Have you ever heard of Selemoh Ha-Levi, the chief rabbi of the Spanish city of Burgos in the late XIVth century?

After the horrifying pogroms of 1390-1391, Rabbi Ha-Levi decided it made no sense to live in terror. So he converted to Christianity, went to Paris, became a Doctor of Theology, returned to Burgos, and, under the name of Pablo de Cartagena, became the bishop of the same city where he used to be chief rabbi.

His wife had refused to convert and they divorced. Cartagena managed to place both of his sons in bishoprics and lived to be 85, which was no mean feat in that era.

As a bishop, Cartagena wasn’t just sitting on his ass. He became a scholar of history and together with his brother, also a convert, created famous accounts of history. Cartagena achieved great prestige and power in the ecclesiastical world of the XVth-century Castille and Aragon.

Cartagena’s son Alonso was a bishop, a royal ambassador, a personal friend of the Pope, and the founder of a great school of history. The vision of history these scholars promoted was that of Spain as Sepharad, the Jewish homeland whose original pre-Roman language was Hebrew. They didn’t mention the word Sepharad, of course, but that was the direction of their work.

What is it that Canadian representatives have tried to demonstrate to the NATO with this map?

The life of an immigrant is filled with milestones. Today was the very first time on this continent that I’ve had to have a plumber come to my place.

Now I will have to get over the ridiculously high charges. Did you know that the cheapest plumber in town charges almost as much per hour as a highly effective and very busy psychoanalyst?

Complex issues tend to annoy and bore people. So they come up with easy, schematic, comfortable narratives and try to massage reality into these simple and accessible patterns. Any aspect of reality that can’t be fit into the easy scheme is excised and ignored.

Look what happened with the Black Lives Matter movement. Somehow it morphed into the easy narrative of opposition to police brutality. Of course, in order to make it a story of police brutality, we need to dismiss Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride. They don’t fit in with the narrative, so fuck them, I guess.

The narrative of police brutality needs further sacrifices. The horrible living conditions in East St Louis, West Baltimore, etc are being excised from the story. When I write about the horrifying death toll in St Louis, everybody is bored and downvotes the story. Effective segregation doesn’t fit in with the narrative, so fuck it, too. All of the people who donated money to the killer of Michael Brown are similarly neatly deleted from the narrative because they don’t fit. Dylann Roof doesn’t fit in either, and neither do those who believe the same things he does.

The narrative of police brutality is very convenient because it’s all about a limited number of “bad apples” whom we can all joyfully despise without ever needing to do anything. A story of a deeply racist society becomes substituted with the narrative of a few flawed individuals. This is akin to treating a pimple on the nose of a man who has AIDS. Sure enough, the pimple is probably a symptom of Kaposi sarcoma but it can’t be cured without addressing the underlying condition.

I’m a foreigner, so I don’t need to play the weird games around racial relations that people around here so love. Yesterday on the news I saw a bunch of comfortable white folks eagerly massage the story of Sandra Bland, a depressed, unstable woman devastated by a recent loss of her baby, into the convenient narrative of police brutality that lets them off the hook.

These regular oohings and aahings about evil police are a comfortable, easy way of letting off steam and never really change anything. “It’s them, not me, they are the evil racist ones, and I’m all good, warm, and fuzzy.” Of course, everything stays exactly the same but that’s the whole purpose of the narrative.

Have you, folks, heard Rick Perry’s anti-Trump speech? Damn, it was good. Impassioned, poignant, desperate.

Trump is bringing talent out of the most unexpected places, it seems.

If you were a fan of S. J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep and were eagerly anticipating his second novel, I have disappointing news. Watson’s second novel titled Second Life is so boring that it will make you wish you had a second life ahead of you in which you’d finally forget the excruciating tedium of getting through this book.

In Second Life, the protagonist (whose name, as well as the names of the other characters I repressed the moment this horrible book was finally finished) is a woman who’s been doing nothing whatsoever for the past 14 years of her life. So she’s bored. And we get to witness her extreme boredom and the extraordinarily boring affair that comes out of the boredom for 450 very boring pages. And then there is a very weird and unconvincing ending that pretends to push the novel towards the mystery / thriller genre. The ending fails to do that because there is no mystery and no thrill whatsoever in this tedious book that I most wholeheartedly refuse to recommend to anybody I do not detest.

Author: S.J. Watson

Title: Second Life

My rating: 0 out of 10.

The main difference between a narcissist and a narcissist ‘ s victim is that the former is oblivious to the needs of others and the latter to his own.

In the meanwhile, Hillary came out with a series of economic proposals that are very interesting but that no one is discussing because everybody is fascinated with the cathartic spectacle of Trump.

Economy is currently good*, and nobody is that interested in the long-term, so Hillary ‘ s efforts are going largely unnoticed. Trump, on the other hand, enacts the “cry of the goat” – a venerable ancient ritual – that offers a cathartic release to the viewers.

Everybody has something they are not saying and desires they are not acting upon. This is the price of civilization, as Freud pointed out. If we want to live in a civilized society, we have to repress many of our impulses. Nobody but an infant urinates or defecates wherever the fancy takes them, for instance. We all make an effort to conduct the process in a civilized way.

All of the dark thoughts and impulses every one of us has are similarly repressed and never shared with the world. Our dark thoughts might or might not be about Mexicans or Vietnam vets but we all have them. And we all pay the price of neurosis for repressing them.

When Trump enacts a carefree release of dark thoughts and impulses, we can vicariously experience this release by observing him. This is the function of a sacrificial goat: to offer a cathartic experience to the public who identifies with the goat and is, for a moment, free of the burden of neurosis.

And for those who will proudly declare that they are not following Trump’s performance and are experiencing no catharsis through him, I have to disappoint. This doesn’t mean you have no store of things that have to be kept buried deep inside. You simply found another sacrificial goat to verbalize them.

* Before you erupt in protest, as I know many will want to, and tell me that the economy is horrible and everything sucks, remember that the message of “the economy improved dramatically thanks to a Democrat administration” is not only correct but will win us the election. Or is the pleasure derived from the “everything is so hooorrrrrible” anthem worth seeing Walker in the White House? Will that make the economy better?

So after Bernie Sanders bombed at Netroots because of his incapacity to say “Black lives matter”, Hillary Clinton posted a message on Facebook that says “Black lives matter.”

Of course, it’s great that she managed to squeeze it out (after refusing to do so and hiding behind the profoundly idiotic “All lives matter” only a couple of weeks ago). But God, does she have to do this naked opportunism thing in such an obvious and contemptible way? This reminds me of the worst moments of her campaign back in 2008 (“Oh, how dare he say anything against guns? I crawled out of my mother’s womb with an AK-47.”)