So I’m hearing the Tories won in the UK, eh?

We can now say our final good-bye to the British higher education and scholarship.

I wanted Labour to win the election because they were promising to crack down on the Russian bandits who live in the UK but use numerous tax loopholes to avoid paying taxes on their dirty gangster money. The UK has long been a paradise for every bit of FSU garbage that wanted to come over and enjoy crime proceeds freely. I was hoping somebody would finally do something about it but no such luck. 

When a person who is speaking Catalonian faces me directly and I can observe their mouth all the time, I understand about 95% of what they are  saying. But if I stop looking at the speaker’s mouth, I understand only about 5%.

Curiously, it’s not like this with any other language. Seeing the speaker’s mouth does absolutely nothing for me in French or German*, for instance. Neither does it help with Portuguese.

* These are languages that I studied in the past.

I’m sure everybody has heard about the protests of Ethiopians in Israel, but I haven’t had a chance to write about it until now:

“Every white person who wants to immigrate is welcome. Every Ethiopian person, regardless of how they practiced Judaism, has been suspect,” said Shula Mola, the chair of the Israeli Association for Ethiopian Jews. “I can’t explain it any other way. It’s about their color.”

Racism in Israel is not limited to Ethiopians, of course: Indeed, some of the weekend’s protesters chanted slogans like, “We aren’t Arabs!”

Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, argued that Israeli police were relatively restrained with Ethiopian protesters, compared to how they deal with protests by the Arab minority. “Every Arab wishes to be Ethiopian for a few hours,” he said.

First of all, it’s not “every white person.” Ethnically non-Jewish spouses of Jews who come to Israel are very unwelcome irrespective of their color. And the children of a Jew and a non-Jew are subjected to the humiliating and fascist rhetoric that their very existence is a form of genocide against Jews. I had this told me to my face by the eager idiots in the pay of the Jewish organizations that trawl the world in search of Jews they can lure to Israel. Back in Ukraine, these organizations would gather small children and teach them to hate their friends who were non-Jewish or not “completely Jewish.” (I experienced this personally, and it’s not a good idea to argue with me about this. It is still a very painful memory.)

Ethiopians do have a lousy time in Israel. I’ve heard an enormous number of offensive and nasty comments about them from Russian-speaking immigrants to Israel. These immigrants feel second-class in Israel because they haven’t practiced Judaism for generations and have no idea what it’s all about. So they seek out a group that is even easier to mark as “not completely Jewish.” And the Ethiopian Jews are easy to single out as “even less Jewish than we are” because of their skin color.

These are the costs of trying to build a mono-ethnic state in the XXIst century. And this is just the beginning. As genetic testing becomes more mainstream and people start getting their DNA profiles as a matter of course, the discussions of who is really Jewish / African / white / Middle Eastern / Slavic, etc. are going to become a lot more complex.

Want to see something hilarious?

First, observe these photos of a luxury mansion:

Huge, eh?

Now see the backyard:

And this is how it looks inside:

There is a lot more, as you can see in this article from the Washington Post.

In case you are wondering why I’m showing this to you, here is the punchline: the owner of the mansion has been working for over a decade as “president of Building Hope, a nonprofit that provides business, technical and financial assistance to public charter schools.”

I have nothing more to add.

So today I started gardening. As a big-city person with zero experience, I decided to begin with a sunflower patch. Google tells me that sunflowers are easy to grow plus I’d love to be able to look out of my study window and see sunflowers. There is no plant that symbolizes Ukraine more than a sunflower.

The first stage of gardening is, of course, shopping. I’ve got to tell you, folks, I rocked that part. I bought a shovel, gardening gloves, granular plant food that the sunflower website recommended, and a thingy that breaks up clumps of dirt.

The next stage, however, was not as easy. I started digging up a plot for my sunflower seedlings. Whoever suggested that digging is easy is an idiot. I sweated more in 20 minutes of digging than I do in an hour of spinning.

The soil here is very weird. Back in Ukraine it was soft and black. And here it’s brown and feels like clay. I have no idea how anything is supposed to grow in this weird clay – like soil.

The result of superhuman efforts was a tiny little patch that now houses two sunflower seedlings. I will continue tomorrow in the hopes that practice makes perfect.

It’s taking me forever to finish Europe’s Angry Muslims. I’m interested in the subject, the author’s argument does not lack merit, I have plenty of time to read but there is a narrative device that the author employs which makes reading a chore rather than a pleasant experience.

The device I’m talking about is sign-posting. I’m not as opposed to sign-posting as some people are but this book’s author takes it way too far. It’s like he never met a sign-post that he didn’t passionately embrace. Literally every page contains at least one “as we will see in chapter 10” or “as I explained in chapters 6, 7 and 9.” The narrative becomes repetitive and circular. The constant references to future chapters create the feeling that the author is bored with whatever he is discussing at the moment. The question in the back of the reader’s mind is, “Well, if chapter 10 is so crucial, why not just skip straight to it and save myself the bother?”

One good result of all this is that I’m now scouring the article I’m currently writing in an effort to remove anything resembling a sign-post.

Avoid sign-posting, people. Or at least keep it to the introduction.

Even Bill O’Reilly was victim-blaming the organizers of the cartoon contest in Texas yesterday. His argument was that the contest wasn’t going to achieve anything anyway. I’m not even remotely understanding this logic. Since when is it OK to open fire at underachievers?

I don’t care what their politics are – these Garland people are heroes. While everybody just yes-butted the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and moved on, they are making efforts to prevent these deaths from being in vain. And that is beautiful.

Russians have exploded in rage and hatred at the news that Kate Middleton gave birth to a baby girl [link in Russian obviously]. Some are now engaging in public fantasies about the baby’s murder. Of course, the infant did nothing bad to them but she is a child of English-speakers, and the rage reserved for anybody who speaks the language is overwhelming in Russia right now.

Nobody promised that the rebirth of fascism was going to be all cute.

My book is going to be reviewed in two academic journals, Hispania and Letras femeninas. This is very pleasing news. Nobody wants to be the author of a book that was not noticed and got no reviews.

It’s weird that the author is never informed that her book will be reviewed, so she gets to search through Google to find out about the forthcoming reviews.

Two reviews for the first book are good, although, who knows, I might even be getting more.