Clarissa's Blog

Does anybody know what’s happening in the Netherlands? Why are people protesting? What’s going on?

One thing that’s worth mentioning is that there have been a lot of working class protests around the world recently. This is unusual because working people don’t have as much free time and energy to protest as the leisure classes. It’s got to be something big to get workers to come out to protest.

On the same day that Alex Berenson was reinstated on Twitter, another highly effective anti-lockdown activist, Emma Woodhouse, was permanently banned. Since COVID receded into memory, Emma has led the fight to unseat Governor Pritzker here in Illinois. The pretext for her ban was a verbatim quote from an article in The Wall Street Journal. This is clearly politically motivated persecution.

Alex Berenson is back on Twitter. I still can’t get over the fact that he was censored and banned over the following tweet:

I have seen terrible cases of people not being able to persuade Twitter to remove videos of their rapes, including the ones they suffered as children. I’ve seen people receive terrible threats that Twitter left unaddressed. I have seen calls for violence against ethnic groups and sexual minorities. None of that gets banned. But Berenson’s politely worded nerdy tweet got him eliminated from Twitter until he sued them into letting him back in.

There’s something really weird about a medication that is threatened by such a polite, mild dissent about its effectiveness.

Yesterday, a grad student from computer sciences showed up to the lab to update our software. The lab was closed because the director and her deputy are away. I offered to open the lab for him but he primly replied that it would be inappropriate. He thought I was a grad student.

I probably should be annoyed that I wasn’t recognized as an important figure of authority that I am but I was very pleased. At my age, it’s more enjoyable to be seen as young than as important.

Boris Johnson is the best thing that happened to Britain in a long time. Unsurprisingly, the Brits aren’t smart enough to appreciate it.

Yes, he fumbled on COVID but who didn’t? The important thing is that he stopped and a lot earlier than other world leaders.

As for the economy, the entire planet is paying for COVID idiocy. But with Johnson the UK finally became a country again. And not just any old country but a true leader in the world. In neoliberal terms, the brand “UK” is today worth about a thousand times more than it did before Johnson. Very, very few politicians have achieved anything like it. Johnson is, in this sense, the exact opposite of Putin who has destroyed the brand “Russia” single-handedly.

I hope Brits wake up and hold on to this talented fellow for dear life.

Latin Americans always complain that their region is sidelined in world politics. But the problem is that they never try to take the lead. No matter what happens – a global economic crisis, COVID, a war in Europe – Latin America can’t be bothered to care because it’s replaying on a loop its eternal obsession with trying out a socialist option. It’s like an elderly relative with dementia who sits in a corner, convinced it’s still 1959, completely incapable of noticing the new generations who are figuring out today’s problems right there in the living room.

Latin American politics is completely geriatric.

As much as I’d like to attribute the exceptional precision of Ukraine’s airstrikes to the excellent performance of Ukrainian intelligence services, the truth is that senior Russian officers often sell the intel about the location of their troops. For cash. To the enemy. This is a link in English but there have been many of these stories. The really interesting part is that the Russian troops and their family members are so overwhelmingly convinced this is true yet they do nothing. The only soldiers who have turned on their corrupt commanders are… not ethnically Russian, let’s put it that way.

This was Rendell’s last novel, and I didn’t read it when it first came out because the books Rendell wrote in the closing years of her life weren’t good. You can’t keep writing a book a year in your eighties and maintain high quality. Now I finally read Dark Corners, and it’s not all that bad. The quirky, weird characters Rendell is famous for are all there. What’s absent, unfortunately, is the writer’s capacity to tie them together within a functioning plot. As a result, weird things happen that are not explained. A character gets kidnapped but then the kidnapping is suddenly aborted, and readers never get an explanation of who wanted to kidnap that character, for what purpose, and why the kidnapping just ends. Inexplicably, the victim never reports the crime and kind of forgets about it, so there’s no investigation.

To resume, unless you are a hardcore fan, I don’t see the point of reading the novel.

What is curious, though, is that Dark Corners, as well as several other novels by Rendell, is driven by the terrible housing crisis in London. I wonder why so much of the mystery genre reflects such daily realities as housing shortages or unemployment while none of the serious fiction ever does. Is anybody capable of understanding art automatically assumed to be so wealthy as to be completely unaware of economic hardship?

One aspect of school shootings that never gets discussed is how often the shooters were on psychiatric drugs that have violent side effects.

We keep hearing about the supposedly ultra powerful gun lobby. But the pharma lobby is much larger and stronger. That’s probably precisely why nobody talks about it.

The Highland Park shooting wasn’t a school shooting but what are the chances the killer wasn’t on something? Or probably a bunch of things. What are the chances he wasn’t a habitual pot user? Very low, I’d say.

There was a mass shooting at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, IL today. The shooter managed to flee. Everybody was freaking out. While the police were trying to apprehend the bastard, Darren Bailey, the GOP candidate for Governor, decided it was necessary to record a video, asking everybody to “move on and celebrate.”

The shooter had been filmed at Trump rallies, so we can all imagine how “move on and celebrate” will be interpreted.

Illinois is a big, important state. Why can’t we get anybody who isn’t a complete moron run on either side? If I had to guess whether Bailey or Pritzker is more intellectually impotent, I wouldn’t be able to say.

The shooter has been apprehended, at least. The police know what they are doing, even if politicians don’t.