Kejda Gjermani

Dorm Room at Renison College in Waterloo

The most urgent thing you need to know about me: Kejda is read K.da. It makes me cringe when someone actually pronounces the j, to the point that I’m considering changing my name to Kayda.

I am an Albanian expatriate of Jewish descent living in Manhattan. I had my first taste of the continent six years ago when I got stranded in Nebraska as an exchange student. Since then I moved to Canada for university, hastily deciding the U.S. just wasn’t it for me (though the Midwestern experience did have a few redeeming qualities).

It was a big mistake. My judgment clouded by rampant redneckophobia, I somehow overly-generalized from what I found in the Midwest, over-extrapolated and—by God—way overreacted. I mean, Canada! What was I thinking? Anyway, I recently graduated with my fancy schmancy Honours Degree in Financial Economics, so it’s all water under the bridge now.

So Who Is Kejda?

self-portrait from Nebraska

Middle Name: Got none
Gender: Female
Year of Birth: 1986
Nationality: Albanian
Likely Ethnic Makeup:
At least a quarter but less than half Ashkenazi Jewish
The rest is Albanian, but may contain traces of polish, greek, and other nuts

Favorite Cities: New York City, Rome
Favorite Sport: Boxing
Favorite Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch
Favorite Artists: Leonardo Davinci, Salvador Dali

Employer: Commentary

Personal Vices: Sushi; V for Verbal Vulgarity (much curbed since October 2007)
Religion: The skeptical empiricism I subscribe to dictates that I designate myself agnostic, but I’m an atheist for all intents and purposes
Favorite Philosophers: John Searle, Karl Popper
Favorite Economist: Ludwig Von Mises
Favorite Novelists: Erich Maria Remarque, Franz Kafka
Favorite Statesmen/Political Philosophers: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin

Political Beliefs:
VERY Pro-America (The constitution and founding documents of the U.S. represent the most consistent and eloquent ode to freedom to date)
VERY Pro-Immigration (Actually, fuck it… I’d even be in favor of near unconditional amnesty. Anyone’s head exploding yet?)
VERY Pro-Free-Banking (By extension, I advocate hard money but no official currency.)
VERY Pro-Israel (Proud descendant of Zion here. I’m no religious Jew, and much of Israel’s economic/foreign policy aggravates me, but there is something deep, meaningful, touching and highly symbolic in the historic struggle of the Jewish people, their destiny of being hated because of their giftedness and industriousness, and their tradition of overcoming tragedies and thriving across the world.)

• Pro-Negative Individual Rights (Emphasis on Negative: Do whatever you want, knock yourself out, go worship gummy bears for all I care, so long as it doesn’t interfere with me; but your needs in no way constitute a valid claim on my life, property, and liberty. You keep your nose out of my business; I’ll stay out of yours.)
• Pro-Second Amendment (The right to self-defense secures all other rights.)
• Pro-Home/Private School (Education is much too important to entrust it to the government.)
• Pro-NATO Bombing of Serbia (Your reaction to this point is a preliminary test on whether you are a rational critic of Islamism or a hysterical Islamophobe.)
• Pro-American Invasion of Iraq (…though against much of the way the war was executed and especially how the after-war nation-building was handled.)
• Pro-Flat Rate Consumption Tax (…in a Utopian alternate universe where people would report it. In the real world, I’d probably settle for property taxes like New Hampshire’s.)
• Pro-Choice (…with some restrictions of course: partial birth abortions are abominable. If you missed your period, go get tested; it’s been at most 15 days since you got pregnant. Make up your mind fast as soon as you find out. I don’t think it’s in any way immoral to terminate a pregnancy within the first trimester, and it should definitely not be illegal. I also fully support the right to terminate late-term pregnancies when the mother’s health is in jeopardy or if life-altering abnormalities are discovered in the fetus.)
• Pro-Same-Sex Marriage (Most specifically, I advocate full separation of marriage and state: Marriage should be just a civil contract. Consequently, I don’t have a beef with polygamists or unions between blood relatives. Don’t get me wrong: I find such unions repulsive, but I don’t condone the use of my tax dollars nor of the state’s coercive authority to break them up. What constitutes real honest-to-God marriage ought to remain a debatable question in the arena of semantics, in which the state should have no involvement. Let the moralists sort it out among themselves, but let their pronouncements, whatever they be, remain irrelevant from a legislative perspective.)
  
• Pro-Intellectual Property Rights (Socialists and other collectivists are loath to admit it, but what makes the world go around are ideas and the freedom to act upon them; not so much tangible Kapital. IP laws are a political acknowledgment of this economic reality.)
• Pro-Capital Punishment (…though the prospect of innocents being wrongfully convicted and executed is almost enough to change my mind.)
• Pro-WWII (By that I mean the involvement of the U.S. in it.)
• Pro-Nuclear Weapons (…in the hands of the good guys. They probably saved us from WW3 and WW4. But deterrence through mutually assured destruction only works with a semi-rational enemy. Ahem, Iran, anybody? In any case, progress can’t be stopped. Once the technology is available someone will get their hands on it. We can’t unlearn discoveries in Nuclear Physics and we shouldn’t wish we could. Civilized countries better stay ahead of the curve in modern weaponization technologies.)
• Pro-Nuclear Energy (The only feasible solution to the world’s pressing and growing energy needs.)
• Pro-Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (…whatever that means. I’m OK with them being applied to known terrorists when absolutely necessary.)

VERY Anti-Welfare (Welfare is theft.)
VERY Anti-Public Health Care (Public health care is rubbish and theft.)
VERY Anti-Federal Reserve (Don’t get me started…)
VERY Anti-United Nations (An increasingly unfunny joke: the emperor has no clothes.)

• Anti-Fiat Monetary System (counterfeit money: how come it’s only OK when the government circulates it?)
• Anti-Subsidies (to anything, including “public goods”: I thought good/profitable ventures didn’t need to be subsidized. Farming subsidies make me sick in particular.)
• Anti-Protectionism (Absolutely! No quotas, tariffs, or ban on any imports. No subsidies to domestic industries.)
• Anti-Public-Education (School-choice, vouchers, and all that are just the pussy way out. I say down with the entire damn enterprise! No public education! No subsidies to private education!)
• Anti-Social Security (I have a bitter first-hand account of the results of Ponzi schemes from living in Albania in the 90s. But I don’t care much for the paternalist rationale behind Social Security to begin with.)
• Anti-Forced-Membership Labor Unions (Unions suck in general actually, because productive labor is almost never a commodity nowadays. But unions are free to suck in peace so long as no worker of any profession is forced to join or to pay them dues.)
• Anti-Union Favoring Legislation (Paper tigers can afford to act tough only through corrupt politicians’ pull.)
• Anti-Income Tax (If you tax consumption you can’t tax income. It’s effectively double-taxation. And if you tax either consumption or income, you certainly can’t tax corporations. That’s triple taxation! You tripping’!? Progressive taxation is just sick and wrong.)
• Anti-Capital-Gains Tax (discourages saving, cripples entrepreneurship, distorts the structure of time preferences, shrinks the aggregate capital base, and it just reeks of Leftist anti-Corporatism. Capital gains are an overall fucking stupid thing to tax.)
• Anti-Anarcho-Capitalism (Anarchist douche-bags suck big sweaty balls.)
• Anti-Patriot Act (If the situation calls for it do declare war. The constitution provides the executive branch with temporarily expanded powers at a time of war. Legislation curtailing citizens’ privacy and freedom in peace time is unsustainable middle ground.)
• Anti-Draft (The draft is slavery. If you need to force your people to fight, your war is not worth fighting for)
• Anti-Vietnam War (It was such a half-assed debacle…)
• Anti-Ban-on-Drugs/Drug War* (Such stupid use of taxpayer money! Just think of how much more resources law-enforcement agencies would have at their disposal to fight actual crimes, if they did not have to serve as moral guardians to the citizenry! You know: murder, rape, assault, robbery, and fraud cases.)
• Anti-Ban on Prostitution* (Oh the hypocrisy! Shouldn’t whoring oneself be a fundamental human right or something?)
• Anti-Ban on Gambling* (The government just wants a monopoly over such a lucrative enterprise. The rationale for restrictions on gambling is as lousy as it gets.)
• Anti-Affirmative Action (Immoral on so many levels: insulting to women, minorities, and every individual of every group on which it is practiced. Want to bridge the achievement gap? Start by lifting the last three aforementioned bans ***. If drug-dealing, violent pimping, and organizing dog/cock/bare-knuckle fights were not lucrative business propositions to minority youths, then said youths would take their education much more seriously as a way of getting ahead in life. Crippling the unions’ pull would also do a bang-up job at weakening the mob. Crime is profitable only when the government bans goods or services in demand or sets up arbitrary monopolies. )
• Anti-War on Poverty (It’s all bullshit. Public housing in particular sucks.)
• Anti-Religion (Especially those religions with aggressive dhimmifying tendencies.)
• Anti-Global Warming Hysteria (I maintain that we are just a pimple on Mother Nature’s ass. It may hurt her when she sits, but so what? Give me real evidence to the contrary and I’ll reconsider my position)
  

VERY ROTTEN about the U.S. not formally declaring war in its extended military engagements since WWII
VERY ROTTEN about the new Iraqi constitution, and about the U.S. not administering Iraq as an occupied country to be governed according to U.S. law instead
VERY ROTTEN about the U.S. not cultivating consistent foreign allies: example, double-crossing Lebanon during the Bush Senior administration, backing the Taliban in the 80s, etc.
VERY ROTTEN about Hiroshima and Nagasaki (I know it was probably necessary and saved more lives, even civilian lives, yet there is something monstrous about it that doesn’t lend itself easily to rationalization)

RANDOM BITS OF TRIVIA

*I don’t drive: That’s a skill I think people my age ought to have, so I feel pretty handicapped over it. I went to driving school in Albania to get my license, but I forgot everything as soon as I passed the appropriate tests and have never been on the wheel since.

*I have an Albanian accent: and I don’t care for it one bit. I started learning English too late in life, which is unfortunate. If only I’d started a few years earlier, today people wouldn’t ask me where I’m from.

*I don’t take notes: That’s a skill you’d think one would learn through four years of university, but I lack even the most basic note-taking capabilities. I wouldn’t recognize my own hand-writing/symbols, so I have built my academic career on copying others’ notes.

*I read “War and Peace” when I was eleven: I certainly wouldn’t have the willpower to go through it today! But as a little girl I was a compulsive reader of classic European literature, which had quite an impact on my development.

*I have never in my life smoked a single cigarette/cigar/joint: or tried any “forbidden” substance except for booze, if that even counts. I still drink about 5 times a year, and when I do, it’s on the feather-light side. I am an extremely cheap drunk because of the zero tolerance you can imagine, and I hate the feeling of getting drunk. I never gamble either. Jee I sound like no fun at all!

*I am the youngest woman in my family to get married since my great-grandmother: the trend has been quite the opposite lately, with women getting married in their thirties or even early forties. That’s kinda random!

*I don’t drink coffee: Tea is my coffee. Coffee is so bitter! I don’t understand how people get used to that taste. Sure it’s an acquired taste, but what would motivate anyone to even try to get over the bitterness in the first place, is beyond me.

*I hate swimming pools: They’re too confining for someone who grew up swimming in the ocean. I can’t remember where I heard that people piss in swimming pools but it didn’t sound that unlikely a proposition in Albania in the 1990s. The psychological damage is done, I will never step toe in a swimming pool.

*My original dream major was: …Mathematical Physics. No joke

*My favorite foods are: Sushi (and most other Japanese food), Mexican food (the real deal, no Tex Mex crap), Albanian cuisine (which you can think of as the best of Italian, Greek, and Turkish food with some eclectic bonuses), unadulterated Italian, Indian, Thai, Chinese, and whatever else strikes my fancy, probably in about that order.

More to come… eventually.

I really appreciate comments. Traffic too.