Folks, have you seen this hilarious blowup between two pissy and ignorant kids at Oberlin? I promise you, it’s the best. One of them goes into fits of rage because another one uses a Spanish word. The kids are so stupid that they confuse “your” and “you are” and say things like “for all intensive purposes.” They obviously have no time to do their homework but dedicate tons of time to stupid, self-righteous anger.

Just as I decided that it might be a good idea to listen to a Chopin concerto at the local symphony, it turned out that the conductor is called Vassily Sinaisky.

A short Google search confirmed my suspicion that this fellow is from Russia and used to work at the Bolshoi. This means the chances of him not being a Putinoid are nil.

So obviously I’m not going. These Putinoids are managing to poison one’s existence no matter how far away from them one tries to get.

Russian media are experiencing paroxysms of enjoyment as a result of the European refugee crisis. Bits of saliva appear in the corners of the TV commentators’ mouths and their eyes bug out in orgasmic glee whenever they talk about the refugees. And talk about them they do. One celebratory report after another on the refugees is appearing on Russia’s state-owned television.

Russia’s Foreign Affairs minister Lavrov says that Russia will not even consider diminishing its support of Assad. Among other reasons for Russia to stay in Syria, ensuring that the flow of refugees towards Europe grows looms large.

Putin sees in the refugee crisis a real opportunity to kick the EU out of its role as the world’s #2 major player. The #1 spot obviously belongs to the US, and Putin never made any secret of his intense desire to see the planet subdivided between its two owners and commanders: Russia and the US.

The EU is getting in the middle of this cozy arrangement, which is why Putin’s propaganda has been vilifying Europe as a degenerate place where gay pedophiles run around unchecked, destroying everything good they encounter. This EU-bashing has been the staple of Putinoid propaganda for years.

The refugee crisis has given Putin’s media an opportunity to announce that the closing stage of the “decline of the West” has finally begun. Once the degenerate, gay-loving, feminism – infested Europe finally collapses, says Putinoid propaganda, Russia will step out of the shadows to which it had been unfairly relegated and bring the world the true light of its profound religiosity and traditional values.

For the past week, I’ve been a New York Times subscriber. This makes me feel like a real grownup academic, so I’m happy.

Today, the newspaper that I got delivered weighed about 10 pounds and had mountains of magazines and inserts sticking out of it. One of the magazines is called The NYTimes Style and it features photographs of men in various stages of dress and undress. The men are way too feminine for my taste but the magazine itself is a very welcome development. I’m tired of having magazines filled with photos of half-naked women stuck in my face all the time. I’m not gay, why would I want to look at women? The most attractive, endlessly fascinating woman I might want to look at is always easily available in the mirror, anyway.

Sorry for a long quote but this is literally the funniest thing I’ve read in a year:

“If you’ve never fucked a fat person, take a minute and ask yourself why. Is it that you truly find their bodies ugly? Are you afraid that fat stigma is going to rub off on you, that people will see you loving a fat person and think that means there’s something wrong with you? Are you fat and unhappy with your own body? Are you not-fat and unhappy with your own body? Has the media conditioned you to believe that sex with fat people is somehow more difficult and less enjoyable (spoiler: it’s not)? Or is it that you have fucked a fat person but insisted to yourself or to them that they’re not fat, instead of telling them what part of their fatness you consider sexy?”

Here is more. I hope the author was trying to be funny because nobody is really that dumb, are they?

The moment I heard Corbyn sigh about the good old times he wants to  bring back, I knew that in a fellow of his age this can only mean one thing. The good old times he misses are the ones when women stayed hidden from view and didn’t try to access power and resources or express opinions.

And it turns out I was right. Corbyn supports gender segregation as a way of “protecting” women and is enamored of Putin, Europe’s most woman – hating leader.

Left, schmeft, forget labels and look at substance.

Speaking at Saturday’s pro-refugee demonstration, Corbyn told the crowds: “Surely, our objective ought to be peaceful solutions to the problems of this world. To spend our resources on helping people not injuring people. “To try to bring back that world of decency, human rights and justice.”

Back from where, exactly? When in history did “that world” exist?

God, where do these Trumpazoids come from in such numbers?

“Trumpazoid” is my new term for idiot politicians who promise easy-peasy recipes that will take us all to some prelapsarian happy past that never existed. Of course, they have always existed but I only just now came up with a term for them. I have no idea who this Corbyn fellow is but he sounds like a right fool.

The Catholic Church was, at its origins, the wellspring of Western civilization. To see it return to these origins, to that part of it which is essential and therefore truly catholic or universal, the wellspring, perhaps, of a universal civilization in the making, is no mean spectacle.

This is not from a Ross Douthat column, by the way. This is from The Nation. That would be the same periodical that sees no value in the efforts of Ukrainians to get rid of their corrupt, cynical oligarchs and find dignity in popular organizing and activism.

That’s the shitty kind of progressive media we get.

The greatest amount of obnoxious, insensitive smartassery appeared in my blogroll on the anniversary of 9/11. The smartassery came exclusively from American bloggers. (I have dozens of examples but I don’t want to link to these losers.) The Spanish and Ukrainian bloggers and journalists in my blogroll wrote only profound, respectful pieces.

There is a huge article, or even a series of articles, in the NYTimes communicating the results of a supposedly groundbreaking study that points to a healthy systolic blood pressure being under. . . 120.

I have absolutely no idea how this can be news to anybody. I’ve known for at least three decades that systolic BP should be 120 or lower and diastolic BP should be 80 and lower. The NYTimes article states that the former guidelines considered systolic BP of 140 or 150 to be good. This is extremely shocking to me. With the systolic of 150, I feel so ill that I can’t function at all. Anybody who experienced it should know that it isn’t normal.

This reminds me of that bizarro documentary where a fellow with an angry girlfriend decided to “prove” that food sold at McDonald’s is not healthy. When the first McDonald’s opened in my city in Ukraine back in 1996, we all knew this was unhealthy food. How is it possible for Americans to spend their entire lives around this stuff and not know that it’s unhealthy?

What’s with this self-infantilization of people who can’t figure out on their own that a systolic BP of 150 is not OK and that fast food is harmful?