Clarissa's Blog

Twitter thinks that when I’m in Canada, I become a completely different person:

What is all this? Who cares about all this incredible weirdness?

I had to travel up North to find at least a little bit of snow. Now I’m staring at the snow, having breakfast, and reading Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. Her novel Angel was great but Mrs. Palfrey is a bleeding masterpiece. Why I never heard of it before is incomprehensible.

Taylor is a writer who is incapable of writing a sentence that is anything but beautiful. I want to speed through the novel to find out what happens next but the beauty of the writing stops me on every page.

Mrs. Palfrey is a novel about old age. Even in Angel it was clear that Taylor’s at her best when writing about elderly people. Chirbes read Taylor in his thirties and didn’t connect to the topic of aging. He connected deeply with Taylor’s description in Angel of what makes a writer. Chirbes didn’t live to be as old as Taylor’s characters in Mrs. Palfrey but I’m sure he would have appreciated the novel later in life. It’s such a great book, such a joy to read.

Never did something this good cost this comparatively little. I watched footage today of Kherson residents going grocery shopping to a normal store with full shelves for the first time in 8 months. Russians had looted all the stores, so there was nothing for the locals to buy. And now finally they can buy food like normal people. Helping eject the thieving, murderous Russian bastards from their lives was, among many other great things, made possible with this American money. Finally, this huge black box called “defense budget” is producing tangible results.

But it’s not only Ukrainians who benefit. It’s the American budget, so it should benefit Americans first. And it does.

There are many (albeit very far from all) such benefits listed in the article, such as this:

The war is also pushing NATO partners to quickly increase spending to the 2% of GDP and above target. Given the US’ technological advantage in defense equipment, a sizeable share of this additional military outlay will be spent on US equipment. 

https://cepa.org/article/its-costing-peanuts-for-the-us-to-defeat-russia/

Trump tried to achieve this and failed. And note that it’s good for the US not only militarily but also economically. Unlike “sending free money to people”, which had already devalued our dollar by 10% in a record-setting inflation, getting foreigners to pay for our technology is great for the economy.

But wait, there’s more:

The revelation that Russia’s defense industry is something of a Potemkin village also generates other strategic and diplomatic wins for the US. Countries eager to secure defense capability to meet their own threats – think of Turkey, India, Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia — might have opted for cheaper, “value” Russian defense offerings. However, with the quality/capability of this equipment now being questioned because of poor battlefield performance, they will likely be vying to acquire a better US kit. But this will require improved diplomatic relations. This is currently evident in the improved US–Pakistan relationship, with Pakistan securing upgrade kits for its F-16s.

https://cepa.org/article/its-costing-peanuts-for-the-us-to-defeat-russia/

What kind of an absolutely extraordinary dumbass would sacrifice all these benefits (and the linked article lists more) to save 5,6% of the defense budget that hasn’t done anything this good for us and the world in decades?

But why shouldn’t this money be spent on the many social ills we suffer from here in the US, people ask?

Anybody who has worked with state money knows that funds allocated for X can only be used to pay for X and never for Y. The pots of state money allocated for different purposes are not communicating vessels. You might have a large surplus in the X pot but you can’t use it to patch a hole in the Y pot. This is why “the money going to Ukraine should have been spent on securing the border / opioid crisis / crime / schools” is moronic. There was never any likelihood that the defense money was going to be spent on any of these worthy causes. Refashioning the US budget to spend significantly less on defense and channel that money into welfare is a cherished goal of the far left. When I was on the Left, we talked about it all the time. It’s a long-term project but those who believe in it should definitely try to get it done. For that project to work, you need all 3 branches of power working in unison, the Pentagon needs to agree, the entire US diplomacy should be refashioned, new state agencies will spring up to administrate the diverted funds, etc. But a couple of decades later, it’ll all settle down and the shift will be achieved.

For now, though, let’s be glad we are spending these 5,6% so well.

Of course, this is nothing but a payout to the dictators ruling those “damaged nations” to keep them in place and preserve the status quo. “Climate” is the excuse that was chosen but it could have been anything else. Colonialism, racism, whatever.

It’s convenient to have words like “climate” that make people emotional whether they are for or against. It’s easy to sneak anything by while everybody goes on about “climate.”

As an extremely unsociable person who is forced to come into contact daily with at least several people who expect verbal contact, I invent little hooks, or small entertaining anecdotes, that I can deliver without much effort. To give an example, my current seasonal hook is “there will be 5 languages spoken around my Thanksgiving table.” I have fed this hook to about half a dozen people today. It works well because I don’t have to come up with a new line for each individual who awaits verbal reinforcement from me. I don’t have to think about what to say at all. I memorize one line, and then people kind of start talking to themselves about it, and all I have to do is make encouraging noises while thinking about something else.

If I’m so unfortunate that I find myself having to go to a party, I prep a hook in advance, and then go from one little group to another, repeating it to each group in turn. It looks like I’m circulating, which gives me an excuse to disappear in the folds of the venue after a while.

People are like hungry birds, constantly needing to be fed with meaningless little chatter. I don’t understand this need but I have learned to pretend to participate.

Friends, rejoice at these good tidings: I have discovered a wonderful and unfairly forgotten author. I came across Elizabeth Taylor’s name (no relation to the actress) in Rafael Chirbes’s diaries. Chirbes speaks of Taylor with such admiration that I had to check her out. Of course, it turned out that Chirbes was absolutely right. Taylor’s writing is superb. Every word in her novel Angel is absolutely delicious.

Angel Deverell, the protagonist of the novel, is a writer of vulgar, verbose, yet very popular novels. Taylor’s own extremely restrained and tasteful writing style offers a hilarious contrast with Angel’s pompous scribblings. A lot more interesting than Angel’s books is her personality. She’s the most absurd, stubborn, and clueless person in existence. The novel traces Angel’s life from adolescence to old age, and in spite of the woman’s narcissism and absurdity, it’s hard not to get attached to her.

Taylor is a mid-twentieth-century British writer. It’s extraordinary that somebody this talented was mostly forgotten. If you have no time, I recommend reading at least a couple of random pages by her. Every word she uses is so precise, so needed that reading becomes pure joy.

I don’t know why everybody is so aflutter regarding what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter. This is very typical neoliberal austerity. It’s exactly what’s happening at my university.

The way it always happens is that there’s a real or manufactured budget crisis, which is invariably blamed on the workers who are told they are guilty of existing. Workers are berated for being lazy, low-quality, racist/sexist/phobic and non-diverse. The strategy is to fire most of them and force the remaining few to do the work of the fired people.

Then things stop working, neoliberals pout, and go wreck something else.

What I find curious is that our far-left university administrator and the somewhat right-wingish Elon are acting in such an identical way. The only difference (which is no difference at all) is that one 🕐 them repeats the word “racism” every 3 seconds.

A family game we really enjoy is guessing a title of a book from an inventive description of its plot. You can ask yes/no questions to get hints.

“A gloomy curmudgeonly animal loses body parts to attract his friends’ attention.”

“A young lady has a complicated but not completely unproductive relationship with mirrors and bunnies.”

What family games do you play?

OK, so was he beaten with a hammer after the police arrived, then? This is making no sense.

I screenshotted because the headline is very likely to be disappeared soon.

I found a perfect Christmas gift for my father. It’s a beautiful new biography of Queen Elizabeth titled The Queen. He was a lifelong admirer of the British monarchy, especially of Queens Victoria and Elizabeth II. I hope the book was delivered to the big library up in the sky where he now lives.