Creative News Reporting

Last night a Georgian news channel reported a hoax on Russia's military invasion of the country under the disguise of news. Only at the end of a 30-min program was it announced that it had been actually a "possible scenario of the events." I suppose, due to his old age, Senator McCain was asleep and did not manage to make a timely announcement that we are "all Georgians now," which - of course - prevented him from looking like an idiot yet again. One time more, one time less would not make that big of a difference, though.

Our newscasts which have been feeding us tales of the economic recovery - lacking the disclosure of a prank at the end - are not that far from such a hoax, yet have not stooped this low so far. (Maybe not all of us are Georgians? Just a thought.) This is an interesting idea for creative journalism, though. Just imagine if at the end of a segment on how great the latest improvements in hiring and manufacturing are our anchors would honestly say, "Just kidding!"

Seriously, I so much liked this postmodernist approach to news reporting, I am placing here the complete text of the event from msnbc.com named "Georgia invaded? Hoax report causes panic
Residents mad at TV station over broadcast of advancing Russian tanks":

"TBILISI - Panic gripped Georgia on Saturday when a pro-government television station broadcast a fake report that Russian tanks had entered the capital and President Mikhail Saakashvili had been killed.


Imedi TV introduced the report as an "imitation of possible events," but the warning was lost on many viewers as mobile phone networks crashed and residents of Tbilisi rushed into the streets.
The report thrust the ex-Soviet neighbors back to August 2008, when Russia crushed an assault by U.S. ally Georgia on the rebel region of South Ossetia in a five-day war and sent tanks to within 28 miles of Tbilisi.


The Georgian Interior Ministry said the report, which did not carry a banner saying it was a hoax, caused "great panic." A cinema in Tbilisi emptied as parents called their children home, a frantic filmgoer said.

Russian Interfax news agency flashed the report on the "alleged" but unconfirmed entry of Russian tanks and death of Saakashvili, and Moscow's Echo Moskvy radio station interrupted its regular programming with the "news."

'Worst day in Georgian history'
Using archive pictures from the 2008 war, Imedi showed advancing Russian tanks.

Switching to a live talk show, the anchor apologized for any panic the report had caused, saying: "We just wanted to show what the worst day in Georgian history might look like."

The report was a barely disguised swipe at opponents of Saakashvili who recently met Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Moscow and called for the countries to restore ties.

Georgy Arveladze, head of Georgia Media Production Holding which owns Imedi, told Reuters the aim was to show the "real threat" of how events might unfold.

Dozens of angry Georgians converged on Imedi, where opposition politician Nino Burjanadze told reporters the stunt was "disgusting."

Freedom of Propaganda in the US

Our Constitution needs to be amended to reflect the realities of the day. Instead of freedom of speech it should read "freedom of propaganda." Here is a fresh example which I heard just a few minutes ago on the Diane Rehm show on NPR. The topic is the "war on terror." A caller asked a question as to why questions raised by Architects and Engineers for Truth on 9/11 aren't being addressed by the officials in a persuasive scientific manner which may put worries of some kind of a government conspiracy at bay.

Two "experts" answered. One said that it is not worth his time to discuss some far-fetched conspiracy theories which try to cast doubt on the FACT that Al-Qaeda had attacked us. The other one reiterated that even though the caller does SOUND like an intelligent person, his question clearly does not deserve to be answered. Both sounded annoyed (surely you would sound annoyed when the only answer you can give is "this can't be so, because it can never be so" and you have to appear such a complete idiot on the air).

The moderator was only too happy to let them get away with the "answers" which were exactly the subject of the question: why are the only answers we are getting in return to scientific EVIDENCE that the twin towers could not have collapsed the way they did from an impact to the top floors of the type - of the type "uh-h-h, go away, you are stupid and unpatriotic." They have nothing to say, but a lot to preach.

A little reminder: please check out INFORMATION on Operation Northwoods which is a documented (and available for public perusal) PLAN by the CIA to commit acts of terror against Americans in order to use it as a pretext to start a war with Cuba pretending that terrorism was the work of the Cuban government.

These government "experts" don't understand that by trying to shun intelligent questions they turn suspicion of their government's wrongdoing into a conviction. Keep preaching, reverend propagandists!

CIA Planning Acts of Terrorism Against American People - a Historical Precedent

Have you heard about Operation Northwoods? I have not until today. Yet, the top secret documents about this Operation were declassified in 1997. This was an operation developed by the US government in 1962, and it called for the CIA to stage acts of terrorism against the US citizens, including hijackings and bombings which could be blamed on the Castro regime with the goal of justifying a US war against the communist Cuba. A detailed account of it can be found in the Internet, including the National Security Archive. To read the Wikipedia summary of this plan, click here. This plan was not signed into action by President Kennedy, but to know that the plan was harbored by our very own government is still shocking.

I have previously given references to a thought provoking movie Zeitgeist available through YouTube which provides evidence that the 9/11 terrorist attacks could PHYSICALLY not have happened as described to us. Now, it turns out there are over 1,000 (one thousand) architects and engineers from around the world are "a new, truly independent investigation of the facts regarding the events of Sept. 11, 2001, saying that the conclusions drawn by the 911 Commission reek of cover-up, are not at all supported by the facts."

See, the laws of physics do not allow sky scrapers to fold like this from an impact to its top floors. Firefighters heard multiple instances of explosions, which were recorded by dozens of witnesses, etc, etc. All of this contradicts the official version of events.

Besides, if our own government is documented to have staged terrorist actions to provoke a war with Cuba, why is it so far fetched to suggest that they could also stage the events of 9/11 to provoke a war in the Middle East? Especially since the explanations they offer to the gullible public about how the terrorist attacks were planned out and executed defy laws of physics and common sense.

An excellent analysis of all this can be found in the most recent post by Paul Craigs Roberts.

Aliens

OK, my husband works with someone who is taking full advantage of this financial crisis. He stashed away enough cash, and is now buying real estate around the country - in trashy places like Myrtle Beach, Las Vegas, etc., and he proudly reports his new acquisitions to his co-workers. Each time I feel disgusted. I question again why it is we live here, I ask myself if we have anything in common with the people we are surrounded by.

Let us put it this way. If I had money to spare, I would be buying some serious art and travel the world. If I felt the urge to take advantage of the depressed housing markets, I would buy an apartment in Paris and visit it a few times a year. I don't think you could pay me enough to make me vacation on Myrtle Beach and own property in the fake paradise of Las Vegas. Just like I find hamburgers - that epitome of the American culinary art - only marginally edible so to speak - if you have no other choice and you are starving, they will do.

Why is it that I don't have money to spare? Because unlike that person, I do not vacation in a trailer with my family. Because I do travel the world. Because we spend serious money for our children's education while that person sings kudos to a mediocre public school where he sent his kids. Why on earth does he feel that people would admire and envy his business acumen? Because I suppose, most people actually do. As I know now, Americans worship nothing more that the Almighty Green Buck.

I feel like I am surrounded by aliens.

Wishing Upon a Star

As we know, the official figures for unemployment do not reflect the reality since they do not take include people who settled for partial employment, nor those who stopped looking for a job. Yet, even the official statistics is pretty bad. the government is "wishing upon a star" to reduce unemployment to 6% by the year 2015. I just read what that actually means. Please read a quote below:

"At the moment, 6.3 Million people remain unemployed for over six months - an increase of 5 million since the start of the recession in December of 2007. To reach the White House's projection of a 6% unemployment rate by 2015, the US would need to create 225,000 jobs per month, every month, for the next five years. But that kind of long term job growth has never been seen before. The year 2006, was the only year in US history that had job gains average over 225,000. But that was for just a single year - doing it for five years may be too much of a stretch."

I hope the White House is on really good terms with some powerful fairy out there who can make their wish come true.

Made in Heaven

On February 14, my husband and I celebrated 25 years together. I clearly remember the time when I considered a 22-year-old to be "too old," and now I myself have been married for 25 years! But this is not the point - I really don't mind my age, I find it rather liberating as the pressure to look good subsided considerably. Who would look at an old lady anyway to appreciate her "looks"? Anyway, I am only mentioning this because I didn't want to get married in the first place. My future husband cajoled me into marrying him, and I never even took his last name thinking that the marriage wouldn't last after he realizes what hell living with me was like. He proved to be tougher than I thought, and I think that marrying him was the best thing that ever happened to me. In fact, I can't believe I got so lucky.

There have been other things in my life when what I first saw as a blow proved to be a blessing in disguise. When our daughter dropped out of a university after just one semester, I thought it was a terrible mistake. I was at a loss how to handle her decision. Think of it: with my two Masters Degrees I am the least educated member of the family. Every grandparent of my kids has a Ph.D., even her great grandparents taught college. So she was going to be the first ever family member who WOULD NOT go to college. She found a full-time job and worked for about 2.5 years before the Greatest Recession started at which time her job was eliminated, and she was laid off. Again, to both her and me it appeared as bad luck. But it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because having struggled to find another job in this economy without any education beyond high school, my daughter suddenly decided that she needed and wanted to go back to the school. She is now extremely motivated and driven in her studies, she is on Chancellor's List, and is working towards her B.S. degree in International Business with a goal of going to a law school after that. Oh, she still works part time, too. I am SO GLAD she worked when jobs were still around and went to school when jobs went away - in that order. Had she stayed in school, she would have graduate from it this May. And then what? Unempleyment amoung young people is at 24%. Now she has a few more years before she will be looking for a permanent job.

Likewise, I am sure that this Recession with a capital "R" is going to be eventually beneficial for the country, if only for making us more humble as a nation. I hope we will emerge from it less materialistic, less aggressive, less arrogant, less corrupt. The old system is dying off, and once the maggots are done with clearing out the rotting flesh, a new shiny skin will grow on our wounds.

So I do believe in silver linings and trusting the Providence.

Happy Anniversary, Honey!

Proudly Made in the US

Toyota is in deep trouble. Not only because of its latest recall for faulty break pedals, but for the recent hits to its reputation as a manufacturer of high quality cars. Apparently, the quality of Toyota manufacturing has been slipping for years now, and it now ranks 16th in the perceived quality, lower than such brands as Volvo and Volkswagen. Consumer reviews bash cheap plastics, crookedly installed glove compartments and dashboards. Analysts blame rapid growth and the desire to win the market share for the loss of quality of construction. It sounds like Toyota fell prey to the American virtues - corporate greed and globalization. The Toyota quality has been slipping since their cars began being built and assembled all around the world instead of just in Japan.

Lexus, on the other hand, is not being affected by the recall, and neither its reputation for safety has suffered. The reason? It has consistently been designed and built in Japan (with a small subsidiary in Canada where just a few dozen people are employed assembling their trucks). I was told by a Lexus dealer that at some point Toyota had an assembly line in the US, but then they had to close it because they could not enforce the same standards of quality in this country. Even under the Japanese leadership Americans were not capable of producing the quality output which was expected of them.

This does not surprise me. A friend from Germany recently built a house which he imported entirely from Germany as a kit, and he brought a German engineer to supervise American construction workers in its assembly. He had to let go of every American very quickly, and bring ALL of his carpenters, electricians, etc. from Germany to ensure the quality he expected and was used to. I hear that in Germany specialists sent to work by their companies to the US demand extra compensation for having to move here for a few years, just like they would going to some African countries. It did not use to be this way - it used to be prestigious and highly desirable for a German to go and have an experience working in America.

Incidentally, a friend who is a CEO of a large European company in the States (and a European national) shared that his company fired an American CFO and hired a Chinese guy instead. They pay him a lot less and his productivity is much higher, as in times higher. He said that from his experience, American businessmen are primarily concerned about the size of their bonuses, not the well-being of the company. The Chinese guy they hired lives in a small rented apartment, saves his salary and sends it back to his family in China. So we don't even have to outsource jobs to other countries any more. They can come and get jobs from us right here, on our turf.

Let me get this straight: we start assembling Toyotas, and their quality and reputation slips, we appoint American CFOs, and the companies (along with the whole economy) tank... Maybe it is not just the globalization, maybe it is simply that WE are not capable of doing anything right any more?

Potholes

Russia has notoriously bad roads. The US has famously good roads. Or so we thought. It is a well-known fact that in Russia money for road construction is largely stolen, and the quality of the road output is a far cry from what was paid for.

We live in the South of the US - North Carolina, to be precise. For years I was convinced that we don't have potholes in the roads and few road repair projects overall because Americans just do it right (well, illegal Mexicans actually, but for the sake of generalization let us consider all our construction workers American). Our engineers know what they are doing, they design roads well, we use proper techniques, we do not cut corners, we use good quality materials, and the output speaks for itself.

And then this winter happened (regards to Al Gore!). We've had two big snow falls so far - as in 8" of snow each time, which in Russia happens about every week. And all around the city our roads are a mess. We have so many potholes that we even stopped trying to go around them. There is simply no way. Our daughter damaged disks on two of her car wheels after she hit one of the potholes for they are deep. So our perception of superior American construction technique and materials goes out with a smoke, and the extent of the problem is so monumental that I am not sure how the city will be able to handle the road repair project of this scale.

Likewise, this recession opened up deep potholes in our whole economy. My perception of American business and political system as being well designed, fair and honest went out with a smoke. We simply looked good, but we were not built well. We were deceiving the whole world into thinking we knew how to "build roads," whereas we were just extremely lucky to not have had bad weather for 70 years through no achievement of our own. And I am not sure how the country will be able to afford the economy repair project of this epic scale. Oh, wait! Are they going to ask us to pay for it, too, just like for the faulty road construction?

Rice Fields of Japan

I just received these pictures in the email, and I wanted to share them. I can only call it embroidery with rice plants in the fields. Enjoy!

Sure as Heck

So Sarah Palin is seriously considering a run for the White House in 2012. She claims she learned a lot in the past two years. She said, "I sure as heck better be more astute on these current events, national issues, than I was two years ago." And then, practically in the same breath, she doles out advice to President Obama on how to win re-election (as if she knows anything herself about win a presidential election) by recommending to play "the war card" - attacking Iran and showing stronger support for Israel. Apparently, she considers that "securing our nation and our allies."

(What allies, by the way? Does she seriously think we have any more allies left in the world, especially if we go back to the role of the world police? After what we have done to the world economy, I am seriously surprised that we have anyone still on the speaking terms with us, let alone being our "ally.")

To me this sure as heck sounds like Sarah has not learned anything at all in the past two years. Not that I expected her to. She has a pretty face, nice hair, but I am not sure about the size of her brain. Besides, she has an awful lot to learn - like, that Africa is not a country, that stopping for a plane refueling does not entail visiting a foreign country, that diplomacy is more than wildly winking at a plane of a foreign leader zooming over your head... (Basically, it feels like all of the foreign policy is still WAY over her head!) Speak of a steep learning curve! So poor uninformed Sarah's idea of a foreign policy is to wage more wars to make us more secure. Seriously, since Obama came to power we have been plagued with terrorism due to his soft stance on national security... Those explosions in our power plants... Oh, wait! It was a gas line explosion - never mind. Well, Washington, D.C. has been practically paralyzed with snow for the past several days! How can we be sure this was not a terrorist plot?

This country has 20% of people unemployed, sky-high foreclosure rates and people living in tent cities all over the country. We can't feed our homeless. We can't treat our sick. Our manufacturing industry is non-existent. And poor dumb Sarah thinks that what should be our first priority is to wage more wars and be preoccupied with a well-being of a foreign country (Israel)? Right!

If Sarah who sure as heck has not learned anything runs for President and wins, this sure as heck is not the country I want to live in.

A Union of Equals

One thing struck me in the latest news about thousands of emails exchanged between Todd Palin and the governor's staff in Alaska during his wife's term as the state's Governor: that Sarah Palin married her intellectual equal. Oh-h-h, what a heartwarming thought! It is always great to find out about true union of hearts and minds in nowadays families.

Through a series of interviews, we all know that Sarah Palin doesn't read and is sadly uninformed. Now we also know that her husband can't write. Just a small example. Here is a quote of it from MSNBC:

"When Sarah Palin complained that the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner wrote a critical editorial after she did them the favor of meeting with the editorial board, Todd Palin advised the press chief to "take the news miner off the press release address list for a few days, see how long it takes them to realize their not on the list."

I just love this "THEIR." The type of a mistake that his spell checker would sadly miss... Did Todd Palin go beyond 3rd grade at school, I wonder? OF COURSE, that would not be necessary to be the dog sled champion, let alone to father 5 kids, so that would not disqualify him in the least from being Sarah Palin's husband. I was just curious, that is all. What an endearing love story theirs is! She can't read, he can't write, yet they live happily ever after and even attemp to rule America. Oh-h-h-h!

Health Care becoming Health Business

I highly recommend reading another excellent article by Paul Craig Roberts "How Wall St Destroyed Private Medicine." In it he shows the political mechanism how revenues were diverted from private doctors' practices to large corporate facilities by regulating Medicare compensation rates to different organizations. Roberts also shows that the libertarian slogan to protect the current "free market" model of medicine is inane since there is no free market medicine in the US. Just another example of how corporate greed, and legalized bribery (lobbying) runs and ruins this country.

Autism and Global Warming

There is news today that the British medical journal Lancet is fully retracting the study it published in 1998 linking the onset of autism to the MMR vaccine. Damage done by that poorly substantiated sensational study is hard to measure. Generations of parents will probably try to shield their children from vaccinations which can save their lives. (You can read more on the story here.)

A few years back there started a big Global Warming Swindle which announced the cause of the global warming to be human industrial activity. Those "findings" were readily supported by "scientists" feeding from the trough with grants available to those eager to subscribe to the idea. Some people made a lot of money on the hysteria. I am wondering how many years need to pass before Al Gore will retract his myth of the man-made global warming. I am afraid, that person has less shame than a British medical journal, and the answer may be, "never."

Global warming and autism are both real "conditions," only the causes for both have been misrepresented by self-serving "diagnosticians."

A Russian Drug

I read a joke recently which said: "If you can stop eating sunflower seeds when there is still half a plate left, then kicking a heroin addiction is going to be a piece of cake." This is a purely Russian joke, of course, and I doubt any Americans can truly appreciate it. Besides, I am not sure it is a joke, not a medical pronouncement. The sunflower-seed dependence is a habit which I find almost impossible to beat.

You see, Russians don't eat popcorn. That is to say, we CAN eat popcorn, but our equivalent of popcorn is sunflower seeds. Except we can get addicted to it. Roasted, unsalted, and unpeeled. The whole idea is to be sitting, peeling them, spitting out the peel and eating the kern. Sunflower seeds are LOADED with calories, so the peeling process slows down the process of swelling of our waist lines considerably. You can eat sunflower seeds when you are reading a book, watching a movie, or chatting with a friend. Guys may be drinking and socializing. Gals eat sunflower seeds and chat.

There is NOTHING good about being hooked on sunflower seeds. You gain weight, you lose a lot of time, you don't really get high, and your appetite is as good as ever. Besides, you make a lot of mess. Come to think of it, maybe I should switch to the cocaine addiction instead? (I think, heroine would be an extreme - needles, expense, etc.) It is my understanding that with cocaine you can at least lose weight and get high. And it doesn't take a lot of time. And the habit is easier to kick... Besides, when you are ready to kick the habit, there are tons of support groups and special programs, and you are lauded as a hero. If I want to kick my sunflower dependence, can I find at least one support group?

Western people don't appreciate how good they have it here!

Pet Politician, Anyone?

A friend of mine opined a few days ago that we should all give up on this country as of last Thursday when the Supreme Court reversed the McCain-Feingold Act on campaign finance reform. As a result, corporations, unions, and special interest groups with deep pockets are now free to use their funds to promote "their" candidates right up to the election day. No longer are the candidates required to include "I am so-and-so, and I approve of this message" verbiage in those ads (a more appropriate message now would be, "I am so-and-so, and I my vote was purchased by such and such corporation"). Personally, I think what has happened in the country for the past 12 months has been good in that it allowed us to see clearly what is what and who is who. Now we KNOW for a fact that our government is there to protect the interest of the financial elite, not the citizens; now we KNOW for a fact that any wars we may be waging are wars strictly for valuables, not values; and now we will KNOW clearly who exactly bought up our elected officials. I am not sure that knowledge is power in our case, but it is certainly better than ignorance and illusion.

Anyway, just today I came across a cartoon which I loved and which summarizes all of this nicely. Enjoy!

A Waste of Time

My son goes to an excellent school. Seriously, I am generally very impressed with the curriculum and with how rigorous the educational standards are. His school is also very expensive. Yet, even in his school I observe that the Middle School is devoted to some extent to simply babysitting. This is also generally the case - from what I could observe over the years - with American public schools. Whatever students learn in the Middle School does not really count, and as a consequence, they are not expected to learn much.

Basically, the REAL education starts only in high school. I am not talking about math which, luckily, is built up year by year starting from the elementary school. But science and history start happening for serious only in the high school. What a waste of time! Between the ages of 12 and 14 children are capable of learning so much, and they are offered so little! For example, you CAN teach them world history, or, say ancient world history in 6th-7th grades, and forget about it in high school. You CAN teach them some basics of physics, chemistry and biology in the middle school, so that your high school courses would be either shorter, or so that you could immediately progress to the AP skipping the "basic" course. This is what other countries do with their youth. Say, we learned all of the Russian medieval history in the 7th grade, and never revisited it again in high school (I still remember pretty much all the dates of when each tsar ruled and what happened during their rule). Our Russian language - as in grammar and composition - instruction ended in 8th grade. After that, we were only expected to write essays on the literary works we studied in depth. For most people, this was enough to provide them with a lifetime of knowledge how to spell correctly and to punctuate properly, which is more than one can say about the American school which - after 12 years of drilling English - produces people who can only rely on the spell checker, and have a very vague idea of what punctuation marks are for.

Like I said, even my son's overall excellent school wasted a lot of the students' time during grades 6-8. What happened in my son's school was this. In 7th grade, they had a science teacher who saw her mission in life to turn the kids into tree huggers by assigning some very basic and very boring tasks, like visiting a local zoo (which we had done on a monthly basis between the ages of 3 and 7), observing a 1'x1' patch of a permaculture garden (new to her, but so well known to my son who grew up working a huge permaculture garden at his Montessori school, again starting at age 3) for 2 moths and writing a REPORT of what they saw, etc. Mind you, this was a science class. When I raised my concerns about the children's lack of LEARNING anything, she more or less dismissed them by stating that it is much more important to teach the kids to love nature.

Then in the 8th grade my son got this social studies teacher whose course was supposed to be in US History and who taught - well, - practically, nothing at all during the whole year. First, they discussed the presidential elections and held mock elections of their own in their school (which my son won, by the way). Then they were assigned a project OF THEIR CHOICE which didn't have to have anything to do with history at all - and my son chose a project on Pluto (as in the Planet). He chose that because, actually, he happened to have an excellent earth science teacher in that grade who made them all passionate about science of the universe. Again, as I raised my concern about the lack of substance teaching, both the Middle School Director, and the social science teacher talked with me as a seriously troubled person explaining that it is much more important to let kids do projects on what they like because the purpose is not to acquire knowledge, but to acquire research skills. My objection that you could expect 14-year-olds to acquire both, were not valid, in their opinion.

I just read in our paper today, that a proposed change to the North Carolina high school curriculum would eliminate World History as a class. Instead, students would be taught "global issues such as human rights, the environment and international efforts to solve world problems. Eleventh-graders would only be taught the US history that occurred after 1877." (Surprise, surprise! I suppose it is getting uncomfortable - with the information widely available on the Internet - teaching lies about the real reasons for the barbarous Civil War which, naturally, had nothing to do with slaves' rights, but was a purely imperialistic war for retaining markets.) What bothered me about this was that introduction of those "issues" bumped out the proper history courses as if we could not fit in both. Just eliminate the babysitting our science and social studies teachers do in the Middle School and make them teach substantive courses, and you will have room for both.

That is to say, if anybody is really interested in educating our youth, not just in talking about educating them.

Darth Edwards

I AM YOUR FATHER...

=

A Wife is Not a Luxury...

In the USSR there was a saying that a car is not a luxury, but a means of transportation, which was quickly transformed into a joke: "A wife is not a luxury, but a means of transportation." The joke referred to numerous cases when a guy would marry a woman who had some Jewish blood in her, and based on that, the family would be allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union, since Jews were the only group of people who were privileged to be granted such a permission.

Anyway, right before Christmas I ran into an acquaintance at a store who told me about her daughter who recently graduated from Yale with a degree in women's studies and is working in a field totally unrelated to her major. I have always believed that if one were to spend money for the elite schools, one better make sure that their child studied something which can translate into a lucrative career. In other words, spending loads of money on women's studies at Yale appears to be a total waste for me. I diplomatically asked her why that major. To which she replied that she does not believe in girls becoming doctors and lawyers because that only invites some mediocre and unmotivated guys to marry them. I have never looked at this like that before.

Well, she may be right, after all! Just look at the figures released yesterday at the demographic trend: "In 1970, 28 percent of wives had husbands who were better educated, and 20 percent were married to men with less education. By 2007, the comparable figures were 19 percent and 28 percent. In 1970, 4 percent of husbands had wives who made more money; in 2007, 22 percent did." (Read the whole article here.)

A Voice of Reason

Don't miss an excellent latest article by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times this week in which he states that the priority in our struggle not only to retain world leadership, but to survive should be on the economic competition with China, and not on the futile "war on terror."

Here is a quote: "Frankly, if I had my wish, we would be on our way out of Afghanistan not in, we would be letting Pakistan figure out which Taliban they want to conspire with and which ones they want to fight, we would be letting Israelis and Palestinians figure out on their own how to make peace, we would be taking $100 billion out of the Pentagon budget to make us independent of imported oil — nothing would make us more secure — and we would be reducing the reward for killing or capturing Osama bin Laden to exactly what he’s worth: 10 cents and an autographed picture of Dick Cheney."

I don't know - I would probably throw in an autographed picture of Sen. McCain and Sarah Palin as well.

You can read the entire article here.

A Green House Effect

I just posted one of my favorite Russian poems on my other blog http://ipoempod.blogspot.com/ which I have loved since early childhood. It is a children's poem, and it tells a story of a pampered kid whose parents dote on him, pile on warm blankets on him when he sleeps, bring him his favorite food whenever he asks and pander to his every whim. The author compares such a child to a tender plant in a green house which is unable to survive in real world. The moral of the story is that one has to be toughened up from the early childhood to be prepared to meet life's challenges. As the poem puts it, a paddled child won't be ready to become a pilot, a brave sailor, to wield a machine gun or to drive a truck. The poem is very well written, and like I said, I have loved it for a long time.

I am now wondering if I love it so much because I really wanted to be such a child myself. In fact, I am now sure that that was the biggest draw for me - if not experience it in real life, at least to read about it in a poem. I was raised ready to face life's challenges, knowing how to survive. I was sent to school when sick if my temperature at 7 am was below 100.5F, I was not allowed to have any night light in the room even though I was terribly afraid of the dark, etc. (Chores and helping with the younger sibling were a given and expected.) Boy, how I wish I instead felt loved and spoiled, felt like I were the center of my parent's universe!

In my own mothering I have much more abided by Vladimir Nabokov's words, "балуйте детей побольше, господа, вы не знаете, что их ожидает!" from the Russian version of "Speak, Memory!" ("Другие берега") which can be translated as "indulge your children more, ladies and gentlemen, you do not know what awaits them in life!" Indulging and setting limits are not mutually exclusive; moreover, a child feels a lot more protected when he or she knows where the limits are set. I firmly believe in parenting as creating a safe space for children, a comfort zone where they can always turn to in life, where they know they will always find a warm wall to lean against, a dinner on the table and a compassionate ear. If you love your children in such a way, you will prepare them for facing life's challenges better than if you let them experience the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune at home.

A plant grown in a greenhouse may be gradually exposed to the life outside and in many cases will be healthier and more vigorous than its crooked and crippled brethren which learned to survive the cold winds or a harsh sun from their early days.

Indulge your children, ladies and gentlemen!

Celente on Obama's Plan to Tax Bank

Gerald Celente, the man who - unlike other "analysits" who are constantly "surprized" by what is going on in the economy - accurately predicted the timing and the extent of the current crisis, considers the plan to recoup $90 billion from the banks TARP program over 10 years but a populist facade aimed to placate the brewing public anger. Watch his 4 minute interview below:

10 Years in Capable Hands

A friend of mine just told me that her boss whose business is importing and selling German-made machinery to various US manufacturing plants had his most profitable year in 1998 (he has been in business for over 40 years). Last year his business was all but dead. The USA stopped being a country which manufactures anything. It only knows how to import and resell.

What struck me is that his best year was just 11 years ago. So it took this little for the richest country in the world to come from prosperity to a perpetual decline. It is really shocking how little time an idiot needs to ruin a country!

An old appliance repair guy who came to my house recently was talking wearily about his country and people who run it, "First they moved all the jobs overseas, and now they play shocked to find out that we have high unemployment." He also mentioned that since all appliances started being made in China, he noticed a drastic change in their quality for the worse. He gave me one example: before, some metal parts and contacts were made out of solid thick metal, and now they are so thin that even a small power surge fries them. The replacement pars also come from China and have the same quality.

Incidentally, a family member who was recently skiing in the Rockies, told me that there were very few other tourists in the hotels and on the slopes, compared to previous years. I told her to memorize everything she is seeing around her, for chances are this is all going to be gone before long. She laughed sarcastically and said, "Obviously! Now that Obama is going to build socialism in this country, everything is going to be ruined!" This family member has a much higher formal education than the appliance repair guy, but evidently, lacks his common sense.

Dickens on Pastor Robertson

I have been re-reading "The Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens, and came across a quote: "Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion."

This somehow made me think of pastor Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh - very pious people (never mind the drugs) - who recently made widely known their appalling views about Haiti. Pat Robertson asserted that Haitians deserved this latest devastation by an earthquake for their old pact with the Devil to rid them of the French dominance. I am wondering if R. Robertson was the Devil's secretary since he is privy to all the details of the pact. And our conservative chief Rush Limbaugh discouraged people from sending money for relief in Haiti by saying, "We've already donated to Haiti,'' Limbaugh told the caller on his radio show. "It's called the U.S. income tax." You can read the transcript of his whole broadcast about this here. Make no mistake, Rush Limbaugh is as much a pastor of his religion, as Pat Robertson is, only Rush's religion is called the worship of the dollar. And whoever wants to take that dollar away from him is declared the Devil.

Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh - the Dickens's Mrs. Joes.

A Winter Scene

It is incredible, but we still have snow on the ground which fell on December 18, 2009. The only benefit in the prolonged cold I see is that it stimulated my husband to start paingint again. He created a number of beautiful oils in a rapid succession. Here is one of them:

A Poem Hanging Above My Desk

After a While

by Veronica A. Shoftstall

After a while you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn't mean leaning
And company doesn't always mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren't contracts
And presents aren't promises
And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes open
With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child
And you learn to build all your roads on today
Because tomorrow's ground is too uncertain for plans.
And futures have a way of falling down in midflight.
After a while you learn
That even sunshine burns if you get too much.
So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul
Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure...
That you are really strong.
And you really do have worth.
And you learn and you learn...
With every goodbye, you learn.

You Don't Have to Be a Rocket Scientist

A while back, when NASA lived through a moment of embarrassment after having launched a multi-billion dollar probe to Mars only to discover later that they have forgotten to convert inches into centimeters in their calculations, and thus the probe was launched to anywhere but Mars, I saw a very funny cartoon in the newspaper referring to that story. I regret not having saved it, but I want to describe it here. In it two young guys in an old clunker are passing by the building with the word "NASA" across the top. In front of the building there is a tottering sign saying "Now Hiring." One of the guys says that he is planning to apply for a job there, and after the other one gives him an incredulous look, exclaims, "What?! You don't have to be a rocket scientist!"

I just heard on the radio that Fox News is hiring Sarah Palin to be its news analyst. Let us see. A person who thinks Africa is a country, who seriously considers the fact that Putin flies over Alaska to be evidence of her foreign relations experience and who cannot name a single news publication which she reads regularly to form her world view is hired as an ANALYST. Right...

Evidently, you don't have to be a rocket scientist there, on Fox News.

A Dubious Honor

John McCain was just awarded an Order of the National Hero of Georgia by Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili for his heroic support of the Georgian military campaign against the sleeping citizens of South Ossetia in August of 2008.

So now our esteemed Senator is a hero of the country which still has multiple public displays of large portraits and statues of Stalin, which recently blew up the only WWII memorial in the city of Kutaisi to fallen soldiers fighting against the Nazi, and which recruited young people into its Army by using inspirational quotes from Adolf Hitler. A well deserved honor!

Statue of Stalin in front of the Gori Town Hall, Georgia

Congratulations, senator McCain! You are a true Georgian now!

An Important Cultural Phenomenon

"Avatar" is unquestionably the most important cultural phenomenon in the US of the past year, if not a decade. With it, James Cameron made our nation look in the mirror and be appalled at what we see. He made us cheer when Americans are savagely killed, he made us give an unequivocal answer: "It feels good" to a question, "How does it feel to betray your own country?", he made us feel triumphant when defeated and pathetic Americans are driven out of the land they tried to conquer. This is the most culturally subversive movie of the year. An absolute pleasure to watch.

Americans, driven by our usual force, greed (or interests of shareholders, as they are referred to in the movie), try to destroy a primitive aborigine culture on a distant planet in their desire to mine a very valuable mineral. When the locals refuse to give up their land and resources voluntarily, the Americans start a full-scale military operation against them... and lose. American war cry is, "We are going to fight terror with terror!" (rings the bell?), and the aborigines' only hope of winning is that they "know these mountains better" than the Americans do. In other words, the movie all but literally evokes our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and cheers our imminent defeat. But the genius of James Cameron is in not tying the plot to a specific historical moment, or a particular military conflict - but rather turning the movie into a parable which can be interpreted as an archetype for a variety of situations, including Israel's war against Palestinians, and any future conflicts the Western world may be involved in against indigenous populations of various countries blessed with natural resources.

The movie presents a special challenge to our mainstream media. Given its astonishing commercial success, the media cannot possibly just ignore it and pretend it never happened. Nor do they dare to analyse its message - again, given its remarkable success (does this mean that Americans are buying the message and are attuned to it? or does it mean that Americans are rather stupid and they just don't read more into the story than the sci-fi plot?). Actually, I mostly see just the reports of dollar figures on the ticket sales while calling the movie "a sci-fi epic." I understand the media establishment's predicament, and enjoy watching them wiggle their way out of it.

The movie "Avatar," - if it is truly understood and accepted by the American public - can be a very significant step in us taking a critical look at ourselves as a country and changing the course, rather than staying it. The movie is as much an important cultural phenomenon as the media's attempt to divert its significance by trivializing it as another idiotic "Star Wars" or "Lord of the Rings."

Both, the movie and its commercial success, make me hopeful for the future of our nation.

Facts are Stubborn Things

In March, 2009, John Kerry wrote an article with the same title dismissing nay-sayers of global warming. His point was that global warming does exist, and the conclusion was that "WE NEED TO ACT NOW." Needless to say, there is no logical connection between the two, as would be evident to anybody who either studied formal logic, or is blessed with having a functioning brain. Global warming may be real, but there is absolutely no evidence that it is man-made (moreover, there is ample evidence that the only culprit is the solar activity), and whether we act now or ever won't make a dent in the natural process at all. Sorry, John Kerry, you can't win not only an election, but even a simple argument.

Notice that now that the whole world is living through the coldest and harshest winter on record, global-warming proponents claim that this does not mean anything - high and low extremes are going to happen even in the overall warming climate, they say. OK, I can accept that. However, just IMAGINE for a second what those same people would have been saying had we been living through the WARMEST winter on record! "Told you! Global warming is HERE! Record high temperatures PROVE global warming, etc." So why doesn't extreme cold disprove global warming then?

I just love hearing them cite the stubborn facts only when they suit them! Hope the inventor of the man-made global warming, Al Gore is keeping his thermostat down in his mega-mansion to save the world from his mega-carbon footprint.

Quality of Life Index Just Published

My sister just sent me the information on the Quality of Life Index published by the International Living magazine. You can find the article here.

The article states that "194 countries are surveyed on nine criteria, including the cost of living, culture and leisure, environment, safety, culture and weather." The top 5 countries were:

1. France
2. Australia
3. Switzerland
4. Germany
5. New Zealand

The US is in the 7th place, Canada in the 9th, and the UK is in the 25th place trailing behind even Uruguay and some Eastern European countries.

CIA as Anti - "Crime Stoppers"

The whole situation with the Christmas airplane bomber does not make sense. A single young male from a Muslim country buying a one-way ticket for cash, flying without any luggage and carrying explosives with him "slips" through the secirity cracks. Mind you, his name is on the terror suspects' list which the airlines "forgot" to check, and his Dad personally went to the US Embassy in Nigeria to report his son as a terror threat. Pardon me for not buying the story. It definitely smells fishy like someone was deliberately looking the other way on multiple occasions. Experience - including my experience reading crime fiction and watching court TV - teaches me that when facts do not fit the story, the story is wrong.

A more likely scenario is that our government which has been trumpeting the end of the recession - which, obviously, is not ending - needs to somehow explain to the public the fact that things are not improving. They need a scapegoat to blame. Terrorism worked beautifully for them in September of 2001, and they rightfully concluded that it would work again. Only this time they did not dare - nor did they need to - to stage a full-scale attack. I suppose that people who valiantly fought the would-be attacker were planted on the plane to make sure this is exactly what happened. The effect is reached: no tragedy, but the public is jolted again with the "terror threat", Joe Liberman encourages us to start a pre-emptive war on Yemen (and on to Iran, no doubt), and any economic troubles can be written off to those new war expenditures which will be handsomely split among the insiders of the military-industrial complex. The public will be convinced that if not for the damned terrorists, we would have been out of the recession by now.

If you accept that scenario, then all of a sudden all the dots are connected into a picture which makes sense. But it is not a pretty picture, no doubt about that.

Anyway, this is not the point I am trying to get at. The biggest point I am trying to make is that by revealing the fact that the father of the "terrorist" went to the US authorities to warn them of his son's radical intentions, and by revealing the name of the father, our own intelligence service has committed a grave crime. A crime against its own citizens. There is little doubt that the father will eventually be killed. And all the relatives of would-be-terrorists saw the writing on the wall: if you want to prevent аn attack on Americans and report your terrorist relatives to the CIA, the CIA will do absolutely nothing about the attacks, but they will publish your name in every news outlet in the world.

The picture at the top should include a disclosure in small print: "But if you DO reveal your identity, we will be sure to make the whole world aware of it. Crime Stoppers Beware!"

This is a much more serious breach of our intelligence security than an irrelevant revelation of the name of some obscure Valerie Plame, which was politically made into such a big deal. Her life was never threatened, and she was not involved in a project protecting some vital and immediate interests of the United States.

The Nigerian banker Alhaji Umaru Mutallah is a true hero who the US has betrayed. Time to check the allegiances of the people who work for our CIA.

An Earth Shattering Discovery

A friend of ours told his daughter who was about to enter college that he would pay her tuition regardless of any major she chooses except psychology and education which he did not believe to be serious disciplines. This friend is a college professor, by the way. Naturally, he is a foreigner - British, to be exact. For an American to not consider education to be a reasonable field of study would have been blasphemous, no doubt.

Well, today, as I was sitting at a doctor's waiting room with my son, we were watching CNN Headline News where they reported an amazing latest discovery by the very education experts our friend denies the right to exist: that spanking is good for toddlers. Wow, wow, wow! What will American educational science discover next? That literacy is a useful skill to have for the majority of the population? That allowing bad students to fail a grade is actually good for them? What is this world coming to??!! We must be living in an age of the American educational science Renaissance!

Few people probably did more harm to this nation than education "experts" who instilled into generations of parents a notion that one has to foster a child's self esteem above everything else. Self esteem not based on any achievements, totally undeserved and unconditional. That rather than spanking a misbehaving child and teaching him that a certain behavior will not be tolerated (while quickly letting your own steam out), you need to engage in endless discussions with a 2-year-old about why you are asking him to stop, then sending him to his room, or taking away his favorite toy, only to discover years later that you have created a monster who is intolerant of any criticism, demands respect for anything he does, and does not respect anybody else in return.

Movies like "Avatar" and "discoveries" that spanking a toddler can do him good fill me with hope that maybe the nation is starting to heal from all the self-inflicted wounds of self-aggrandisement, ignorance and arrogance.

One last question: how much money did the "experts" get paid to conduct this breakthrough study?

Care to Connect the Dots?

These days there is a lot of talking about our security services failing to connect the dots with a supposed plane terrorist who allegedly tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas day. And there were many dots to connect, as it turns out.

This situation, though, illustrates very well what is wrong with other sides of the American civilization: we fail to connect the dots.

Take education, for example. We spend more than any other country on educating the nation's children, but the results are dismal at best. We pump in more money into doing some sham research to find out even better and more expensive ways to teach our kids, we spend a lot of time debating about what needs to be done, but we fail to see that one of the biggest problems in our education is its discrete character. There is no continuity of care, so to speak.

Our children have a new teacher every year. Moreover, once they start Middle School, they have a new teacher in EVERY SUBJECT EVERY YEAR. I read obituaries fairly regularly in our small town, and it is not uncommon to read absurd statements like "Mrs. So-and-So retired in 1998 after having taught 5th grade math for 40 years." WOW!!! How would you like to read that Dr. So-and-So retired from treating the left kidney for 40 years?

If you are only charged with teaching Math in 5th grade, your main concern is to get through the year and to have the kids pass a standardized test at the end of it. You basically don't care if they do not get some particular concept for life. They may need to have a full grasp of that concept in Algebra I in 8th grade, but that is not going to be your personal problem.

This is how they taught us in Russia which was a much poorer country than the US, but beat it in academic achievements of its school children in every subject hands down. We went to school for 10 years - 6 days a week. Grades 1-3 were the elementary school, 4-7 - the middle school, and 8-10 - the high school. All the grades were housed under one roof, and the schools were not as huge as the American ones - 900-1000 students max total in all grades combined.

In the elementary school we would have 1 teacher for all 3 years. So she knew that if she did not teach us to read well in the 1st grade, she personally would have to struggle with us for a couple more years. Starting with the Middle School, we would have the SAME math, geography, history, etc teachers who would teach us THROUGH THE HIGH SCHOOL. So our math teacher knew very well that if she did not drill multiplication of fractions into our heads in the 4th grade, she personally would have to reap the consequences of this later on. There was continuity of education.

Just imagine for a minute that there were no internal medicine doctors, and that the medicine were even more fractured and specialized than it is today: that some "specialists" treat only the right ankle, and some treat only the upper lobes of the lungs. How would you ever know what is wrong with you if there is NOBODY to see the whole picture and to know how treating one local problem is affecting the rest of the body?

I am not at all convinced in the reality of terrorism threat to the US, but I know for a fact that even the worst enemy would not be able to hurt the education of this country worse than we deliberately are doing it ourselves. Connect the dots, America!

No Heart - No Heart Trouble!

Rush Limbaugh who THOUGHT he had a heart attack, was examined at the hospital and released with "no heart trouble found," as MSNBC put it. That, of course, I could have told them even before any doctors saw this conservative guru. To have heart trouble one needs to heave a heart, which is not the case with this particular patient.

Another oxymoron is waiting for us in the elaboration of the same story in the news. After his release from the medical center, Mr. Limbaugh THOUGHT he made a case in defence of the status quo of the American medical system by saying that he got the best health treatment in the world "right here in the United States of America." If you didn't have a problem, and did NOT get any treatment for it, why on earth would you make any pronouncements regarding the supremacy of the health care you did not receive?

I have a premonition that Mr. Limbaugh in not at risk of developing not only heart trouble, but also a brain tumor.

I guess, good for him!

Georgian Department of Defence Quotes Adolf Hitler on TV as an Inspiration

Some of my readers may find it interesting that in the days prior to its attack on South Ossetia in August of 2008, Georgian Department of Defence had quoted Adolf Hitler in its army recruitment video clip which you can watch here or below:



The clip was removed after their utter defeat in this shameful campaign, but it resurfaced on the Internet sites since the recent demolition of the only World War II memorial in the city of Kutaissi, Georgia. Americans may want to know that the official Georgia erases memories of victories over Nazism, while at the same time quoting the great Nazi leader as an inspiration for its army recruits.

Some friends Senator McCain has!