Clarissa's Blog

Another really annoying new fad is that students refer to Hispanic politicians and writers as “they.” I’m struggling to understand sentences like, “Augusto Pinochet was a dictator of Chile and they are best known for…” or “in their book Jorge Volpi describes their experience…”

Drives me up a wall.

I made butter chicken using what was promised to be an authentic Indian recipe.

Result?

It tastes like what borscht would probably taste like if made by an Indian person. I mean, it’s not bad. It just isn’t Indian.

In other gastronomic news, Klara says that pelmeni only taste right when N makes them. Yes, pelmeni are Russian. But how does he manage to make them more authentic? These are store-bought pelmeni. You throw them into boiling water and then fish them and once they float to the service. I stood and observed N make the pelmeni. There was no secret move. Still, Klara always knows when I made them and says they taste disgusting.

And by the way, it’s not all non-white people who awaken the Great American monomania. It’s only the non-white people who can be seen as miserable, pathetic, deprived. Only the non-white abjection hits the pleasure centers of the American brain and awakens the savior instinct which is the whole point.

A black department chair asked at our recent anti-racism workshop, “You make it sound like I personally am a racist. Is that what you are saying?”

“Yes,” the presenter responded without skipping a beat. “You absolutely are.”

The black department chair isn’t pathetic. She’s a scholar, a full professor in Gucci eyeglasses. That by itself makes her a white supremacist because “black” and “white” are emotional categories. If a non-white person doesn’t provoke delicious feelings of guilt and anger, that person becomes an enemy. And so what are you going to do to preserve the worldview in which non-white people are sad and downtrodden victims? You are unconsciously going to do everything to keep them down. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve repeated at these anti-racist meetings that most of our black students are from normal middle-class families. They aren’t illiterate idiots incapable of googling “office hours” to find out what this expression means.

The black department chair has two children in high school. They will go to college and get treated like mental invalids. Will that help them succeed in life? Clearly, it won’t. Time and again, I see professors “of color” ask in absolute shock, “Are you trying to save that my achievements aren’t real and I wasn’t hired on merit but because of how I look?” These are successful people who are deliberately beaten down to make us all feel good about ourselves.

I spent all day yesterday trying to talk to people about the video of the 3 Ivy college presidents saying that calling for a genocide of Jews is not against their code of conduct. And the tenor of the discussions showed me that people honestly don’t understand what’s going on.

Every person I spoke with kept asking, “But why do they hate Jews? Why do they like Palestinians more?”

The question shows that people don’t understand America. America is like one of my older colleagues who is very upset that VCRs were removed from the classrooms a decade ago and she can no longer show her video tapes in class. Whenever we go to lunch as a group, it doesn’t matter what we are talking about, she’ll find an opportunity to kvetch about her video tapes.

“These budget cuts are ridiculous!” we say.

“Yes!” she responds. “We spent all the money on fancy new equipment, and now there’s no money. If we’d stayed with the VCRs, like I always said, we wouldn’t have this problem now.”

“The election in Argentina was really something!” one of us exclaims.

“I used to show this great video about Argentina in class,” the older colleague replies didactically, “and now I can’t because there’s no VCR.”

This is a harmless, if tedious, eccentricity, and we sometimes mention all sorts of topics just to see how she’ll manage to bring them back to the subject of video tapes. And she does it effortlessly every time.

Americans are like that. They have a favorite idée fixe, and no matter what you bring up, they always refer it back to their unscratcheable itch. Nobody cares about Israel or Palestine. They are stand-ins for this American monomania. Those college presidents weren’t talking about Israel. They were deep in their version of my colleague’s VCR fixation.

People who are from here already know what I’m talking about but folks from elsewhere are still confused. The great American monomania is the race question. Yes, in Israel, Jews and Palestinians look the same. But as I said, nobody cares about Israel. In the US, Jews are white and anti-Jews are not. And you can’t side with white people over non-white people. In yesterday’s video, Elise Stefanik was asking the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn to side with whites against non-whites. And you can’t do that. It brings back America’s biggest intolerable affect, its biggest sacred wound.

I’m not from here, so I think Americans should get over it. My ancestors in Ukraine were bought, owned and sold, and I have no words to convey how over it I am. It’s a curious fact that means absolutely nothing to me. But… telling people to get over their foundational traumas is a waste of time. I deeply love and admire Americans and I very much hope they’ll calm down already. A lot is being thrown away over this unnecessary fixation. But it will take as long as it will take.

In the meantime, I think I’ll call my VCR colleague and ask her to lunch. After all, there are worse obsessions to have than hers.

This is a sad day when Democrats in Congress block aid for Israel and Ukraine, sacrificing it to their need to facilitate sky-high levels of illegal immigration to the US.

Lowering the rates of illegal immigration has broad, bipartisan support among voters. So does military support for Ukraine and Israel. But Democrats choose to disregard the voters’ wishes on the altar of their single-minded obsession with eliminating national borders.

Yesterday, Klara’s second-grade teacher sat next to her for 20 minutes, trying to figure out why Klara was staring into an open book. She didn’t believe the kid was reading.

This does not bode well for the education system if a 7-year-old who reads is an uncommon sight in a classroom.

To the person who misses me and wants to hang out: me, too! I’m available for lunch tomorrow in St Louis.

Yes, I now have dreams in Ukrainian quite often. It’s really weird because in the awake state I can speak Ukrainian very fluently if I remove the control in my head completely. The second I start thinking about a word or an expression, I stop dead in my tracks and can’t say anything at all. A language is like dancing. You can’t think about what you are doing because it will stop everything. The most important thing for language learning is knowing how to relinquish control.

As for Steve Sailer’s observations about the characteristics of autogynephiliacs, he’s spot on. Confused young girls are a casualty of a paraphilia common to some highly intelligent, rich and influential men in very masculine fields, such as the military, sports, IT, etc. Part of their paraphilia is to bend others to their will and make them unwilling participants in the paraphiliacs’ performance. These are people who can put enormous sums of money and high-level connections into practicing their fetish. The brother of Illinois governor Pritzker is a great example.

For password-protected posts, please send me an email at clarissasblog@hotmail.com, and I’ll email you the password.

My notary in Canada says Quebec is going to start prohibiting non-residents from buying real estate in the province. That’s wonderful and pretty unbelievable news. Young couples in Canada no longer can buy a house in major cities in Canada because real estate is being bought out by rich foreigners as an investment, and this drives up the costs of housing in insane ways. This, if true, will be the most nation-state measure I’ve known Quebec to take.

Our town was always great in terms of housing prices. I used to see many students graduate, get married and buy a house for $110,000-$130,000. But now, it’s weird. We have new apartment buildings with $700,000 two-bedroom apartments and a whole new lane of Tesla chargers being installed. It feels like a bunch of rich people moved in.

This deserves to be watched in full, my friends. Presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn disagree that calling for a genocide of Jews constitutes bullying and harassment according to their universities’ code of conduct:

This is truly one of the most out there things I’ve seen, and I work with people like these every day. We’ve spent a week hearing endless outbursts of outrage over some anti-semitic no-name Twitter accounts, but when presidents of 3 major universities say that calling for a genocide of an ethnic group is not necessarily wrong, that’s perfectly fine. There’s, you know, context.

It’s just truly.

I mean.

Is this finally going to make an impression?