Here’s a really great article:

Karl Rove harbors no illusions as to just how fundamentally changed—indeed just how far gone—the America of 1979 is when contrasted to what passes as ‘America’ in 2021, as Rove is absolutely a high-profile political ‘person of interest’ in the abduction, torture and murder of the American nation-state as a functioning republic and a demographically and culturally cohesive enterprise. His greasy fingerprints are all over crime scenes that stretch today from the violent mass stampede across the border to the savage chaos exploding throughout the imploding cities to the deadly silence of the shuttered manufacturing plants that once hummed across the heartland and amidst every kindergarten class to every university lecture hall where working white Americans are ritually defiled in theory as well as in practice.

I don’t know who the author is but this is excellent writing.

LOS ANGELES — As it scrambles to deal with the surge of Haitian migrants at the southern border, the Biden administration is seeking a private contractor to operate a migrant detention facility at the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with a requirement that some of the guards speak Spanish and Haitian Creole, according to government records.

Good job, Biden voters. You truly did us all a solid getting this guy elected. I’m sure the private contractor who’ll run the Gitmo jail will be fully vaccinated, so it’s all good.

The US budget includes one billion dollars for Israel’s Iron Dome. This explains why the Israeli government so eagerly handed its population over to be Pfizer’s lab rats. If that was the choice, I’d go with the metaphorical shot over a real one, too.

OK, I feel better now. The idea of millions of schlemiel Jews was intolerable.

P.S. Please, somebody, appreciate the beauty of the post’s title.

There were two things I suffered from really badly before I got COVID.

One was neuralgic back pain. I think I mentioned it on the blog. It was frequent and very painful.

The other problem was spells of extreme fatigue that would last between 12 and 24 hours. I even documented them trying to figure out the pattern. There was none. At least a couple of days a week I’d feel completely wiped out for no discernible reason. I even thought maybe it was early menopause.

Since COVID, I haven’t experienced either problem once. It’s been months. Does anybody have an explanation? Is it the weight loss? Or is there such a thing as a good long COVID?

One of the culinary practices that horrify me in the US is the habit of serving pasta with breadsticks. Pasta is bread. Why do you need bread to accompany bread?

Italians (the real ones, from Italy; no disrespect to the other ones), please enlighten me. Is this done in your country? In Ukraine we eat extremely unhealthily. But even we make fun of the folks who eat pasta with bread.

When are US leftists going to remember how much they usually want to be “like Norway”?

Throughout the pandemic I’ve been reading updates from Ukrainians in Norway like you read communiques from sanity. Time to make Norway endemic and recognize that COVID definitely is just that.

A friend gave each of her adult children a gift of $100,000 to use as a downpayment on a house. The total number of children is 4. Actually, I think one of the kids got much more because she wanted to buy in DC. Knowing my friend, it’s not her last half-mil she shared so easily.

The friend recently retired from my college, which is the lowest-paying PhD-granting institution in the state. Her husband is a school teacher.

Theirs isn’t inherited wealth. Their kids had free lunches from school growing up. The husband is first-generation college graduate. They are in their seventies now.

What I’m saying is, this used to be a pretty great economy.

Everybody on social media is delighted by these images but I find them hideous. These poor plants would have looked much better, in my opinion, if people left them the hell alone. The guy in the picture at the bottom is said to have tortured that poor tree for 8 years to get this result. 8 years! Is he a sociopath?

Data collected from 18 states between March and August suggest the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine reduces the risk of being hospitalized with COVID-19 by 91% in the first four months after receiving the second dose. Beyond 120 days, however, that vaccine efficacy drops to 77%. . . The surprising findings came as a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel recommended against offering booster doses of the Pfizer vaccine to all Americans ages 16 and older.

Very surprising findings. Utterly shocking. To the cognitively challenged, that is. Everybody else has known this since June by observing the numbers coming out of countries that vaccinated earlier and harder.

But hey, at least these morons acknowledged the drop after 4 months. Now let’s wait for them to acknowledge the drop to under 40% at 6 months.

Ukraine’s tech industry was well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity thanks to the dramatic evolution it’s undergone in recent years. Since the first IT companies appeared in the mid-1990s the sector has experienced a meteoric rise. Today it accounts for 4 percent of GDP and employs roughly 200,000 people, boasting some of the country’s highest salaries. Much of this growth has been built on outsourcing. But while in the early days the main sell for international customers was the ability to hire competent programmers at lower prices, as the industry has matured the value proposition has shifted considerably, says Chubay. “It’s not about the cost anymore, it’s about the expertise and ultimate outcomes,” says Chubay. “We have moved up the value chain. We have become more holistic, and we are gaining more and more responsibility over bigger chunks of our client’s businesses.”

BBC World News.

Oh yes. Ukrainian programmers charge like total bastards. And good for them. I don’t think anybody should undersell their labor. But the idea that you can hire them cheaply – this hasn’t been true since last century. This creates a weird situation in Ukraine where a class of people makes the kind of money that’s way higher than even the US median while the rest makes between 1/10 and 1/5 of US median.

I’m still not fully over the poor guy who left all this and went to Mexico with the hopes of recreating the Ukrainian programmers there.