The suggestion of some of Harvard’s trustees to stop charging tuition is great. Right now, over 70% of undergraduate students at the school come from extremely wealthy families. And it’s been demonstrated time and again that students do not benefit from being surrounded by people who are exactly like them all of the time. Besides, it’s not like Harvard or Yale need the tuition money.

The only problem I’m seeing is that it will be very hard to select among the applicants. Everybody who applies has the perfect GPA and a bunch of super impressive extracurriculars. It would suck if applicants are pushed towards (even more) gimmicky application letters to stand out.

A delegation of Marine Le Pen’s lackeys traveled to Moscow and then to the occupied Donbass region of Ukraine. Le Pen’s people are to play the role of “international experts” who, supposedly, have carefully studied the situation in the region and arrived at the conclusion that Ukraine is to blame and Putin is a hero.

Obviously, the “independent reports” created by these “experts” were printed out in the Kremlin, so the National Front apparatchiks didn’t need to stay in Donbass for long. After a short overnight visit, they went back home to keep pushing the public opinion in France in the direction of a greater support for Putin.

There is reason to believe that Putin is planning to use his German patsies on a similar assignment. Yes, these methods do seem crass and heavy-handed but most people don’t trace information to its source. They will vaguely hear that something bad about Ukraine was revealed by independent French and German experts and will never think to ask who these experts are and what interests they serve.

You know what’s really creepy?

People have started to use Trump to say things they feel uncomfortable saying in the first person. The way this new genre works is this:

A person wants to say something mean about, say, New Zealanders. “Of course, Trump hasn’t said anything mean about New Zealanders yet,” this person writes, “but if he did, here is what it would sound like.” And a string of insults to New Zealanders follows.

It’s totally weird but it keeps happening. Here is one bizarre example.

OK, people, wait, is it true that Obama said the following in his State of the Union speech:

Even as their economy contracts, Russia is pouring resources to prop up Ukraine and Syria — client states they see slipping away from their orbit.

Tell me it’s a lie. Because this is offensive in ways that are too disturbing. I know he is uninterested in foreign policy but this is a gaffe even George W. Bush wouldn’t make.

Why didn’t anybody tell me??

Yale Alumni Magazine tells me there is some sort of a foodie revolution on the way in New Haven. This is refreshing because when I was there, the place was very problematic in terms of food. There was barely anything but stupid pizza and endless Thai restaurants. And now there are Ethiopian food trucks and all kinds of good things there.

This is what happens to people who forget the old maxim, “Where you can nothing, you should want nothing.”

Putin has sent his emissary to Serbia to inform Serbs that if they continue getting closer to the EU, they will “bring a second Cologne on themselves.” Serbs reacted with disgust and outrage to this attempt at manipulation.

Even the most reasonable among the Republican candidates is a total weirdo:

Kasich, who has an iPad but not a smartphone and doesn’t use email, doesn’t seem to follow the headlines very closely: A couple of weeks ago, he told reporters he was unaware of the militia standoff in Oregon that was all over the news.

Even if it’s just a pose, it’s a pretty obnoxious one. Pretending not to use email has gone out of vogue back in 2001.

Since people seem to want to know more about post-war Germany, I’m happy to share.

Initially, Americans wanted to de-Nazify Germany and get the hell out. The American economy was booming like never before, and both voters and politicians wanted to enjoy the prosperity. Before retreating, Americans wanted to do something to make sure that Germans understood what they’d done and started facing the consequences.

Getting Germans to accept culpability for the crimes of Nazism was pretty much impossible, though. With very few exceptions, Germans saw themselves as victims and refused to listen to anything. They’d pout and sulk and feel more sorry for themselves than even the most bratty of Ivy League protesters today know how to do. Americans would, for instance, try to get Germans to learn about the Holocaust. With truly American straightforwardness, they would put on documentary footage about concentration camps and tell Germans that unless they saw the film, they wouldn’t get their ration-cards (which meant they wouldn’t get fed.) Germans would come to the movie theaters but the moment the film started, they’d turn away and simply refuse to look. Obviously, they knew everything but liked to pretend they didn’t.

The British were also trying to feed and de-Nazify in the areas they controlled. It was an enormous sacrifice for them because all of the food given to Germans was taken out of the mouths of the starving people at home. I feel nothing short of amazement when I think about the humanity and the humility of the British who wanted to share their food with Germans after everything Germans had done to them. For a while, however, things started to look as if both Germans and the British would starve to death because there was nothing left to rebuilt the demolished economies in both countries.

There was enormous anger against Germans and a great resistance to getting involved in rebuilding their country on the part of the US. However, the most stringent “let them all get what they so richly deserve” American officials got to change their minds when they saw the suffering Germans were experiencing. Soon enough, the notorious words of one of these officials (“you can shoot ’em, starve ’em, or feed ’em”) became the consensus and Americans reluctantly agreed to sink huge amounts of money into rebuilding Germany and, of course, the rest of Western Europe.

Rebuilding the German economy soon necessitated ending all attempts at de-Nazification, though. For instance, the moment after 333 mining engineers were fired from Ruhr coal mines for having been active in the Nazi party, horrible accidents began to happen. Nobody but these Nazis knew how to run the coal mines. So 331 of the Nazis had to be re-hired because the mines were crucial to rebuilding the economy. And the same thing kept happening in all areas of the economy.

It took Germans until late 1950s and early 1960s to start accepting culpability for Nazism. By that time, Americans had already given the Western part of Germany the gift of prosperity and booming economy. I’m very interested in what needs to happen for a nation to accept horrible things it has done and to begin dealing with guilt and responsibility. I’m obviously waiting for Russians to start facing their role in the history of humanity. It seems that, if Germany and Spain are any indication, I’ll be waiting for a very long time.

Come to think of it, there might be a reason why Germans have such an intense reaction to the word “refugees.” The biggest refugee crisis in human history took place in Germany in 1945-6. Fifteen million Germans were homeless + there were about 9 million displaced persons, and these 24,000,000 people were roaming the devastated country, starving and desperate.

As we all know, if Americans didn’t feel sorry for the pitiful Germans to the point of being willing to give up on de-Nazification and feed them, most of these people would have died.

This might be the memory that is lurking in the background of the current refugee situation in Europe.