As usual, the presidential campaign is getting bogged in the discussions of feel-good non-issues.

It’s obvious that nobody is going to deport 11 million illegals. The cost and the logistics of that would be insane. But there is a huge number of simpletons who are choosing not to notice that any discussion of the mass deportation is a con man’s trick of distracting a mark while reaching into the poor sod’s pocket.

The same purpose is served by the endless discussions of the need to raise taxes on hedge fund managers. I could care less about hedge fund managers. Tax them to the gills, deport them and their anchor baby, track them like FedEx packages – whatever. But don’t talk about raising their taxes like it’s going to change the world.

There are about 7,000 hedge funds in the US. Many of them will go bust this year. Most of them don’t make that much money at all. Raising the taxes on the salaries of their managers should definitely be done but it’s not going to make a major difference to anything.

Easy recipes do not exist. The politician who offers you one is reaching into your pocket while you are distracted with the shiny bauble of a cutesy slogan.

By the way, have you noticed how all these feel-good easy recipes are about inflicting pain on somebody who is supposedly depriving (“robbing” is always the preferred term) you of something? The con man politician needs to convince you that somebody else is robbing you so that you don’t notice that it’s what he’s doing.

Somebody just called me “midcareer.” WTF, midcareer? I’ve only been working for 7 years and there’s about 25-28 left in me.

People are so desperate to categorize and label that they don’t even stop to wonder if their labels make any sense.

This is a job seeker’s labor market, and workers feel secure enough to leave the jobs they don’t like:

Hires climbed to the highest level of the year at 5.12 million and the number of Americans voluntarily quitting their jobs climbed to 2.75 million from 2.73 million the prior month. The number of voluntary quits tends to rise when people are confident about job prospects.

Most people are so comfortable that they can’t stand good news, so here is what many will consider a welcome worrisome trend:

And the share of Americans participating in the labor force, at 62.6% in July, matched the lowest reading since 1977, a possible sign there’s a mismatch between job openings and job seekers.

I noticed this problem when we were looking for a departmental secretary. This is an office position that requires a very limited skill set. Yet out of the 8 people we considered, 5 were utterly unprepared for any office job. (Out of the remaining three, one was not a good fit on a personal level, one couldn’t decide if she wanted a job, and one we hired.)

We had to hire someone with an MA because candidates with lesser qualifications showed an extreme incapacity to conduct themselves properly in an office setting.

This is a serious problem on the job market these days: jobs that require nothing but a warm body are increasingly rare. In the meanwhile, the number of jobs that require a worker who is a confident denizen of the modern world is growing. And there are not enough people to fill these positions. For instance, one of the insurmountable obstacles for our candidates was the need to work with people from a wide variety of countries. The candidates were visibly (and sometimes offensively) uncomfortable with anybody who was not exactly like themselves. And how many jobs these days welcome this sort of thing?

A significant number of job seekers eventually give up the search altogether because there’s nothing they have that the job market is ever likely to need. Such people are unequipped to arrive at the real reason for their marginalization by the job market (if they were so equipped, they would easily get employed) and start coming up with all kinds of bizarre outlets for the anger this incomprehensible reality produces in them. The political consequences of this anger and confusion are easy to observe.

Did you hear about Darren Goforth’s murder? A horrible tragedy, a disaster for his family. Yet crowds of people are already eager to use the murder to make some idiotic point about Black Lives Matter.

Once again, the need to massage reality into a familiar narrative rules the day.

This blogger keeps making important points about the destruction of print journalism. We have all accepted the idea that the Internet is to blame for newspaper closures, but in reality, the collapse of print media is a result of egregious and stupid mismanagement. And the irresponsible, lazy-ass, ignorant journalists did all they could to hasten the demise of their own print media. 

Read at the link about the senseless destruction of New Orleans Times-Picayune.

What kind of a fucking piece of degenerate garbage does one have to be to declare war on Little Free Libraries? Seriously, though, do these people come home and tell their families, “Hey, I brought down two more Little Free Libraries today. Let’s celebrate! I got those fuckers right where it hurts”?

Sick fucks.

If Trump keeps on this path of taxing the rich and defending social security, what are the chances that some white Democrats who are deeply distrustful of a woman in leadership and don’t care much for immigrants themselves start to look at Trump and think he’s talking some truths for them too.

Oh yes. It’s already happening. Anti-immigrant feelings know no party affiliation, and I’m already seeing a timid “But some of the things Trump is saying do make sense” on the blogs of some male Democrats.

If you read Spanish, do check out this poignant open letter that Felipe Gonzalez, Spain ‘ s first Socialist president, wrote to Catalonia’s idiot independentists.

For all his faults, Gonzalez did a lot to bring democracy to Spain and to ensure that after two centuries of military uprisings and civil wars the country finally got a constitution. Gonzalez and his generation were hoping that this constitution would finally stick. But less than 40 years later it’s about to be torn up and used for toilet paper by a bunch of smug, Trump-like idiots who believe that dumb jingoism is the order of the day.

As you know, my attempt to read books in English during this vacation has not been very successful. Kent Haruf’s novel Plainsong has offered a timid improvement over the books I have read so far. It’s very far from perfect but at least it isn’t desperately bad.

The novel is set in rural Colorado and narrates the lives of a bunch of very limited, simple-minded folks who exist in a sort of an unthinking animal-like stupor. Some are inexplicably, irreflexively mean. Others are as unthinkingly kind. There is no explanation for anybody’s actions. Things simply are.

The only certainty that organizes this existence is the inevitable badness of all mothers. The unmitigated horribleness of the mothers, however, is offset by the niceness of everyone else. There is no explanation for why mothers are so bad while most other people are kind. This is presented as a fact of life not worthy of discussion.

The author must have been aware of the insufficiency of this worldview and tried adding cachet to his novel by messing with punctuation in a way that makes it hard to read. Direct speech, for instance, is not marked off by quotation marks. The characters’ words and the narrator’s voice all come in a jumble that the reader has to sort out.

In spite of all these unendearing characteristics, though, the novel is better than my preceding attempts to read in English.

In Siberia, a tiger needs to be alone on 600 square kilometers of territory in order to avoid starving. In India, on the other hand, a tiger only needs 22 square kilometers of territory to provide itself with food. The reason for the difference is obvious. Nothing grows in Siberia because of the climate. As a result, there are very few deer for the Siberian tigers to hunt and eat. India is obviously known for its lush vegetation, so tigers don’t face this problem.

This is why I detest the stupid map that idiots are eagerly circulating and that shows the “unfairly” uninhabited territories in the Northern hemisphere. Yes, most of Russia is empty of people and even animals. And India is bursting at the seams with people and natural variety. But that’s because of the obvious climatic and geographic differences and not an injustice of any kind.

Just ask the tigers.