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!

Give W Credit where it is due

George W Bush was evidently way smarter than he looked. It was a truly prophetic gesture to refuse to ratify the Rome Statute in 2002 which established the International Criminal Court in Hague, an international tribunal for persecuting war criminals. The USA is in great company here - other countries who refused to join the treaty were Israel, Russia and China. As a result, it turns out that Tony Blair can be tried as a war criminal for the act of aggression against Iraq (a violation of the international law), and W can't!

The movement to have Tony Blair tried as a war criminal is gaining steam in the UK - you can read more here.

Also today read a new article - brilliant and thought provocative as usual - by Paul Craig Roberts "Americans Are Hell-Bent of Tyranny."

Tell Me Who Your Friend is

The USA is squarely on the side of the "young Georgian democracy" in its conflicts with Russia. Here is what I - surprise, surprise! - do not see reported in our American propaganda - eh-h-h - news. The democratic republic of Georgia decided to blow up a WWII memorial. Let me remind you that the Soviet Union was the decisive force in the victory over the Nazi Germany having lost 27 million lives of its own citizens. Among those killed were 300,000 Georgians. Not to worry. The monument was to be demolished to make way for the construction of the new Georgian parliament building (curiously being moved outside of the Georgian capital Tbilisi). Mr. Saakashvili timed the demolition so that it would coincide with his birthday on December 21 (incidentally, that day is also the birthday of another famous Georgian, Stalin). Georgian opposition voiced their protests against the demolition which were, naturally, ignored in the best traditions of the Georgian democracy. Anyway, the blast was eventually held 2 days ahead of the schedule for reasons unexplained to the press. During the explosion a woman and her 8-year-old daughter were killed by a piece of debris which accidentally hit them.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Saakashvili! Hope you get a particularly tasteful tie as a present.

Great friends we have, really! Blowing up monuments to people who defeated fascism (blowing up their own citizens as a collateral damage, too). Huge portraits of Stalin can still be seen on the streets of Georgian cities. What do friendships like that say about us? Oh, wait. I remember that at some point Osama bin Laden was our friend. Never mind!

The news has been reported by Reuters, and some other Western media - but not the US. Oh, no, not the US. We do not report unpleasant news about our dear friends. We are all Georgians here, remember? Count me out.

The Real Size of the US Deficit in 2009 is $9 Trillion

I already mentioned the site http://www.shadowstats.com/ on my blog as a source of information about the economy which does not tweak the economic data to make it more palatable for the general public consumption, and does not put a positive spin on the numbers. The problem is that the site is not free. Well, I stumbled across a source which reports the recent information off that site in the open Internet. And what they are reporting is shocking.

It turns out that the release of an annual US deficit report by the US Treasury will be delayed by two months till at least February 2010. This deficit calculation uses the Generally Accepted Accounting (GAAP) principles, the same which are required of all of the US corporations. And according to the shadowstats website, it is going to show a deficit of $9 trillion in 2009 ALONE.

"The reason why the “official” deficit numbers are so radically different from the real budget numbers for the United States is that with GAAP accounting, the government is not allowed to hide its “unfunded liabilities” off of its balance sheet." You can read more on the story here.

So as a corporation, the US is almost bankrupt: with a $14-trillion-a-year GDP we can't be running annual deficits of $9-trillion for long.

So let us wait till February and see how much of this information we will be able to read in the - what some of my friends consider to be - American news.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words