Every once in a while, I visitor to this blog throws a tantrum and says, “You banned me from the blog! You deleted my comment! You don’t respect my free speech rights!”

Such people are idiots.

Free speech protections exist to prevent the government from persecuting you for your speech acts. They DO NOT, however, promise to force people to hear your speech. If people refuse to hear you out, that’s their right. Nobody is guaranteed an audience. Nobody should be forced to listen.

Free speech protections do not guarantee anybody a busload of willing listeners. If you decide not to read my blog, I will not have the recourse to chase you around and whine about how you infringe on my free speech by choosing not to listen to it.

This is why mentioning free speech in the context of protests at Yale and Mizzou is idiotic. Students are not a governmental agency. They are not vested with the power to guarantee anybody’s free speech rights. In their capacity of private citizens, they are not obligated to listen to anybody they don’t want to. If students don’t want to hear what the Master of their college or his wife have to say to them, then they are absolutely entitled not to listen. Just like you are entitled not to finish reading my post. And just like I’m entitled not to read your comment if you choose to leave it.

I believe that students at Yale are acting like obnoxious little brats. It’s my right to think that. And it’s their right to keep being bratty. When students ban speakers from their campus or shout down an administrator, that’s idiotic, ridiculous behavior that makes me cringe. It is not, however, an assault on free speech simply because there is a bizillion and one other venues where this speaker or administrator can express everything that this particular audience refused to hear.

After the recent Holocaust – related debacles on the blog, I decided to refresh my own knowledge of the Holocaust and realized I didn’t know as much as I thought I did.

Did you know, for instance, that Hitler tried to attract Poland as its ally in a prospective war against the USSR but the Poles were very dedicated to the plan of creating a Jewish state in the territories that had been mandated to the British Empire by the League of Nations in Palestine? So Hitler and the Poles ended up being at odds, and Hitler allied himself temporarily with the USSR against Poland.

And now a question for everybody. What is it that Hitler had against Jews? What sin did he impute to them? And please don’t say world domination because that’s no answer at all. Hitler had nothing against world domination itself. It’s only the supposed Jewish world domination that bugged him. So what were Jews doing that bugged him so much?

From an article in the NYTIMES, I gathered that some naive folks actually expected somebody in Russia to give a damn about the so-called doping scandal. That, of course, didn’t happen.

Russian – speaking people are extremely jaded about things like lying, cheating, stealing, sexual violence, domestic violence, corruption, bribery. None of these acts are considered to be a big deal. Ukrainians are now painfully and slowly trying to extricate themselves from this way of thinking. Russians are yet to see anything wrong with it.

This is all a legacy of the Soviet Union, of course. There, the greatest sin was not having enough money or consumer goods. This bleak, soulless materialism was only reinforced during the bandit wars of the 1990s. Morality could only stand in the way of personal enrichment, so there was no space for it.

In Russia’s war with Ukraine, we have seen mothers and wives (fathers are always absent either physically or in any way that matters) agree to pretend that their sons and husbands never existed for either a payout or a promise of one. More recently we’ve seen complete indifference in Russia to the crash of a Russian plane in Egypt. We’ve seen so many horrible things, and now we are to believe that somebody is going to have anything to say about a sports doping scandal?

The biggest reaction to the scandal will be a flaccid condemnation of the evil West for, once again, scheming against Russia, and that will be it. Once again, Russia will descend into a soporific admiration of its own uncontested greatness.

On the subject of getting rich, I always wanted to become so rich that I’d be able to buy any book that struck my fancy, even a hardcover. Now I can do that but the problem is that I don’t have the time to read all the books I can afford to buy.

At this stage of working on my book, there is a lot more cutting than writing. It’s sad to have to cut but it’s also a good sign. It means that the end is in sight.

As we saw yesterday, candidates for the highest political office in the country prefer to get really easy, boring questions that pose no challenge to them and get very traumatized when moderators do anything but coddle and humor them.

Now, please remember that those whiny students at Yale are children of this same class. Is it surprising that they are just as fragile and want the university to be their “safe space” instead of an intellectual environment?

I’m shocked with what I’m about to say because I detest this fellow but the most presentable, consistent and composed person at the debate today was Ted Cruz.

Everybody else came off as “a sprinter and not a marathoner”, which is shaping up to be the theme of this electoral cycle. Fiorina lost the most endearing characteristics which were her self-control and unflappability and started looking like a very nervous crow. Rubio was swallowing words, constantly misspeaking, and then lost it completely by the end. Trump’s sprint had ended back in September, so he was barely awake in this debate.

The moderators were the worst this time around. One had something wrong with his voice and looked very ill and not  altogether there. Another one looked like she had a seasonal pass to a plastic surgeon’s office. Questions were rambling and very boring. I guess, the candidates managed to terrify everybody into being completely anodyne.

And hey, did anybody understand why Christie was kicked out while Rand Paul was allowed to stay on? Christie, at least, had that popular drug addiction video. What does Paul have?

I was out for a walk, so I’m only watching the second part of the debate.

What I like in the Republican debates and what was absent in the Democratic debate is a detailed discussion of tax plans. It doesn’t mean I like these plans (Cruz, for instance, hates the Department of Commerce so much that he proposed to eliminate it twice in one sentence), but I like the existence of a detailed discussion of taxes. I like concreteness, and I hate vagueness.

Somebody has got to ask Bernie Sanders to which extent his admiration of Sweden stretches to its extremely high taxation of the middle class. And instead of vague, populist pronouncements about taxing hedge fund managers, I’d like to hear something that includes actual numbers.

P.S. Rubio is kicking Rand Paul’s ass on the taxes issue. It’s enjoyable to watch.

Hmm. . . Trump is opposed to the TPP. TPP must be a good thing.

P.P.S. Watching Carson talk about foreign policy is painful. His stated goal is “to make jihadis look like losers.” That poor fellow.

And Trump just informed the world that there are countries surrounding Ukraine that should be protecting it instead of the US. Which, as we know, is not protecting it at all. Somebody, please give Trump a map.

Rubio, at least, knows how to pronounce “Ukraine” correctly. Other candidates are still doing the obnoxious “the Ukraine.”

P.P.P.S. Fiorina gave an embarrassingly stupid speech on “how socialism starts.” Somebody, please give Fiorina a history textbook for toddlers.

By the end of the debate, Rubio grew tired, started giggling, fidgeting, and behaving in an unhinged way. He doesn’t seem very emotionally stable. Even Trump looks like a model of stability next to him, and that’s not a good thing.

So is anybody going to be watching the GOP debate #4 tonight or is everybody done with the debates?

I feel like I know all that the candidates will say but it’s still hard for me to stay away even though I have recorded several Law & Order episodes that I’ve never seen before.

Following political news is my compensatory mechanism, like alcohol, pot, gaming, or working out is for other people. When I was moving to the new house, I was do exhausted, for instance, that I read news articles obsessively for up to 6 hours a day.

Do you, folks, understand all the fuss around sexting?

“OMG, these photos will ruin the teenagers’ lives forever!”

The photos will only have an impact on their lives because prudes like these get crerpily excited over a bunch of boring amateur naked photos. Otherwise, their impact would be nil.

In Colorado, idiots want to arrest kids for sending out naked pictures of themselves. Apparently, being arrested will be very helpful in getting them to not have their lives ruined. Let’s save them from the devil of their own nakedness!