Words can’t express how much I despise these people. Ukraine went from being the world’s third largest nuclear power to having to beg for ammunition because your country spent 30 years and tons of money disarming it, you stupid fuck.
Since the Illinois minimum wage hike went into effect, we’ve been raising the hourly wage for our lab workers in one-dollar increments. Obviously, nobody gave us more money to enable us to pay the higher wage. So we fired half of the workers. And cut lab hours for the existing ones.
It was exactly what I predicted when the law was first passed. I don’t take much credit because a blind monkey in a stupor could have predicted this.
I also predicted that COVID closures would be catastrophic for higher ed. People scoffed into my face back then but now everybody keeps saying, “God, this is catastrophic.” Yes, shocking. If only anybody could have predicted this.
I don’t understand, are they doing this on purpose? Are they trying to mock the victims of the hurricane?
I watched three times and I don’t get it. Why would anybody at a government agency think it’s a good look to make a mockery of the results of a natural catastrophe?
One fails to watch the news for 3 days, and already things become incomprehensible.
You gotta love Americans. Wonderful, kind people. I had to make a left turn across three lines of very dense traffic that went on for as far as eyes could see. I thought I’d be stuck there for half an hour but guess what? I didn’t wait for even 10 seconds. All three lines immediately stopped and gave way. Nobody honked, nobody was an asshole. These are tired people who are coming home from work all the way from STL, and the highway sucks ass at this moment. Yet nobody was irritable or mean.
Every time this happens, I’m touched almost to tears. Such great people. Such an incredible country.
The kind of personality that is the most successful in the current economic system combines a highly focused, controlled, disciplined and regimented side with an audacious, risk-taking, mercurial and independent bent. Somebody who accepts no disciplining from an outside authority but has a very deep source of inner discipline.
Usually, the mercurial, bold and dynamic idea-generator and the patient, focused plodder are two different people. It’s combining the two such contradictory personalities into one that’s difficult and rare.
Trollope is my favorite Victorian novelist, both as a writer and a human being, and I always read something by him when weather gets colder and nights grew longer because he’s such a cozy author. What an extraordinary culture the one that he describes! What a lovely way of being! The system of property relations and the legal system are just amazing, especially if you are aware what was in existence in other places at the time. If you believe that Jane Austen didn’t write enough, you should be reading Trollope who wrote a stunning lot and in a similar, if somewhat more complex and elevated fashion.
Cousin Henry is an uncharacteristically short novel about the costs of indecisiveness. The Welsh squire Indefer Jones and his nephew Henry Jones are tragically indecisive, and the way that the author immerses us in their inner travails is priceless. The reason the Joneses vacillate so much is that they can’t figure out how to reconcile what they want with the strict moral code that was inculcated in them since infancy. This is Victorian literature, so of course, the moral code always wins, and that’s a good thing in Trollope’s universe of characters and events.
Some of Trollope’s novels can get heavy but Cousin Henry is very easy to read, clear and to-the-point. If you don’t have a lot of time to read but want to experience something high-quality, this novel could be just the ticket.
US presidential candidate Donald Trump has said that he threatened Vladimir Putin with a strike on Moscow if he invaded Ukraine.
Trump once again reiterated that he had a “great relationship” with Kremlin ruler Vladimir Putin and got along with him very well.
“I said, ‘Vladimir, if you go after Ukraine, I am going to hit you so hard, you’re not even going to believe it. I’m going to hit you right in the middle of fricking Moscow,” Donald Trump said.
Even just hearing about this is activating all of my pleasure centers. At the Catholic dinner last week Trump spoke at length about the religious Ukrainians and pro-Ukrainians who approached him and spoke about Ukraine, and it has clearly made an impression. This is what I’ve been saying for months, since I finally got a platform in Ukraine. Reach out, explain, make your case. Don’t assume you know what the reaction will be. Don’t trust the propaganda.
Now finally they are waking up and doing something, and I’m glad.
Let’s take a moment and imagine Moscow wiped out as our happy meditation to start the day off right.
No, but he’s successfully blackmailing Biden and Harris into holding Ukraine back from winning.
Extraordinary projections, extraordinary.
The same happened with the Ukrainian counteroffensive plans in the summer of 2023.
The result is that nobody with any intelligence is informing the US of anything any longer, leaving our leadership to squawk weakly, “what? Wait, what?”
I’m so very sorry. A terrible loss. So so sorry.
In the short term, you need to get through the first terrible months. It’s going to start getting better but not immediately. Keep thinking that the pain will recede. It will, you just need to get through right now and it will. When the pain overcomes, breathe through it and remember that it will pass.
Establish a ritual where at the same time each day you scream out your pain. Eight to eight thirty pm, you scream it out.
An alternative can be to buy a large sheet of paper and a black crayon and draw your pain in violent squiggles. A canvas and a tub of paint can also work. Go to the store and see which paint looks like your pain that you want to pour on a canvas. Take a bunch of old clothes you were going to throw away and rip them into shreds.
In the long term, it might be a good idea to start a project that will commemorate your mother. You can get one of those paint by numbers kits based on a photo and then paint her. Spending time with her image every day can be a good thing. It can be whatever your creative side can manage. If she left a book of favorite recipes, you can recreate them all. Whatever can make you feel that you are in communion with her.
Grief is like a prison term. You have to do the time. It can’t be shortened, unfortunately. You’ll have to breathe through it. Every breath brings you closer to things being bearable.
I’m so sorry you are going through this. Please try to be OK. You are needed.
A conservative literary critic and college professor
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I’m sorry I don’t agree with you on that. Walnut
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The NATO is completely subservient to Russia. Please keep up.
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Have you heard of World War II?
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How does $100 a barrel oil and above hurt Russia? Walnut
Bombing civilian buildings would not shorten it in any way. None of what you suggest would shorten this war.
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