As we all know, Putin loves to pontificate about the “horrible degradation” of Western societies. Here is just one example from his many  speeches on the  subject:

“Policies are pursued [in Western countries] that put large families and same-sex partnerships in the same category, belief in God and belief in Satan. Excesses of political correctness reach the poin

t where there are serious discussions on the registration of parties that have propaganda of pedophilia as their objective. People in many European countries are ashamed and afraid of speaking about their religion, holidays are abolished or given other names, names that shyly conceal the nature of those holidays, and aggressive attempts are made to force this model on the rest of the world,” Putin said.

“

This is a direct path to degradation and primitiveness, to deep demographic and moral crises,” he said

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Of course, now the Russian mass media are busily looking for proof of the scary Western degradation. This week, for instance, one of the most popular TV channels broadcast a report about a small American boy whose parents decorated the walls in his bedroom with photos of naked men.
“These are the evils of political correctness!” the broadcaster wailed. “Parents subject a 5 – year – old to gay porn just so that nobody would suspect them of disliking gays! Are these the much vaunted values we are supposed to adopt?”

There was ample footage of the boy, the room, and the naked men on the walls to accompany the story.

Of course, bloggers soon found out that the footage had been photoshopped. In the original story, the parents covered the boy’s bedroom walls with decals of cars. The gay porn was introduced into this story by the diseased imagination of the servile Russian newscasters. But since most people in Russia watch TV and don’t read blogs, this fake story was an effective propaganda tool.

For your entertainment, I wanted to share this completely bizarre rant from somebody who is beyond clueless:

That said, it’s difficult to say that Francis is wrong about any of this. Virtually no European countries are replacing their populations through natural means, achieving a birth rate of 2.1 live children per woman to even maintain their populations, while several EU members are near the 1.2 rate signalling “death spiral,” i.e. the birth rate at which the population cannot recover. The reasons for this are many and varied — birth rates among native-born Americans are hardly better than in the EU, while the lowest rates on earth are found in East Asia, especially Singapore, Japan, and South Korea, indicating that there’s more than a European problem here — but it can be safely said that the Catholic Church’s ban on birth control is being widely ignored in countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal, which have among the fewest babies in Europe, per capita, yet which a generation or two ago were still strongly Catholic and impressively fecund.

While Francis’s analysis of Europe’s population problem, which is really a deep crisis of civilizational pride, identity and meaning, manifesting in a lack of will to even reproduce, is difficult to refute, it was his proposed remedy that received the most comments.

Native-born Americans, deep crisis of civilizational pride – who is this sad fuck?

It’s a long rant, and every paragraph is more idiotic than the one before.

There was so much sneezing, coughing and dedicated nose-blowing during my most recent bout of illness that I popped a vessel in my right eye. This isn’t particularly dangerous but it looks frightening, especially since the Halloween is long gone. The really obnoxious part is that the blood-shot eye will take up to 3 weeks to go back to looking normal, and I have to be at work on Monday. This means I will have to wear sunglasses.

In the popular imagination, sunglasses at 9 am on a December Monday are associated with two things: alcoholism and domestic abuse. So I’m resigning myself to the narrative of “these Russians kept boozing all the way through the long weekend and then beat each other black and blue” being attached to me. Especially since something possessed me to post a picture of Stoli (of which each of us only had a single celebratory shot) on my blog. This is precisely the image of myself I wanted to cultivate as my tenure case was making the rounds.

So my sister bought a house in Montreal. It’s a big, beautiful, expensive house. She paid the so-called “Welcome Tax” (I kid you not) in the amount of $10,000. She also paid a boatload of other taxes. She is a hard worker, so there are lots of taxes. That’s all she ever seems to do: work, hand over the money, work, hand over more money. Obviously, she never gets anything back, but it isn’t like she is hoping to. 

Before moving in, she hired workers to paint the rooms, change the old bathroom faucets, install new lighting fixtures – in short, everything people do before they move into a new place.

Yesterday, however, she heard that, in her absence, a state bureaucrat entered the house, photographed all of the remodeling supplies she had bought (with her own money that she had left after paying the ridiculously high taxes), calculated their value, and placed an injunction on her. The injunction prohibits her from doing any painting or other work inside her own house. It turns out that people are not allowed to do home repairs in that municipality if the repairs are done for the amount greater than $2,000. 

When people start doing repairs, these bureaucrats penetrate into their houses (without asking permission), conduct what amounts to warrantless searches, and forbid the repairs until a special permit is obtained by the owners. The owners are also fined $500 per day for painting the walls inside of their own houses.

Obviously, after the injunction is placed, these bureaucrats become impossible to locate. It isn’t like you can call them on the phone, write them an email, or just come an see them to find out when you will be able to continue the remodeling. They disappear, they drag things out, they stay hidden as long as possible. In the meanwhile, the workers one has hired to do the remodel can’t continue the work, the new bathroom fixtures and furniture can’t be delivered, and the move-in date has to be shifted again and again.

Of course, it is important to give “work” to the perennially unemployable, so they are herded into these bureaucratic positions with the state. Sadly, however, they can’t just stay in their offices, drinking tea and staring stupidly at their Facebook pages. They need to get out in the world and make themselves noticed. And that’s when complete insanity begins.

As a response to the crisis, Spain attempted to abandon its two-party system. Both major parties, the conservative Popular Party and the liberal Socialist Party, showed themselves incapable of doing anything of value about the crisis. So finally, Spaniards moved ahead on introducing a third option.

Of course, there were always other parties on the scene. But they never had enough support to turn into major players in the political arena.

The new third option in Spain is a young leftist party called “Podemos” (translated as “We Can.”) At first, the party sounded quite radical, proposing, among other things, to lower the retirement age to 60 and to refuse to pay Spain’s foreign debt. The wave of enthusiasm for these ideas made the party unexpectedly and massively successful at the European elections of 2014.

However, now that the specter of Spain’s internal elections has appeared on the horizon, the new party has significantly toned down its dramatic proposals. Now it’s all about restructuring the debt, rather than refusing to repay it, and holding on to the retirement age of 65 is presented as a major, if unlikely, achievement. The idea of the basic income (which many people, as weird as it sounds, consider a progressive measure) is being abandoned, as well.

This means that Spain’s new progressive party has moved to the center before it has even had a chance to try itself out in internal elections. Even though the party’s early success was predicated precisely on not being like the boring old center-left Socialist Party, Podemos is turning itself into a copy of the establishment party.

In Confucianism, a boy is enjoined from killing the mosquitoes that pester him because this is a way to show respect.

Question: how is respect shown by not killing mosquitoes?

Snarky One-Line Descriptions of Countries http://masonporter.blogspot.com/2014/11/snarky-one-line-descriptions-of.html

Do check out the link; it’s hilarious. The best slogans are those of Poland and Russia.

Whatever it is that you do or do not celebrate tonight, enjoy yourself!

I did the gefilte fish the Ukrainian way instead of the Polish recipe I had used before. The Ukrainian version has no sugar added, and the sweetness is achieved through the use of beets. Which is why the whole thing is so red:

The ornament on the coulibiac is my rendition of a hedgehog:

It’s a  hedgehog in profile. You can see the little feet on the bottom. Yes, I suck as an artist but it turned out very tasty.

And for those who are neither cooking nor celebrating, here is a nice collection of links for you to peruse tonight:

Germans are incredible wusses: “Angela Merkel has proposed that high-level trade talks be held between the EU and the Russian-led Eurasian Union in hopes of easing tensions over Ukraine—in part to tamp down on domestic critics that she is being unreasonably tough on Russia.” Merkel is being unreasonably tough? On Putin? Do these people live on the same planet? Merkel has been beyond limp-wristed with Putin.

Spain is doomed, too. (In Spanish). See and contrast the first last sentences of the article.

And to relieve the tension: a hilarious video about somebody acting very stupid at a museum.

Radio Shack is dying, and here is a collection of hilarious and sad stories from the former employee.

“How Famous Artists Would Plate Thanksgiving Meals.”

Bath rituals. I have my own, too, which is why the article interested me.

I have been rewarded for reading miles of Dan Savages inanities in my blog roll: “Couples who wind up in counseling before their first year together is up are, in my opinion, better off being counseled singly. By which I mean to say: being counseled as singles, not as a couple.” Yes, a million time yes. I wish more people knew this.

People are so funny: “Despite the Right’s Thanksgiving myth, the Pilgrims rebelled against their corporate landlord.”

An article on how cell phone size impacts our behavior. None of this has been true since I got my huge-screen phone but I’m normally weird.

Putin’s European Fan Club: “The Europhobes and Putin are ideal bedfellows—the Russian autocrat’s own brand of moralistic vigor has a close affinity with the illiberal anti-American creed that unites Europe’s far left and far right.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (probably the best American journalist right now) on Obama’s response to Ferguson.

You’ve got to laugh when you can’t cry any longer. Here is a hilarious analysis of Darren Wilson’s horrifying injuries at the hands of the “demon” that attacked him.

And a perspective on Ferguson from an immigrant from Western Europe.

Juan Cole’s website published its most offensive piece yet. It is titled: “What if it was Russia and China invading and Bombing?” Yes, seriously? What if Russia invaded and bombed a country? Can anybody imagine what would happen then? I, for one, have absolutely no idea whatsoever how something this weird can even be imagined. Fuck you, Cole.

A very good article on the language of demonization used by Darren Wilson against Michael Brown.

A beautiful article on Ferguson and why we need history: “My fellow historians, your society needs you.  We need to go out and set things straight.  We need to go out in public and interpret the wonderful if obscure academic histories for the masses, who need to know the context of what they are seeing.  We need to do it because no one else will do it.  The price of inaction is too high.”

Why everybody is so angry: “McCulloch didn’t present a case. He dumped a case file in the hands of 12 people who were not legal experts and said have at it. He knew there were inconsistencies in testimony, because guess what…there ALWAYS is. If that were a reason to not indict, most of the people in prison wouldn’t be there. This was a game for McCulloch, a game he knew he could manipulate and win. He didn’t want to indict a cop and he knows that juries don’t want to either. So a little prod here and there is all he would need.” This sums it up quite well.

And this is a really stupid article about Ferguson: “So, with the decision today I will be confronted again with the fact that I do not live in a just country and perhaps never will. That my existence is only possible because of the existence of the Great Satan. I don’t know what to do with that besides get angry and hope for the fall even though such a fall can only bring me great pain. I would be lying if I said I welcomed that. But, like I already said, education is hard.” This is not about you and your delusional fantasies about “Great Satan”, you freak. I, I, I, me, me, me. This is beyond self-centered.

I have no idea who this Bill Cosby fellow is but the whole story is quite shocking. Here is a good post.

The case against early cancer detection: an important article.

Terror in the Crimea today. The fate of the forgotten region that everybody joyfully erased from memory to please Putin.

The strange happenings on a suicide hotline.

“Schumer, New York’s senior senator and a likely heir to Reid, called for Democrats to “embrace government” as they try to hold the White House and recapture control of Congress in 2016. “We must convince the middle class that the only way out of their morass is by embracing a strong and effective government, not demeaning or running from it,” Schumer said during a lengthy speech at the National Press Club, which at times sounded like an analysis of political trends over the last 100 years. “We’re a pro-government party,” he added in summation. “We have been all along. We can’t run from it.”” Oh, Lordy. We are all screwed. If there is one message likely to bomb at the time when the nation-state collapses, it’s this one. Are the Democrats trying to throw away their obvious and great advantage?

And a really, really great post about an immigrant experience that every immigrant keeps having. And I hate it as much as the linked blogger. The only part of my experience that is different is the last paragraph. Students ask me where I’m from all the time. But that is only because it is extremely unprestigious to have a non-foreign foreign language teacher. So I don’t mind.

Is this the beginning of the end of the nation state?

Imagine a world where your virtual self is just as important as your physical location. Well it may not be far away. For about AU$70 and a thumbprint you can now become an e-resident of Estonia. It’s the first country in the world to offer what it calls a digital identity to foreigners. Some people say it may be the beginning of the end of the nation state.

Remember where you heard it first, though.

Thank you, n8chz, for the link.