It’s impossible not to admire the Israelis for their dogged determination to transform a desert into an orchard and ultimately benefit the entire humanity in spectacular ways.

Ian Welsh’s posts are so hilarious that I just need to link to the funniest among the recent ones. I know it’s wrong to laugh at mentally disturbed people but, in this case, I just can’t help it.

“I am no Luddite, but I have always rolled my eyes a bit at the various expensive educational programs that seek to put a laptop into the hands of every student. A computer is a tool: It is only as good as its user.” Hear, hear! I am yet to see any benefits stemming from the current obsession with flooding classrooms with technology. And I absolutely love technology.

Homeschoolers discover that public schools are not as evil as they for some reason imagined.

The law enforcement in Quebec is beyond ridiculous. Oh, the stories I could tell!

In Russian: the leader of Russia’s Communist Party suggested that St. Petersbourg be renamed back to Leningrad. I actually happen to agree. Tsar Peter was marginally worse as a blood-thirsty maniac than Lenin, so why the hell not?

What’s the matter with Tom Frank? Why has his writing deteriorated so much since his brilliant What’s the Matter with Kansas? Here is a great response to Frank’s linked piece of inanity.

In case you needed any more proof why the mistaken belief that men and women are different is deadly: “But how could Rodger—or any lonely psycho—react differently? Girls perplex and terrify your childish mind. They’re just so different—as Jeffery Eugenides wrote, they’re “women in disguise” who are impossible to fathom. Often, they don’t even seem human; like Prufrock, you can only comprehend them as collections of parts. . . Since you can’t understand girls, it’s easy to turn them into fantasy creatures, whose love has the healing power of unicorn blood.”

A graphic novel illustrating Chelsea Manning’s trial. The most horrifying thing to me was the very Soviet-like use of psychiatry to torture the prisoner.

Melissa McEwan insults women a lot more inventively than any vicious woman-hater I have ever met. See her exhaustive vocabulary list of insults directed at women. I get a feeling she really digs humiliating us and calling us names.

An insightful short post on who makes it impossible to speak the truth about the advent of the disgusting Russian nouveau riches to the UK.

In Russian: a new law is being prepared in Russia that will mandate forced abortions to be performed on women deemed unfit to procreate.

The French and the Germans keep selling themselves put to Russia.

“Anyway, I wanted a sci-fi thing to listen to, and despite the fact that Ayn Rand is sort of a despicable person, I sheepishly admit, I like Atlas Shrugged. What? It’s a good story. I’ve read it probably 5 times, but after the first time, I always skipped the 100-page John Galt rant.” That’s exactly how I feel about Rand.

When such completely ridiculous stories are rolled out to illustrate the existence of misogyny in tech, I’ve got to wonder if there is any misogyny there at all. Do rad the story and tell me if you see any misogyny in it.

A great idea for a T-shirt. I don’t wear T-shirts, but I do want this one.

In Russian: everything that Ukraine has achieved in the last 3 months.

Finally, a good, useful post for people contemplating a switch to non-academic careers.

The overwhelming success of Russia’s propaganda machine.

One amazing thing that came out as a result of the Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl debacle is the fascinating story of how his father transformed himself to help his son. This is the only country I know of where a non-Jewish father will be so unabashedly nurturing and dedicated to his kid. I’m in awe of this outstanding father.

This is exactly how I see Kindle books vs real books.

“I don’t really know what non-toxic masculinity is. Maybe we’ll only find out once we’ve dismantled the toxic kind. Maybe non-toxic masculinity is the dismantling of toxic masculinity. I know it’s my duty as a man.” What’s really toxic is the belief that all women or all men on the planet have some special way of being that they absolutely need to get right. In reality, masculinity or femininity is whatever the hell you want it to be. Because they don’t really exist. they are meaningless, silly, constrictive myths.

I’m not sure how much I agree but it’s an interesting take: “We need to grow up about espionage and have a real, adult debate about it. Snowden, his retinue, and his defenders, approach the matter like petulant children who hate that the world does not operate the way they fantasize it does. Thanks to this, and their continuing baldfaced lies interspersed with ugly smears of their opponents, they have no place in the grown-up discussion that free societies ought to be having about issues of intelligence and privacy.”

A newcomer to the US has found the most American thing ever. And it’s hilarious. I wept with laughter for five minutes when I read this post.

The European attack of puritanic paranoia would be funny if it weren’t very disturbing.

“She said her parents were pressuring her. That’s what parents do in the land of privilege. They push their children to succeed, to excel, to stand out and prepare for the future in which the children, in turn, will pressure their children. If her parents had not been pushing her to get better grades, to work harder and be more, Carly Rousso would not have taken to inhaling chemicals to get high and escape her troubles.” The author of this post is trying (in a very gauche manner) to be sarcastic but accidentally makes a correct statement. This is exactly how drug addiction is generated.

I had no idea Sweden was such a totally crappy place: “Sweden has continued to lower tax rates for the already rich, while keeping taxes on new wealth through work or entrepreneurship high. In 2005 the left abolished the inheritance tax entirely. This means that today the top tax rate for someone who inherits wealth is 0%, and the tax rate for someone who creates new wealth by building a new company 67%.”

“I’m not going to fill you in on the details of my own life because they aren’t important, but the fact of the matter is that avoiding thoughts about traumatic subjects are not how you learn to deal with traumatic subjects, and this bullshit that somehow I am responsible for your thoughts is just that — bullshit. I’m me. You’re you. I’m responsible for my own thoughts. You’re responsible for yours. The notion that your own thoughts are someone else’s responsibility isn’t a recipe for healing, it’s a cop-out.” A brilliant post, highly recommended.

And here is a really lame-ass defense of trigger warnings. A warning that one prof puts on thesyllabus: “If you ever feel the need to step outside during one of these discussions, either for a short time or for the rest of the class session, you may always do so without academic penalty.” Does this weirdo impose “academic penalty” for people stepping outside the classroom during other kinds of discussions? I’m now beginning to understand why my students keep asking, in terrified little voices, for permission to use the bathroom.

In Russian: the Russian media circulate a picture saying it’s proof that Ukrainian troops are bombing Ukrainian cities. The picture turns out to be one of a railway crash in Quebec, of all places.

I should have heard about this Chinese gentleman before I made such a huge effort to learn to drive.

The post of the week: A really powerful post on the importance and meaning of the Pride.

There is evidence that Putin is trying to de-escalate the war with Ukraine.

Ukrainian secret services report that the Russian troops have moved away from the Ukrainian borders (albeit not very far).

The Russian ambassador has returned to Kiev.

Putin has actually referred to Yanukovich as “the former president of Ukraine.” This is a big deal because until now he’s been insisting that Yanukovich is still the only legitimate president.

Putin has met with Ukraine’s actual president Petro Poroshenko one on one. This meeting was kept secret from the citizens of Russia but it did happen.

Now, and this is important: the reason why Putin is (kind of, somewhat, a little) de-escalating is 100% regional. It is not in any way linked to Obama, Merkel, Western sanctions, or the Tooth Fairy.

Putin had obviously hoped for a Blitzkrieg in Ukraine. He committed the mistake of all intellectually challenged dictators and believed his own propaganda. He was sure that Ukrainians would be eager to become part of Russia and did not envision the possibility of a massive and passionate Ukrainian resistance to his invasion.

It has become clear now that Ukrainians will fight a guerrilla war if the invasion continues. And Ukrainian guerrillas are known for having defeated Hitler, which means that Putin stands no chance against them.

This is why he is now retracting and regrouping. This is a temporary lull in hostilities, of course. The goal of rising to the role of the world’s greatest superpower has not been abandoned.

Putin said yesterday that renaming the city of Volgograd back to Stalingrad was a good idea. The Russian Orthodox Church issued an official statement wholeheartedly supporting this plan.

Of course, that’s the same Church that held services every Sunday while Stalin was alive, asking God “to bless and keep in good health out God-given leader Joseph Stalin”.

N and I just had a disturbing “Back in USSR” moment at the local Best Buy. We wanted to buy a refrigerator, a washer and a dryer, which – and correct me if I’m wrong – has always seemed like a fairly big, expensive purchase to me.

We selected our appliances and proceeded to pay for them. And that’s when problems started. The washer I selected was nowhere to be found. The warehouse and the other stores in the region didn’t have it.

“Just give me the one you have right here in the store, then,” I suggested.

“No, we can’t do this,” the manager said. “We can’t remove items from display.”

“Why not?” I persisted. “It’s right here, I want it, what’s the problem?”

But the idea of selling me the washer “from display” seemed to be too disturbing.

So we decided just to buy the refrigerator. For an hour we walked around the store while the manager struggled with the computer.

“I’m sorry, what seems to be the problem?” I finally asked.

“The system is down. I can’t get the purchase to go through.”

“Can we just pay and you will put the purchase into the computer later?”

“No!” the manager exclaimed. “We have a system and we have to follow the system.”

I always thought that “the system” was called capitalism and was quite simple: I give you money and you give me goods in return. Supply and demand, I demand, you supply. But no, it seems like bureaucracy has penetrated into the most sacred redoubts of the capitalist society. Now people who want to get rid of a significant amount of cash can’t do that until mountains of correct paperwork get filled out.

So we just left having purchased nothing.

“In the USSR we also couldn’t purchase any appliances,” N commented. “But there at least they didn’t torture us by showing us this enormous selection of goods and then refusing to sell them.”

In developed countries, people in their sixties are enormously healthier than their peers from, say, 100 years ago (or from today’s Ukraine). They are active, energetic, engaged, they look and feel young. Good healthcare, good cosmetics, good hygiene, and good abundant food retard physical aging dramatically. I remember the feeling of complete shock when my mother and I traveled to her native village in Ukraine and met an ancient old lady who turned out to be my mother’s former classmate. The woman looked like she could easily be my mother’s grandmother.

The greatest problem of aging lies in the area where you can’t buy off disintegration with money or technological advances. A tendency towards intellectual rigidity sets in human beings at around the age of 35. If very specific efforts are not made to combat it, we see beautiful, physically agile and spry 60-year-olds who, sadly, are nowhere nearly as agile intellectually.

Intellectual labor doesn’t stave off this rigidity. All of those professors who keep teaching pretty much the same thing for decades, scholars who keep rewriting the same idea they had 30 years ago, and intellectuals who recycle the old instead of generating the new are all products of this affliction.

Intellectual rigidity makes people incapable of finding fresh solutions to problems, gets them bogged down in endless feuds that last forever and start because of something incredibly trivial, and makes them an intolerable burden on collagues and family members. Since these folks possess a lot of physical energy, they can create quite a lot of disruption.

It is very important to start battling intellectual rigidity as early as possible. Most people don’t even notice the moment when their reading list begins to slide more and more towards the Franzens, the Wolitzers, mystery, sci fi, fantasy, or YA. I know several academics who honestly believe they read a lot but who have not read more than 3 serious books last year. And this is just one area where rigidity sets in. What people watch, what they talk about, what they do in their free time – it is easy to get bogged down but it’s hard to get one’s intellect back to full-time work once it’s been idling for a while.

Some people really love their husbands and prepare beautiful surprises for them to celebrate the anniversaries of their relationship.

Seven years is usually a critical time in a relationship. People who manage to withstand the crisis of 7 years stay together. Until 15 and 25, which are also considered dangerous to relationships. I’m not feeling the crisis yet but it’s only day 1 of the eighth year.

We are continuing the celebrations tonight with some really cool folks who are coming over to explore our town and its manifold culinary possibilities.

Have you heard of this?

FLOTUS for Senate?

It wasn’t that long ago that such a slogan would seem absurd, but political wags are beginning to wonder whether Michelle Obama is mulling a run for Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk’s seat in 2016.

I’m still living in “not that long ago” because the whole thing sounds beyond absurd to me. I happen to live in Illinois and I kind of prefer to have people representing our state who are actual politicians. I must be horribly outdated and not ready to face the reality of politics turning into an unadulterated reality-TV show that I myself predicted recently.

I’m so upset right now, people, that I need to vent here on the blog because I’m not very fit to talk live to human beings at this moment. I have a lot to do today and it’s a very tough day as it is, so I need to get over this soon.

Today is the 9-month anniversary of my C-section, so I’m already just hanging in there, kind of. And then I just had to find out that an acquaintance has been using what happened to me, my tragedy, for manipulative purposes. It tuns out that this creature was so traumatized by what I had do undergo that this is somehow an excuse for her treating people in a shitty way. It is not a nice feeling to find out that I’m being trotted out, without even being informed about it, to justify stinky behavior on somebody’s part.

I’ve been making enormous efforts not to turn my tragedy into everybody else’s. I have been completely professional at work and never shirked my duties even minimally, although if everybody ever had an excuse to do so, that would be me. I have not forced anybody to become a hostage of my emotional states, I have not treated anybody shabbily because I’m sad, I’m dealing with everything with the help of people who have offered help. And now this sorry excuse for a human being is using the death of my child as a self-serving mechanism. 

And if this at least were a relative or a close friend who does have a genuine emotional response to the situation, I could understand that. This person, however, is a very distant acquaintance with whom I have maybe talked a dozen times in my entire life. And by the way, right after it happened, she behaved in a very poor way towards me, too. 

It’s OK, I will deal with it, just like I’ve always dealt with everything else. But God, how I hate these spoiled divas who need to exploit the problems of others because they’ve never had any of their own.

Why does the new President of Ukraine have to be sworn in on the Bible? What’s with the stupid parroting of the Americans? The Bible means something to many Americans, which is why there is at least a logic to having it at the inauguration. In Ukraine, the Bible has meant nothing to the overwhelming majority for almost 100 years.

Nothing disgusts me more that this ridiculous need to fake an interest in religion among the post-Soviet people. Whenever I see Putin make the sign of the cross, I just feel creeped out. Do Ukrainians have to follow down this path of complete idiocy (and sacrilegious profanation, by the way)?

I spend so much time at the gym these days and there are so many TV screens there that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is now like a relative. Fox News can now abandon the dead-end stories about Benghazi and IRS investigations and clamp on to a scandal that, if covered correctly, can actually have an impact at the elections of 2014 and 2016. The story is being picked up by the international press because, unlike Benghazi, this is something capable of attracting many people’s attention.

We have no access to the information available to the military, so we cannot possibly know what happened. The danger of the Bergdahl debacle is that it falls neatly into the vision of the President as somebody who decides to improve a situation he doesn’t understand, rushes in half-cocked, and messes everything up completely. There have been five years to figure out what to do about Bergdahl, yet his rescue looks unprepared, uncoordinated, and pushed through without any consideration of the consequences. This is the same pattern we have seen just the other week with the President’s plan to “rescue” higher ed. The higher ed has been there for a long time, it has suffered from serious structural problems for at least two decades, this is not something that just emerged. There has been time to address these problems in a measured and step-by-step manner.

We all know that there is great demand for stories that would make Obama look incompetent and flailing. But he’s doing all he can to make sure these stories are easy to concoct. There was not a great supporter of Obama than me both times when he was elected (mostly because of the “But just look at the other guy, brrrrr” approach) but I can’t deny that I’ve started avoiding American news because I don’t want to see yet another story that would make me even more disappointed.

P.S. I have started doing the same thing concerning Obama that I have been doing for years regarding the Canadian government of Stephen Harper. Whenever a fresh story about either Obama or the Harperites gets reported, I start mumbling under my breath, “The economy, the economy, at least they managed to improve the economy. (Or prevent it from getting to the point where it would need improvement, as in Harper’s case.”)

So let’s discuss. Do you feel less or more enthusiastic about Obama than you were back in 2008? Did he live up to your expectations? What was the biggest disappointment (if any)?