Day: August 17, 2015

In the past year, the richest businessmen  (read, bandits) of Russia lost between $1 billion and $4,6 billion each as a result of the sanctions.

Of course, this isn’t their money. They were allowed to hold these assets for their criminal organization with the goal of duping the West into believing that it won the Cold War and that capitalism was being adopted in the post-Soviet territories.

Almost none of these oligarchs have Russian last names. The people who were selected by the organized crime concern to hold the assets mostly had Jewish and Central Asian last names. This was done in order to help regular Russians to channel their resentments into the familiar direction of ethnic and racial hatred.

For the first 400 pages, this book seemed like the perfect beach read. The life at a small motel in the 1950s Vermont was described beautifully. The struggles of a family whose livelihood is destroyed by a highway built nearby made a lot of sense. The way of life of a little town that is demolished by technological progress was of great interest.

The author, however, decided it was too much trouble to tie all the loose ends at the end of the novel and instead came up with an easy answer to the questions posed by the plot: fairy-tale monsters. It’s quite a jarring experience to have the supernatural sprung at you on page 400. Everything before that was extremely realistic, and there was no way anybody could anticipate the appearance of magical monsters.

But this wasn’t even the worst part. What really annoyed me was the source of the evil monstrosity. I’m telling you, folks, you’ll never guess who brought all of this malignant monstrosity to the quiet, peaceful Vermont.

Brits.

Yes, you read right. The British people in the novel carry inside them this genetic disease that turns them into monsters who kill good, trusting, earnest Americans.

I had no idea that the image of evil, scary foreign women who carry inside of them the taint of a disfiguring, incurable disease was even a thing any longer. I don’t even know how to rate this book because this all looks so outre to me.

Well, I have 3 more books in the “entertaining beach reading” category. Let’s see if they are any better.

There’s been a deluge recently of articles about the evils of paid work. Salon workers, Amazon workers, Google workers, Amazon workers again are depicted as poor persecuted victims of tge very concept of work.

It’s becoming clear how this post-work society (also known as “gig economy”) will function. Those with careers will pacify those without with stories about the tragic victimhood of the people who work. And so instead of protesting, the poor discarded losers will actually feel privileged and fortunate to be excluded from the evil workplace.

And hey, people are lapping up these ridiculous articles. I have not encountered a single piece questioning their purpose. Such a primitive little manipulation strategy, and look how well it works.

I was not technically abused as a child, but I was not treated well. My father used to hit us when he was drunk. He never broke anything but he came close a few times, and my brother and I both thought he was likely to kill us one day. I was chronically terrified. My mother ridiculed everything about me, from my ideas to my appearance to my speech patterns. When I was small she would threaten to give me to an orphanage when I misbehaved, and would laugh when I tearfully begged her for reassurance that she would keep me.

Beaten, terrorized, ridiculed, threatened, humiliated, but none of this counts as abuse. God, what a stupid, pathetic tool. Even in adulthood, she can’t manage to give a name to what happened to her.

People in Florida are so pleasant, kind, and welcoming that even the proverbially nice Midwesterners begin to look like gruff, unsociable grinches by their side.

I wonder if there are people who are even pleasanter than this and what that would look like.

I’m also happy that I first emigrated to the somewhat aloof Montréal because I think I’d have had a mental breakdown if I’d had to face the super friendly Floridians straight off the boat. I could barely keep myself together when every store attendant in my early immigration days said, “Hi, how are you?” I suspected them of harboring evil designs on my person and meager property because why else would they smile at me?