Sorry for a long quote but this is literally the funniest thing I’ve read in a year:

“If you’ve never fucked a fat person, take a minute and ask yourself why. Is it that you truly find their bodies ugly? Are you afraid that fat stigma is going to rub off on you, that people will see you loving a fat person and think that means there’s something wrong with you? Are you fat and unhappy with your own body? Are you not-fat and unhappy with your own body? Has the media conditioned you to believe that sex with fat people is somehow more difficult and less enjoyable (spoiler: it’s not)? Or is it that you have fucked a fat person but insisted to yourself or to them that they’re not fat, instead of telling them what part of their fatness you consider sexy?”

Here is more. I hope the author was trying to be funny because nobody is really that dumb, are they?

The moment I heard Corbyn sigh about the good old times he wants to  bring back, I knew that in a fellow of his age this can only mean one thing. The good old times he misses are the ones when women stayed hidden from view and didn’t try to access power and resources or express opinions.

And it turns out I was right. Corbyn supports gender segregation as a way of “protecting” women and is enamored of Putin, Europe’s most woman – hating leader.

Left, schmeft, forget labels and look at substance.

Speaking at Saturday’s pro-refugee demonstration, Corbyn told the crowds: “Surely, our objective ought to be peaceful solutions to the problems of this world. To spend our resources on helping people not injuring people. “To try to bring back that world of decency, human rights and justice.”

Back from where, exactly? When in history did “that world” exist?

God, where do these Trumpazoids come from in such numbers?

“Trumpazoid” is my new term for idiot politicians who promise easy-peasy recipes that will take us all to some prelapsarian happy past that never existed. Of course, they have always existed but I only just now came up with a term for them. I have no idea who this Corbyn fellow is but he sounds like a right fool.

The Catholic Church was, at its origins, the wellspring of Western civilization. To see it return to these origins, to that part of it which is essential and therefore truly catholic or universal, the wellspring, perhaps, of a universal civilization in the making, is no mean spectacle.

This is not from a Ross Douthat column, by the way. This is from The Nation. That would be the same periodical that sees no value in the efforts of Ukrainians to get rid of their corrupt, cynical oligarchs and find dignity in popular organizing and activism.

That’s the shitty kind of progressive media we get.

The greatest amount of obnoxious, insensitive smartassery appeared in my blogroll on the anniversary of 9/11. The smartassery came exclusively from American bloggers. (I have dozens of examples but I don’t want to link to these losers.) The Spanish and Ukrainian bloggers and journalists in my blogroll wrote only profound, respectful pieces.

There is a huge article, or even a series of articles, in the NYTimes communicating the results of a supposedly groundbreaking study that points to a healthy systolic blood pressure being under. . . 120.

I have absolutely no idea how this can be news to anybody. I’ve known for at least three decades that systolic BP should be 120 or lower and diastolic BP should be 80 and lower. The NYTimes article states that the former guidelines considered systolic BP of 140 or 150 to be good. This is extremely shocking to me. With the systolic of 150, I feel so ill that I can’t function at all. Anybody who experienced it should know that it isn’t normal.

This reminds me of that bizarro documentary where a fellow with an angry girlfriend decided to “prove” that food sold at McDonald’s is not healthy. When the first McDonald’s opened in my city in Ukraine back in 1996, we all knew this was unhealthy food. How is it possible for Americans to spend their entire lives around this stuff and not know that it’s unhealthy?

What’s with this self-infantilization of people who can’t figure out on their own that a systolic BP of 150 is not OK and that fast food is harmful?

Hey, check this out. This stunning piece was made by a Ukrainian artist:

Here is another view:

The work of art is titled “Love.”

It’s really fucking profound.

After this election cycle, politicians will finally understand that running for Congress, drumming up support and donors, serving as governor, trying to come up with a semblance of policy is all a huge waste of time.

Instead, an aspiring politician should simply get on a reality TV show. Then viewers will have no trouble memorizing the politician’s name.

So I started reading Greg Grandin’s Kissinger’s Shadow and I already wish I hadn’t. I know this fellow from his book on Latin America and I shouldn’t have expected anything good from him.

There’s nothing ideological in the reason why I’m frustrated with Grandin’s new book. The problem I have is with his writing. It’s so sloppy, careless, and disrespectful of the reader that I keep getting angry.

For instance, Grandin has this obnoxious habit of making a statement and following it with a column and a quote. One, of course, assumes that the quote will support the statement. But it turns out, almost always, that the quote and the statement are not related to each other. Here is an example from page 1:

Nixon suggested that he had invaded Cambodia not just in response to a foreign threat but to domestic disorder: “It is not our power but our will and character that is being tested tonight.”

I have no idea whether Nixon suggested that or not but there’s no way for me to find out from this quote. Besides, the quote is weak. I’m guessing there was much stronger stuff in Nixon’s statement but Grandin seems to pluck out whatever sentence he glances upon first because he’s too lazy to look any further.

The author’s disrespect for his readers can also be seen in ridiculous statements like this one:

This book, though, focuses not on Kissinger’s outsized personality but rather on the outsized role he had in creating the world we live in today, which accepts endless war as a matter of course.

I don’t believe Grandin is ignorant and honestly thinks that the concept of war as a natural state of humanity was invented by Kissinger. But he thinks readers are dummies who will unthinkingly swallow whatever swill he pushes in their faces.

It’s not a good sign when a book annoys you so much before page 11.

As I’ve been saying only for a bizillion years, there is no Israel Lobby:

And because the deal stands, one hoary old myth should fall: that of the “Israel Lobby”, and its supposed secret, malign control over the U.S. government. The Israeli state and major U.S. pro-Israel organizations were foursquare against the deal. Yet, not only did they not defeat it, but they couldn’t even get a bill of rejection to the President’s desk.

The only useful thing about the myth is that it masked just how much Israel is a project of the US. But to believe that there is an actual influence that some sort of an Israel Lobby can have on the US politics, one has got to be all shades of dense.