Right now Hillary is marching in the NYC Pride Parade. It’s so beautiful I get goosebumps. The gay rights movement has achieved so much.

Forgot to mention that the same National Ombudsman for Children’s Rights is also known for his statement that women over the age of 27 are old and wrinkly, so it’s OK to allow retirement-age men to marry underage girls. ‘Cause God forbid a 60-year-old man should be forced to limit himself to those wrinkled 20-year-olds.

A horrible thing happened in Russia. Fourteen children drowned during a boat excursion in their summer camp. The country is so corrupt that the camp’s managers had sold places in the camp to many more kids than the camp could accommodate. As a result, several dozen children who didn’t get beds in the camp had to be kept in boats at all times. Until 14 of them drowned.

Of course, it took forever to get help to arrive and rescue drowning kids, and the children had to act heroically and desperately to save smaller kids.

The National Ombudsman for Children’s Rights came to visit the survivors. “I hear you had a nice swim,” he guffawed at the small, shivering, terrified kids who had just seen their friends die before their eyes.

The amount of casual daily cruelty in our former USSR countries is shocking. The Ombudsman for Children’s Rights who thinks it’s cute to mock survivors of a terrible tragedy is a fairly young man. He probably doesn’t even remember the USSR that well. But he is infected by its mentality of cruelty and hatred anyway.

I wouldn’t give much credence to the polls that  measure Trump’s support. We’ve seen time and again that these polls underestimate Trump’s following by a noticeable margin.

What happens is that people realize that voting for Trump is not a socially approved choice, so they are not too eager to disclose their preference for him. I’d disregard these polls completely. They only measure how many people feel like disclosing they’ll vote for Trump, and that information is useless.

Spain didn’t manage to elect a government on a first try and after 6 months of impotent bickering is holding a rematch. Voters are jaded and unenthusiastic.

Britain is considering a revote on its most recent referendum ten seconds after it happened. People voted without realizing their vote might have consequences.

The US presidential election resembles more a reality TV season than an actual election. An aging starlet happily chirps about voting in a way that would prove the most fun.

On a smaller scale, the state of Illinois elected a grifter who is so unaware of how to exercise his duties that the state has had no budget for a year and a half.

Representative democracy needs engaged citizens in order to function. Loners who press buttons and poke screens to create an illusion of being part of something can’t make it work.

Remain could have and should have won. There was no reason for it not to take those couple of percentage points that made all the difference. But the campaign was run in an idiotic way, denying the obvious, straining to insult everybody who was not 100% a remainer, and slipping into an off-putting self-righteousness. The result is a predictable loss at the polls.

Of course, the EU is kinder to those who embrace fluidity, be they from a poorer or a richer member of the union. Of course, it’s more cruel to those who stay put. Its whole point is to erode the nation-state and embrace fluidity. Denying that is deranged.

Of course, many intra-EU migrants come to the UK to enjoy its more robust welfare system. Denying that is also deranged. I only spent a week in the UK last summer and still managed to meet just such a migrant who gladly shared the strategy he and his friends use to benefit from the UK welfare. This is a fact of objective reality, and one can scream one’s head off, accusing everybody who notices it of being a racist, without achieving anything productive.

All of these hysterical outbursts (“You are a racist! You are a hateful bigot! You are murdering me by having opinions! Your support for Hillary means you want my relatives to die!”*) scare people away and lose elections and referendums. The only workable alternative is to accept that the opponent is as human as you are and try to find the kernel of truth and reason at the base of his or her opinions. Of course, there are irredeemable crazies and bigots, but they are not the entire 52% of those who voted Leave.

There is not a shadow of doubt in my mind that if Remainers had stopped vociferating “Racist! Xenophobe! Old fart!”, they could have turned the vote to their advantage. Let’s learn from this sad debacle and avoid it in our own election. Let’s give a wide birth to the “Every Hillary supporter is a murderer of my relatives” freaks**.

* These are all direct quotes. I invented nothing.

** It’s a very real online outburst I witnessed. And what’s really sad, not a single person told this freak to stuff it.

If you are trying to lose weight and hit one of those annoying plateaus where the weight doesn’t move in any direction for weeks, try visiting a massage therapist. Even just one or two massages can have a magical effect on your weight loss efforts.

I have no idea why this very inoffensive ad that gently satirizes Trump has been banned from American networks but apparently it has.

I also have a few friendly suggestions for my fellow foreigners that I hope to deliver at my multiculturalism seminar in October.

1. Please know that it is entirely unnecessary to inform the locals every single day about how much more sophisticated and refined everything is where you come from. They’ve heard it many times before and nothing but politeness prevents them from asking you why you are still here, in the place you consider the land of unrefined and low-cultured yokels.

2. Venting your grievances against the foreign policy of the United States with every American in sight is not a good idea either. A Midwestern college professor is unlikely to tell you anything about said policy that would put your mind at ease.

3. If you are desperate to introduce locals to your national cuisine, ask them over and cook for them. But interrupting every meal with lectures on how this is not even real Chinese / Mexican / Ukrainian, etc food is deeply obnoxious. Oh, and please remember that every foreigner’s quest to buy the correct ingredients to make food just like back home is of interest to no one.

4. Just try it out. You can pout, vent, or feel hugely superior to everything you encounter here, or you can give it a try. At the very least, you’ll get a new experience out of it.

5. I’m guessing nobody begged you on bended knee to come over. So it’s up to you to learn the local customs and adapt. And if nobody is collapsing with joy at the news of your arrival, it’s their right.