Clarissa's Blog

The new post on the Ukrainian blog is about my favorite Soviet spy novel. Plus, I added everybody’s favorite comment panel and a couple other things for the ease of use. I also got my first two visitors from Russia, which is weird but what are you going to do?

Douglas Murray is great, and I highly recommend his recent article about the British civil service scandal. Here’s a little quote:

When I survey the current state of Britain, apart from needing to lie down, I always face one question. When was it that the grown-ups disappeared, or otherwise chose to vacate the room? How is it that the party of Gordon Brown is simulating horror at the throwing of a cherry tomato? That civil servants complain if someone doesn’t like their homework? That the trial of the Deputy Prime Minister is being carried out by a man who boasts about commendations for his written work and for being ‘kind’? When did we all become such drips?

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/where-have-all-the-grownups-gone/

When one hears the accusations of bullying advanced by the complaining civil servants, one does think it’s a bad comedy show. That adult people would think it’s ok to infantilize themselves to such a degree is extraordinary.

But their affected childishness isn’t the real problem. Remember how I recently posted about the meeting agenda with pre-planned feelings? “We leave this meeting energized and confident…” Remember also the budget meeting that the administration tried to open with a conversation about our feelings over the Memphis video?

Here’s the deal: the moment you decide to start bringing your feelings to the workplace, you become a sitting duck. It will be deployed against you endlessly. Your energy will be sucked out of you by daily masturbatory conversations about how you feel. You will be stripped of authority and treated like an infant.

There’s a price to pay for everything. Expecting your job to heal (or arrange itself around) your emotional wounds will make you poorer and easier to exploit.

Folks, did you know that TikTok is a gambling platform? I had no idea. I’ve obviously never used it myself, so I thought it was one of the social media, like Twitter, Facebook, etc but for kids. Turns out, it’s nothing of the kind. It’s very straightforward gambling.

Apparently, there’s an algorithm that chooses a particular video to beam to the public. Such a video can garner tens of millions of views, making its creator a mega star instantly. It’s like winning the lottery. But the mechanisms of the algorithm are unknown. So people make a lot of completely meaningless videos in hopes that one of them will be chosen by the algorithm. Unlike YouTube, Twitter, etc. where views and likes reflect the quality of your work, TikTok is arbitrary. This reinforces the idea that hard work and effort are useless, that reality is chaotic and unpredictable, and that success is the result of stupid luck.

By any measure, the roughly $30 billion, and counting, that we’ve spent on Ukraine is real money. But it’s a little more than a third of what President Joe Biden is spending on new IRS enforcement, and about a fifth of unspent funds from federal pandemic relief. It is a fraction of a fraction of the defense budget.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/02/08/republicans-ukraine-russia-00081832

The rest of the article is good, too.

And here’s another illustration of what I’m saying. A middle-aged couple was banned from Airbnb because their adult daughter has un-PC political views. Today it’s parents, tomorrow it will be the neighbors who never talked to her at all:

https://twitter.com/Lauren_Southern/status/1623103441844436992?t=TS1j11ZCwEdgc1BOXN-jtg&s=19

Wasn’t it better when things were about profit extraction, pure and simple?

N found a job opening in his field at a large company in St Louis. Then it turned out that they require COVID vaccination from all applicants. Obviously, he won’t apply because his job consists of sitting at home alone in front of a computer. This requirement isn’t about health. It’s about showing fealty.

The funny thing is that in order to do what he does, you need to have a very high IQ and be capable of extraordinarily high level of complex thinking. You simply can’t be an obedient lemming and do this job. The company in question will wait for a long time for anybody to apply. Our geographic area isn’t rich in this kind of specialist to begin with. N’s current job stood vacant for 7 years because they simply couldn’t find a specialist. And looking for people in other states isn’t easy either. In the places where quants tend to live, salary expectations are in a different galaxy because the cost of living is very different. Neither can the job be outsourced overseas because there is only half a dozen universities in the world which train these particular specialists, and they are all in the US.

These are very rare skills that require constant updating. N takes classes at MIT, Stanford, Princeton, etc all the time. There’s literally not been a single day in a decade when he didn’t sit with textbooks, lectures and instructional videos after work. The vaccine-loyal company is losing an opportunity to hire a unique specialist over something utterly unnecessary. This isn’t capitalism. This is a complete perversion of capitalist thinking where the guiding principle should be, as Kevin O’Leary aptly puts it “to make MMMONNNEY.”

The Ukrainian student let me hold some Ukrainian money. Unexpectedly, it was a very powerful experience. I haven’t held it in my hands for 25 years. It is really strange to have a deep emotional response to holding money. The only reason why I didn’t start crying or babbling incoherently is because I’m ashamed of showing weakness in front of this very stoic and calm young person.

The thing is, when I left Ukraine, I really left. I completely disengaged myself, never went back. And then all of a sudden, it’s like plunging into a long-ago life that I thought was gone forever.

Yesterday, I was waiting for my new Ukrainian friend (the exchange student) at the entrance to the building where I work. She’s 19, so I guess I subconsciously felt younger although I didn’t verbalize it to myself. I dropped my backpack on the floor, climbed on a table, and sat there dangling my feet, chewing gum, and furiously texting on my phone.

At that moment, my secretary was coming downstairs on her way home from work. She saw me, and obviously I never comport myself that way at the office. I’m the kind of person who never gets called anything but “Professor” because I don’t invite familiarity. I’m usually kind of intimidating.

“Are you OK?” she asked, looking disturbed. “Do you need help?”

“Yeah, I’m good,” I said, chewing ferociously. “Waiting for a friend.”

“Oooh-kaaaay,” said the secretary staring at me like I was a total basket case and slowly backing away.

Then an Associate Dean came by and also offered help.

I’m starting to think I need to show the different facets of my personality more at work.

A colleague stops me after a meeting and exclaims, “I met your best friend Jo-Jo! We had such a nice conversation about you.”

“Lester,” I say, “I don’t have a friend called Jo-Jo. Nothing even close.”

“Really??” asks Lester. “That’s weird.”

Two weeks later, we have another meeting of the same committee.

After the meeting, I stop to chat with a colleague named Peter.

“Peter!” Lester exclaims when he sees us together. “I talked with your best friend Jo-Jo but I completely confused you and Clarissa!”

Peter and I stare at each other in amazement. He’s male, black, tall, and definitely not Ukrainian.

“How, Lester?” Peter and I ask. “How could you possibly confuse us?”

“Oh, it’s because you both wear a lot of pale blue,” says Lester who teaches painting. “You always look so similar.”

Can anybody put me out of my misery already and post a comment on the Ukrainian blog? It can be in any language. How great would it be to have comments in several different languages? Extremely great.

The url is https://ukrlit.art.blog/. Can you imagine how pathetic it feels to be the only commenter on your own blog?