At this very moment  (and for the next 3 days) my aunt, a refugee from the Donbass war zone, is undergoing such outlandish, ridiculous security checks in Canada that one wonders what kind of a freak invented them. This is only one stage in her endless bureaucratic struggle.

Strangely, no Prime Minister came out to hug her, no mayor crawled around her on his knees, and no phone cards or SINs were delivered.

My aunt, by the way, is not asking the Canadian government for a dime and is entirely self-reliant financially. Which, I’m guessing, is precisely the reason nobody in Canada is happy to see her.

Sarah Palin loves the Le Pen family. The Le Pen family is sponsored by Putin. Let’s make a small intellectual effort and guess which party Putin wants to win the US elections.

Unsurprisingly, Putin’s #1 candidate (after Jeb became an impossibility) is Trump. Not only are they ideologically close but also very similar on the level of personality. For instance, both are half-heartedly faking religiosity. Both are into outrageous consumerism. Both love the cameras. Both present a public persona based on vulgarity and incitement of ethnic hatred.

The following statement Trump made about Ted Cruz is 100% true:

“The way he’s dealt with the Senate — where he goes in frankly like a bit of a maniac — you never get things done that way,” Trump said on “Fox News Sunday.” “You can’t walk into the Senate and scream and call people liars and not be able to cajole and get along with people. He’ll never get anything done. That’s the problem with Ted.” 

People say that Cruz is faking the crazy but he’s being way too convincing doing it. The guy looks outright unhinged. Plus, he is a religious fanatic, and that makes him even worse than Trump.

As I said from the start of this campaign, Republicans simply don’t have a candidate. There is nobody in that overcrowded field who could represent the party with dignity and decorum while looking attractive to the base.

One of the best ways to discredit extremist movements is to make them look ridiculous, so that joining or backing them is seen as stupid, uncool, or embarrassing.

Is that an adult person with a functioning brain writing? “Uncool”? People join extremist organizations, murder, blow up, rape and torture because nobody informed them that it was “uncool” to do that?

Of course, a crowd of infantile 50-year-olds is busily reposting this bit of air-headed idiocy. And hey, that’s the most intelligent bit of the article I quoted. The rest is even dumber.

So let’s imagine an infant called Xi who is born in China and spends the first 6 months of his life there, surrounded, obviously, by speakers of Chinese.

At the age of 6 months, Xi is adopted by a French couple and removed to France where he grows up as a monolingual French speaker with nobody speaking Chinese around him.

But here’s one crucial thing:  Xi’s brain will still function as that of a Chinese speaker even though he will not remember a single word of Chinese. In order to speak French – his only language – he will be accessing secondary functions of his brain.

People tend to equate memory with impact and find it hard to understand why the events of infancy and early childhood have such an enormous significance for who they are. It’s precisely before the age of 3, however, that the brain’s extreme plasticity makes it receptive to the environment in a way it will never be again.

This is especially crucial for immigrants to keep in mind. Children of immigrants born in the new country will obviously speak the language of the new country as their native tongue. However, if they are exposed to their parents’ language in infancy, their brain will never be fully set up to process the language of the new country.

What does this mean? That immigrants must expose the child to the language of the new country from birth and, ideally, before birth.

Here is the actual study.

47 percent

Percentage of Americans who are “somewhat worried” or “very worried” that they or someone in their family could be the victim of terrorism. That number was 33 percent in 2014.

Seriously? I hope it’s just a pose because if people are serious about this, I’m scared for their mental health.

The mayor of Montréal is helping a Syrian boy put on boots:

I wonder if self-flagellation is next on the menu because I’d love to see Monsieur Coderre do that.

Marine Le Pen lost the election! This is great news not just for France but for Ukraine and a massive defeat for Le Pen’s sponsor Putin.

In case anybody is completely oblivious to European politics, Putin champions all of the far right, nationalistic, anti-EU parties of Europe. He passionately wants the EU to collapse and doesn’t begrudge any money to the European parties that advance this goal.

I decided to take a break from work on a rainy Sunday afternoon to read the new issue of the New York Times Magazine. And what do you think I found?

The stupid smug face of the useless rich Papa’s boy Justin Trudeau. There is no escaping from this fellow.

Since being sworn in 15 seconds ago, Trudeau has already managed to turn his rich spoiled brattiness into the country’s issue #1. For two weeks, Canada has been debating whether it’s reasonable to use public funds to pay for the 2 (TWO!) nannies this wealthy man is employing. Apparently, expecting Trudeau to pay for his own damn nannies is way too much to ask. In the meanwhile, the same Trudeau is taking away the childcare subsidies of the working middle class.

From the Nanny State to state nannies for the fortunate few, this is the journey that Canada is traveling with Trudeau whose political philosophy rests on creating as many divisions, antagonisms, and resentments among Canadians as possible.

It’s like Canadians are playing a cruel joke on the immigrants. First they welcome them into a kinder, gentler version of Canada where everybody is super stoked to see them, the Prime Minister rushes to embrace them, the helpful bureaucrats show up of their own free will to facilitate the paperwork acquisition, there are free pre-paid international phone cards, toys, clothes, beautifully appointed rest areas, etc. 

So the immigrants understandably think, “Ah, this is what Canada is like!”

But after Canadians decide that they’ve derived all the value they could from this new toy, they toss it and move on. And the immigrants get to emigrate for the second time. This time, they arrive in the real Canada, a capitalist society that is harsh, unforgiving, with a bureaucracy that is anything but helpful, locals who are not that welcoming or eager to have them there, and a realization that free cheese in this society can only be found in mousetraps.

And it’s like, “Ta-da! Gotcha, you fools! Did you really think that the fake Canada constructed for the sake of making the Prime Minister look good is real?”

One positive thing is that most refugees are not active on Canadian social media and don’t read the Canadian press so they have no exposure just yet to the avalanche of smug, self-congratulatory writing Canadians engage in on the subject of their arrival.