Is this the beginning of the end of the nation state?

Imagine a world where your virtual self is just as important as your physical location. Well it may not be far away. For about AU$70 and a thumbprint you can now become an e-resident of Estonia. It’s the first country in the world to offer what it calls a digital identity to foreigners. Some people say it may be the beginning of the end of the nation state.

Remember where you heard it first, though.

Thank you, n8chz, for the link.

Instead of a properly Jewish Thanksgiving, this will, rather, be a “Russian Jew Thanksgiving” because, aside from the famous gefilte fish, I will be making a traditional Russian coulibiac with wild mushrooms. I never made a coulibiac before because I’m a really shitty baker. I have never even tried one. But recently N and I were watching a Russian TV show where people were eating a coulibiac. The wistful expression on N’s face told me I needed to be making a coulibiac as soon as possible.

I will post the coulibiac recipe tomorrow.

I’m looking for trashy, relaxing reading as I’m recovering from a major cold. There was a cute discussion of a novel titled Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant on NPR today. Has anybody read it? Is it good? I need something that I can snooze through in front of a fireplace. Ideally, no intellectual capacity will be strained in the process of reading this book.

Grabbed the phone to send a text message to my husband to ask him to buy firewood. And saw that there was a message from him to me saying, “Please buy firewood.”

Great minds think alike but some of them think faster than others.

Now I have to go get firewood before I proceed to cook the planned dishes for our Jewish Thanksgiving.

“I had no idea Jewish people had Thanksgiving,” a student said after I shared this information in class.

So I had to explain that I invented my own Jewish Thanksgiving because I need to perfect my gefilte fish recipe.

Ukraine has stopped social assistance payments to the inhabitants of “The People’s Republic of Donetsk.” The “People’s Republicans” are whining and moaning about the unfairness of that decision. 

This is a region where nobody has ever considered the possibility of working and feeding themselves. It has always been about demanding that somebody feed them. The whorish mentality of the region’s inhabitants is nothing short of appalling. 

I think I already shared the story of my young and able-bodied cousins in Donetsk who sent off their retirement-age mother to a fish factory in Canada so that she can work herself to death and feed them and their young and able-bodied husbands. The mother’s Canadian visa ran out and she was planning to return home. But the 30-year-old “children” opposed her return because they need the mother to keep working and feeding them. They are supervising her every move, throwing tantrums every time she takes a free day because when she is working, she is not making money to send to them. And nobody is seeing this situation as strange or worthy of comment. I mean, she is their mother, so of course she is supposed to provide for them.

Ask me once again why I emigrated.

Here is an interesting quiz to determine one’s philosophical stance.

Unsurprisingly, my views coincide 100% with those of Ayn Rand. More surprisingly, I coincide in 0% with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I really thought there would be at least a 5% overlap, but there is nothing. I’m also close to John Stuart Mill and Jean-Paul Sartre.