My Ukrainian colleague told me this story yesterday.

A tumor was discovered in her aunt’s kidney. She had an operation to remove it but when the doctor examined her, the X-rays showed there is another tumor.

The woman started to cry.

“Don’t cry,” said the doctor, trying to console her. “We will remove the second tumor, and you will be fine.”

“Oh, I’m not crying because of that,” the woman said.

“What then?” asked the doctor.

“I’m sad about what happened with the Crimea,” the patient sobbed.

On the Russian news a man says, “A man has to know how to drive a stick shift. And for a woman, it’s OK just to drive automatic.”

This burning piece of ultra-important information was delivered at the most highly watched official news program.

I’m so glad I emigrated because Russian-speaking countries are still very uncivilized.

Three times today I read in different places that Obama was to the right of all Dem candidates in 2008. Where is this coming from? How is Hillary Clinton more of a Leftist than Obama?

I was for Hillary back in 2008 but I never noticed any particular Leftism in her as compared to Obama.

I almost forgot that today this blog turned 5. Happy anniversary to me and my great blog!

2,150,000+ hits. 85,000 comments. Recipes, book reviews, discussions, photos, political commentary, link encyclopedias, funny stories, anger, and rage!

And, of course, the smartest readers of all blogs ever. I was feeling very lonely when I started this blog at the most unfriendly department in the universe. And now I have a huge group of people willing to debate, discuss, argue, disagree and analyze right in my pocket (meaning, on my iPod) wherever I go.

I don’t have a single reader here who agrees with me 100% on everything, and that must mean I’m doing something right. I suspect that even this celebratory post will cause somebody to disagree about something. Which is the whole point. There are too many blogs that promote complacency and uniformity. I want to foster disagreement. Cranky malcontents and principled dissidents are always welcome here.

So here is what I suggest: let’s spend five more years arguing and disagreeing about everything we can think of.

Happy anniversary to us!

A student writes, “I prefer works of art (literature and film) where a man and a woman get married at the end. I don’t really enjoy any other kind of artwork.”

From the Russian news: the government of Russia announced that the Crimea is going to be Russian Mecca which is why tourism has to be developed.

What this all means is a mystery.

People keep asking why I put such a scary photo of myself on the blog’s homepage.

I have managed to prevent my blog from going the way of many other blogs and becoming a feeding ground for crazies who use the blog author’s honesty and kindness to behave in incredibly rude, aggressive, and condescending ways. Here, I have created an environment where only normal people find it comfortable to stay for any length of time.

Anybody who behaves inappropriately towards me is first yelled at and then banned. If I’m not careful, I might find myself in a situation where some unhinged weirdos would start asking me to “examine my privilege.”

Nate Silver (who is my new favorite blogger now that he has a blog of his own one can add to a blogroll) points out that the gaffes made by politicians can have zero influence on the voters even if the press explodes over them:

The first is Barack Obama’s remark at a San Francisco fundraiser about voters who “cling to guns and religion,” which was first reported by the journalist Mayhill Fowler on Apr. 11, 2008. Then-candidate Obama’s comment generated more than 2,500 news articles by the end of that month, according to a search of records at NewsLibrary.com. But it had no effect on the polls, either nationally or in Pennsylvania, which was the next state to vote in the Obama vs. Clinton Democratic primary. Instead, Hillary Clinton’s win in Pennsylvania was in line with demographic trends from earlier primaries.

What about Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments during the general election campaign in 2012? They barely moved the polls; there was a swing of perhaps one percentage point toward President Obama.

I don’t consider Obama’s 2008 comment to be a gaffe but one of rare instances when  a politician said something valuable and true. What’s curious, though, is that there is such an enormous gulf between what the press thinks is relevant in politics and what the voters believe is.

Might this disconnect be one of the reasons why the political process is so broken right now? Are the journalists simply failing to report things that actually matter to voters because they have no idea what those things are? Back in 2012, it was obvious to me that wasting time on Romney’s “47 percent” was a mistake. How come people who have no other job but to follow politics don’t see such obvious things?

Last week also offered an unusually large crop of really bad posts that, I believe, deserve a thread of their own. These are just bizarrely poor, people. Maybe we should take a vote on which one is the worst.

I had no interest in watching Noah until I read the linked review. Now I think I really need to see it.

I didn’t know people still wrote such viciously anti-Semitic posts. And I don’t care what made the self-hating Jew of the author become so vile. This is unacceptable irrespective of reasons.

Atheists who claim they are morally superior to religious people are idiots. Just like the religious people who claim that they are morally superior to atheists.

A completely ridiculous and disgusting reaction to an even more ridiculous and disgusting reaction to the death of Fred Phelps. Just look at the picture. It almost made me barf.

It is sad that nobody is telling this obviously disturbed person to take his or her obsessive and very unhealthy posts on the TV show Friends to a therapist.

I shouldn’t go for the really low-hanging fruit but here is something recent from Juan Cole: “So Obama denied the premises of Romney’s perspective. Russia, he said, is a narrow Eastern European issue, not a globe-straddling one. In this regard Obama is certainly correct. Romney and other hawks appear to want to resurrect the Cold War.” Oh, Lordy. Or if “Romney” is Putin’s nickname, then I apologize.

“One way of escaping the current American nightmare and of redefining the American Dream is to get rid of the bosses—such that workers can become their own bosses.” The quoted person is a college professor, in case you are wondering.

A completely ridiculous and offensive attempt to excuse the murder of a young woman. I literally couldn’t fall asleep for hours after I made the mistake of reading this garbage article.

From Shakesville: “Every person in this video is thin. There isn’t a fat person to be seen. This is because images of thin people are supposed to be aspirational for fat people, and because the weight loss industry is explicitly eliminationist: The stated objective is to get rid of fat people.” I’m starting to think she is writing all this to make fun of the idiots who giver her money.

And from the same blog, a really shocking post that seems, at first, to be about a horrifying case where a child rapist receives no punishment for his crime because he’s rich but that, at the end, is revealed to be all about using this tragic story to excuse another child abuser.

What’s worse, another blogger decided that this was a cute trend to join and also used the same raped child to excuse a child abuser. What’s wrong with people?

Feel free to share things that appalled and shocked you recently.