I bought a new Fitbit yesterday. It’s big like a little saucer. Yes, yes, I know it’s spying on me. But what can I do? I love the little bugger. It helped me improve my sleep, and I have had severe sleep issues my whole life. If I don’t sleep, there’s nothing to spy on because I’m practically dead.

And it even shows me the weather on the home screen. I’m obsessed with weather like all parents of small children.

The Biden administration isn’t on Ukraine’s side in the conflict with Russia. It’s a lie pushed by the same media that sold you COVID, BLM, Jussie Smollett, etc. Biden has given Putin Nordstream 2 and is pressuring Ukraine to give an autonomous status to the occupied territories. This is a catastrophe for Ukraine.

Trump easily and peacefully kept Russia in check for 4 years. It’s eminently doable. Nobody needs to “go to war over Ukraine.” Nobody in Ukraine ever suggested anything this insane. This is a propaganda talking point, like “the racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s murder” or “stay home save lives.”

It’s sad to see every conservative under the sun freaking out on social media that “Biden is ready to go to war with Russia over Ukraine.” If that’s true, I have a few Pfizer vaccines to sell you.

When I was a small child, I loved books about Lenin. Those were children’s books with short, simple stories about Lenin’s childhood that demonstrated how absolutely godlike he was in his perfection since birth. My parents didn’t buy dreck like that, so I once stole a couple of these books from a classroom library. They were like lives of saints adapted for very little kids. Lenin was a mix between Jesus and Santa, not that I knew who they were. For a child, it’s very soothing to read something with a 100% moral clarity on who the good guy – the only guy in the universe of such luminous, unmarred goodness – is.

Zoe Valdes is one of the writers of the Cuban Diaspora. Her most recent novel Pájaro lindo de la madrugá was supposed to offer a different perspective on Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator who lost to Fidel Castro and his guerrilla in 1959. I have absolutely nothing whatsoever against reading an alternative viewpoint on Batista. But this book is terrible, my friends. It’s horrid, horrific, atrocious, and ghastly. Those little books about Lenin from my Soviet childhood are true art compared to the garbage Valdes has excreted in this book.

Pájaro lindo de la madrugá is a mix between a gushing hagiography and a vulgar sentimental novel. Batista in this novel is Jesus, Santa, and Virgin Mary combined. Back when Stalin ordered a biography of himself, rewrote it by hand, printed millions of copies, and forced Soviet citizens to buy them, he managed to produce a more balanced, less vomit-inducing account of his own life than Valdes’s novel about Batista. This garbage is embarrassing to read. Batista is portrayed as a creature of unblemished perfection even in the saccharine scenes where he dumps his wife and the mother of his children for a random (and very young) girl he picks up on the street.

The characters in the novel frequently say things like, “Batista had one huge flaw. It was that he was too kind (too brilliant, too trusting, too sweet, too perfect), etc.” Parts of the novel read as copy-pasted pages from online encyclopedias. Others are cringeworthy scenes of Batista demonstrating his inhuman virtues.

I found two things of value in this painfully slow and plodding novel.

One is the correct observation that most of the anti-Batista sentiment in the pro-Soviet camp was based on his being “black.” That’s all we knew about him in the USSR. He was black. Meaning, eww, how nasty. Of course, if you find the pictures of him, you’ll see that he wasn’t even black. Batista was somewhat darker-skinned than Fidel. And Fidel deftly played on the Cubans’ quite extraordinary racism to reject Batista for his ‘blackness.’ (Cubans are, without a doubt, the most racist people on Earth by a wide margin. And it’s only gotten worse during the Castro times.)

Another useful thing in the book is the statement that Cuba’s tragedy is not economic but a moral one. That is absolutely true regarding every Socialist regime in history. (Neither Cuba nor the USSR ever managed to build Communism. They were Socialist countries in the classical sense). The USSR wasn’t terrible because there were no consumer goods and you had to hunt for a pound of butter for hours. That was bad but it’s so not the main problem. The absolute moral collapse in every possible way was what’s bad about the USSR. And it’s impossible to explain to anybody who hasn’t experienced it. This is why I am horrified by Cuba every time I visit. People have had their souls surgically removed. As a Soviet writer once said, Soviet people are primitive biological life forms. They are meat bags wrapped around nothingness.

These are two good things about the novel but now that I have told them to you, please abstain from reading. The torture to which Valdes subjects the Spanish language should be criminal.

Another very common trick that bosses used during Soviet times was saying to an employee in a severe voice, “I have something very important to discuss with you. Come to my office in 3 days, and I’ll let you know. In the meantime, think about whether there’s anything you want to tell me.”

The employee stews in his juices for three days, imagining all sorts of bad shit and wondering what kind of dirt the boss has on him and expects him to confess. When he finally comes to the boss’s office, he’ll be so much more compliant because he’s been worn out by the wait. The KGB loved this sort of tricks.

When a boss tries to do this to me (and yes, they absolutely do), I show up at his office immediately, saying, “I was passing by and wondered what it was you needed.” I also have a series of tricks to get the boss’s secretary to let me through without an appointment.

“Gosh, I think Jack forgot this folder in my office! I’ll just pop in to see if it’s his.” Or, “Jack is expecting me. It’s not on the schedule? Hmm, weird. I guess he forgot to tell you. He’s so funny sometimes.”

If it’s a legitimate meeting and not a manipulation, they’ll tell you what the meeting will be about. If they don’t, it means they need to cow you into compliance for some reason.

What would you call an administrator who spends the two hours of a meeting, chewing the cud about trivial, unimportant stuff, and at the end says, “Sorry, we are out of time, I’ll just briefly mention these budget cuts (or other extremely unpopular measures). That’s it, now we are really out of time. Good bye!”?

This happens every single time. And nobody agrees with me that this isn’t accidental but a deliberate strategy to avoid a discussion or a confrontation. The meetings are online, so once the organizer hits the button “end meeting for all,” nobody gets to say anything else.

I feel gaslit not even by the administrator but by the colleagues who say I’m “reading too much into this.”

This didn’t happen once or twice. It’s been 1,5 years of bimonthly meetings run this way.

I don’t think my husband and I even discussed whether to get vaccinated for COVID. We talk about COVID very little. We definitely never discussed whether to vaccinate our kid. It’s like we never discuss whether to invest in a Ponzi scheme or kick puppies. It’s all very obvious, so what’s to discuss?

We have very different interests and access different news sources. I don’t think N has ever heard of Kyle Rittenhouse or would understand that funny meme about the Waukesha killer being called a car. He’s never read a word by Alex Berenson. N is in a million online forums but they are completely different from mine.

This subject, though, we are completely on the same page.

A Soviet defector explains how to engineer a takeover of a country:

If this resonates with you, here’s a full video.

Yes, that James Joyce, I know. I hate the modernists, too. But this short novel (or a long short story) doesn’t have any of the linguistic experimentation and confusing, long sentences we normally associate with Joyce. Everything is very realist, very understated, and very clear.

The story is – to me, that is. To other people it’s about something else entirely – about marriages between people of very different levels of emotional development. If you’ve never had to live with a person who’s kind of emotionally stunted compared to you, you won’t feel the story. You know, the people who can never notice what anybody around them is feeling, who are all “me, me, me,” who kill the mood for everybody without realizing it, and act as a dead weight on everybody else’s emotional state.

Gabriel, the main character of The Dead is a reader, a book reviewer, and a person who feels things intensely. His wife Gretta, whom he loves dearly, is none of these things. Gabriel never wanted to accept that Gretta’s lower social class meant anything but it does. She’s incapable of existing in a more complex emotional universe that is Gabriel’s. She’s one of those people who are going to crap all over your excitement, happiness, and joy not out of spite but because she’s not equipped to notice that you are feeling them. The only emotion accessible to them is feeling sorry for themselves.

None of this is spelled out in those words in the short novel. As I said, it’s very understated, which is the only modernist thing about it. Make of it what you will but it’s a great book. And the subject of emotional compatibility is fascinating. Forget marriages. Imagine being a more emotionally complex child with an emotionally stunted mother. There are some people who feel things more intensely, who are touched deeply by art, who feel nature, etc. And there are those with the emotional range of a piece of wood. Like N and his mother. She just doesn’t understand what the big deal is in saying the insensitive, horrid things she says. Emotionally, she’s a primitive organism. Joyce’s Gretta isn’t as bad as that but she’s definitely one of those less complicated human beings, so to speak.

The big Twitter accounts that were posting updates on the Gislaine Maxwell trial have been banned with no explanation. Instead, we are treated to the tawdry spectacle of the Jussie Smollett’s trial.