The Legal Alien

An important issue; an utterly disappointing book

2008-03-10T00:57:00.000-07:00

Here is my review of the book "The Case Against Adolescence" by Robert Epstein

*****************

I have read Dr. Epstein’s interview and an article on the net, and was very excited to read this book. Sadly, while his main idea is liberating and refreshing, the book itself is utterly disappointing. It is full of weak argumentation, selection and substitution of data, poor understanding of cultural context and betrays a certain agenda. In fact, if you are interested in the concept, IMO you can safely skip the book altogether and instead google Dr. Epstein’s articles, “The Myth of Teen Brain” and “Trashing Teens” – you’ll get the salient point and learn about Dr. Epstein novel research methodology, w\o the accompanying eyebrow-raising junk.

Dr. Epstein makes a bad call to foray into the history of childhood in order to support his argument against adolescence. The result is the opposite: he shoots himself in a foot. He follows Aries’s controversial “sentimentalist” point of view that the childhood itself had not existed until recently. He cites, e.g., Jean Ledloff’s and Margaret Mead’s work, which supposedly shows children fully integrated in the adult society, working alongside grown-ups. In reality, Ledloff has observed that yakuana children grouped themselves by age and spend a lot of time with their peers; even the vocabulary of different age groups differed considerably. They certainly weren’t expected to perform to adult’s standards, i.e., weren’t considered fully competent. Mead’s and other researcher’s extensive studies also showed that the maturity gap – the time period between hitting puberty and assuming fill adult responsibilities – has existed in virtually all cultures. It was decidedly much smaller than it is presently in the west, but denying its existence is inaccurate.

Dr. Epstein cheerfully describes traditional cultures, free of adolescent turmoil; apparently he isn’t aware that his accounts of child suffering, labor and war participation look decidedly bleak. One cannot help thinking that if Aries is right and childhood, as well as adolescence, hadn’t existed, than thank God almighty it has been invented. Consider the following passage: “… as many as eleven million young people live on the streets in India [..] young people constitute between 10 and 33 percent of the workforce in various industries [..] Many develop “resiliency” and “self-preservation skills,” but sometimes it means resorting to activities such as pimping, prostitution, theft, drug peddling and begging [..] adolescence is still largely absent in [..] this vast country,” – JEEZ, where do I sign up? %\

Dr. Epstein’s understanding of forces at play in other cultures is very poor. His account of Russia is off base, as is his take on a supposedly trouble-free adolescence in Japan (apparently, he has never heard of hikikomori and NEET). More importantly, Epstein seems to confuse the young adult’s psychological health and well-adjusted behavior with lack of individuation (not to be confused with individualism). The lack of individuation results from authoritative parenting and growing up in the culture where the person has little intrinsic value apart from being a part of the community – a cog in the wheel. When this is beaten into the person’s head from the earliest age, rebellion is simply not an option. Epstein misses this aspect of the problem entirely. While writing about the trouble-free adolescence in Philippines, he mentions the following: “Daughters are more obligated than sons to work abroad to support the family during tough times”. In plain English, that means that young females are routinely sold into human trafficking (prostitution or domestic service=servitude) and are expected to take it in stride for the good of the family. Could it be that THIS is what the Filipino teens are beginning to rebel against?

The latter example illustrates that the traditional trouble-free adolescent experience has been markedly different for young males and females, and that is also lost on Dr. Epstein. As bad as the tendencies in western adolescence have been, they have done away with the exploitative marriages of young females. Dr. Epstein speaks very positively about early marriages, glossing over the fact that those were often done against the woman’s will, and limited the public and historical roles of women. His apparent fixation on barely pubescent brides has made me somewhat uncomfortable, and his reference to Nabokov’s Lolita as “the sexy young siren” has made my jaw drop. I really, really hope that this is not what I think it is, and that Dr. Epstein simply hasn’t read the book he is referring to.

He makes another blunder in his psychological analysis of “The Lord of the Flies” as it pertains to the problem of child competence and adolescence, which borders on ignorance. Let’s for a moment forget the metaphorical nature of the “Lord of the Flies” plot, and accept that it has a literal meaning relevant to our topic. Dr. Epstein states that “the story is an acknowledgment that young people can be tough and self-sufficient, at least when the adults aren’t here to take care of them”. If you are fuzzy on the book’s content, pick it up and you’ll see that those self-sufficient young people self-organize in a brutal way and kill their peers – I can’t believe that Dr. Epstein considers it a sign of those kids’ competence. Second, he states that “the characters never broke down [..] until the adults showed up [..] they were never child-like – until they were expected to be”. I am utterly flabbergasted that a professional psychologist would make such a statement. The kids broke down precisely because everything that was happening to them has just too much, and now they finally didn’t have to hold themselves together on the brink of collapse. Indeed, people can survive unbelievable hardships, but the stress robs the person of vital energy and may irreversibly stunt psychological growth. This has been described multiple times in the literature – surely Dr. Epstein is aware of that?

As if this all wasn’t bad enough, Dr Epstein advocates corporal punishment for teens, and it is here that all of the above comes together. Under the guise of teen liberation it is the same old obey-your-elders, toughen’em up, spare-the-rode-spoil-the-child nonsense, discredited thousand times over.

This ties directly to Epstein’s view of anti-child labor movement as well-meaning but ultimately misguided and harmful to kids. Make no mistake: if Dr. Epstein’s idea were to take hold, you will see young adults and, by extension, children, back in the sweatshops in no time. The looming economic crisis may provide a real necessity for this, and Dr. Epstein’s concept will serve as an ideological basis for such movement. As usual, that will only apply to poor and underprivileged teens and children. Conveniently, those more privileged, such as Dr. Epstein’s own children, have nothing to worry about. For them there will always be wilderness camps where they could be toughened up for a few thousand buck, while their parents are busy raising their “easy” siblings or doing whatever interests them more (see p. 103 of the book for context).

The above, however, is the worst-case scenario. I do not forsee anyone taking Dr. Epstein’s utopian recommendation of competence-based transition to adulthood. While age is indeed the legal barrier of entry into the adult society, it is a proxy not for general maturity but rather for a minimum set of skills. The demand for the actual competence in our fast-paced society changes daily. Therefore, formal degreed education remains a good benchmark for the person’s skills – and as time goes by, more and more education and related experience, including low level work, is needed to prove your worth. Obtaining one’s M.Ds and PhDs and building the CV takes time and effectively shuts young people out of the adult world.

The limitation of the young people’s entry into the society IMO stems not so much from cultural factors but from the structural ones. The western society is getting increasingly complex, while the basic resources, for the first time in the history of humanity, are available almost to all. In such situation, it is more rational for the society to keep some of its members idle rather than try and include them into the structure, jeopardizing its orchestrated work. A similar situation exists in ant colonies and in the communities of other social insects. In any ant hill, the majority of worker ants are idle. Young ants are taught nothing and instead are routinely chased away by older ants. Food is not a limited factor in the colony. But it is risky to disrupt the working groups, where leaders have proven themselves and everyone understands the hierarchial structure and works together. As a result, the young ants learn what they can on their own and create their own groups, which in the opportune times find ways to be useful for the colony.

In my view, the only way to combat the real problem of dysfunctional adolescence in the western world is being a counter-culturist within your own family. This means maintaining close and trusting relationship with your growing children, fighting the influence of media; encouraging your teens to homeschool themselves, take advantage of volunteer opportunities, facilitating their business initiatives – in short, helping them develop self-reliance, resilience and leadership qualities in a nurturing environment.

2008-03-09T15:40:00.000-07:00

so let me recap the whole Eric Pepin story -- it is unbelievable.

First, the guy barely gets out of the nasty lawsuit with molestation and sexual misconduct charges. He gets aquitted on the "reasonable doubt" shtick -- in other words, the defense succeded in painting his accuser as an untrustworthy character and confuses him into contradicting himself.

Obviously, as it is all occuring, this all is published in mainstream media, people talk about it.

People also talk about it on public internet forums. One such discussion occurs on the SOTT forum. People talk about whether his dubious meditation program works, quote the articles about him, make conclusions.

SOTT, if you don't know, is non-profit, and its whole existence is dedicated to public service of educating people about deviant personalities in politics, business and private life.

Pepin then self-publishes a news release where he describes the details of the court and says that his accusers have made it up -- of course, there is no way to check that independently

http:[..]//www.send2press.com/newswire/2008-02-0219-003.shtml

this appears on February 19th.

On March 5th the SOTT is served a lawsuit.

Around the same time the high-profile links in the guruphiliac blog, in which Pepin's trial is detailed in an unfavorable light, goes dead.

The caches are available for your consideration:

here and

here

Methinks Eric Pepin doth protesteth too much, as he seems to be instituting a total sweep of the dirt on him that's available on the Internet.

If anything has hurt his business and reputation, it is his own frivolous actions and the media attention to them, and not public discussion of those.

Getting together and talking, comparing notes and sharing information is the ONLY THING that people have in the face of corporate lies and deceit.

So yes, it is a free speech issue, and the precedent would reverberate widely throughout the Internet forums and communities.

Pepin seems to act like a bully. He must have been thinking that slamming people at SOTT with a lawsuit will shut them up. And yet, the opposite has happened -- there is more talk now about the whole affair than never before.

Whatever happens now -- he will regret it, because the informational spill can no longer be contained.

Bad call, Master Eric.

this is BIG:

2008-03-09T15:35:00.000-07:00

Internet Free Speech Under Threat! Eric Pepin - Higher Balance Institute Sue SOTT for 4.47 Million Over SOTT Forum Comments!

by Laura Knight-Jadczyk

Yesterday, as I was working on finishing up the next installment of the Comet Series of Articles, FedEx delivered a packet of mail from our corporate registered agent in the U.S. It was "Complaint and Demand for Jury Trial" filed in the State of Oregon by Eric Pepin's Higher Balance Institute, LLC. The reason? A discussion on the SOTT Forum that begins HERE.

Well, that was entertaining enough when you think about the fact that the discussion that he objects to was centered on several newspaper articles that describe his close calls with the legal system in Oregon over charges of sex abuse.

The legal document I received is 10 pages long so I'm just going to summarize it here. If you want to read the whole thing (it's hilarious beyond belief!) go HERE for the pdf.

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF OREGON

Civil No.: CV '08-0233 HA

COMPLAINT AND DEMAND FOR JURY TRIAL

HIGHER BALANCE, LLC, an Oregon
Limited Liability Company, dba HIGHER
BALANCE INSTITUTE, Plaintiff

v.

QUANTUM FUTURE GROUP, INC, a
California corporation, and LAURA
KNIGHT- JADCZYK, Defendants.

Plaintiff Higher Balance LLC, dba Higher Balance Institute ("HBI") files this Complaint against defendants Quantum Future Group, Inc. ("QFG") and Laura Knight-Jadczyk and alleges the following:

...defendants committed intentional torts that were purposefully targeted at HBI within the State of Oregon; defendants knew that HBI is a resident of the State of Oregon; defendants' tortious conduct cause HBI to suffer economic harm within the State of Oregon; HBI's claims arise out of defendants' activities relating to the State of Oregon; and the exercise of jurisdiction over defendants is reasonable in light of their intentional misconduct directed towards a resident of the State of Oregon.

As this Court has specific personal jurisdiction over the defendants, venue is proper in this district and division under 28 U.S.C 1391(a)(3)

General Allegations:

HBI is an Oregon-based company with over 40,000 customers from all over the world. HBI is dedicated to helping its customers relieve stress, reduce anxiety, and achieve emotional balance and spiritual enlightenment through meditation techniques. The majority of HBI's revenues are derived from the online sale of its books and CDs, which are designed to help its customers learn these meditation techniques.

[Etc...]

Defendant QFG operates a website known as Signs of the Times ("SOTT"). QFG posts articles and sponsors forums regarding various conspiracy theories and allegedly corrupt organizations on the SOTT website.

Employees and agents of QFG, including defendant Knight-Jadczyk, serve as administrators and moderators of SOTT forums. QFG employees and agents, including defendant Knight-Jadczyk, post comments and analyses in SOTT forums. These employees and agents act within the course and scope of their agency for QFG when serving as administrators and moderators of the SOTT website and when posting comments and analyses on the SOTT website.

SOTT forums are available to the general public online.

...Many of HBI's existing and potential customers read the SOTT website as a source of alternative media....

FIRST CLAIM FOR RELIEF - Defamation - Libel

....Beginning in May 2006, QFG sponsored a forum on the SOTT website concerning HBI under the heading "COINTELPRO."

Beginning in November 2007, defendants intentionally posted several false, baseless, and derogatory accusations concerning HBI on the SOTT website including, but not limited to:

a. HBI is a "front for pedophilia";
b. HBI is a "cointelpro" organization;
c. Meditation, as sold by HBI, is an act of "falling into confluence with a psychopathic reality";
d. Those associated with HBI must be careful to avoid sexual molestation by HBI members;
e. HBI is conning the public;
f. "Fishy sexual conduct is occurring at HBI; and
g. HBI "leads people more deeply into sleep."

By posting these statements in a public internet forum, defendants have published and communicated false and baseless accusations concerning HBI to third parties, including existing and potential HBI customers.

Defendants' statements tend to subject HBI to hatred, contempt, and ridicule and tend to diminish the esteem, respect, goodwill and confidence in which HBI is held by the public and by its customers.

Defendant made these false statements with knowledge of their falsity or with reckless disregard for their truth.

As a result of defendants' false and defamatory statement, HBI suffered general damages in the form of loss of reputation in an amount to be determined at trial, but in any event, not less than $500,000. HBI has also suffered special damages in the form of lost income in amounts to be determined at trial, but in any event, not less than $834,732.

Defendants defamatory statements are still available to the general public on the SOTT website and are easily found through internet searches relating to HBI. Defendants conduct causes HBI irreparable harm, and HBI is entitled to an injunction preventing defendants' continued defamation of HBI.

SECOND CLAIM FOR RELIEF: False Light

Defendants intentionally gave publicity to matters concerning HBI that placed HBI in a false light before the public. etc

...economic damages ... not less than $834,732.

THIRD CLAIM FOR RELIEF: Intentional Interference with Economic Relations - Interference with Business Relationships

Defendant intentionally interfered with many of these business relationships by communicating the false and defamatory information listed...

...economic damages ... not less than $97,299.

HBI... has also suffered damages in the form of loss of reputation ... damages .... not less than $500,000.

...Defendants conduct was malicious and warrants punitive damages...

FOURTH CLAIM FOR RELIEF: Intentional Interference With Economic Relations - Prospective Economic Advantage

Defendant's interference has diminished the esteem, respect, goodwill, and confidence in which HBI is held by the general public, thereby hindering HBI's ability to obtain many new customers with whom HBI had a prospective business relationship. ... damages to be determined at trial...

...On its First Claim for Relief, that HBI be awarded general and special damages in amounts to be determined at trial, but in any event, not less than $1,334,732, and that defendants be enjoined from their continued defamation of HBI.

...On its Second Claim for Relief, that HBI be awarded damages in an amount to be determined at trial, but in any event, not less than $1,334,732. and that defendants be enjoined from continuing to place HBI in a false light.

...On its Third Claim for Relief, that HBI be awarded damages in an amount to be determined at trial, but in any event, not less than $597,299. plus punitive damages, and that defendants be enjoined from their coninued interference with HBI's prospective business relationships.

...On its Fourth Claim for Relief, that HBI be awarded damages in an amount to be determined at trial, but in any event, not less than $1,205,000 plus punitive damages, and that defendants be enjoined from their continued interference with HBI's business relationships.

... That HBI be awarded pre-judgment and post-judgment interest on all damages recovered.

...That HBI be awarded its costs and disbursements incurred in this action; ...

Harry and David demands a trial by jury on all issues so triable.

25th day of February, 2008.

Bullivant houser Bailey PC
Renee E. Rothauge
Chad M. Colton
Tel 503.228.6351
Attorneys for Higher Balance Institute

Whoah! That's some heavy duty stuff, eh? Sounds like we just ripped up on that poor guy for no reason at all!

But that's not quite the situation. The original article about Eric Pepin that was brought to our attention on page 5 of the above-mentioned forum thread read as follows:

A 39-year-old Aloha man who promises spiritual awakening through meditation books and CDs he sells on the Internet is facing sex-abuse charges.

Beaverton police Detective Mike Smith said Eric J. Pepin runs what appears to be a cult out of his Higher Balance Institute on Southwest Second Street in Beaverton.

Pepin was arraigned Tuesday in Washington County criminal court on one count of using a child in a display of sexually explicit conduct, two counts of second-degree sexual abuse, and four counts of third-degree sexual abuse. He was released after posting $26,750 cash, or 10 percent of $267,500 bail. A trial was set for Sept. 12.

Using a child in a sexual display is a Measure 11 crime punishable by a mandatory minimum of 5 years and 10 months in prison.

Jamison Dwight Priebe, 21, who works for Pepin and lives at the same address in the 19600 block of Southwest Cooperhawk Court in Aloha, also was arrested on one count each of using a child in a sexual display and third-degree sexual abuse.

Priebe and Pepin turned themselves in at the Washington County Jail last week after a grand jury handed down secret indictments. Priebe was released after posting $25,375 cash bail and is awaiting arraignment Monday.

Smith said a man who is now 20 was 17 and working for Pepin when he allegedly was sexually abused at the Higher Balance office in the 11900 block of Southwest Second Street in Beaverton and at Pepin's former home in the city.

A call to the Higher Balance Institute on Wednesday was answered by a "Personal Star Reach Coach," who referred questions to Pepin's private attorney, Sam Kauffman.

"The charges are false, and we are confident Mr. Pepin will be exonerated," Kauffman said.

Pepin's Web site claims he has located more than 100 missing persons and runaways, along with U.S. Navy submarines, through a psychic ability he calls "remote viewing."

Pepin's meditation systems, which sell for $79 to $149, help customers develop their "sixth sense" and apply it "inward to awaken a dimensional universe within the mind," the Web site says.

According to an affidavit Smith filed with a request for a search warrant, the alleged victim told police that Internet customers who rave about Pepin's teachings are men and women usually older than 35. But, the man said Pepin told him he should recruit "good-looking men" between the ages of 18 and 24 to work for him.

The court record also says Pepin knew the man was 17 when he forced him to perform sex acts.

The boy, Smith wrote, "was taught by Pepin to believe that the sexual contact was only a spiritual necessity." But after a while, the affidavit says, the boy decided he was being used by Pepin, who bought him meals and paid him $200 after sex.

The man contacted Beaverton police in January.

Smith said anyone who may have had underage sexual contact with Pepin should call him at 503-526-2280.

Smith said the man accusing Pepin told police he met one of Pepin's followers at Beaverton Town Square in April 2004. He told Smith the recruiter invited him to meet Pepin and see him demonstrate levitation.

Pepin introduced himself dressed in a robe emblazoned with the words "Master Eric" and a triangular symbol and told the victim to take off his shirt, the detective said.

"It's a cult," Smith said, "anytime you have a guy who fancies himself as the master, the leader."

In another story from Associated Press found HERE, we read:

Beaverton police Detective Mike Smith said Pepin operated the Higher Balance Institute in Beaverton. Smith said the ornate robe emblazoned "Master Eric" turned up during a search.

Well, I've been falsely accused of trying to start a cult myself, so I might ordinarily have had sympathy for Pepin, but when I read the bit about the robe, I blew my tea through my nose. I guess that's why I'm such a failure as a cult-leader (aside from the fact that I'm not interested in the job) - I hardly ever wear anything other than sweats and bedroom slippers and spend all my time working!

In any event, even though a grand jury felt that there was enough evidence to indict Pepin, he was eventually acquitted in trial before a judge as the following report informs us:

Institute leader acquitted of sex charges

HOLLY DANKS - HILLSBORO -- A Washington County Circuit judge called the leader of a metaphysical Internet sales company manipulative and controlling and his testimony unbelievable, even as he acquitted him Wednesday of charges that he had sex with an underage boy.

Judge Steven L. Price, after a five-day trial without a jury, found Eric James Pepin, 40, not guilty of two counts of second-degree sexual abuse, four counts of third-degree sexual abuse and one count of using a child in a display of sexually explicit conduct.

Also acquitted of third-degree sexual abuse and using a child in a pornographic display was Jamison Dwight Priebe, 21, who has worked for Pepin's Higher Balance Institute since he was 18.

"Everybody has stood by me who knows me," Pepin said Wednesday after hugging supporters. "They had faith in me, prayed for me. I told them I wouldn't let them down. I did nothing of what was alleged. I've been nothing but honorable and impeccable."

However, Price said it was "probable that the conduct alleged in all counts occurred," but he wasn't convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. "There's a lack of strong corroboration," such as a date-stamp on a videotape of the sexual encounter, the judge said.

The accuser testified Pepin had him take off his shirt the first day they met at Pepin's Beaverton home in April 2004.

"He was going to try and fix my energy and he needed me to trust him," the accuser said. Pepin touched the teen's "chakra points" on his heart, head and lower abdomen.

"Eric asked me to tell him everything I had done in my life that I was ashamed about," the teen added.

The accuser said Pepin asked him how old he was the first day they met and that he told him the truth.

"He said students had to be 18 because he didn't like parents fussing around," the accuser said.

But within days the two were having sex, including a three-way encounter with Priebe, the youth testified. Pepin called it "crossing the abyss," the accuser said, "surrendering yourself to your teacher, your master."

Pepin testified he is gay and has had sexual relationships with most of his 11 employees, but not before they were 18. Pepin said he gave his accuser a job, even though the teen was a poor worker, and continued to be intimate with him and give him money after he was fired, to help him out.

Stephen A. Houze, Pepin's private defense attorney, called the accuser a liar more than 100 times in his closing argument and noted that Pepin was "the perfect patsy" because society wants to believe the worst of a gay man. Houze said the accuser brought the charges because he wanted to shake down Pepin.

Pepin's Higher Balance Institute, now on Northwest Saltzman Road in Cedar Mill, reached an annual high of $2 million in Internet sales of meditation CDs, tapes and books before his arrest in July.

Pepin touts himself as a psychic and "remote viewer" who has found lost submarines and missing people, and says he created the "psychic pill" Magneurol6-S that enhances brain function, heals nerve damage, heightens paranormal experiences and relieves stress for $79 a bottle.

Andrew Erwin, deputy district attorney, called Higher Balance nothing more than a sex cult run by a "snake oil" salesman who preys on the troubled.

The accuser had nothing to gain by going to police and turned down $250,000 from Pepin to drop the sex charges, Erwin said.

"I'm disappointed," Erwin said of the verdicts. "The judge wants proof beyond all doubt and that's too high a standard."

And now, Pepin wants to sue QFG and yours truly for talking about these articles, published in a newspaper and scattered across the web (though all of them are no longer on the newspaper's website, wonder what's up with that?)!!

Notice that Pepin, himself, revealed his "sex cult" practices in his own testimony. We'll be trying to get transcripts of the trial to publish so our readers can hear it from the horse's mouth; stay tuned for that.

Notice also that Pepin's attorney, Houze, accused the victim of bringing charges because he wanted to shake down Pepin even though the kid turned down 250 K hush money offered by Pepin. Well, maybe that's what gave Pepin the idea of suing me. Only thing is, he's gonna have a hard time collecting his 4.47 million because I don't own a thing, live in a rented house, drive a used car and QFG rarely has more than a grand in the bank at any given time. When we have fund-raisers, the funds are used almost instantly, repaying loans and covering basic expenses for the site and equipment.

It's also humorous that Pepin is suing QFG which only sponsors a world-wide group of independent researchers who, together, make up sott.net. QFG doesn't own sott, nor does QFG have any employees nor any official oversight of anything that the sott.net researchers say or do.

But the bottom line is this: Eric Pepin is convicted out of his own mouth of being a sexual predator. I mean, what kind of teacher of meditation says that he has sex with all his employees? And all of them young men?

Nope, we aren't backing down. We firmly believe, based on available official documents and court records, that Eric Pepin is a danger to innocent people looking for spiritual guidance. Obviously, young guys just looking for sex and money and a good time will be delighted to take his pills, listen to his tapes and attend his retreats. But the wider public who are not aware of these things in Pepin's background, who are not aware that even the judge who acquitted him regretted having to do so, and that the Prosecutor of the case was also convinced that justice had NOT been done, need to be warned about this sexual predator in our midst.

Maybe Eric Pepin will take Sott.net down, we don't know. We don't have money for an expensive defense attorney, we barely stay afloat. But even if that happens (and we hope our readers will help us out now as never before), there are others who know and I don't think that Eric Pepin and all his minions can track down and silence all of them.

Even if you can't give to our legal defense fund, I will appreciate letters of support during this trying time. Write to sott(at)sott.net and I will try to answer each and every one.

And thanks to all our readers for your constant support and encouragement.

Comment: Oregon police say man abused teen in cult-like operation
"Two Aloha men arrested on sex-abuse charges"
Leader of Washington County Internet company acquitted of sex abuse
Sexual predators in the religious scene

Make no mistake about it: This is an attack on internet freedom and freedom of speech, plain and simple. If Eric Pepin were to win, based on the accusations in the complaint, it would set a precedent that would reverberate across the world. It would make anyone who had a different opinion or view of the world - other than that which is approved by the PTB - subject to suppression and censure. The issues of psychopathy and conspiracy are specifically named in the complaint as well as the connection between religion and making money. If this suit were to succeed, it would significantly chill further discourse about conspiracies, pathological deviance, mind control methods and real cults, including the Judao-Islamo-Christian dominator trio. It would be a disaster.

And so, I think we can begin to notice who is and is not interested in assisting us in publicizing this threat, what so-called "alternative news" sites or "conspiracy theory" sites are willing to come to our aid in facing this threat against all of us on the net.

Certainly there are people and sites that have felt the sting of our critique and we have felt theirs more than once. This is the watershed. As Martin Niemöller said:

"In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up."

It's time for those who stand for freedom of speech, for our First Amendment Rights, to speak up or forever be silenced. Because that is what will happen if Eric Pepin and the Higher Balance Institute prevail. He will create the precedent for total suppression for the PTB masters whether that is his intention or not.

and the most disgusting adoption ad award goes to ...

2008-03-09T15:31:00.000-07:00

this one:

This is selfish, disfunctional and insulting to adoptees worldwide.

Children are not supposed to satisfy the emotional needs of adults. It is the opposite: adults are meant to support and nurture the children.

Sadly, the adoption discourse today often confuses the two. This ad only reflects what many people think adoption is all about.

Sickening.

Survival in Times of Uncertainty: growing up in Russia in the 1990-s

2008-01-22T02:13:00.000-08:00

News about political upheavals, signs of impending economic disaster or projected natural catastrophes tend to generate strong “fight or flight” emotional reactions in readers. We want to sell all we own, run for the hills and barricade ourselves in a fully stocked compound -- preferably one with a bomb and meteorite shelter attached to it.

Major changes to our lifestyle are inevitable; yet the time frame and the exact way the changes will occur are uncertain, which only adds to our stress. To put some further food for thought out there, I would like to share what I remember from growing up in Russia during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the accompanying economic upheaval, i.e., during the time of high uncertainty. This will by no means be an exhaustive account. I was 10 when the Perestroika started in 1985. The economic situation got progressively worse, with the very worst hitting in the early 90-s. I admit I don’t remember things as well as I should have. Psychologically and physically, I was sheltered by my age and its petty egotistical concerns, by my parents’ effort to provide for the family, and by living in a close-knit community that had a lot of strength, spirit and intellectual resources. Now that I think about it though, memories and conclusions are coming up that I never thought about. Some of them are unexpected and counterintuitive to the prevailing survivalist mentality; but they may be relevant to the coming changes and end up being useful to someone.

The crisis in Russia was as much ideological as it was economical. People had to let go of everything they believed in, in an unconsciously religious sense. The history of the last 70 years and beyond was completely re-written in my school books, with good guys and bad guys switched around, by the time I was graduating from high-school. People have found themselves in the midst of a national identity crisis, with their cultural background being modified or erased, and together with it, their self-respect based on their country’s achievement. While neither the “democracy” nor the "free market” constitute a truly robust ideology for the masses, people in the US have a sense of entitlement and believe in the superiority in their way of living. Therefore, one might expect some confusion and disorientation when their illusion of the USA being the “beacon of light” for the world collapses in shambles.

The federal government used to plan and control every aspect of one’s life in Russia. While inefficient, it did provide a sense of security and self-righteous comfort. Now this way of life has disappeared in a flash, giving way to a very uncertain future. USA has long-lasting traditions of local control and the entrepreneurial spirit, but people in Russia had to learn those from scratch or rediscover within themselves. However, there was also an upside of the centralized government-run economy. First, there was no major housing crisis. Housing in the USSR was government-owned, and eventually was privatized by residents; quite a few fortunes made and lost, and individual tragedies happened, but the majority of people kept a roof over their heads. Second, not as many people were actually laid off from their jobs. The government institutions and services were hit very hard, the industry was at standstill, and some plants did close. Most, however, simply didn’t pay their workers money for months and there was very little work to do. But things were still moving, public transportation was working, and people still had access to basic medical care and services. In the US, the organizations and enterprises would function more efficiently, but if they don’t, people would simply be thrown out on the street.

The immediate bodily memory from that time that comes to mind is the sensation of cold. Cold winters, faltering heat, cold homes, cold classrooms in college; wearing coats in lecture halls and hallways, pen ink freezing. Warm clothes and small space heaters are a must-have :) Also, vitamins and supplements are great items to have on hand. I remember a large bottle of multivitamins from some western charity’s “humanitarian aid”, and how much better we felt after taking them.

By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in December of 1991, the retail stores were routinely empty. In the winter of 91-92, the starvation on a national scale was narrowly averted. In 1992, “The First Default” hit and the currency took a plunge, obliterating everyone’s savings. I went to college later that year, and my stipend, which long time ago was supposed to cover one's basic living expenses in a free student housing, was just enough to buy a chocolate bar.

To survive, people went to subsistance farming. Everybody had a "dacha" -- a small plot of land, sometimes with a summer house, sometimes not; whoever didn’t have one rushed to get it. A plot of land just over an acre, planted compactly with all kinds of things, plus a smaller plot of potatoes, fed the family of four through the year. Tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage etc were pickled and canned; berries and apples were made into jams and "compot" -- a kind of boiled sweet drink; potatoes and root vegetables were stored in a root cellar.

Those who, before the default, had put their money into tangible media, were able to do better financially. Foreign currency which retained its value was a popular choice. Also, it had proved useful to have at hand some valuable everyday items, such as alcohol, cigarettes, chocolate, followed by soaps, cosmetics, etc. These weren't used as much for bartering as a currency of its own for services rendered.

As I was thinking about this topic, I was struck by the following realization, counterintuitive but supported by evidence. The limiting factor in the survival, on both the level of the individual and the community, was NOT the ability to produce your own products and NOT even the available resources or lack of them. It was transport and infrastructure – the ability to trade, deliver your surplus elsewhere and from there get other things you need.

This is why the countryside and the small town in Russia took a very hard hit in the 90-s, and may never fully recover, as some say. One would think it should be exactly the opposite – people would have gone into the remote villages and lives off the land and the woods. However, even in the most self-sufficient household, one cannot produce or make everything he or she needs. And being in a remote location precludes one from delivering their surplus to other in a timely manner for trading or exchange, especially with the roads being as atrocious as they are (a problem endemic to Russia, but can be an important factor elsewhere as well). Plus, as the government budgets dry up, the collective farm go bust, the village school is closed, the general store (already empty) is closed; there is no library, no cars and no gas for them, no TV reception – in short, absolutely nothing to do other than to drink yourself into oblivion, making bad home-made vodka of your decaying surplus grain – and the sense of community is gone, people are getting away like rats off a sinking ship. The “dachas”, mentioned earlier, were a different matter – they were clustered in suburbs and used by town dwellers, and they were flourishing, but in the villages there are many deserted houses to this day.

A similar thing happened in small towns. E.g., in the town of where my relatives had resided (population 15, 000), the only industrial enterprise – an assembly line for radio-transmitters – had closed; the rest of the industry (a bakery and a milk and cheese processing facility) served local needs only. IN a town such as that, the roads are better, and one can bring in things to trade – but one can only sell as much as people can purchase, and people can’t purchase much since there is no other way to make money besides the meager salaries of teachers and doctors. Again, the sense of community weakens, people begin to leave.

Those who stayed back and managed to work in the new conditions: reorganize the collective farms efficiently, run their own personal farms, organize local industries (my relatives had a small fish-smoking plant that was making good profit) and revitalized their communities through those activities, did well though.

The lesson from this is that the desire to hide out in the boondocks results from a ‘fight or flight’ emotional response to a stressful situation, and in a long run is counterproductive. Instead, a survivor should network within the community, stay just close enough to major traffic routes, keep the transportation lines are open, and have some kind of vehicle in one’s disposal. A truck is good, if there is reliable fuel available (the rising prices of oil should be considered). A horse too, if things get THAT bad. It is best to be by a river or another body of water, it is very good to live by the bridge, ferry or a dock on one’s property, and a boat.

In the 90-s Russia, a lot of people who had bleak job situation and “no marketable skills”, as we would say, got involved in transport and trade, which serves to further emphasize the importance of infrastructure for survival. These people were called “chelnoki” (“chelnok” means “a shuttle”). One could recognize them by the giant striped plastic coffers they were carrying around. In the early days, somebody could board the train, go to the Chinese border, fill the coffers with mass-made cheap flip-flops or hair scrunchies, bring the back to town and resell for profit in retail or in bulk to other traders who would take it further. Other people went to Poland, Bulgaria or Turkey. Very soon, these importing operations became more centralized. Many traders would go to the bulk warehouses in bigger cities, buy whatever they specialize in, and take it to corner markets for miles around, reselling for profit.

This is where having a vehicle really comes in handy. E.g., an acquaintance’s family, through some scheme or other, owned a truck, the size of a small U-haul. At first, the parents were selling clothes form the back of the truck in the market. Later, the father began working as hired driver for a bigger operation, and the mother no longer had to work; with all that, they were earning noticeably more than college professors with extra income, and had no need for a “dacha”, being able to buy everything they need in the market. More often though, the trading, and whatever else, were done on top of the subsistence farming.

One thing that is important to mention is that the organized crime moved in VERY quickly to control all the trade and businesses. Mafia and gangs banded together based on location and\or ethnicity. Therefore, one shouldn’t be afraid so much of people with guns who come to take your food away, but rather of people who come with guns and demand a regularly paid share of your profit or surplus. This is another downside of survival in a remote location: pathocratic organizations can only be countered with an educated and decisive community effort.

To reflect the growing instability, in Russia, personal and corporate security grew as an industry. Many ex-army officers and military conflict veteran got involved into the security business. Self-defense items like Mace, electric shock devices, knifes were sold; martial arts and weight-lifting became popular. People were putting steel doors on deadbolts and steel bars on the windows on their apartments, not paying attention to fire safety. A lot of people got large dogs, a Rottweiler or a German shepherd (which really isn’t a good idea in small apartments), and insisted in training them to attack.

With organized crime comes, well, all kinds of vice and the surrounding industry – gambling, prostitution, drugs and human trafficking. The not-so-glamorous past of some of the top Russian fashion models goes back to those kinds of things. One should be aware of that and protect the most vulnerable in the community.

Another surprisingly counterintuitive point is directly linked to the above, or rather to the underlying general values and the self-serving aspect of the human behavior. The bare necessities were essential, for sure. But they weren’t things that were traded in the most visibly brisk way. Rather, those were the unessential items that symbolized status, from tiny trinkets like chewing gum to jeans, fox fur hats, and entertainment centers to luxuries like certain antics and such. A couple of recent studies, aiming at figuring out correlation between earnings and happiness, showed that isn’t so much the absolute income as the fact that you are earning more than your neighbor that makes people happy. Another reason may be that those things served as a measure of prosperity that made one feel that his or her hard work is paying off. Human nature, I guess. I remember in the winter of 93-94 walking around the city’s main street and going into a store – not the fanciest one either – just to stare at a bottle of liquor that cost more than 1 mln rubles. To get it into a prospective, my straight A monthly stipend was a couple of thousand rubles which could buy me a few large chocolate bars (things have gotten better since 1992 :)). Yet, there was that bottle, waiting for its buyer, and there were people in the city who could have bought it and probably eventually did. This could give us some idea as to what kinds of items may be useful in the coming economic crisis for the trade with the outside. E.g., animal breeders were doing well – and one could understand the demand for large guard dogs, but somehow even in the hardest of times there were people who would sink $100 (yes, dollars, i.e., many monthly stipends) on a rare Persian kitten. Some poor teachers or librarians were literally living off their pets, selling the litter and spinning wool out of the fur and down.

Personal survival and the survival of the family depended on a right mix of flexibility, on one hand, and staying true to oneself on the other. The more invested people were in their job-related identities and past achievements, the worse it was for them. In general, women fared better than men. The elderly were in trouble. When it came to the worldview adjustment, the middle-age men were hit hardest; too many were paralyzed with all the changes and were content to sit around in their cold and empty engineering or accounting offices, drinking tea or stronger drinks and swearing at the government. Oftentimes, it was their wives who buckled down and traveled the railroad with the striped coffers in hand. The birthrate plunged. The children who were born during that time exhibited more language delays and other learning problems (I have seen a crude estimate of 15-20% increase from early education specialists) than those born a decade before or after.

Younger men, those in their 20-s or early 30-s, took the plunge more often, going off the beaten career tracks and into either business or organized crime, or both, as it happened. Some of them were quite successful; I am not talking about oligarchs who had plenty of connections to begin with – just the average folk. Yet, presently, the life span of men in Russia is mid-fifties, 12 years lower than that of women, and there is another demographic gap among the males in their late 30-s and 40-s. A lot of the latter were simply killed off in gang wars of the 90-s; other are now succumbing from the delayed effect of stress: heart attacks and degenerative diseases.

In my community most people worked in academia or research. Those jobs were severely affected by the budget cuts and delayed salary payments. Yet, among the intelligentsia, leaving the academic career to trade goods in the market was viewed as selling one’s soul to the devil. Some people have disregarded that prejudice; and some of those who put a sincere effort in their new endeavors ended up being quite happy with their choices, not marred by their former collegues’ bitterness over their success in their less than noble pursuits.

However, those who stayed in academia approached the situation differently as well. Some just droned day in and day out, accomplishing little. Others looked for opportunities in the industry. A lot of professors and researchers were getting R&D contracts with governmental and business organizations, to help support their budgets. Still others refused to compromise and stuck to their principles of doing what you love, i.e., fundamental research, and doing it well. Those people made an effort to publish in international scientific journals, to go to conferences and make contracts there, i.e., to market their primary skills. From there, foreign grants and joint projects sprouted. It was common for a lead scientist to work most of the time overseas, and with these grants finance the research at home. Many people left and never came back, especially the young people who went to graduate schools and post-doc positions, and then to fulfilling careers abroad.

The value of education didn’t decrease. On the contrary, it increased, especially for certain professions. Often, these fads were misplaced and didn’t correspond to reality. When I was applying to college in early 90-s, many people wanted to major in business, economics or law. These degrees were considered prestigious, but had at the time limited further opportunities in academia, research or corporate work in a provincial town. In truth the most valuable major in my college ended up being geology and geophysics. It was the easiest to get into, but the graduates were snapped up by Russian and foreign corporations in the booming oil and related industry, to do the exploration of natural resources, and have on average done exceedingly well. This is an isolated example, but it does suggest that in times of economic uncertainty when trends can’t be fully unraveled, simply doing what you like best and resisting the peer and cultural pressure – in other words, trusting the process -- may be one’s best bet. And another sure bet, again, is providing infrastructure for people’s choices, whatever they may be: college prep tutors and foreign language teachers have done well for themselves, because no matter which major people choose to pursue, they still need to make the cut.

It seems that in order to survive AND THEN to live (which isn’t the same thing), sometimes you had to balance between being flexible and staying true to whatever your personal convictions are, and sometimes you had to make a hard choice between the two. The latter sometimes is the matter of changing one set of social conventions into another -- and that is a very big thing for many people -- but it can go even deeper to the very essence of the person, I think.

That choice could really go down to the bare bone when the going gets hard. Ernesto Che Guevara remembered the differences between the town dwellers and the villagers in a randomly assembled group of resistance fighters. When some things had to be abandoned, the town folk would leave behind food, but keep articles of personal hygiene, while the villagers would never do such a thing. Clearly, the town people considered the attributes of civilization more important for survival -- not only to help preserve their identity, I suspect, but also to ensure the continuity of societal order in the community via symbolic communication and sticking to their social roles and patterns of behavior.

My grandmother remembers a similar incident. She was coming of age during WWII, in a tiny remote village in the South-Asian part of the USSR. A few families were evacuated from big cities to their village. She remembers seeing them arrive and gawking at a young girl’s fancy coat and real mary janes, way too delicate for the rugged living out there. Later, that family ended up being very clumsy in their household work and seemingly unable to learn. Moreover, certain things they simply refused to do. They wouldn’t heat the house with dry cow dung (there really wasn’t anything else to do it with), saying that “it would stink up the food” (it didn’t), and preferred to sit miserably in their drafty home, cold and hungry. At the same time though, they kept their spirits up with reading, which eventually helped turn my grandmother onto learning and becoming a school teacher. My great-grandmother was barely literate and had little respect for books, but was very proud of her daughters who went to teacher’s college.

In a yet another case that I remember from a magazine article, a young Jewish woman talked about her time in a concentration camp; she was the only one in her ward to washed her stockings every day, as she was used to, no matter what. Other inmates were shrugging their shoulders at that, having abandoned any attempts to preserve hygiene to conserve energy. Yet, she was the only one in her ward to live to see freedom: almost everyone else died during a typhoid epidemic. Whether the washing of the stockings had anything to do with it is debatable, but the fact remains.

The ultimate intertwined dualism of the two choices is best expressed, I think, in the following two stories of survival. A reporter friend once had to interview an elderly woman, an Auschwitz survivor. That lady was one of the Dr. Mengele’s twins, a subject of vivisection. Her identical twin sister had died early from complications of those experiments, but that lady went on to live a fulfilling life. A reporter was amazed by her calm, quiet presence, and asked what gave her strength. The woman basically said that very early on, she looked at everything around (she was a young kid back then) and decided for herself right there that she and her sister would LIVE, and she’ll do whatever she needs to keep them alive; she decided she’d steal if she needs to steal, lie if she needs to lie, hide if she needs to hide, etc – and that’s what has helped her to endure the unendurable.

The opposite view is expressed by Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago”. He talks about feeling gripped by the survival instinct as soon as he got into that system, the instinct that makes one bow to the superiors or the criminal authorities and “market your skills” to them, hoping to deserve better treatment. Yet he is repulsed by this in himself, and talks with shame about having done doing that. Instead, he admires other people who kept their core dignity: professors that would have shared their knowledge with one another in prison cells between brutal beatings; people who strove to help others, neglecting their own interests, those who saw love and beauty around, despite everything, and those who attempted daring escapes against all odds. And it is almost as if, because of their effort and pure intent, sometimes these people got a lucky break -- but even if they didn’t (which I suspect still was the majority of cases), he still feels that they lives were full and meaningful. “Those who refused to survive, lived,” -- says he.

I don’t think it is possible to say which one is “right” – that would be determined by a particular situation, the moment, and the call from the Universe, if we attune ourselves to hear it.

2008 Iowa Caucus: a report from the trenches

2008-01-13T14:37:00.000-08:00

This piece has appeared on Signs of the Times website:

********

Barak Obama has won the 2008 Iowa Democratic caucus with 37% of the popular vote, closely followed by Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, with about 29% each. Mike Huckabee has won the Republican Caucus, with 34% of the popular vote.

Here are some thoughts from an Iowa resident and a witness to the process.

The caucuses were packed! Long-time participants say they don't remember there ever being such a high voter turnout. The town was eerily empty after 6:00 pm, while in the precincts there was no parking for blocks around. A family member, who went to a local democratic caucus, said that there were more than 200 people from our small neighborhood alone, and she has seen almost no one at all that she knew, which is unusual. The same thing was happening in the local republican caucus, which was in the same building. And, once the caucuses started rolling, the decision has been reached very quickly - ours was one of the first in Iowa to come to a conclusion. In short, people seemed to already have made up their minds, and have come out en masse to show it.

Barak Obama's supporters were the most numerous, from all walks of life - middle-age people, college cheerleaders, elderly, young families. They radiated excitement and were obviously on a roll. A lot of young non-voters were there to observe, as well - it was truly a community affair.

Overall, I had two main impressions about the caucuses and the preceeding campaign.

First, both candidates who won, Obama and Huckabee, had the most grass-root support and had largely relied on it to win. Obama's campaign people have by this time bothered the living daylights out of me, having called every week, personally and with prerecorded messages; earlier in the day of the caucus they stopped by no less than 3 times with leaflets and caucus reminders.

Mike Huckabee had also come out of nowhere with very little funding and quickly gained ground because of volunteer support. I don't watch TV and therefore missed his controversial Christmas ad. But apparently he has been courting religious home-schoolers for support and volunteering (after all, they have large families and unlimited schedules; plus, volunteering for a candidate is a great practical addition to any social studies curriculum). However, people have been digging up his record regarding his stand on education, which is less than stellar from the home-schooling prospective.

First, during his tenure as an Arkansas governor, he signed a bill restricting home-schooling freedoms; and second, he has played both sides of the debate, managing to get the endorsement of both the Homeschool Legal Defense Association and their arch-enemy, a teacher's union. This has generated quite a backlash against him, judging from the discussions in my homeschooling groups. Additionally, the conservatives have begun to criticize him for only giving lip service to the traditional values while being a closet "liberal". Still, he seems to have generated enough momentum to rise to the top.

Second, the entertainment factor is really prominent in this election; moreover, it has never been as obvious that the so-called 'democratic process' is simply a part of the 'bread and circus' package for the masses. For example, as the caucuses are rolling across Iowa, there is an exhibit on the history of caucuses through the years in the State Historical Building - made as if to provide a perfect backdrop for the candidates' campaigning efforts.

In addition to that, a show called "Caucus! The musical", written by a local author and presented by local actors and comedians, has opened to rave reviews. It may be in your neighborhood soon, too, as a spin-off of the show is going to be performed during the New Hampshire primaries, and possibly also during the respective party conventions in Denver and Minneapolis.

It seems that Barak Obama, for whatever reason, is perceived as fresh, interesting and glamorous and is able to tap into this demand and stream of supply -- in other words, he has a high entertainment value and this is what drives his rise in the ratings. Otherwise you simply can't explain what's happening. Critics have pointed out long ago that Obama is a nobody with no political experience or accomplishments, that the average person knows very little about him (besides the random facts from his books, including former drug use and school failures, which he managed to spin off in a positive way), that his actual program is wishy-washy and status-quo oriented.

According to some analysts, he is a blank slate on which everyone seems to project whatever hopes and dreams they may have. With the help of the spirit of entertainment, it appears to work very well.

This shows on both corporate and grass root levels. Oprah has endorsed Obama and has personally campaigned for him in Iowa. Of all people, she knows what sells in the industry, and as many lucky people have already learned to their advantage, if she gets behind something, be it a book or a concept, it starts selling like hotcakes.

The grass root support, or, more accurately, perverse fascination, has produced projects like barelypolitical.com with its "Obama Girl" videos. The whole thing is a joke, or so they say, but the concept reflects some truth, as exemplified in the tongue-and-cheek slogan, "join the political party". The "fun factor" helps to sell both t-shirts and politics.

All of this suggests that many, many people are ready for a sweeping change and are willing to come out and do a show of hands for it - but, being unaware and asleep, they go by their instinctive, visceral likes and dislikes. Nobody votes on issues anymore, and not in the least because there are no real issues on the table by design.

Based on how the Iowa caucus went, I am wondering whether the 'powers that be' have a plan B just for this kind of situation. If both of the obviously evil candidates, Giuliani and Clinton - high on the Israel factor and backed by psychopathic corporations - are overturned by a populist tide and neither of them gets the nomination, then it is very likely that a festive match-up and a hair-split decision between two nobodies, like Obama and Huckabee, will be engineered. Meanwhile the normal sordid business of manipulation of the population will continue as usual. That is of course if this years Presidential election is not stolen out from under the noses of the American people much like the last two were.

All of it remains to be seen. Either way, the prognosis is not good for "the greatest Democracy on earth".

VIRGINIA SHOOTING

2007-04-17T18:14:00.000-07:00

While the country is transfixed in horror and grief in the face of a terrible tragedy of the Virginia Tech shooting, nobody seems to be asking an obvious question:

this is SO incredibly improbable, WHO do they think we are to take it at a face value?

In a self defense class, I was told that if a gunman doesn't have a hold of you, your best bet is to run-- because the chance of him hitting a moving target is only about 10%, and even that is overwhelmingly likely not to be deadly.

Even if one practices enough at a shooting range, killing a real person is a while another matter. We have a deeply hard wired biological prohibition against killing, and it takes special training or circumstances to get over it. When it comes to killing a lot of people, circumstances alone are not enough -- one must be used to this kind of thing on a very deep instinctual level, to keep the heart rate down and all reflexes under control. Otherwise, to put it simply, the hands shake too much.

Because of this I don't buy that an average Joe could in a matter of minutes shoot to death 30+ people with a small hand gun that he bought a month ago. This is unhumanly accurate and efficient. This is triple the number of victims in the Columbine shooting (where there were two shooters with some serious bazookas in their hands), and double that of the Texas U massacre of 1966 (where the guy was shooting from the roof using a sniper's rifle).

He obviously has, or has been, trained.

My versions, from the most to the least likely:

1) he played a lot of first person shooter videogames, which are known to desensitize to violence;

2) he was trained in some secret op;

3) he wasn't the real shooter, or there were more shooters, and they are still at large.

2007-03-04T23:56:00.001-08:00

1) if one is in a relationship that one knows\feels isn't working out because of some deep running and subtle irreconcilable differences, or 'just because';

2) but one is afraid to make a move to end it (for the fear of hurting another person, or for the fear of change, or for the fear of being lonely, or for some personal gain etc);

3) than it is the same as covertly "asking" the other person to take the responsibility and end it;

4) than it is very likely that the other person WILL make that move, in a most inopportune time, and chances are pretty high that it will be ugly.

Hind sight is 20\20, but may be this lesson, learned from an old and all-out-wrong relationship, will help someone.

2007-03-04T23:54:00.000-08:00

A fundamentalist Christian friend sent this to one of my groups:

> As a side note, we heard on the radio that a group
> of Jewish rabbies
> are looking for sheep to sacrifice in the temple.
> The Muslims have
> possession of the temple right now (from what I
> understand?) so this
> is a big issue.  These 71 Jewish rabbies feel that
> Israel needs to
> get back to the sacrifice and they already have a
> red heifer (the
> first one they found was stolen or killed or
> something?).  The 71
> rabbies are representative of the 70 judges that
> Moses had to help
> him rule the people of Israel.  The Jews have not
> sacrificed in the
> Temple since AD 70.  We know this has to happen for
> the last days
> prophecies to be fulfilled, because the antichrist
> will be the one to
> stop the temple sacrifices...3 1/2 years after they
> start (I think
> that's what I remember...correct me if I'm wrong). 
> We have all
> heard that we are living in the end of times...but
> when we see the
> last of the last days prophecies being fulfilled, it
> really brings it
> home.
>



The big problem with this initiative is that the
Temple has not been rebuilt, nor are there any plans
to do so.  Temple Mount isn't the same thing as the
temple of Jerusalem. It is a suggested location of the
two previously destroyed jewish temples, and also the
site of two major muslim religious shrines.   As a
matter of fact, the Torah prohibits any person "from
entering the site of Temple Mount due to its
sacredness". 

Thus, any sacrifices made in that area will represent
sacrelege.  Those can only be done in the Temple.
Conservative Jews are taking offense at the blasphemy
of these sacrifices, proposed by what really is a
fringe, extremist group of rabbies.

A similar view is held by some orthodox Jews regarding
the beginnings of the state of Israel
(http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com).  They believe
that repatriation of Jews in Israel was premature, as
it was led by nationalist secular forces, without an
expressive command from God.  This opinion of 'the
true Torah Jews' certainly should be kept in mind when
considering israeli-palestinian conflict and Israel's
political stand in the world. 


It is clear that someone is liberally using biblical
references to support a certain political agenda.  It
is also clear that the Prophecy is being artificially
rushed to fulfillment.  We may, and probably should,
ask two questions:
1) Why?
and
2) Who benefits?

2006-12-10T01:23:00.000-08:00

Colin Wilson qrites in "A Criminal History Of Mankind":

Dominance is a subject of enormous interest to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals -- or human beings -- seems to be amazingly constant. [...] biological studies have confirmed [... that ...] for some odd reason, precisely five per cent -- one in twenty -- of any animal group are dominant -- have leadership qualities." [...]

This animal connection is very interesting.

A corresponded told a following story that originally came from an article in some psychology or ethology magazine.

Baboons are highly hierarchial primates, where a dominant male basically mates with all females, and subdominant animals have no chance. A clan of baboons was observed in a national park. They lived by a hotel within the territory and regularly came to rummage in the daily trash, searching for scraps of food. As always, the dominant males were the first to eat, and others got whatever was left, if any.

One day, something was thrown out that has already gone bad. Dominant males, being first to feed, ate it all up and died. The scientists were very interested in observing what would happen to the population now. But nobody could have predicted the results. In the absence of dominant males, no one stepped up to take their position. The other baboons developed an altruistic society, where everyone was pretty much equal, and tended to the sick and the weak. What's still more interesting that the stray males who have joined the community later have also accepted those rules of the game.

These stories and others, I think, go to show that altruism and selfishness are two separate evolutionary paths.

The problem is that any explanations of altruism in animal studies is either trying to pin down some reason why it still may be USEFUL for the individual and the population in some way, or depict altruistic creatures as dumb or sick or, in general, unfit. Here is an example:

A 2-3 year old lioness 'Kamunyak' had adopted a Fledgling young Oryx calf. The news was treated with a lot of skepticism since an Oryx is a type of antelope upon which lions usually prey. [..] The lioness, nicknamed Kamunyak, or The Blessed One, by locals, had protected her adopted young from danger and had allowed them to nurse from their biological mothers. [..]Three years have passed and astonishingly Kamunyak, (the lioness' Samburu name), had in total adopted six Oryx calves. [..] Sometimes even to her expense as she could not effectively hunt so as to keep guard; a fact that emaciated her to a point of near death. [..]

There are several theories that have been proposed to explain this extra ordinary behavior of the female African lion.

1) The question has been raised whether this could have begun on a hunt with an unusually long game of cat and mouse, where after 24 hours she bonded with the calf. [..]
2) The Samburu people suggested Kamunyak is barren. [..]
3) She could have a serious hormonal imbalance, which is triggering this abnormal behavior with another species. [..]T
4) [..]If a lioness' rank affects their endocrinology perhaps a phantom pregnancy is a possible explanation.
5) [..]Oryx calves are remarkably similar in colour to the tawny coat of an African lion, and it is possible that once the lioness had locked onto the smell of "cub" in the calf then it's lack of a feline physique ceased to matter.
etc

Consider also that Darwin was influenced by Smith and Maltus, i.e. economic and social theories of the time, and as shown by Ernst Mayer, his concept of evolution was essentially deductive. Looks like the very method used in biological studies is influenced by certain ideology that glorifies egoism, and, as a result, doesn't offer a concept of altruism as a choice of intrinsic value. Psychopathology everywhere -- no wonder they like game theory so much in population studies.
Another thing worth mentioning is that many equate egoism with general fitness, which implies that egotistic individuals are somehow better.

This is not necessarily true. As Colin Wilson writes: "Inevitably, a percentage of the dominant [types] have no particular talent or gift; some may be downright stupid.” This agrees with studies of sociopaths, natural human egotists. Their IQ is average or slightly lower, when compared to the population average.

This corresponds to what we see in animal studies. I have read recently in the Atlantic Monthly that because of new information, it is clear that a lot of animal communities a great deal more democratic than was previously thought. The leader, or a dominant, doesn't make decisions on when and where to take off and go to new feeding grounds, or to run away from danger. Animals just do it all together when a certain treshold percentage of individuals wants to turn that way, or when someone senses that something's not right.

Thus the 'leader' does not necessarily LEAD anyone. He is not necessarily smarter of wiser or more resilient. He is just bigger and stronger and gets advantage in mating. And the funny part is that he may be bigger and stronger not because of his genetic fitness, but simply because he has been pushing others out of the way all his life and getting more food than they did.

Mirror Neurons and Empathy

2006-12-09T00:00:00.000-08:00

A corresponded send me a link to an interesting bit of information, which I would like to pass on:

from Wikipedia:

A mirror neuron is a neuron which fires both when an animal performs an action and when the animal observes the same action performed by another (especially conspecific) animal. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of another animal, as though the observer were itself performing the action. These neurons have been observed in primates, including humans, and in some birds. In humans, they have been found in Broca's area and the inferior parietal cortex of the brain. Some scientists consider mirror neurons one of the most important findings of neuroscience in the last decade.
[..]
It is not normally possible to study single neurons in the human brain, so scientists can not be certain that humans have mirror neurons. However, the results of brain imaging experiments have shown that the human inferior frontal gyrus and inferior parietal cortex is active when the person performs an action and also when the person sees another individual performing an action. Therefore, these brain regions are likely to contain mirror neurons and have been defined as the human mirror neuron system. [..]

In the monkey, mirror neurons are found in the inferior frontal gyrus and inferior parietal lobule. These neurons are active when the monkeys perform certain tasks, but they also fire when the monkeys watch someone else perform the same specific task. Researchers using fMRI, TMS, and EEG have found evidence of a similar system (matching observations with actions), in the human brain.[..]

Mirror neurons certainly have the potential to provide a mechanism for action understanding, imitation learning, and the simulation of other people's behaviour.[..]

Defects in mirror neurons are linked to people with autism.

another quote form an essay on the subject:

Rizzolatti's discovery can help us solve this age-old puzzle. He recorded from the ventral premotor area of the frontal lobes of monkeys and found that certain cells will fire when a monkey performs a single, highly specific action with its hand: pulling, pushing, tugging, grasping, picking up and putting a peanut in the mouth etc. different neurons fire in response to different actions. One might be tempted to think that these are motor "command" neurons, making muscles do certain things; however, the astonishing truth is that any given mirror neuron will also fire when the monkey in question observes another monkey (or even the experimenter) performing the same action, e.g. tasting a peanut! With knowledge of these neurons, you have the basis for understanding a host of very enigmatic aspects of the human mind: "mind reading" empathy, imitation learning, and even the evolution of language. Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds."

Sounds like these mirror neurons could be a possible mechanism underlying empathy and altruistic behavior. The mirror neuron systems described in monkeys appear to pertain to gross an fine motor skills. Humans may have more developed and flexible mirroring systems, better equipped to evaluate visual and auditory symbols. Our culture and learning is based on imitation. In early development, gross motor skills imitation is the easiest kind, and comes first, followed by fine motor skills and language. One can imagine same type of pathways that help people learn the meaning of complex emotions and how they are expressed.

Perhaps, in brains of psychopaths they malfunction because of a genetic defect or, in frontal characteropathy, damage to frontal zones of the brain? The link to autism is also IMO significant.

Here is another quote that sums up my own recent thoughts on altruism:

It is often said that man is selfish by nature. Even when humans sometimes demonstrate altruistic behavior, e.g., help another without obvious gain for the self, it is done with the expectation that help will be reciprocated, or so says the game theory. Yet, the understanding of how mirror neurons work demonstrates that empathy and conscience are very natural. If someone has troubles, you also feel bad, and if someone is happy, you feel happy too. When a baby cries, his mother feels his crying as his own; and when mother is happy and content, so is the baby -- this is very important, especially in the first few months of life. Such behavior is natural for us, we are really not THAT selfish.

It all fits, as a piece of a puzzle, unless I am missing some details.

Education: IB and NWO

2006-12-04T00:21:00.002-08:00

Charlotte Izerbyt is an education researcher who writes from an edgy traditional conservative position. She authored a book 'The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America', where she decries a conspiracy of an American education system takeover by UN socialists, in order to bust the traditional americal values of freedom and democracy :), as a part of implementation of a UN-based New World Order. She collected a great deal of factual information, but her conclusions are IMO one-sided: on that level there is only one 'master' so to speak, and and all the factions that come into play and power are the endless 'good cop vs/ bad cop' game. Which is what she misses
entirely, and it becomes a big us vs. them thing.

Well, looks like either Izerbyt was right all along, or we are beholding the next players coming onto the stage:

Learning globally

The Bush administration has begun issuing grants to help spread a United Nations-sponsored school program that aims to become a "universal curriculum" for teaching global citizenship, peace studies and equality of world cultures.
The goal is to devise a curriculum to teach "a set of culturally neutral universal values to which all people aspire," based on human rights, equality of the sexes and "open-mindedness to change and obligation to environmental protection and sustainable development."
The U.S. Education Department has issued its first $1.2 million grant to implement the European-based International Baccalaureate (IB) program in middle schools that are to become "feeder schools" for the IB's high school diploma program in low-income school districts.

Did you catch this thing about the low-income school districts? Here it is again ('low-income' is the same code-word as 'minority'):

The Bush administration's $1.2 million grant from the Education Department's Advanced Placement Incentives Program (APIP) is to train teachers and set up six middle- and high-school "partnerships" to implement the IB curriculum for minority students.

So what should these kids learn?

In a statement called "The Road to Peace," UNESCO said: "Let it be a school of values, of attitudes, above all of practical action so that we learn to obtain justice through nonviolence and ensure that all human rights become a living reality for every person. [..]

The IB curriculum, UNESCO said, would promote human rights and social justice; the need for "sustainable development"; and address population, health, environmental and immigration concerns.

"Changing patterns of national and international migration and political and social transformation have given cultural diversity a new importance," the statement said.

No kidding. Know thy place, everyone.

What floored me is HOW the kids are supposed to learn about non-violence and human rights:

"The IBO programs promote a constructivist approach to learning," the 1999 UNESCO document stated. "Teachers recognize that students bring prior knowledge to any learning situation and will come into contact with the curriculum through activities designed by the teacher. The students make sense of their experiences to construct meaning."
As an example, fourth-grade teachers at Christ Church Episcopal School in Greenville, S.C., said they "set about fomenting an uprising in our classrooms" in order to allow their 9- and 10-year-old students to understand the dynamics of the American Revolution leading to independence in 1776.
Writing in May in "IB World," the program's international magazine, four teachers said they wanted the children "to experience personally the forces that lead to revolution, without shedding blood in the classroom, of course."
The teachers said they circulated a fake official-sounding memorandum that told students their recesses were cut to make up for days that school had been canceled for snow. "The students were really angry, pointing out that the lost classes had not been their fault and that they had not been consulted about this," the teachers wrote.
The students' own proposal for Saturday classes instead of cutting recess was rejected. As discussions ensued, one student called on classmates to "take over the school," and another student demanded that they "go on strike."
"I'm not sure fighting for recess is that important, but fighting for freedom is," one student said.
"This was the moment of truth," the teachers wrote. "This was the connection that made the 18th-century American Revolution real to these 21st-century students."

The specter of the Stanford Prison Experiment has risen :). Jokes aside, how insane is that, and what better way to teach that the system has you?

Here is the curriculum itself:

In IB's two-year high school diploma program, pupils study three major subjects at the "higher level" and three minor subjects at the "standard level," which must include mathematics, humanities, and at least one science and a foreign language.
Students also must take IB's philosophical course on "Theory of Knowledge" and research and write a 4,000-word extended essay on a subject of their choice, similar to a university thesis, under the supervision of a teacher.
IB-diploma students also must complete 150 hours of extracurricular "Creativity, Action and Service," which could include sports, music, art, drama, and volunteer service in the community.
English courses use a "Prescribed World Literature List" of 421 authors, including 57 from England and the United States. Critics, however, question the narrow selection.

Call me an elitist academic, but this doesn't sound like much. Oh, right, it is a 2-year program, as opposed to the traditional 4-year high school program. In UK, IB is used in some schools for kids over 16; I am not sure whether in the US they will start it at 14 and let kids out of high-school by 16. That would make sense: 16 is a compulsory attendance age in many states, and after 16 nobody monitors troubled kids anymore. Which is why up to 30% of kids drop out of high schools in their junior and senior year; this is according to the new statistics that have been covered up intil recently and have just began to surface. IB would simply legitimize this state of affairs.

So there we have it:

take already disadvantaged poor kids;

brainwash them with a set of fuzzy values on one hand and a set of psychopathic psychological tactics on another, to cut off the roots of any legitimate dissatisfation with reality that they may have;

dumb them down with a curriculum specifically designed for this purpose;

and off they go, to the bottom of the ladder, helping to propell the consumer-driven society forward.

One more step towards the Brave New World.

Open Letter to Shoutwire.com

2006-12-01T22:57:00.000-08:00

To Whom It May Concern:

I am a member of Shoutwire. It has recently come to my attention that Shoutwire, and alternative news site, belongs to the same holding that Spankwire, a porn site, and links directly to it.

Details are here and here.

Because of this, I no longer want my name to be associated with Shoutwire, and request that you deactivate my account.

Thank you for your cooperation.

A big development over at LiveJournal

2006-10-20T00:11:00.000-07:00

LiveJournal (LJ) is a popular blogging tool in Russia, with over 600,000 bloggers who use cyrillic alphabet. It has a nice set-up for networking: one can comment on other people's blogs, add people to 'friends', create communities and read all the friends' messages on one page -- kind of like MySpace minus the graphics.

The Russian segment of LJ has long attracted prominent personalities, and the community is highly charged and politically polarized. Neonazis hate the anti-fasists (antifa) and vice-versa, liberals regularly fight with conservative nationalists, etc.

In comes a team of businessmen, Alexander Mamut and Anton Nossik, who want to tap into the money-making potential of the blogosphere. They want to create an blogging-entertainment portal, and make money off the context-tailored ads that they will insert in their blogs.

Nossik is an internet guru; he created rambler.ru, a search engine; lenta.ru, a news portal; and a couple of other news portals, one of which is Kursor -- Israeli News (http://www.cursorinfo.co.il/). Mamut is an oligarch, a banker who later became an economic advisor to the President Putin's team. A connection with Israel is alleged (dual citizenship?), in any case, his heritage is emphasized on many sites.
Their partner is an American, Andrew Polson, owner of a publishing house and another internet portal.

For a couple of weeks rumors were flying that they were approaching various blogging outlets with offers. And then the other day, the blogspace is abuzz with the news that they DID essentially buy out the Russian part of LJ. A wishy-washy message about it, in English, went out from the main LJ administration.

Mamut, Nossik and Polson's company, SUP-Fabrik, acquired the license to provide services to the russian users of LJ from the parent company, Six Apart. They will transfer content to servers in Russia, beef up features, provide their own tech support and a newly created Abuse Team.

The nationalist segment of LJ went nuts. They are especially concerned with the Abuse Team, and that its presence will essentialy mean censorship. The was a rumor, later turned out to be a hoax, that Nossik (and he is himself a #1 rate blogger in LJ), speaking as SUP officer, expressed concern with the 'nationalist tendencies' in LJ. Privacy and copyright are other top concerns, since the management will have access to private online entries ( or so the people surmise, there is no developed legal system in Russia to prevent them from doing so). One prominent blogger deleted his journal in a huff, a few others did the same or threatened to, and still more others changed their preferences to 'appear' to be from another country.

Although there is a certain glee at the plight of nationalists on the other side of public opinion, I have yet to see a Russian user who was satisfied with this turn of events. You just can't escape the connection to the big and therefore somewhat illegal money, the Russian government, and the foreign interests. Censorship and privacy concerns (for both personal and financial info) all stand.

It is clear though that the real target are not nationalists/skins and suchlike -- they are serving their purpose. It is an old Macchiavellian strategy: channel the anger and the coarse destructive energy of young people who otherwise have no perspectives in society, towards hating others of different skin color. This takes the the courrupted government itself off the target, and also takes care of the growing immigration and ethnic mafia problems. No, the real target are those who think further than that -- those who see into the game, or have potential to do so.

Add to it a curious synchronicity: The Russian Ministery of Internal Affairs sponsors a bill that aims for a total control of the Internet, to weed out terrorists and extremist organizations. The bill somehow turns up at the Duma( parliament) without any preliminary discussion and analysis, no one knew about its existence until today.

I will continue to monitor further developments.

It should be fun.

2006-10-12T22:06:00.000-07:00

In a Brothel Atop Street 63
News: The intimate face of slavery in Cambodia -- where buying and selling children is a family business.

Mother Jones's Magazine
By Scott Carrier

March/April 2006 Issue

I THINK OF THIS RICE FIELD AT SUNSET, out in the countryside. I’m with Lisa and the sun is going down and the sky is dark with storm clouds on the horizon, but the long grass is glowing, luminescent, and there’s a water buffalo caked with mud standing motionless by the side of the road staring me straight in the eye. Two men are riding by on heavy Chinese bicycles, each wearing sandals and shorts and a headlamp powered by a six-pound battery slung over his shoulder, each holding a wooden spear against the handlebars. Frog hunters. And from far away—a mile across fields and trees—an electric guitar and the bass notes to “Oye Como Va” played karaoke style.

There’s a village of wooden huts built up on stilts—cows and chickens underneath, pigs in a pen around back, fruit trees, vegetable gardens, marijuana plants. Lots of kids running around, babies on their sisters’ backs. Dogs barking. Mosquitoes. The men come and we eat dinner sitting cross-legged in a circle—one of the chickens and some of the vegetables in a noodle soup made with ganja buds, a specialty for Lisa, who says her stomach has been acting up. The men are joking and laughing, pouring shot glasses of homemade alcohol and making toasts where every glass touches. The two oldest men are in their mid-50s and one is wearing a hat with a bald eagle and an American flag. I ask him if the Americans bombed this area in the early ’70s, and he says not this village but in the mountains nearby there were a lot of bombs. “And you still like America?” I ask. He says, “Yes, of course. I fought with the Americans as a Lon Nol soldier.” He tells me the man whose house we are eating in also fought as a Lon Nol soldier, but he died four months ago from AIDS. He and the other men believe his ghost is still here, that he hasn’t left yet. We toast the ghost, and it gets quiet, except for the crickets.

After dinner, we walk through a couple of gardens to a small hut made from bamboo poles and thatched palm fronds. There’s no light inside, completely dark, but there’s a voice, like a rock being rolled through dry grass, and the room smells as if an animal has died. Someone brings a light, a 29-watt fluorescent tube on the end of a long extension cord. The woman is at least 80 years old, white hair, skin and bones, lying on a wooden bed without a mattress, blanket, or pillow. Her eyes are moist and cloudy. She sits up and holds her arms around her shins. The toes on her right foot have swollen to twice the size of the toes on her left foot, and there’s a three-inch square of skin on the top of her foot that has turned to mushy liquid, pureed salmon. Above the infection, the skin is a black flame, turning green and yellow. Gangrene.

She says it hurts.

There’s no money for a doctor or a hospital. Traditional ointments and teas did nothing to stop the infection.

Lisa sits down next to the old lady, takes her leg gently in her hands, and speaks to her in Khmer. Lisa is an American who produces public service commercials and documentaries for Cambodian television. She knows nothing of medicine, doesn’t know the woman has gangrene, but she does know she’s dying—slowly and painfully—she can feel it, and she tries to comfort her. I’m frightened by the whole thing and turn around and there are 12 children pressed together just inside the door, all motionless and absolutely quiet, eyes fixed on Lisa’s hands, all wondering if this American woman who is tall and beautiful can cure their great-grandmother. Maybe she has magical power. I can’t quite take it and step through the kids to get some fresh air and listen to the dogs bark. Next door there’s another, larger hut, and inside a man is sitting on a stool two feet from a 12-inch television screen. He’s glued to it, as if manning a periscope. The screen shows new cars and houses with carpets and refrigerators, beautiful people with stylish clothes, women with lipstick. It shows this world, another planet, where there’s lots of cool stuff and money, a place where grandmothers do not die slowly, painfully, in the dark, from gangrene.

THIS IS HOW what we now call human trafficking begins. It’s an awkward term, borrowed from the black market for drugs and guns, only in this case it means the buying and selling of human beings. We used to call it slavery, but the United Nations and the U.S. State Department thought we needed a new name because it’s become such a big business. Worldwide, people are cheaper now than ever before, and there seems to be an endless supply as well as an endless demand.

The causes are said to be exploding populations, increasing power differentials between the rich and the poor, corrupt governments, failed states...and television, which functions like a huge suction machine, a black hole, pulling people away from shrinking farms and into swollen cities. It starts as migration, a children’s crusade for some of that stuff to bring back home. They leave the village and give themselves up to the great sky of luck; they take a chance. And it ends, too often, with young people being bought and consumed and thrown away like a candy bar and its wrapper. And this is also a cause: the desire, the pull for more cheap bodies, whether they are put to work in garment factories and paid 15 cents an hour for 90 hours a week, or thrown onto Thai fishing boats and fed methamphetamines for a few years then shot and thrown overboard, or sold into prostitution or domestic service in Sweden, the United States, or Saudi Arabia. The supply and the demand, the push and the pull, are inseparable.

Nobody knows the numbers. Slaves, unlike guns or drugs, are hard to see and count. Is this boy on your fishing boat an employee? Is this girl a willing prostitute? Is your maid free to leave the house? No one tells the truth. The United Nations claims that every year 600,000 to 800,000 men, women, and children are trafficked as slaves across international boundaries and millions more are sold as slaves within their own countries, but experts in the field say these numbers are inflated to gather public awareness. None of the experts, however, deny that there is a serious problem. And many, if not most, have gone past the point of believing in a solution.

When I spoke with Cambodians about slavery, they very often didn’t know what I was talking about. They answered questions I didn’t ask, and I asked questions they didn’t understand, back and forth. It was very frustrating. Then I found out that in Khmer there is no word for “slavery.” No word for slavery, but there is a word for “slave”—khiom, an old word from back in the days of Angkor Wat and the God/Kingdom. Now the word has a new meaning: It means “I.” A young Cambodian art historian told me this. Maybe he was stretching an etymology, but it seemed to make sense to me. We think of slavery as the practice of depriving people of their individual rights and liberties, turning them into objects that can be bought and sold. But Cambodians have never had a concept of individual rights and liberties, so how can they be deprived of them? To them it’s like, “Of course people can be bought and sold. It happens all the time. What’s your problem?” They think of slavery as cheating, a business deal gone bad—one person lies and tricks another into bondage or work with no pay. And cheating they know very well. They’ll talk about being cheated all day long—out of houses, food, cars, children. But I didn’t want to know about cheating. I wanted to know about slavery. I’d try to make the point that human beings are different from used cars. “To buy and sell people—isn’t this a bad thing?” And they’d say, “Yes, sometimes, when the person is cheated.”

An example of how it happens: A 14-year-old girl is bored with living on the farm in the countryside. She has an older sister who left and went to Phnom Penh and hasn’t been heard from since, but the girl believes if she can get to Phnom Penh, she can find her sister and live with her and maybe get a job in a garment factory. So she sneaks away and gets on a bus and meets a woman who says she can help. She knows a restaurant that needs a dishwasher, and she’ll take her there. The girl thinks, great, what good fortune. But the restaurant turns out to be a brothel, and the woman sells the girl for $300 and walks away. The girl, being from a poor farm village and knowing virtually nothing of the world, believes this is a debt she has to pay back. It was just a woman on a bus, and the girl to her was like a wallet found on the street.

Up until recently, experts in the field of human trafficking believed that members of crime organizations came to the villages and recruited young bodies with deceits and lies. They called it “stranger danger.” But now they are starting to believe that most of the time the young people are tricked into slavery by people they know—an aunt, a boyfriend, even their own mother. It’s more like everybody knows how to do it, and usually people are betrayed by those whom they trust.

Another example: There’s a family of Vietnamese immigrants living in a wooden shack next to abandoned railroad tracks on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. The mother, who says she is 70, though I peg her as closer to 50, has 13 children, none of whom have an income except for her two youngest daughters, whom she periodically sells into debt bondage as prostitutes. With this many kids and lots of grandkids and cousins, somebody is always getting sick or hurt and needing medical attention. So the mother borrows money from her neighbors at the going rate of interest—20 percent a month. Soon she is way over her head in debt and has no way to pay it off except by selling her daughters again. She’s been doing it since they were about 10. She recently sold the older one, her name is Nee, now 17 years old, to a brothel in Taiwan for $1,000, and was getting ready to sell the youngest one, Auk, now 15 years old, in the same way for the same amount, but Auk ran away. Now, the mother says, she is worried sick about her. Auk, hidden away in a house on the other side of town, is also worried and scared. If she refuses to do her mother’s bidding, she will risk breaking her “mother-daughter relationship,” essentially cutting herself off from her family forever, meaning she will live and die alone and then spend many rebirths in pain and suffering. Nee was a good girl and willingly left home to work in Taiwan. She calls Auk on her cell phone and says she doesn’t know what city she’s in and has to sleep with six or seven men a night and that her stomach hurts, but she’s not going to come home until the $1,000 is paid back because their mother needs her help. The mother says she cries for her daughter in Taiwan every night, but what can she do? She owes money that must be paid back, and there is no other way.

It’s like a soap opera, and it gets worse. Enter Mark, an American, early 50s, living in Phnom Penh. Five years ago, he was living in Florida and had arthritis so bad he couldn’t walk one block. So he quit his job and flew to Thailand, where he exercised every day, drank lots of tea, and had a lot of sex with young prostitutes. He cured himself in a few months. He says, “Everybody should have a regular sex life. Jesus, when I was living in the States, I couldn’t get nothing. I might go six months without getting laid.”

After he was in Thailand for a while, he flew to Cambodia to renew his visa and took the time to visit a brothel outside Phnom Penh known for having young girls. There he met Nee, the older daughter, who was then 13. Mark liked Nee a lot, maybe he even loved her, and he asked her if she wanted to get out of there and go with him. She said yes, for sure, and so he bought her out of the brothel for $1,500 and paid her mother $1,000. And then he married her and bought a big house and let 10 members of her family move in.

He put Nee and Auk in school. He taught their little nieces and nephews how to ride bicycles. He took them to the beach on weekends. He loved it.

“You know, it’s funny,” he says. “It was like I went through this Lolita syndrome. I was in la-la land for two years. Maxed out all my credit cards. Or, part of it, do you ever do something just because you can do it and you think it’s the wildest thing and you want to do it? I mean to buy someone out of a brothel was so wild, something you read about in the National Geographic in the Sudan or something.”

The thing he didn’t do, however, was give the girls’ mother enough money to pay off all her debts, which at 20 percent a month interest grew very quickly, and the mother, with her daughters out of the business, had no way of covering it. Mark claims she convinced Nee to divorce Mark and go work in the higher-paying Taiwanese brothels, which she did. Then, according to Mark, the mother tried to steal the home away from him while he was out of town. Then she filed charges against him for the crime of debauchery—sleeping with a child under the age of 14—and that cost him a lot of time and worry and $2,000 to pay off the judge. Still, he doesn’t hate the mother.

“She’s a fucking bitch, excuse my French, she causes all sorts of problems. She’s an evil, evil woman, but I kind of like her a little bit. Even after she took me to court, cost me thousands of dollars, almost sent me to prison for years, when I saw her I gave her a kiss. Like I said, a flaw in my character.”

Mark openly admits to all of this. He speaks as if he has no guilt or shame about having had sex with a minor, because in his mind he was doing nothing but trying to help her and her family. And he loved her, maybe, he’s not sure. Plus, he says he feels okay about talking because he’s been given immunity from prosecution by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in return for helping them obtain evidence for the conviction of another American pedophile with a much worse record.

I meet the Homeland Security officer Mark is working with. He comes over to Lisa’s office for a chat, and I ask him why the Department of Homeland Security is in Southeast Asia tracking down pedophiles.

He says, “Because they are terrorists.”

“Terrorists?” I ask, somewhat dumbfounded.

“Domestic terrorists,” he says with some hesitation.

“Domestic terrorists? I’ve never heard the term.” And that is the end of the interview. He leaves in a huff.

Is this off the subject?

ACCORDING TO THE United Nations, human trafficking includes “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person....” It goes on and on, passing through a difficult section about the selling of people for use as sexual slaves and ending with “the removal of organs.”

Off the record, people within the U.S. State Department in Cambodia will tell you they don’t know what human trafficking is or how it happens. And yet their job is to get rid of it. They say they have more anti-trafficking money than they know what to do with, that there aren’t enough aid workers in the country to give the money to, and consequently much of the money is being given to faith-based initiatives. They call this cronyism, like it’s an infectious disease.

The other side of this, however, is that Cambodia is actually way fucked up. Mothers really do sell their kids. Little babies are sold for adoption, girls as young as eight are sold for their virginity, boys are sold to beg on the streets of Bangkok and Saigon, or thrown onto fishing boats, never to come back. It happens, a lot, and nobody does anything to stop it. Not really. Cambodia is the first country in the world to create a special police task force to fight human trafficking, and in the four years of its existence, the number of arrests for sexual trafficking offenses has increased from 40 to over 600 a year. This sounds like a positive statistic until you realize that the justice system in Cambodia is just a pretense for extracting money from the accused, who are expected to buy their way out of jail. A debauchery rap now costs $20,000. The accused hires a lawyer, from jail, and the lawyer pays off the court clerk, the prosecutor, and the judge. The records of the court proceedings—like, for instance, the number of successful convictions for trafficking-related offenses—these documents are said to rest in the possession of one man, National Chief of Police Hok Lundy, and he has not been inclined to release them.

The political system in Cambodia is shaped like a pyramid, where the people on the top can commit unspeakable crimes and the people on the bottom have no rights at all. Money, in the form of bribes and extortions, flows upward through the pyramid, and violence comes back down. This is the cultural mechanism of impunity. It’s where the slaves come from. The U.S. State Department has published in its 2004 report on human trafficking that high-ranking members of the Cambodian government are directly involved in, and profit from, the sale of human beings—among the aid workers monitoring the trafficking, this is a well-known fact. The names are known but they are not spoken. There is silence in the face of evil, and under this silence the phrase “human trafficking” becomes a bullshit term, propaganda, a way of labeling something we don’t understand in order to throw a lot of money at it while loudly saying we are winning the war against it.

I’ll tell you about two places I saw. One was an open-air market for girls at a place called the Chicken Farm outside Koh Kong, a town on the southwestern coast. There’s a river and a port, ships coming and going from the Gulf of Siam. The road coming into Koh Kong is dirt and impassable at times during the rainy season, but the road going out of Koh Kong, over a bridge and across the border into Thailand, is concrete and busy with truck traffic. The Chicken Farm is out in a field near the river, or that’s how I imagined it. I couldn’t see a thing, the night was so dark—no moon, no stars, just the dim outlines of six or seven huts and the doorways glowing red, small shrines lit by candles out front, the smell of burning incense. The girls sat in pods of light from fluorescent tubes—six in front of me, eight next door, five across the road. They came from the farmlands of Cambodia and Vietnam, 12 to 16 years old, all for sale. “Cheap, good price,” the pimp tells me. “You want boom boom, $15. You want take, you keep, no problem. Good price, you say.”

The other place was on Street 63 in Phnom Penh, right in the middle of the city, not far from the U.N. offices and the shopping mall. It’s a room up two flights of steep steps, a room that could have once been a classroom or even a small dance studio, and there are 20 girls, fifth-graders, sitting in chairs in a big circle around me. Their faces covered with white makeup, purple lipstick. All from Vietnam. None are virgins. One is straddling my thigh, with her arms around my neck, and I can’t look at her and I’m trying not to hear the few words she’s saying. The others are laughing and giggling with each other, and when I make eye contact, their smiles turn to fear. They are supposed to flirt with me, but they’re not even old enough to know how to flirt and they’re scared—scared that I might choose them and scared that I might not and they’ll be beaten. At that moment, I would have rather been almost anywhere else, but to make it worse, in walks another man, an American by his dress, early 60s, like he’d just come in from playing golf. He sits down next to me but does not make eye contact, and at that point I stop breathing. I’m there to look, but he’s there for the real thing and I should hold it together and try to talk to him, find out what he thinks he’s doing, but I bolt for the door and the girls all instantly freak out and start screaming in terror. They stand in front of me and I have to pull arms off my waist and tear hands off my shirt, and just as I get to the stairs, the pimp blocks my way and says I can’t leave. I grab him by the arms and hold him out over the stairs and ask him if he wants me to let go. This calms him down and I run out of there, demons flying, chasing me out the door.

It’s creepy, for sure, but the thing that’s really unnerving is that it happens right out in the open. It’s no secret to anybody, and yet no one does anything to stop it. You walk away from it, and there’s a tearing sound, like the ripping of fabric that goes on and on and will not stop.

Lisa is making a video documentary about human trafficking, an Asia Foundation/USAID project for the Cambodian television audience. She wanted to go to these places with me, but she couldn’t, not without setting off all the alarms, so to speak. So I tell her about what I saw and she freaks out on me. She’s my guide, really the best I could ask for, but she sometimes breaks down in tears. I think this is common among NGO workers and diplomats in Cambodia. They spend their days trying to help people, trying to rebuild the country, and many spend their nights trying to drink and dance away the despair that comes from knowing their efforts are failing. The men often descend into hard drugs and prostitutes; the women become lonely and emotionally wounded. It’s tough—tough to sleep through the hot humid nights, tough to face the street in the morning.

I tell Lisa what I saw and she falls apart. She has a number of powers—charm and grace and also the talent or curse of the empath. She can feel what others feel, and apparently just my descriptions can make her become one of the Vietnamese girls with white faces.

“I think they’re reptilian,” she says. “They use that part of their brain. You’re always on the bottom tier, always a pain in your stomach. You ever been hungry for days at a time? Do you know what that feels like?”

She’s been here more than four years. She’s made friends with a lot of people—from kids who scavenge the garbage to the bodyguards of the prime minister, from pedophiles to State Department officials, and lately many of them have been telling her it’s time for her to leave, if not for good, at least for a while. She stays here because this place opened a hole inside her. She doesn’t know what’s inside the hole, she just knows it hurts and the only way to respond is with love and compassion. This is her job, her real job. But tonight there’s crying and yelling and a lot of expressed anger. She’s my guide, the best.

Again, maybe this is off the subject.

IN 1979, WHEN THE KHMER ROUGE FELL from power, the population of Cambodia was 5.2 million people. This number was down by about 2.5 million from the previous decade, due to a three-year bombing campaign by the United States that killed up to 500,000 people, followed by the Khmer Rouge’s three-year experiment with agrarian reform when up to 2 million people died from execution, starvation, or disease. But since that time, in only 26 years, the time frame we think of as one generation, the population of Cambodia has nearly tripled, approaching 14 million. It’s now a country where 60 percent of the people are under the age of 20.

You stand on the street, say Sisowath Quay, on a Sunday afternoon, and it seems no one is over the age of 30, and all around there are young couples in love. A boy on a scooter, shirt unbuttoned, hair blowing in the wind, a girl with her arms around his waist, her head on his shoulder, flapper girl hat pulled down tight on her head, contented. Couple after couple holding hands in the park along the river, each living out their own private karaoke video. Families having picnics on the grass in the park outside the Royal Palace. They bring out the elephant. Mothers and fathers buy incense to burn at the Buddhist shrine for their dead relatives. The kids get candy and cheap toys.

It’s wrong to say the culture was wiped out by the Khmer Rouge. It’s too easy an answer. The Khmer Rouge, for instance, never destroyed the Royal Palace. They left the flaring dragon flames along the roof and the snake running around the foundation. And they didn’t destroy the sense of family identity, although they tried. Under the Khmer Rouge, families were purposefully separated and children sometimes killed their own parents, but today there is nothing more important or present for a Cambodian than his or her family. And Cambodians are still animists. They live with ghosts and spirits. The Khmer Rouge only made more of these. Also, Cambodians are still a very warm and compassionate people, gracious in ways that shame most Americans. They smile a lot and are quick to laugh. This is perhaps the most noticeable thing about them as a culture.

But if you look a little more closely, you’ll see that underneath this veneer of a smile is a deep pool of low-grade terror. It comes from knowing you live in a country where there are no jobs, no industry or source of revenue other than through tourism and the money being pumped in by foreign aid, a country where the average wage is less than a dollar a day and nobody expects it to rise any higher, a country where anything can happen and nothing will be done about it. Look closer at the families picnicking on the grass and you’ll see a mother shaking her one-year-old baby and slamming it into the ground like a rag doll. I watch it through a video lens, zoomed in from a distance. The mother is surrounded by other people and yet no one does a thing. Nobody even looks up.

Pick up the recent issue of the Phnom Penh Post and check out the police blotter. There most likely will be at least one report of a mob beating—fights that start small and quickly attract a crowd, everyone beating on one person. A policeman, off duty, uses his gun to hit a motorcycle driver and take his bike. He’s attacked by women on the street—middle-aged, middle-class women who beat him to a pulp, out of control. Lisa saw one. It was during the water festival, which pulls a lot of people into the city, and many of them come to “go crazy.” The streets were packed, traffic at a standstill, Lisa was sitting on the back of a motodop when suddenly a man a few feet away was down on the ground and other men were kicking his head.

“They were taking a few steps for momentum and kicking it like a soccer ball for a free shot.” She jumped off the scooter and ran to the man on the ground and begged the others to stop—a very brave and stupid thing to do—and if not for her motodop driver pulling her out of there, she could have easily been pummeled. “I was so close and the blows were so violent I could feel them in my body. I’ve never felt that kind of violence and hatred. It was fucking surreal.” She went home and curled up like a small child, aching to be held.

The culture was not wiped out, it just has chronic and endemic post-traumatic stress syndrome.

IT COMES TO AN END, FOR ME, late at night in a discotheque, a hip place with murals of fantasy scenes from a tropical island. There’s a dance floor with a mirror ball and strobe lights pulsing to Cambodian disco music, bodies crushed together, writhing like snakes in a pit. I’m sorry but I can’t get into it. I stay in a booth and lie down, looking up and over at a glassed-off private room that’s dark except for a television on the wall showing a National Geographic program on chimpanzees. There are five or six men in the room, customers, sitting in chairs, and four young women serving beer and walking around in high heels and very short skirts. Two men in suits guard the door. The men in the chairs look bored and tired, uninterested in the women, and there’s a chimpanzee on the screen pounding, pounding, pounding a coconut or something like a coconut with a rock. I think it’s a female chimpanzee, and it seems like she is pounding the rock just to show off to the other chimpanzees around her, as if it’s her rock and she is pounding with it and none of the other chimps is going to stop her. She’s happy, she has a tool and she knows how to use it.

I look to the dance floor and it is also pounding. Lisa is dancing with two Cambodian women, her friends, “professional girlfriends” who were both sold into prostitution before they reached puberty and now support their large families as paid mistresses to sad middle-aged Westerners. They are a success, in a way, but still call Lisa to borrow money when things get tight. Lisa’s trying to dance with her friends, but it seems half the men on the floor, all Cambodian, have surrounded her. This bothers me (did I say I am in love with her?), but she’s like, “okay, whatever.” I look back to the National Geographic special and the chimp is still pounding. Enough, we get it—chimps know how to use tools. From the stone to the strobe light, pounding, pounding, pounding. I understand everything. I understand nothing. I close my eyes and try to sleep.

2006-09-23T21:47:00.001-07:00

There is a report that Osama Bin Laden has passed away:

PARIS (AP) - The French defense ministry on Saturday called for an internal investigation of the leak of an intelligence document that raises the possibility that Osama bin Laden may have died of typhoid in Pakistan a month ago but said the report of the death remained unverified.

[..]

The DGSE, or Direction Generale des Services Exterieurs, indicated that its information came from a single source.

"According to a reliable source, Saudi security services are now convinced that Osama bin Laden is dead," said the intelligence report.

There have been periodic reports of bin Laden's illness or death in recent years but none has been proven accurate.

According to this document, Saudi security services were pursuing further details, notably the place of his burial.

"The chief of al-Qaida was a victim of a severe typhoid crisis while in Pakistan on August 23, 2006," the document says. His geographic isolation meant that medical assistance was impossible, the French report said, adding that his lower limbs were allegedly paralyzed. On Sept. 4, Saudi security services had their first information on bin Laden's alleged death, the unconfirmed document reported.

Wait ... the guy had multiple wounds, diabetes and was on dialysis for the last n years (here is an extensive list of his maladies)

Even in the US the mortality rate of the dialysis patients is more than 20% a year, add to it all the complications from heart disease and diabetes ... yet somehow he survives for many years on a simple dialysis unit in his cave, and is even getting healthier and healthier, if we were to go by his photos that are fed to the media.

The numerous stories of his death might have been hoaxes, but it is indeed more likely that he had already perished somewhere. They'll confirm when time is ripe, OSIT.

2006-09-16T22:19:00.000-07:00

Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country. Here are last year's winners:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p. m. instead of 7:30.
12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.
16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.
18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

White Lie Cake

2006-09-16T21:10:00.000-07:00

forwarded message:

>OK you Guys, the seriousness is over I think it is time for a little good
> clean fun!!!! If you have ever had much dealing with the church ladies then read
> and enjoy White Lie Cake.
>
> If you have ever told a white lie, you are going to love this....
> ....especially all of the ladies who bake for church events.
>
> Alice Grayson was to bake a cake for the Baptist Church ladies' group bake
> sale in Tuscaloosa, but she forgot to do it until the last minute.
> She remembered it the morning of the bake sale and after rummaging thru
> cabinets she found an angel food cake mix and quickly made it while
> drying her hair, dressing and helping her son, Bryan, pack up for Scout
> camp.
>
> But when Alice took the cake from the oven, the center had dropped flat
> and the cake was horribly disfigured. She said, "Oh dear, there's no
> time to bake another cake.

> This cake was so important to Alice because she did so want to fit in at
> her new church, and in her new community of new friends.
>
> So, being inventive, she looked around the house for something to build up
> the center of the cake. Alice found it in the bathroom : a roll of
> toilet paper. She plunked it in and then covered it with icing. Not only did the
> finished product look beautiful, it looked perfect! Before she left the house
> to drop the cake by the church and head for work, Alice woke her daughter Amanda
> and gave her some money and specific instructions to be at the bake sale
> the minute it opened at 9:30, and to buy that cake and bring it home.
>
> When the daughter arrived at the sale, she found that the attractive perfect
> cake had already been sold. Amanda grabbed her cell phone and called
> her Mom. Alice was horrified. She was beside herself. Everyone would
> know, what would they think?

> Oh my, she wailed! She would be ostracized, talked about, ridiculed.
>
> All night Alice lay awake in bed thinking about people pointing their
> fingers at her and talking about her behind her back.
>
> The next day, Alice promised herself that she would try not to think about
> the cake and she would attend the fancy luncheon/bridal shower at the
> home of a friend of a friend and try to have a good time.
>
> Alice did not really want to attend because the hostess was a snob who
> than once had looked down her nose at the fact that Alice was a single
> parent and not from the founding families of Tuscaloosa, but having
> already committed she could not think of a believable excuse to stay home.
>
> The meal was elegant, the company was definitely upper crust old South
> and to Alice's horror, the CAKE in question was presented for dessert.
>
> Alice felt the blood drain from her body when she saw the cake, she
> started to get out of her chair to rush and tell her hostess all about it,
> but before she could get to her feet, the Mayor's wife said, "What a beautiful
> cake!"
>
> Alice, who was still stunned, sat back in her chair when she heard the
> hostess (who was a prominent church member) say, "Thank you, I baked it
> myself."
>
> Alice smiled and thought to herself, "GOD is good."

They Thought They Were Free

2006-09-15T23:20:00.000-07:00

They Thought They Were Free

But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental
things. One had no time."

"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’" "Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway.

I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.

"Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too
late."

"Yes," I said.

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally,people who have always thought as you have.

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."

I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.

"I can tell you," my colleague went on, "of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He as just—a judge. In ’42 or ’43, early ’43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an ‘Aryan’ woman. This was ‘race injury,’ something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case at bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a ‘nonracial’ offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party ‘processing’ which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the ‘nonracial’ charge, in the judge’s opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom."

"And the judge?"

"Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience—a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That’s how I heard about it.) After the ’44 Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don’t know."

I said nothing.

"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.

"Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany’s losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."

Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 166-73 of They Thought They Were Free:
The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, published by the University of Chicago
Press. ©1955, 1966 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions
of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in
electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright
information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is
notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or
republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the
consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references
included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the
text.)

Milton Mayer
They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
©1955, 1966, 368 pages
Paper $19.00 ISBN: 0-226-51192-8

The Giving Tree

2006-08-07T23:58:00.000-07:00

Somebody recently mentioned a book called "The Giving Tree" by Shel
Silverstein. This is one of the beloved modern children's classics in
the English-speaking world. So I got out my copy and revisited it.

If you have never read, or don't remember this story, I transcribed it
below (minus the author's poignant illustrations).

If you look at the Amazon reviews ,
it is clear that the readers' opinion is very polarized: the majority
of reviewers loved it, while a small minority couldn't stand it. The
debate is never about the writing style but rather the message itself
– and some people do argue quite seriously.

Those who like the story consider it to be a great description of a
pure unconditional love, such as a parent gives to a child. Those who
hate it say that glorifies both the `take-all' mindset and giving to
the point of self-destruction.

I have read as an adult and admit to being repulsed by it from the
first take, to the point of being physically nauseated. The
relationship depicted in it is vampiric and ultimately destructive to
both parties, yet is being held up as a model. The old "giving until
it hurts and giving because it hurts" thing.

I am wondering though if I was somewhat biased by a dedication written
on the cover by my MIL to my husband (he had it since he was about 9),
going on and on about how wonderful and special this book is. This is
the same person who since had practically disowned us -- and we could pretty much already see it coming back long before I was first reading that book :(

However, I think taht m opinion would have been the same regardless of that dedication. I have never been in the "giving tree" situation for prolonged periods of time, yet I have a very low tolerance for this kind of relationship and feel the pain of it in my bones. I hope I have already somehow learned this lesson -- perhaps paying for it dearly.

Here is the story:
***
THE GIVING TREE by Shel Silverstein

Once there was a tree … and she loved a little boy. And every day the
boy would come, and he would gather her leaves, and make them into
crowns, and play king of the forest. He would climb up her trunk, and
swing from her branches, and eat apples. And they would play
hide-and-go-seek. And when he was tired, he would sleep in her shade.
And the boy loved the tree … very much. And the tree was happy.

But time went by. And the boy grew older. And the tree was often
alone.

Then one day the boy came to the tree and the tree said, "Come, Boy,
come and climb up my trunk and swing from my branches and eat apples
and play in my shade and be happy."

"I am too big to climb and play," said the boy. "I want to buy things
and have fun. I want some money. Can you give me money?"

"I'm sorry," said the tree, "but I have no money. I have only leaves
and apples. Take my apples, Boy, and sell them in the city. Then you
will have money and you will be happy."

And so the boy climbed up the tree and gathered her apples and carried
them away.

And the tree was happy.

But the boy stayed away for a long time … and the tree was sad. And
then one day the boy came back and the tree shook with joy and she
said, "Come, Boy, come and climb up my trunk and swing from my
branches and eat apples and play in my shade and be happy."

"I am too busy to climb trees," said the boy. "I want a house to keep
me warm," he said. "I want a wife and I want children, and so I need
a house, Can you give me a house?"

"I have no house," said the tree. "The forest is my house, but you
may cut off my branches and build a house. Then you will be happy."

And so the boy cut off her branches and carried them away to build his
house.

And the tree was happy.

But the boy stayed away for a long time. And when he came back, the
tree was so happy she could hardly speak. , "Come, Boy," she
whispered, "come and play."

"I am too old and sad to play," said the boy. "I want a boat that
will take me far away from here. Can you give me a boat?"

"Cut down my trunk and make a boat," said the tree. "then you can
sail away … and be happy."

And so the boy cut down her trunk and made a boat and sailed away.

And the tree was happy … but not really.

And after a long time the boy came back again. "I am sorry, Boy,"
said the tree, "but I have nothing left to give you – My apples are gone."

"My teeth are too week for apples," said the boy.

"My branches are gone ," said the tree. "You cannot swing on them –"

"I am too old to swing on branches," said the boy.

"My trunk is gone," said the tree. "You cannot climb—"

"I am too tired to climb," said the boy.

"I am sorry," sighed the tree. "I wish that I could give you
something … but I have nothing left. I am just an old stump. I am
sorry …"

"I don't need very much now," said the boy, "just a quiet place to sit
and rest. I am very tired."

"Well," said the tree, straightening herself up as much as she could,
"well, an old stump IS good for sitting and resting. Come, Boy, sit
down. Sit down and rest."

And the boy did.

And the tree was happy.

(c) Shel Sylverstein

bullying as an underlying principle of modern society

2006-08-03T00:00:00.000-07:00

Bullying in the school system is a serious problem. Let's look the stats in the eye:

BULLYING STATISTICS

* Thirty percent (30%) of U.S. students in grades six through ten are involved in moderate or frequent bullying — as bullies, as victims, or as both — according to the results of the first national survey on this subject.
* Bullying is increasingly viewed as an important contributor to youth violence, including homicide and suicide. [..]

RECENT STATISTICS SHOW THAT:

* 1 out of 4 kids is Bullied. The American Justice Department says that this month 1 out of every 4 kids will be abused by another youth.
* Surveys Show That 77% of students are bullied mentally, verbally, & physically.
* In a recent study, 77% of the students said they had been bullied. And 14% of those who were bullied said they experienced severe (bad) reactions to the abuse.
* 1 out of 5 kids admits to being a bully, or doing some "Bullying."
[..]
* 100,000 students carry a gun to school.
* 28% of youths who carry weapons have witnessed violence at home.
* A poll of teens ages 12-17 proved that they think violence increased at their schools.
* 282,000 students are physically attacked in secondary schools each month.
* More youth violence occurs on school grounds as opposed to on the way to school.
[..]

The last point especially stands out for me, underscoring that school is really a dangerous place worth avoding.

Homeschoolers are very aware of this issue: a full 9% of people list bullying and behavioral issues in the school as their primary motivator for the choice to homeschool.

no matter what the reason is for their educational and lifestyle choice, many more homeschoolers hold the notion that they would also, as a bonus, at least somewhat shield ther children from the bullying and all the physical and emotional stress it imposes on a developing psyche of a child. At the same time, nurturing the child with attention, love and respect will create a individual with a healthy self-esteem, who will no doubt effortlessly fit into his own cozy niche in the fabric of society.

Your truly is, largely, in this camp too. But recently I am beginning to see a bigger picture here.

You see, the unspoken assumption in this philosophy is that life at large is a much healthier place than school is, with is unnatural confines and absurd restrictions. Bullying, people maintain, really doesn't happen in the real world so much. Who could imagine someone being bullied at a place of employment?

As a result, the only damage they see from bullying is to the children's personal safety within the timeline of school age, and to their self-esteem in the future. The latter hurts their chances for a full rich life in an apparently safe and happy environment, where all is for the best.

The question I have is: if this is so, then where do all the school bullies, who through their years in the system became quite proficient in their craft, all of a sudden disappear when they hit working age?

The answer is: they don't. They find themselves cozy little niches in companies big and small, where they bully their coworkers in ways unimaginable (see the link below for some horror stories). I will stick with the stats in my quote, to show that the numbers are quite similar to what we see among the kids in school:

[..]

Bullying is "repeated, health-harming mistreatment," Namie said, and it usually includes "verbal abuse, behavior that's threatening, intimidating or humiliating, or work interference."

When the behavior perpetrates the boss's own agenda at the expense of the company's goals, you've got a boss who's going too far, Namie said.

[..]

At least one in four firms
How pervasive is workplace bullying? That's hard to pin down.

About 24 percent of companies said workplace bullying had occurred "within the past year," according to a survey of 516 firms in 2004 by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). In that survey, bullying is "repeated intimidation, slandering, social isolation, or humiliation by one or more persons against another." It includes workers who bully other workers.

But that's a survey of managers, so it's likely an understatement. The survey respondents "may not be aware of what is going on, or they might want to present the company in a positive light," said Paula Grubb, a research psychologist with NIOSH and researcher on the study. "If they're managers, they tend to identify with management."

Between 10 percent and 16 percent of workers say they are currently experiencing "regular bullying" by their supervisor according to a separate series of studies focusing solely on supervisors who bully subordinates (rather than workers who bully their colleagues), said Bennett Tepper, in an e-mail message. Tepper is a professor of managerial sciences at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

When you ask workers to look back in time, however, that figure skyrockets: 50 percent of workers say they've had an abusive boss at some point in their working career, Tepper said.

Meanwhile, a separate survey finds that workers' top pet peeves hint at some forms of bullying: 44 percent said "condescending tones" are the most annoying workplace situation, followed by 37 percent who said public reprimands are the top pet peeve, according to a survey of 2,318 U.S. adults in February by Harris Interactive for Randstad USA, the staffing firm.

[..]

What I note here is that those bullies quoted in the article are only the ones who got caught. There is probably just as many who were more careful and covert in their aggression.

All that creates a truly pathological environment, where homo homini lupus est, and it is just the way things are: either you eat or be eaten - or go insane trying to grasp why the world is so crazy.

The latter apparently is exactly what happened to the young Barbara O'Brien: under the stress of covert and overt bullying at her workplace, her mind snapped and she ended up hopping around the country for six months in the state of acute schizophrenia. She eventually snapped out of it spontaneously (a truly rare case), but not before her subconciousness took her through a rollercoaster of a complex drama, truly fantastic and yet incredibly closely mimicking reality.

She wrote about her experience in the book, "Operators and things: The inner life of a schizophrenic". In her hallucinations, she was visited by people, or entities, who called themselves Operators, and referred to other human beings as Things, which they exploit and manipulate mercilessly for the cshow of power:

Hadley [an operator] was famous from coast to coast for his
experiments. There was a woman who had been convinced that she was an
apostle of the sun and who thought she dined every night with the sun
god [a projection of the operator]. She had used her delusions to
start a new religion among Things and had made quite a bit of money
out of it."

[..]

"People lived out their lifetimes, I reflected, taking strange
actions, never aware that their actions were motivated by some Operator.

[..]

Such laws as Operators were subject to had obviously been made to
protect Operators. Nowhere was there compassion or sense of
responsibility for Things.
"Are you shocked because Things are exploited?" Nicky wanted to
know. "Doesn't your own kind exploit every form of llfe it can
exploit? There's nothing more ruthless than a Thing. Your kind is in
no position to criticize."
"I should think," I told him, "that Operators would feel toward
Things at least the way that Things feel toward dogs."
"That's about it," said Nicky.
"But that's not it. Apparently nature developed two species of
men. One could help and benefit the other. Instead, one exploits the
other without compassion."

When she regained her power of reason, she clearly related what she saw to what is going on in an average workplace, calling the bullies Hook Operators:

As a young adult, I dug into the community, living by its codes.
You went to work for a company and you stayed with the same
company untill you married or became pregnant or died. You advanced.
in the company, step by step, until you reached your top
level. You didn't flit around from job to job. You were expected to
adjust to your company as you adjusted to the community. At my
company, I adjusted well until I came up against something, sud-
denly, which Burr couldn't handle. Hinton might have been able to
cope with it but Hinton had long been restricted to a limited area,
work methods[Hinton and Burr are both Operators from her hallucinations, whom she later identified as subconcious archetypes]. He was never permitted out of Burt's pocket for any
other task. The human Hook Operators appeared and started their
operations and Burr could only behave like a Burr. Overcome by
fear he could neither fight nor run. He could only stand, digging in,
until tragedy struck. In insanity, there is nothing more important than escape.

The individual, whether he is invaded by strange chemicals or not in-
vaded by strange chemicals, is caught in a situation which says
plainly: fight or run. The individual who is to become schizophrenic
can do neither. He hangs on, digs in, breaks finally, unable to meet
stress. What is stress? Stress is a situation which you have not
learned to meet and which terrifies you, occurring in a place you
cannot leave.

The Hook Operators were new in my life when they appeared
in Knox. They represented a type of human behavior that horri-
fied me because it was so new and vicious, and which paralyzed
mc because I had no idea whatever of how to deal with it. The be-
havior patterns o£ the people I had known all my life were funda-
mentally decent patterns formed from principles and codes that had
been built into individuals. Coming upon the Hook Operators suddenly
was something like turning a calm winding country road and
finding mysdf in a nightmarish jungle. I had had no training for
journeying through jungles.

I am afraid we can not change the broad-scope reality here, either via our thoughts or revolutionary action. Creating a safe niche, a strategic enclosure of a sort, works. And yet, while enjoying it's safety, we must teach our children to navigate through life's jungles, almost like a branch of human knowledge.

Because bullying is here to stay. There will not alsways be an adult on the playground to break up the fight. When bullies grow up, it's a level playing field.

bullying
school
work
O'Brien
Operators and Things
news

more on 911

2006-08-01T23:46:00.000-07:00

You'd think that the recent Moussaoui trial disclosure is a definite win for the 911 Truth movement.

I am not holding my breath though, because of what Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes here

After a few days of exchanges, providing referenced material for discussion, and being flamed by such luminaries as Holmgren, Grable and (surprise!) Alex Constantine, I realized that it is really, really true: the 911 Movement is co-opted to the very core, and probably always has been.

we see what they want us to see, that's all.

Israel, Lebanon, and kids

2006-07-28T00:38:00.000-07:00

One mother, who is residing in Haifa, has a blog 'from a war zone'. I understand that this is the area of Israel where the daily grunt of Arab-Israeli conflict doesn' touch as much as elsewhere, but that now feels the heat of the conflict with Lebanon.

Recently she wrote about how she talks (or doesn't talk, as you will see), to her children about the war. I translated it to English:

***
I wanted to start with a quote from an article that I have read a couple of months ago/ Apparently, some Jewish people, who themselves have been born after the WWII, but whose parents lived through the Holocaust, were diagnosed with PTSD – and it was related to that war that they have never seen.

As hard it is for our children now, and whatever they’ll remember from this few weeks will depend, first of all, on us parents. Whether we are ready to shield them from the war, or if we are leaving them next to us, to feel all that we are feeling.
Of course where you live is important – it hard not to feel the war in Nahariyya. Yet it is not a deal braker – one can continue living in Haifa, or be afraid for your life in Ramat-Gan. IMO if a child in Tel-Aviv is playing sirens and rockets, or asks whether his grandmother in Haifa is still alive, this means first of all that his [arents didn’t protect him from the war, even if at the first sound of bombs they evacuated into the center of the country from Haifa.

I don’t agree that emotional stress also has positive sides to it. I think that peaseful life amd spending time with family and other children include enough emotionally challenging moments. Because of this, our fears of war and heavy thoughts should not get to out children. This is hard, and sometimes very hard. This means that you speak calmly and continue with a story when a ‘boom’ goes over your heads; you don’t discuss what’s happening in front of your kids. You tell them ’all is well, no one is hurt, you can go out into the hallway’ as you take out from your ear an earphone, from which you have been listening to news about a direct hit into a residential house in your town.

But – one minute after the siren life goes on, with dolls, games of hide-and-seek, bubbles, and going into the shelter(miklat), children say, ‘Mama, go on with the story’.

WE don’t have a TV in the house. If we did, we wouldn’t have watched it during the first days in front of the kids. Now, as they say, there is only a running text at the bottom of the screen, and they no longer show anything.

My children know next to nothing about this war. They don’t know the name of the country from which they are bombing us – but they know that it is far from here, and that our army will defend us. They know that the planes are roaring in the sky because they are flying to protect us. They know that our Army has almost hit The Big Bad Guy, and most likely soon will get him.

The magic word, especially during the first days, is ‘just in case’. No, the rocket will not hit our apartment – we are going downstairs just in case, because everybody is told to do this when a siren goes on. Of course everything will be fine with us all, and you are sleeping in the living room because that’s what everyone is told to do, just in case – and it is fun to sleep here, isn’t it?

When children go to sleep, I rearrange their shoes and slippers so that, when they get up, they could quickly dress on their own. ‘What if you want to go in our room, and can’t find your slippers?’

And a few more words about living town. First of all, I really do not want to make refugees out of my children. I understand people who live and take their children from Haifa to visit someone – friends or aquaintances – or go to a resort or a camp at the sea. It is harder for me to understand those who run or urgently evacuate from Haifa. Again, I understand that is worse in Tsfat or Nagariyya, and from there, perhaps, it is necessary to run, and perhaps than there is no time to think how to explain the departure to a child. It is not like that in Haifa. And I believe firmly that for the children the departure can and should be presented as a visit, and not as a desire to run away from bombings.

Second – returning to the subject of emotional stress – I am not sure that it is easier for a child, evacuated quickly without parents, than it is to my kids that are now dancing in the living room. I actually think that it is worse for a scared child. And people who ‘left Haifa in such a rush that they left everything behind’, probably, don’t have it easy either. Not because they don’t have their stuff , but because of fear, clutching their minds and hearts.

I should probably clarify – I understand very well that bombs are dangerous. We go down into the shelter ten to twenty ties a day, I do get scared when a ‘boom’ goes on up above; and when I leave the house for any reason, I scan the street to note which building I can run into if anything, and where the north is.

But this fear is in my head, and not those of my children. Because I know how to live with it and manage it, but my kids don’t.
***

She later commented:

I don’t think that one should shelter children from reality. But if this reality will disappear anyway, and pretty soon – does the child have to know about it, if we can get along without that? I think this is the rub. And you know, even if my children have been hearing sirens for 2 weeks, I hope that after a day of silence this war will be a history for them, something to read about or to listen to, and not a personal emotional experience.

***

Notice how valid and sound coping strategies are mixed with absolutely impossible mindwarping. As in 'THEY are bombing us', and not the other way around.

The actual death count illustrates quite a different picture .

The mindwarping is also being imparted to the kids through powerful archetypes (Big Bad Guys vs the army of defenders) and open ideology.

As much as I can relate to her anguish and the desire to do the best thing, it BEATS ME that she HAS NO CONCEPT that kids in LEBANON have no luxury of having their inner emotional landscape protected, or 'pretty soon' viewing this war as a 'history'.

Also I think there is a glimpse on how the average Israelis view the war, and what they actually KNOW about it (not much, or so it seems).

WHERE ARE THE CHRISTIANS?

2006-07-19T22:31:00.000-07:00

Never thought I'd live to favorably quote an extreme conservative, especially this creep ... but he speaketh the truth here, at least in major part, so there goes:

WHERE ARE THE CHRISTIANS?
Pat Buchanan Wed Jul 19, 6:50 AM ET

When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert unleashed his navy and air force on Lebanon, accusing that tiny nation of an "act of war," the last pillar of Bush's Middle East policy collapsed.

First came capitulation on the Bush Doctrine, as Pyongyang and Tehran defied Bush's dictum: The world's worst regimes will not be allowed to acquire the world's worst weapons. Then came suspension of the democracy crusade as Islamic militants exploited free elections to advance to power and office in Egypt, Lebanon, Gaza, the
West Bank, Iraq and Iran.

Now Israel's rampage against a defenseless Lebanon -- smashing airport runways, fuel tanks, power plants, gas stations, lighthouses, bridges, roads and the occasional refugee convoy -- has exposed Bush's folly in subcontracting U.S. policy out to Tel Aviv, thus making Israel the custodian of our reputation and interests in the Middle East.

The Lebanon that Israel, with Bush's blessing, is smashing up has a pro-American government, heretofore considered a shining example of his democracy crusade. Yet, asked in St. Petersburg if he would urge Israel to use restraint in its air strikes, Bush sounded less like the leader of the Free World than some bellicose city councilman from Brooklyn Heights.

What Israel is up to was described by its Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz when he threatened to "turn back the clock in Lebanon 20 years."

Olmert seized upon Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers to unleash the IDF in a pre-planned attack to make the Lebanese people suffer until the Lebanese government disarms Hezbollah, a task the Israeli army could not accomplish in 18 years of occupation.

Israel is doing the same to the Palestinians. To punish these people for the crime of electing Hamas, Olmert imposed an economic blockade of Gaza and the West Bank and withheld the $50 million in monthly tax and customs receipts due the Palestinians.

Then, Israel instructed the United States to terminate all aid to the
Palestinian Authority, though Bush himself had called for the elections and for the participation of Hamas. Our Crawford cowboy meekly complied.

The predictable result: Fatah and Hamas fell to fratricidal fighting, and Hamas militants began launching Qassam rockets over the fence from Gaza into Israel. Hamas then tunneled into Israel, killed two soldiers, captured one, took him back into Gaza, and demanded a prisoner exchange.

Israel's response was to abduct half of the Palestinian cabinet and parliament and blow up a $50 million U.S.-insured power plant. That cut off electricity for half a million Palestinians. Their food spoiled, their water could not be purified, and their families sweltered in the summer heat of the Gaza desert. One family of seven was wiped out on a beach by what the IDF assures us was an errant artillery shell.

Let it be said: Israel has a right to defend herself, a right to counter-attack against Hezbollah and Hamas, a right to clean out bases from which Katyusha or Qassam rockets are being fired and a right to occupy land from which attacks are mounted on her people.

But what Israel is doing is imposing deliberate suffering on civilians, collective punishment on innocent people, to force them to do something they are powerless to do: disarm the gunmen among them. Such a policy violates international law and comports neither with our values nor our interests. It is un-American and un-Christian.

But where are the Christians? Why is Pope Benedict virtually alone among Christian leaders to have spoken out against what is being done to Lebanese Christians and Muslims?

When al Qaeda captured two U.S. soldiers and barbarically butchered them, the U.S. Army did not smash power plants across the Sunni Triangle. Why then is Bush not only silent but openly supportive when Israelis do this?

Democrats attack Bush for crimes of which he is not guilty, including Haditha and
Abu Ghraib. Why are they, too, silent when Israel pursues a conscious policy of collective punishment of innocent peoples?

Britain's diplomatic goal in two world wars was to bring the naive cousins in, to "pull their chestnuts out of the fire." Israel and her paid and pro-bono agents here appear determined to expand the Iraq war into Syria and Iran, and have America fight and finish all of Israel's enemies.

That Tel Aviv is maneuvering us to fight its wars is understandable. That Americans are ignorant of, or complicit in this, is deplorable.

Already, Bush is ranting about Syria being behind the Hezbollah capture of the Israeli soldiers. But where is the proof?

Who is whispering in his ear? The same people who told him Iraq was maybe months away from an atom bomb, that an invasion would be a "cakewalk," that he would be Churchill, that U.S. troops would be greeted with candy and flowers, that democracy would break out across the region, that Palestinians and Israelis would then sit down and make peace?

How much must America pay for the education of this man?

***

Where are the Christians indeed? Well, some of them are very busy bashing Buchanan:

Christians Against Buchanan is opposed to the candidacy of Patrick J. Buchanan for the presidency. We oppose his candidacy as Christians because his anti-semitism is unbiblical, and because Christ gives us a special mandate to oppose it.

Any criticism of Israel's foreign policy is equaled to anti-semitism in public opinion this days, or so it seems.

BATTLECRY RALLY

2006-06-19T01:20:00.000-07:00

This sent chills down my spine. Hitler Youth reincarnated.

You can brainwash grown-ups into all kinds of things, but if you want them to put on brown shirts, march to the cause and kill for it, you have to start while they are still kids.

First come the Good News Camps, the Bible Study camps ran by teachers during afterschool hours on public school premises. Perfectly legal apparently, as court rulings finally decreed. Those target elementary school-age children. Wall Street Journal ran an article on this issue a couple of weeks ago. More on that to follow.

Then, as those kids get older, it's BattleCry (quotes from three artiles by the same author follow):

BattleCry For Theocracy

If you've been waiting to get alarmed until the Christian fascist movement started filling stadiums with young people and hyping them up to do battle in "God's army," wait no longer.

In recent weeks, BattleCry, a Christian fundamentalist youth movement, has attracted more than 25,000 people to mega-rally rock concerts in San Francisco and Detroit, and this weekend it plans to fill Wachovia Stadium in Philadelphia.

attleCry is a part of the evangelical organization Teen Mania, and you can learn a lot about the kind of society that Teen Mania is fighting for by reading up on its Honor Academy, a non-accredited educational institution that offers directed internships to 700 undergraduate and graduate youth each year. Among the academy's tenets: Homosexuality and masturbation are sins. Interns are forbidden to listen to secular music, watch R-rated movies or date; men can't use the Internet unsupervised; the length of women's skirts is regulated. The logic behind this-that men must be protected from the sin of sexual temptation-is what drives Islamic fundamentalists to shroud women in burkhas! [..]

Teen Mania and BattleCry are multimillion-dollar operations that send more than 5,000 missionaries to more than 34 countries each year. Their supporters and members are some of the most powerful and extreme religious lunatics in the country. BattleCry's "partners" include Pat Robertson (who got a call from Karl Rove to discuss Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito before the nomination was made public), Charles Colson (who as President Richard Nixon's lawyer was knee-deep in the Watergate scandal and who went to jail for obstruction of justice in the Pentagon Papers case), and Jerry Falwell (who blamed Sept. 11 on homosexuals, feminists, pagans and abortionists). BattleCry's events have been addressed by former First Lady Barbara Bush (via video) as well as former President Gerald Ford. This weekend's event will include Franklin Graham, who has ministered to George W. Bush and publicly proclaimed that Islam is an "evil religion." [..]

Fear and Loathing at Philadelphia's BattleCry

It began with fireworks so loud and startling I screamed. Lights and smoke followed, and a few kids were pulled up on stage from the crowd. One was asked to read a letter.

This was the letter that opened the event. Its author was George W. Bush. Yes, the president of the United States sent a letter of support, greeting, prayer and encouragement to the BattleCry event held at Wachovia Spectrum Stadium in Philadelphia on May 12. Immediately afterward, a preacher took the microphone and led the crowd in prayer. Among other things, he asked the attendees to "Thank God for giving us George Bush."

On his cue, about 17,000 youths from upward of 2,000 churches across America and Canada directed their thanks heavenward in unison.

Throughout the three and a half hours of BattleCry's first session, I thought of only one analogy that fit the experience: This must have been what it felt like to watch the Hitler Youth, filled with self-righteous pride, proclaim the supremacy of their beliefs and their willingness to shed blood for them.

A man of imposing size sat down next to me and my friends and asked us if we were planning any disturbances.

And lest you think this is idle paranoia, BattleCry founder Ron Luce told the crowds the next morning (May 13) that he plans to launch a "blitzkrieg" in the communities, schools, malls, etc. against those who don't share his theocratic vision of society.

Blitzkrieg.

Nothing like a little Nazi imagery to whip up the masses. [..]

(While in the bathroom, I saw something equally unsettling--a preteen girl wearing a shirt being sported by many attendees that night: Jesus on the cross, robes waving, and emblazoned across the front the words "Dressed to Kill.") [..]

It was a mantra Luce repeated all through the night: the need to submit one's self fully to Jesus, to belong completely to Him.

"He doesn't just want to be in your heart, He wants to own your heart.... There's only one good reason to come to Christ: because He's the rightful owner of your life.... You don't have to know much about Jesus, just enough to surrender your whole life."

Throughout this section, a loud crowd from the back of the stadium would periodically erupt, "We are warriors!" [..]

BattleCry: Ron Luce's Holy War

[..] After what amounted to a celebration of genocide against Native Americans and a pep rally for death by STDs, things got really gory: Evangelist Franklin Graham took the stage.

Graham began by tossing out the despicable canard that HIV/AIDS is a punishment from God. "We get outside of marriage and there are consequences," he told the crowd.

He went on to assert that God sees marriage as a "relation between a man and a woman. Not a man and a man or a woman and a woman." This drew him his loudest applause of the day, never mind that the Bible celebrates many instances of marriage between one man and many women. Maybe the next time I go to one of Luce's gatherings I'll take a bunch of bumper stickers that read: "Man + 1,000 Women = Marriage." People can put them on their cars to promote a model of marriage in the Bible-a model in which King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines (and for some reason God never gave him AIDS as a punishment).

How long must we put up with a world where religion plays a role in whipping up people to kill others?

The heart of Graham's speech was a call for holy war. He preached about the "battle for souls of men and women from north to south, east to west, over the entire Earth." There is, he declared, "No way to God but through Jesus Christ." [..]

While calling on the youths present to engage in this "battle for the souls of men," he declared: "No souls can be saved without the shedding of blood. Blood must be shed!"

Shortly thereafter the large screen above the stadium lit up with images of Navy SEALs making their way from backstage. Dressed in camouflage, carrying automatic weapons, kicking down doors and firing blanks into empty rooms along their way, they seemed like the embodiments of the house-to-house raids and indiscriminate killings that have been seen in rare footage that made its way out of Iraq.

Fireworks exploded and flames billowed as Ron Luce greeted the warriors, bragging that all of them had been involved in real battles. They are part of FORCE Ministries, a Christian organization composed of current and retired Navy SEALs, law enforcement members and other military personnel who evangelize at events like these and conduct Bible study sessions at military bases around the world. Among those on stage was a SEAL just back from Afghanistan and a member of a police SWAT team. All of them are trained to kill, and they apparently do so or have done so in the belief that God sanctions their actions. [..]

Da Vinci Code revisited

2006-06-12T22:54:00.000-07:00

As the release of The Da Vinci Code was fast approaching, I kept wondering at the amount of negative publicity surrounding the film. Preachers decried its viles and lies from pulpits; in some places, there were mass protests and the viewing opportunities were restricted altogether. In the media, the tone of discussion changed overnight from exalted anticipation to total contempt. AS soon as the critics saw the previous, articles appeared in papers that the movie is terrible, even before the reviews came out.

Well, I thought, the movie may indeed not be very good, but the amount of negativity thrown at it far exceeds the reasonable and customary ... why, I wondered?

It is clear that the religious right sees The Da Vinci Code, with its alternative version of early Christianity, as a threat to the establishment. They also realize the potential of using this movie as a platform for evangelizing. Thus their ire and the multitide of debunking books, which enjoy brisk sales on the wake of Dan Brown's oeuvre.

Yet this doesn't explain why many non-religious people also have a strong negative reaction to the movie.

Perhaps people are so invested in the consensus reality that they in general strongly react to any concept that has a potential to disturb the status quo. This is the reason why most people reject conspiracy theories. This rejection is even more apparent with The Da Vinci Code, since it touches on what is such an integral part of common culture.

Keeping all this in mind, I went and watched The Da Vinci Code the other day. Well, what can I say ... make a guess ...

IT SUCKS! BIG TIME!

Forget the trail-blazing ideas and the iconoclastic plot -- everything is dreadfully superficial and looks dead from the start. The movie struck me as plain BORING. In the book, the clues are revealed gradually, with a lot of background. The move skims over it in a mad race from clue to clue, which gets annoying pretty fast. Both those who read the book and those who didn't soon get lost -- the first know this stuff already, the second can't follow it. Terrible acting from lead stars doesn't help either.

But the best part was when at the end Langdon says to Sophie smth along the lines of "Jesus, Mary Magdalene -- does it really matter what really happened? It is what you BELIEVE that matters ... Imagine what would MM do in this situation ... would she seek to destroy the faith -- or to revitalize it?"

And this is why I suffered 2.5 hours of jaw-stiffling boredom, to hear THIS @#$%?

I think we may soon start seeing car stickers and bracelets with "It is what you BELIEVE that matters" or
"What would Mary Magdalene do?" :):)

This gives a hint of something more incidious than a simple film-making flop. The Da Vinci Code appears to be a successful management program, attempting to accomodate maximum number of people from traditional religious and new-age paths.

IMO the Da Vinci Code may actually have serve the religious right. It may have led the masses to stifle their vague questioning of the official story of Christianity, and into accepting any alternative concept as either a version of the same basic truth, or a work of fiction -- or both.

Yet, this "It is what you BELIEVE that matters" reels of a typically liberal "You're OK, I'm OK, WE are both OK". This kind of talk makes the conservatives' blood boil, since it goes against their proclamed absolute values. Thus we have yet another false dichotomies, when a solution to a problem is reduced to two alternatives, neither of which accurately reflects reality. And a choice between these alternatives inevitably results in a dog fight.

It does cover all bases indeed.

MySpace!

2006-04-30T12:57:00.000-07:00

I now have a page on MySpace, it's located here. Join in!

Lie Busters!

2006-03-31T23:22:00.001-08:00

I am thinking of renaming my blog 'Lie Busters'. Lately, every issue I start examining turns into a bunch of twisted rotten lies, and disintegrates at the slightest touch. Everything, you name it.

Ours is the world of lies, for true, and I am only beginning to understand it.

Man, being a realist sure does wear you out.

On a more optimistic note:

If there's something weird in your neighborhood
Who you gonna call? LIE BUSTERS!
If there's something strange and it don't look good
Who you gonna call? LIE BUSTER!
(Oh yeah)
I ain't afraid of no lie,
Lie busting makes me feel good!

YEAH!

EVOLVE!!!

2006-03-25T23:21:00.000-08:00

And our reason #10561 for homeschooling is ... [drrrrumroll]

The missing link
Scientist discovers that evolution is missing from Arkansas classrooms.

[..] “Bob” is a geologist and a teacher at a science education institution that serves several Arkansas public school districts. [..] Teachers at his facility are forbidden to use the “e-word” (evolution) with the kids. They are permitted to use the word “adaptation” but only to refer to a current characteristic of an organism, not as a product of evolutionary change via natural selection. They cannot even use the term “natural selection.” Bob feared that not being able to use evolutionary terms and ideas to answer his students’ questions would lead to reinforcement of their misconceptions.

But Bob’s personal issue was more specific, and the prohibition more insidious. In his words, “I am instructed NOT to use hard numbers when telling kids how old rocks are. I am supposed to say that these rocks are VERY VERY OLD ... but I am NOT to say that these rocks are thought to be about 300 million years old.” [..]

The explanation that had been given to Bob by his supervisors was that their science facility is in a delicate position and must avoid irritating some religious fundamentalists who may have their fingers on the purse strings of various school districts. Apparently his supervisors feared that teachers or parents might be offended if Bob taught their children about the age of rocks and that it would result in another school district pulling out of their program.

Let me get it straight.

As early as 1925 Scopes Monkey trial tested in court the Butler Act, an unconstitutional law which forbade "public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals".

The case generated an overwhelming publicity, but in the end the anti-evolutionists won, and the teaching of the evolutionary theory was against the law in Tennessee for another 40 years.

Butler Act was repelled as unconstitutional in Tennessee in the 60-ies, and finally US Supreme Court in Epperson v. Arkansas 393 U.S. 97 suled all such bans as unconstitutional, on the grounds that their primary purpose is RELIGIOUS (thank you very much!).

Nevertheless, the state of Alabama continues to use the disclaimer stickers warning students against accepting evolution as a fact, and encouraging them to "keep an open mind". Other similar efforts to introduce pseudo-scientific concepts in science curriculums abound in other states, including Arkansas, as described in the article.

I find a few things seriously wrong with the picture. Pick your winner, and I'll tell you mine.

For one, it is disturbing that teaching a scientific concept became a loaded political issue. And then we wonder why kids do poorly in math and science.

Further, it is very disconcerting when evolution is denied and sidelined on the basis of "free speech" and "fair and balanced approach", and argument commonly envoqued by anti-evolutionists. Essentially, this gives equal weight and meaning to the concepts of evolution and creationism / intelligent design. This demonstrates their complete and total lack of understanding of what evolutionary theory they are so afraid of, is really about. Come to think of it, it is patently absurd that a court, local or Supreme, is considered competent to judge right or wrong in this situation. Western legalism in action.

The truth is that the theory of evolution is not a FACT, and never have been considered as fact by scientists. It is just what it is -- a THEORY. It came a long way since Darwin's time, and have been thouroughly revised based on our modern knowledge of genes and mutations. And yes, it doesn't explain everything.

However, evolutionary theory is the only SCIENTIFIC theory of the origin and development of life that we have. 'Scientific' means that it follows scientific research process, from hypothesis through experiment/observation to conclusions.

Creationism and a recently popular wishy-washy concept of 'intelligent design' are NOT scientific. Their basis lies in the belief in the God-creator, or a similar conviction, which must be taken a priori in good faith, and cannot possibly be confirmed or refuted.

And yet, this fundamental differences between science and non-science are blurred regularly, even by the new Pope, no less.

Additionally, what bothered me in the original article is the overwhelming complicity of silence around the issue and obvious pattern of intimidation of teachers. Scary as all get out.

Finally, IMO the winner is an obnoxiously obvious implication of "the money trail". Quoting the original article:

[..] directors agreed that “in a perfect world” they could, and would, teach evolution and deep time. However, back in the real world, they defended their stance on the prohibition of the “e-word,” reasoning that it would take too long to teach the concept of evolution effectively (especially if they had to defuse any objections) and expressing concern for the well-being of their facility. Their program depends upon public support and continued patronage of the region’s school districts, which they felt could be threatened by any political blowback from an unwanted evolution controversy.

With regard to Bob’s geologic time scale issue, the program director likened it to a game of Russian roulette. He admitted that probably very few students would have a real problem with a discussion about time on the order of millions of years, but that it might only take one child’s parents to cause major problems. He spun a scenario of a student’s returning home with stories beginning with “Millions of years ago …” that could set a fundamentalist parent on a veritable witch hunt, first gathering support of like-minded parents and then showing up at school board meetings until the district pulled out of the science program to avoid conflict. He added that this might cause a ripple effect, other districts following suit, leading to the demise of the program. [..]

Again, this is not about TRUTH, or calling apples 'apples' and oranges 'oranges'. It is about the fact that whoever pays the piper orders the tune.

Unfortunately, I have observed a few examples of this same thing in my own community.

One was when a local library, a brand new facility with a coffee bar and a video/dvd collection to rival that of Netflix, informed me that they are charging a buck for each interlibrary loan, because -- get this -- they need money, and people in the community said in a survey that they just don't value this particular service. To reflect that, the library mission statement is that they are first "providers of popular culture resourses", and only after that "are dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge". Apparently, my minority status of someone who actually visits the library to get BOOKS, comes with a price tag.

Another one happened just recently, when a superintendant of a local school district spoke to moms in the playgroup we attend, and consistently referred to us parents as their -- get this -- 'customers'!! Yes, we are customers (we, not even our children), consumers of the service they provide. Aside from education, parents apparently need a plain old baby-sitting service. The number of parents who want full-day kindergarten has doubled in the past five years; such parents are now a majority. And the school system is on its toes to meet the need, notwithstanding lack of research that would confirm any benefits of full day K for an average child.

No reason to wonder why our kids' education is so poor. Money is not an issue, otherwise schools wouldn't spend $50K+ on putting together the Cats musical -- kid you not, read it in the Wall Street Journal today.

Kids learn what we want them to learn, no more, no less. So, to see the responsible party, one only has to look in the mirror.

Evolution
intelligent design
news
education

on defending yourself

2006-03-23T23:51:00.000-08:00

There is a book called BabyWise on the shelf of the parenting section in our library. It looked innocent enough, but actualy it is a secularised version of the Growing Kids God's Way (GKGW) parenting approach, espoused by Gary Ezzo and his ministry, Growing Families Inyernational. They encourage Bible-based approach to child rearing, or rather what they understand it to be, since Bible is pretty nebulous regarding the actual methods of raising children -- after all, this isn't its main focus.

There is a great deal of critic of this method here , which pretty much sums it all up. Moreover, doubts are raised over the integrity of Mr. Ezzo himself. The pattern of lying and plagiarizing is especially alarming.

Yet at the same time, Mr. Ezzo and his organization have many supporters, who love his child-rearing curriculum and staunchily defend his character, basing largely on their overwhelmingly positive impressions from personal interactions. However, in light of what we know about ponerology and psychopaths, personal impression would be something that we should trust least of all in such controversy.

It all comes down to the question: who is lying and who is telling the truth? I think that the websites I quoted above are suffient to carefully examine all available evidence. But to make a conclusion, one must also correlate both theory AND practice of Ezzo's GKWG with one's own deep-seated convictions about how we should parent our children.

If you find yourself in a deadlock, here is the featherweight that should move the scale.

The most notable thing to me is that, despite the seriousness of all the allegations, nowhere do Mr. Ezzo and his team publicly defend themselves. Their way of dealing with problems is to move to a different locations and affiliations, dismiss critics as evil and malicious individuals, and/or subtly change the tone of their materials, to create ambiguity allowing for difference in interpretation. But the task of defence itself, appears to be relegated to their supporters, who have put up a dedicated site -- and even this is a recent development.

My experience has been exactly the opposite. Truly honest people DO defend themselves personally, making available to the public all related information and communications. Such defence is all the more urgent if you uphold an important principle, and if your life's work is being threatened.

Here is an example of just such insidious COINTELPRO attack. Notice transparency, timely response and detailed account of all that happened, with factual evidence attached -- all personally put together by the affected party.

All of this is notably absent in Ezzo's case.

Ponerology
psychopath
GKGW
Ezzo
COINTELPRO
news

V for Vendetta!

2006-03-20T23:58:00.000-08:00

I have seen 'V for Vendetta' over the weekend and give it two thumbs up. I don't want to spoil the show for you by revealing the plot in advance, but will say a few words about it nonetheless.

V for Vendetta isn't as much of an action movie or a suspense thriller as one would expect basing on the Wachowski brother's previous hit, The Matrix trilogy. This seems to have confused a bunch of reviewers and resulted in an average rating of B or B-. Well, let me tell you -- they are wrong. The movie has a well thought-out plot, and flows like a good story.

The main character, V, sais at some point, 'writers use a lie to tell the truth' -- and this fits perfectly the movie itself, which practically spells out everything that happened here since 911 and before, you can't make it any clearer. This is why it is genuinely amusing to me when people interpret the movie as promoting terrorism, or see it as a debate of whether terrorism can be justified, as in 'end justifies the means'. IMO blowing up an empty building, with music and fireworks, seems a lot less terroristic than killing 80,000+ people as a part of elaborate plot. This is what totalian regime in the movie did to come to power, while making all participants very rich as an added bonus.

The real question to ponder is what DOing something about the grizzly reality does to a person. This is why V's mask never comes off -- because there is no face behind it. His path made him barely human, and turnes him into an immortal idea. This is where Evey's role is very important, because while she learns from him, she also teaches him something -- gives him back his heart, in a way.

As with the Matrix movies, there are many esoteric references, key words and images scattered throughout; an example would be the red rose, a drop of blood and the shape of an apple it makes when put in a glass of yellow liquid. Domino effect is another loaded symbol. Lastly, I imagine that the part when V puts Evey through a prison experience as a means of killing her fear, was totally lost on many people; but the whole scene was symbolic of initiation, down to Evey's shaved head, her prison gown that looked more like the orange robe of a buddist monk, and the water and fire images.

I interpret a large part of the movie as a symbol of esoteric initiation and path IN the world, utilizing the shocks that a sick pathocratic system amply provides, with a goal of creating an alternative future. The real Fourth Way path, in some sense.

However, the impression from the movie was somewhat overshadowed by a couple of things I learned about the Wachowski's. Apparently, there was a truly bizarre story of Larry Wachowski getting heavily into BDTM right after the first Matrix movie, and him getting together with a prominent LA dominatrix, with accompanying divorces on both sides. Rumors abound that he is transgender, and there is a talk about sex
change operation.

There is a Rollinge Stone article dealing extensively with this issue. It may have more details about the whole affair than one cares to find out -- I certainly have learned more than I bargained for, so caveat lector.

The bottom line is, IMO Wachowskis are NOT on the roll. The 'V for Vendetta'
project was started before the Matrix trilogy, and there is nothing else coming down the pipe. They haven't even directed the V movie. They are keeping quieter and quieter as time goes by, and now will only be making videogames and comic books, if that.

I always thought that Wachowski brothers are somehow 'in the know'. Another way to look at it is to hypothesize that a lot of creative people get their ideas from some universal pool. This seems innocent enough; but the material presented here puts an extra twist onto the concept. Apparently there may be an Army of superhuman psychic projectors who are beaming ideas into people's heads, inspiring them to rethink certain universal myths and incorporate important ideas in their creative work. I'll take that -- I like Star Treck :).

Nevertheless, whatever it is that they know or 'get' from somewhere about the Matrix and other aspects of hidden reality, IMO doesn't seem to be accompanied by the real understanding of 'the terror of the situation'. Otherwise may be LW wouldn't have fallen for the Woman in Red (a specially designed one in this case, with a bullwhip and all).

I have seen this kind of thing before, and it just makes me very, very sad.

V for Vendetta
movies
Wachowski
Matrix
Rolling Stone
news

a carrier of many grains of sand

2006-03-02T00:09:00.000-08:00

As the sand of my time began its trickle,
So I came to be
I was a happy child,
Playing with grains of sand,
Rustling softly as they fell.

Until one day it was no longer enough,
And I began to ask. And kept on asking.
Until a path has opened before me, full of light.

But I was weak and fearful,
And didn't realize how important it was,
Not the path itself,
But the moment of choice.
And so I turned away and didn't take it.

Years later, here I was, crying
Because life was no longer what I thought it should be,
And the sand of time was now falling heavy.

I searched and searched in vain for that forgotten path
But when I found it, it was cold and empty.
And as I walked a couple of miles on it,
It disappeared.

More years have passed
More sand has fallen down and drifted away.
Again I asked
And kept on asking
And cried
And asked again.

Until another path revealed itself to me.

No longer do I see the glorious bright light
Instead, it's lined with thorns and flowers
And littered with strange foreboding objects
Alerting one to mystery and danger.

Yet, it is broader path, and well defined
And I can better see what lies ahead.

But of course I don't know where it ends.

And so I walk on it
With wobbly and usnure steps
Like those I took at the dawn of my childhood,

While the sand of time is falling like a snowstorm behind me
And each of little grains is

equally,
painfully,
precious;
more so with every step I take.

and now I try to snatch a few and save them in a handful
the precious few

to carry them with me
and share with some others
who may be walking this path too some day
or are already doing so.

So here I am, plodding along slowly
I don't know where I am going
Or what I will become

I only know that now I am
The carrier of many grains of sand,
And this is more
Than I have ever been before.

cat vs. dog -- more fun

2006-02-28T20:30:00.000-08:00

Another fun quote:

**************************************

As seen in a dog's diary:

7 am - Oh boy! A walk! My favorite!
8 am - Oh boy! Dog food! My favorite!
9 am - Oh boy! The kids! My favorite!
Noon - Oh boy! The yard! My favorite!
2 pm - Oh boy! A car ride! My favorite!
3 pm - Oh boy! The kids! My favorite!
4 pm - Oh boy! Playing ball! My favorite!
6 pm - Oh boy! Welcome home Mom! My favorite!
7 pm - Oh boy! Welcome home Dad! My favorite!
8 pm - Oh boy! Dog food! My favorite!
9 pm - Oh boy! Tummy rubs on the couch! My favorite!
11 pm - Oh boy! Sleeping in my people's bed! My favorite!

As seen in a cat's diary:

Day 183 of my captivity... My captors continued to taunt me with bizarre
little dangling objects. They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while I am
forced to eat dry cereal. The only thing that keeps me going is the hope
of escape, and the mild satisfaction I get from clawing the furniture.

Tomorrow I may eat another houseplant. Today my attempt to kill my
captors by weaving around their feet while they were walking almost
succeeded - must try this at the top of the stairs. In an attempt to
disgust and repulse these vile oppressors, I once again induced myself
to vomit on their favorite chair - must try this on their bed.

Decapitated a mouse and brought them the headless body in an attempt to
make them aware of what I am capable of, and to try to strike fear in
their hearts. They only cooed and condescended about what a good little
cat I was. Hmmm, not working according to plan...

There was some sort of gathering of their accomplices. I was placed in
solitary throughout the event. However, I could hear the noise and smell
the food. More important, I overheard that my confinement was due to my
powers of inducing "allergies." Must learn what this is and how to use
it to my advantage.

I am convinced the other captives are flunkies and maybe snitches. The
dog is routinely released and seems more than happy to return. He is
obviously a half-wit. The bird, on the other hand, has got to be an
informant and speaks with them regularly. I am certain he reports my
every move. Due to his current placement in the metal room, his safety
is assured.

But I can wait, it is only a matter of time...

FW: Smarty-pants test -- fun!

2006-02-20T21:42:00.000-08:00

Well, enough talking about serious things, time to lighten up. Here is a chain letter I got the other day that made me laugh. Let me share it with you here:

> Below are four questions and a bonus question.
> You have to answer them quickly; you can't take
> your time. Let's find out just how clever you
> really are.
> Ready? Go!!! (scroll down)
>
>
>
>
> First Question:
>
> You are participating in a race. You overtake the
> second person. In what position are you now?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Answer: If you answered that you are first, then
> you are absolutely wrong! If you overtake
> the second person, you are second!
>
> Try not to screw up in the next question.
> To answer the second question, don't take as much
> time as you did for the first question.
>
>
>
>
> Second Question:
>
> If you overtake the last person, then you are...?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Answer: If you answered that you are second to
> last, then you are wrong again. Tell me, how
> can you overtake the LAST Person?
>
> You're not very good at this are you?!
>
>
>
>
> Third Question:
>
> Very tricky math! Note: This must be done in your
> head only.
> Do NOT use paper and pencil or a calculator.
>
>
> Take 1000 and add 40 to it. Now add another 1000.
> Now add 30. Add another 1000. Now add 20. Now add
> another 1000 Now add 10. What is the total?
>
>
> Scroll down for answer.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Did you get 5000?
>
>
>
> The correct answer is actually 4100.
>
> Don't believe it? Check with your calculator!
> Today is definitely not your day. Maybe you
> will get the last question right?
>
>
>
>
> Fourth Question:
>
> Mary's father has five daughters:
> 1) Nana, 2) Nene, 3) Nini, 4) Nono.
> What is the name of the fifth daughter?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Answer: Nunu?
>
>
> NO! Of course not.
> Her name is Mary. Read the question again.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Okay, now the bonus round:
>
> There is a mute man who wants to buy a toothbrush.

> By imitating the action of brushing one's teeth
> he successfully expresses himself to the
> shopkeeper and the purchase is made.
>
>
> Now, if there is a blind man who wishes to buy a
> pair of sunglasses, how should he express himself?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> He has only to open his mouth and ask. He is
> blind, not mute!
>
>
> KEEP THIS GOING TO FRUSTRATE THE SMART PEOPLE IN
> YOUR LIFE!
> (author's name removed to respect privacy)

The Third Kind Of Homeschooling Families

2006-02-14T09:05:00.000-08:00

Just read the following article in Business Week, and felt compelled to comment on it:

Meet My Teachers: Mom And Dad
A growing number of affluent parents think they can do better than any school

Slater Aldrich doesn't attend any of the top-shelf public or private schools near his family's Madison (Conn.) home, not even his mother's alma mater, the $18,000-a-year Country School. Instead, the 11-year-old spends his days playing the role of town zoning officer, researching the pros and cons of granting approval to a new Wal-Mart. Other endeavors include pretending he's a Sand Hill Road venture capitalist, creating Excel-studded business plans for a backyard sheep company, and growing his own organic food. "It's kind of like living on a white-collar farm," says his dad, Clark Aldrich. Aldrich vowed he'd never put his kid through the eye-glazing lectures he endured in school, even at prestigious institutions like Lawrence Academy and Brown University.

[..]

No longer the bailiwick of religious fundamentalists or neo-hippies looking to go off the cultural grid, homeschooling is a growing trend among the educated elite. More parents believe that even the best-endowed schools are in an Old Economy death grip in which kids are learning passively when they should be learning actively, especially if they want an edge in the global knowledge economy.

[..]

In some circles homeschooling is even attaining a reputation as a secret weapon for Ivy League admission.

I applaud the authors of the article for finally identifying the THIRD and DEFINITIVE demographic category of people who choose homeschooling as part of their lifestyle: the sophisticated, brainy, affluent, and overeducated ELITE! Those are the trailblazers of today, a far cry from the backward Bible-beating fundamentalists and equally austere and unappealing pot-smoking types. Finally, a group of people I can identify myself with! or, wait, can I really? I am definitely overeducated but, alas, far from affluent! oh no, not again![sorry, couldn't resist :):) -- sarcasm off now].

On a more serious note, the article paints a pretty little picture indeed, save for the following nuances.

American people are notorious for their complete lack of class conciousness. It seems that everyone, from a department store clerk to a Lexus driving $300K+/year doctor or lawyer, refer to themselves as MIDDLE CLASS. A joke, really -- but IMO this is the basis of the "American Dream", keeping the system going. People appear to think that they can achieve everything no matter what the starting point, with hard work and a bit of luck.

The article American equality? That's rich provides chilling statistics about upward mobility and the decline of real term wages, that rips the American Dream assumption to shreds.

My guess is that people from both the low and high end of middle class are aware of these trends, even if subconciously. Perhaps this is why they all are desperately afraid to take a wrong step and become poor. Which doesn't stop them from keeping dreaming, of course.

What this means, in reference to the Business Week article, is that the very term AFFLUENT EDUCATED ELITE is an oxymoron. Ironically, the educated are most often neither affluent, nor are they elite. And sometimes, they aren't even 'educated' in a true sense of the word.

By the time a professional goes through an exorbitantly long and expensive stint in college, she is often neck deep in dept. Thus, affluence, i.e., being financially well-off, doesn't start until late in life, almost too late for many to start a family of their own.

So much for affluence.

Prestige of academic professions is plain low among people in general and young adults pursuing a degree. Which is why a lot of researchers, especially lower tier ones, are foreign-born and educated.

And in any case, it is not the educated who influence the real life social and political decision -- it is the rich who own and head big corporations. The CEOs of large companies often are graduates of second-tier schools. No surprise here: the skills they need for business aren't learned in the white towers of academia. Rather, these innate, often times sociopathic, tendencies are perfected in the game of real life, which these are determined to win.

So much for the elite.

Lastly, with the formal college education now viewed solely as a 'job training', most people are going into law, medicine, and business for money that those professions promise to bring, rather than pure and selfless interest. These are the people I have seen plenty of when I was TAing: all they cared about was getting an A in a course, no matter what the means, cramming or cheating. Forget 'bringing out what is best in you', as is the original meaning of the word 'education'.

I understand that the article in Business Week is trying to present homeschooling as a viable and constantly evolving lifestyle option. It seems to achieve its goal, making it obvious to the readers that homeschooling touches the lives of people exactly like them: the average successful college-educated folks.

However, I am concerned that the article actually does homeschooling a disservice. The booming frontier of homeschooling is shifted from a remote Christian fundamentalism and dated hippism to a more modern, but equally artificial 'affluent educated elite', i.e., yet another elusive group that one can't truly relate to.

The truth of the matter is that most homeschoolers are average people like you and me, who are simply fed up with the lies of the system. Many of them have some education under their belts, and each of them falls somewhere on a wide of continuum of beliefs and convictions. There is a great diversity within the community, but one can always find a niche. It is about as diverse as the society itself.

And that's the story I am sticking to.

homeschooling
business
education
affluent
news
opinions

"A Prophet" by A.S. Pushkin

2006-02-04T22:27:00.000-08:00

Prompted by a recent bout of reflection and contemplation, I revisited a wonderful poem that was required reading in middle school in Russia. This poem is called ‘A Prophet’. It was written in 1826 or about that time by Alexander S. Pushkin, a classic author of Russian literature.

It still beats me how this poem could possibly have made it into the school program of an atheistic society. It is loosely based on Isaiah 6, and relies greatly on christian symbolism and religious language.

Another thing that evades me is how one could possibly have expected a 5-6 grader to understand the poem's meaning. Not surprisingly, a traditional interpretation was spelled out and firmly implanted by teachers. According to it, 'A Prophet' reflects A.S.Pushkin's understanding of the mission of poet in the society.

This makes some sense, since Russian literature has always been concerned with social wellfare. A 19-th century literary critic V. Belinski identified the two questions of Russian literature as 'Whose Fault Is It?' and 'What Is To Be Done?' Here, he plays on the titles of the two popular novels of the time, perhaps not the strongest in terms of style and substance, but preoccupied with the ideas of revolutionary changes in society.

Combined with that overarching understanding and a few more of Pushkin's poems dealing specifically with the fate of a poet, "A Prophet" does appear to tell a cohesive tale.

Yet, now, with some more life's lessons under my belt, I understand that there is more to the story. I am amazed at and infinitely grateful to the genius of A.S. Pushkin, who created it is the most perfect description of spiritual awakening and initiation in world literature.

Read the poem below and see for yourself. I tried to translate accurately to transmit meaning exactly. In original, it is rhymed and infinitely more beautiful.

A Prophet

by Alexander S. Pushkin

Suffering from spiritual thirst,
I struggled, walking in a desert.
And then a six-winged Seraphim
Revealed himself to me at a crossroad.

With its fingers light and nimble as a dream
He touched my eyes.
My eyes have opened, all-seeing,
Like the bright eyes of a frightened eagle.

He touched my ears,
And they were filled with noise and bells ringing,
And I heard and perceived the shudder of thunder in the sky,
And the high flight of angels,
And the sea monsters moving under water
And the sad existence of a vine, vegetating in the valley.

Then, he went for my mouth
And tore out my sinful tongue, my babbling and lying tongue,
And with his bloody hand
Put the tongue of a wise serpent
In my frozen mouth.

Then he cut through my breast with a sword,
Took out my beating heart,
And thrust a coal, burning with fire,
Into my open chest.

… I was lying in a desert like dead
When the voice of God called to me:
“Get up, o Prophet, see, and hear,
Be filled with my will,
Go across the seas and the lands
And burn people’s hearts with a word.”

*****

just a little footnote:

Interestingly, the word Seraphim comes from the Hebrew verb ‘saraph’ (to burn), or the noun ’saraph’ (a fiery, flying serpent). From a few Bible references associating them with snakes in the wilderness, it has been concluded that the Seraphim were serpentine in form and associated with fire. But in Isaiah, they are angelic beings surrounding God’s throne.

Laura Knight-Jadzcyk in her book The High Strangeness of Dimensions, Densities and the Process of Alien Abduction quotes and develops an idea that Serpent was linked with creation and revered in cultures where Nature was worshipped, but in monotheistic religions its image was corrupted to represent evil. And in the Bible, we see conflicting descriptions of Seraphims as a ‘good’ serpent or an angel, quite unlike the other serpents, specifically, the evil Serpent from the Garden of Eden.

It sure looks like some kind of a glitch, an older information not properly sanitized.

Yet, a poet saw right through it, and made Seraphim the force that awakens and initiated with fire, so that the Prophet could See, Hear, Speak, and Understand emotionally, forever being compelled to DO by his burning heart.

Prophet
Seraphim
Pushkin
Initiation

forbidden knowledge

2006-01-24T22:08:00.000-08:00

I was a teenager when perestroika hit my native country, Soviet Union. First came a flood of long supressed historical facts, and the so-called 'reevaluation of values'. All of a sudden, building the bright future was no longer a lofty goal; everyone looked back and was horrified at the price of the country's accoomplishments during the past 70 years.

Our history textbooks became completely obsolete. I don't think my history teacher opened them at all. By the end of high school, my country's history has been completely rewritten, and I developed a firm contempt towards history as a branch of human knowledge. There is no truth to it, I thought bitterly; all historians do is rewrite books when politically necessary. Winners write history. Whoever pays the piper orders a tune. Shame.

If you think this can't happen here, think again.

In her book The language Police , Diane Ravitch documents eforts from both right and left to strike out 'objectionable' words from school textbooks. Below is a sample of such words and topics from the book, as quoted here :

Anchorman (banned as sexist, replace with “anchor person” or “newscaster”), p. 171
Bitch (banned as reference to female dog), p.172
Bookworm (banned as offensive, replace with “intellectual”), p.172 – ditto: Egghead p. 175
Cro-Magnon Man (banned as sexist, replace with “Cro-Magnon people”), p. 173
Dirty old man (banned as sexist and ageist), p.174
Fat (banned, replace with “heavy” or “obese”), p.175
Fellowship (banned as sexist, replace with “Friendship”), p. 175 (Sisterhood is not mentioned)
Founding Fathers (banned as sexist, replace with “the founders, the framers”), p.175
[..]
Satan (banned), p. 182 – God is also banned, p. 176
Yacht (banned as elitist), p. 183

Among the images to Avoid are: Women who are not team players; Men or boys in active problem-solving roles; People of color who abandon their own culture or language to achieve success; American Indians as primitive or warlike; Asian Americans as working in a laundry or as musical prodigies or class valedictorians; Latinos who are lazy or passive; Mexicans grinding corn or riding donkeys; Jews always wearing business suits, glasses, and carrying briefcases; People with disabilities as saintly like Tiny Tim, or as a burden to others; Fat social misfits; Old ladies with twenty cats; and Irish policemen, pages 184-194

Among the topics to avoid are: Conflict with authority (parents, teachers, law); Crime; Dialect (especially black dialect); evolution presented as fact rather than scientific theory; Guns and shooting; Lying or duplicity of any kind; Physical violence; References to Humanism that might give it the status of religion; Religion; Unpunished transgressions; or Winter holidays (probably because of the pagan origins of many of them -Y.B.), pages 194-195

There is also a list of books forbidden in school libraries or removed from school reading lists around the country. It is actually very extensive and can be found here . Included are Catcher in the Rye, Alice in Wonderland, both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Advetuntures of Heck Finn, Brave New World, Gone With The Wind, and basically every other known book.

The newest victim of special interest groups lobbying is the history of India as described in school textbooks. Apparently, this year, the State of California has commissioned 6th grade history books. During the reviewing process, two conservative US-based Hindu groups came forwards with changes, amounting to rewriting and whitewashing the country's history :

Instigating the California debate were two US-based Hindu groups with long ties to Hindu nationalist parties in India. One, the Vedic Foundation, is a small Hindu sect that aims at simplifying Hinduism to the worship of one god, Vishnu. The other, the Hindu Education Foundation (HEF), was founded in 2004 by a branch of the right-wing Indian group the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

[..] In one edit, the HEF asked the textbook publisher to change a sentence describing discrimination against women in ancient society to the following: "Men had different duties (dharma) as well as rights than women."

In another edit, the HEF objected to a sentence that said that Aryan rulers had "created a caste system" in India that kept groups separated according to their jobs. The HEF asked this to be changed to the following: "During Vedic times, people were divided into different social groups (varnas) based on their capacity to undertake a particular profession."

The hottest debate centered on when Indian civilization began, and by whom. For the past 150 years, most historical, linguistic, and archaeological research has dated India's earliest settlements to around 2600 BC. And most established historical research contends that the cornerstone of Indian civilization - the practice of Hindu religion - was codified by people who came from outside India, specifically Aryan language speakers from the steppes of Central Asia.

Many Hindu nationalists are upset by the notion that Hinduism could be yet another religion, like Islam and Christianity, with foreign roots. The HEF and Vedic Foundation both lobbied hard to change the wording of California's textbooks so that Hinduism would be described as purely home grown.[..]

A Wall Street Journal article today (you have to be a subscriber to access) deals with this issue blow by blow. It also explains why this issue concerns everyone in this country, not just Californians. California is the biggest customer of eduicational textbooks, accounting for 10%-12% of the market. If California want changes made in their textbooks, it is more economically feasible for the publisher to adopt their version as the standard text. As a result, everyone gets the washed-out Californian books.

Christian, Jewish, Muslim groups also constantly put pressure on educational resource publishers. Trouble is, the history of human sociaty from times immemorial is largely the history of CONFLICT between these groups. There is absolutely no way to make everyone happy, unless history is stripped off of most of its unpleasant facts. And we are left with a certain consensus reality, far different from what actually is. Apparently, this is quite allright with those who rpomote the changes:

"There is no such thing as an objective history," Jain says. "So when we write a textbook, we should make students aware of the status of current research of leading scholars in the field. It should not shut out a love for motherland, a pride in your past. If you teach that your country is backward, that it has no redeeming features in our civilization, it can damage a young perspective."

With all the recent talk about India being the new rising superpower, it all makes sense. What better way to unite people than a strong national idea backed by a monotheistic-type religion.

Make no mistake, the debate here is not about who got the facts right, even though schoarly debates were conducted to thouroughly investigate the issue.

This is all about who gets to influence the minds of growing children. The power of this tactic can not be underestimated. When one generation is raised on different books and differe views, it is enough to completely obliterate the whole area of human knowledge. And create a brave new world.

However, I can tell you that it damages a young prospective a lot more to realize, little by little as you are growing up, that you are told twisted lies. That a lot of things are hidden from you. That your textbook tells an optimistic story, but has a glitch here and there, hinting that there is a grimer reality behind it all. And you, having no point of reference to make sense of those glitches, feel utterly lost. And then everything crumbles, as it usually does, and you realize that your own people are not as noble as portraied, but rather are cruel or apathetic, unfair of tyrannical, .. well basically they are people like everyone else.

And this is what is.

I'll stick to living books when I teach my own children.

News
censorship

do YOU have a dangerous idea?

2006-01-22T09:10:00.000-08:00

A friend recently sent me a link to an online discussion at the World Question Center. Their topic for 2006 is ‘What is your dangerous idea?’ In response to this question, prominent philosophically-minded scientists weigh in with their comments on what ideas may be "socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous [..] not because [they] are assumed to be false, but because [they] may be true".

I browsed quickly through the comments. There is a range of opinions across the spectrum from 'science has no chance against religion' to 'there is no God'. There is a lot on similar wishy-washy false dichotomies, but precious little on what is really going on in our daily life.

Robert Schank does write eloquently on failures of the education system:

My dangerous idea is one that most people immediately reject without giving it serious thought: school is bad for kids — it makes them unhappy and as tests show — they don't learn much.

When you listen to children talk about school you easily discover what they are thinking about in school: who likes them, who is being mean to them, how to improve their social ranking, how to get the teacher to treat them well and give them good grades.

[..]

We need to stop producing a nation of stressed out students who learn how to please the teacher instead of pleasing themselves. We need to produce adults who love learning, not adults who avoid all learning because it reminds them of the horrors of school. We need to stop thinking that all children need to learn the same stuff. We need to create adults who can think for themselves and are not convinced about how to understand complex situations in simplistic terms that can be rendered in a sound bite.

Just call school off. Turn them all into apartment houses.

Of course I agree with him. But, 1 out of 50 kids already being homeschooled, this dangerous idea is hardly revolutionary and thus not nearly as dangerous as it perhaps was 20 years ago.

C'mon, don't you guys have anything MORE to say? Anything that is TRULY dangerous, anything that would upset the illusion we live in so much as to draw the incinerating wrath of the Powers To Be?

I have a couple of such ideas to suggest. How about these:

- There are among the rest of us people without conciense , unable to fell genuine emotion and empathy, no remorse or sense of responsibility -- and they do whatever they want, without shame, as long as they can get away with it. These people are called psychopaths, or more recently, socipaths. People who had dealt with such individuals can attest on their destructive effect on every normal aspect of human existence.

- Worse still, our social and polical system has been hijacked by psychopaths from time immemorial. Quoting from Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes (by Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Ph.D.
with commentary and additional quoted material
by Laura Knight-Jadczyk) :

Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements as well as the accompanying ideologies… and turned them into caricatures of themselves…. This occurred as a result of the … participation of pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are, and have been, so similar in their essential properties.

Doesn't this explain almost EVERYTHING that has been going on recently?

You have probably seen the Pentagon Strike video already. After all, this is one of the most widely disseminated pieces of information on the Internet. While it answers a lot of questions some people have, there are money other people who completely reject the information, based solely on an emotional reaction, "I don't believe it! This simply can not happen here, in our country, the freest democracy in the world".

This reaction underscores our very basic desire to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the world is fair, and all people are basically good but sometimes commit commiting bad action because they are mistaking, or ingorant, or are hurting inside.

People's minds are fighting all out against the notions that I put forward above. And when the evidence pointing to the organized psychopathic evil in high places, some say in disdain, 'those conspiracy nuts again'. This has become a derogatory label. Yet, as explained here :

Conspiracy theory is more thoughtful than fearful. The motivations
behind conspiracy theory research are cognitive and social. It is very
much like doing family genealogy. You begin with a few facts. Then you
puzzle out the story, make inferences and hypotheses, and seek further
facts. With help from other people, with good luck, you discover
information that is sometimes difficult to find. A story emerges,
suggesting new facts that should be sought. The satisfaction comes from
finding the facts, constructing the story, and sharing the process and
discoveries with other people.

It appears that conspiracy research has been labeled, marginalized, and often times corrupted precisely because it sometimes hits upon truly DANGEROUS ideas.

The article Evidence That a Frozen Fish Didn't Impact the Pentagon on 9/11 and Neither Did a Boeing 757 takes the reader through just such process of corruption.

In conclusion, this is what I would like to say to the prominent philosophically-minded scientists:

For the idea to be truly dangerous, it must move your very being and really cut through the illusion of our existence. And it must be the hill that you are willing to die on.

Otherwise -- talk is cheap.

Now, DO you have a dangerous idea?

Technorati categories: News, Science, Politics,Homeschooling

Thank you Caitlin Flanagan!

2006-01-16T22:10:00.000-08:00

We have just yesterday received a current issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine. Late into last night I have been reading Caitlin Flanagan's essay on the casual oral sex among teens and tweens .

My strong recommendation to every mother is to grab the magazin from a local library, or shell out for subscription, for this essay alone. Read -- and weep.

Ms. Flanagan's writing is of impeccable taste, and her quirky style makes me laugh every time I read her essays (although this one is no laughing matter). She is a frequent contributor to The Atlantic, writing primarily on women's issues.

I plugged her name into Google just now and was surprised to find out that she is viewed by some as an anti-feminist writer. On of her previous pieces titled Nanny Wars has rattled a lot of people, who blamed her for undermining women's right to work. I don't want to get into a discussion about feminism in this blog (just yet, anyway). I will only say that IMO Ms. Flanagan seems to understand that modern women live in a complex world where you are damned if you do and damned if you don't, and where any real help is hard to come by.

As someone pointed out on the Ms Magazine's website discussion: 'Caitlin Flanagan states the sad truth. It points directly to our ugly culture—not the shortcomings of women.' I think the above applies 100% to her conclusions in her new piece. Says Caitlin Flanagan:

"As a parent, I am horrified by the changes that have taken place in the common culture over the past thirty years. I believe that we are raising children in a kind of a post-apocalyptic landscape in which no forces beyond individual households -- individual mothers and fathers - are protecting children from porhography and violent entertainment. The "it takes a village" philosophy is a joke, because the village is now so polluted and so desolate of commonly held, child-appropriate moral values that my job as a mother is not to rely on village but to protect my children from it."

I couldn't help recalling a quote by Maria Arbatova, a contemporary Russian writer, and the foremost Russian feminist. Note though that in Russia the common understanding of what feminism is, differs somewhat from the Wikipedia definition. Work was never a issue to debate since Russian women always worked. However, if your husband does dishes once in a while, then you are a certified feminist. Go figure.

Anyways, in her book 'I am 40', Ms. Arbatova describes her life, full of absurdity imparted by the no longer existing Soviet system. When she talks about raising her sons, she says (in paraphrase),

"As a mother, I felt that my duty to my children was to fight the system that was out to hurt them."

These two women come from geographically opposite ends of the world, live in socially and politically very different cultures, and bear opposite labels of 'feminist' and an 'anti-feminist', respectively. Isn't it ironic then that they hold a very similar, if not identical, views when it comes to their children's well-being, and moral and physical safety?

Christiane Northrup in her book 'Women's bodies, women's wisdom' suggests replacing 'patriarhal culture' with 'addictive culture', when discussing women's issues. Feminism then can be redefined as any aspect of human life and endeavor that seeks to replace the addictive system of life and relationship with a wholesome one.

This new definition would help understand why women from different cultures and views on feminism agree on some very important issues. It would also show that many of those who talk about feminism don't truly have its spirit at heart. While those who profess to hate feminism sometimes are, deep down, the biggest feminists of them all.

beyond having cake and eating it

2005-11-19T07:41:00.000-08:00

I have been wrecking my brains over how radical unschoolers approaches the common parental challenges (sweets, TV -videogames, etc), with complete lack or restrictions.

I am beginning to think that this reflects a certain underlying basic belief that it a foundation of a whole unschooling philosophy. I am not sure whether I can put my finger on it, but I’ll try.

Radical unschoolers appear to believe in the basic natural goodness, perfection even, of human beings. From here, it follows that children will figure out the right thing to do if left to their own devices, that their nature will guide them.

This is not a new concept. In a way, it represents a return to the very roots of modern childrearing. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first person to voice this concept in his seminal work, ‘Emile, ou l’Education’ . His ideas were a far cry from the predating view that children are miniature adults, full of original sin that must be stomped out.

Rousseau compared a child to a savage, who at the time of Enlightement was viewed as a perfect human being, innocent and unspoiled by civilization, just as Nature intended. Rousseau's childrearing methods were directed at preserving and enhancing those beneficial traits within his pupil, achieved through simle, commonsense approaches. He showed how Emile, having the wisdom of Nature behind him, integrates perfectly in the ways of civilization.

The catch is that Rousseau doesn’t let civilization come anywhere near Emile during his formative years. Only than he believes the Nature can infuse his body, mind and spirit with strength and wisdom.

Now however we want to have our cake and eat it (no pun intended). We think that children can maintain innocence while partaking liberally of every pleasure and temptation that society bombards them with. We think that they will be able to understand the real value of every experience and thought, guided only by their natural goodness and unconditinal approval of their parents.

It is a certainly a nice idea, warm and fuzzy – and easy.

The question is, is it supported by any fact or data? Does it make sense considering everything we know about history, about human biology, about our society and the forces that operate in it?

To probe still deeper, do we feel basically at home in the world that we ourselves have created, and find it satisfactory? Or are we prodigal sons and daughters, struggling to find our way through wilderness?

I don’t know the answers to those questions.

I do notice however a parallel between the permissive approach of radical unschoolers and the issue of childhood competenceas discussed by Donald Elkind in his book ‘Miseducation’ .

Doing away with any rules and restrictions shows an assumption that our children are competent. It implies that they will be able to deal with things that we the adults can’t deal with in a satisfactory matter.

According to Elkind, childhood competence is a defining trait of our contemporary childrearing methods. It is very interesting to note that although radical unschooling concept defies society in many ways, it still remains a child of our time, as shown by its utmost reliance on childhood competence.

What a tangled web we weave.

to have your cake and eat it

2005-11-17T09:42:00.000-08:00

Recently, a question have been raised on one of my homeschooling board: should we limit the intake of sweets by our children? Someone cited the Sandra Dodd's website and her True Tales Of Kids Turning Down Sweets.

Being fully plugged into a homeschooling community, one gets to see that there is a wide range of opinions about how to approach homeschooling. The website above is an example of what some people call 'radical unschooling'.

Radical unschoolers subscribe to a child centered, respectful way of living. For many, it translated into having no restrictions or rules in the house. Rules are thought to constrict chlid's spirit; absence of rules promotes the developemnt of children;s natural ability to figure things ou for themselves. It appears that radical unschoolers apply their fundamental beliefs to all aspects of chlidrearing, including the sugar issue.

According to SD and her followers, children can have their cake and eat it, and be better humans for it.

Yet, I see quite a few problems with the permissive attitude towards sugar. IMO thereis also a larger issue with this whole approach, but I'll cover it in another posting (stay tuned!).

Back to the sugar issue. I have a sweet tooth -- or rather I should say 'had'
until it caught up with me in a form of various dental problems and candida infection.

Yet, I only gathered up will power to give up sweets when I read a book by Dr. Weston Price, 'Nutrition and Physical Degeneration'. You can look at pictures in
this book and see the results of sweet tooth in action. One look was enough for me not to be able to eat sweets again. I had two dental check-ups since
and passed with flying colors, first time since I was 17.

Interestingly, a yeast infection on my skin resolved itself soon after I cut sweets out of my diet. I got it after my root canal saga (long story); it
manifested itself in a itchy rash. Nothing else I did helped permanently.

Banning sugar and white flour is the only common theme in all diet systems, from low fat to Atkins to macrobiotics to whatever. Some people are blessed
with good control of their blood sugar levels and yeast, and better dental health, and thus can withstand more abuse than others. But even those people's bodies will give thanks many times over when sweets are ditched.

Proponents of permissive attitude towards sugar consumption say that letting their kids eat what they want, whenever they want teaches their children to be in control of their bodies, and helps them learn to naturally regulate themselves.

The problem with this idea is that both animals and humans have evolved (or were created, whichever you prefer) and lived for thousands of years in the environment where food of any kind was scarce. And there is nothing in nature that is as sweet as refined sugar.

As a result, our bodies signal hunger reliably, and have countless adaptations for a lack of food (blood sugar adjustments, ketogenesis, protective changes in stomach lining to help protect it from the acid, etc).

Yet, there is virtually no mechanisms to signal satiety. Both humans and animals will eat everything that's on the plate. We basically stop eating when we feel out stomach bursting or when our jaws get tired of chewing, whichever comes first. Or we throw up if we disregard the above SOS messages. Chemical signals of satiety come much later.

Plus, we have plenty of ways to encourage us to eat more (endorphine production in response to sugars especially, stomach stretching to accommodate more food, stomach acid production and enzyme composition changing).

The bottom line is, our bodies are hard-wired to overeat.

This is also why I wasn't impressed by the account of a child who leaves half a donut unfinished. A half a donut is a size of a child's palm, is nutritionally worthless, and is pure sugar and fat. Eating it gives the body no real nutrients, but puts in motion the above SOS type response (stretching of a stomack, may be even nausea from all the fat) in the body. Refusing a second half of a donut is not what I'd call 'natural regulation', it is rather like setting aside a cup of poison while already feeling quite sick from it.

When people talk about moderation in eating, it almost appears that moderation is subjective and means differet things to different people. For some, going to McDonalds couple of times a week is 'moderation', for others, it's once a month. Whereas in naturopathic tradition and other sources from times long gone, 'moderation' means a very precise thing: a portion a size of your cupped hands, of natural, mostly low calorie food. That translates into about 1000-1300 calories a day for a grown person (still less for children).

In our society, RDA is 2000 calories a day. The 1000-1300 cal/day regimen is called a 'restricted calorie diet', which sounds really austere. Yet, it is this exact diet that increases life span of lab animals by 50-60% and keeps them free of degenerative diseases. And it is called 'restrictive' not because it causes malnutrition, but because the scientists in the study had to restrict animal's food intake, giving them precisely measured portions. Otherwise the animals would have continued eating.

To make things even more difficult, we often eat to fill emotional void and other unrelated reasons. In such case though, I would suggest that the primary issue is in the need to control, which would probably manifest itself on many different levels. This is apparently an issue that many of SD's followers on this subject struggle with, or so it appears fom the numerous testimonies on her website.

When that's dealt with, and the food is stripped of any attached meaning, value judgement such as 'good food /bad food', feelings of guilt over eating this and that, feeline either weak or 'healthier than thou' or whatever, we find ourselves back at square one -- the objective facts. Not all food is created equal. Some food is nutritious and other isn't. We live in the environment where food is plentiful, which we are ill adapted to. And biology alone offers no way to cope with it.

Many traditional cultures adjusted by incorporating various rituals in food preparation and consumptions. Ancient Egyptians fasted 3 days every month. Ayurveda has recommendations of foods to eat at certain time of the year, and food combinations for different body types. Traditional Russian culture utilised prolonged lenten fasts. There were a few throughout the year, linked to CHristian Orthodox holidays. The Lent was the longest one, 6 weeks of strict plant based diet with a small amount of fish thrown into it. There were a couple of days of total water fasts, and a few days of water fasts and vegetarian days throughout the year. There were other smaller 'lents' at other times of the year. E.g., on 'Apple Savior' holiday in August, people ate only fresh apples for a few days (this 'apple fast' or a 'grape fast' is now recommended by naturopaths for a wide range of ailments). Everyone followed this regimen, including young children (sick people could get exemptions from the priest).
Sadly, these time-tested methods are no longer in use.

Yet, we have record of these traditions and our modern understanding of human biology. One good thing about being a modern human is that we have a wealth of knowledge at our disposal and a capacity for critical thinking.

This is why I think we should use this strength of ours and arm ourselves and our children with knowledge, rather than rely on nature alone.

A solution for my family is not to have any sweets in the house. WE find that if it's there, we don't miss it. And I lead by example by passin on a cookie or a birthday cake outside of the home, too.

to go or not to go (to college)?

2005-10-25T21:56:00.000-07:00

A growing number of young adults are wondering whether they should bother going to college, with increased tuition and uncertain job prospects. This mood seems particularly strong within a homeschooling community. There is a comprehensive discussion here, and this is an excerpt from it:

"Ultimately, success has two contributors, ability and
industry (in the sense of hard work). Mr. Gates and Mr. Dell were
famously able to succeed without completing their higher education due
to selection of a field where, frankly, fairly easily acquired skills
were used intelligently, and with great industry, to achieve dramatic
results."

While I agree in principle, it always irks me when Bill Gates is used as an example of a self-made man. Truth is, he came from an already very wealthy family with plenty of connections. He went to elite prep-schools, and spent his two college years in Harvard. And afterwards, he could afford to work for years (!!) without income. Michael Dell's family was also quite prominent: his father was an orthodontist, and his mother was a personal finance manager. Plus, they are Mormons, so he likely have enjoyed tremendous community support. Again, he could afford not to go to college.

There is certain myth, and aspect of the American dream perhaps, that one can accomplish anything whatever the starting point. Yet, an overwhelming rule seems to be that money comes from money -- and a right network perhaps. The latter represents the true value of the Ivy League education. Many companies recruit selectively at prestigious schools, offering the graduates top jobs that don't even make it to the job market otherwise. Or say, your roommate's father is a big wig someplace or other and helps you get a job there, etc.

True, there are many genuine self-made people, who come from poor families, work their way through it all, and achieve outstanding personal and financial success. The thing is, they achieve it by going to college. Immigrant families, too, value aducation above anything else, and the parents break their backs so that kids can go to college. Another thing worth noting that the Ivy Leagues, for instance, have need-blind admission: which means that if they admit you, they are prepared to give you full support you need (combination of grants and loans). My husband, back when he applied to a bunch of schools, got the best financial aid offer from an Ivy League college, which covered almost everything. And it is the same now.

It has certainly gotten more financially diffcult for everyone to go to college, it seems to have hit the lower middle class and middle class families hardest. These also seem to be the people who are considering skipping on it, are carefully weighing out pros and cons, and looking for examples to follow. People do find a lot of lofty reasons while college is not the best thing (stifles creativity, bad education, etc). I wonder though if this is what the psychologists call 'Transformation into Opposite', a coping mechanism of sort. It must be good for you if it happens, you know. Everything is to the better in this best of the worlds.

Well, it isn't. And IMO the cultural memes such as 'Bill Gates = self-made man', serve to obscure an issue much larger than the dilemma of 'to go or not to go to college'. Upward mobility in the US is at all-time low, and the gap between the rich and the poor increases dramatically. In fact, a child from a poor family has a better chance in life if he/she is born in Europe or even Brazil (!). Plus we have the continuing dismantling of social net, overpopulation, depletion of resources, economic instability, and general uncertainty.

If it continues this way, we'll soon be back to the 'gilded age', with a few very rich people with no care in the world, and many many poor with no security whatsoever. Middle class has no place in a troubled world and may not be here much longer. This is a global trend noted by a quite a few.

But, in a mean time, people will try to adapt, like they always do. When the economy took a nose-dive in the 80s, what happened? Women went to work. Who is going to go to work today? I am afraid children. Kids will stay home longer with their parents, wait on starting a family, and go to work earlier, at the expense of college education. And we are already seeing some of that. In North East, a lot of young adults already choose to live with their parents after college graduation, so that they can save money up for a house. Or take my SIL, a college graduate and a resident of a big city, who is turning 30 and for the first time can afford to live without a roommate. This discussion, too, illustrate shows that a lot of people do think of skipping college and do already do so as well.

For a young adults, it is very liberating to give a good thought to what he/she want to do in life, and choose whether to go to college basing on this decision, and not what is 'considered' to be right. This is what any mature person should do. Yet, one also has to be aware that there are forces at work in the society that want to make you skip college for the wrong reasons. Because yes, if one goes to college and does the routine, he/she will likely end up slaving away for somebody else. But if one doesn't go to college, there is even more chance that one will slave away for somebody else, but for a whole lot less money.

I have been wrecking my brain over this for quite a while now. At this point, the solution I see is in the general attitude rather than in a specific decision. One has to be smart, self-reliant, independent, and do your own thing. Working for yourself is the key IMO. To own a business is ideal. Interestingly, immigrants do that a lot too. If your chosen path requires going to college, or you feel like doing it, than do it, otherwise skip. Unjobbing sounds like it would fit right into this model.

This is all a personal opinion only, and, additionally, is subject to change.

corporal punishment is alive and well

2005-09-25T10:40:00.000-07:00

I was shocked and horrified at the staggering numbers of corporate punishment cases in what I assume to be typical school discricts.

Another thing that bothered me was the mention of corporal punishment having been officially prohibited for (only) 20+ years. That would put it at what I thought were very civilized 80s.

'Safe environment', my foot.

Corporal Punishment Disputes Up in N.Y.

By MICHAEL GORMLEY, Associated Press Writer
Sun Sep 25, 7:30 AM ET

ALBANY, N.Y. - Formal complaints of corporal punishment in New York classrooms more than doubled over the past five years, with 4,223 accusations reported in 2004, according to records obtained by The Associated Press.

At the same time, fewer school districts were filing the required semiannual reports detailing corporal punishment allegations, the records show.

Many of the allegations involved faculty or staff pushing, slapping and grabbing students' arms. Among those verified were an incident in which a teacher put a misbehaving student outside to cool off in December without a jacket, a teacher who tackled a student who reached for a pencil on the floor, and several cases of students' mouths taped shut.

[..]

David Ernst of the state Schools Boards Association said the lack of uniform reporting makes it impossible to draw conclusions about trends in corporal punishment.

Fewer school districts may be filing the required semiannual reports because of superintendent turnover or because they include their corporal punishment incidents in mandated reports on child abuse instead, he said.

Ernst said officials believe corporal punishment in schools is actually becoming less common. [yeah, right!]

New York's schools, with about 3 million students, have had to report incidents of corporal punishment since 1985. Corporal punishment has been prohibited there for over two decades.

Deputy Education Commissioner James Kadamus said he believes the most serious cases — those that could be considered child abuse under state law — are being reported.

"We are trying to emphasize a safe learning environment and that goes for both the kids' behavior and the adult behavior," he said.

America's Battered Wife Syndrome

2005-09-11T21:16:00.000-07:00

America's Battered Wife Syndrome
by Gail Thomas

Dear America,

As a friend of the family I can't sit back and watch you do this to
yourself without saying something. Consider this a long distance
intervention.

Your man is no good. He treats you like crap, lies to you, abuses you,
bullies you, exploits you, takes your money. As a friend I want to tell
you that you deserve better. You deserve a person that treats you with
respect, cares about your welfare, and your children's welfare, but
that's not George and it never will be.

Do you tell yourself that he'll stop, or that it won't get worse? He
won't ever stop, every insult, injury and death he has caused are a line
that once crossed will never be uncrossed. Forget the dream. You will
never have the American dream with George. You have to forget about what
might have been, what George might have been, and realise that at the
end of the day you are what you do, and look at George's track record.

Notice how he's alienated all your friends? Who can blame them, they
can't understand why you stay with him when he treats you like shit and
embarrasses you in front of everybody. The more his public behaviour
overshadows yours, The more doubt creeps over them, they wonder if they
knew you as well as they thought they did. You seem to have changed - if
you condone his behaviour- and your silence can create the impression
that you do. People are more inclined to take things at face value when
they feel alienated. Your friends remember the good times you had
together, the heroic battles you fought together, all of the intricate
interweavings between their families and yours through time and space.
Do you even recognise yourself anymore America? He is a drunken,
coke-addled loser and he always will be, you should kick him out of your
house today before he can destroy any more members of your family, your
history, your culture, before he decimates your bank account so
irretrievably that China and Saudi Arabia repossess all your stuff.

YOU CAN DO BETTER! You are an amazing country, beautiful, interesting,
funny, positively glamorous, you wouldn't stay single for five minutes,
you know that suitors would be competing for your affections and any one
of them would be ten times better than George. And how can you stand his
god-awful Stepford's answer to Marie-Antoinette mother, piping up with
another casual atrocity every time she opens her mouth.

Because of George and his friends global warming is now upon us - I know
what it has cost your family already, combined with George's complete
uselessness and indifference in a crisis. It would probably now be
possible for a mathematician to calculate exactly how much of all of our
futures we are losing for every minute you stay with that sick,twisted,
idiot.

I see you doing what everyone in your position does - you end up looking
to the perpetrator for comfort because theres no one else left, and look
at how he reacts for Christ's sake, look at what he did to New Orleans,
and you should know that yet again he did it in front of all of your
friends, all of us saw nothing happening whilst thousands died, all of
us heard Ray Nagin and the president of Jefferson Parish (I must heard
him 30+ times now and I still cry every time) and all of us heard
George's bloody mother. We have been trying to help and he won't let us.
We are all appalled and aghast, it breaks our hearts to see him hurting
you like this, and you not fighting back, you just take it and take it
as it slowly spirals down into the pits of hell. What will it take
America, will you let him kill you before you'll kick him out? This is
not rhetoric America, he is killing you every day you stay with him. If
I had described your relationship with George to you back when you were
still with Bill you never would have believed me. He degrades you in
little increments, every day he erodes your assets as well as your
dignity, your reputation, your legacy and your life America.

All of our TV crews were rescuing survivors as they filmed the
devastation because there was nobody else there to help them, all of us
saw the victims being treated like some sudden new insurgency. with
suspicion and hostility. Those poor people, the heart & soul of New
Orleans, the very people whose culture and history made New Orleans
beloved around the world, He just left your brothers and sisters to die.
Can you really continue in your relationship with George after this?
There is a degree at which cognitive dissonance becomes outright
delusion. He is a maniac, he is destroying your life, please, please
leave him, just leave him, only you have the power to make it stop.

He is selling out your family business, if you let him continue like
this how are you going to live? How are you going to feed your children,
what happens if you get ill? Everything he has ever touched has turned
to shit, he puts any idiot that'll kiss his ass into positions of power
and New Orleans is the result. Kick him out America! Do it today! I know
it feels like you would be leaping into a void, but I promise you, you
will be leaping out of one. Your friends will come back as soon as they
see you are back to your old self, they really miss you. I know that
less than 36% of your heart is still in it. Go with the 64% of you, that
36% is just that vestigial, primitive part of the brain that clings to
the familiar no matter how badly the familiar sucks.

It all comes down to you, America. I know no-one likes other people
passing comment on their relationships but this is an extreme situation.
You are in very real danger, he is hurting you everyday and he is
hurting us, your friends as well. But only you can make it stop. We are
all rooting for you, although we don't get to talk to you very often
anymore, because he cuts us off from you. We are on your side, we will
all be over the moon the day you finally kick him out. You know he
really should be thrown in jail for the things he has done to you. Him
and all of his gangster friends.

Please, please, do it America, you know I am right. If not for yourself
then do it for your brothers and sisters and children. Do it before he
kills any more of your family or anyone else's. We are all really
worried for your welfare.

Your friend,

Gail

Gail Thomas is am a British/ Australian dual national living in Sydney
with her American partner. Her website is http://www.12thharmonic.com

After Katrina fiasco, time for Bush to go

2005-09-10T08:01:00.000-07:00

After Katrina fiasco, time for Bush to go

BY GORDON ADAMS
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 8, 2005
WASHINGTON - The disastrous federal response to Katrina exposes a record of incompetence, misjudgment and ideological blinders that should lead to serious doubts that the Bush administration should be allowed to continue in office.

When taxpayers have raised, borrowed and spent $40 billion to $50 billion a year for the past four years for homeland security but the officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency cannot find their own hands in broad daylight for four days while New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast swelter, drown and die, it is time for them to go.

When funding for water works and levees in the gulf region is repeatedly cut by an administration that seems determined to undermine the public responsibility for infrastructure in America, despite clear warnings that the infrastructure could not survive a major storm, it seems clear someone is playing politics with the public trust.

When rescue and medical squads are sitting in Manassas and elsewhere in northern Virginia and foreign assistance waits at airports because the government can't figure out how to insure the workers, how to use the assistance or which jurisdiction should be in charge, it is time for the administration to leave town.

When President Bush stays on vacation and attends social functions for two days in the face of disaster before finally understanding that people are starving, crying out and dying, it is time for him to go.

When FEMA officials cannot figure out that there are thousands stranded at the New Orleans convention center - where people died and were starving - and fussed ineffectively about the same problems in the Superdome, they should be fired, not praised, as the president praised FEMA Director Michael Brown in New Orleans last week.

When Mr. Bush states publicly that "nobody could anticipate a breach of the levee" while New Orleans journalists, Scientific American, National Geographic, academic researchers and Louisiana politicians had been doing precisely that for decades, right up through last year and even as Hurricane Katrina passed over, he should be laughed out of town as an impostor.

When repeated studies of New Orleans make it clear that tens of thousands of people would be unable to evacuate the city in case of a flood, lacking both money and transportation, but FEMA makes no effort before the storm to commandeer buses and move them to safety, it is time for someone to be given his walking papers.

When the president makes Sen. Trent Lott's house in Pascagoula, Miss., the poster child for rebuilding while hundreds of thousands are bereft of housing, jobs, electricity and security, he betrays a careless insensitivity that should banish him from office.

When the president of the United States points the finger away from the lame response of his administration to Katrina and tries to finger local officials in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La., as the culprits, he betrays the unwillingness of this administration to speak truth and hold itself accountable. As in the case of the miserable execution of policy in Iraq, Mr. Bush and Karl Rove always have some excuse for failure other than their own misjudgments.

We have a president who is apparently ill-informed, lackadaisical and narrow-minded, surrounded by oil baron cronies, religious fundamentalist crazies and right-wing extremists and ideologues. He has appointed officials who give incompetence new meaning, who replace the positive role of government with expensive baloney.

They rode into office in a highly contested election, spouting a message of bipartisanship but determined to undermine the federal government in every way but defense (and, after 9/11, one presumed, homeland security). One with Grover Norquist, they were determined to shrink Washington until it was "small enough to drown in a bathtub." Katrina has stripped the veil from this mean-spirited strategy, exposing the greed, mindlessness and sheer profiteering behind it.

It is time to hold them accountable - this ugly, troglodyte crowd of Capital Beltway insiders, rich lawyers, ideologues, incompetents and their strap-hangers should be tarred, feathered and ridden gracefully and mindfully out of Washington and returned to their caves, clubs in hand.

Gordon Adams, director of security policy studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, was senior White House budget official for national security in the Clinton administration.

Katrina Hall of Shame

2005-09-07T08:07:00.000-07:00

from The Hurricane Katrina Hall of Shame...

"Hurricane Katrina vanden Heuvel!"
--Rush Limbaugh (Late August)

-

"The destruction from [The Nation editor] Katrina vanden Heuvel is expected to be massive.... The poor and disabled are particularly likely to suffer from the effects of Katrina vanden Heuvel... Coming up: How to explain Katrina vanden Heuvel to your children..."
--National Review Editor Jonah Goldberg (8/30/05)

-

A young [black] man walks through chest deep floodwater after looting a grocery store in New Orleans...

Two [white] residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans...

Captions at Yahoo News (8/30/05)

-

Baseball Hall of Famer Dave Winfield wasn't the only VIP who joined Padres President John Moores in the owner's box last night at Petco Park. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, here to join President Bush at the North Island Naval Air Station today, took in the game, too.
--Copy in the San Diego Union-Tribune (8/30/05)

-

"It makes no sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild a city that's seven feet under sea level....It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed."
--House Speaker Dennis Hastert (8/31/05)

-

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
--President Bush (9/1/05)

-

"The federal government did not even know about the convention center people until today."
--FEMA director Michael Brown (9/1/05)

-

"I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water."
--Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff (9/1/05)

-

HALLIBURTON GETS KATRINA CONTRACT
--Headline (9/1/05)

-

"Last night, we showed you the full force of a superpower government going to the rescue."
--Chris Matthews on MSNBC (9/1/05)

-

"Elimination of the death tax would be a victory for fairness and job creation. Working together, we can help eliminate the burden of the death tax once and for all."
--Mass email from RNC Chair Ken Mehlman (9/1/05)

-

"You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals...many of these people, almost all of them that we see are so poor and they are so black..."
--Wolf Blitzer, CNN (9/1/05)

-

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
--President Bush (9/2/05)

-

Out of the rubbles (sic) of Trent Lott's house---he's lost his entire house---there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."
--George W. Bush (9/2/05)

-

"The City of New Orleans and its residents owe the President a profound debt of gratitude."
--John Hinderaker, Powerline blog (9/2/05)

-

"There's trucks?"
--President Bush (9/2/05)

-

"...it was my belief, I'm trying to think of a better word than typical--that minimizes, any hurricane is bad--but we had the standard hurricane coming in here..."
--FEMA director Michael Brown (9/3/05)

-

"Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater..."
--Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff (9/3/05)

-

"Days before Katrina nearly wiped New Orleans off the map, 9,000 Jewish residents of Gaza were driven from their homes with the full support of the United States government. Could this be a playing out of prophesy?"
--Rick Scarborough (9/4/05)

-

"I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, 'New Orleans Dodged The Bullet.'"
--Chertoff (9/4/05)

-

"When Air Force One dipped below the clouds on Tuesday so the president could peer out the window down at the disaster, the image was uncomfortably imperial."
--Newsweek (9/4/05). The president didn't fly over the area until Wednesday.

-

"...but the media has a fascination with the blame game and instead of looking for what can we do to help now there's a lot of why didn't we do something different?"
--George H.W. Bush (9/5/05)

-

"What I'm hearing which is sort of scary is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this...this is working very well for them."
--Barbara Bush (9/5/05)

-

"I dropped a twenty in the bucket."
--Millionaire Jeb Bush, speaking from the broadcast booth on a collection for hurricane relief at the Miami-Florida State game. (9/5/05)

-

"Bureaucracy is not going to stand in the way of getting the job done for the people."
--President Bush (9/6/05)

-

"Americans don't sleep in tents."
--Unnamed FEMA official, responding to the head of the Hurricane Center of Louisiana State University who was trying to urge FEMA to set up tent cities in other states to handle the hundreds of thousands of Katrina survivors. The story was told by Tim Russert on `Imus in the Morning' (9/6/05)

-

"Louisiana's Senator Landrieu announced on network television, "I might likely have to punch him, literally." And my question, since "him" is the President, and both punching and threatening to punch the President is a felony, has her qualifying words `might likely' saved her from arrest and prosecution?"
--Unknown reporter to White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan (9/6/05)

-

"I understand there are 10,000 people dead. It's terrible. It's tragic. But in a democracy of 300 million people, over years and years and years, these things happen."
--GOP strategist Jack Burkman defending Bush (9/6/05)

-

"We really don't have time to play the political game right now."
White House Counselor Dan Bartlett (9/6/05)

-

Reporter: Just to get you on the record, where does the buck stop in this administration?
Scott McClellan: The President.
White House press briefing (9/6/05)

-

To be continued...sadly.

Katrina coverage

2005-09-01T07:55:00.000-07:00

My heart goes to the people affected by the Katrina disaster. I am reading the accounts of devastation in New Orleans and surrounding areas, and it is terrible. The infrastracture and fabric of civilized society deteriorates VERY quickly.

This is what a war is like. I hope people will remember this befire waging a war someplace else.

The public officials IMO are unreasonably optimistic about the economic impact of this disaster. If we are to consider New Orleans alone, we shuld keep in mind that to 80% of US ag export goes (sorry, used to go) via Mississippi barge route through the NO port. I used to watch those barges on Mississippi river almost every day. Not to mention imports and destruction of oil rigs. WE will all feel it very soon, and not just in the gas prices.

However, to fully appreciate the magnitute of the destruction, consider the following, written by a survivor and a witness:

The material world in which we lived has been utterly and completely
destroyed; only the earth remains.

Homes and commercial structures which survived every catastrophe since
the 1840's (yes, that's the correct date -EighteenForties), including
Hurricane Camille, have simply ceased to exist.

All you are seeing on TV is New Orleans and the casinos in Biloxi but I
can assure you there is more to the Mississippi coast than the casinos
in Biloxi. The coast is 90 miles wide and, from east to west, here are
the cities that are NOT being featured on the news: Pascagoula, Ocean
Springs, Biloxi, Gulfport, Long Beach, Pass Christian (home),
Diamondhead, Bay St. Louis, Waveland, and Pearlington. Each city was
populated with thousands of residents, many of whom evacuated, many who
remained. No news footage of them. Just the endless banal coverage of
those damned casinos. Every one of those cities and towns were heavily
damaged or totally destroyed. Every structure within 200 yards of the
beach is gone. No recognizable landmarks remain.

Public schools are damaged or non-existent. Churches and temples
(including First Baptist in Long Beach which survived Camille in 1969
and my baptism in 1957) are non-existent or severely damaged. Medical
facilities (doctors offices, pharmacies, etc) non-existent or severely
damaged. Retail centers are non-existent. Recreation areas
non-existent. Gulfport-Biloxi International Airport - severely damaged.

At the east and west ends of Harrison County (my home), both vehicle and
railroad bridges on the waterfront Highway 90 across Bay St. Louis
(west) and Biloxi Bay (east) are completely destroyed.

Scenic Drive in Pass Christian, 2-miles along the beach lined with
ancient oaks and late 19th-century and ante-bellum homes so stately and
graceful that it was once called "the most beautiful street in America"
and was on the National Registry of Historic Places, is now a pile of
rubble.

No electricity since early Monday. Which translates into: no living and
no commerce of any kind is possble. for home and businesses, no lights,
no cooking, no air conditioning, no fresh water, no toilets. gas
stations are destroyed or closed (pumps are electric)

In an area 90 miles wide by approximately 6 miles deep:

1) cell phones are now useless paperweights. transmission towers
were damaged or blown down. none have electricity. Of those that have
their own generators, the generators were destroyed in the tidal wave
and because the roads are not passable (see below) technicians cannot
reach the towers to repair the generators. Theres no gasoline for the
generators. Regular land-line phones are out and service will not be
back for 2-3 weeks or more. "Satellite" phones are only means of
communication.

2) every single road has to be cleared by bull-dozer and
electricians (downed power lines everywhere) before it is passable

3) every single motor vehicle caught in the storm-surge has been
destroyed, inundated under 20+ feet of muddy salty water. Envision:
every privately owned automobile, police cruiser, ambulance, rescue
wagon, fire truck, post office delivery vans, UPS/FedEx truck, etc., is
now useless.

4) municipal goverment and services no longer exist. Buildings
housing all governemnt offices are non-existent or damaged beyond use.
In my city, the police department has simply vanished from the earth;
officers survived but physical plant is gone and vehicles inoperable

5) Tens of thousands of homes are now scattered rubble. In many of
those homes, someone died. If the body is visible, it is not
recoverable until mountains of debris can be removed. It's sunny and
the temperatures are in the 90s. (Ignore "current death toll" on
evening news reports! It will be weeks, probably months, before a
staggeringly higher death count is officially recognized)

6) In every destroyed home was a refrigerator and in many of them,
freezers, filled with the family's choice of meat, poultry, fish, and
game. Those appliances now litter the landscape, their contents strewn
about, rotting in the sun and heat.

7) every single grocerystore in the storm-surge area had its
contents blown out. Mountains of fresh produce, red meat, fresh fish
and poultry, eggs, milk, frozen food, etc., now lies rotting in the sun.
Add this to 5 & 6 above and you see the health hazard in the making.

8) mortuaries have been destroyed. Refrigerated trucks are
arriving to be used as temporary morgues.

9) mosquito eggs that had lain dormant in dry soil have now been
re-vitalized; in the next two or three weeks, the horde will hatch and
attack

10) every place of employment on the coast is destroyed. no one
who survived and no one who returns will have a job. all are now
unemployed. The casinos alone employed 14,000 people, now jobless. The
hospitality industry (hotels and restaurants) employed thousands more,
now jobless. The 500-boat fishing fleet, if the ships survived, have no
crews. Of the ships that may be operable when their crew can return,
there are no homeport facilities to off-load and process their catch.
The port of Gulfport, 2nd largest on the Gulf coast and largest port of
entry for commerce from central and south america, has been destroyed.
Retail stores (pharmacies, hallmark cards&gifts, groceries, dry
cleaning, hardware, fast food, etc., all gone--those that remain cannot
open due to lack of power. No-one who was expecting to get a pay check
this week for work done last week will get a check and "plastic" is as
useless as cell phones. Credit/debit cards drawn against local banks
cannot be used in in commerce because the banks are destroyed. And
ATMs? Fuggedabboutit. Most of the ATMs were inundated and are now
filled with muddy salt water. State aid? the casinos pump $500,000 of
tax revenue each day into state coffers and every penny of that income
ceased last Sunday. That's $180,000,000/year that the state will NOT
receive.

A terrible, terrible situation.

And here is the latest from the Powers To Be:

Barbara Bush: Things Working Out 'Very Well' for Poor Evacuees from New Orleans

NEW YORK Accompanying her husband, former President George H.W.Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in Houston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to the poor who had lost everything back home and evacuated, "This is working very well for them."

The former First Lady's remarks were aired this evening on National Public Radio's "Marketplace" program.

She was part of a group in Houston today at the Astrodome that included her husband and former President Bill Clinton, who were chosen by her son, the current president, to head fundraising efforts for the recovery. Sen. Hilary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama were also present.

In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: "Almost everyone I've talked to says we're going to move to Houston."

Then she added: "What I'm hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."

Like mother, like son ... like all of them past, present and future.

Most Wanted: reckless driver in a red pickup

2005-08-23T08:24:00.000-07:00

I am in a particularly vindictive modd today, and want to recount the details of a car accident we were in in May. It goes to illustrate the point that following rules and being careful is not enough, you also have to always watch out for the other jerk.

It happened on Saturday, Mother's day weekend. We were going on the left lane on the interstate just west of Ann Arbor, MI, when a big red pick-up truck with a giant American flag plastered across its rear window cut us off. He appeared from nowhere going at no less than 90 miles/hour, and attempted to pass us from the right. I didn't really feel him hit us, although he smashed our right front light panel pretty good. However, the force of the impact was such that it stripped the right front tire off the wheel, and the tire lost pressure instantly, just like in a blow-out. At the time of course we didn't know that. All we knew is that the car became impossible to control: it started wheering with ever increasing amplitude, and then went into a tail spin. We flew off the road right into a grassy divider, and slammed into a steel railing that was positioned there. The car kept going, but we were able to stop it at this point.

The fact that all four of us, my husband, myself, and the kids, came out alive and unharmed, is nothing short of a miracle. If we were to come off the road only about 20 yards further down, where the railing was right at the curb, we would have slammed into it head on and ricocheted onto somebody's path. Another 100 yards further there was no railing at all, and it would have been entirely possible to fly thorugh the grass onto the oncoming traffic lanes. We read up on how to drive through a blow-out when we came back home; the only sensible advice given was 'pray to God'. The car also has only cosmetic damages. The right rear light took almost all the impact with the railing; the plastic broke, but the lamp itself worked. The panel bent slightly, but it didn't even have to be replaced. Same with the front light, although there, all the panels needed replacement.

Sometimes I hear people moaning about the good ol' days, whene everyone ate white bread with real butter and didn't get fat, and when everyone rode without car seats. The car seats for some reason epithomize government control to those people. Well, I want to say that I can't thank God enough for them, since my children might have easily smashed into the walls or flied into the windows were they not safely buckled.

The accident happened out of the blue; I didn't have any premonitions, never even figured that something was terribly wrong until it was obvious that the car can't be conrtolled. The whole incident took no more than 8-10 seconds, yet ut felt like considerably more than that. My perception as we were weering back and forth was considerably heightened, I noticed every crack on the road. When I saw that railing going at me as in slow motion, all I could think was 'grave injuries', and still it didn't sink in. When we hit and barely felt the impact, I felt absolutely elated, jumped out and yelled 'we are alive!' I got scared when I looked around and realized what could have been; but it really only hit when we got back home. For a while after, I have been very sluggish and wheepy for no apparent reason (other than the accident).

Now, here is why I can't get this out of my mind:

The other driver just sped off and left the scene of the accident. The police told us that without a license plate, it is impossible to find him. Remembering the license plate was the last thing on my mind in those moments; although I think it was a blue Michigan color. WHAT KIND OF A SICK, EVIL BASTARD WOULD DO SUCH A THING!? I would have dearly loved to find him and rip him to pieces.

Another thing that sort of bothered me is that no one stopped or called 911. There were quite a few people around; somebody was actually passing us while we were having trouble, but many had enough sense to slow down. Still, quite a few people saw us going down, and yet, no one stopped. It didn't matter on our case, fortunately; we called everyone ourselved. But it is really chilling to think that someone may bleed to death on the roadside as a result of an accident, and people would just fly by.

A towing truck came; the man helped us replace the tire, and we drove on a donut to the nearest tire shop, making it there minutes before closing. They replaced the tire, inspected everything, and we were able to get back on the road and continue with our drive. It has costed us a few K to fix the car (those cosmetic daMages are very expensive), thank goodness that the insurance picked up a lot of it.

I know that I have been given the greatest gift of life and a chance to finish whatever it is I am here to do.

And if you ever see a big bright red pickup truck (a GM brand more likely), with a wavy American flad plastered across the back window, may be with a blue Michigan plate, please -- take down his number and pass it along to me, so that I can get him by all means legal and physical.

I am back, and more on homeschooling

2005-08-11T08:13:00.000-07:00

I was out of country for a long time, with limited Internet access, thus no new entries. But I am back now and ready to write more. I found two comments on one of my past entries that I haven’t seen before, and would like to use them as a platform for future discussion. Thank you Chris and Cynthia for taking time to read my dormant blog, and for your comments!

Cynthia, thanks for your prospective as a recent high-school graduate. You start your comment by writing: "You might wish to be careful about how far you go as far as homeschooling. I can see your point about the failings in the school system, I just got out of high school, but be sure not to go isolationist." You are basically equating schooling to socialization, and you reiterate your point later on. Thus, the more one homeschools, the more isolated one is. I want to point out that learning and socialization are not the same things. And in fact in education the shift to emphasizing socialization is a relatively recent one (see e.g., Charlotte Izerbyt, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America"). Academics went down precisely as it started to happen. Because to me, socialization and academic learning are different, I don't immediately make a connection between homeschooling and being isolated. One can learn at home and then go out and socialize. And with the amount of extracurriculars children take these days, it is practically impossible to grow up isolated.

You say, "The job market being what it is from this point of view it's not what you know it's who you are socially". "Who you are socially" here is an interesting Freudian slip, IMO. This is what the school does very successfully, is molding you into one of the few social prototypes. The stereotypical ones would be the jock, the cheerleader, the popular, nerds etc. In real life there is slightly more the variety, but the basic picture is the same. And it is really amazing to observe the reemergence of these social roles when people congregate into the groups. I have been in a few of women’s clubs over the years, and there is always a struggle for popularity and influence, right along the old high school clique lines. The good part is that bitches have never won, at least in my experience, but still, it all is very amuzing.

But of course this is not what you really meant by “who you are socially”; you meant that being social and outgoing is a requirement for the modern job market. While social people do better anywhere, undoubtedly, it is also very obvious that there are different kinds of people and different jobs to do. A reporter or a PR officer must be social, while a researcher must be able to work on his own. And I would imagine that a naturally introverted person simply wouldn’t choose to be a PR officer, and instead would choose a job that better suits his/her natural temperament. But this is really self-explanatory.

What I want to point out that ‘being social’ and ‘working well in groups’, that you seem to equate, are, again, two different things. My husband was studying for his business degree in school just as I was working on my research degree. While I had to work on my own a lot, they were always required to do group projects. And I tell you, that was the stupidest thing, and had no relation whatsoever to the actual process that goes on at a workplace. The amount of time wasted on endless meetings and chit-chat was huge, the product substandard, and some people ended up shouldering a lot more work than others, creating grudges. In an actual workplace, everyone in a team has their relatively independent parts that they do; they get together to report on the progress, discuss the developments, and go on working on their parts again. And there is still a boss, you know, who supervises the project and tells you to do things. ‘Being social’ is reserved to lunch-time and political shmoozing, and we all know that it is important, but that alone wouldn’t get you anywhere.

I too am wishing you good luck in your endeavors, and please stop by again to read my blog!

Chris, I think that you are correct in principle in that homeschooling children are the same as general population: some social and outgoing, others more introverted. Yet, there is definitely a difference there too. I can’t yet say exactly what it is. There is a fact though there are no cliques and power struggles among the moms in the homeschooling groups I belong to, although there are conflicts sometimes. Go figure.

Thank you for stopping by, and please come again!

in memoriam Terri Schiavo

2005-04-01T22:12:00.000-08:00

Terri Schiavo passed away yesterday. God rest her soul.

I regret not having followed her struggle from the beginning. In recent weeks, however, I received quite a few messages in support of her struggle via my network of Catholic homeschooling friends. The messages urged to pray for Terri, take action by writing to your congressman, and other suggestions along those lines.

I went and read up on the issue on MSNBC. However, I didn't dwell on it. Both the messages I received from my religious friends, and the interpretation of mainstream media were treating Terri's struggle as a "Right to die vs Right to live" issue. This is right along the lines of the Pro-life vs Pro-choice issue and that of Strong government vs Government that leaves the people alone. All of these are full of false dichotomies. By a false dichotomy, I mean offering people a 'choice' between a rock and a hard place, thus stealing from them the REAL choice of mapping their own actions. This approach relies heavily on sweeping generalizations and on black and white world view. Because of this, any discussion of the above issues quickly deteriorates into absurd, and I refrain from ever participating in such.

However, about a week ago, I had a dream in which I was saying good-bye to Terri (who for some reason looked very much like one librarian from a local library, but this was obviously a quirk on the part of my subconciousness). The dream was very powerful and filled me up ith great sadness. I cried and cried, and woke up with tears in my eyes. I was sad for days afterwards.

This prompted me to read more about the case and reexamine my assumptions. It amazes me now how much Terri's struggle has been misrepresented. So many eloquent speeches were said in support of Right To Live and the Sanctity of Life, and as many in defense of Right To Die With Dignity and Respecting Private Family Decisions. The people who defended Terri's Right to Live couldn't care less about the Right to Live of the many innocent Iraqi civilians. How one can be pro-life and por-war at the same time I will never grasp, but I know a lot of otherwise sane people who subscribe to this notion. While people who talk about Dying with Dignity and respecting Terro's presumable wishes, overlook many glaring inconsistancies in the case.

When everything is taken into account however, a truly horrific picture emerges. It has nothing to do with either of the two purely theoretical in our state of society 'rights', but instead has 'premediated murder' written all over it.

The following powerful commentary sums it up perfectly and deserves to be reproduced here in its entirety:

[...]

The public has been told that Terri Schiavo is a "vegetable" - a shell of a person in what is called a "persistent vegetative state" (PVS). They say that her brain is "mush" (an actual quote), and that she is unaware of her environment and unable to communicate at even the most basic level.
We are also told that she had expressed her desire to be removed from life support if she were ever in such a state. Her husband, supposedly out of love for her, claims to be striving to fulfill her wishes and free her from her "living prison." Her poor, misguided parents, on the other hand, are portrayed as delusional - clinging to every blink of Terri's eyes as proof she can think - unable to face the truth and let go.
First of all, examination of the evidence demonstrates quite clearly that Terri's brain is not "mush." She is able to communicate. One member of the SotT team had a family member in exactly the condition Terri is in, and also had a friend who WAS in a Persistent Vegetative state, having been revived after cardiac arrest, and the difference is profound. People in a "persistent vegetative state" make meaningless noises and movements. Terri Schiavo clearly makes noises and movements that have meaning, that relate to understanding what is happening in her environment.
Numerous people, including three nurses charged with her care, have testified to many instances of communication. She had distinct signals to notify nurses when she had soiled her adult diaper or started her period. She greeted her nurses when they entered her room. She was distressed and depressed after visits by her husband, Michael Schiavo. There are sworn affidavits attesting to these observations.
Second, Terri is not completely reliant on the feeding tube. She is able to swallow water. Nurses have testified that she has also been fed orally, but that her husband Michael had ordered she be fed by tube instead. Judge Greer's order didn't just require that the feeding tube be removed. It expressly forbids anyone from feeding her orally, from giving her water, or even putting ice chips to her mouth.
Michael Schiavo claims that Terri had privately expressed her wishes to him. But there were no witnesses to that conversation, and we have only his word that such sentiments were ever expressed by Terri.
Several of Terri's friends have testified to the contrary.
This subject actually highlights the typical way the case has been handled. Terri's friend Diane Meyer testified in 2002 that Terri, in 1982, stated to Meyer that she disapproved of the fact that the parents of Karen Ann Quinlan were seeking to remove their daughter from life-support.
Judge Greer dismissed this testimony from Terri's friend ruling that it was obviously not credible since Quinlan had died in 1979, therefore Terri must have been a mere child when she made the comment.
The FACT is that Quinlan actually died on June 11, 1985. making Terri an adult when she complained about the ventilator being removed, thus supporting the testimony of Diane Meyer, Terri's friend.
Greer refused admit his mistake about the date of Quinlan's death and to reverse his ruling. Instead he ruled that Michael Schiavo's hearsay testimony would stand.
It should also be noted that Michael Schiavo conveniently remembered that Terri had said years ago the she wouldn't want to live on life support only AFTER the malpractice suit awarded more than $1 million to Terri for her rehabilitation. We should note that $300 thousand of this award went to Michael and he has allegedly paid $385,000 to his attorney Felos. Michael Schiavo pledged that the money would go to Terri's care, but all of her rehabilitative therapy stopped immediately thereafter, by Michael's order.
Another important avenue of investigation has also been neglected. Judge Greer denied the Department of Children and Families (DCF) to investigate 30 accusations of spousal abuse. There is testimony from expert witnesses that warrant investigation into the circumstances surrounding Terri's alleged collapse from a chemical imbalance. Allegedly there are numerous suspicious fractures on bone scans.
A neurologist who examined the timeline of Terri's brain scans found that for the first three days of her initial hospitalization in 1990, her brain scans were normal. Then suddenly, on the sixth day, her brain scan showed evidence of a massive injury. He concludes that Terri was hit on the head and suffered intracranial hemorrhage while in the hospital. The physician maintains that she did not suffer her brain damage outside the hospital but while she was hospitalized.
According to the physician, if the reports produced are accurate (normal CT brain on Feb. 27, collapse on Feb. 25, 1990) then she did not suffer an event of massive ischemia on Feb. 25, 1990, the date of her alleged 'collapse' The physician says that there is no radiologist or neurologist or neurosurgeon in the world that would dispute this as it is impossible. The CT on Feb. 27, 1990, would have been grossly abnormal." The entire article including Terri's NORMAL original brain scan can be found here.
Why is this significant?
Terri's brother and several friends have testified that Terri had expressed to them her intention to divorce Michael. They had a "violent" fight on Feb. 24, 1990, the night before her so-called "collapse." She was found, in the early morning hours, on the hallway floor with her hands around her neck.
The cause of Terri Schiavo's brain damage has never been determined. Michael Schiavo has ordered those medical records sealed.
Michael Schiavo has been reported to say "Isn't the bitch dead yet?" to the staff at the Suncoast Hospice. The affidavits are available on the (court documents section) of www.terrisfight.org .
Nurses who made positive notations on Terri's chart found those notations removed by the next day. For a long time, Michael instructed that there be no sunlight, no radio and no television in Terri's room.
These are just some of the items from the Schiavo case that are not being reported in the mainstream media which is playing wildly upon the emotions of those who have not taken the time to search out the facts.
Tracking the events chronologically suggest a scenario quite different from the one presented to the public. This is not a "right to die" case. This is a "right to kill a disabled woman who can't speak for herself" case. More than that, it is a case where it seems clear that Michael Schiavo may have a vested interest in Terri NOT receiving any rehabilitative therapy. It suggests that he is afraid of that therapy and what Terri might say IF she had ever received it and had been able to tell what REALLY happened on the night when she suffered her alleged "collapse."
Consider the fact that Michael has been offered a million dollars to relinquish his guardianship of Terri. He could take the money, turn her over to her parents, and walk away from the whole problem. He wouldn't have to suffer the ire of half of America who are accusing him of being a killer. He wouldn't have to be responsible for Terri.
Some people think that Michael refused this money because he loves Terri so much that he is "incorruptible." He is determined to see her "wishes fulfilled."
There is another way to look at this refusal when one considers all the evidence.
Do we REALLY think that Michael Schiavo loves Terri so much that he is willing to withstand the hatred of millions of people, to stand up against George Bush and the congress, (who, we should point out, are easily enough able to get judges to do what they want when it serves their interests, so we suspect that Terri's death serves their interests more than her life), to be the villain for the rest of his life?
Do we believe this when we know that Michael Schiavo began living with another woman within weeks of Terri's accident while still suffering this great, everlasting love that drives him to free Terri?
Sorry, we don't buy it.
It seems rather clear that Michael Schiavo is driven by something else. Yes, he refused a million dollars. Yes, he refuses to let Terri's parents care for their daughter. Yes, he refuses to care what anyone thinks of him or how many people call him a murderer because he is driven by something else.
Michael Schiavo is driven by fear of what Terri would say if she lived and received therapy and recovered her ability to speak. The one person who could accuse him of murder and make it stick will soon be dead.

[...]

A friend who worked as a nurse for a very long time, pointed out another high strangeness in Terri Schiavo's case. Terri was in hospice care for 3 years prior to her death. Hospice services are reserved for the terminally ill that have less than six months to live. Terry did not fit these criteria; in fact it is not uncommon for a person in her condition live up to 50 or 60 years of age. Also, hospice provides palliative care, which includes nourishment, hydration, and pain relief. None of this was given to Terri while she was dying. In fact the very removal of those caused her death. The implication of this are deeply disturbing.

The death of Terri Schiavo is a marker of profound change in American values and society. This is yer another good cop / bad cop game, where numerous people and organization from the whole spectrum of political affiliation and ethical views take advantage of the situation to further their own goals. And in the meantime, the real issue, that of a cold-blooded and heartless murder of an innocent disabled woman, is covered up and ignored.

It is all the more significant that Terri's death is accompanied by the impending death of Pope John Paul II. Someone also remembered that a similar thing happened in 1997, when the death of Princess Diana was closely followed by Mother Theresa's death. A death of a martyr followed by a passing of a "Catholic Icon" in both cases. I too can't help feeling that this is more than a coincidence.

Lastly, there is this:
Did Nostradamus Predict the Sacrifice of Terri Schiavo?

Quatrain 6,72

Par fureur feinte d’esmotion diuine,
Sera la femme du grand fort violee:
Iuges voulans damner telle doctrine,
Victime au peuple ignorant immolee.

Through feigned fury of divine emotion
The wife of the strong one will be violated:
The judges wishing to condemn such a doctrine,
She is sacrificed a victim to the ignorant people.

I don't know about you, but to me it seems that the shoe fits.

eBay and I

2005-03-31T23:21:00.000-08:00

I apologize for neglecting my blog in the past two or three weeks (gee, has it been THAT long??). I have been selling some stuff on eBay. And let me tell you, whoever says eBay is easy money, is WRONG. I go to bed at 3 a.m., and had my first square meal in two weeks today. This should be over soon, until the next opportunity presents itself. Still, it's worth it; may be I can finally buy books that I want, and fix my car.

Speaking of finances, more news today on the impending collapse of the US dollar. The budget deficit figures quoted in the article floored me, really did. I remembered a line from my favorite movie, Dave. The one where this dude, presidential look-alike, becomes the president. At some point, his best friend, in an effort to help save a federally funded program, looks over the the federal budget and says, 'If I run my business this way, I'd go bust in no time'. This is exactly how I feel about the current budget situation. If I balanced my family budget in the way they do there, we'd be out in the streets before you can say 'bankruptcy'.

Well, while the country is tethering on the edge of disaster, people continue to live their lives; and they still want to buy expensive apparel, albeit at serious discount. So eBay's future remains bright in times of trouble, up to a certain point of course. Meanwhile, I'll be putting my money in gold, and in more inventory of designer shoes :); with an understanding that one must remain flexible and on constant lookout.

community colleges help separate the wheat from the shaft

2005-03-14T23:35:00.000-08:00

It is always funny to me when the left (i.e., Gatto) and the far right (i.e., Charlotte Iserbyt) point out the same problems in education, and blame the other side for them! The article below should settle the debate and make it clear that at this point in time, it is the right (eh, it is central now but it doesn't change it's nature), like I said, the right in power are destroying the education in the US.

Bush boosts nation's community colleges

President pushes for federal support of job programs
The Associated Press
Updated: 3:05 p.m. ET March 2, 2005

[both the far left and far right would have massive heart attacks upon reading the title alone]

ARNOLD, Md. - President Bush, pushing for more flexibility in job training programs, said Wednesday that the federal government needs to support community colleges because they are available and affordable to meet the needs of modern-day workers.

[he should have said 'worker-bees' to cement his point]

“We must never lose sight of the need to have an education system ... that’s capable of keeping this country competitive by adjusting to the workplace as it really is,” Bush said at Anne Arundel Community College. “I have come to herald success.”

[it all starts with the education, that' right. The education creates the modern assembly line workplace, and will do so more efficiently in the future]

Bush has proposed doubling the number of Americans who get job-training help from the government, as a way to restore lost jobs. He aims to do that in part by consolidating federal job-training programs, but is also striving for broader change.

[consolidate means cut]

He wants to require accountability in certain programs,

[like No Child Left Behind - if you don't teach to test, we'll cut your funding even more]

give states more flexibility and provide $250 million to community colleges that design courses in partnership with the needs of local employers. He also wants to create personal job training accounts that give the unemployed federal money for services aimed at helping them get back to work.

['personal job training account' is a euphemism for taking away whatever meager unemployment benefits. This expression, btw, is straight from Frank Luntz's republican speak manual, which in itself is a reason to be very, veru cautious about it]

The president’s latest budget request asks Congress for $125 million to promote dual-enrollment programs that allow high school students to earn college credit.
“Community colleges are available,” Bush said, sitting in a gymnasium in front of a sign that said “Jobs and Growth.” “They are affordable and they are flexible.”

[this is exactly what I call "sepataring the wheat from the shaft". Detour the 'dumb' kids, i.e., the majority, into community colleges for job training, and the select few will enjoy genuine education, allowing them to take their fathers' place as a ruling elite]

Bush’s proposed consolidation of federal job-training efforts is aimed at increasing the programs’ effectiveness. But it is also part of an attempt to save $1.9 billion in the next fiscal year by targeting overlapping programs that serve the same purpose.

[i told ya!]

Democrats, however, say what is needed are better job training programs, not what they say are cuts in the job-training budget.

[talk is cheap, Democrats! DO something about it, if you can, and please, NO mandated preschool as per Al Gore!]

secret history of the world

2005-03-08T23:19:00.000-08:00

From the description, it seems that this book goes where Da Vinci Code dares not thread.

**********

Secret History of the World

If you heard the Truth, would you believe it? Ancient civilisations.
Hyperdimensional realities. DNA changes. Bible conspiracies. What are the
realities? What is disinformation?

The Secret History of The World and How To Get Out Alive is the definitive
book of the real answers where Truth is more fantastic than fiction. Laura
Knight-Jadczyk, wife of internationally known theoretical physicist,
Arkadiusz Jadczyk, an expert in hyperdimensional physics, draws on science
and mysticism to pierce the veil of reality. Due to the many threats on her
life from agents and agencies known and unknown, Laura left the United
States to live in France, where she is working closely with Patrick Rivière,
student of Eugene Canseliet, the only disciple of the legendary alchemist
Fulcanelli.

With sparkling humour and wisdom, she picks up where Fulcanelli left off,
sharing over thirty years of research to reveal, for the first time, The
Great Work and the esoteric Science of the Ancients in terms accessible to
scholar and layperson alike.

Conspiracies have existed since the time of Cain and Abel. Facts of history
have been altered to support the illusion. The question today is whether a
sufficient number of people will see through the deceptions, thus creating a
counter-force for positive change - the gold of humanity - during the
upcoming times of Macro-Cosmic Quantum Shift. Laura argues convincingly,
based on the revelations of the deepest of esoteric secrets, that the
present is a time of potential transition, an extraordinary opportunity for
individual and collective renewal: a quantum shift of awareness and
perception which could see the birth of true creativity in the fields of
science, art and spirituality. The Secret History of the World allows us to
redefine our interpretation of the universe, history, and culture and to
thereby navigate a path through this darkness. In this way, Laura Knight-
Jadczyk shows us how we may extend the possibilities for all our different
futures in literal terms.

With over 850 pages of fascinating reading, The Secret History of The World
and How to Get Out Alive is rapidly being acknowledged as a classic with
profound implications for the destiny of the human race. With painstakingly
researched facts and figures, the author overturns long-held conventional
ideas on religion, philosophy, Grail legends, science, and alchemy,
presenting a cohesive narrative pointing to the existence of an ancient
techno-spirituality of the Golden Age which included a mastery of space and
time: the Holy Grail, the Philosopher's Stone, the True Process of
Ascension. Laura provides the evidence for the advanced level of scientific
and metaphysical wisdom possessed by the greatest of lost ancient
civilizations - a culture so advanced that none of the trappings of
civilization as we know it were needed, explaining why there is no
'evidence' of civilization as we know it left to testify to its existence.
The author's consummate synthesis reveals the Message in a Bottle reserved
for humanity, including the Cosmology and Mysticism of mankind Before the
Fall when, as the ancient texts tell us, man walked and talked with the
gods. Laura shows us that the upcoming shift is that point in the vast
cosmological cycle when mankind - or at least a portion of mankind - has the
opportunity to regain his standing as The Child of the King in the Golden
Age.

If ever there was a book that can answer the questions of those who are
seeking Truth in the spiritual wilderness of this world, then surely The
Secret History of the World and How to Get Out Alive is it.

The Secret History of The World and How To Get Out Alive by Laura Knight-
Jadczyk, published by Red Pill Press, Preface by Patrick Rivière €35.00 (867
pages).

http://www.qfgpublishing.com/

tonight's find

2005-03-07T23:23:00.000-08:00

I was browsing my evening news, and the following piece caught my eyes:

Aliens Don't Like to Eat People That Smoke! (obviously, here they mean the ILlegal aliens, the little green (or grey) men that fly saucers and mess with us at night, or so some otherwise sane people believe).

Jokes aside, everybody knows about health risks associated with smocking (lung cancer being one of them). It gets overlooked, however, that the carcinogenic effect in that cigarette comes from all the junk, tar, and other garbage that accumulates in thtough modern processing. The addictive substance itself, nicotine, is non-carcinogenic amd has interesting properties in the brain:

" Nicotine mimics one of the body's most significant neurotransmitter, acetylcholine. This is the neurotransmitter most often associated with cognition in the cerebral cortex. Acetylcholine is the primary carrier of thought and memory in the brain. It is essential to have appropriate levels of acetylcholine to have new memories or recall old memories.

[..]

Acetyl-L-Carnitine (ALC) is the acetyl ester of carnitine, the carrier of fatty acids across Mitochondrial membranes. Like carnitine, ALC is naturally produced in the body and found in small amounts in some foods. ...Research in recent years has hoisted ALC from its somewhat mundane role in energy production to nutritional cognitive enhancer and neuroprotective agent extraordinaire. Indeed, taken in its entirety, ALC has become one of the premiere “anti-aging” compounds under scientific investigation, especially in relation to brain and nervous system deterioration.

ALC is found in various concentrations in the brain, and its levels are significantly reduced with aging.(1) In numerous studies in animal models, ALC administration has been shown to have the remarkable ability of improving not only cognitive changes, but also morphological (structural) and neurochemical changes. ...ALC has varied effects on cholinergic activity, including promoting the release(2) and synthesis(3) of acetylcholine. Additionally, ALC promotes high affinity uptake of choline, which declines significantly with age.(4) While these cholinergic effects were first described almost a quarter of a century ago,(5) it now appears that this is only the tip of the ALC iceberg. [Gissen, VRP's Nutritional News, March, 1995]

[..]

...We have shown that numbers and function of diverse nAChR subtypes can be influenced by many biologically active substances, ranging from steroids to local anesthetics, and by agents acting on the extracellular matrix, the cytoskeleton, on second messenger signaling, and at the nucleus. We also have shown that chronic nicotine exposure induces numerical upregulation of many diverse nAChR subtypes via a post-transcriptional process that is dominated by effects on intracellular pools of receptors or their precursors."

the above simply means that you'll have more ACL receptors if you smoke. Which is why probably that there may be possible BENEFITS of nicotine for certain brain disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease (that's associated with low levels of ACL), see here .

I personally don't smoke, never tried to, and never had any desire to try. But, in an unlikely event that I were to take it up, I would probably roll my own out of organic tobacco. That is, if there still were a freedom to do so, which is really unlikely, judging from the recent moves towards anti-smoking laws.

homeschooling -part III

2005-03-07T22:30:00.000-08:00

I realized today that a book I have been wanting to buy and read, The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, is available online at his site. Now I can read it there whenever I have a chance. I am still plannin to buy it though. John Taylor Gatto is a former teacher with 30+ years of experience teaching in public schools system, who became a whistleblower and an outspoken critic of modern education system.

Here are some quotes from his well researched newest book:

"The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn and it isn’t supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason’s words, “the control of human behavior.”"

[..]

"In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure:

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another
class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege
of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific
difficult manual tasks."

and more horrors along these lines. If you didn't know this, read and wheep.

However, there is hope, and it is illustrated by the following passage (my favorite):

"In the northeast corner of an island a long way from here, a woman sells plates of cooked shrimp and rice from out of an old white truck. Her truck is worth $5,000 at most. She sells only that one thing plus hot dogs for the kids and canned soda. The license to do this costs $500 a year, or $43.25 a month, a little over a dollar a day. The shrimp lady is fifty-nine years old. She has a high school diploma and a nice smile. Her truck parks on a gravel pull-off from the main highway in a nondescript location. No one else is around, not because the shrimp lady has a protected location but because no one else wants to be there. A hand-lettered sign advertises, "$9.95 Shrimp and Rice. Soda $1.00. Hot Dogs $1.25."

The day I stood in line for a shrimp plate, five customers were in front of me. They bought fourteen plates among them and fourteen sodas. I bought two and two when it came my turn, and by that time five new customers had arrived behind me. I was intrigued.

The next day Janet and I returned. We parked across the road where we could watch the truck but not make the shrimp lady nervous. In two hours, forty-one plates and forty-one sodas were handed out of the old truck, and maybe ten hot dogs. A week later we came back and watched again as nearly the same thing happened. Janet, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, estimated that $7 of the $10.95 for shrimp and soda was profit, after all costs.

Later we chatted with the lady in a quiet moment. The truck sits there eight hours a day, seven days a week, 364 days a year (the island is warm year round). It averages 100 to 150 shrimp sales a day, but has sold as many as 300. When the owner-proprietress isn’t there, one of her three daughters takes over. Each is only a high school graduate. For all I know, the only thing saleable any of them knows how to do is cook shrimp and rice, but they do that very well. The family earns in excess of a quarter million dollars a year selling shrimp plates out of an old truck. They have no interest in expanding or franchising the business. Another thing I noticed: all the customers seemed pleased; many were friendly and joked with the lady, myself included. She looked happy to be alive.

[..]

At the heart of any school reforms that aren’t simply tuning the mudsill mechanism lie two beliefs: 1) That talent, intelligence, grace, and high accomplishment are within the reach of every kid, and 2) That we are better off working for ourselves than for a boss.3 But how on earth can you believe these things in the face of a century of institution-shaping/economy-shaping monopoly schooling which claims something different? Or in the face of a constant stream of media menace that jobs are vanishing, that the workplace demands more regulation and discipline, that "foreign competition" will bury us if we don’t comply with expert prescriptions in the years ahead? One powerful antidote to such propaganda comes from looking at evidence which contradicts official propaganda—like women who earn as much as doctors by selling shrimp from old white trucks parked beside the road, or thirteen-year-old boys who don’t have time to waste in school because they expect to be independent businessmen before most kids are out of college. Meet Stanley:

I once had a thirteen-year-old Greek boy named Stanley who only came to school one day a month and got away with it because I was his homeroom teacher and doctored the records. I did it because Stanley explained to me where he spent the time instead. It seems Stanley had five aunts and uncles, all in business for themselves before they were twenty-one. A florist, an unfinished furniture builder, a delicatessen owner, a small restauranteur, and a delivery service operator. Stanley was passed from store to store doing free labor in exchange for an opportunity to learn the business. "This way I decide which business I like well enough to set up for myself," he told me. "You tell me what books to read and I’ll read them, but I don’t have time to waste in school unless I want to end up like the rest of these people, working for somebody else." After I heard that I couldn’t in good conscience keep him locked up. Could you? If you say yes, tell me why."

This is my reason #1 (out of 1631 and counting) for homeschooling. I hope that it will help my children to be independent. They may want to start their own business, or launch a career of some kind, but there's the same mindset that comes with it, which is priceless, and which very few of us posess.

Another good book that comes to mind is The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by Grace Llewellyn. This one is geared towards teenagers:

"You won't find this book on a school library shelf--it's pure teenage anarchy. While many homeschooling authors hem and haw that learning at home isn't for everyone, this manifesto practically tells kids they're losers if they do otherwise. With the exception of a forwarding note to parents, this book is written entirely for teenagers, and the first 75 pages explain why school is a waste of time. Grace Llewellyn insists that people learn better when they are self-motivated and not confined by school walls."

Also, did you know that
Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith opt to homeschool their children?

Rock on, Niobe!

da vinci code

2005-02-28T22:33:00.001-08:00

I have just looked up Amazon to see any news on the new book in my favorite series, Harry Potter (July 15, save the date! I think I'll wear my Halloween witch costume to the store :0) While browing around, I noticed that a new book by Dan Brown, The Solomon Key, is coming out soon as well.

Dan Brown is an author of The Da Vinci Code , a best selling novel. I got The Da Vinci code on my birthday a year ago, and read it in one sitting. I have been interested in early Christianity for a while now, and the book certainly hit on some concepts that I came across before, and some I wasn’t aware of.

So it’s a fun read. However, people seem to forget that it’s just a piece of fiction!

I have quite a few Christian friends. Most of them are both intelligent and very nice. They do, however, possess a certain black and white view of reality; it’s full of contradictions that are apparent to any observer but escapes them completely.

For instance, the whole Harry Potter series is a big no-no. They genuinely fear that a volume of The Prisoner of Azkaban could jump out of its shelf and bewitch them and their kids on the spot. One of my friends (the more liberal one of all, mind you) said that she read it and kind of liked it, but was surprised that the Hogwarts celebrated Christmas. “It’s impossible, they can’t be doing that – they are witches!!” I am not making it up, honestly.

The Da Vinci Code elicits an even more extreme reaction. It is perceived as a rabid attack at the very tenets of faith, or rather, at those aspects of faith that have to do with literal interpretation of religious texts. It is the latter ones that people for some reason hold most dear. Is it perhaps because such approach does away with any questions, and thus is most comforting for the ‘true believer’ type?

So, just as there is a Christian Harry Potter, a ‘wholesome’ alternative to the JK Rowling’s bestseller, there are plenty of books that debunk the claims in The Da Vinci Code. To me, the sheer volume of those indicates that their authors are riding Dan Brown’s tail of fame. However, there is obviously high demand for those little ‘guides’ by people, who want to reaffirm their threatened view of the world. I was told of Catholic school teachers that always keep copies of those guides on their desk, so that they can address and blow to smithereens any heresy that the students may pick up from The Da Vinci code. Those teachers apparently have quite a choice, as evidenced by the following sample from Amazon:

The Truth Behind the Da Vinci Code: A Challenging Response to the Bestselling Novel, by Richard Abanes (this guy also wrote Harry Potter and the Bible … enough said)

Da Vinci Code Decoded: The Truth Behind the New York Times #1 Bestseller, by Martin Lunn

The Da Vinci Code: Fact or Fiction, by Hank Hanegraaff, Paul L. Maier

The above-mentioned are self-described ‘concise’ guides that help you ‘turn debate about the book into an evangelistic opportunity’ (that’s scary, but again, I am not making this up!).

There is another book in the mix, Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine, by Bart D. Ehrman, and it appears to be different. I have not read this book, but I have listened to Professor Ehrman’s courses on early Christianity that are available through the teaching company. He is a professor of religious studies, who started out as a believer, but in course of his studies came to realize that Christianity today bears little resemblance to its original form. Of all the tail-riders, his book is probably most accurate in dissecting what’s fiction and what’s historical fact in The Da Vinci Code.

However, it is ironic that both the original book and all the debunking are missing the point. The book has a great plot, but in the end it turns out that all the bad things were done by misguided individuals rather than directed by a powerful evil consortium (just like in Arlington road, ‘one man alone’, puh-leeze!). And as to the Grail, the conclusion is so wishy-washy, that I wanted to shout in frustration ‘so WHAT the heck is the Grail and HOW do we find it?!?’

Yet, there obviously IS the Holy Grail, and there obviously IS some kind of secret code to crack the mystery. But to get to it, one has to go beyond both Bible-beating and scholarly analysis. We have to remember that Jesus spoke in parables. Therefore some serious thinking required to decipher what the religious texts really say, or hint at, and then we have to figure out how it applies to our lives here and now. A daunting task for sure.

I found one source that deals with the subject in this way, attempting to SEE THE UNSEEN utilizing a variety of resources. If you are interested in what the real Da Vinci Code, may be about, you will appreciate The True Identity of Fulcanelli and The Da Vinci Code,
by Laura Knight-Jadczyk

It is very interesting how the subject of the code is linked to the alchemist and philosopher Fulcanelli; Le Mystere Des Cathedrales has been on my reading list ever since I visited the Cologne cathedral.

Read and see for yourself.

why I homeschool - part 2

2005-02-28T00:06:00.000-08:00

For me, academics is an important reason for homeschooling.

I observed my friends with older children, and it seems to me that academic achievement is jut not emphasized in US schools. Only select few take advanced courses in math and science, and what's considered 'advanced' here is a requirement for all students elsewhere! There is a lot of talk of micromanaging the learning with tests and sich (as per No Child Left Behind). However, from what both parents and students talk about, it seems that everyone is only preoccupied with social aspects of school life and extracurricular activities, mostly sports. And how to get into a college, as if this just happens on its own.

As an outsider, I get an impression that public school education is firmly rooted in attitude adjustment and social conditioning. A lot of private schools are no better. The friend's daughter goes to a Catholic school, and her blunders (which she would utter in perfect confidence) made my hair stand on end. And she is a straight A, model student!

For what forms social conditioning often takes, see "Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence" by Rosalind Wiseman. The title pretty much says it all, you can find out more at Amazon. I skimmed through another book by this author, "Odd Girl Out", and plan to get this one soon. My daughter is not even in kinedrgarten, but it's never too early to start getting ready! Because, even though we homeschool, she is bound to encounter some of that - I can't shield her from everything, and this isn't the point anyway.

Another thing that comes to mind when I think of education in US, is that the majority of people in academia and R&D in the States, and especially in lower-level positions (i.e. those who actually do the work), are foreign born and educated.

Consider the following statistics :

"This (the newly imposed visa restrictions - thelegalalien) is a matter of grave concern to us," says David Daniels, dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois. "Roughly half of the students in engineering graduate programs nationwide are from foreign countries."

and here :

"As per figures compiled by NSF researchers Jean Johnson and Mark Regets in 1993 and reported by Gwynne (1999), 431,000 of the total 2,685,000 scientists and engineers with degrees and 101,000 out of 345, 000 with Ph.D.s in the US were born abroad. As stated by Paul Bartlett, president of Hall, Kinion & Associates, US born Caucasians form a minority in most Silicon Valley companies today"

and, mind you, that's engineering, there is a lot more foreigners employed in science depts in US schools. More importantly, the numbers quoted in the article represent faculty. The lower-tire specialists (grad students, postdocs, technicians) are overwhelmingly foreign-born and educated, as my personal experience and that of many others show

I went to graduate school in the US in late 90s and graduated in 2000. In my incoming class in my department (biology), out of 15 students, there wasn't a single US-born person. About one half of the labs in my dept were led by US-born professors, the rest were foreigners. And in all labs, you'd have may be one American born postdoc, and the rest (average I'd say about 7) were foreigners. Same goes for the students.

The only science department that didn't have any foreign students was medical biology, because of the funding restrictions. Engineering has slightly less foreign students than science, then economics, and humanities / liberal arts would have few foreigners (I don't know whether this is because of language barrier or less job opportunities).

Part of the reason for this picture is that the career in research was considered one of the most prestigious at my home country (back when I was little things have changed since), and other around the world. Here, smart young people choose medicine, law, and business: these jobs pay well and provide a measure of independence.

Yet, imagine if all the foreign students, scholars and researchers were to dissapear by magic - there would be no one to continue spinning the wheels, simply because the population in general doesn't have the required educational background, and I mean not in terms of qualification, but in terms of its scope and intensity.

The following article expands this point with some facts and numbers:

Educational complacency will make U.S. feel the pain

By Craig R. Barrett

" When will we wake up and smell the competition? U.S. corporations are begging for talent, as foreignscientists and engineers increasingly find well-payingjobs on their own doorsteps.The balance of innovation has begun to tilt eastward,as China and India start taking their own products to market. For the first time, other nations are about toproduce more U.S. patents per year than the UnitedStates.China and India are expanding their university-levelmath, science and engineering programs at a pacecomparable to the United States after World War II.Asian colleges now produce six times the number ofengineering degrees produced here. "

"one simple reason we're lagging behind:We've institutionalized low performance through lowexpectations. High schools expect only a small numberof students to take the advanced math and sciencecourses young people need.Moreover, all signs suggest that future requirementsfor high school completion may be even less rigorous. Several states, concerned about achievement rates, areconsidering easing their graduation standards, eventhough their exit exams are pegged below the 10th-grade level." *****
Mind you, I don't believe that education in Russia was fundamentally much better. I believe that all insitutionalized learning has flaws that can not be remedied. I fell like I am charting our course on mostly unknown land; but it is better than going down the trail I walked in the past, the one that I know is going nowhere. So, onward!

fake Nikes, fake blogs

2005-02-25T22:17:00.000-08:00

Many of us know that there are tons of fakes in that wide world of consumer products. I mean counterfeight merchandise, such as fake Gucci bags and Nike shoes.

While it is upsetting to be burned by those, the most that can happen is that the fake bag or shoes will fall apart within a couple of weeks from the date of purchase, or embarasse you in front of your eagle-eyed friends. Big deal.

Fake news and news reporters, however, present a much more serious matter. Consider, for instance, the Gannongate saga , of which I am sure you have heard plenty:

"James Dale Guckert (c. 1958) worked under the pseudonym Jeff Gannon as a White House reporter between 2003 and 2005, representing Talon News. After Guckert came under public scrutiny [...], he resigned from Talon News on February 8, 2005.
Guckert has stated that he obtained frequent daily passes to White House briefings. He attended four Bush press conferences, and appeared regularly at White House press briefings. Weblogs discovered Gannon's pseudonym and made public his past history, as Guckert, 'Gannon', and 'Bulldog'. Questions have arisen as to Guckert's relationship with the White House and with the Republican Party. Although he did not qualify for a Congressional press pass, Guckert was given daily passes to White House press briefings "after supplying his real name, date of birth and Social Security number."

Notice that weblogs blew the whistle on him. This shows the increased role of blogosphere in current events, and its influence on the information flow.

And just as with everything that becomes popular, you have to start watching out for fakes.

take a look at this :

"MSN Search Finds Viral Campaign
by Shankar Gupta, Thursday, Feb 24, 2005 6:47 AM EST
NOT CONTENT WITH its massive television, Internet, and radio advertising blitz to promote its newly released proprietary search engine MSN Search, MSN apparently has released a viral campaign, “MSN Found,” to promote the search site.
An MSN spokesperson declined to comment on the viral campaign, other than to say: “There is a lot of great content to be found out on the Web. ‘Found’ complements MSN Search by finding more of the unique content on the Web.”
When the MSN Search marketing blitz was being announced, an MSN executive told OnlineMediaDaily that an agency called 42 Entertainment would be creating virals to promote the search engine.
42 Entertainment declined to comment on the campaign, and referred any questions to MSN’s public relations firm. An MSN spokesperson confirmed that 42 Entertainment worked on the viral campaign, saying: “MSN works with a number of third-party companies, and 42 Entertainment has worked on this and a number of other Microsoft projects.”
The ad features six fictional characters, each with their own Web log. They are Reggie, a DJ from London; Tad, a surfer from Venice Beach; Karen, a dog breeder from Sandusky, Ohio; Swing, a hotel concierge from Tokyo; Cy a security guard and conspiracy theorist from Chicago; and Denise, the owner of the new True dating service.
The viral’s main site, www.msnfound.com, collects all the blogs together, along with pictures of the authors. Each of the authors has a unique shtick.
For example, DJ Reggie suggests music for his readers, all conveniently available on MSN’s music page. Several of the blogs also mention the dating site www.True.com; MSN declined to comment on any relationship with the dating service by publication time.
Each blog also has a section called “finds,” which collects four MSN search results pages on things relevant to the blog’s subject matter. Reggie’s music is “vertiginous.” Don’t know what that means? Why, just click on a link to MSN Search (provided on the blog), and it’ll take you to a dictionary entry provided by MSN Answers, one of the selling points of the search engine.
One common thread in all the blogs is the use of other popular Internet phenomena. Surfer Tad’s blog links the infamous exploding whale video, which wasn’t an ad for anything, but became a popular Internet viral.
Searchers using particular terms (“blubber blowout,” in the case of Tad’s exploding whale) for these videos, which have already gained popularity on the Web, are given both a regular organic search page and also a direct link to the various virals, hosted by MSN and with links back to the fictional characters’ blogs.
The blogs’ fictional characters also interact with each other. During the first wave of entries, “Swing” writes about receiving flowers from a secret admirer--while security guard Cy writes that his “impromptu study of human emotional response to unexpected gifts produced highly intriguing results.”"

The last sentense sounds somewhat cheesy to me and obviously made up. But fakes, in time, do get better at imitating the real thing; some of those fake Nikes are so good that only an expert can tell them from the genuine ones.

And this isn't the only case of a big company using the blog phenomenon to promote itself (McDonalds is another example).

So be careful what you read - I know I will be, now that I have read this disturbing article.

forest homeschooling

2005-02-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

I don't have much time tonight, so I am just copying one of my favorite articles on homeschooling. Forest homeschooling works! Even though the story has a happy end, it's somewhat ironic how things turned out. The father and the daughter were leading a simple and healthy life, the kind that many of us dream of. And than along comes the police, deems their living conditions 'unacceptable', and decides that they should be a part of the system. And it is all written up in a way that the family has to thankful not to be put in a homeless shelter / foster care!

Another thing to think about is that, if you ever wanted to just drop out for some time and go live in a woods -- guess what? you really can't! All land is taken, either private or government property, and trespassing is against the law.

oh well

Forest family had an elaborate camp among trees

PORTLAND, ORE. - A man and his 12-year-old daughter spent the lastfour years living in a remote hillside in Portland's Forest Park,police said. The pair was discovered in a dense, wooded area by an Australian cross-country runner and his wife.They reported seeing an older man with white bushy hair and a beard,and a young girl at what appeared to be a "well-established transientcamp." They called police on April 28.That afternoon, North Precinct Sgt. Michael Barkley sent fourofficers on all-terrain vehicles to find the pair but they didn'tfind them."We had very little to go on, " Barkley said. "There's no way youcould not do everything you could because it was a report of a childliving up there."The next morning, the runner escorted police to the site.After an hour-and-a-half hike, police found an elaborate camp duginto a steep hillside.Under a tarp-covered, wood-framed shelter, they found sleeping bags,a partially burnt log, a Bible, a stack of old World BookEncyclopedias, rakes and other tools.A rope swing, a tilled vegetable garden and a small creek werenearby.A police dog found the pair huddling behind a tree about 50 yardsfrom the camp.The man and girl told police they had lived in the park for fouryears. The pair appeared clean, well-fed and healthy, Barkley said,and the girl was well-spoken beyond her years.The man, who identified himself as Frank, told police he was a 53-year-old Marine Corps veteran and college graduate who served inVietnam.He came to Oregon with his daughter, Ruth, from Tacoma with no joband virtually no money. Frank told police that the girl's mother wasinstitutionalized in New Hampshire, and the two now lived on a $400-a-month disability check.Rather than live on the streets and expose Ruth to alcohol and drugs,Frank said, they hiked deep into Forest Park and built a lean-to.The pair went into the city twice a week to stop by the bank, attendchurch, buy groceries and clothes from Goodwill. Frank, a devoutChristian, said he taught his daughter using the old encyclopedias.They grew vegetables and used the nearby creek to keep clean. Theystored perishable foods in a small pool of water at the creek's edge.The man and girl told police that the runner was the first person tofind their camp in four years.Their biggest worry was being split up, Barkley said."Please, don't take me from my daddy," the girl told the 26-yearpolice veteran as they sat on a log talking for at least 30 minutes.Barkley, who has a 6-year-old daughter, said he was struck by therelationship between father and daughter."What was so clear was that their living conditions wereunacceptable, but their relationship was a real deep love and caringfor each other," Barkley said.Officer Joe Campbell, who helped find the pair, said separating thepair would have broken their hearts. "Their whole lives seemed torevolve around each other," said Campbell.A pediatrician found the girl free of any illness, any signs ofphysical or sexual abuse - and no cavities. A criminal backgroundcheck came up empty, according to police reports.Even though the child and father lived for such a long timedisconnected from society, the girl had been home schooled and was ingood physical shape.In fact, the girl received a very good education from her fatherwhile living among the trees. Officials said the girl, who would benormally in 7th grade, is at a 12th grade equivalency."When we interviewed this little girl, she was very impressive. Shereally was very responsible, and she really looked as though she wasway advanced in her years," said Portland Police Cmdr. Scott Andersonsaid.KATU Television has been given permission from 'The Forest Family's'father to set up a college fund for 12-year-old 'Ruthie.'To make donations for the girl, who for the last four years havelived in the forest and was educated by her father, to 'Ruthie'sCollege Fund' at any Bank Of America Branch.Police say the father was ecstatic when KATU offered to set up acollege fund for his daughter.The father has done a wonderful job of educating the girl, sayspolice. She reportedly performs at a 12th grade level.Police persuaded them to leave the camp, promising help them findfood and shelter.The pair spent two nights at a homeless shelter. Barkley found theman a job and a place for the two to live on a friend's horse farm inYamhill County.Now, Barkley said, the pair are living in a mobile home and adjustingto life with heat, electricity and electric water.The man mows lawns and is learning to drive a tractor, and the pairride bicycles to a nearby church on Sundays."The amazing part of this was the fact that Sergeant Barkley reallyevaluated what was best for these people," North Precinct Cmdr. ScottAnderson said. "Sometimes police would be a little quicker to hand things off to state workers. But instead ... he saw this through to the end."

bad times for homeschooling PR

2005-02-23T23:02:00.000-08:00

These are bad times for homeschooling PR; two high profile child abuse cases are making rounds in the news and blogosphere, both involving parents who homeschool.

One is a case of physical and sexual abuse of a 14 y.o. girl in Arizona.
Quoting from the article :

"Abused girl's home prison: a bleak life

As she sat alone, trapped in a small, dark room, the 14-year-old girl tried to remember her multiplication tables.
She hadn't been to school for nearly three years.
Her father and his live-in girlfriend kept her locked in the room, a pink blanket covering the lone window.
Twice a day she was sent to the bathroom to eat a small meal and relieve herself."
There is also this cartoon that kind of goes with it.

Then, there is this horrible story :

Fla. Couple Accused of Torturing Kids

BEVERLY HILLS, Fla. - Only after John and Linda Dollar's 16-year-old son was hospitalized with a head wound did investigators find what they say were signs of abuse at the home: a cattle prod, pliers and what appeared to be toenails.

The Dollars — regarded by state social workers a decade ago as model parents — now stand accused of monstrous acts against five of their eight children, including the 16-year-old, who weighed just 60 pounds when he was hospitalized.

And no amount of discussion and letters to the newspapers will change the fact that through this coverage, 'homeschooling' and 'child abuse' were put together and subtly linked in the minds of average readers. This serves to further stygmatize all homeschoolers and promote anti-homeschooling legislation, as evidenced here :

Abuse case prompts rethink of homeschool laws

After the arrest of a man accused of abusing a daughter who had not been in school in five years, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano said she plans to examine the state's laws on homeschooling. "

These incidents of abuse make me very angry and upset. I hope that these offenders will be punished with the full extent of the law. I can find no mercy in my heart for them.

What bothers me is the following:

1) If you take a look at the first link above, you'll see that in the case of the abused girl in arizona, there was a police investigation against her father at some point, with Child Protection Services also being involved. Why didn;t they pick up on the abuse? Why wasn't she removed from the house?

2) Similarly, in the case of the Dollars children, they were evaluated at a school at least once, and no one noticed anything. See the quote and .link below:

"The five Citrus County children suspected of being tortured by their adoptive parents were evaluated at a private Hillsborough County school at least once in 2004, a Citrus sheriff's spokeswoman said Wednesday.
As authorities try to determine why no one would have noticed the abuse, the school is the first indication that outside authorities had contact with the children.

3) Not to mention the fact that three of the Dollars children were adopted (see the third link at the beginning). Adoption requires stringent multipart evaluation of parents and household. Why didn't they see any indications of abuse, or its possibility, then and there?

Looks like the failure of the system, yet again.

It is obvious to me that homeschooling doesn't cause abuse. Just as having a stick in your hand doesn't cause you to go and wack someone with it. I can't find the article now, but HSLDA estimated the probability of abuse in homeschooling families to be many times lower than the national average. In that article they cited a few high profile cases from years ago, and pointed out, too, that many times child protection services were there and did their job, but didn't notice anything until it was too late.

Here is a quote from another online source that gives a fair prospective on actual safety of our schildren within the system. From this sample list, I omitted a few entries, but itremains quite impressive nonetheless:

"As documented in Why We Homeschool, children in public schools are regularly brutalized and victimized both by classmates and by educators. [...] Am I? The most recent issue of "Why We Homeschool" (Jan 20, 2001) reported the following items for the preceding seven days. (Keep in mind that these were only the items I happened to stumble across, without looking very hard, in a handful of newspapers. This isn't comprehensive, and it obviously doesn't include any of the incidents that didn't appear in the papers I happened to look at that week, let alone the ones that didn't get media coverage at all.)

Error-filled science textbooks being used by 85 percent of public-school students in America.
US Surgeon General report warns parents to more closely monitor their children's friendships, because peers strongly influence children to commit acts of violence.
Michigan schools join nationwide trend toward school programs that enable -- some would say, encourage -- parents to "ditch" their children for as much as 12 hours a day.
California boy charged with felony for bringing unloaded pellet gun to school.
Tennessee boy arrested for bringing unloaded pellet gun to school for after-school target practice.
Girl suspended for defending herself from assault
Four suspended in Michigan school stabbing
Gun threats in schools in Seattle and Illinois
Police say they'll not hesitate to use deadly force against children who make threats
School shooting in Sweden.
Parent and elementary teacher in fistfight
Alaska teacher molests student
Teacher acquited as 'goofy' for blowing kisses on female students' stomachs
Boy suspended for writing a dramatic presentation on school violence. Educators organize to decry sympathetic media reports.
Principal impregnates 14-year-old student; may lose certification for a few years.

That's not a "year in review." That's ONE SINGLE WEEK! And it's not atypical!"

I rest my case.

why?

2005-02-22T22:11:00.000-08:00

Standing in the kitchen, looking at the clock (it's past midnight already, again, how did this happen?), sipping my cup of tea. Peace and quiet at last.

As the impressions of the day pass again before my eye, I am left with a feeling of sadness. It is due to a realization that crystallized in my mind today.

Homeschooling, music, this business I am working on; all this seemingly unrelated things eventually serve one purpose, underlying all others. I am reassembling myself, piece by piece.

In fact, for quite a few years now, I have been trying to fix myself. And before that, it took me a few years to realize that I am in a mess. I think I figured that one out by my mid-teenage years.

Don't get me wrong, I am a stable individual, never took Prozac or got counceling etc. In general, I appear to have it all together, and by conventional standards I probably do have it together indeed.

I am talking about something different. About seeing the flaws of your personality. Recognizing wrong choices made long time ago, and seeing how they still affect my life today. Feeling helpless in front of your limitations. An urgent desire to change the pattern, to break the intergenerational chain, if not for myself, then for my children and their children.

Kind of like what Castaneda calls recapitulation:

"In order to elicit a seeing response in me, don Juan utilized other foreign units of cognition. One of the most important units, he called the recapitulation, which consisted of a systematic scrutiny of one's life, segment by segment, an examination made not in the light of criticism or finding flaw, but in the light of an effort to understand one's life, and to change its course. Don Juan's claim was that once any practitioner has viewed his life in the detached manner that the recapitulation requires, there's no way to go back to the same life" (p. 4)

this is quoted from here .

see also this
:

"According to Don Juan, recapitulation is an exercise to recall, review, release, and recharge energy. It rids a person of assumptions and preconceptions. It frees locked energy and restores balance. The chief thing about recapitulation that seems to not be clearly stated by the so-called Toltec teachings, is that what it really does is increase awareness, and with awareness, the individual is able to employ will to choose to act differently "

Unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of shutting myself in a hotel for a week, so that I could recapitulate undisturbed. So I basically fake it till I make it.

What I realized today is that for years now (YEARS!), I have has an inkling of what's necessary, but lacked awareness and understanding of how to accomplish it. Because of this, I was wobbling here and there aimlessly, like a blind kitten. And only now do I realize WHAT it is that I am doing, and WHY. And that in my last few choices and actions, there is a definite method, an attempt to correct precisely certain imbalances. With an understanding that once it's done (or is on the way), one has to be fluid and move on.

That's encouraging, I guess.

There is a lot of sadness though that comes with it. Why? Why does it have to be this way? Why am I so thick that it takes me forever to see things? And why did I get into this mess in the first place?

Russian literature always was concerned with the issues of moral and social justice. This led one critic to say that the two most important questions in Russian literature are: 'Whose fault is it?', and 'What to do?' (alluding to the two popular novels bearing these respective titles).

It is very tempting to concentrate on the first questions and blame parents, school, society, aliens, or whatever, for all your problems. This does help in understanding things but ultimately solves nothing.

It is much more important to concentrate on the second question. The answers to it aren't readily coming, but they do exist.

Signing off now, good night

the law of three

2005-02-21T23:57:00.000-08:00

I would like to use the comment I received on my last post as a platform for further discussion. A guest had the following two questions:

"Do you look for truth in external things?"
"Is the truth not inside of you?"

In turn, I would like to ask the following question: how can you hope to see the truth inside yourself, if you can't see it among the lies of the world around you?

Splitting this in two parts (EITHER external OR internal) is an example of false dichotomy that's so prevalent in the world today. Like in 'if you are not with us, you are against us'.

In this context, attempting to 'see the truth in external things' would amount to chasing fanthoms created by the Matrix. Similarly, 'seeing the truth inside yourself' would amount to staring at your navel, chanting OOM and drowning in subjectivity. Both will get you nowhere.

A fresh approach is necessary. This is straight along the lines of the Gurdjieff's Law of Three. Here is a link to a a primer on Gurdjieff's ideas.

The Third force will put these two parts of the question together. And in my uneducated opinion, the Third Force in this situation is represented by objective study and action.

The thing is, yeah, I would like to be able to look inside myself and see the Truth. I am well aware, however, that this is simply not possible, because my Truth-O-Meter is way out of tune. Blame biology, social conditioning, lies to others, lies to self -- everthing is implicated. And now it's time to clean it all up. So how to do that? Practice objectively seeing the world around me, and acting upon what I see. I tell you, it's not as simple as it sounds, and I have barely scratched the surface.

So, to this two questions, I'd like to answer that they are one and the same, but ONLY if there is objective inquiry and action.

Everywhere you look, there is the Face of God, as Sufis say, but you have to look AND see.

Thank you for an interesting discussion. I keep wanting to write more about homeschooling, hopefully tomorrow. Stay tuned!

the truth is out there - I hope

2005-02-20T23:44:00.000-08:00

As a 'legal alien', and I am using it as a metaphore, I have forgotten where I came from, and developed certain ties and allegiances to this world. Obviously, I belong here now, no matter how strange and incomprehensible it is, and whether I like it or not.

Yet, there is always a hint of another reality existing, the one place that is home, where I long to be. In light of this, I am constantly asking myself the following two questions:

1) Are there other Legal Aliens around me, and where do I find them?

2) How DO I get out of here?

On both of these, there were many false calls that disappointed me, but in a way served to strenghten my reserve.

I have been reading this writer's site for some time now, and I am glad to say that, at the very least, I know that my questions make sense, and somewhere, there are answers to them. And the way to them is through objective research, some serous hunting for clues, and most importantly, applying these principles in my own personal life. It's like, 'the truth is out there' .. ta-da ...

Read here if you are interested, it is a new article.

BTW, I loved Da Vinci Code (this was my 'easy' book for some time), but was disappointed in its wishy-washy ending. This article is a lot more 'stiff', but it does deliver the punch.