In politics, there’s rhetoric, and there’s reality. Let’s leave aside the former for the moment and concentrate on the latter. Forget what Putin says and look at what he actually does.

1. An enormous point of contention between him and the nationalists has always been his concerted and relentless effort to erode the border between Russia and its Eastern neighbors. He brought in an enormous number of easily exploitable workers from places like Tajikistan*. He’s refusing to institute visa requirements for them, which drives the nationalists up a wall in rage. He instituted jail sentences for “hate speech” that questions this arrangement.

2. Putin’s only real, actual, effectively protesting opposition aside from the nationalists has been organized labor. Putin is very actively repressing organized labor to serve the interests of the fluid financial elites.

3. In foreign policy, he’s extremely hawkish, believing that it’s Russia’s role to control – by military means if necessary – the state-building initiatives of other countries.

4. His best friends are members of the supranational financial elites who often are not even citizens of Russia and don’t reside in Russia.

5. Another thing that nationalists detest him for is his constant effort to eradicate the word “Russian” (русский) in favor of “citizen of the Russian Federation” (россиянин).

6. Yet another complaint of the nationalists is that because of his immigration policies half of the children coming to the first grade of public schools in Moscow don’t speak Russian. There is no attempt to address the ethnic enclaves that are growing in Moscow and that are linguistically and culturally walled off from everybody else.

I’ll let you figure out on your own what or who all this reminds you of.

* Hence the reference to Tajikistan in the previous post that describes a game invented by Russian-speakers.

There is this game that people play to remain sober about the fluid economy. They answer the question of how long it would take them to train their replacement. Imagine you are given a person who is a blank slate in whatever it is you do. How long do you need to get them to do what you do at work every day? But you can’t cheat. Imagine you put everything you’ve got into training them. The candidate is an 18-year-old high-school graduate who arrived from his native Tajikistan yesterday.

For what I do now, realistically it would take 20 years. You simply can’t do all the reading and the processing of the reading in less.

N is overqualified for his current job, so he says 6.

If the war we are currently waging on research, literature, and anything beyond language courses is successful, then if the candidate speaks Spanish, it would take me two months. If he does not, then 2 years.

I don’t know what else to say to persuade people that we are nuts for doing this (of our own free will, no less.)

Putin has been running around the world poisoning people for over a decade. Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium – polonium! – in the UK back in 2006. He died. Yuschenko was poisoned with an unidentified substance. He didn’t die but was disfigured.

This is a very old Soviet practice that started back in the late 1920s. The goal is intimidation. “We’ll find you wherever you go. There’s nowhere on the planet that we can’t reach,” is the message.

Sixty years ago, Solzhenitsyn wrote that the West will tolerate absolutely anything that the USSR dishes out because all it cares about is to be left in peace to continue consuming. He’s still right.

Instead of making ridiculous speeches and expressing embarrassing grave concerns, Theresa May should respond to Putin’s actions with deportations. Enough of this empty bluster! Enough of the ridiculous “we give Russia 24 hours to explain!” that Russians are openly laughing about.

The crucial, tragic mistake of one UK government after another was to welcome all of these interminable processions of bandits and gangsters from Russia. The only real sanction that the UK can impose on Russia is to return all of the children, wives, mistresses, and whores of the Russian government officials and oligarchs back to Russia. All of these so-called “business visas” that the UK has been selling to every dirty criminal bastard in the world for half a million need to be revoked.

Putin’s people are running around London poisoning people. Have done so for years. When will the UK government finally put an end to this?

I had to switch to my husband’s health insurance last year because I was getting no coverage at work during the budget crisis. While I could tolerate this situation for myself, I couldn’t allow my infant daughter to spend even a day uncovered.

My husband’s insurance is a lot worse than the one I had through the state of Illinois. It’s 3 times more expensive and the deductibles for everything are sky-high.

I have finally understood the reason for Illinois’s constant budget troubles. With pensions that even their recipients are saying are ridiculously generous* and these unparalleled health benefits, no wonder the state is sinking. The system seems engineered to make people hate state workers.

Of course, I’m not going back on the state insurance because it’s very clear to me that the whole thing is unsustainable. And I don’t want to be anywhere near it when it all collapses like it almost did a year ago.

*It’s hard to explain why anybody should be able to retire on a full pension at 55 after working in a very non-life-threatening job. It’s even harder to explain why anybody’s taxes should cover this sort of indulgence.

It’s like people are inhabiting a different universe. Pompeo has always been a lot more anti-Putin than Tillerson. How anybody can arrive at a conclusion that removing Tillerson in favor of Pompeo is some sort of a gift to Putin is a mystery.

The moment Trump does anything pro-Putin (and anti-Ukrainian because it’s the same thing), I’ll be howling like a banshee. I’m very ready to howl because I’m just in that sort of mood. I just need a reason. Or even a little excuse.

I’m sure by now everybody has read the hilarious piece in the NYTimes about the rich guy who has consumed no news for a year. The funny thing in the article is the idiot reporter who seems completely unaware that this is how most people live. And good for them.

The protagonist of the article is an idiot because he’s a huge drama queen and is making a nuisance of himself to others. But there are many folks I know who have zero interest in the media ridiculousness, and I think they are right. I have quit watching TV news, and I’m skipping on online news more and more because there’s rarely anything but dumb, pompous posturing.