To counteract Putin’s claims that the revolutionary movement in Ukraine is anti-Semitic, groups of Ukrainian Jews marched down the streets of Kiev and Odessa in support of Ukraine’s sovereignty. When passing by the Arab Cultural Center, the Jews yelled, “Allahu akbar!”

“And this is why, Mr. Putin, you will never defeat this country,” one Jew explained.

The West is finally picking up on Putin’s old trick of handing out Russian passports to citizens of other countries and then invading said countries on the pretext of “defending” the newly minted Russian citizens. He pulled this trick in Georgia and now is doing the same thing in Ukraine. But, as Hillary Clinton is pointing out, the trick is older than Putin:

Putin has been on a campaign to give Russian passports to anyone who has Russian connections, Clinton said.

The Russian leader has recently done so in the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, which, Clinton said, is similar to what happened in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Hitler resettled tens of thousands of ethnic Germans who were living in parts of Europe to Nazi Germany.

Clinton made her comments at a private event benefiting the Boys & Girls Clubs of Long Beach.

“Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the 30s,” she said. “All the Germans that were … the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.”

José Manuel Durão Barroso the President of the European Commission exhibited a similar concern, saying that this is the first time in a while that the global peace is being threatened in such a blatant way.

In the meanwhile, Canada supports Ukraine. Given that half of Canada was built by Ukrainians, it makes sense.

A bunch of administrators decided that it is necessary to stop using books at the university. Everybody is supposed to switch exclusively to digital textbooks. This will cost a packet to the students and the university. But Apple will get enormous profits and so will Amazon. Remember my post on who the idiots are that agree to rent digital books from Amazon for enormous amounts of money? The answer has been found: universities.

Apple sends representatives to universities to “educate” professors on how to teach using these e-books. Remember the post I wrote yesterday about the way school-teachers in Chicago are trained? Apple representatives are worse.

Of course, the faculty members in the Humanities resist the abandonment of actual books in favor of this ultra-expensive and enormously inconvenient e-book option that limits academic freedom and defrauds students for the sole purpose of enriching Apple and Amazon.

But the Schools of Nursing, Engineering and Management scream down the Humanities, telling them that they are reactionaries who don’t understand the beauty of technology.

I just discovered this is happening at my university.

Are you sure it isn’t happening at yours?

Russia’s Ministry if Defense declared that a nuclear inter-continental missile PC-12M is being currently tested by the Russian armed forces.

The official Russian news agency ITAR-TASS stated that the testing if the missile aims to demonstrate “the meaningful nature of any decision made by the Russian government and the futility of the West threatening Russia with anything.”

Until 1991 this news agency made statements like these all the time. And now it’s back in business.

The threat of economic sanctions that the US is planning to impose on Russia (while the EU is wimping out, as usual) is really bothering Putin. He is making statements to the effect that he has no idea what the armored vehicles belonging to the Russian armed forces are doing in the Crimea and where the soldiers occupying the ever-growing territory in the region come from. As we say in Russian, this is a discourse of, “This ain’t me, and this cow isn’t mine either.”

At the same time, the Russian government is working on a bill authorizing the expropriation of American and European property, bank accounts and companies located in Russia. According to the bill, any loans made by US banks to Russian businesses will be unilaterally cancelled by Russia.

This will definitely do miracles for the Russian economy, especially given that what the country eats, wears and uses to maintain every aspect of daily living is imported.

The way Russian economy works is that those who manage to get some of the money acquired through the selling of Russian oil and gas can afford to buy the same clothes, shoes, phones, computers, TVs, cars, etcetera that we buy in the US or UK, but for twice or three times the price. And the rest of the population sits there, dreaming of buying those things. In the meanwhile, nothing is being done to create a more self-reliant economy. (The Ukrainian economy is the same minus oil and gas).

Today is Day 101 on my Seinfeld Chain. This is the longest chain I have ever had. I have discovered that the first month on the chain is very similar to the first week in a spinning class: you realize that life is not worth living with this kind of suffering in it.

The second month on the chain is like the second week in a spinning class: you develop a sense of hopeless resignation to your sad fate.

The third month of daily writing is like the third week of spinning: you begin to get a masochistic enjoyment out of the process.

And the fourth month on the chain is like the fourth week in a spinning class: you realize that life is not worth living without this activity.

I have a regular winter cold, also known as a common as dirt cold. As a result, I conjugated a verb incorrectly in class for the first time in my life.

“Shouldn’t this be an “e”?” a student asked.

Of course, at that precise moment, my voice decided to abandon me. So all I could do was nod and rock my body repeatedly like an old Jew sitting over his Torah.

I have to say, though, after PUPPPS, gestational diabetes, gestational periodontitis, and gestational everything else, it’s kind of nice to have a familiar sickness that I recognize and that doesn’t feel extraneous or intrusive.

 

Amazon has become completely shameless. It now charges from $10 and upwards (up to $100 or more, in some cases) for renting a digital copy of a book. Not selling, mind you. Renting. A digital copy. For ten to a hundred bucks.

This was supposed to be done for expensive textbooks but now this option has spread to regular books, too.

Have you ever heard of anything more ridiculous?

Endless articles in my blogroll insist that economic sanctions against Putin will not work because they never work. Of course, there is evidence that the threat of the sanctions is working already, but who cares, as long as pundits can trot out a dozen other situations that are “just like” this one and where sanctions did not work.

One thing that could really tip the balance here is introducing visa restrictions. Just let the Russians know that it will be a tad harder for them to travel to Europe and the US, and this will help Ukraine enormously. The only people who will suffer because of this measure are the bandits because regular folks in Russia are not likely to jet set all over the world, as you can imagine.

In the meanwhile, we can see that the Ukrainian soldier from the video I linked to earlier today was not mistaken in the belief that “America is on our side”:

In a demonstration of support for Ukraine’s fledgling government, Secretary of State John Kerry arrived here on Tuesday with an offer of $1 billion in American loan guarantees and pledges of technical assistance, a senior State Department official said on Tuesday.

Technical assistance is more important than the loans because it is crucial to do something to prevent this money from being stolen just like all the previous loans were.

So. It seems like the punishment he got from the market and the magical words “economic sanctions” have had some effect on Putin. He is now making statements saying that,

1. He has no intention of annexing the Crimea.

2. The armed forces that have occupied the Crimea are not doing it at his behest.

3. He is giving an order to withdraw the Russian troops from the territory of Ukraine (where they have been conducting “scheduled maneuvers.”) Altogether, 150,000 troops, 90 airplanes and 880 tanks were brought by Putin to the border with Ukraine in the recent weeks. If they do withdraw back into Russia, that will definitely be good news.

This withdrawal of troops needs to take place as soon as possible because shots have already been fired by Russian soldiers at Ukrainians at the military base of Belbek occupied by the Russians.

Here is a video that transmits some of the complexity of the conflict in Ukraine. In the video, you can see unarmed Ukrainian soldiers marching with flags and singing the Ukrainian national anthem and being shot at by the bandits who occupied Belbek. They don’t wear a uniform that would allow to identify them but it is obvious from the conversation that everybody knows they are part of the Russian armed forces.

For those who don’t speak Russian, here is what happens. The Ukrainians are stopped by bandits who shoot at them.

“Don’t shoot!” the Ukrainians yell. “America is on our side! And look, we are carrying the Soviet flag! Will you shoot at the Soviet flag?”

It’s true, the Ukrainians are carrying both the national Ukrainian and the Soviet flag.

Here are tweets from an American journalist who witnessed this confrontation.

“Just because of a single politician, we, the military, should be butting heads?” one soldier asks, appealing to the solidarity of the other side.

Let’s hope that the single politician he is referring to does see what’s good for him and finally removes the troops.