The vice-president of Russia is asked in an interview, “Are there any structural changes our government could undertake to deal with the current economic crisis?”

“The most reasonable thing to do,” says Putin ‘ s right-hand man, “would be to close down all schools*. That would be most effective. But our people are not ready for that yet. They are just not ready.”

This is not a joke. This is from an actual interview. Tell your favorite Leftie friend about the beautiful regime he’s supporting**.

* “Schools” doesn’t mean colleges in Russia. This word refers solely to primary and secondary education.

** For some mysterious reason, I haven’t encountered any Liberal women who are Putinoids. Only Leftist men worship him. It’s a weird psychosexual mystery.

It is a mystery why completely humorless people insist on working as comedians:

Comedians are always supposed to punch up

; i.e., if you’re going to make fun of people, don’t make fun of people who have less privilege than you do. It’s why LGBTQ comedians can make fun of straight people, why single people can make fun of married people, why women can make fun of men.

People who use the expression “to have less privilege” should not attempt to do comedy because that’s like somebody who weighs 500 pounds doing ballet.

I’m being told that Redditors are fainting in shock over the cussing I unleashed yesterday at a Russian patriot.

Gosh, maybe I should start issuing trigger warnings so that the tender sensibilities of the gentle wallflowers on Reddit don’t get too scandalized.

It’s an important milestone for a scholar when she actually starts getting invitations to publish articles in edited volumes (by people who are not her friends, acquaintances, or former grad school buddies I mean.)

I received such an invitation today from two important scholars in my field. They seem to have been impressed by my recent publications.

I feel important.

Crowds of brilliant people, including on this blog, tried to explain evolution to me. But it was useless. I remained utterly unconvinced.

And then I put up a bird feeder and within a month realized that evolution is very real.

The squirrels are evolving like crazy in their battle to get access to the seeds in the feeder. They are battling two PhDs and the Home Depot chain but they are winning every time. It takes them about two days to unravel each new contraption we invent to keep them out of the feeder. I will not be surprised if I see them develop opposable thumbs and start a “Clarissa Is Primitive” blog.

So yeah, evolution is totally a thing.

Few people would now be willing to argue that massive open online courses are the future of higher education. The percentage of institutions offering a MOOC seems to be leveling off, at around 14 percent, while suspicions persist that MOOCs will not generate money or reduce costs for universities—and are not, in fact, sustainable.

Everybody who is actually working in education (as opposed to blabbing stupidly about it) have been saying this only from the beginning of the MOOC idiocy.

The problem is that all you need to understand that MOOCs are hopeless is to be a teacher. But it’s very hard to explain to a non-teacher why this was a dead-end project from the start. You can’t scale teaching. Just like you can’t scale dentistry, no matter what Dr.Phil with his online clinics will tell you. You can only teach when looking people in the eye and engaging with them as individuals. 

One of the greatest principles of teaching is: if you don’t know a student’s name, you aren’t really teaching him.

Some people have absolutely no shame. What kind of a stupid prick do you have to be to appropriate the name of the Black Lives Matter campaign to make some idiotic point about a country you understand as little as all of the other countries you stupidly blab about?

Of course, this “Yves Smith” person is actually a former (yeah, right) Goldman Sachs employee. It’s quite obvious she is being paid to discredit Liberalism by posting these silly and hysterical posts under the guise of a progressive blogger with a French (seriously?) name.

Rand Paul declared that parents own their children.

Everybody with a functioning brain gagged.

When will this silly bit of fluff finally remove itself from public view and let adults engage in politics? His Daddy issues are beyond boring.

Republicans have decided to blame their plummeting relevance to the young on scary, evil professors. Scott Walker has started making some silly beatings about the need to burden professors with so much teaching that they have no time to think or learn. Obviously, there is nothing such professors can teach anybody but that’s precisely the point.

Remember what I told you about political parties that will try to hang on to power by offering  $19.99 solutions to complex problems? This is one example.

The $19.99 parties are doomed, and this plan by the hapless Walker is really doomed but, in the meantime, the especially facile will feel relief. The easy, snappy solution has been found! The nation-state is crumbling because Daddy (professors are obviously representatives of the symbolic father) is not working hard enough. Let’s force Daddy to provide, and everything will be right again.

But adults don’t get a Daddy to provide for them. They get to grow up and provide for themselves. And Scott Walker can’t give you a Daddy provider, no matter how much you whine and beg.

We are facing an enormous global transformation, and populists like Walker and Syriza are just wasting our time with their empty promises to turn back the clock and undo globalization, the information revolution, the Internet, the digital technology, etc. Walker, Syriza and Putin are peddling a fantasy where all of these developments can be taken back but that fantasy is silly, childish, and escapist.

I wish more idiot Russians came over to the blog and I could insult them in a wide variety of languages like I just did with a freak who has the gall to identify as “Russian_and_Proud.”

Russians, do me a favor. Come here and be kicked and humiliated by me. This makes me feel good. I know many languages, and I can swear like a drunken sailor in all of them.

Any decent person who has the great misfortune of being Russian experiences shame and horror today. It took my husband a month to write a letter to the Russian Embassy because he’d get to the phrase, “I, such and such, am a citizen of the Russian Federation” and just couldn’t proceed. Because he’s normal and he’s ashamed of belonging to such a horrible country and such horrible, vicious people.