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.

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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.

And in another cheery bit of news, the Russian Orthodox Church is lobbying against the introduction of laws that will penalize domestic violence and for a ban on the very expression “domestic violence.” The Church insists that the state should not get involved in anything that is happening in a family because “family is sacred.”

Russia’s highest official in charge of the rights of children agrees:

“Constant excessive use of the term ‘domestic violence’ is a way of brainwashing, turning into zombies, intimidating families and parents,” Astakhov wrote on his Instagram page this spring. “The family is the safest place. A lot more crimes are committed in public places, on transport and in stores. Let’s treat the family with care.”

More than 14,000 women are murdered each year in Russia by their husbands and boyfriends. Over 600,000 women experience domestic abuse on a permanent basis.

Statistics on the incidence of child abuse are not routinely collected in Russia. It’s known, however, that 30% of children hospitalized as a result of domestic violence are infants under the age of one. At least 2 million children are subjected to physical and sexual abuse by their families.

All attempts to facilitate the prosecution of domestic violence crimes are angrily denounced by the Russian Orthodox Church. Only 2% of Russians practice the religion, yet the Church is extremely powerful because it services Putin’s agenda in return for enormous profits it is allowed to derive from selling tobacco, alcohol, and real estate.

The Church has collaborated eagerly and actively with Russia’s police state since the Stalin era, so it didn’t even have to adjust when former KGB agent named Putin came to power. The leaders of ROC are known for their outlandishly lavish lifestyles and ostentatious love of luxury.

Russia, in the meanwhile, is celebrating Europe’s mounting difficulties and is doing everything to make them even worse. Putin is funding most of the neo-Nazi parties of Europe as well as useful idiots like Corbyn. For Putin, there’s no difference between Farage and Corbyn, since both aim to weaken the EU and the NATO. And the weak EU and NATO automatically strengthen Putin.

Everybody is stuck on the events in Cologne, but since then there’s been a wave of sexual assaults on women and girls of all ages all over Germany.

As usual, female bodies, become a site where political and ideological battles are played out.

The second New Year’s began with a series of minor domestic disasters.

The moment N started carving the turkey, the plate cracked and the stuffing (that’s quite mushy because it consists of alcohol-drenched currants) started spilling all over the table.

At that very moment, the chimney started – for no reason whatsoever – to send clouds of smoke into the house. Fire alarms on all 3 floors started blaring.

N rushed to save the turkey. I rushed to open the door to let the smoke out.

And, of course, at that moment I slipped and fell flat on my back.

And, of course, N freaked out, dropped the turkey and rushed to pick me up.

Ultimately, I’m fine, the chimney came to its senses, the turkey was salvaged (and turned out to taste sensationally good) but it took us about an hour to straighten everything out and get on with the dinner.

As a result, there are no pictures. Maybe we’ll have to do a third New Year’s that will be a little less eventful.

So remember this blogger whose personal life we followed? New year, new guy, and what do you think? Three minutes into the relationship, she’s going out of her way to be useful to the fellow, cooking, cleaning, babysitting, acting some sort of a bizarre 1950s wife fantasy. Of course, the fellow is creeped out and withdraws.

People who don’t value themselves are of little value to others. But a person who is not capable of self-awareness will never even try to figure out why everybody keeps running away. She’ll hide from the truth behind inanity. “Dating is difficult. Relationships are hard work. That’s the way things are.” And it’s not about education or intelligence. This poor woman described her interactions with her family, and it became crystal clear why she is so beaten down and lacking in self-awareness.

This is all very sad. But even though she’s not helping herself, she can help others who will see these patterns and decide to stop being self-destructive.