Clarissa's Blog

Our lecturers didn’t show a picture of Muhammad but they all still lost their jobs anyway. The story of austerity and how it’s destroying higher education is being hidden behind these manufactured scandals.

Klara has a reading competition at her school. Kids read books from a list and do quizzes on them. Each book is worth between 0.5 and 3 points depending on the length and complexity. The class that reveives 250 points total gets an ice-cream party.

Yesterday I went to the library and brought 11 books for Klara. I left them in her room but this morning I found the whole pile in my study.

“You don’t want to read them?” I asked. “Should I look for different ones?”

“No,” she said. “I already read them. “I’m ready for the quiz.”

We did the quizzes, and she scored 100%.

I’m off to the library for more books. The challenge is supposed to last until June but I have a feeling she’ll earn ice-cream parties for all classrooms well before that.

I thought no text could be more superficial, cliched, and predictable than an interview with Meghan Markle.

Nobody, I thought, could be as smug in their absolute ignorance than Meghan.

And then I started reading The Poisonwood Bible.

But there’s good news, too. Finally, there was an Orthodox service in the Lavra, one of the holiest places in Ukraine. The contract that had placed the Lavra under the control of the FSB stooges from Moscow finally expired, and a real service could take place.

This is a beautiful moment. Finally, Orthodox Christmas came to the Lavra.

And:

This is undeniable. But people’s lifestyles have changed, too, generating much higher expectations.

For instance, Mexicans could have chosen to declare themselves the children of Hernán Cortés who not only spoke the language they speak and practiced the culture that’s theirs today but was also a mega-winner. Instead, they decided to go with Cuauhtémoc, who not only had a culture they don’t practice and a language they don’t speak, but also was… not a winner.

Americans went with George Washington, and look at the result.

Arestovich says he’s against adopting an anti-colonialist narrative for Ukraine, and I’m so glad! Defining yourself as anti-anything makes you completely dependent on what you supposedly oppose. Subjection continues but this time it’s consciously chosen and aggressively pursued.

All countries that defined themselves through their status as former colonies are poor, miserable and unimportant. And those who didn’t choose losership and victimhood as an identity are doing well.

It’s the same in individual lives. Everybody suffered, everybody experienced hardship. But only some define themselves as losers and live as such.

Before I had a kid I thought that organizing playdates would be a drag. But it turns out that the real drag is dealing with kids for whom “play” means “stare at a screen.” These are kids who even a year ago loved to play but now every suggestion to take them to the playground, the park or anywhere else without screens is greeted with animosity.

Here’s a really funny, well-written review from Unherd of an academic book on woke butts. Yes, butts. There’s a woke way of having a derriere, in case you didn’t know, and this book reveals it to eager readers.

In the meantime, I’m back to the fictional variant of woke butts that is offered in The Poisonwood Bible. The problem with the woke is that it’s so predictable. You don’t need to read the woke butt book (or The Poisonwood Bible) to guess that the point it makes is that white people are evil and disgusting. Butts, shoulders, elbows or toes are all an excuse to deliver this idea.