Few experiences are sadder than those of a Ukrainian who arrives at a Ukrainian food store located at an hour’s drive from her house and realizes that she left her wallet at home.

All this food – so near, yet so far away. Oh, the pain, oh, the cruel disappointment.

A Syrian refugee on the border between Slovenia and Austria says, “This is a war between Russia and the US. And we are the ones suffering. I lost 9 people from my family. This is wrong!”

Can we listen to the Syrian refugee instead of Kissinger, Carter, and every dumbass journalist who is chirping on the subject? Seriously, maybe it makes sense to hire a Syrian to write about Syria, a Ukrainian to write about Ukraine, etc. Otherwise, we get the kind of narcissistic, self-centered, projection – ridden analysis that keeps driving this country’s foreign policy into the ground.

Products that have been salted, cured, or otherwise processed to enhance flavor are “carcinogenic to humans,” the Paris-based International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) found in its report, published in the Lancet Oncology. That puts processed meat in the Group 1 carcinogenic category alongside substances like tobacco, alcohol, and plutonium. And non-processed fresh meats like beef, pork, and lamb, among others, are “probably carcinogenic to humans,” the agency said.

The solution seems to be either to stop eating altogether or to just inject some polonium and be done with the whole thing already.

I’m trying to come up with things that are still OK to eat, and for now my list has one item: lettuce. Everything else will cause immediate painful death, it seems.

We also know that the main criticism against Hillary is that her positions change with the polls, and that she is not a person of substance. I do not agree with that completely, but I would be lying if I did not admit that it was reason for concern.

People are freaks. This is the best thing about Hillary, and they are whining about it. 

The last thing a politician needs to have is opinions of her or his own. A politician’s job is to promote the voters’ beliefs. The job description doesn’t involve foisting one’s own substance on the people whose interests you are supposed to represent. If you go into politics, remove all of your substance and fill the resulting void with the wishes of the voters. 

Do those who moan about Hillary’s willingness to change her opinions in order to please the voters prefer politicians who know that an overwhelming majority of Americans don’t want the government to shut down, do want stricter gun regulations, do want abortion rights, and do want higher taxes for the very rich, yet advocate for the exact opposite because of their stupid, redundant, and needless principles? 

I mean, if I support a politician, s/he better stick all those personal preferences up his or her anal cavity and represent me. Because that’s the whole point of representative democracy. 

I’m very glad I read The Story of a New Name, the second book in the writer’s Neapolitan tetralogy. I wasn’t that much into the first book in the series but that was because I’ve read too many Bildungsromane and am now allergic to the genre. Besides, these novels are supposed to be read as one big work of literature and not 4 separate books. So I take it all back, the books are great, they deserve to be read immediately.

People, seriously, you all need to go read these books right now because they are the literary sensation of the decade. Ferrante is constantly compared to Jane Austen but these writers couldn’t be more different. Ferrante’s protagonists, Elena and Lila, are trying to escape the degradation, the poverty, the intellectual stupor, the beatings, the sexual violence of their miserable neighborhood in Naples. These are – FINALLY!!! – female protagonists who are complex, profound human beings and not whining princesses in search for a substitute Daddy who will adopt them and protect them from existing.

I can’t remember when was the last time I found an interesting female protagonist, and here you have two! And they are different! Go read the novels! This is real world, real people, real situations, and not some sci-fi fantasy fairy-tale about superpowers and magic kingdoms.

When I was in the last two grades of high school, we didn’t have separate changing rooms for boys and girls for PT. The weird thing is that when we were 11-12, we did have separate rooms. But when we arrived at ages 16-17, separate changing rooms were no longer necessary. None of the adults found anything strange in the situation. Poor boys suffered terribly while the girls made sure the suffering was as intense as possible.

This was right after the collapse of the USSR but all the Soviet structures were still in place. (They mostly are even now, although I have no idea if the changing room situation is any different.)

Today’s article on Syria in the NYTIMES  by Jimmy Carter is as vacuous as the one published by Kissinger last week.

It is starting to become clear why the 1970s were such a fiasco in terms of foreign policy.

One of these state requirements that is not entirely useless is the mandatory affirmative consent training. (Once again, we do not mandate anything. It’s a state thing. The student registration system shuts down and doesn’t let students register for any courses next semester until they do the online training. Professors have zero control over this process.)

I’ve looked at the mandatory consent training, and it seems pretty innocuous. To me, everything it teaches one about sex is extremely basic. But given the low sexual literacy among the young people, I’m sure much of the training can be quite a revelation to some of the students.

Of course, the whole issue of a university being charged with supervising students’ sex lives is pretty icky. Besides, one has got to wonder how the young people who don’t go to college fit into this picture. Should they and the college students never have any sexual encounters with each other? This is all very weird. But at least this particular state requirement might have some useful effects.

Every day I get up to 40 emails from different bureaucratic branches of my university that I delete without reading. Everybody I know in academia has the same experience. When I think about the enormous wasted work of all these people who keep creating and sending out flyers, brochures, notifications, lists, queries, quizzes, projects, plans, announcements, etc. that nobody even opens, let alone uses, I feel sad.

Obviously, the university doesn’t create these ridiculous bureaucratic departments because it’s fun to have them around. We are simply following the endless and endlessly stupid requirements of the federal and state regulators. That’s the same state, by the way, that hasn’t given us a broken dime worth of funding for a quite a while and is actually stealing the money we pay into our insurance program. We get to slash every academic program on campus to pay for the exploding cast of bureaucrats, their secretaries, and the secretaries of their secretaries.

The names of the offices that send out this useless stream of paperwork are very telling. Office for Promotion of Multiculturalism, Office for Diversity and Inclusion, Rape and Sexual Assault Prevention Office, Career Advancement Center, Spirituality Center, etc. It’s like a really crazy game we are all playing where we try to create the image of ourselves as multicultured, inclusive, spiritual, advanced, and diverse, as if that were something you become by creating reams of paperwork repeating the words “diversity,” “culture” and “spirituality.”

The Prime Minister of Ukraine has announced that 42% of the management of the country’s equivalent of the INS will be fired. In Ukraine, this organization mostly occupies itself with the customs control of imports and exports. It is known to be incredibly corrupt, making it next to impossible to conduct honest business in Ukraine.

The same number of high-ranking officials in control of the Ukrainian IRS will be fired as well.

Gosh, if this had been done back in the 1990s or early 2000s, Ukraine would be a peach of a country by now.