I thought this vile, stupid Pope could not possibly be any more disgusting, but oh yes, he can. He’s going to Cuba to meet the corrupt KGB snitch and notorious gangster Goondiayev.

Goondiayev’s current assignment is to work as the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. Even in an organization as sensationally and shamelessly corrupt as ROC, Goondiayev stands out for his insane greed and debauchery. Goondiayev is close to Putin, approving and celebrating every atrocity his KGB colleague commits.

Nobody with a shred of decency would agree to appear in the same room with Goondiayev who’s known for mocking the Bible and making millions from tobacco and alcohol sales. Stupid Francis, however, wouldn’t know what decency looks like if it stared him in the face. He’s happy to flit to Cuba to kiss up to Goondiayev, Putin, and Castro because he doesn’t care about faith, the Bible or Jesus. All this piece of shit wants is to appear in the news and feel important.

Oy vey, why are Uber drivers so damn talkative? It’s like they’ve spent 20 years in solitary confinement and now want to get in all the chatter they’ve been deprived of. 

I love to talk but I only talk about profound subjects. Small talk makes my brain hurt. And today’s driver almost talked my ear off during the hour-long ride. Somebody totally needs to start a company where passengers can pay more to get silent drivers. Maybe a fine could be imposed per every word the driver says. 

What I miss from the old Blogger platform is that I could install the visitor tracking system and see where readers came from. It was really fascinating to see that whenever an angry post about Lloyd Blankfein was published, I’d get numerous hits from Goldman Sachs. (And then Google Ads would send me angry emails about alienating unnamed business partners. Good times.)

It was also fun to see hits from the FBI offices at Quantico, VA or all kinds of governmental organizations in Washington. WordPress doesn’t give me this opportunity, and I don’t even know if Rauner or somebody from his entourage has been reading my posts.

There were disturbing moments, as well. Somebody from the Nashville, Tennessee police department was obsessively entering into Google search the queries of “I hate Clarissa,” “fuck Clarissa” and “Clarissa is SO MEAN!!!”

In everything else, Blogger was vastly inferior to WordPress, and I’m not sorry I made the move.

What is happening in Ukraine is a metaphor for individual human existence. Ukrainians have defeated an overwhelmingly stronger and better prepared enemy and turned a deeply hostile public opinion in their favor. But the internal enemy of deep-seated corruption is proving a lot harder to defeat. Corruption exists inside oneself, and inner demons are always a lot harder to vanquish than any external enemy.

This is why people so often hide from the need to battle their inner demons behind rants about evil bosses, coworkers, neighbors, and all sorts of nasty oppressors.

I have very little hope that Maddow and Todd will come up with original questions and won’t force the candidates to repeat the same things we’ve already heard many times. Maybe they should have invited yesterday’s rabbi instead.

In any case, I can’t resist the temptation to watch!

20:08 – “a progressive is someone who makes progress” is a great slogan.

20:09 – telling Bernie he’s achieved nothing is rude and unfair. What’s with this moderator?

20:10 – it’s funny that it takes a 74 – year-old fellow to notice that times have changed and public education for all can no longer be limited to K-12. Knowledge has expanded, so public education for all should expand.

20:13 – I don’t think Obama and Biden ever claimed they were progressive. The label only came into vogue this year.

20:15 – words can’t explain how bored I am with hearing about Bernie’s votes on guns. Enough already! He explained it many times.

20:21 – Obama is becoming the Democratic oracle. Everybody will now claim special closeness to him and invoke his name as a talisman. The guy is still young but he’s getting consecrated in front of our eyes.

20:25 – Hillary’s on a tear tonight. I like it. We need anger, we need passion.

20:28 – 1990s??? What do 1990s have to do with Hillary who was unemployed at that time?

20:33 – this is unexpectedly lively. I’m glad I didn’t skip it.

20:43 – when they start on Wall Street, I fall asleep. It’s empty chatter with no meaning.

20:45 – Hillary should take the debate from Bernie’s economy turf to her “everything else under the Sun” turf. Hillary, talk about feminism! Parental leave! Abortion rights! Foreign policy!

20:46 – it’s ridiculous to ask Hillary to give up her texts for free when nobody else is being asked to compromise their livelihood in this way. Absolutely ridiculous.

20:51 – Maddow ‘ s question to Bernie is ridiculous. The idea that companies will not work with him because of a few speeches he made is bizarre.

21:02 – my heart bleeds for poor Bernie whenever he is forced to talk about foreign policy.

21:04 – Bernie’s foreign policy (“we cannot be the policeman of the world”) is verbatim what Jeb’s is.

21:10 – let’s not bring Cuba into this as some great achievement. There is no achievement here. A deal with the devil had to be made to thwart Putin. That’s nothing to celebrate.

21:13 – Crimea is Ukraine, Senator. These are not separate entities.

21:14 – Hillary’s answer on Russia is gladdening my heart. It’s not for nothing that Putin detests her. Why the fuck did the stupid moderators interrupt her?? This was going very well.

21:24 – Bernie is very gracefully dismissing the stupid hype around the Iowa caucus.

21:25 – in 1964??? Seriously? Why not ask Bernie about his experiences in the Napoleonic wars? That would be as relevant but more fun.

21:32 – yes! We do know that the goddamn emails are a fucking absurdity.

21:34 – Maddow asks Bernie the most absurd questions ever. A couple of people messed up. That doesn’t amount to “losing control.”

21:36 – Hillary can be gracious, too. If she tries really hard.

21:43 – finally, a question on Flint! I was growing desperate. Yes, Snyder has to resign. He is a national disgrace. He’s worse than Rauner, and that’s saying a lot!

♤♡◇♧♤♡◇♧♤♡◇♧♤♡◇♧

CONCLUSION: A great debate. I knew that when the dead weight of O’Malley were shed, the debate would go much more smoothly.

Both candidates are energized, passionate, and worth listening to. Both did great. Nobody disappointed. The inanity of the moderators did not stop the candidates from saying what they needed.

We all won tonight.

Today, I received publishing agreement forms to sign from 3 different places where my articles were accepted. Obviously, this doesn’t occur every week or every month, but it’s really cool that so much is happening for me professionally. My career is really taking off. I’m proud because this did not come easily to me. I had to wage a great battle with my own limitations. 

P.S. Please don’t feel compelled to write “Congratulations!” on each such post. I’m planning to have a great number of professional successes and I don’t want people to tire themselves out with constant acknowledgments.

94% of Germans support accepting refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and a host of other countries. 76% of supporters of the anti-immigrant AfD party are in favor of this as well.
75% of Germans want even more refugees than that and favor offering asylum to those facing religious or political persecution.

This is what the German people want, it’s their country, and the choice is theirs. Let’s drop the silly belief that Big Mamma Merkel is forcing poor Germans into something they don’t want. Merkel is simply responding to an overwhelming wish of the people. Germany is a democracy, she can’t argue with a 94% demand.

That the current situational implementation of the refugee policies is not making all Germans happy does not change their enormous support for refugee acceptance itself.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton struggled Wednesday night to answer a question about why she took more than $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in one year.

“Well, I don’t know. That’s what they offered,” she said…

Anybody who watched the townhall yesterday knows that Hillary didn’t “struggle” with the idiotic, sexist question. She dismissed it with a joke because she’s by now used to decades of sexist moralizing about women’s “rightful role” in society. It’s truly admirable that she can be so gracious about this endless badgering. (The quote is from MSNBC that is shamelessly shilling for Bernie and if you go to the original source, you’ll see that the stupid fuckers accompanied the lying piece with a photo where Hillary looks confused and about a hundred years old.)

The most disappointing thing is that I found this ridiculous quote gleefully reposted by a female academic. One would expect a professional, intelligent woman to be a but more aware of the realities of sexism, but no such luck. Well, I shouldn’t be surprised, given that the academic in question once wrote a disgusting, vicious libel about my university. You all know the kind of work we do and the student population we serve and can imagine what kind of a superficial, snobby person would want to spit on us from her ivory tower.

Please contrast all this infantile mud-slinging with my invariably respectful yet not obsequious coverage of both Bernie and Hillary.

In the wake of the Paris attacks, the Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio declared that the reason ISIS targets the West is “because we have freedom of speech, because we have diversity in our religious beliefs … because we’re a tolerant society.” Yet only weeks earlier, ISIS had downed a Russian airliner over the Sinai, thus targeting the distinctly intolerant regime of Vladimir Putin.

Lord Jesus, but people are stupid. Putin’s regime surely looks intolerant to an American but how intolerant does it look to members of ISIS? Has anybody seen Russian women? They are very much unburqaed, to put it mildly. Russia is a deeply atheist society with extremely loose morals and social permissiveness of rare proportions.

The whole story with the Russian airplane that crashed over Sinai is fishy in the extreme, and the rumors of Russia’s dislike of ISIS are quite baseless. Up to the quoted part, the article was making an interesting argument and I was following it with curiosity. But if an author is capable of this kind of blooper, he can’t be trusted to say anything very valuable.

The most crucial part of writing about foreign affairs is to accept that people, countries, cultures, civilizations are different and deserve to be understood on their own terms and approached in all their complex richness.