I developed a severe allergic reaction to the antibiotic I was taking to treat my previous ailment. I so rarely take any meds that I had no idea I was badly allergic to sulfas.

The funny part is that I’m covered with an aggressive, disfiguring rash. And next week I’m going to teach about the infectious diseases Europeans brought to the New World during the Spanish conquest. Picture me saying, “And then the Indians started getting covered with this rash that they couldn’t explain, and then they started dying” while taking off my jacket and revealing a terrible rash that covers me.

Gotta make the best out of existing conditions.

Sarah Gerard is clearly talented. To take a story about a drug-induced killing in a community of Bohemian misfits and turn it into a riveting read takes great skill. I’m ideologically Gerard’s opposite, yet I enjoyed reading Carrie Carolyn Coco enormously. She simply knows how to write.

Gerard is also a very good, generous person. Among the acquaintances she describes, she’s the only one with a real talent. Yet she so sweetly refers to the pretentious hacks in her circle as artists and treats their sad creative efforts with such gentleness that one can only admire the depths of her magnanimity. I’m not nearly as good of a person and I openly admit it. I made fun of the ethnobotanical literary critic because I know what literary criticism is and couldn’t contain my reaction to ethnobotanicist’s theorizing. Gerard, on the other hand, benevolently tolerates the freak show that surrounds her and treats its participants as if they were her equals.

If only someone guided her away from #BLMing and #MeTooting crap and towards Great Books (which she rubbishes as being racist and sexist) and valuable ideas, Gerard could grow into a serious artist.

Russian military (Kadyrovites) are looting Russian stores in Glushkovo, Kursk region, which will soon be cut off from the main Russian forces when the last bridges across the Seim River are completely destroyed. pic.twitter.com/qXfl6nxgoD

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) August 18, 2024

Kadyrovites means Chechens, in case people don’t know. These are the Chechens who have been raping young Russian conscripts stationed in the Kursk region, which prompted these soldiers to surrender to Ukrainian Armed Forces en masse.

I’m trying to put to rest the extraordinarily bizarre myth that Putin is a Russian nationalist. Putin spent a quarter century facilitating mass migration of Central Asians into Russia and conducting population replacement as he eliminates ethnic Russians through endless wars and mass rape campaigns. I have seen dozens of videos of Chechens doing the most terrible things to Russian soldiers. I’ve never seen anything in the opposite direction. Everybody on the front lines knows that Kadyrovites get whatever they want.

It’s frustrating that so much of the discussion around the events in the region rests on the most exotic fantasies that have nothing to do with reality.

Disclaimer: Carrie Carolyn Coco is not a novel. It’s a piece of investigative journalism in the true-crime genre. All quotes in the post below are from interviews Gerard conducted with actual people.

Sarah Gerard’s search for an alternative explanation of Carolyn Bush’s murder was unsuccessful. However, in the process of investigating her acquaintance’s death, she conducted many interviews with people in Bush’s circle of friends. These are self-identified “far-left Socialists” who talk like a parody of a clueless wokester but do it in complete seriousness. One, for example, introduces herself as “a poet and performance artist, an ethnobotanic literary critic.” Yes, that’s all one person. If you are curious what an ethnobotanic literary critic is, apparently it’s somebody who says things like the following:

“It was an early draft of trying to pull together my understanding of Blackness and femininity, and the parallels with plant life, and how that resource is not valued.”

She was working as a flower courier then, “bringing the dying carcasses of floral material from human to human in acts of celebration.” Humans raise these beings only to kill them. She felt compelled to write about that, and about “that trans-moment of turning myself into an extremely delicate version of myself in order to rage, fully grieve.”

I swear to God this is not a parody. These people really are like that.

Carolyn’s friends mourn her death by engaging in narcissistic displays of their extreme woundedness and exhibitionist analyses of every shade of their flamboyant emotions regarding her death. They believe that every emotion deserves to be exhaustively and repetitively verbalized and assign earth-shattering importance to their constantly shifting moods.

Gerard shares the political views of the people she writes about and routinely regales readers with such pearls of lefty wisdom as

Racism is woven into the fabric of our culture

and

Our culture, for some reason that I still can’t explain, seems to hate anyone who isn’t a man

and

There’s a lot of misogyny in Southern culture

and

I think it’s something about our culture.

Yes, Gerard really likes the word “culture.”

Gerard wanted to preserve the memory of Carolyn by telling about her life and the art she created. But she did the dead woman no favors because Bush’s art consisted of her producing the following kind of writing:

It was like parataxis, and the chance operation of parataxis, the accumulative algebra of parataxis, its absolute certainty, which is felt precisely as a continuity of emptiness.

In case you don’t get art, this is supposed to be “an extended prose poem blending memoir and criticism.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Philistine!

Gerard is not lacking in talent and, thankfully, her own text is not filled with “the accumulative algebra of parataxis.” She’s good at making her characters come alive on the page and show us vividly how they conduct their squalid woke lives dedicated to the following kind of projects:

Let’s sustain our practice and come together to create a space where we work, create, discuss, read, or write. One that is ours for collaboration, action, or exegesis.

It is impossible not to feel pity for these confused young people who come from wealthy yet broken homes and who lead lives of such extraordinary narcissism that any possibility of a normal human contact among them is out of the question. They take copious amounts of drugs, practice witchcraft, busily swap “partners” (which is their word of choice for sexual partners), talk up a storm about how they are victimized by the racist-sexist culture, and treat each other like absolute garbage. Some of them will come to their senses before it becomes too late, find normal jobs, get married, and move to the suburbs. Those they leave behind will become more and more eccentric and will be ever understand why their former comrades keep betraying them.

I highly recommend the book because it’s important to know this subculture, and Gerard writes so well that the book goes down a treat. It’s very depressing in spite of the funny bits about ethnobotanic whatevers and parataxical parataxis but people like theS are about to put a president into the White House and it’s useful to understand how they think.

Several questions here. How is your French? I recommend avoiding any but the most generic accents and any sort of slang if you are not near-native fluent. “No manches, güey” sounds absolutely atrocious when coming from anybody who is not absolutely, completely fluent in Spanish. Even something as mild as “chévere” is embarrassing in anybody who can’t pass as a native speaker.

If you are near-native, then it really depends on how people in that culture perceive it. Some cultures are more sardonic than others, and you’d be an absolute butt of every joke in Ukraine if you tried to do one of our regional accents. If you are developing this accent, it must mean you’ve interacted with people from the region. If they seem fine, then it should be OK. There are cultures where people love it if you speak like them. But there’s no way to know without an in-depth interaction.

Also, prepare to explain that no, you aren’t from there but you have the accent because… If that’s not boring, then go for it.

At the emergency room today (don’t ask), the doctor wanted to calm me down (really, don’t ask) and initiated a conversation about my academic degrees and other achievements.

“How did this university get so lucky as to get you?!?” she exclaimed.

I probably should have asked for a doctor’s note, mandating that the university appreciate me more.

And I don’t mean students. Students are mega appreciative.

Sarah Gerard is the only daughter of a successful Florida politician. She’s also a writer. Sarah received two college degrees from very pricey colleges.

This year, Sarah released a true crime book where she investigates the 2016 murder of her acquaintance Carolyn Bush. Carolyn was murdered by her roommate who was experiencing a marijuana-induced psychotic break.

“I didn’t know that was a thing,” Sarah chirps excitedly in her book about Carolyn’s murder. “Can it be a thing? I smoked a lot of pot and never had a psychotic break!”

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the intellectual level of our creative elites. The tuition at the college Gerard attended is over $60,000. Per year. And that was before she received a graduate degree and taught at several very prestigious universities. Yet she thinks that if she didn’t have a severe reaction to a substance, this means nobody else can. She goes on for all 350 pages of her book trying to unravel what could have possibly caused this murder. I don’t want to refer to a book about a murder of a young woman as hilarious, so I will say it’s hysterical, uproarious, funny, and highly entertaining. And not because of the author’s extraordinary grasp of logic, as evidenced by her marijuana comment. That’s the least of it.

Stay tuned to find out more about Sarah Gerard’s unintentionally comedic book Carrie Carolyn Coco.

The second thing that Ukrainian soldiers did after capturing the Russian city of Sudzha was take down the Lenin statue:

The first thing they did was give humanitarian aid to Russians in the form of food and hygienic supplies.

NOW – Germany blows up the cooling towers of the Grafenrheinfeld nuclear power plant, once a symbol of the country's energy independence.pic.twitter.com/C0OeeSvIiL

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) August 16, 2024

The nuclear plant’s operations were discontinued in 2015. This is one of several actions Germany undertook that year to go back to the Middle Ages.

Only a few weeks ago, we were being told that Bidenomics is a great success and the economy is doing exceptionally well.

Today, Kamala Harris gives speeches about how people are struggling economically and enumerates everything that’s become more expensive or downright unaffordable during the Biden administration.

And it awakens nobody’s interest that the exact same Kamala who is rubbishing Biden’s economy today was praising it to the skies just a few weeks ago. Her view of the administration in which she’s still, even today, is second in command changed dramatically, and people simply accept that.

Please understand that my problem here isn’t with Kamala. Politicians lie to get elected. An honest politician is an oxymy. I’m trying to comprehend the people, regular voters, who accept this obvious contradiction and ask no questions.

Is the economy good or bad? You shouldn’t need Kamala to tell you. You can’t possibly have agreed that it’s wonderful a month ago and then agree that it’s very bad today.

People don’t know how to have their own opinions. That’s what bothers me. They need somebody to tell them what to think about everything, including their own daily experience.