7:53 – ah, so Trump decided to make an issue of Bill Clinton’s sex life of 30 years ago. “Mommy, Billy started it first!” is a very adult debating strategy. Very presidential and mature. 

8:04 – they chose people who haven’t made up their mind yet. Do they even have minds if they can’t reach a decision at this late stage? What is their misfortune?

8:06 – the first question is funny, given the circumstances. Yes, Trump is modeling very appropriate behavior for youth. Especially the youth whose life goal is to end up incarcerated.

8:10 – Anderson Cooper goes straight for the video. Trump repeats words “locker room” like they are a magical eraser of reality.  

8:17 – Trump is trying to defend himself with some really bizarre, stumbling stories. 

8:19 – who is the brain-damaged freak who applauded Trump?

8:24 – I’m almost feeling sorry for the wobbly old man. Almost. 

8:26 – we are back to emails? Seriously? Wake me up after this is over. 

8:29 – Cooper is at least trying to keep Trump from interrupting.

8:31 – why is Trump hovering behind Hillary when she talks? Is he that desperate to be on camera?

8:38 – “Yes, Islamophobia is bad,” Trump says. This would be comical if it weren’t so offensive. 

8:51 – the question about whether politicians can have public and personal positions is so infantile that I’m ashamed I heard it. 

8:54 – “She’s raising taxes on the middle class, you can look at me, she’s raising taxes.” What does any of this mean? Is he altogether with us? 

9:00 – why does he keep bringing up Sanders? Bernie endorsed Hillary and is campaigning with her, or hasn’t Trump heard?

9:07 – “Russia is new and we are tired and old and exhausted in terms of nuclear.” I need an interpreter. 

9:08 – “Assad is killing ISIS and Russia is killing ISIS and Iran is killing ISIS.” WTF does this mean?

9:09 – Trump publicly snubbed Pence. Fun!

9:11 – “Why can’t they just go secretively?” The fellow is so stupid. 

9:22 – another dig at this mysterious Blumenthal whom Trump seems to be obsessed with. 

9:26 – Hillary’s vision of what the Supreme Court should be like is so beautiful. I love her. 

9:34 – Hillary is so smart and light on her feet. She came up with the perfect response to the very hard question of what’s positive about Trump. I love her even more. 

Things are always more complex than they seem. Everybody blamed Germany for squeezing Greece so hard, but nobody noticed that for years Greece was the door into the EU for every bandit and crook in the world. All you needed to do was rent an apartment in Greece (which you can do for $250 a month, so it’s easily affordable to every crook), and you could have your EU papers. At first, Greece required that these crooks lived in Greece for 180 days to get their papers but then canceled this requirement. The flood of horrible, completely criminal folks from places like Russia that was gushing into the EU from Greece was driving everybody in the EU nuts. Which contributed to the anti-Greek sentiment.

The handwritten book I’m making for Klara prompts me to share my ideas about successful entertainment. Other than “the most successful entertainment I can think of happens 2,000,000 light years away from me,” I’ve got nothing.

Making a Murderer has set a very bad precedent of manipulating the public opinion to support murderers of women. A documentary came out recently that glorifies the vicious murderer Amanda Knox. Just like the film that manipulates facts and edits reality to present Steven Avery as innocent, the Knox documentary is shameless in its rewriting of Knox’s story. 

As we have seen in the bizarre obsession with the “real name” of Elena Ferrante, most people are incapable of noticing the difference between reality and a fictional narrative. If it’s written in a book or especially if it’s shown on TV, it’s got to be true. It doesn’t seem to occur to many viewers how easy it is to edit a story in absolutely any direction that the filmmaker wants. 

Knox is already running free and Avery has every chance of being released. Justice by TV is a very dangerous thing. 

So this is why the topic of idiot Assange has been revived! It turns out that excerpts from Hillary’s super-duper top secret speeches have been released. I missed this story completely. 

Of course, the speeches proved to be as boring as anything. Hillary is in favor of universal health care, sheesh, what a scandal. Who could have guessed? And she’s for green energy? Wow, such a shocker. 

I can’t believe how much time was wasted on this non-issue during the primaries. 

In Spanish, if there is a group of even a billion people all but one of whom is female, the group is addressed in the masculine. 

There are some bored, nasty American academics who think it’s their right to mess with a language that is not theirs  (and if you are an immigrant, the language is no longer yours to regulate) and who go into fits when they see gendered adjectives or nouns. In a gesture of extreme cultural imperialism, they substitute the vowels o and a that point to gender with meaningless x. The resulting atrocity is an unpronounceable concoction like, for instance, “Latinxs.”

I once had a group of Latin American students (not immigrants, actual Latin Americans) come to my office who had a spoiled rich brat professor correct them in class when they didn’t do the dumb x thing. They were really angry. Their complex and often harsh reality was being erased to serve the needs of a rich fool who refused to entertain the possibility that somebody on the planet had more pressing concerns than her PC-hissy fit.

Before talking to these students, I never really thought about the x thing. But once I spoke to them, I realized how ridiculous we make ourselves look to anybody who has real problems and can’t worry about crap like gendered pronouns and adjectives. 

I did get the funding for the conference in Texas. But then  I got an email from the organizers that address the participants as “Estimadxs colegxs.” The dumbness of this is hard to explain to anybody with a functioning brain. The “x” is used these days (by brainless freakazoids, of course) to avoid using either the masculine form “estimados” or the feminine form “estimadas.” The really ridiculous part, though, is that the “a” in “colegas” is immutable. It does not depend on gender. So substituting it with the terrified, PC “x” serves zero purpose, even within the diseased logic of the estimadx-ers.

Now I don’t even want to go.

After the groping video, I hope that Hillary is holding at least one more thing up her sleeve. We need something else to come out in the last two weeks of October. Or maybe she is planning to provoke him into attacking yet another individual, like he did with the Khans and Machado. That reliably plunges his ratings. 

What I really loved is how the video was released a couple of hours after Trump yet again asserted that his temperament was the best thing about him. He so set himself up for this one. 

I asked N if he ever met men who talk about women like Trump in the notorious video and he says yes, when he was an undocumented field worker in the UK, he shared living quarters with a guy from Armenia who’d been so sex-deprived back home that he boasted of having had sex with sheep and goats. He talked like that.