And. . . at the last moment Governor Rauner stepped in and saved Our Problematic Sister. He needs it because after he loses his governor seat, it will be turned into an online diploma mill, and he’ll gain financially.

I don’t care much because even if all of the OPS’s budget were given to us, neither I nor my students would see a dime. All the money would go to building yet another Diversity Center and to hiring yet another million ideology police to persecute us. So ef your money, Governor. We are better off without it.

Spice addiction is devastating Russia. I had no idea there were so many idiots who ingest it right here in Illinois.

A great article on the challenges faced by the anti-gun movement. In my part of the world, articles like the ones quoted at the link are published for money by corrupt journalists. On the positive side, everybody knows that this kind of crap can’t be taken seriously. I don’t know how it works here. Are these journalists honestly dumb or are they writing it for openly corrupt reasons?

When Jennifer Fowlow started her PhD program in women’s studies, her dream was to become a professor.

But by her third year, she says, she was fed up.

“When I look back … to me it was just one big, stressful guilt trip,” says Fowlow.

“There was always another article I should have read, another book I should have gotten, more notes I should have written.”

Good for her that she had the insight, the self-awareness and the courage to quit. If “there is always another article to read and to write” is stressful instead of exhilarating, then doing something else with your life is the only thing that makes sense. I admire people who have the strength to realize this and don’t spend the next 30 years visiting their stress and guilt on everybody around them.

She should definitely be proud of herself for dropping out.

The companies belonging to oligarch Oleg Deripaska continue their free fall. Since the sanctions were introduced on April 6, he lost $3,6 billion and might be forced to declare a default in the coming days. There’s poetic justice in this because Deripaska had enriched himself during the wild capitalism era in Russia, and now global capital is biting him in the ass. So yeah, the sanctions are harsh and they are working extremely well.

Now, in his meeting with Putin Trump can still give Putin the victory of his life if he says that the US is ready to recognize that the Crimea is part of Russia. The symbolic is stronger than the economic, and I have no doubt that Putin would be willing personally to cut Deripaska in small pieces and feed him to sharks in exchange for such a gift.

If Trump does say something like this, I don’t for a second believe it will be because Russians bribed or coerced him to do so. I think he simply doesn’t understand why it’s a big deal.

I also believe that Trump doesn’t for a second believe he owes his win to the Russians or to anybody else. Whether he actually does owe it or not is immaterial. He doesn’t make an impression of a person who is capable of recognizing something like this even if it is true. He certainly isn’t behaving like somebody who feels any obligation towards Russians. I don’t think he is cognitively equipped to recognize a debt of this magnitude.

So if he crushes Ukraine with such a statement, it will be a result of an impulsive, unthinking moment. And then everything will depend on whether Ukrainians will be able to realize that it’s a result of impulsivity and not of any concerted policy and of a coherent worldview.

It’s a special day for us today because we are ordering takeout. We haven’t done this in forever, so it feels ultra-decadent and requires a ton of preparations and discussions. We are doing Applebee’s carside because nobody else has anything I can eat, and we want to give the Indian restaurant a rest. Plus, the carside part feels even more fancy and decadent. I feel like I need to dress up for this meal.

The cause for this celebration is that N’s article has been accepted for publication in a very fancy place after 6 rounds of revisions. At one point, we couldn’t use any of the computers in the house because he was running his programs on them and we didn’t want to slow them down. I contributed by editing the article and, most importantly, the letter N wrote to the editors when they were requesting unreasonable changes. I edited it in the direction away from “you stupid dimwits, go stuff yourselves” and towards “esteemed colleagues, thank you for your valuable suggestions. However.”

Our sister university is dying. This was clear a while ago from the dejected, hopeless demeanors of the faculty members who were extremely unexcited to work for their school.

We are in a bizarre situation because the sister school gets most of the finding in our university system yet produces a lot less. It constantly has to borrow money from us because, even though we get less funding, we manage our resources better and have a surplus. Our enrollments are growing. The sister’s are plummeting. We are producing tons of exciting research. They get tons more free time and money for research yet don’t produce like we do.

Just to give a single example, the sister school renamed its Foreign Languages and Literature department to “Languages, Cultures, and International Trade.” I’m sure you can measure the degree of utter desperation that produced this move.

So it’s all just like in a typical dysfunctional family.

Finally, the Board of Trustees recognized that robbing a thriving school to feed a dying one is dumb and decided to reallocate the funds we get from the state in a way that will reflect the real state of affairs. Of course, the Republican lawmakers in the state legislature immediately interfered. They clearly prefer that the entire university system that our two schools constitute should die.

I know there are people from the sister university reading this and I want them to know that I’m greatly saddened by the agony of what used to be a great school. I don’t believe, however, in dragging out agonies. Once life and joy have seeped out of a place, there’s no amount of money that can bring it back.

Well, I, for one, am happy that this clueless and nasty character is quitting her teaching job.

Poor delusional tools are massaging reality into a friendly shape but reality is resisting.

I don’t see why this is supposedly anti-Semitic and what the scandal is about but judge for yourselves.

What British people consider to be murder. I’m never going to get this.

Ancestry.com helps people break the cycle of horrible lies.

Every time I decide that Sarah Kendzior can’t get any sillier, she breaks her own record. I have no idea why she thinks it’s so cute to pose as a dumb airhead. And I don’t really think she is one. It’s a persona she cultivates.

As we say, even the most backwards among us have finally donned jeans. In other words, the demise of the nation-state is finally being discussed in tabloids.

Every time I decide that Sarah Kendzior can’t get any sillier, she breaks her own record. I have no idea why she thinks it’s so cute to pose as a dumb airhead. And I don’t really think she is one. It’s a persona she cultivates.

It’s unbelievable that adult people are publicly expressing the idea that oligarchs Deripaska and Vekselberg can avoid losing money to sanctions because they had “so much time to move their assets that the effect is minimal.” What do they think these “assets” are? Loose pocket change that they can hide in a different pocket? Once the value of your company drops by 15% on the stock exchange – which is what befell Deripaska yesterday – there’s not much “moving” you can do to change that. And hey, Deripaska is extremely rich. But losing a billion in one day is hardly “minimal” even for him.

This is what happens when you get wedded to a narrative and begin to avoid all evidence that undermines it. Even people who are not naturally dumb begin to sound downright idiotic when it happens.

I think talent excuses a lot of things. Literary talent especially. For instance, I’m opposed to linguistic policies and governmental efforts artificially to preserve languages in many places (that will remain unnamed right now due to me not wanting a hassle at this point in my life.)

But I wholeheartedly support all of these things in the Basque Country. In the midst of extremely difficult circumstances that went on pretty much forever, this small bunch of speakers of a language that has almost no non-bilingual speakers created the kind of cultural production and the kind of literature that some 100-million-plus powerful monolingual nations have not.

If a language has the kind of literature written in it that we see in Saizarbitoria, Atxaga, Uribe, Zaldua, etc, then they are absolutely entitled to measure the size of letters on neon signs (which I’m not saying they even do.)

As I said before, my approach to separatism always operates on a case-by-case basis. If your artists are choosing to avoid the minority language because wee-wee, life is hard, and it’s hard to get published, then you can’t make a case that this culture is worth preserving.

And I don’t have a separate set of criteria for Ukraine, either. Now is the time for Ukrainians to decide if they choose their language and can create something major in it. Whatever they decide is up to them.