Clarissa's Blog

So this place where we are staying is a large farm on a lake. They have horses, cows, buffalo, bison. The horses roam the place freely, and some of them used to be mustang and lived in the wilderness. Then they were adopted and now live on this farm.

There are also cottages for vacationers, an RV site, a bunch of campsites, a dock, a beach, and a mini-pier with a cafe is being built. And there are treehouses.

This is all owned by a Romanian family. They came to the US in 1977 for obvious reasons. Settled in California, had 9 kids. Then moved to rural Missouri for the kids, the schools, the affordability. By now the children have grown up and started their own families. But they all still live right here, next to their parents.

So four years ago – and this is the cutest part of the story – they all bought this farm together and started turning it into a vacation destination. Every family member does what he or she enjoys best. One takes care of the horses. Another is building. Yet another is driving the online sales.

I found out this whole story on the very first day because I bumped into the mother of the nine kids, the original immigrant with a thick accent, and she really warmed up to me once she heard I’m from Ukraine.

I swam in the lake for an hour, scaring everybody because people don’t believe the temperature of the water is survivable.

A guy who won Jeopardy three times in a row went on TV and raised three fingers to show off his three victories.

Immediately, several hundred Jeopardy contestants who didn’t win three times claimed that the fingers were a “white supremacist gesture.” There are no white supremacists to speak of, so anything can be deemed a “white supremacist something.” This is very convenient because you can easily destroy anybody who annoys you by having a nice day or enjoying a success you resent.

The Jeopardy guy is now abjectly apologizing. He’s terrified and confused. These things are happening daily. Daily. People are being destroyed, fired, humiliated over nothing. Just because somebody feels like destroying them. This is what the left has become. A pack of rabid hounds tearing some poor schmuck apart because he won some stupid TV contest.

https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1387835798461063168?s=19

I can’t watch people suffering like this and not being able to figure it out. The reason why liberals (who tend to be wealthier than non-liberals) ritualistically express hatred towards their country is the same as why they send their kids to expensive schools that teach woke slogans.

They are trying to improve their value on the job market.

Liquid capital values workers who have no attachment to place, country and culture. Loud and repetitive denunciations of one’s country – it’s bad, it’s racist, it’s the worst – are meant to make it easier to accept the reality where country is not a meaningful concept.

https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1387836012995416069?s=19

That’s why they topple statues, cancel the canon, and destroy the artistic achievements. It’s easier to let go of something shitty than of something great. They are moving to a world without nation-states and are trying to make it hurt less.

It’s painful to see people endlessly name the phenomenon, as if that explained something. “They think the country is bad! It’s not true but they still think it!” Yes, obviously. The interesting question is why.

Happy International Woke Worker’s Day.

The most open-minded students I see are the freshmen. By open-minded I mean interested in anything but the limited number of the standard woke slogans.

As they progress through the college career, students tend to lose interest in anything but the discussion of how the US did something bad. I could offer a Senior seminar titled “The US Is Evil” and get gigantic enrollments and fantastic reviews.

There’s been a marked increase in wokeness among students over the past decade. It’s popular because it’s so easy. You can ace any course in the Humanities if you memorize a bunch of punchy slogans that make you feel like everything that’s complicated is suddenly easy and clear.

I’m so proud of myself. Last August I anticipated that an issue might arise in the schedule for Fall 2021. I set things up so that if the issue did crop up, I’d have an easy, elegant way to solve it.

This week I found out that the issue I had anticipated did, indeed, arise. And I now had everything set up to solve it.

The Dean’s Office is very impressed. There are several more things like these where I’m playing the long game. I’m calculating things so far in advance that I have several projects going on that will benefit the department five years from now. I also have a very long-term strategy aimed at making sure that the administration of the university system as a whole does what I need it to do in a very important issue that might crop up eventually. I can’t reveal the details because it will only work if my antagonists in this struggle are caught unawares.

N says he’ll buy me The Art of War by Sun Tzu and Machiavelli’s The Prince but I’m not sure they have much to teach me.

Professors who talk the most about “critical thinking” are the ones who are the most eager to turn students into brainwashed drones. It’s gotten so, I cringe whenever I hear this expression. “We teach critical thinking” has come to mean “we know THE TRUTH and make sure all students parrot our dogma.”

I feel sorry for the people who are seriously debating the canard of “free universal daycare.”

Let me tell you how this universal daycare works in Canada, population 30 million, income tax rate for somebody like my sister 52%.

Yes, you are entitled to an almost free daycare for your kid. (It’s $7 a day, which sounds amazing.) So yippee, my sister put her kid on the list for one the moment she was born. And she was offered a space! Of course, by that time the child was six.

And that, I repeat, in a country with one tenth of the population of the US.

This is a completely ridiculous, inane discussion that exists solely to distract us from the terrible abuse that’s being perpetrated against small children today in the form of masks and lockdowns. Make masks illegal for kids. That’s very easy to do. Reopen the playgrounds. Reopen fucking schools.

You’ve got to be touched in the head to take these fantasies about the free daycare seriously from an administration that hasn’t been able to get kids back into already existing schools.

I truly have the best husband. He finds me in the house during the day (I usually work in the office) and his face lights up with joy. He’s been seeing me daily for over a decade, yet the happy surprise has never worn off. He says “I’m so happy you are here with me” several times a day.

For his birthday, I’m whisking him away to a remote location in the woods with no people for miles. I think this is his definition of paradise. People ask if I’ll mind being in isolation for several days, but I haven’t worked from home since June. I see so many people daily that I’m ready for a bit of a self-imposed lockdown.