Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article confirmed that many Israelis knew from the start – as I’ve been saying only forever – that accepting Germany’s reparations was a great act of charity on the part of the Jews towards the Germans.

Coates describes the passionate opposition of Menachem Begin and his followers to accepting the reparations.

Paying the reparations is the only thing that stands between Germany and its horrible legacy.

As you know, I have relatives in Donetsk, so here is an update from there. Donetsk and Lugansk will not participate in the Ukrainian presidential election. Polls are usually located in schools, and people armed with machine guns have occupied the school buildings to prevent polls from being organized.

One school principal tried to comply with the law and organize the polls but the terrorists said they would hang her. They have already killed and tortured many people so she believed them.

My relatives say they are terrified of going outside because heavily armed bandits are roaming the streets.

A young woman from Kiev who had the misfortune to visit Donetsk was taken hostage by the terrorists. Today she was liberated and shared horrible stories about her time in captivity. There were some Ukrainians among the captors but the majority were from Russia. They spoke with Russian accents and betrayed unfamiliarity with Ukrainian reality.

A scary doubt just assaulted me. If people find it so hard to get it through their thick skulls that there are no innate differences (other than in the way their reproductive systems work) between men and women, do these same sorry excuses for human beings fail to realize that there are no differences but the very insignificant physiological ones between people if different races? Or has civilization conquered at least this bastion of barbarity?

By the way, I just read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic and I highly recommend. Very well-written, very insightful. I’m an immigrant, so maybe everybody who’s from around here already knows all this stuff but for me it was a revelation. I now want to find out more.

After the mass murder Elliot Roger perpetrated today, MRA groups and especially the PUA-hate forum should be designated domestic terrorist groups and get investigated by the FBI.

This is the new end table I just bought. I don’t believe in coffee tables avd consider them passe but a good end table can make.a whole room.