Some of the best things are counterintuitive. Who could have thought that the cure for my life-long low energy in the mornings would consist of waking up while it was still dark outside?

I always thought I was miserable in the mornings because I’m a late sleeper and hate waking up. But it turns out that… I don’t even know what it turns out except that somehow waking up before sunrise has cured me.

I thrive in the absence of sunlight.

One thing that I’ve noticed about language instructors we get from Muslim countries is that they are all princesses. They behave like giggly, adorable, spoiled 5-year-olds. One doesn’t know how to react because one doesn’t want to hurt their feelings but neither can one babysit them like they expect. For reasons of my personal psychology, I react badly to childish adults, so it’s a sore trial for me every time.

Obviously, nobody ever offers us male instructors of Arabic so I don’t know how they are.

Once again, we have the inane posturing about how “we shouldn’t send US troops to fight in Israel”.

Folks, based on how successful the American troops have been in the past 70 years, nobody wants them showing up to help. In fact, I’m sure we could probably get people pay good amounts of money to have US troops abstain from helping.

If you disagree, I invite you to re-watch the footage of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. I hear Putin watches it a couple of times a week just to have a good laugh. And how could you blame him?

These endless fantasies about how massively sought after the US troops are around the world remind me of the BLM activists who similarly are convinced that everybody wants to touch their hair. They fret about it constantly and it’s embarrassing because nobody has any interest in their hair.

All of the well-meaning Jewish Americans who passionately and aggressively supported the BLM (which is pretty much all of them) are finding out that the feeling isn’t mutual.

Our administrators finally issued a statement expressing sadness and concern over “the violence and loss of human life in Israel and Gaza”. You’d think there was an earthquake that caused the loss of life without any human agency.

Condemning, or at the very least mentioning, Hamas for the slaughter it committed in Israel shouldn’t be hard. But clearly it is.

I’m used to this kind of thing throughout the war in Ukraine. “We support peace and oppose war! We hope both sides find a way to resolve their differences!”

It still hurts, though. I’m used to it but it doesn’t stop being painful.

The events of the past few days have once again demonstrated that the rhetoric of post-colonialism and anti-imperialism needs to be retired for good. It has been racialized and emptied of all content.

There are no more empires. The empires are all long gone. Unless you are speaking of things that happened 60+ years ago, avoid this useless terminology.

As I’ve been saying, things have been weird with students since COVID. In the course I’m teaching now, a little over half of the students have dropped out. The rest will all get As. It’s going in the direction of the only grades possible being A and W (withdrawal).

What’s really unusual is this:

1. How easily many students give up. I know these students. They could have been successful in the course with just a bit of effort. Yet they chose to give up completely and very early. And it’s not just any course. It’s our gateway into the program. Dropping out means dropping out of the entire program, which is a big decision.

2. How extraordinarily hard the remaining students work. I’ve never seen anything like it in my entire career.

This is an enormous stratification happening right in front of us. I’m seeing something like it among adult colleagues, too. Some people have just given up while others have been propelled into the stratosphere.

This is not a phenomenon that’s specific to academia. If you’ve heard about the current fad of “quiet quitting”, you know that it’s happening everywhere.

The debate about the terror attack on Israel has reached the academic social media site academia.edu. Here is a tiny portion of it:

I’m particularly impressed by the exceptional rhetorical and linguistic skills of the purported academics.

I have no idea why the website put this on my home page since I never did any searches or had any publications on the subject of Israel. They never put anything Ukraine-related on my page, even though my most widely read article was published in Ukraine and is accessed many times a day from Ukraine.