I’m noticing that comment voting is important to people, so I have changed the system to make it more sophisticated. Now, instead of just upvoting or downvoting a comment, you can rate it on a scale from 1 to 5. Do check it out and tell me how you feel about the new system. I made the stars green but I can also make them red, yellow, blue, or grey.

Are you curious why there haven’t been many posts yesterday and the day before? The answer is that WordPress is one of those concerns that just can’t leave well enough alone. They keep futzing with the system that used to work perfectly well. Every time they introduce some “improvement” that messes every thing up, the users have to protest for months to get the system back in working order.

The most recent “improvement” is that now, whenever I push the “New Post” button, I don’t see the familiar box for writing posts, like I always used to. Instead, I get redirected to some butt-ugly, bright-blue page that takes forever to load. When it finally loads, I have to press another button to get redirected back to the page where I can actually write my post. That also takes forever. The only reason why I can post as much as I do is that I come up with posts fast, write them fast, usually while I’m on the run from one place to another, and publish them fast. 

I am mystified by WordPress’s decision to make the process of posting a lot more time-consuming and cumbersome. Of course, they will can this idiotic initiative, just like they canned all the previous ones. That, however, will only happen after they aggravate every single one of their users to an extreme degree.

And now, to compensate for this bout of whining, here is a hilarious horoscope of me I received yesterday:

Curiosity is one of the reasons that an Aries Dragon will want to get to know someone. They tend to seek out others who are a bit different and modern in their opinions and thoughts like they are. These individuals love to chat and so any potential friends or partners should be prepared for hours of interesting discussion. An Aries Dragon sometimes uses a person’s responses to questions to judge whether they will be worth conversing with. This is rather pompous and doesn’t always bring good results but they still seem to automatically do it. Once you get to know them they will not mind you using the same tactics on them.

The Aries Dragon often falls in love very easily and may have several relationships before they find the right one. They will usually rush in with all their avidity and slightly overly trusting nature without their usual think ahead reasoning. When it comes to love and romance an Aries Dragon is a bit of a perfectionist and they have high expectations of a personal relationship. They cannot understand why others are more cautious and hold back their feelings initially. These people need partners that are demonstrative and will return the same amount of affection and openness.

When the Aries Dragon is angered or upset they may reveal the weakness in their personality of not taking kindly to the advice of others. If they are brooding these Aries are best left too it. They like to work out their own solutions to problems, in their own time and will rarely take recommendations from other people. If you try to offer guidance or suggestions they will usually be flatly ignored. Even if they know the advice is good they will still refuse to listen and have even been known to do the total opposite of what is suggested.

Here is more. The spelling at the linked site is atrocious but the analysis is super funny. You’ve got to agree this is me to a T.

Two young women and two young men were arrested in Russia for allegedly painting the top of a public building blue and yellow (the colors of Ukrainian flag) and flying a Ukrainian flag on top.

Knowing how often the Russian criminal justice system railroads innocent people and makes them confess through torture and rape, the Ukrainian artist who actually did paint the building has been trying to confess and get the innocent people released. He hasn’t been hugely successful.

The story reminded me of this ancient Soviet joke where Stalin lost his pipe and a huge investigation was launched to find the thief.

An hour later, Stalin called the Chief of his secret police.

“It’s OK,” Stalin said. “I found the pipe. It had fallen between the desk and the bookcase.”

“Good to know!” the chief of secret police said. “Because I’ve been investigating and everybody except for one person confessed to stealing the pipe.”

“EXCEPT ONE?” Stalin bellowed. “Keep investigating!”

My cousin’s husband was shot by terrorists in Donetsk but survived the wound. Another family friend was beaten and robbed by the terrorists. Neither man had participated in the hostilities in any capacity.

In case this has already been forgotten and a fresh round of idiotic questions is about to crop up: I still don’t like these people. And I still don’t want to see them dead or harmed in any way. And if for you emigrating means wishing death on everybody who remained in your country of origin, there is something seriously wrong with you.

And an example of losers and freaks discussed in the previous post:

We cannot assume that the repression in the former USSR under Lenin and Stalin was simply a collection of baseless show-trials and megalomaniacal repression when even liberal scholars such as J. Arch Getty (who is recognized as one of the most important academic scholars on the former Soviet Union) have demonstrated that there were actual conspiracies to destroy socialism.

This silly little thing actually teaches students at a university in Toronto. The freak masturbates to his pathetic fantasies of Stalin’s genocide for one simple reason: he is a useless misfit and a life-long loser. So he identifies with Stalin and slaughters millions of people in his fantasies to feel important.

I’ve been thinking that jihadism and narcoterrorism are the only alternatives to capitalism left for wanyone who chafes under the established order in a post-communist world. Capitalism triumphed a generation ago, communism is dead, but what remains is deeply unsatisfactory to much of the world, especially after the 2007-2008 economic collapse — yet there appears to be no alternative.

Yes, the Communist dream was embraced by all sorts of misfits, criminals, and losers. But let’s not worry about them too much. They will always find an excuse to continue being misfits, criminals, and losers. 

I’m sure that by now everybody has seen the video of Kajieme Powell being shot by police in St. Louis. It is very clear from the video that the police did not at any time even consider doing anything but killing him. Readers tell me that police are trained only to shoot to kill and nothing else. But does anybody know why that is?

All I can think of are economic reasons: nobody wants to have to pay the pension or workers’ comp in case something happens to a police. I’m hearing these pensions are not insignificant. So it’s cheaper just to train police to shoot to kill.

If anybody has better explanations, please share.

As a beginning homeowner (and a person who never lived in a house before), I’m constantly expecting horrible things to start happening. So, of course, when I heard strange rumbling, I immediately thought, ‘Pipes!’

So I started running around the house like a scared hippopotamus, looking for the source of pipe breakage and not finding it.

Then a rustling sound joined the rumbling.

The scared hippopotamus started running faster and panicking harder.

In the end, it turned out that the rustling and the rumbling were rain and thunder.

Philip Bobbitt says that the death of the nation-state will be accompanied by the death of one of its most ambitious and valuable projects: the obligatory primary and secondary education of all citizens provided by the state free of charge. I would absolutely hate to see that happen and so would Bobbitt. But it’s going on already.

I haven’t had cable TV at home for several years. Now I switched it on again and one thing that I’m noticing is how aggressive, shameless and I’d say even angry the advertisement for online schooling (meaning, no schooling at all) of K-12 kids is. 

The curious thing is that the destruction of the compulsory education is not (yet) being promoted by the worshipers of free markets. They obviously will participate with glee in the project but for now it is an affliction that people are happily inflicting on themselves. Here is, for instance, an example of the so-called “unschooling.” It makes my hair stand on end precisely because I know what an enormous civilization achievement was the creation of a compulsory, free, inclusive system of education. It took our  civilization millennia to get there. I’m now fearing it will take all of two seconds to destroy it.

Today, I was talking to students about the Roman Empire and the Caliphate of Córdoba. The constant refrain of the lecture was, “And then – as tends to happen all of the time – barbarians came and destroyed this great civilization.” I don’t want to be saying this about us twenty years from now.

And then again, I might not even have any students to say it to if things continue this way.

I know I haven’t posted anything interesting for a few days and I’m sorry! Classes have begun and I need to get used to the new schedule and figure out my routine. Since I had no actual vacations, I have trouble staying awake long enough to teach my 4 courses.

My classes run one after another this semester, with only 15-minute breaks between them. I don’t mind because they are all in Spanish. It’s hard for me to switch from Spanish to English and back but this semster I don’t have anything in English.

All of the courses are higher-level which is also great. I’m very happy with the students this year because they are very enthusiastic, engaged, and very advanced. I will have to change half of the activities I prepared because these students are too advanced for them.

I promise to post something profound as soon as I can think of it.