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.