Clarissa's Blog

Said William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution who conducted the analysis. “We think of immigrants as being low-skilled workers from Latin America, but for recent arrivals that’s much less the case. People from Asia have overtaken people from Latin America.”

I don’t know who the royal “we” is in this quote but I’ve been teaching exactly this in my lectures on immigration for almost 5 years. And I never teach anything unless I have a bunch of reliable sources.

I wonder why this is being presented as some sort of big news.

I have nothing but contempt for the Russian protesters who tried to come out against the pension reform in recent weeks. These weepy posts make me want to barf.

The Crimea is dying. The Northern part of the peninsula will have to evacuate. The rest will be dead within a decade. It’s an enormous ecological catastrophe.

The reason it’s dying is the lack of water. There is no way of bringing fresh water to the peninsula if not from Ukraine. There are also massive shortages of food but forget that. Without water to irrigate and flush out the waste, it’s all turning into a desert that stinks of sewage.

But what does it have to do with the people who protest the pension reform in Russia, you’ll ask?

As I reported back in 2014, Putin spent the federal reserves that guaranteed the stability of the pension fund on annexing the Crimea and invading the Donbass. This was not a secret. It was all openly discussed and voted for by the parliament.

As the vote was coming in, today’s “underprivileged protesters,” as the linked article refers to them, cheered. They were all ecstatic when Putin annexed the Crimea, invaded Ukraine, and sent troops to Syria. These very people were howling with joy after every invasion. They kept saying that they are ready to eat stones if that meant they could have the Crimea. I mean, that was actually a fashionable thing to say.

Now the time has come to pay for the fun they’ve had. It’s a costly and stupid kind of fun, but as Klara says sagely at the bookstore, “We always have to pay for our purchases, Mommy.”

The anger of these protesters is caused by the discovery that invading other countries isn’t cheap. That’s the extent of their political conscience. They want to invade and murder at will and not have to pay for it. And now they are really really pouty that this is not how life works.

The worst part is not that they are getting knocked in the teeth by the Russian police but that they won’t learn anything. Tomorrow they will cheer another invasion and then pout when it turns out that bombs, troops, and weapons cost money.

Is Prague hot in mid-October? Will I die without air conditioning?

What are some of the must-seens and must-knows for this city?

This college sounds like paradise. They don’t seem to have Spanish, though, so it’s more like a pre-university program. But it’s a damn good one.

The new head of civil rights at the Education Department signaled a significant policy shift that explicitly defines Jews as not only a religion but also an ethnic origin. This is really really great.

I stopped reading after the first paragraph because spats between bored rich students at Rutgers are of no interest to me but I’m very happy for this move. The idea that one is somehow less Jewish because one doesn’t practice Judaism is hurtful and wrong.

The article is very poorly written so I don’t even know why I linked to it.

Mike writes:

I love it when I’m struggling with some complex script and my partner comes over and punches it up and makes it work right in about 30 seconds. Shit, that saved me a load of time.

This is very rare. My husband is like this but it’s so rare. I had an unhappy personal life until I met him because it’s very rare. Men get insecure, pouty, and begin to sabotage. And nothing is easier than sabotaging somebody you live with. Of course, it’s all mostly unconscious. More intelligent folks don’t want to recognize that they are threatened by their partner’s success. So they hide it from themselves.

With me it’s especially complicated. You have to take many things on faith. I don’t make much money. But I need tons of time to myself that I spend in what looks like loitering around: reading, thinking, staring at the wall. I also need money for books, for conferences when the university denies funding, for travel. But I need it to be accepted as an article of faith that what I do is valuable. If you are an academic, you know that it’s impossible to live with somebody who doesn’t believe your research is very valuable.

It takes accepting that I’m valuable in my own right and not because of the uses I can be put to as a prop for the perennially wounded male ego.

I know people hate long-quote posts with no text on my own, but what can anybody say after reading this? It’s all pretty clear.

Immigrant parents separated from their children by the Trump administration and returned to their homes are refusing to be reunited with their children because their countries are so dangerous, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union told a court on Friday. Gelernt said parents who refused to be reunited tended to have older children who could be recruited by violent gangs if they returned home. In addition, some children have relatives in the United States and are unlikely to end up in foster care. The ACLU contacted parents in Central America of 162 children and said 109 refused reunification, according to a court filing.