By the way, the parliament of Catalonia just passed a bill guaranteeing a UBI of about €600 a month to everybody, including illegal immigrants. 

Until now, Spain has had no far-right parties and no anti-immigrant sentiment. Clearly, Catalonia’s law-makers decided to change this.  

And by the way, all of these exclamations about how “nothing can be done, we will all be automated away, the liquid capital has won already” is nothing but a socially acceptable form of capitulating to capital, so to speak. I wish people just honestly said, “I’m doing well and everybody else should go screw themselves” instead. 

Finally, I found something I haven’t been able to get a hold of for decades: garlic scapes. The young farmer at the farmer’s market who was selling them was stunned that I could identify them. They taste amazing in garden salads. I used to pick them at my first husband’s dacha back in Ukraine. I hated that darn place (although it was a beautiful huge house with a real fireplace and a big garden), and the garlic scapes were the only thing to reconcile me with being there.

A big bunch cost me a strange price of one dollar seventy six cents.

That’s what the new economy should look like according to Zuckerberg and Co: 

You and I should work more and never retire to sponsor the existence of a disaffected underclass that will spend its life on Facebook and opiates paid for by your and my money. The underclass will be manipulated through Facebook and such to vote for people who will make this setup possible. 

Mind you, this doesn’t have to happen. We can set things up differently if that’s what we want. 

Zuckerberg supports UBI because it’s the best way for him to siphon off public funds into his own bank account. 

What will people on UBI do all day? Sit in Facebook and buy $3 bras and the rest of the crap off its ads. UBI is the best way to guarantee that taxpayers keep sponsoring the billionaires’ lifestyles. 

A profound transformation of our very state-form is occurring. A new form of global capitalism is being created. The Liberals (progressives, the left wing, whatever) studiously pretend nothing is happening and everything is peachy gooey. I like Hillary, I supported her, but let’s not pretend like it wasn’t the most out of touch campaign in the world. (After Bernie’s, I mean).

People intuit, however, that something is not right. Their anxiety is exploited by a cunning and immoral billionaire who is propelled to power by simply acknowledging that something is going on and the people’s anxiety is real. 

The Liberals (progressives, the left wing, whatever) look at all this and decide that the way to deal with the situation is to mask the symptom and pretend there is no disease. Remove Trump and we can all go on pretending that more and more people will need disability or some other form of UBI simply because they are eager to “try out new ideas” and not because the new form of capitalism has turned them into human waste. We can all go on pretending that toilet signage is our greatest social justice cause and big business is supporting it because it suddenly became super progressive.
Kushner, schmushner, the most enormous planetary transformation we are to witness in our lifetimes is underway, and this is what we are on about? 

What’s especially cute is that all of these revelations about Kushner come from anonymous sources in the Trump campaign. 

What a royal waste of time all this is. 

And before anybody objects, when was the last time I was wrong on anything that had to do with Russia?

Why are there so many deeply crazy people running around?

Example, but there are hundreds more:

And Trump is violating every intuition, every deep reservoir of feeling we have about how one ought to be a man, a leader, a symbol of our national identity. We are not distracted when we respond to those feelings. In fact, we might be better off to articulate our responses as feelings, as intense and profound and utterly righteous feelings.

I very sincerely hope that this fellow is simply a poseur who doesn’t mean a word of this shit. But I’m afraid these crazy folks do exist and I might run across a few of them and hear all about how Trump violates their reservoirs.

This kind of dumbfuckery is why I hate Zuckerberg: “We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.” Yeah, that’s what people on welfare do. They try ideas. Spoiled rich brat. 

I really enjoyed this classification of straight-A students. What do you, folks, think? Does it ring true to you?

And this is a true gift for the holidays: the most ridiculous advice ever on female orgasm. I haven’t stopped laughing since I read it. “Just rub.” I can’t get over it. 

Great advice on finding ideas to write about. 

When consumers try to do politics.

I never thought I’d find anything Ryan does commendable but this definitely is. 

Yes, intelligence is genetic. Why this is so controversial is a mystery to me. 

Sleep loss leads to weight gain. 

The poisoned generation. Everybody should read this, everybody. 

Disturbing developments during Trump’s visit with Netanyahu. This looks very strange. 

It’s turning out to be “My Day in Pictures” kind of day. 

Klara is at an age where I need to plan out the entire day with tons of outdoors activities if I am to have any peace to cook or read during the day. 

In the morning we visited the town’s oldest neighborhood. This is a place with really old, beautiful trees, small houses whose owners have lived here forever (and some have even been around for more than one generation!), and very broken down sidewalks. These are overwhelmingly blue-collar folks with an occasional college instructor renting a house before he can buy something in a middle-class neighborhood.

I never saw anything but Bernie signs in this neighborhood during the election. 

The funny thing is that the town’s most expensive neighborhood has nothing like this sensational foliage. The rich people’s house’s sit under the scorching sun with no shadow to hide from the heat. Of course, they have swimming pools but no pool can substitute these gorgeous old trees.