An article in El Pais points out that almost all of the refugees who come to Hungary are not planning to stay. Their real destination is Germany or Sweden. And what do Germany and Sweden have that countries like Hungary don’t? Exactly.

There is a lot of discussion of what the refugees are fleeing (war, poverty, etc.) but not nearly enough of what they are traveling towards. For instance, these refugees don’t seem interested in fleeing to Russia, in spite of its very porous and extremely long border and its depopulated areas that could easily house a hundred million people. Even Serbia and Hungary – peaceful and prosperous countries – are of no interest.

No, the refugee wave is moving towards a very specific destination. Germany and Sweden stand for “the most robust welfare systems in the world.” That’s the refugees’ goal.

Folks, have you tried roasted seaweed snacks? It’s the best thing ever.

The German population of Florida is not useless like the one where I live. It has its own newspaper and even a good schnitzel restaurant, even though it is run by a Czech.

The Germans in my region are useless. They lost their culture completely and we have to contort ourselves into weird shapes to convince them that having a German program at the university is not a bad idea. And they can’t even establish a German restaurant in the area.

There is Oktoberfest in a neighboring town but it’s about as German as I am (i.e. not at all.) They serve Budweiser at that Oktoberfest! Any self-respecting German would die of shame seeing such an Oktoberfest.

I just heard that a huge new 1,000-page biography of Kissinger is coming out. I’m very much into the stories of immigrants with funny accents who succeed beyond anybody’s imagination and wipe the floor with their detractors.

This will be my gift to myself for the Day of Knowledge.

Al Qaida has captured a significant part of Aden, a large port city in Yemen that used to be the capital of the country’s more secular Southern region. Saudi Arabia has destroyed Yemen with 5 months of unrelieved, horrifying bombing and a blockade that allows almost no food or humanitarian aid to enter this heavily import – dependent country.

The hunger and desperation are growing in Yemen. The state has been destroyed, and a terrorist organization of crazy religious fanatics has stepped into the vacuum.

The excuse that the Saudis use to bomb Yemen is that they are helping fight the rebels who are supposedly supported by Iran. Simply put, Saudi Arabia is waging a war on Iran on Yemeni soil while the Yemenis get to pay the price and Al Qaida celebrates new territories falling into its hands.

After Yemen ‘ s last remaining port was bombed into the ground, even the International Red Cross suspended its work in the country. 65% of the country’s population has no access to any medical care. 21 out of the country’s 25 million people struggle to find access to potable water.

The US is allowing the Saudis to destroy Yemen and create a humanitarian disaster of untold proportions because Obama needs to demonstrate to the Congress that he’s prepared to be tough on Iran if needed. The goal, of course, is to ensure that the Iran deal is ratified. And it’s an important goal. But there is always a price to pay for every decision you make in foreign affairs.

The tragedy of the situation is compounded by the Saudis’ total failure to defeat the Houthi rebels. All of the bombings, all of the destruction, the blockade are only hurting regular, peaceful Yemenis. And the only clear winner is the organization of crazed religious fanatics who will further victimize the people of Yemen.

There’s nothing we can do, obviously. But I believe it is important to stop navel – gazing and discussing Trump and Ashley Madison every once in a while and get informed about things that are happening in the world.

As I scroll through my blogroll, I have this funny trick that helps me guess the financial status of the authors. The more tragic, desperate and apocalyptic the posts are, the more financially comfortable their author is. And the posts that are optimistic and lack drama-queenishness are invariably written by those who are still trying to become economically comfortable. (Obviously, there are no poor people in the blogroll because blogging requires both leisure and intellectual / educational capital.)

Well-off people surely do like to entertain themselves with imagining all sorts of horrors as they live their problem – free lives. And those who have actual problems see no need to indulge in imaginary ones.

Hey, folks, check this out. Ashley Madison was nothing but a scam, offering to millions of sad, lonely men an illusion that they might be wanted. In reality, though, there was barely a handful of women even registered (let alone answering messages) on the site.

Here is the ratio of male-to-female participation:

Twenty million to less than fifteen hundred. This makes the “affair guarantee” sold by the website especially hilarious. It works precisely like the oldest con in the world where the shaman would guess the sex of your future baby, promising a full refund in case of a mistaken guess.

The question arises, then, how these 20 million suckers were duped into believing there were women on the website. Here’s the answer:

Ashley Madison employees did a pretty decent job making their millions of women’s accounts look alive. 

Read all the sordid details here.

Of course, if the 20 000 000 male users of the website strained their non-existent intellects the tiniest little bit, they’d know that these female accounts were all fake. Women don’t need to pay for sex. It’s easily available to them in amounts that are excessive even to the most sexually voracious. 

When I told N I didn’t understand Carter’s decision to undergo radiation at his very advanced age, N’s reaction was unexpected.

“Maybe his wife is still alive,” he said, “and he doesn’t want to leave her company even a minute earlier than is absolutely necessary.”

I’m very loved.

The more I read about Common Core, the more I like it. Take, for instance, the way Common Core organizes the teaching of literature*.

Teachers get to choose the works of literature they want students to read. Nobody imposes the reading list on them (there is a suggested list but not an obligatory one). I believe this is perfect because there is hardly a point in every teacher in the country discussing To Kill a Mockingbird at the same point in the year irrespective of whether he even likes it.

Teachers are human, believe it or not, and we don’t teach every book with the same effectiveness. There are indisputable classics that I simply don’t like and shouldn’t be teaching. If I have no enthusiasm for an author, I won’t be able to fake it for my students.

Instead of the prescribed content, Common Core asks that teachers use the readings they prefer to teach students how to approach ANY text. Students learn how to analyze the readings, draw conclusios, and look for textual proof for their opinions. To me this sounds like a dream come true. If students come to college knowing that opinions need to be supported with evidence, what more can I want out of my teaching life?

The objections to this system rest on the belief that teachers are lazy cheats who will teach nothing but newspaper articles if nobody forces a reading list on them. (Here is a hugely popular education blogger who makes precisely this argument.)

Honestly, the bugbear of a lazy, irresponsible teacher who looks for any excuse to do as little work as possible is starting to get on my nerves. I can hardly think of another profession that is viewed with as much suspicion as teaching. Why we can’t just relax already and trust the teachers to come up with a good, solid reading list on their own is an absolute mystery to me.

The teachers I know are really dedicated, insanely hard-working professionals who wouldn’t short-change students by teaching them easy crap. Whether we support or detest the Common Core (and I have no dog in this fight, so I’m open to all arguments), I suggest we do so without demonizing teachers because there’s way too much of that happening already.

* I’m not pedagogically or intellectually equipped to discuss the teaching of mathematics so it’s useless to ask me.

Chinese journalists were driven to a fit of hysterical laughter when they saw who is guarding the long border between China and Russia:

The border is extremely long and there are no resources to guard it. As a result, scarecrow soldiers were placed on watch towers to fake a military presence on the border.

A fake border guard of a fluid border is the perfect symbol of the post-nation – state world. In Europe, Russia, the US border guards are powerless to stop migratory flows. And you know what that means: good-bye welfare state.

It’s interesting how all presidential candidates in the US promise to restore the illusion of a robust nation-state.

“I will magically make state borders not fluid again!”

“I will police your morality like in the good old days of the nation-state!”

“I will bring back welfare!”

“I’ll bring back the sense of commonality, of clearly defined us versus clearly defined them!”

“I’ll introduce an external or an internal enemy (Mexicans, banksters, anchor babies) for us to use as a prop in our collective identity building.”

If you take all candidates’ promises together, you’ll have the perfect definition of the nation-state. I understand why they are running on nation-state nostalgia. All we know is the past, and for the last 200 years, all we’ve known is the nation-state.

But here’s the question: might we be missing an opportunity to prepare for inevitable transformations as we indulge our understandable nostalgia for the nation-state? Isn’t this grasping of an illusion similar to the sad scarecrow of a border guard on a formerly relevant border?