For the most part, the issue is disappointing, with two long articles dedicated to bitching about the supposed dishonesty of more successful journalists, an uninspired article on the results of the most recent war in Gaza, and an article on Obama that put me to sleep on paragraph 4.

However, the issue was redeemed for me by a brilliant piece on the efforts to bring 20,000 Jewish refugee children to the US during the Holocaust. The article was written by Robert Slayton and reveals why the attempts to bring even such a tiny number of these refugees to the US failed. There was never any talk of spending even a tiny amount of state money on the refugees. Charitable organizations volunteered to take care of the Jewish kids. However, there were powerful organizations that opposed the plan and fought to prevent charities from being charitable to Jewish kids.

When the issue was debated in the Senate, the US region that showed the greatest hospitality to Jewish refugees was the Midwest. But even there, only 1/3 of senators voted in favor of the plan. After a protracted battle during which an enormous amount of anti-Semitic and vicious statements was made, the bill failed and the kids were not saved.

The issue ends with a great article arguing that Rand Paul is actually a total Liberal. It seems that Rand Paul stinks so badly that now Liberals and Conservatives are sticking him into each other’s arms and yelling, “No, you take him! No, he’s yours!”

Christophe de Margerie, a French oil magnate and a close buddy of Putin, was killed in an accident in Moscow 3 days ago when his airplane collided with a snowplough whose driver was extremely drunk.

It’s hard to be sorry for a freakazoid who died as a result of his own choice to keep kissing Putin’s ass. It is very significant that he died in an airplane, too. These rich nasty criminals forgot all too soon about the passenger airplane shot down by Putin’s terrorists. 

A large group of elderly people in Russia was swindled out of their savings, pensions and apartments by a group of con artists.

During a TV show taped to warn people about this scam, the newscaster asks one of the victims, “You don’t seem very worried. Are you still hoping that these criminals will give your money back?”

“That doesn’t matter,” the old gentleman responds with supreme indifference. “If they don’t return the money, I will go to the embassy of the United States, tell them what happened, and they will give me the money.”

“But what does the United States have to do with any of this?” people in the audience ask. “What makes you think they will give you money?”

“Because that’s what they do,” the old gentleman waves off the concerned people. “There is somebody in a neighboring town who got a condo from them. And they give money. They’ve got lots.”

All of the attempts to get the gentleman to talk about persecuting the scam artists who robbed him are met with a wall of stony indifference. He only wants to talk about the Americans who will give him back the  money stolen by Russian criminals “because that’s what those Americans do.”

When the US Embassy fails to give him money, the sad old gentleman will join the army of people around the world who feel betrayed by Americans.

Since people wanted stories on the USSR, I can offer a documentary:

I warn you that this is very very disturbing and the images are graphic and tragic.

The people of Spain still can’t get over the 500,000 people who died in the Civil War. In the same decade, Ukraine – whose population is the same as Spain’s – had 10,000,000 people slaughtered. Spaniards are talking about their war, studying it, publishing novels and academic studies about it, trying to process the trauma.

Ukrainians dared to mention the genocide timidly and a couple of times which angered the country who perpetrated the genocide against them. After years of ruthlessly and cruelly mocking the genocide in Ukraine (the 10 million of dead Ukrainians were the butt of endless jokes and stand-up comedy routines in Russia since Putin came to power), the Russians outlawed any discussion of the genocide by scholars. Even that wasn’t enough, so Russia decided to start a new genocide of Ukrainians to distract everybody’s attention from the one in the 1930s.

Back in 1930s, happy, chirpy, fat Western Lefties traveled to the USSR in droves, publishing gushing accounts of how ecstatically happy everybody there was. Today, happy, chirpy, fat Western Lefties don’t even go to the trouble of traveling. They know for a fact that there is a civil war in Ukraine and that Putin is a good guy because. . . well, he’s just got to be a good guy, right? Any other possibility would be too hard to process.