Mikhail Iossel

"...the stories are bursting real heart, real melancholy, and real questioning from an acutely sensitive and perceptive soul," writes Alexander Hackett. Read the rest of the review at the link below: mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/sent...
@mikhail-iossel.bsky.social @llpmtl.bsky.social

Never once has Trump condemned a single atrocity committed by Putin. Trump played golf while Putin was killing women and children with a missile strike on Kryvyi Rih, Zelensky's hometown. Trump played golf and didn’t say a word about it.

The dedications page of my upcoming book, SENTENCE

Let me know if you've ever seen anything more ridiculously and obscenely pathetic than this so-called "Trump dance" -- the Dance of the Dunces.

early-morning window view, Nairobi

I was born under totalitarianism and spent the first 30 years of my life in a totalitarian society. It is no place for one to remain unbroken for too long. Believe me when I say, a bit grandiloquent as it may sound: freedom is better, under any and all circumstances. It's as uncomplicated as that.

Nominating the universally loathed pedophile and totally incompetent blowhard for the AG was the first sign of Trump's seriously overestimating the scope of his political mandate. Gaetz goes down in flames, withdrawing from consideration -- Trump's first defeat as president-elect. More will follow.

They were wrong. The boomerang of war always returns to the exact spot of its launching.

They've convinced themselves that their lives would go on as usual, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening; that this war would engulf parts of the Russian territory, that it would never interfere directly with their lives.

but with time, the Russian society as a whole, most Russians seem to have been able to "normalize" it, by pretending it had nothing to do with them and their lives -- that it was taking place somewhere far away, in a whole other geographic space and moral dimension.

The majority of Russian people had no interest in seeing this war started, much less prosecuted for years on end and at a staggeringly enormous cost in human lives, and many millions of them were vehemently against it;

Tens of thousands Ukrainian people killed -- women, children, the elderly. Whole cities destroyed. Countless war crimes committed -- all due to the malevolent will of one uncommonly vicious human insect in the Kremlin.

1000 days ago Russia launched its unconscionable, criminal, lawless, entirely unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine. The sole reason for unleashing it was the increasingly deranged Putin's messianic desire to demolish the Ukrainian state and annihilate the very Ukrainian ethnic identity.

But he is Trump's incitatus -- one of the four of them, to date -- that horse Emperor Caligula planned to make a consul to humiliate the Roman senators. Besides, in Trump's view, if a man has not been credibly accused of being a rapist or pedophile, he has no business being a member of his cabinet.

It would seem self-evident that if you can't release a House Ethics report for public consumption on the findings about Matt Gaetz's activities, he can't be the US Attorney General.

If only I could persuade that boy who still, incredibly, re-inhabits me from time to time -- more out of a mix of pity and curiosity than anything else -- to be the author of my stories, how infinitely better his writing would've been than anything I ever could hope to come up with.

Piet Mondrian. Windmill in the Evening. 1906

Claude Monet. Corner of the Apartment. 1875

René Magritte. The Telescope. 1963

The incoming president of the United States has paid hush money to a porn star.
His nominee for the Secretary of Defense -- a FOX talk show host, all covered in Christian-Right tattoos -- has paid hush money to a woman who accused him of sexual harassment.
Trash of a feather crawls together.

EXPLAINED: Why Lions Don't Attack Tourists Inside Safari Vehicles The cats are often seen interacting freely with tourists inside vans.

now you know

www.kenyans.co.ke/news/106471-...

“One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time,” to quote Andre Gide.

Musk is a big fan and frequent phone caller to Putin, who -- in case Musk may have forgotten -- has been adjudicated as a war criminal by the ICC. It is small wonder Musk is repeating Putin's talking points. But what a shameful and remarkably dangerous character.

Zelenskyy: "We are an independent country."
Musk: "His sense of humor is amazing."
Musk, a product of South African apartheid, should not be insulting any country, let alone Ukraine amidst the war criminally unleashed by Russia.

“…for we don’t exist, we get existed…”

--Bernhard, The Loser

More than half of all adult Americans read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
And they vote.

James Baldwin, for LIFE Magazine, 1963

Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, in July, 2023:
“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
OK, it’s good to know I’m immune, even though I had it… twice.
.

Jose Escofet. Basket of Lemons. 1992

A guy who funnelled thousands of dollars to teenage prostitutes through Venmo is Trump's pick for AG.

Make sense. All those godly evangelicals supported a man who was found liable for sexual assault for president, and now they get Matt Gaetz.