In the sea today we discovered a crab, dolphins, big and small fishes, and a stingray.

On the beach we encountered a dweeb with a drone. The drone was equipped with a camera.

Next to the hotel we found a small nature preserve with pink flamingos.

Mainstream media loves Trump and doesn’t like Hillary. The reason is not that these journalists find themselves ideologically closer to The Donald than to Clinton. Obviously, they don’t. But as journalists, they love gimmicky campaigns that allow them to publish long, easy, chatty pieces.

Hillary’s campaign is not gimmicky while Donald ‘ s is. She needs to start doing some clownish stuff. Tongue-kiss Bill in public, for instance. Yes, I know, gross, but the presidency of the US is at stake. Or she could cry. People seem to love her when she cries. She could do some “typically womanly” thing like humor the BLM and talk about hearts, ribbons and cookie recipes with them. Or she could say shit like “Being a wife and a mother is the hardest job in the world.” Yes, again, vomit, vomit, vomit, but the presidency is at stake.

When she starts making an ass out of herself in these ways, the press will love her and she’ll get tons of good coverage.

Europe is facing a choice right now: drop the concept of a refugee or drop the concept of a state welfare system. Preserving both is an impossibility.

If it were up to me, I’d drop the concept of a refugee. It’s a remnant of the post-WWII guilt, and time has come to get over it. The victims of the Holocaust are not benefiting from the destruction of the most advanced social safety net on Earth. Europeans will do them no favors if they dismantle their welfare states.

Europe is rapidly aging and is in desperate need of immigrants. To meet this need I’d lose the suffering – based immigration in favor of merit-based immigration. Canada, by the way, has a very sophisticated system of merit-based immigration, and Canada dealt with the most recent global economic crisis better than anybody else on the planet. If you are still unconvinced, Canada’s merit-based immigration brought me to this continent, and I’m not exceptional in any way. Need I say more?

The defenders of suffering – based immigration refuse to take into account one simple fact: people who failed to be successful in their own country (where they know the language, the culture, the structure of the society and have networks of support) will obviously find it even harder to get by in a place where they know nothing and nobody. This means they will require a lot of assistance. That will overburden the welfare system. Hence – go back to the beginning of the post to see the only existing set of possibilities.

Immigration is a very psychologically draining enterprise. Immigrants who come without a store of psychological resilience either drain their own emotional resources very fast or, what’s even worse, drain their children’s. And people who were beaten down by life back home will only have shreds of mental resources to bring with them to a new country. Even for somebody who was doing very well in their own country, immigration is traumatic. And for those who were barely managing to survive, it will be shattering.

Human beings are not chess pieces that can be moved around effortlessly. Everybody carries a history, and that history is the best predictor of whether one is prepared to take on the harsh burden of being an immigrant.

On the one-year anniversary of the death of a 18-year-old black teenager named Michael Brown by a (now confessed racist) white police officer named Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, was asked if she forgave Darren Wilson for his cruel and wanton act of legal murder. She told Al Jazeera that she will “never forgive” Darren Wilson and that “he’s evil, his acts were devilish.”

Good for her! And anybody who would have preferred to hear that yes, she forgives is an idiot.

Even at the Oxford conference people almost drove me to a fit of rage with their suggestions that forgiving Wilson is some sort of a heroic and superior act.

Now we have clear cut proof that Obama personally forced Ukraine to cede the Crimea to Putin:

As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces took over Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in early 2014, the interim Ukrainian government was debating whether or not to fight back against the “little green men” Russia had deployed. But the message from the Barack Obama administration was clear: avoid military confrontation with Moscow.

The reason why this dumbass order was given is that Obama adamantly refuses to learn anything about other countries. It’s as if the very existence of other countries were an affront yo his sensibilities.

As U.S. officials told us recently, the White House feared that if the Ukrainian military fought in Crimea, it would give Putin justification to launch greater military intervention in Ukraine.

Of course, the exact opposite was true. Putin became emboldened by the easy annexation of the Crimea and immediately launched the very “greater military intervention in Ukraine” that Obama was trying to avoid.

And please don’t tell me Ukraine could have avoided following Obama’s order. When you are being invaded by the world’s second greatest nuclear power, you have to be suicidal to start antagonizing the world’s greatest nuclear power.

People, we’ve got to wake up and start electing politicians who are at least vaguely aware of the existence of countries other than the US. The American foreign policy has been bizarrely idiotic for. . . ok, I tried to think about it but nothing but “forever” comes to mind.

The world is changing, though. There won’t be any chance of sitting out any more global conflicts. We need to start doing something to prevent them from happening. Or we’ll be very fucked.

An aborted blastocyst is “a murdered baby.” But a real, living child is “an anchor baby” who needs to be thrown away.

These stupid, stupid, hateful fuckers.

One more reason to detest LA: upscale Goodwill boutiques.

[Polish] There is still a lot we don’t know about the Chechen terrorists who bombed Boston in 2013.

It boggles the mind that a shockingly brilliant journalist like Ta-Nehisi Coates could have written such a preachy, saccharine and weak book. I guess it goes to show that everybody should stay within their own genre.

An ultra – conservative hag of a journalist who normally can’t shut up about how immoral everybody is all of a sudden produces a rant in defense of Ashley Madison. Might she be the female version of Josh Duggar?

In case you need more proof that Hamas is nuts, follow the link.

Australians, as usual, show that their sense of humor is as out there as their continent: “From Australia, we watch Israel at a great distance, safe in the knowledge that the regular and horrific levels of violence in the region are far from our shores.”

In the meanwhile, in the otherwise peaceful region the feisty Australians care about so much, “ISIS beheaded 82-year-old Khaled Al-Asaad on August 18, 2015, in the 2,000-year-old city he spent his life restoring. Syria’s most prominent antiquities scholar is the latest victim of the Islamic State group’s war on history.”

If you are not American, you will be floored when you read this article and discover that there is a whole tradition of serving “salads” in mounds of Jello in this country. Be careful, though, the images might make you barf. (Hat tip to Epicene Cyborg).

There are scholars and then there are scholars who study David Bowie, aka total weirdos.

The tragedy of a teenager who confuses the suffering produced by domestic abuse with politics. This kid still has tons of time to grow up but how many adults refuse to notice that their pseudo – political hustle and bustle only serves to drown out their inner demons.

The only way to interest people in Virginia Woolf these days is to write about her sex life, it seems.

I find it very bizarre that the 90-year-old Carter would want to undergo radiation for his brain cancer. What can be the upside here? Dragging it out for 6 or 7 painful months longer? I’d think the more logical thing would be to concentrate on preparing for death. Especially since he seems to have claimed to be a religious person.

I obviously wasn’t around when he was president but I watched a documentary about him, and it was obvious from the footage that he was a mighty strange fellow. And apparently that hasn’t changed.

What would the world without humans look like? Researchers have come up with an answer and even a map:

Now researchers have suggested the rest of the world may have enjoyed the same level of biodiversity if it weren’t for us greedy humans. A world without people could have seen elephants and rhinos wandering across northern Europe and even Britain

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Of course, the value of such a planet would be nil.

People are asking if I consider those who cheat on their spouses to be pathetic.

Of course, I do. They are immature loser wimps,  and I find immaturity to be intolerably boring. I would never want to spend any time around a person who plays the game of “you be my Daddy / Mommy and I’ll be your 14-year-old kid” with their spouse. I don’t dispute anybody’s right to infantilize themselves in this manner but I prefer not to have to witness this spectacle.

I can’t imagine ever debasing myself to the point of accepting that anybody other than me has the right to decide what I should do with my body. I live my sexuality openly and freely and I’ll be damned if I ever betray it in a way that requires sneaking around and concealing it.