I listened to Trump on TV and here is the problem: he sounds sincere. Except for when he says “I’m an Evangelical” and “I like the Bible”, he sounds like somebody who believes what he says. 

Hillary, on the other hand, has once again started slipping back towards sounding fake and scripted. It’s clear that she is once again allowing focus groups and aides to write her lines, and that as somebody who is not a naturally good liar, she doesn’t know how to make this parroting sound passionate and convincing. 

There was a time when Hillary overcame the fakeness and started sounding sincere but now this new-found skill is disappearing. When she delivered the stale old “Trump’s words are a recruitment tool for ISIS”, she sounded so rehearsed and boring that I cringed. Trump, on the other hand, never repeats stuff that has been said on every website and in every newspaper in existence. He comes up with his own material, and this, once again, sounds more sincere.

Many voters are not intelligent enough to process and analyze content. They respond to visual stimuli and the vague feelings of comfort or discomfort those stimuli arouse in them. These are people who are baffled by the world’s complexity and become enraged whenever they realize that, once again, somebody is manipulating them. 

Hillary is, unfortunately, trapped in fakeness because the most engaged and activist part of her base is deeply into scripted, rehearsed statements delivered verbatim an endless number of times. And the voters who’ll come to the general election don’t respond well to that.

Don’t worry, Hillary will win the election but it will not be a super easy win. We can all help Hillary by letting go of the scripted pronouncements we tend to love so much. Let’s give her a chance to be competitive by allowing her to speak her mind every once in a while.

Does anybody know what it means when people start their blog posts or paragraphs with “Welp.”? I tried to guess from the context but I don’t even have any guesses.

This annoying verbal tic is getting more wide-spread.

At this very moment  (and for the next 3 days) my aunt, a refugee from the Donbass war zone, is undergoing such outlandish, ridiculous security checks in Canada that one wonders what kind of a freak invented them. This is only one stage in her endless bureaucratic struggle.

Strangely, no Prime Minister came out to hug her, no mayor crawled around her on his knees, and no phone cards or SINs were delivered.

My aunt, by the way, is not asking the Canadian government for a dime and is entirely self-reliant financially. Which, I’m guessing, is precisely the reason nobody in Canada is happy to see her.

Sarah Palin loves the Le Pen family. The Le Pen family is sponsored by Putin. Let’s make a small intellectual effort and guess which party Putin wants to win the US elections.

Unsurprisingly, Putin’s #1 candidate (after Jeb became an impossibility) is Trump. Not only are they ideologically close but also very similar on the level of personality. For instance, both are half-heartedly faking religiosity. Both are into outrageous consumerism. Both love the cameras. Both present a public persona based on vulgarity and incitement of ethnic hatred.

The following statement Trump made about Ted Cruz is 100% true:

“The way he’s dealt with the Senate — where he goes in frankly like a bit of a maniac — you never get things done that way,” Trump said on “Fox News Sunday.” “You can’t walk into the Senate and scream and call people liars and not be able to cajole and get along with people. He’ll never get anything done. That’s the problem with Ted.” 

People say that Cruz is faking the crazy but he’s being way too convincing doing it. The guy looks outright unhinged. Plus, he is a religious fanatic, and that makes him even worse than Trump.

As I said from the start of this campaign, Republicans simply don’t have a candidate. There is nobody in that overcrowded field who could represent the party with dignity and decorum while looking attractive to the base.

One of the best ways to discredit extremist movements is to make them look ridiculous, so that joining or backing them is seen as stupid, uncool, or embarrassing.

Is that an adult person with a functioning brain writing? “Uncool”? People join extremist organizations, murder, blow up, rape and torture because nobody informed them that it was “uncool” to do that?

Of course, a crowd of infantile 50-year-olds is busily reposting this bit of air-headed idiocy. And hey, that’s the most intelligent bit of the article I quoted. The rest is even dumber.

So let’s imagine an infant called Xi who is born in China and spends the first 6 months of his life there, surrounded, obviously, by speakers of Chinese.

At the age of 6 months, Xi is adopted by a French couple and removed to France where he grows up as a monolingual French speaker with nobody speaking Chinese around him.

But here’s one crucial thing:  Xi’s brain will still function as that of a Chinese speaker even though he will not remember a single word of Chinese. In order to speak French – his only language – he will be accessing secondary functions of his brain.

People tend to equate memory with impact and find it hard to understand why the events of infancy and early childhood have such an enormous significance for who they are. It’s precisely before the age of 3, however, that the brain’s extreme plasticity makes it receptive to the environment in a way it will never be again.

This is especially crucial for immigrants to keep in mind. Children of immigrants born in the new country will obviously speak the language of the new country as their native tongue. However, if they are exposed to their parents’ language in infancy, their brain will never be fully set up to process the language of the new country.

What does this mean? That immigrants must expose the child to the language of the new country from birth and, ideally, before birth.

Here is the actual study.

47 percent

Percentage of Americans who are “somewhat worried” or “very worried” that they or someone in their family could be the victim of terrorism. That number was 33 percent in 2014.

Seriously? I hope it’s just a pose because if people are serious about this, I’m scared for their mental health.

The mayor of Montréal is helping a Syrian boy put on boots:

I wonder if self-flagellation is next on the menu because I’d love to see Monsieur Coderre do that.

Marine Le Pen lost the election! This is great news not just for France but for Ukraine and a massive defeat for Le Pen’s sponsor Putin.

In case anybody is completely oblivious to European politics, Putin champions all of the far right, nationalistic, anti-EU parties of Europe. He passionately wants the EU to collapse and doesn’t begrudge any money to the European parties that advance this goal.