Note that Spain is, as usual, excluded:

A great interview about Europe with George Soros: the future of the EU, Merkel, refugees, Ukraine, Greece, Russia. I especially like the part about Ukraine and Obama’s mistakes in handling Russia.

Paul Krugman’s brilliant article on Bernie Sanders: “The Sanders health plan looks a little bit like a standard Republican tax-cut plan, which relies on fantasies about huge supply-side effects to make the numbers supposedly add up.” It’s true, people. Let’s look at reality: everywhere on the planet where the social programs Bernie advocates exist, the middle-class is taxed at at least 3 times the rate it’s taxed in the US. Let’s debate whether that reality is acceptable to us but let’s not close our eyes and indulge in weird fantasies.

On the subject of Bernie Sanders I feel excluded and marginalized when I discover that everybody but me has Bernie supporters attacking and harassing them. Bernie is so anti-intersectional that he is not even noticing how much he contributed to my exclusion.

Contrary to what many people believe, consumerists’ most orgasmic moments do not occur when they buy. They occur when consumerists toss stuff away. They have special terminology and share gushy accounts of their erotic adventures in tossing. There is a new technique called “Konbari-ing”, for instance.

Breastfeeding fanaticism has gone so far that the crazies are telling women without breasts to lactate through their armpits.

In France, life expectancy has also dropped for the first time in decades.

In a complete bastardization of feminism, people are now blaming their shitty sexual scenarios on patriarchy. The word “pathetic” doesn’t even begin to describe what these people are.

As we all know, I’m completely in support of the idea of reparations to African-Americans. But yesterday’s article by Ta-Nehisi Coates on this subject is fully deranged. The time on reparations is running out, and here the most valuable proponent decides to go all nutso and sabotage the issue.

There is now a huge scandal over allegations that a Russian-speaking 13-year-old girl was gang raped in Berlin by 3 “men with Southern appearance.”

The allegations are being reported by the Russian media, known by their tendency to engage in disgusting, vicious lies.

The allegations are being denied by German police, known by its tendency to downplay crimes against women and crimes committed by migrants.

Putinoids are salivating over the story in disgusting ways. Anti-Putinoids are salivating over the possibility that the story is fake in equally disgusting ways. The actual experience of the actual girl is of as little interest to anybody as women’s rights in Germany or elsewhere.

OK, remember the story about the plummeting life expectancy among middle-aged white people? Turns out, life expectancy is not plummeting for all middle-aged white people. It is plummeting specifically for women. And not all women, either, but women in the US South and, to a lesser extent, in the Midwest.

Here is a link.

We all know I’m not very sociable, but being forced into socialization by Uber is not all bad. People are strange and weird creatures, and it’s good to be reminded of the great human variety out there.

Today’s driver, Terry, has always hated Obama. Everything about Obama goes against the grain with him, all of Obama’s policies suck, Obama destroyed the economy and caused 270 Walmarts to close.

However, Terry is so happy about the lifting of sanctions against Iran that he is “almost beginning to wonder if Obama is not that bad.” For no particular reason, Terry has been reading up on Iran for years and really feels for Iranis. So now he’s celebrating the lifting of the sanctions.

Another day, another Uber. Today’s driver tells me that it’s going to snow hard today. My weather app disagrees but the driver is adamant. He’s lived here his entire life and knows the signs of approaching snow.

After the driver put several of his friends on the loudspeaker to tell me it will snow, I had to believe them.

So it’s a war of apps today, Uber vs Weatherbug.

In the context of Harvard admissions and whether they should be free, there are always muted references to “Asian students” and unspecified problems they are causing. For those who don’t know, I want to explain what the main issue here is.

“Asian students” is a way of saying “Chinese students.” Students from China often arrive with perfect SAT, TOEFL and GRE scores that turn out to be completely fake. I know of quite a few cases (including in Ivy League schools) where students from China arrive at a grad program in English lit with a perfect GRE score, and it turns out that the students literally don’t speak a word of English.

There is an even greater problem with letters of reference and transcripts from China. There is a lot of corruption going on in the country, and since China is so enormous, there’s no way of controlling what’s happening. That’s the reason colleges balk at admitting students from China.

There is some really idiotic myth that Chinese students are discriminated against because they are too smart and will outshine American students but it’s just a silly story. In reality, there is hardly a program in this country that hasn’t had any experience with falsified documents from China.

It totally sucks that good, honest Chinese students are suffering as a result of this issue but when you have one situation like this after another, I literally don’t know what else a department is to do.

The suggestion of some of Harvard’s trustees to stop charging tuition is great. Right now, over 70% of undergraduate students at the school come from extremely wealthy families. And it’s been demonstrated time and again that students do not benefit from being surrounded by people who are exactly like them all of the time. Besides, it’s not like Harvard or Yale need the tuition money.

The only problem I’m seeing is that it will be very hard to select among the applicants. Everybody who applies has the perfect GPA and a bunch of super impressive extracurriculars. It would suck if applicants are pushed towards (even more) gimmicky application letters to stand out.

A delegation of Marine Le Pen’s lackeys traveled to Moscow and then to the occupied Donbass region of Ukraine. Le Pen’s people are to play the role of “international experts” who, supposedly, have carefully studied the situation in the region and arrived at the conclusion that Ukraine is to blame and Putin is a hero.

Obviously, the “independent reports” created by these “experts” were printed out in the Kremlin, so the National Front apparatchiks didn’t need to stay in Donbass for long. After a short overnight visit, they went back home to keep pushing the public opinion in France in the direction of a greater support for Putin.

There is reason to believe that Putin is planning to use his German patsies on a similar assignment. Yes, these methods do seem crass and heavy-handed but most people don’t trace information to its source. They will vaguely hear that something bad about Ukraine was revealed by independent French and German experts and will never think to ask who these experts are and what interests they serve.

You know what’s really creepy?

People have started to use Trump to say things they feel uncomfortable saying in the first person. The way this new genre works is this:

A person wants to say something mean about, say, New Zealanders. “Of course, Trump hasn’t said anything mean about New Zealanders yet,” this person writes, “but if he did, here is what it would sound like.” And a string of insults to New Zealanders follows.

It’s totally weird but it keeps happening. Here is one bizarre example.