Clarissa's Blog

This is the White House press secretary’s statement on Ma’khia Bryant:

I’m feeling very nostalgic for Trump’s “mean tweets” because what the current administration is doing is irresponsible, inhumane, and downright evil.

As in the case of the two kids who murdered an Uber driver, I support criminal penalties for the parents (real and foster) of all kids who participated in the knife fight in Columbus, Ohio.

These people created murderous maniacs and unleashed them on society. And we are so in thrall to consumerism that we allow them to play victims on TV when their children end up dead or in jail.

A group of nurses are protesting in Toronto. They were fired for refusing to push experimental gene therapy on their patients and expressing doubts about Ontario’s insane COVID protocols on social media.

This is in response to people who say that if there were no problems with this experimental new technology, medical professionals would say something about it. Medical professionals are trying to say something but they get muzzled.

The usually interminable and deathly boring meeting of administrators we have every Tuesday was blissfully cut short to enable everybody to listen to the verdict in the Chauvin trial. Apparently, the verdict is coming in within the half hour.

I decided to embrace my newfound identity as a conservative, which, for me, means finding a reading list and ploughing through it. In my searches for lists, I have come across this brilliant syllabus for a course titled “Conservatism in America” by a professor at Appalachian State University.

You can see this is a great prof by looking at how many office hours he has and when they are scheduled. Appalachian State had really good professors in the Humanities. There’s something deeply great about their hiring policy.

The book club wants to read Shakespeare. It’s OK, I like Shakespeare. The only problem is that they’ve chosen the single play of his that I can’t stand. It’s The Tempest. Nothing whatsoever wrong with it, except that I’m in Hispanic Studies, which means that I’ve been fucked in every orifice by the postcolonial readings of this poor play. If there was ever a way to spoil Shakespeare for people, it’s this kind of incessant clobbering over the head with a single, very politicized reading.

The reason why Dawkins’s 1996 award was taken away is that a couple of days ago he tweeted that people get hounded if they don’t believe that transwomen are literally women. And he immediately got hounded for making that observation.

I know that Dawkins is annoying but that’s not the point. This isn’t about trans issues either. We are now in a situation where stating facts of objective reality is not allowed if these facts contradict the dogma. The facts range from “2+2=4” to “Officer Sicknick died of a stroke.”

Folks, I can’t recommend my pre-birthday ritual strongly enough. It took a bit of shuffling things around but spending an entire week doing nothing but stuff that I enjoy is totally worth it. I feel renewed, refreshed, rejuvenated, and deeply at peace.

You don’t have to wait for your birthday. Do it as “a celebration of spring” ritual. All you need to do is make a list of everything you really enjoy and plan for how you’ll fit it into a week’s time.

Instead of a monument to the unknown soldier, our times demand a monument to the unknown parent. It would honor every parent who has spent the last year bending over backwards to make sure the kids have a normal life and don’t notice anything is wrong. The brave people who saved their kids’ psyches by sacrificing their mental and physical health.

Look how beautiful our campus is, really:

One of the benefits of psychoanalysis is that I developed a capacity to enjoy nature. From a hard-core nature-hater I turned into a total tree-hugger.