OK, people, wait, is it true that Obama said the following in his State of the Union speech:

Even as their economy contracts, Russia is pouring resources to prop up Ukraine and Syria — client states they see slipping away from their orbit.

Tell me it’s a lie. Because this is offensive in ways that are too disturbing. I know he is uninterested in foreign policy but this is a gaffe even George W. Bush wouldn’t make.

Why didn’t anybody tell me??

Yale Alumni Magazine tells me there is some sort of a foodie revolution on the way in New Haven. This is refreshing because when I was there, the place was very problematic in terms of food. There was barely anything but stupid pizza and endless Thai restaurants. And now there are Ethiopian food trucks and all kinds of good things there.

This is what happens to people who forget the old maxim, “Where you can nothing, you should want nothing.”

Putin has sent his emissary to Serbia to inform Serbs that if they continue getting closer to the EU, they will “bring a second Cologne on themselves.” Serbs reacted with disgust and outrage to this attempt at manipulation.

Even the most reasonable among the Republican candidates is a total weirdo:

Kasich, who has an iPad but not a smartphone and doesn’t use email, doesn’t seem to follow the headlines very closely: A couple of weeks ago, he told reporters he was unaware of the militia standoff in Oregon that was all over the news.

Even if it’s just a pose, it’s a pretty obnoxious one. Pretending not to use email has gone out of vogue back in 2001.

Since people seem to want to know more about post-war Germany, I’m happy to share.

Initially, Americans wanted to de-Nazify Germany and get the hell out. The American economy was booming like never before, and both voters and politicians wanted to enjoy the prosperity. Before retreating, Americans wanted to do something to make sure that Germans understood what they’d done and started facing the consequences.

Getting Germans to accept culpability for the crimes of Nazism was pretty much impossible, though. With very few exceptions, Germans saw themselves as victims and refused to listen to anything. They’d pout and sulk and feel more sorry for themselves than even the most bratty of Ivy League protesters today know how to do. Americans would, for instance, try to get Germans to learn about the Holocaust. With truly American straightforwardness, they would put on documentary footage about concentration camps and tell Germans that unless they saw the film, they wouldn’t get their ration-cards (which meant they wouldn’t get fed.) Germans would come to the movie theaters but the moment the film started, they’d turn away and simply refuse to look. Obviously, they knew everything but liked to pretend they didn’t.

The British were also trying to feed and de-Nazify in the areas they controlled. It was an enormous sacrifice for them because all of the food given to Germans was taken out of the mouths of the starving people at home. I feel nothing short of amazement when I think about the humanity and the humility of the British who wanted to share their food with Germans after everything Germans had done to them. For a while, however, things started to look as if both Germans and the British would starve to death because there was nothing left to rebuilt the demolished economies in both countries.

There was enormous anger against Germans and a great resistance to getting involved in rebuilding their country on the part of the US. However, the most stringent “let them all get what they so richly deserve” American officials got to change their minds when they saw the suffering Germans were experiencing. Soon enough, the notorious words of one of these officials (“you can shoot ’em, starve ’em, or feed ’em”) became the consensus and Americans reluctantly agreed to sink huge amounts of money into rebuilding Germany and, of course, the rest of Western Europe.

Rebuilding the German economy soon necessitated ending all attempts at de-Nazification, though. For instance, the moment after 333 mining engineers were fired from Ruhr coal mines for having been active in the Nazi party, horrible accidents began to happen. Nobody but these Nazis knew how to run the coal mines. So 331 of the Nazis had to be re-hired because the mines were crucial to rebuilding the economy. And the same thing kept happening in all areas of the economy.

It took Germans until late 1950s and early 1960s to start accepting culpability for Nazism. By that time, Americans had already given the Western part of Germany the gift of prosperity and booming economy. I’m very interested in what needs to happen for a nation to accept horrible things it has done and to begin dealing with guilt and responsibility. I’m obviously waiting for Russians to start facing their role in the history of humanity. It seems that, if Germany and Spain are any indication, I’ll be waiting for a very long time.

Come to think of it, there might be a reason why Germans have such an intense reaction to the word “refugees.” The biggest refugee crisis in human history took place in Germany in 1945-6. Fifteen million Germans were homeless + there were about 9 million displaced persons, and these 24,000,000 people were roaming the devastated country, starving and desperate.

As we all know, if Americans didn’t feel sorry for the pitiful Germans to the point of being willing to give up on de-Nazification and feed them, most of these people would have died.

This might be the memory that is lurking in the background of the current refugee situation in Europe.

This is the first Democratic debate that disappointed me. I understand we are getting close to the primaries but the populist sloganeering got too much for me. Nobody said anything insightful or unexpected. It was all empty slogans and silly yelling.

The debate ended early because candidates don’t seem to have much to say. The moderators were a disgrace. This was quite a fiasco. Maybe it’s just as well that nobody watched it (except me and reader Dreidel.)

I won’t be able to watch the whole thing but I need to see at least a portion to make sure that Hillary is all right and is still winning.

Please leave comments

20:13 – I’m getting very tired of people piling on Bernie about his gun control record. This is getting old and gratuitous.

20:17 – it’s good they are off the guns and on to racism. This is what the election should be about.

20:19 – Bernie is dreaming. He has no chance against Trump.

20:20 – the moderator sucks. He derails every interesting conversation and turns it to idiotic soundbites and Google searches.

20:23 – Bernie’s idea of involving the DoJ in all cases of anybody dying in police custody is absolutely deranged.

20:35 – O’Malley today looks like a couples therapist mediating a contentious marriage.

20:44 – whenever Bernie starts on the Congress being bought by Big Money and a handful of controlling billionaires and a political revolution and an uprising, I just begin to wilt because this is not a serious conversation. This is the kind of talk that excites pimply potheads.

20:52 – Bernie gets booed for mentioning speaking fees from Goldman Sachs. I support the booer.

20:53 – Hillary has taken the position of being Obama’s defender from Bernie. This is smart. Bernie is trying to stake out his own piece of the Obama halo.

20:55 – Bernie is asked about policy but he veers off into the personal time and again.

20:58 – are voters really so primitive that all this anti-Wall Street sloganeering is necessary?

21:01 – people! Democrats! Progressives! Stop bickering. Start running against Republicans already!

21:07 – what’s with the idiotic cartoon???

21:09 – Bernie is on and on about how everyone is owned by somebody. He’s like a woman who is convinced that all women but her are whores.

21:23 – oh, God, not the tired old canard about who supported the war in Iraq.

21:28 – Bernie will drive me nuts today. Who told him that Russia wants to destroy ISIS? Has he been following what’s happening at all?

21:29 – Russia “fomented war in Ukraine”? Who is this brain-dead moderator? What a stupid piece of deadwood.

21:30 – Hillary is quite disappointing on Putin, too. She had a very creepy reaction to the word “relationship.”

21:34 – Bernie can turn absolutely any question to his favorite issue of evil private companies. I can imagine dinnertime conversations at his house. “Honey, please pass the salt. Talking about salt, when I think of those evil private companies, it’s like pouring salt on my wounds.”

21:41 – O’Malley called Trump a fascist. That’s not OK. This is not a term to bandy around lightly.

21:42 – Bernie said something weird and unnecessary about the USSR. What was all that about? . . . And now he’s back on corrupt Wall Street. This is excruciating.

21:44 – the moderators are trashy and disgusting.

I have no idea when I’m actually hungry. As in the old joke where a woman tells her partner, “Honey, bad news: what we thought was orgasm turned out to be asthma,” I tend to confuse all kinds of things with hunger and vice versa.

I’m now using a machine to tell me when I actually want to eat and then connect the readings with the physical symptoms I experience, and every time it’s like “Ah, so that’s what it is!”

I never has any control over my eating schedule when I was growing up, and this is the result. All these ridiculous beliefs that in “proper” families everybody has got to sit at the table at the same time and eat the same things produce obese people with health problems.

The tradition originates from the times when the entire family would work in the same field and then come home at the same time and eat the same things for lack of options. Our reality has changed but we still cling to the same regimen even though people who spend the day on different schedules and with different expenditure of energy can’t be hungry at the same time. And what’s worse, once you break the habit of self-regulation, it’s crazy hard to restore it.

By the way, there have been experiments conducted since the hoary 1926 that if you give toddlers a choice, they will instinctively choose a nutrition regimen that will be perfect for their own individual needs. In the meanwhile, there are very few adults who have this sort of instinct.