I wrote a blindingly devastating (does anybody get the pun or is it too academic?) peer review of one article today. I will now write a second equally shattering piece for another article.

But hey, I’m not wantonly cruel. I actually told the author of the first piece how he can improve. I created an idea on the spot and gave it to him as a gift (I am 90% certain the author is male). Of course, I could write the article myself but where to find the time? I’m booked up with writing engagements until 2027.

In the second piece, there’s nothing wrong with ideas or the argument. The reason why I’ll reject it is linguistic. The author is clearly a native speaker of Ukrainian whose Spanish is… limited. I’m not even talking about the beauty of the prose or stylistic flourishes. Her basic grammar (and I’m 90% certain it’s a she) is what we call “Low Intermediate.” I don’t want to be a meanie who always rejects but “la autora ha escribido”? Seriously? If it’s too hard to find a native speaker to edit, how about turning on MS Word spell check?

This is a question that’s hard to answer without going into specifics of a particular country or situation. If we are talking, for example, about a war where the existence of a nation is at stake, then yes, everybody should fight.

Other than that, I don’t think it’s justified. The only reason to do it at a time when there’s no invasion is to take another step in the direction of genderist fantasy that denies physiological differences between men and women. I’m an old-school feminist, and I have no patience for this silliness.

So if there’s an actual, dire need, then yes. If there’s no need other than to posture, then to hell with that.

I watched a clip from Fauci’s recent congressional hearing where he admitted that COVID vaccines didn’t stop infection and transmission. It’s really funny because, as people who were around in early 2021 know, I was aware before the vaccines were made available that they will do neither. I knew it not because I’m a clairvoyant but because I read the papers where Pfizer very openly and clearly explained what the vaccine was supposed to do and how it was going to work. The mechanism of its functioning was not impossible for a reasonably educated person to understand. Yet people confused “trust science” with “trust whatever news channels on TV say about science” and refused to look.

The COVID-era experience of somebody who didn’t access the news and only learned about the virus and the vaccines from scientific papers was, consequently, enormously better. Obviously, most people aren’t capable of reading such papers, so they are easily confused.

And now Fauci himself is saying exactly what I did in January of 2021, and everybody goes, “well, of course, nobody could have known back then.”

Gosh, that was a stupid time.

The notification that “Biden signs an executive order to shut down the Southern border” appeared on my work desktop.

This sounded like a fabrication, so I Googled. Of course, it was a fabrication. What really happened is this:

WASHINGTON — Facing mounting political pressure over the migrant influx at the U.S. southern border, President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order that will temporarily shut down asylum requests once the average number of daily encounters tops 2,500 between official ports of entry, according to a senior administration official.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna155426

Only a few months ago, Biden needed Congress to pass a bill to do this. Reminders that he had all the authority needed for this measure were dismissed as right-wing propaganda. Of course, letting in 2,500 people a day still constitutes almost a million people per year in addition to an even larger number of legal immigrants plus those who cross the border illegally without being apprehended. This is not “shutting down the border” but an absolute travesty. Of course, 2,500 illegal migrants a day is worse than up to 13,000 a day that we’ve been having until now. But the border is still wide open and let’s not forget it.

The Washington Post CEO told the writers at the newspaper that nobody wants to read what they write. In response, an angry staffer immediately revealed why WashPo is losing relevance and will continue to do so:

“We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around,” Lewis said. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”

Another staffer accused Lewis of choosing two of his “buddies” to run the Post.

“The most cynical interpretation sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies to come in and help run The Post,” the staffer said. “And we now have four White men running three newsrooms.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/wapo-boss-sounds-alarm-over-dwindling-audience-heated-staff-meeting-people-reading-your-stuff

These people are literally writing themselves out of jobs, yet they can’t stop. It’s fascinating to watch.

I kind of got distracted from Latin America and missed that Mexicans elected a Jewish woman as president. She’s far-left, so a lot of good it will do for Mexico. This is the kind of person who likes to chirp excitedly that she’s “a citizen of the world”, so you can imagine. But there’s value in having a person with a Jewish last name becoming Mexican president, so there’s value in that. Her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador appealed to his imaginary Aztec ancestry a lot but hopefully the new president being named Sheinbaum will spare us at least that kind of silliness.

As intensely rigid as I am in my private life, I’m a model of fluidity in my professional life. I have now effectively abandoned my activities as a paid translator to be an unpaid professor in Ukraine.

But if you want to see people who are really not rigid, get a fill of the creators of borscht-flavored ice-cream:

By the way, the difference between how Jews and non-Jews make borscht in Ukraine is that Jews add sugar to it. As the saying goes, the life of a Jew is bitter enough, so it makes sense to sweeten every dish.

An excellent question! Thank you for asking it.

Whenever I travel to Europe, I feel geographically grounded. It’s very hard to explain but it’s like the time zone is finally right. My body knows that this is where I’m from and reacts accordingly.

That’s the body, though. As for the soul, I have the soul of an Anglo person. I always did, and that’s why I felt extremely out of place back in Ukraine. I didn’t emigrate “in search of a better life.” I was making an exceptionally good living in Ukraine back in the 90s. But it felt wrong. Everything felt wrong. I spoke, read and wrote English before any other language, and maybe that is what did it. I feel most at home, comfortable and understood among Anglophone people.

I left Ukraine in 1998 because I couldn’t look at what was happening. People were shitting away (pardon me, but I feel this very strongly even now) their historic chance of becoming something. And I didn’t want to watch them do it.

Today I turned back towards Ukraine in large part because it seems to me that America is shitting away its own historic mission and advantage. And once again, I don’t want to look. This is truly the best country in history, and instead of celebrating that and making sure it remains so, we are doing everything to unmake it. I’m very hopeful it’s a temporary glitch. When I talk to people in Ukraine, I feel like the biggest of Grinches, crushing their illusions about what America is. Of course, it’s best to know reality but we could all change what our reality is shaping up to be.

N never perceived himself as European because that’s not a thing in Russia. He’s not a group person at all, so I can’t pin any collective identity on him. But from the European side of me, I want to say that America was built by Europeans and should be proud of its great European heritage. On the other hand, Europeans should remember that America is the best that they’ve done and act accordingly.

I wanted to read something recent, and Wolf at the Table is that, having been published only a couple of months ago. The novel is about Myra and Alec, siblings from a large Catholic family. There are other siblings but they are accidental to the story of Myra’s incapacity first to notice that her brother is a serial killer and then to do something to stop him. The universe sends her innumerable signals about what’s going on but she’s too weak and indifferent to take action.

To keep the plot going, Rapp uses every favorite trick of American novelists which makes the novel sound like a parody at regular intervals. There are heiresses eager to throw themselves at every passing loser, rapey Catholic priests, amazing job opportunities and marriage prospects strewn around the path of a doped-up paranoid schizophrenic, and a whole lot of baseball. Rapp writes well but excludes from much of the story the only character who is not completely pathetic. Everybody else is so weak, bumbling and immoral that the character who’s a serial killer almost looks good in comparison. He, at least, has some agency and isn’t just floating around aimlessly.

What I’m sure the author did not intend is the novel’s depiction of the degeneration of a hard-working, religious, and Republican-voting family with many children. The siblings depart from their religious roots and become either antisocial / criminal or sad / pathetic. All they can produce among them by way of progeny is one psychotic son. Who, in turn, produces another psychotic child. The only sibling of the bunch who seems to have a normal life married a rich Jew. But that’s the character we hear very little about because the novel concentrates on the death of Catholicism and its aftermath.

Once again, a visitor comes to my office, sees this:

and joyfully exclaims, “Ah, you teach Russian!”

It took three statements to the effect that I’m a professor of Spanish to get the fellow off the topic of when my imaginary Russian courses are scheduled next Fall.

On the positive side, he’s placing the flag in the right geographic region, so that’s progress.