As usual, Poles can’t keep track of which Semitic people they hate the most:

Anti-migrant resentment boiled over into anti-Semitism in Poland on Wednesday, when a protest against taking in Muslim refugees ended with the burning of an effigy of an ultra-Orthodox Jew holding the flag of the European Union.

Those stupid buggers. Nothing will ever teach them to smarten up.

The discussion of refugees is based on complete idiocy from both sides. For instance, the pro-refugee side keeps blaming the opponents for their refusal to see reality while easily editing out inconvenient bits of reality.

Take the Tsarnaevs, for instance. This family of Chechen terrorists was in the US as asylum seekers. And getting the asylum status is one step harder than getting the refugee status because of the added hurdle of needing to get a tourist visa first. (Getting a tourist visa to the US from Russia is not the same as getting one from France, obviously.) The Tsarnaevs easily overcame all these hurdles and proceeded to slaughter people in Boston. In the meanwhile, some good, deserving family was languishing within the immigration system because of its incapacity to lie and cheat.

The really sad part of the US immigration process is that it’s quite painful and unforgiving for good, law-abiding people and very easy to game for all kinds of shitty folks. I’ve seen this so many times that I don’t even want to look any more.

And it’s the same with social welfare where it exists (not in the US). In Quebec, for instance, good, hard-working people can get no assistance in a moment of legitimate hardship while diamond-bedecked swindlers rake in the cash needed to buy a new country house. (These are real people I know I’m talking about.)

None of this means that all immigration should be closed or the welfare system (where it exists, obviously, and that’s not in the US) should be scrapped. All I’m saying is that there is a whole world of possibilities between “nobody ever games the refugee / welfare system” and “everybody who uses these systems is a criminal and a cheat.”

So remember Podemos? The party that was created by Spain’s Indignados movement on which #Occupy later modeled itself?

At first, the party was all “we’ll ditch the constitution, we’ll leave the EU, we’ll refuse to pay the debts to European banks, we are a radical alternative to the political status quo, let the revolution begin!”

That was only in 2013 but since then the party has traveled to the center with great speed. Today it’s all “the constitution we’ve got is not that bad, the EU has its uses, the status quo is quite attractive, revolution who?”

Hasna Aitboulahcen, the woman who died by the side of terrorist  Abdelhamid Abaaoud yesterday, turned out to be a drug addict and alcoholic. A couple of months ago, she decided to add a niqab to her drug and alcohol addiction. Nobody ever saw her read the Koran or anything at all.

It’s curious that there doesn’t seem to be a single one among these terrorists who isn’t a falling-down drunk.

The Russians have been busily spreading a story about US Department of State paying off Russian gays to sabotage Russia’s superior patriarchal values and lead the country towards complete degeneration.

These stories are aired in Russia every day, and nobody would notice. This time, however, Russian newspapers published a letter that the Department of State supposedly sent to the leader of Russia’s LGBT community, instructing him to sabotage Russia. 

When the workers of the US Embassy in Moscow read this carelessly written, ridiculous “letter from the Department of State,” they corrected its numerous mistakes in red ink and sent it back to the newspaper with the suggestion to seek services of an editor the next time they decide to use a fake letter.

As the great historian Timothy Snyder says, today in Russia, the expression “gay lobby” serves the same purpose that the expression “Jewish lobby” served for Hitler in the 1930s.

Yet again, scientists fail to find any differences in male and female brain. Because there aren’t any:

“Sex differences in the brain are irresistible to those looking to explain stereotypic differences between men and women,” said Dr. Eliot. “They often make a big splash, in spite of being based on small samples. But as we explore multiple datasets and are able to coalesce very large samples of males and females, we find these differences often disappear or are trivial.”

Scientists keep looking for these non-existent “gendered brains” because there’s a huge premium in finding them. There is no media attention, no link love, no gleeful facebooking in science. The only way to attract crowds is to soothe them with some new variation on the tired old “men, Mars, women, Venus” idiocy.

There are crowds of people who are so empty inside, so devoid of individuality that this “men and women are different” mythology is all they have to fill the inner vacuum, poor sods. For them, this research is painful to contemplate. For those with some inner substance, it’s all “well, duh, everybody knows that gendered brains are a crock invented to tranquilize idiots.”

So Hollande is going to Moscow, to beg Putin to protect him from the scary, big terrorists? What a pathetic little wimp.

The moment he was elected I said he’d be a disaster. Now nobody will deny, I hope, that a more pitiful, tottering excuse of a leader has not been known to France in many decades. France is a mess. Economically, politically, militarily – the country has become a joke.

So today I added 507 words to my introduction, worked on editing an article, visited my Indian buffet, ran errands, pulled up some more secondary sources and annotated them, walked for 1,5 hours like every day, got to the store that sells N’s favorite cookies, did 2 loads of laundry, folded while watching Dr Phil, removed the summer decorations from the front yard, made Italian sausage and kale soup, cleaned the patio furniture, washed a blouse by hand, cleaned the window sills and now. . .

finally. . .

I can lie in bed and. . .

do more work in the form of catching up on crucial reading for my research.

Researchers were stunned to see the difference in people’s metabolic responses to the exact same foods. For instance, some people’s blood sugar rose higher after eating sushi than it did after eating ice cream. And for one middle-aged woman, the act of eating tomatoes — which she thought were part of a healthy diet — actually caused her blood sugar to rise significantly.

I have no idea what these researchers research but it can’t be blood sugar. The very first thing a diabetician tells you is to avoid white rice completely and be very careful with tomatoes. “Healthy” and “good for keeping blood sugar low” are entirely different things. Between an apple and a chunk of cheese or a banana and a steak, a diabetic has to choose the latter, no matter what the popular wisdom holds as “healthy.”

A fruit salad with a glass of orange juice might be healthy for many people but for a diabetic they are only marginally better than cyanide.

We’ve got the media suspending reporters for tweeting “lady liberty bowed her head” after the House voted yesterday to stop Syrian refugees frm coming into the country, even as many of their biggest stars have been behaving like a bunch of hysterical schoolgirls 24/7 ever since Paris.

Because everybody knows that the only thing more offensive to a guy than being called a girl is being called a hysterical girl.

It’s hilarious how some people can’t manage to hold two of their liberal beliefs in their heads at the same time.