betray it in a way that requires sneaking around and concealing it.

I did the exact opposite of every piece of advice on this deranged list of suggestions for first-year tenure-trackers.

As a result, not only do I have tenure, but I also had a fantastic time in these past six years, always saying and doing exactly what I wanted, not scheming, not manipulating, just being who I am (including not selfish, not cutting corners in teaching, and very loud all of the time).

So I have some advice of my own for people on tenure-track or any other career path: forget these stupid scripts, be passionate, be honest, enjoy yourself, and you’ll get everywhere you want to get without turning yourself into a mental invalid in the process.

Turns out thousands of addresses on Ashley Madison have .gov, .mil, and .edu  extensions. The realization that there are so many arrant losers among the elite who’d use an official work email to meet cheating partners is disturbing.

The Chinese teachers comment with amazement on the unruly behavior behavior of the British kids and blame — what else! — the “generous” benefits of the British social safety net. Having welfare available made kids rude and lazy, one Chinese teacher claimed, since they knew they had the dole to fall back on.

Hey, that’s precisely one of the bizarre – ass ideas in the book by that Indian journalist I’ve been telling you, folks, about.

It’s sad that spreading important, useful ideas is so hard while this kind of dumbassery catches on like fire.

Notice how these silly, deluded Duggars and Co come up with sets of strict rules and regulations, exercise iron self-control (aka intense masochism), police their kids and each other, avoid exploring premarital sex or pornography, etc. Yet the marriages they end up creating are sad, pathetic, insincere, filled with cheating, drama, lies, and regular mea culpas.

In the meanwhile, people like N and I (and tons of other couples we know) live our lives freely, pursuing our pleasure as we see fit, and then get together and effortlessly create relationships based on complete fidelity, trust, honesty, and mutual support.

These poor, repressed, sex – deprived creatures eventually go off their rockers and subscribe to cheaters’ websites. And I, a woman who has never allowed anybody or anything to dictate to her when, where, or with whom, find sexual fidelity to be the easiest thing in the world.

These poor fuckers are doing the exact opposite thing of what they need to do to achieve their goal.

This beautiful bird isn’t in the least afraid of people and it allowed me to come very close to photograph it.

Then some nasty kids started scaring the bird and trying to chase it away while their parents stood by and grinned stupidly. Horrible children always come from horrible parents.

American children are almost without exception well-behaved and not annoying. But these were tourists, and their children were unexpectedly horrible.

So the pill that’s supposed to treat female sexual dysfunction has been approved by the FDA. I thought it would be a great thing but now that I read about it, I’m confused.

The pill purports to address not the blood flow to the genitals but “receptors in the brain” in order to combat lack of sexual desire. Normally, the biggest problem in terms of sexual dysfunction that women experience is not that they have no desire for sex or can’t get aroused. The problem is that they can’t bring the arousal to the point of culmination.

But the pink pill isn’t addressed to these women, it seems. It is, instead, supposed to treat women who have no sexual desire at all. This is a very serious pathology, and how many people on the planet can have this problem? Three? Fifteen? What’s the point of making a pill just for them when there’s a much more widespread dysfunction?

This is very puzzling.

There is nothing more dangerous in foreign affairs than the very American hubris of “people everywhere in the world are obligated to be the way I imagine them because I’m such a center of the universe.”

Trump’s foreign policy approach is grounded in this worldview. But Bernie Sanders’s is even more unabashedly like this.

Putinoid activists attacked a literature  conference in the Russian city of Kaliningrad. The conference was dedicated to the works of Kafka and Orwell.

It’s very telling that Putinoids feel that Kafka and Orwell were writing about them.