We keep hearing about a referendum where the people of Crimea will supposedly vote on whether they will become part of Russia. Nobody mentions, however, that the Russian troops have already established a border between the Crimea and the rest of Ukraine.

Serious troops are occupying the border and not letting anybody in or out of the region. The roads and the streets are filled with armored vehicles and masked soldiers with machine guns.

Obviously, any vote taken in such circumstances is worth what the water left after boiling eggs is.

Canada kicked out the 9 members of the Russian military who are currently located in the country. This is just stupid. Kick out the bandits and, most importantly, their wives and kids! When the families descend back on tge Russian thieves in Moscow, that will teach them a lesson.

So, folks, have you heard of this new thing when you buy a plane ticket online, pay for it, and then are required to call the airline and pay them $20 more so that this plane ticket actually counts? And if you don’t know you have to of that, then the airline doesn’t care that you paid for your ticket and expect to board your flight?

Here is what happened. I arrived in Toronto on time, but when I tried to board my flight to Montreal, there was no seat for me.

“We oversold the flight,” the airline’s rep said in an accusatory voice. “Come back tomorrow morning and we’ll see what happens.”

“It’s 3:30 pm,” I said. “I need to be in Montreal today.”

“That’s your problem,” the rep said, twitching in a very pissy way. “You didn’t buy your seat, so this is your fault. And this isn’t just you. These people aren’t getting on the plane either.”

I looked at “these people”, and an unpleasant suspicion visited me. An Indian young lady, an elderly Chinese couple who had almost no English, an Arab man of about my age with a painfully apologetic smile on his face, a Sikh gentleman, a middle-aged Korean woman, two Hispanics – there wasn’t a single Smith or Archambault among this bunch. Was the airline overselling its flights and then choosing people with unpronounceable last names who are probably recent immigrants and, hence, not likely to protest?

The Indian woman, in the meanwhile, was trying to attract the rep’s attention in a polite, quiet voice.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” she rustled. “Could you help me?”

The rep was walking past the woman like she was so much furniture.

And this was when I lost it.

“Follow me!” I roared, and we all trudged to the airline’s customer service.

“We are all leaving for Montreal today!” I yelled. “And we are getting compensation. The maximum! Now!”

The reps tried protesting but whenever they opened their mouths, I vociferated, “You are causing me extreme distress and great inconvenience! We need our tickets and our compensation!”

My sister was text-messaging me every 5 seconds during this discussion.

“See?” I yelled, shaking my phone at the reps. “People are expecting me, and you have caused them great distress, too!”

This was where the reps broke down, gave us all tickets, $800 per person, $45 in meal vouchers, and a heartfelt apology.

So now I’m getting a pedicure at the airport spa and waiting for a masseuse to give me a massage.

The moral of the story: don’t mistreat immigrants in my presence, or you will see the wrath of a Ukrainian woman.

“I need to go through your hair, ma’am,” the TSA officer said.
I don’t blame her because this hair is so thick and abundant that I could easily be smuggling a skinny terrorist inside it.

A research project involving the study  of rabbit populations in the area is being discussed*. Everybody wants to fund it, except one colleague who is very opposed to the project. In the midst of his long and passionate speech denouncing the project, I open my eyes really wide and say in a wounded, shaky voice,

“Peter, just be honest with us. . . do you hate bunnies?”

The room shakes with laughter. Peter laughs so hard that tears start rolling down his face. After everybody settles down, we unanimously vote to fund the project.

* I obviously changed the details, but this story did happen in reality.

My father’s friend from the Crimea says that everybody in the Crimea who works, has a business [i.e. has adapted to the post-Soviet reality] is perfectly happy with the region remaining part of Ukraine.

However, the Soviet holdovers who don’t want to work and are confident that they will get better handouts from Putin than they can get out of the Ukrainian government all want to become part of the Russian Federation.

And in my native city of Kharkov, the split doesn’t occur along language or ethnic lines either. Those who want to be part of Russia are simply those who know that the RF has more money to spread around in handouts. We are seeing this split inside actual families we know where everybody has the same ethnicity and speaks the same language.

“Mmmm, sausage!” I thought when I saw the following photo on Facebook.

 

The discussion of the photo on Facebook revealed to me, however, that this is ice-cream.

I just read that Obama finally signed the visa restrictions on the Russian officials who are involved in the invasion of Ukraine. And he also ordered that their foreign (stolen) assets should be frozen.

This is exactly what should be done. Obama has somebody very knowledgeable advising him on Russia, it seems. All these Americaphobes in the Russian government get very upset if they can’t visit the country they hate so much on a regular basis.

Thank you, Mr. President!

Russia’s Prime Minister Medvedev stated that now people who have resided on the territory of the USSR or the Russian Empire will be able to apply for a Russian passport and get it through a vastly simplified procedure.

This will, of course, give Russia plenty of chances to invade a variety of countries in order to “protect” the 2 or 3 persons with these newly minted Russian passports.

Imagine what kind of environment this creates for the Russian speakers around the world. Would you want any of us around if you knew that the Russian army can appear any second to “protect” us?

An absolutely disgusting article has appeared in The Nation about Putin. It turns out that this nice, kind fellow is being “personally villainized” by American media in keeping with “US policy, that devalues multifaceted analysis for a relentless demonization of Putin, with little regard for facts.” In reality, claims The Nation, all of Russia’s problems are caused by the US and Yeltsin.

The shamelessness of this piece’s ignorant and bigoted author goes as far as referring to Ukraine as “the heart of Russia’s historical civilization.” The existence of a 48,000,000-nation with its own distinctive language, culture and history is of no interest to this Putinoid piece of journalistic garbage. The article blames a host of journalists for avoiding any fact-checking, yet talks about “the now exceedingly dangerous confrontation between the two Ukraines” as if such a confrontation were a fact of reality and not an excuse created by Putin to justify an invasion of a sovereign nation.

The Nation used to be a proudly progressive magazine, yet this piece berates the Obama administration for sending gay athletes to the Sochi Olympics as part of the US delegation. Yes, how dare the President of the US disrespect in this egregious way Putin’s venerable homophobia? Instead, the article suggests, Obama should have traveled to Sochi out of “gratitude” he must feel towards Putin.

This last statement is quite true. We should all be massively grateful to Putin that he hasn’t nuked anybody just yet.

As I was reading the article, I scrolled back to the masthead at least 6 times to make sure it was, indeed, The Nation I was reading. All of a sudden it has become a progressive cause to worship a politician who persecutes gays, says that Stalin was not a dictator but an effective manager, states that the greatest geo-political disaster of the XXth century was the collapse of the USSR, jails people for engaging in peaceful protests, hands an enormous country over to big corporations, tramples on women’s rights, destroys the separation between church and state, falsifies elections in the most egregious ways possible, puts dissident politicians in jail on trumped up charges, tramples on the freedom of speech, and is known for his misogynistic, racist and homophobic statements?