Whenever I hear about yet another “naturalized citizen” who shoots up, blows up, or freaks out, I always wonder how come my husband and I have to experience constant drama with our immigration documents in spite of our utter peacefulness.

Barbara Demick is a journalist who traveled to North Korea in order to find out what life there is like. Such visits are always so strictly monitored that Demick failed to glean many insights. Then she found people who’d defected from the horror show that is North Korea and recorded their stories.

Nothing to Envy is a really great book that I highly recommend. The lives of North Koreans whom Demick interviewed are engrossing. The author never condescends to her subjects, never patronizes or dehumanizes them. She manages to bring their experiences to the pages of her book in all their rich complexity.

What I found very curious is how similar many things were in the Koreans’ and the post-Soviets’ reaction to the collapse of their system. During the famine of the 1990s, Koreans started to create a clandestine market economy. Just as in the FSU, these black market businesses were mostly run by women while men continued going to their unpaid “jobs” feeling lost and resentful. I’m telling you, people, capitalism and feminism go hand in hand. Even in such a deeply patriarchal society as North Korea (were all contraception is illegal and divorced women lose their children in 100% of cases), women perked up and gained a measure of authority and self-respect the moment elements of capitalism were introduced.

Of course, our post-Soviet situation lacked the tragic aspects of what North Korea experienced in the 1990s. There was no famine, no concentration camps. Yet, we also saw an appearance of large numbers of abandoned children who lived at the train stations, and our emigres were as browbeaten, miserable and confused as North Korean defectors. Our teachers were the most impoverished class since they were convinced that making money was beneath them and preferred to grumble and mumble instead of working.

Demick’s view of the North Koreans is tainted by the fact that she only managed to speak to defectors. As a result, the perspective the book offers is invariably that of the people who were disillusioned with the regime even before leaving the country. By the end, it begins to look like nobody in North Korea believes the party ideology. That, of course, is not true. When the regime finally collapses, we are not likely to see crowds of happy, liberated North Koreans. Even those who will initially be euphoric will soon find that inscribing themselves into capitalism is an onerous task.

Author: Barbara Demick
Title: Nothing to Envy
My rating: 9 out of 10

Airport smoking lounges of the past have been substituted with device charging corners. Addicts patiently sit there, tied to their obnoxious yet overpowering habit and wistfully stare at those who are free of the addiction and can pass them by at ease.

So I went ahead and used Uber for the third time. I needed to get to Heathrow and decided that everything be damned if at my age and working as much as I do I will subject myself to subways and shuttles. Not that I used any other method of getting to an airport but a taxi even when I was young and poor, to be honest.

And it turns out using Uber was a great idea because the driver I got was an immigrant from Spain who’d left the country 5 years ago, right after the crisis hit. So you can imagine how much we had to say to each other.

Just like every single person from Spain I ever talked to, Ricardo finds the discussion of who will win the next election in Spain to be quite boring. The crisis is about the corruption, and Spanish corruption is a product of the country’s history and culture, he believes.

Ricardo is an educated person with a degree from the Complutense, but there’s no need for him and his expertise in Spain.

“Here I will always be an immigrant, always suspect, always second-class,” he says. “But it’s worth it because here in the UK I go to a government agency an nobody expects me to bring a bribe. And do you know how many people who work in the official capacity here are not white? There are quite a lot! And that never happens in Spain. We keep our dark-skinned immigrants at the very bottom. And I don’t want to live in such a place.”

The culture of nepotism and corruption in Spain goes so far back that nobody knows how to live any differently. My hope is that the young Spaniards who are leaving the country to go work in the EU, Canada or the US will discover a different way of life and bring the knowledge of how to live without corruption back home with them.

The 42-year-old Ricardo is not planning to go back, though. He’s applied for UK citizenship and is preparing for the exam.

Hey, have you, folks, seen the scandalous Planned Parenthood video? Edited, schmedited, if any part of it is true, if it’s not a 100% hoax, these creatures deserve to be taken behind the barn and shot. I only managed to watch about 5 seconds of it before having to turn it off. Who is this horrible, vulgar freak of a woman and why does she have employment anywhere at all? I hope she gets fired immediately because this dumb piece of stupid trash just set reproductive rights decades back.

And to think she had to go and do this at the beginning of an election cycle. The election was the Democrats’ to lose before this, and now I just don’t know any longer.