I have very little hope that Maddow and Todd will come up with original questions and won’t force the candidates to repeat the same things we’ve already heard many times. Maybe they should have invited yesterday’s rabbi instead.

In any case, I can’t resist the temptation to watch!

20:08 – “a progressive is someone who makes progress” is a great slogan.

20:09 – telling Bernie he’s achieved nothing is rude and unfair. What’s with this moderator?

20:10 – it’s funny that it takes a 74 – year-old fellow to notice that times have changed and public education for all can no longer be limited to K-12. Knowledge has expanded, so public education for all should expand.

20:13 – I don’t think Obama and Biden ever claimed they were progressive. The label only came into vogue this year.

20:15 – words can’t explain how bored I am with hearing about Bernie’s votes on guns. Enough already! He explained it many times.

20:21 – Obama is becoming the Democratic oracle. Everybody will now claim special closeness to him and invoke his name as a talisman. The guy is still young but he’s getting consecrated in front of our eyes.

20:25 – Hillary’s on a tear tonight. I like it. We need anger, we need passion.

20:28 – 1990s??? What do 1990s have to do with Hillary who was unemployed at that time?

20:33 – this is unexpectedly lively. I’m glad I didn’t skip it.

20:43 – when they start on Wall Street, I fall asleep. It’s empty chatter with no meaning.

20:45 – Hillary should take the debate from Bernie’s economy turf to her “everything else under the Sun” turf. Hillary, talk about feminism! Parental leave! Abortion rights! Foreign policy!

20:46 – it’s ridiculous to ask Hillary to give up her texts for free when nobody else is being asked to compromise their livelihood in this way. Absolutely ridiculous.

20:51 – Maddow ‘ s question to Bernie is ridiculous. The idea that companies will not work with him because of a few speeches he made is bizarre.

21:02 – my heart bleeds for poor Bernie whenever he is forced to talk about foreign policy.

21:04 – Bernie’s foreign policy (“we cannot be the policeman of the world”) is verbatim what Jeb’s is.

21:10 – let’s not bring Cuba into this as some great achievement. There is no achievement here. A deal with the devil had to be made to thwart Putin. That’s nothing to celebrate.

21:13 – Crimea is Ukraine, Senator. These are not separate entities.

21:14 – Hillary’s answer on Russia is gladdening my heart. It’s not for nothing that Putin detests her. Why the fuck did the stupid moderators interrupt her?? This was going very well.

21:24 – Bernie is very gracefully dismissing the stupid hype around the Iowa caucus.

21:25 – in 1964??? Seriously? Why not ask Bernie about his experiences in the Napoleonic wars? That would be as relevant but more fun.

21:32 – yes! We do know that the goddamn emails are a fucking absurdity.

21:34 – Maddow asks Bernie the most absurd questions ever. A couple of people messed up. That doesn’t amount to “losing control.”

21:36 – Hillary can be gracious, too. If she tries really hard.

21:43 – finally, a question on Flint! I was growing desperate. Yes, Snyder has to resign. He is a national disgrace. He’s worse than Rauner, and that’s saying a lot!

♤♡◇♧♤♡◇♧♤♡◇♧♤♡◇♧

CONCLUSION: A great debate. I knew that when the dead weight of O’Malley were shed, the debate would go much more smoothly.

Both candidates are energized, passionate, and worth listening to. Both did great. Nobody disappointed. The inanity of the moderators did not stop the candidates from saying what they needed.

We all won tonight.

Today, I received publishing agreement forms to sign from 3 different places where my articles were accepted. Obviously, this doesn’t occur every week or every month, but it’s really cool that so much is happening for me professionally. My career is really taking off. I’m proud because this did not come easily to me. I had to wage a great battle with my own limitations. 

P.S. Please don’t feel compelled to write “Congratulations!” on each such post. I’m planning to have a great number of professional successes and I don’t want people to tire themselves out with constant acknowledgments.

94% of Germans support accepting refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and a host of other countries. 76% of supporters of the anti-immigrant AfD party are in favor of this as well.
75% of Germans want even more refugees than that and favor offering asylum to those facing religious or political persecution.

This is what the German people want, it’s their country, and the choice is theirs. Let’s drop the silly belief that Big Mamma Merkel is forcing poor Germans into something they don’t want. Merkel is simply responding to an overwhelming wish of the people. Germany is a democracy, she can’t argue with a 94% demand.

That the current situational implementation of the refugee policies is not making all Germans happy does not change their enormous support for refugee acceptance itself.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton struggled Wednesday night to answer a question about why she took more than $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in one year.

“Well, I don’t know. That’s what they offered,” she said…

Anybody who watched the townhall yesterday knows that Hillary didn’t “struggle” with the idiotic, sexist question. She dismissed it with a joke because she’s by now used to decades of sexist moralizing about women’s “rightful role” in society. It’s truly admirable that she can be so gracious about this endless badgering. (The quote is from MSNBC that is shamelessly shilling for Bernie and if you go to the original source, you’ll see that the stupid fuckers accompanied the lying piece with a photo where Hillary looks confused and about a hundred years old.)

The most disappointing thing is that I found this ridiculous quote gleefully reposted by a female academic. One would expect a professional, intelligent woman to be a but more aware of the realities of sexism, but no such luck. Well, I shouldn’t be surprised, given that the academic in question once wrote a disgusting, vicious libel about my university. You all know the kind of work we do and the student population we serve and can imagine what kind of a superficial, snobby person would want to spit on us from her ivory tower.

Please contrast all this infantile mud-slinging with my invariably respectful yet not obsequious coverage of both Bernie and Hillary.

In the wake of the Paris attacks, the Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio declared that the reason ISIS targets the West is “because we have freedom of speech, because we have diversity in our religious beliefs … because we’re a tolerant society.” Yet only weeks earlier, ISIS had downed a Russian airliner over the Sinai, thus targeting the distinctly intolerant regime of Vladimir Putin.

Lord Jesus, but people are stupid. Putin’s regime surely looks intolerant to an American but how intolerant does it look to members of ISIS? Has anybody seen Russian women? They are very much unburqaed, to put it mildly. Russia is a deeply atheist society with extremely loose morals and social permissiveness of rare proportions.

The whole story with the Russian airplane that crashed over Sinai is fishy in the extreme, and the rumors of Russia’s dislike of ISIS are quite baseless. Up to the quoted part, the article was making an interesting argument and I was following it with curiosity. But if an author is capable of this kind of blooper, he can’t be trusted to say anything very valuable.

The most crucial part of writing about foreign affairs is to accept that people, countries, cultures, civilizations are different and deserve to be understood on their own terms and approached in all their complex richness.

Given that Obama is still alive, could we hold off on the hagiography for the moment?

I’m all for maternity leave, but the following is wrong: “Allowing women to breastfeed at work and therefore skip maternity leave is like allowing workers to eat at their desks and therefore skip a lunch break. It’s not a victory; it’s a defeat.” Many people will cause way too much harm to themselves and their babies if forced to stay away from work. Maternity leave is great but it can’t be obligatory. People are different.

The family of Angolan rebel sues the makers of Call of Duty.

Echidne is surprised that Michael Moore is oblivious towards sexism. She must have missed every one of his documentaries and books where Moore expresses profound nostalgia for the 1950s family model. He has repeated ad nauseam that he can’t imagine a greater abomination than a mother who works.

Amazon is planning to open up to 400 real bookstores! This will be do great.

A disgusting anti-Semitic gathering in Chicago.

“What people on the right and the left are arguing against are the hardline tactics progressives (and this is one area where liberals and progressives really need to be separated) take policing speech: labeling certain opinions as completely off-limits, words being refashioned as “violence,” deplatforming those who fail to fall in lockstep, going after some nobody’s employer because they said something idiotic on their Facebook page, etc.” Exactly. That’s precisely why I detest the professionally outraged Schmindies who pollute public space with their fake self-righteousness.

Cuban political prisoners condemn the Obama policy on Cuba. I understand their outrage completely but, to me, the goal of thwarting Putin that the policy achieved still matters more. Other than that, the rapprochement with Cuba is, of course, shameful.

Like this blogger, I also love writing in books. By looking at my books, you can easily spot my favorites because they have the most marked up pages.

The problem with Jewish museums. A very good, insightful article.

The refugee crisis allows for massive amounts of public money to be transferred to big business.

We, the highly qualified, highly educated immigrants, are used to being hated by the Lefties. But it seems like it’s getting popular among the Righties to hate us, too.

And here is yet another case of a person hiding from her individual problems behind fake political rhetoric.

“Look, I love Bernie Sanders like a play cousin. While I’d like to support his candidacy to be the Democratic nominee, I just can’t. Again, it’s not that he has bad ideas, it’s just because there’s no way in hell we’ll see any of his proposals become reality. There’s no political will on the Hill to make any of this happen. And, I’m sorry: Bernie Sanders may be Jewish but his name ain’t Jesus.” Exactly. And of course, Bernie finds support among the very young. They can easily waste 4 years on chasing after a silly dream and not feel it. The older we are, though, the more wasteful this seems.

A truly pathetic wedding trend.

Is Bernie’s famous sense of decency cracking under the pressure of the campaign?

And yet another study proving that life experiences of parents define the lives of children. Consider the horrible damage done to people who are not allowed to have the information about their real parents, grandparents, etc. They have no way of figuring out what’s happening to them.

After Iowa, everybody is rushing to point out how disorganized and underfunded Trump’s campaign is. That, however, makes things really scary because if Trump got such amazing results without investing money and effort, what can’t he do with a bit of both?

Sanders’s senior adviser just said on MSNBC that Obama and Biden are progressives while Hillary isn’t. Which is every kind of funny.

20:04 – I don’t know why everybody is ragging on Bernie’s age. He looks sensational for 74. And his energy level is out of this world.

20:06 – all these townhalls go the same for me: first, I get convinced by Bernie but then I listen to Hillary and realize she’s still better.

20:10 – Bernie finally recognized that he will be raising taxes on modest earners. At least, he’s finally being honest about it. Of course, I’ve got to say, paying even more taxes to get the kind of crappy care people get in Canada does not inspire me.

20:20 – I wonder if there is a single person on the planet who hears Bernie’s “Muslim troops will crush ISIS because it hijacked their religion and Russia will help” and thinks it’s not the most insane statement possible.

20:26 – the question on veterans was a gift to Bernie. Great answer!

20:29 – a 75-year-old woman in the audience also looks sensational. So good to see. In my country, people consider themselves ancient after the age of 50.

20:41 – it is really fucking fantastic to hear Democrats battle each other for who is more progressive. That’s a very big deal.

20:48 – kudos to Bernie for mentioning overprescribing doctors and their contribution to drug addiction.

20:52 – Bernie has a brilliant standup act mocking Trump. He’s the best!

[Off-topic: does anybody else think Bill Clinton looks very frail and unwell these days?]

21:05 – Hillary is brilliant. She delivers a blow hidden in every seemingly casual statement.

21:06 – as for why young women prefer Bernie and don’t like Hillary, that’s easy. At this age, they yearn for a kind Daddy and not for a strict Mommy.

21:09 – every word Hillary says is calculated and carefully planned. Love this about her! Love people who are manipulative in professional contexts! (This isn’t sarcasm, I really do.)

21:23 – Hillary gives a brilliant answer to the inane question about her Iraq war vote.

21:31 – a rabbi – who else? – asks the only profound question of the evening.

21:44 – I think it’s absolutely damn shameful and a fucking disgrace that Hillary has to be persecuted about the money she made making speeches. Yeah, ’cause women should only work for free and never make any real money. Sexism flourishes and stinks up the world.

CONCLUSION: Bernie is great but I’m with Hillary.

I’m doing a bibliography review and watching a pre-recorded Kitchen Nightmares marathon. The structure of the show is identical to that of another personal favorite, The Profit. Successful multimillionaire professionals try to help failing businesses by giving them money, paying for renovations, freeing them from debt, finding cheaper suppliers and huge contracts, etc. Every single time, though, it turns out that the problems of the business can’t be resolved this way because they stem from the psychological issues of the owners or messed up relationships between the workers.

Kitchen Nightmares‘ Gordon Ramsey has zero sensitivity to these issues, which is why he fails so often in comparison to the more sophisticated Greek fellow on The Profit who always begins with an effort to get people to talk about their psychological problems.

With all the talk about the crucial importance of early childhood experiences, it is important to remember that these experiences are not an unappealable death sentence. People absolutely can liberate themselves from the childhood trauma that is sucking them dry in adulthood, making them depressed, listless, underachieving, lonely, addicted, sick, etc.

One thing people need to seek such liberation is an external source of energy. Their own energy is spilling out of them through the breaches created by the trauma, and they need to supplement it from something that comes from the outside. This external source of energy can be falling in love, interacting with friends, pursuing a hobby, practicing a religion, doing work that one likes – in short, energy comes from healthy, constructive enjoyment (and not from enjoyment derived from self-destructive practices.)

The problem is that many people are too traumatized even to seek these sources of supplemental energy. What they see as love, sex, work, hobby, friendship and religious practice is actually self-destructive, masochistic engagement with the world that reinforces their childhood trauma.