I hate it when people say this kind of shit:

At the first presidential debate this week, GOP nominee Donald Trump fat-shamed a fictional IT character he made up. . .Trump said, “I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK? You don’t know who broke in to DNC.”

I can see the fat but I can’t see the shaming. This was one of the more incoherent parts of Trump’s performance at the debate but shaming? Which part of the statement is supposed to be fat-shaming? The sitting on the bed part? The mentioning of 400 lbs? It’s just a number. It’s not shameful in itself.

It’s bizarre that this imaginary bed-sitter was even brought up but nobody is saying that Trump is shaming people sitting on beds in this comment. 

What really happens here is that the linked blogger finds the very existence of 400 lbs people so shameful that a simple mention of their existence sounds like an outrage to him. It’s a projection of the first order.

And by the way, being a hacker at this level takes brains. If anything, Trump’s  (admittedly cuckoo statement) is dispelling the old stereotype that extremely obese people are dumb. 

A two-year investigation into the tragedy of flight MH17 has concluded that the plane was downed by a missile that had been driven to the place it was launched from Russia. And after the plane was hit, it was returned to Russia. 

It looks like I was wrong when I said the Kremlin didn’t order the hit and had no knowledge it was being planned. It is now becoming clear that the missile was brought in specifically to hit an airplane. But MH17 wasn’t the airplane that the Kremlin wanted to get hit. 

There was another airplane there at that moment in time, and it passed MH17 shortly before the fatal missile was launched. It was a Russian airplane bringing vacationers home to Russia. It was supposed to be brought down to give Russia a casus belli, i.e. a justification for invading Ukraine openly. 

Since the report came out, the Kremlin has been in a state of huge panic. Of course, they blame Americans.

Folks, since you all were so helpful in the process of writing the book, help me decide the following issue. 

Should I include a chapter on theater as one of the reviewers recommends  (but doesn’t insist)? I have very little time to introduce all of the required changes. Should I make time for a whole new chapter?

Another annoying thing is the need to get copyright permissions for the use of quotes. This is a scholarly book. I will get no profit from it. It is written in English, so it will bring the names of Spanish writers whim nobody in the English-speaking world even knows about to the attention of a few American scholars. That’s all it will do. Why should there even be the issue of copyright restrictions?

The publishers want me to translate all of the quotes. And one of my chapters is on poetry. This is all poetry that was written yesterday, so no official translations exist. 

I so don’t see myself as a translator of poetry. Sheesh.

Israel’s president Reuven Rivlin came to Ukraine to give a speech to the Ukrainian parliament. He decided that it would be a good idea to blame Ukrainians for the Holocaust and repeat the most egregious lies about Ukrainians during WWII that had been invented by Soviet propagandists.

Of course, there were Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis. Just like there were French, Russian, Dutch, Polish, etc. collaborators. There is absolutely zero reason to believe that there were more Ukrainian collaborators than any others. What is well-known, however, is that Ukraine sacrificed an enormous lot to defeat Nazism.

This is not just about history. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 under the pretext of protecting the people of Ukraine from hordes of Ukrainian neo-Nazis that was supposedly roaming the streets, killing everybody who spoke Russian. Since then, it has become clear that these are lies. Ukraine’s far-right party got less than 1% of vote in the the national elections. Ukrainian Muslims and Jews are very supportive of the current government and of the Revolution.

Ukraine is still at war with Russia, and this is the precise moment that Rivlin chooses to resuscitate the old Soviet myths about “anti-semitic Ukrainians.” This is both offensive and dangerous, especially since it is done in the context of everything that is going on.

I wonder why this piece of stupid loser doesn’t go to Russia to ask the Russian parliament about the neo-Nazi conferences Putin keeps hosting that attract Nazis from all over the world and about the huge sums of money that Russia invests today to sponsor far-right politicians in Europe and the US.

People who really annoy me are pro-Trumpian Ukrainian patriots. I just found one such idiot online. His argument goes as follows:

Yes, Trump keeps saying he likes Putin but the moment he sees how mendacious and evil Putin is, he will change his mind!

Because Trump has demonstrated an amazing capacity to analyze facts and acknowledge his mistakes. Not.

Hillary is a globalist. She supports the erasure of national borders. And that means she will support the erasure of the borders between Russia and Ukraine. 

Yes, it’s totally Hillary’s fault that in 25 years of independence Ukrainians have not managed to establish a functioning border with Russia. She’s been working on erasing that border her entire adult life, at the very same time as she’s been trying to destroy ISIS for the past 50 years. 

Pathetic, that’s what this is. 

What I don’t get is if there is an enormous border that is being crossed illegally by crowds of people all the time, then what is the purpose of wasting money and resources on hassling graduate students or visiting professors whose visas will expire in the near future? The visas haven’t expired yet, the people broke no laws. Why seek them out and intimidate them? Especially if they come from a country that entitles them to stay here indefinitely as tourists without any visa?

Both N and I experienced this kind of thing- for no reason since neither he nor I never spent a minute in this country illegally and never got as much as a parking ticket – and now somebody I know is undergoing the same thing. 

What’s interesting is that Trump didn’t go after Hillary nearly as hard as he had gone after all of his Republican opponents in the primary. This is not the same Trump we saw in the primary.