One of Klara’s favorite games is identifying parts of the body. I say, “Klarochka, where are toes?” and she shows me her toes. 

“Where are teeth?” and she touches her teeth. 

Finally, I say, “Where are eyes?”

Of course, Klara is a smart baby and she doesn’t want to poke herself in the eye. She thinks about it for a second, pokes me in the eye, and announces, “Eyes!” 

So remember the rapist in Berlin who raped a 13-year-old Russian immigrant girl and filmed the rape to use as blackmail? He was given a suspended sentence of one year and 9 months. Meaning, he won’t serve a day and is free to go rape some more kids. 

I wish people kept this in mind whenever they start peeing themselves with delight over how very progressive Europe is compared to the supposedly backwards US. Shit’s the same everywhere. 

A lady at the park asked me if I’m Klara’s babysitter. I neither dress not act youthful, so I’m thinking she must have thought I’m one of those foreign au pairs one sees in TV shows set in New York. It’s got to be the accent, right? Because there’s nothing else. 

From an interesting article on immigration in The Atlantic:

In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.”

Even for California it sounds deranged. Is it an urban myth of some sort?

One more quote from the article linked in the previous post:

By the spring of 2016, one top Clinton adviser explained to me, the campaign’s own polling showed that white voters without a college degree despised Clinton. The extent of their loathing was surprising—she polled far worse with them than Obama ever had, especially in states like Ohio and Iowa.

It’s because they are horrible racists, of course. 

It creeps me out when people discuss “the Resistance” as if it were real:

Leaderless and loud, the Resistance has become the motive power of the Democratic Party. Presidential hopefuls already strive to anticipate its wishes. Elected officials have restructured their political calculus to avoid getting on its wrong side. The feistiness and agitation of the moment are propelling the party to a new place.

Aside from a dwindling group of excitable folks posting silly things on FB and Twitter, there is zero evidence of political mobilization. If anything, people are getting less interested in politics because they see it as increasingly irrelevant. 

For instance, it was very hard to get people to write a tiny paragraph for congressional hearings about the hardship our lack of state budget caused them. Curiously, the folks I see mentioning “Resistance” on FB did not participate at all yet they see themselves as more politically active as those of us who did.

I experience a sense of being in the presence of something surreal when the same person who begins every conversation with me by asking when I will “finally join the Resistance” refuses even to consider joining a real political effort. It’s as if posting crap on Facebook were suddenly a political act while working for the union or organizing for the next election weren’t.