I checked. It’s a real article.

They really don’t get it. The cultural divide gaped at me like never before.

I started participating in a research group with 30+ scholars from Spain and France. We met on Zoom yesterday to discuss our research projects. The meeting started with everybody introducing themselves. People said their name, where they worked, and what their current research project was. Because that’s what we gathered for. To do research. So everybody explained their research.

Except me.

I said my name and that I’m department Chair. Nothing about research. The scholar who organized the group and invited me gave me a bemused look because he knows my scholarship. I have significantly more publications and of greater weight than anybody else in the group. Including him. He’s somebody who develops my ideas in his writing, which is how we met.

But I couldn’t squeeze it out. Sixteen years of keeping it all in at work, pretending I’m very small, that I’m just like everybody else. I was attending the meeting from my office, and my work persona took over. And at work I’m not somebody who reads, writes, and publishes.

Please understand that I’m not blaming anyone for this. This is an issue of my personal psychology and my own individual responsibility. I’m sharing this because this is my sharing space and because I want people to know that the opposite of the imposter syndrome exists. I don’t fear that others will think I’m not good enough. I fear they will notice that I am.

The Supreme Court has unfrozen USAID, so there goes that. Of course, it’s the fault of evil Commie justices because it’s not remotely possible that Trump can’t be assed to find competent lawyers to argue the case convincingly. That’s something that never happened before.

Hey, maybe Trump asked the Kraken lady to do it again. ‘Tis the season for second chances for the congenitally stupid.

I don’t know if Trump’s tariffs will be good or bad. It’s impossible to be a specialist in everything, and on this topic I confess that I have zero knowledge.

Is it possible that the tariffs will have disastrous consequences? For all I know (which is nothing whatsoever), yes, absolutely.

Is it possible that they will have great consequences? Just as possible.

I don’t know where to find a good, reasonable explanation of tariffs other than acquiring an additional degree in Economics. I have already spent more time than I ever wanted to learn the basics of virology, and there’s a limit to how much I can do to compensate for the information vacuum we live in.

There’s a lot of wailing about tariffs in the media but it’s the same media that told us there was an epidemic of police killing unarmed black men and all the rest of it. So that’s worth bupkes.

The problem is, nobody has those policies because they don’t exist. Africa is experiencing a population boom and Finland isn’t. That tells you all you need to know about the connection between policy and population growth. There’s policy to stop people from reproducing but no policy in reverse.

I have a friend from Benin who grew up with 11 siblings in a dirt-floor hut in Africa. Now she’s an American mother, and she says that she’s a mother in a completely different way than her own mom in Africa was. Her children are children in a completely different way. Our subjectivity is different in the West. We experience ourselves in the world in a radically different way. We are not a Fordist model of conveyor belt production of children. We are the artisanal model. The only way to go back to the subjectivity we left behind 200 years ago is through a cataclysm of extinction-level proportions. Obviously, we don’t want that. But what’s the problem, anyway? Why should we pursue quantity over quality at this point? Yes, it’s a good thing for people to have children. It’s normal and happy-making. But why does it need to be 10 children and not 2 or 3? Look at Elon Musk with his 14 kids that have to beg on social media for his attention. How is that better than having a real father, who’s there to play baseball with you, take you to the arcade, and make cringey but endearing Dad jokes? What is the purpose, to crunch out numbers or have an experience that brings together two different subjectivities (the parent’s and the child’s) in the most fulfilling, deep, pleasurable and enlightening manner possible? I know without a shadow of a doubt that N, for example, is enormously happier in his fatherhood than Musk because he has time and energy to build a nuanced, profound relationship with his child. Any man (but obviously almost no woman) can father a crowd of children all over the place and never care that they exist. But for what purpose? Yes, yes, I mean a man with money but you’ll notice that it’s usually the men with money who treat their fatherhood much more carefully than lazy layabouts.

So my conservative advice is let’s have children and concentrate on being good, attentive, loving parents to them. Or good, attentive, loving aunts and uncles if we don’t have kids of our own.

Did Trump say anything I need to know in yesterday’s speech? I didn’t watch, and there’s nothing except raw emotion on social media.

Totally true. And it’s the best thing about adulthood. You get to be the master of your emotions and not let them eat you up. Once you get it, it’s a really great thing.

Should have gone with DeSantis. Let’s see if the federal authorities shut down the Florida investigation.

BlackRock just bought two ports on both sides of the Panama Canal. And 40+ more ports in 23 countries.

Or are we on BlackRock’s side now? Just in case I missed the most recent directive.

The past several days have been a big letdown for us, right-wingers. I’m not into partisanship or personality cults, and everybody who is interested in that are asked kindly to proceed to the left where crawling on one’s knees for some dude or another is normal.

It’s concerning that billions in funding, free speech limitations, and UN voting are being decided on the basis of subservience to Israel. I support Israel but I want to live in a nation-state, not a branch office of Israel.

The efforts to portray us like the pro-pedophilia party proceed unopposed and include not only the mysterious disappearance of the Epstein files but the goofy posing of right-wing influencers with fake files and moronic jokes of the House GOP Judiciary Committee. These are self-inflicted wounds that are a result of sloppiness.

The situation with Ukraine is completely mishandled. JD Vance is making bizarre statements, calling Britain and France “random countries”, then saying it’s not what he meant. The whole thing reeks of playground cattiness and a lack of seriousness. The plan to make the European war the responsibility of Europe was proceeding apace, and now this absolute goof is meddling and opposing an excellent plan in which the EU was taking responsibility on its own shoulders. You want America First? Excellent. Go do that. Speaking of which:

Lutnick went on record with a statement worthy of the losers who praised Bidenomics, saying, “there may well be short-term price movements.” What is this, bloody USSR? We now have our own novoyaz to avoid saying that prices will go up? We need to hear what is happening to the economy and why.

None of this is OK, and we shouldn’t be cowering in fear, like a bunch of lefties, and failing to point this out. That the President himself is going to mete punishments to idjit students who think wrong thoughts, I’m sorry but this is Obama-style crap. Everything I listed above reeks of Obama. Not in the conspiracy sense that he’s pulling the strings but in the sense that sloppy unseriousness has infected both parties to a degree that currently looks irreparable.