People are so dishonest. Among everybody who rolled out the statistic about the 30,000 annual gun deaths in the US, not a single person was honest enough to mention that two thirds of these deaths were suicides, i.e. not preventable through gun control.

As thet say, don’t trust the stats you haven’t falsified yourself.

I finished Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, and I have some good news: it’s possible that European literature (and consequently European culture) is not dead. It might have simply been taking a nap. Not only did Houellebecq come out with something decent, now Ferrante has brought the clinically dead Italian literature back to life.

Everybody knows that Italian Studies are dead on this continent. At most, an American university might have an ancient Italian professor teaching Intermediate Italian in utter isolation. And if even Americans won’t study you, that means your culture is irredeemably lost.

Europe has not been producing anything massively valuable in terms of culture for quite a while. Spain, yes, but “Africa begins in the Pyrinees”, so it’s a question just how European it is. Plus, Spain is fertilized by the vibrant Latin America to whom it gave its language and culture. Also, I’m biased in Spain’s favor. Germans keep being as scatologically German as ever, and in the UK the valiant Zadie Smith single-handedly is trying to fill the gap where the British culture used to exist. Scandinavians produce tons of shallow commercial glop, and Eastern Europeans can’t even do that.

But now all of a sudden everybody is back to reading European novels and talking about European writers and the ideas they produce. And that’s huge. I hope this isn’t a fluke but, rather, one of those moments when the endlessly announced decline of the West once again fails to transpire.

Finally, the New York Times published a valuable, insightful piece on ISIS and Islam. It’s written by an author called Mustafa Akyol and is a lot better than any of the usual pieties on the subject. Highly recommended.

I love my fellow immigrants but sometimes we can get on anybody’s nerves.

In Montreal there was a blackout in one of the residential areas. 

“Well, it’s Canada,” announced an immigrant from Iraq contemptuously. “It’s not like anybody expected any better from Canada.”

This reminded me of a Russian woman from Yekaterinburg who said to me once with the same contemptuous shrug, “New York! Phe! That’s such a provincial little place. It’s even more pathetic than Paris.”

There is a middle-aged woman from Poland working in the “Russian” section of the local ethnic food supermarket. (I believe she’s from Poland based on her accent and facial features.)

The woman always looks terrified and very defensive whenever I approach her. Today she almost burst into tears when she had to tell me that the product I wanted wasn’t available. Her hands were shaking and her voice was unsteady, so I had to reassure her I was really fine without this particular brand of squash paste. (God, I love squash paste. But you’ve never tried it because it isn’t manufactured here.)

Russian speakers are mean but immigrant Russian speakers are REALLY mean. I can only imagine what my cultural compatriots put this poor lady through at that store every day.

Since the collapse of the USSR, the central complaint of the people of Russia  (but not of other Soviet republics that I know of) was “Nobody fears us any longer!”

I can’t tell you how many times I heard or read this phrase in discussions of whether the end of the USSR was a good thing.

“We can now travel! And buy anything we want! And read all the books we like!”

“Yes, but nobody is afraid of us any longer!”

“We can start businesses! Be in control of our lives! Listen to music! Express ourselves freely! Use contraception! Buy tampons!”

“Yes, but who cares about all that if NOBODY FEARS US ANY LONGER!!!”

Today, the people of Russia are happy because although the economy is in the toilet, they can’t express themselves freely, contraception is under attack, and traveling or starting a business is more and more out of reach, Russians feel feared by the world, and that’s somehow more important. Why this is so crucial to them is a total mystery to me. I mean, it’s fun to be feared but how much of your economic well-being would you give up for that?

I’m starting to think that the only reason why it seems like there is some massive problem in the US secondary education system is that a high school diploma no longer gets one a job. So people conclude that something is wrong with the schools and flog them to death. But it’s not the schools, it’s changing reality.

The students who come to college unprepared and barely literate wouldn’t have been more prepared in the past. They would have been exactly the same but we wouldn’t see them because they’d be hidden from view in their manufacturing jobs. Now that there are no more manufacturing jobs, these young people want to join the world of more comfortable, less mechanistic work. And as a result, the educated classes can no longer pretend that these young people don’t exist.

None of this is a problem of the school system per se, though.

My favorite time of the year is upon us, and I’m preparing the holiday menu. We will be celebrating:

1. American Christmas;
2. New Year’s;
3. Our Christmas (January 6-7);
4. Old New Year  (January 13).

American Christmas will be themed chic and elegant. We will be having roast pheasants, mushrooms, and something called “a wine cake” that I never made before but N requested.

New Year’s will have a traditional Soviet theme. We will watch Soviet movies, listen to Soviet music, drink Soviet champagne, and eat traditional Soviet “salads”, Soviet stuffed eggs and Soviet desserts. Our favorite restaurant where we usually go for New Year’s countdown has closed, so we’ll have to do the Soviet version of the countdown at home. We will also listen to the New Year’s address by the President of Ukraine.

Our Christmas will be done in the Ukrainian style with Ukrainian dishes and traditions. The Old New Year still remains to be planned.

Yes. We know how to enjoy life.

I haven’t had Type 2 diabetes (yet) but I have experience with gestational diabetes which is treated almost exactly the same. And here is my conclusion: even with a very good insurance, this is not a cheap disease to have.

Copays for doctor visits, Metformin, insulin, lancets, test strips, syringes, syringe-disposal boxes, alcohol pads, skincare products, etc easily come up to  $150-200 per month. Diabetic – friendly diet of the kind that will help you not drop off with a heart attack in a few years is quite costly. Diabetics have to be physically active, so a gym membership is indispensable. And the best, most helpful thing for people with diabetes mellitus is psychological assistance of the expensive kind (meaning the drug-free one).

The problem, though, is that Type 2 diabetes is not an illness limited to the rich. It’s very likely to develop in people who are lucky to have any health insurance at all, let alone all the extra cash and resources that I enumerated.

Plus, it’s an illness that requires a very stable lifestyle and the capacity to control one’s routine to at least a degree. For instance, I met this woman with gestational diabetes whose boss wasn’t letting her have any snack breaks and constantly messed with her lunch break. And this sort of instability is very bad for diabetics.

Diabetes is not a rare disease. There are millions who are diabetic or pre-diabetic in this country. (Although the numbers have plateaued in recent years, which is good.)

The point that I’m trying to make is this: getting everybody health insurance is just the baseline. It’s crucial but insufficient. I would have never found out how deeply involved the disease is with issues of class if I hadn’t gotten it myself. And it’s important that everybody realize how much more difficult poverty makes treating illness even if people have insurance.

Slovenia rejected gay marriage in a referendum today. What a stupid country.

Spain elected its most fractured parliament yet. The Conservatives failed to get the needed majority number of seats that would allow them to avoid seeking a coalition, which is good. But stupid Putinoid Podemos did quite well, which is bad.

It seems that Ukraine will get its visa – free entrance to the EU. Let’s just hope there is an EU for Ukrainians to enter.

Russia is being quite secretive about the explosion at one of its nuclear reactors. The residents of the neighboring area are panicking.