Opinions, art, debate
I wrote 58,724 words of my book since October 2, 2023. Of course, I also wrote articles and book chapters in that time. But oh, this goes so slowly.
Today I wrote about the experience economy (as in, selling experiences instead of physical products.) Tomorrow, I’m scheduled to do the bit about the peculiar nature of Mexican homophobia. On Friday, I’m writing about Calderonian jealousy. And yes, it’s all connected.
I didn’t know I was part of a trend among the “well-heeled” but I clearly am.
I can’t criticize the trend because N is extremely happy. He says it feels like he’s on a permanent paid vacation. And he has the exact same number of friends and contacts with co-workers as he had before working remotely, which is zero. It’s been 4 years (since early COVID), and seeing the absolute joy this is giving him is irresistible. Of course, this means I’m now doomed to going daily to the office even when I stop being department Chair but it’s still worth it.
Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is boasting on the front page of The Wall Street Journal that, “Ukraine will not legally recognize the occupation of Crimea. There’s nothing to talk about here.” This statement is very harmful to the Peace Negotiations with Russia in that Crimea was lost years ago under the auspices of President Barack Hussein Obama, and is not even a point of discussion. Nobody is asking Zelenskyy to recognize Crimea as Russian Territory but, if he wants Crimea, why didn’t they fight for it eleven years ago when it was handed over to Russia without a shot being fired?
https://x.com/TrumpDailyPosts/status/1915079714806411650?t=9jyYOiCkaiBSqodO725uMA&s=19
Trump is not wrong. Letting Russia keep the Crimea without Ukraine officially recognizing this as legal would be a good solution. And yes, the Crimea was ceded without much effort to retain it 11 years ago. There is a cluster of reasons and bad mistakes that led to that situation. Obama is a big part of the reason but so are many Ukrainian decisions since 1991. And, of course, the terrible mishandling of the Cold War where Russia was rewarded with money and more nukes for the depredations of the USSR was the initial cause of all the current tragedy.
There is no way out of this mess without recognizing that the Cold War win was pissed away and turned into a huge loss.
Between 1992 and the early 2000s, the United States provided over $20 billion in aid to post-Soviet Russia. The Cold War is the only war where the presumed winner paid reparations to the loser without requiring any concessions, a Nuremberg-type trial, disarmament, or ideological cleansing. Even today the US is still paying the reparations in the form of military aid to Ukraine. There’s no end in sight now that Russia has its sights on the Baltics and beyond.
Contrast this to how Germany was (very deservedly) treated after losing WWII. Yes, there was the Marshall Plan but only after Nuremberg, de-ideologization, executions of the complicit, and the splitting in two.
What kind of a win is it when you get absolutely nothing and end up on the hook for endless cash infusions? What kind of a win entails the opponent still financing every regime hostile to you around the world?
I don’t know if it’s true but everywhere in the world where this was tried, the results were bad. The only people who are motivated to have children by cash payouts are lumpen ghetto dwellers. They waste the money on stupid shit immediately, and those surplus kids can’t be integrated into society. This often leads to the need for permanent war to get rid of them. Russia is a great example. The cash payouts did not remove the need to bring in millions of Central Asians because that’s not how things work.
It’s a very liberal idea that any problem needs to have money thrown at it. In reality, many (not all but many) issues can’t be solved with money. Most of the high birthrate countries are extremely poor and very dysfunctional. We need to concentrate not on quantity but on quality.
Nobody does. I will repeat once again that 30 years of grievous mishandling of the results of the Cold War by every US administration since 1990 cannot be undone in a month or a year. Especially since nobody has the guts to say what actually happened: the US, which supposedly won the Cold War, behaved like a defeated foe paying tribute to the assumed loser of the conflict.
Economically, ideologically, politically and militarily, the US behaved like it lost the Cold War. Now we are seeing the results. When a culture despises itself, the result is always bad.
I’m fascinated, absolutely fascinated to know how the media will spin this as a bad thing:
FDA Commissioner Dr Marty Makary announced the agency will phase out the use of eight artificial food dyes in America’s food supply within the next two years. . . The Trump administartion will set a plan for food companies to follow in order to adequately phase out the use of Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, Blue 2, and Green 3 by the end of 2026 and start using natural alternatives, which the FDA will approve or deny first.
Of course, this is amazing and an absolute dream but I wonder how this measure will be turned into the most Nazi thing ever on the news.
“Family life changed as parents tried to produce the sort of children who could get into selective colleges. Over time, America developed two entirely different approaches to parenting. Working-class parents still practice what the sociologist Annette Lareau, in her book Unequal Childhoods, called ‘natural growth’ parenting. They let kids be kids, allowing them to wander and explore. College-educated parents, in contrast, practice ‘concerted cultivation,’ ferrying their kids from one supervised skill-building, résumé-enhancing activity to another. It turns out that if you put parents in a highly competitive status race, they will go completely bonkers trying to hone their kids into little avatars of success,” writes David Brooks.
Yeah, this “concerted cultivation” crowd consists of either very recently college-educated (meaning, first generation) or immigrants. Among the extensively educated, the fashionable thing to do is precisely to leave the child in peace. Immigrant children are dragged to Kumon while the children of the crowd that goes to the opera for enjoyment are all at the playground or in the park.
The hardest skill and the biggest premium on the job market is the capacity for deep focus. The second one is knowing your mind and having initiative. Both skills are actively destroyed in most extracurriculars. Brooks is talking about something that existed in 2005 but has changed dramatically since then.
My university will now charge international students the same very low tuition fee that we charge in-state students. We have no admissions criteria, which means that everybody who applies is accepted. Some people who don’t apply are also accepted.
This is a bizarre measure to adopt in the midst of a budget crisis of such proportions that programs need to be eliminated and people fired. I have no explanation for this project other than that it’s an immigration scam.
Clarissa's Blog 