… against arrogant American women and their money.
In recent years Russian elected officials have used a wide range of legislation and executive decisions to curtail United States influence and involvement in the internal affairs of Russia, systematically undoing major US political, economic and social interference that began after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. That interference included the brief adventure of looting the country’s critical natural and remaining financial resources by Wall Street “Masters Of The Universe” and the efforts of western academics to rapidly introduce western economic principles and financial practices into a country still in shock from the sudden collapse of its entire, and radically different, societal and financial structures. This perversity paved wide avenues for greedy Russian criminal robber barons to amass vast fortunes by seizing control of those resources – which the Russian government has in recent years been gradually clawing back in order to keep the country afloat. Such laws and executive decisions have accelerated since the re-election last May of President Vladimir Putin, who is very well known for championing the best interests of the independent Russian state (“Mother Russia”) above all else – which is precisely what any elected president is supposed to do. (See Footnote #1.)
Even the very foundation of “NATO”, and perhaps its most important provision, effectively precludes the organization or its members from taking action inside a member state without that state’s full concurrence. This is based on the fundamental understanding that lawful states do not interfere in the internal affairs of other lawful states unless officially invited to do so, and most especially inside states that practice principles of democratic representation with a fully functioning judicial system. But that principle only works if you’re a member of “the club” (“NATO”). Not being a member is what made the former Yugoslavia a sitting duck. The same applies to Russia. With truly incredible naiveté, the western “experts” who flooded into Russia during the 1990s expected that complex matters which they and their societies had learned to perfect for well over a century could be simply interjected overnight into a society with zero experience with them and no structure in place to manage and police them. (Imagine the “city slicker” taking the “country bumpkin” to the cleaners before ducking out of town on the last train.) Those “experts” took a nation on the ropes and sent it like a speeding train toward total disintegration, and then left chagrined that all their marvelous theories had not worked so well in a vast nation they did not begin to understand. It was Vladimir Putin who almost single-handedly then leaped on that speeding train and pulled the hand brake; he has had a bad taste of bile ever since.
The most recent law enacted by the Russian Parliament was ostensibly in retaliation for an arrogant American law enacted this year (2012) by Congress and signed by President Obama punishing Russian officials and citizens accused of “violating human rights” inside Russia by prohibiting them from traveling to the United States and from owning real estate or other assets in the US. Russians, especially wealthy ones, travel often to the United States and also own property there. Theoretically someone in the US or elsewhere could accuse such Russians of “violating human rights” and not only deny them access to the US but have their property in the US confiscated. Russians who send their children to US universities would even lose access to their families. The universally accepted method for pursuing grievances against those in another state is to pursue your gripe in that nation’s court system; apparently the bully US Government felt that such a civil method was now beneath them.
A rational person might wonder why the US Congress, in all its collective wisdom, didn’t bother to pass such a law targeting, say, next door Mexico, where thousands of human rights violations occur every day. Could it be that this is the country that provides the vast majority of the household workers employed by well-off American women? Those women certainly wouldn’t want to upset the Mexican ruling class that ensures those workers keep crossing the border to earn a minimum wage income doing menial chores for Americans too “special” to do them themselves. Or how about targeting Saudi Arabia, where they laugh really hard at any mention of “human rights”? Nope, whiny western leftist interest groups at the moment only hate the “right wing” conservative government of Russia. Finding an appropriate counter to such an offensive law was not easy from the Russian side; as members of Congress knew, few Americans now travel to Russia or maintain financial assets there.
Being lectured by arrogant American twits about “human rights” really grates Russian sensitivities. This from a country that has waged wars against five other countries in just the last twelve years, routinely kills people by remote control from a very safe distance using a political assassination “hit list” managed in the Oval Office, buys whatever it wants wherever it is, operates the most pervasive self-serving censorship and propaganda mill in the democratic world favoring its “special” women, kidnaps people and secretly moves them around the world for permanent torture interrogations in filthy dungeon prisons, prefers to view its “national defense” military as the World’s Cop imposing its will wherever it is ordered, gave huge mortgages to millions of people who couldn’t afford them so that the madness resulted in a global financial meltdown, has a government so far in debt that even the next four generations could never pay it off, cares far more about some endangered animal in Africa than about its own dead and maimed soldiers, routinely intercepts and reads the confidential internal governmental communications of friends and foes alike, has a native population that can’t be bothered to have and raise even half the number of children needed to pay for their own lucrative entitlements, systematically discriminates against boys in its own woman-dominated school systems, has the world’s highest rates for such admirable practices as incarceration, abortion, violence, welfare, drug addiction, etc., etc.. Even though it has a greater percentage of its own citizens in prisons than any society in world history, Americans obviously prefer to kill people rather than sit down with them in a sincere effort to actually understand them. “Everyone thinks just like perfect me, and, if they don’t, they damned well better get with my program!” (It all comes straight from unchallengeable American women, who then indoctrinate everyone else, from birth onward, with that same utter nonsense.) From Putin’s vantage, the Americans are the last people on Earth with a right to lecture anyone on “human rights”. And, from a purely objective view, it’s difficult to argue with him.
While it certainly would not be difficult to make a case about US officials “violating human rights” over the past decade, enforcing such findings would be difficult given that those US officials at the moment can hide behind the most powerful military on the planet and have no reservations at all about spending their grandchildren’s future to buy whatever they want for themselves today. So the Russians selected another way to even up the score, with comparable numbers.
The upper chamber of the Russian Parliament unanimously approved 143 to 0 a bill to ban adoptions of Russian children by United States citizens. The new law would also impose sanctions on American judges and others accused of “violating the rights” of adopted Russian children in the US. (This has recently become a problem in other countries as well, most notably in Finland. Often the trigger point is the usual childish divorce nonsense.) Russian President Putin has announced that he will sign the bill, while the Russian Federation children’s rights advocate recommended extending the ban to the rest of the world as well. “There is huge money and questionable people involved in the semi-legal schemes of exporting children,” he said. Many Russians believe that American and European adoptive parents and adoption agencies take advantage of severely strapped orphanages to essentially bribe their way into getting Russian children.
As the US law had aimed at Russian citizens and their government officials, with very clear echoes of the way the US regarded and treated the previous Soviet regime, the Russian adoption ban took direct aim at the American public and their elected representatives. It would effectively undo a bilateral agreement on international adoptions that was ratified just earlier this year, before the most recent example of arrogant US Congressional stupidity. That Russia-US agreement, by the way, had also facilitated heightened Russian oversight in the US in response to several high-profile cases of abuse and deaths of adopted Russian children in the United States, such as an American, who had left a child in a closed vehicle until it expired, allowed to go free by a US court. Such cases receive high visibility in the Russian media and invariably infuriate Russian citizens. (That agreement also requires a one-year notice of intent to terminate by either side, so it’s possible that Putin will sign the new law, but delay its implementation for a year.)
This most recent turn of events naturally has greatly upset Americans grown accustomed to going wherever they want to go with their money to adopt foreign children. But this story has been building for well over a year, long before the new US law, and it has key aspects that most Americans would not even imagine. About 1,000 Russian children were adopted in 2011 by parents from the US, which leads in Russian adoptions, and more than 45,000 such children have been adopted by American parents since 1999. (Does anyone know how many American children have been adopted by Russian citizens? Do the Americans allow it? Do such children lose their US citizenship? If not, do their adoptive parents acquire US citizenship? This is NOT a simple one-sided problem according to “me”.) There were slightly more than 10,000 adoptions in Russia in 2011, about 3,400 of which were by foreigners. Russians adopted the other two-thirds, but this is still a drop in the bucket of the overall need.
Since the fall of Soviet Communism, the country has struggled mightily to find and marshal the resources necessary to meet all the country’s many social needs, including adequately caring for and educating its most important resource, its children. However, it has long been obvious that the country needs first to dramatically change the popular mindset, acquired from the West, about the responsibilities of marriage and children, a mindset that has plummeted since 1990. The country has the lowest birthrate in the world, a birthrate so low that it threatens the very future viability of the whole country. (Russia has a much higher death rate than birth rate, which is steadily lowering its population.) This is the largest country on the planet, with the largest share of Earth’s natural resources, but unless it can reverse the birthrate trend, the country before mid-century will be very close to being unable to manage, much less defend, itself. There is a certain demographic point when such a country, including our own, enters unavoidable free-fall to total failure and disintegration. Unlike the US, Russia has no ready source of unlimited immigration to take up part of the colossal native-born slack, so President Putin has long sought and tried, unsuccessfully so far, many creative ways to achieve the requisite change in native popular thinking about families and children.
Now, finally, the Parliament is joining his efforts, and the popular Russian anti-American backlash may help. After enacting the adoption ban, lawmakers in Moscow also said that Russia, which has more than 650,000 children living without parental supervision, should take care of them on its own, as indeed it should. But, in addition to a struggling economy, Russia also has quite low life expectancy averages, and very high premature death rates (both especially for males) – which are major reasons for all those children without parents of their own. Russia is a First World society trying to contend with its Third World realities. At the same time, the Russian lawmakers acknowledged flaws in the system and adopted a resolution calling for measures to make adoption by Russian citizens easier. “The attitude toward the protection of parenthood and childhood has to change drastically on every level,” the resolution said, citing excessive bureaucracy, lack of financing for children’s medical care and insufficient efforts to promote adoption.
The attitude toward the protection of parenthood and childhood has to change drastically on every level in the United States as well. The US is teetering on the brink of finding itself in the exact same situation as Russia – a First World society struggling with its Third World realities. It seems that the hardest thing for Americans to do is view themselves as others view them, as they really are. Maybe I can act as interpreter by asking a few relevant questions no one is allowed to ask in America. It seems to me that President Putin, the Russian Parliament, and various key Russian officials have a good point, even several very good points, about adoptions. Their obligation is to Russia and its citizens, not to privileged American women.
(First some background about the US: Traditional orphanages in the United States began closing after World War II as government-funded public social services steadily increased. US adoption policy and procedures, as well as child protection laws, began to take shape, leading to the demise of traditional American orphanages, which were replaced with individual and small group foster homes. The reformers pushing for this change argued that children would do better placed in homes, where they could receive personalized care and individual attention, than in institutions that were often under-staffed. It was also argued that a foster care system was more efficient and cost-effective than orphanages. This trend also applied to orphanages operated by non-government entities such as Catholic Charities. By the 1950s more children lived in foster homes than in orphanages in the US, and by the 1960s foster care had become a government-funded program. Since then US orphanages have disappeared entirely. In their place are modern boarding schools, residential treatment centers and group homes, though foster care remains the most common form of support for children who are waiting for adoption or reunification with their families. In addition, domestic adoption agencies like American Adoptions can help pregnant mothers find homes for their newborn babies and infants without them ever entering the foster care system.)
(So the adoption process in the United States no longer involves traditional orphanages. Today, there are three primary forms of domestic adoption: a child may be adopted (1) from the foster care system, (2) as an infant in a private adoption, or (3) as a relative or stepchild of the adoptive parents. About 135,000 children are adopted via one of these channels in the United States each year.)
(The American foster care system accounts for about 60% of non-stepparent adoptions. There are roughly 430,000 children in the US foster care system. Of that number, approximately 110,000 are waiting to be adopted. The average age of a waiting child is 7.7 years old, and 29% of them will spend at least three years in foster care. Of the 110,000 waiting children, about half (51,000) will be adopted, which means that another 59,000 waiting children will not be adopted and will remain in foster care.)
.
> We are a nation of well over 310,000,000 people. Aren’t there enough orphan children here in the US to adopt? Or is it a matter that our adoption standards are higher than those in Russia, China, Guatemala, Kyrgyzstan (!?!), so it’s harder for people to adopt children here? Are these Americans simply using their money to take advantage of standards elsewhere that they cannot meet at home? American adoptions from China dropped 69% (from 8,000 in 2005 to 2500 in 2011) after China tightened the rules – which included that prospective parents be younger than 55, married and not clinically obese.
(Another 25% of US adoptions are from other countries, which helps ensure that thousands of American children will remain in foster care while adoptive parents go shopping for their specific wants abroad. While the costs may well be higher abroad, the standards for parents are usually lower than in the US. It’s also easier for people involved with foreign adoption services to mislead American parents about the health of the adopted child. The high level of care available in the US, coupled with American national and parental wealth, are the usual overriding deciding factors.)
> Just why do Americans have to go to Russia, Ukraine, China, even Guatemala, to adopt children? When one country closes its doors, as did Guatemala and Kyrgyzstan (!?!), the rich Americans quickly just find new foreign doors elsewhere. Many people around the world even suspect the Americans of wanting those children just to mine their bodies for organs to serve their own rampant narcissism. Americans have adopted an astounding 234,000 foreign children over the past twelve years, most from China (67,000), with Russia in second place (45,200). Third World countries like (3) Ethiopia, (4) Ukraine, (5) Kazakhstan, (6) India, and (7) Columbia, where US dollars go a lot further, follow. American women imported 23,000 foreign-born children in 2004 alone. They adopt twice as many girls as boys. (Self-involved, and self-loving, American women naturally have a decided preference for replicating themselves.) The adoption rate for the US is 75 per 100,000 residents, and for some reason Minnesota has the highest rate (168 per 100,000). (This is probably due to a local woman’s herd fad that is making such adoptions a status symbol.) With per-child adoption costs alone running between $20,000 and $50,000, this is primarily a market for the privileged. (The imported adoptions are still a drop in the bucket of the total number of foreign women and their families we import to have and raise the children we don’t.)
> And if so many Americans want to adopt, why is our abortion rate so shamefully high – over 800,000 every year? (See Footnote #2.) This one makes absolutely no sense. One group performing those abortions, Planned Parenthood, receives over $500,000,000 in both federal and state taxpayer funding every year – to pick up the unwanted costs of the free choices, the elective behavior, of American women. Why do American women kill their own children while adopting foreign children? Any other country viewing just this one aspect has to suspect something demented going on.
(Only 4% of women with unwanted pregnancies give their children up for adoption. So only about 15% of US adoptions are voluntarily relinquished American babies.)
> Because of severely under-staffed and under-financed orphanages, many of the children adopted by Americans in Russia have physical and mental “issues”, including autism, Down syndrome and AIDS. (In the intelligent interest of natural self-protection, American society used to screen people wishing to immigrate for physical and mental “issues”, including communicable diseases. But that was before “us” became totally subordinated to “me”.) How much of the cost of addressing those “issues” will be borne by American taxpayers, both now and for the rest of the lives of such children? Those costs will prove astronomical. (There’s an element of the Mariel Boatlift here; in a 1980 program to allow about 125,000 Cubans to emigrate, the Cuban Government, taking full advantage of American emotionalism, secretly included about 30,000 people released from Cuban jails and mental health facilities in order to relieve itself of their burden and shift it to American taxpayers.)
> The need in Russia is obviously great, and if it’s so “heart-rending”, then why don’t we just fund the orphanages in Russia and avoid many of the “issues” from developing in the first place? We don’t because that would be best for the children (and the United States and Russia), and American women are far more concerned with “me”. What provides such women more of an excuse to wallow in their victimhood than being “saddled with a special needs child”?
> And just why do so many Americans wait so long to have children that it is no longer possible, or is very improbable, to give birth to healthy children of their own, much less raise them properly? Everyone knows that the older the mother, the greater the probability of children born with medical problems, including autism, but still we have women past 35, even well into their 40s, believing that they are “different” (i.e., “special”). The “issues” that develop in those poor Russian orphanages are no greater than the “issues” that develop when privileged American women delay far too long to have children, when American women place their own wants above all else, including the needs and best interests of their society, even of their own children. There should be a law that requires American women to make their damned choice before a certain age, say 30, and stick with that choice like an actual adult, or pay a very heavy fine to their society for the problems they create.
> If so many Americans want children, why do we need to import so many millions of Third World immigrants willing to have the babies needed to pay for all of our lucrative birthright entitlements? (Children become essential taxpayers, and our native-born birth rate is only HALF of that required just to maintain the status quo, much less meet the ever burgeoning taxpayer costs of those entitlements. What makes anyone think that they can have all those entitlements without making the necessary investments in them?) How many self-involved women would rather adopt children than go through the “hassles” of pregnancy and childbirth themselves? That is the absolute epitome of narcissism.
> If Americans are so intent on adopting children, why are they so complacent about the inept public schools that are supposed to educate those children, about a female-dominated industry that ensures twice as many girls as boys go on to get university degrees, that does such a criminally poor job of educating boys, that won’t even grant boys a gender unless they screw up? Why would any president anywhere want to send their child citizens to a country with so many monumental problems, including the most expensive and worst performing public schools in the developed world, a country that hides so much ugliness behind politically correct censorship, behind so many self-serving rationalizations?
> Some American adopters even view these children as little more than merchandise, like cars, that, once acquired, can simply be traded away if they end up with a “lemon” that requires much more of their time, effort and money to properly raise than they had imagined. There are even, incredibly, shamefully, on-line bazaars that accomplish such things – with zero oversight. ALL children inherently require enormous amounts of time, effort, love and money to raise properly, and the chances that adopted children will require even more of all four is significantly high. Any responsible adult who has actually raised their own children, and then encountered children of the same age who have lived their whole lives in an orphanage, knows such simple obvious truths, even without the range of developmental and physiological problems that are endemic to non-Western institutions.
> It used to be that having and raising children was a blessing that happened to come with enormous fulltime responsibility – by TWO parents equitably dividing the required labor, for as long as it takes. Now, if parents even bother to get married, we change marriage partners like part-time jobs while farming out most of our parenting responsibilities to that “vast village”, mostly paid for by “someone else”. How far would the number of foreign adoptions drop if that “vast village”, paid for by “someone else”, wasn’t there? Are children now just commodities intended to provide “me” with whatever I want for “me”, a self-image trophy to be placed on the shelf to show others, to allow “me” to further wallow in “eternal victimhood”? Is this why social autism among American boys is climbing so incredibly high so fast? (A LOT of us out here in the real world simply do NOT buy any of the newly invented “physiological cause” excuses; social autism is first and foremost an inescapable sign of infant neglect. Just ask any understaffed orphanage on the planet. See Footnote #1 to “Bullies“.)
I’m sure others can think of more questions to ask American women, if they were allowed to do so in public.
.
Only self-involved American women who exist in their own vacuum womb would not consider at least some of all the other relevant factors mentioned above, and more, would think it’s all about “”me” and “whatever I want, now”. It seems to me that we Americans would do ourselves, and everyone else, a really great favor by taking some very hard looks at ourselves rather than taking out stupid animosity against others who are first and foremost responsible for the best interests of their own nation and their own citizens – rather than for whatever emotional, whining, self-involved Americans want for themselves while passing off the responsibility parts to “someone else”. As they always do, American women will inevitably make this Russia matter all about “the children”, when it really is all about “me”. (How many US women exercise their right of “choice” to have children – who then become “the cross they have to bear”, for which they can then demand the help of “everyone else”? It’s just using children as blackmail chits, vote-buying extortion. It’s enough to make you want to puke.) American women actually believe that the world revolves around them and their every want and demand of the moment. These thoroughly offensive self-involved childish jerks have gotten so accustomed over the past forty years to turning American men into their dumb trained dildos that they think they can now do the same with the whole world, simply by queenly decree.
Most of this stuff just makes me ashamed of being an American. Just who is teaching our young people how to THINK?
“If you chase two rabbits, you catch none.” – Confucius.
Life is all about trade-offs. Real life is all about making adult choices, and then living with those choices and their consequences. American women can NOT “have it all”. No one can. They need to become adults and make adult decisions. If they want a full-time career, then they should not have children, which itself is a full-time responsibility. If they want to accept the full-time responsibility of having children, then they should not shortchange those children and everyone else by also pursuing a career, at least until the initial twenty-year commitment is over. THAT is the “choice” they have, the trade-off that exists in the real world. And they should make that choice well before age thirty. It is long past the time when American women should have started accepting the equitable responsibility that accompanies every one of all those rights and choices they have claimed for themselves over the past half century. The nation’s future is no less important than whatever women want for themselves every other week.
With so many blatant major problems in our own society, it seems disingenuous at best to take out any animosity against the President of Russia, who has his own very major problems, most imported from sick societies to the west, to deal with. I side squarely with the Russians on this one. “Go home, Ugly American. Go clean up your own house. Leave our children alone, and take your money with you. You just don’t measure up anymore.”
.
(See “The Most Important Import” and “Premises and Conclusions”, posted separately.)
.
Addendum: President Putin signed the new law, which had passed both houses of Parliament by overwhelming majorities, within 24 hours of receiving it on his desk. It takes effect on 1 January 2013. The status of the existing bilateral agreement on adoptions remains unclear, as does the status of approximately 46 US adoption cases currently winding their way through the Russian bureaucratic process. Clearly the Russians have had enough of the sanctimonious Americans interfering in their internal affairs – while demanding a level of “justice” in Russia that is not replicated in America. (Russian authorities later decided to allow the 46 cases already underway to go forward.)
Of course, Americans are not alone in this seamy industry. French authorities recently arrested six members of a French charity and convicted them of fraud for attempting to import 103 children kidnapped in Chad for adoption by French citizens who were told they were actually orphans from Darfur in neighboring Sudan. (Chad and Sudan are in Muslim Saharan Africa, northwest of another favorite western adoption source, Ethiopia.) No one is certain how many similar cases have already gone undetected. Ever wonder what happens after these children have been adopted, granted citizenship, and dozens of their family members show up on the doorstep? In western societies, slowly dying for want of enough new native-born taxpaying workers to pay for their own birthright entitlements, it’s not difficult to understand authorities’ confliction about pursuing such human trafficking – intended mainly to serve the narcissism of its own rich citizens, damned the consequences to either the children or their own society. To some, it all seems a new form of myopic “plantations”, such as with which Ireland, and especially “northern” Ireland, has been struggling for the past 400 years. But this current practice is fed mostly by self-involved “special” people demanding that everyone else adjust to their own lifestyle choices and pick up the tab for their own elective behavior. (Most of these women, exercising their rights of choices, pursue lifestyles not conducive to optimum child-bearing health, and delay pregnancy until medical difficulties associated with procreation become increasingly likely with age. Many are also unmarried, significantly overweight, have their own health problems, and will rely heavily on their society to assist with any problems that arise in “raising” their adopted children. None are male bachelors – who have almost a zero chance of adopting children in their own society under rules established by women. What sane man wants to jump through all those incredibly invasive adoption hoops for years in the enormously unlikely event that he will succeed, even at great expense, and then spend the next quarter of a century having some women’s Gestapo breathing down his and the child’s neck constantly threatening to take away the child?)
April 2015: According to the Wall Street Journal, Americans adopted just 6,441 foreign children in 2014 – a drop from 23,000 in 2004 to the lowest number in 30 years – due to growing anti-American and nationalist sentiment against overseas adoptions in Russia, China, South Korea and Ethiopia. US officials have also increased efforts to prevent the selling of babies who are not orphans.
____________________________________________________________
Footnote #1. Bogymen. We modern Western humans, in all our brilliance and with all our advanced technology, seem to have a really great need for invented bogymen. (Those in America MUST be selected solely from that steadily shrinking minority that is white, male and heterosexual, and we really love such bogymen who also seem “masculine”.) Creating bogymen to shift blame and focus animosity allows us to distill very complex problems down to a level that even the simple-minded can grasp, that allow the requisite easy answers, short cuts and quick fixes that we now need in our “solutions”. “Kill the bogyman, fix the problem.” It’s simple. (Note our attention, even since Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, on foreign bogymen like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, etc., whose demise, we pretend not to notice, changed little. China is smart to now be ruled by committee.)
It’s difficult to focus hatred on a collective. We profess a reverence of “leadership”, but actually crave our very own puppet dictator – to rule according to “me” over everyone else. We like to presume that one person, one “leader”, even in a democracy, is solely responsible and can simply ordain by edict, or be ejected – UNLESS that person is a woman – whom no one is even allowed to criticize. (Under our carefully constructed belief system, American women are inherently eternal victims. Since victims are blameless and cannot be held responsible, they cannot lead; who would ever follow an eternal victim? They can only dictate, according to “me”, while calling themselves “leader”, from the very safe rear.)
Vladimir Putin, because of the role he has been trying to play in keeping his country in one piece, is one of those bogymen. The legal authority of the Russian Federation’s President is almost exactly the same as is that of the United States President – along with his (or her) political party, wealthy supporters and herds of championed interest groups. Actually, because of the executive authority commandeered or expanded by American presidents over the past 12 years, the US President’s authority is actually very considerably greater than that of the Russian Federation. Yet President Putin still enjoys, even after all those years of experience at the helm, much broader support among Russian citizens than does President Obama among American citizens.
There is, however, one major difference between these two presidencies. Since 1999 Putin has been first and foremost focused on the future viability of his nation, a nation that is in a VERY precarious situation. He is guided far more by harsh reality than by academic political dogma. If there had not been a Putin over the past dozen years, there would be no Russia today. It’s just that simple. Our own nation is in very real danger of quickly finding itself in a very similar situation. We, on the other hand, are far more concerned with re-shaping the world according to “me” than we are about finding and implementing equitable solutions to some of the truly monumental problems at home that threaten our own viability. (The problem here is now very familiar: We all want “someone else” to take the blame, pay the bills and do the hard stuff for “special me”.)
It’s a hell of a lot easier ordering around that powerful and well-functioning US military than it is trying to herd 310,000,000 self-involved cats, each functioning with their own “tailored truth”. It’s even easier than that when no one else, including President Putin, has such a military to shift public attention away from where it should be focused. It also allows all sorts of ignorant “experts” sitting around on their fat asses pontificating ad nauseam about what that military should be doing, and where American taxpayer money should be spent, everywhere else. You don’t have to be Einstein to wonder how people who can’t begin to solve any of their own colossal problems over the past forty years can presume to know how to solve those of the rest of the world – a world about which they know almost nothing.
Much to my embarrassment, almost every non-American I’ve met over the past quarter of a century knew a million times more about America than most Americans know about them, and most of what they knew about America was not all that flattering. Many Americans, with their insufferable sense of superiority, might know a few things about major foreign tourist attractions, but they know next to nothing about the culture, the history, the people. If they do casually know actual non-Western people, they select those who are “just like me”, never considering that those people, especially if they speak English, are almost always those who worked the local “system” to their advantage, usually via corruption or unearned birthright entitlement, at the expense of everyone else.
Even worse, people in Pennsylvania know, or care, next to nothing about people in Montana – in their own country.
It seems that the smaller the world becomes, the smaller we become.
In the end, boys and girls, the bogyman is us.
Hint: The best leader in the Western World is actually a women – Angela Merkel – who grew up in the suffocatingly oppressive deprivation of Communist East Germany and has been Chancellor of Germany (the national government that seamlessly unites the previously separate countries of East Germany and West Germany into one huge state) for the past seven years. There were no “special” people in Ms Merkel’s formative years, so she makes no presumptions about anyone, including herself. Above all, she is determined that her modern united country not end up where her East Germany was. So far, she has been doing a truly excellent job of that objective, all while gradually nudging the rest of Europe along to her adult way of thinking with its very healthy measure of responsibility. Naturally she also has a very suspicious regard for all sorts of propaganda (or “marketing”). Far more than anyone else today, she reminds me of our own Greatest Generation leaders, but Vladimir Putin is a close second. (His style just sells better in Russia than it does in the US, where men are expected to kiss women’s rings while telling them whatever nonsense they want to hear.)
Footnote #2. Fairy Tales. The biggest mistake made by those first enacting all those lucrative birthright entitlement programs was their failure to directly link the future size of those entitlements to the nation’s birth rate; this would have required those entitlements forty years in the future, especially Social Security and Medicare, to fall dramatically in accordance with the birthrate. Such responsible planning would have avoided the nation’s bankruptcy resulting from the failure of spoiled citizens to make the responsible investments in their own entitlements.
To all those incredibly self-involved Baby Boomers and their legions of “me-ism” disciples: This notion that you pay into Social Security and Medicare for yourself is asinine. You pay into those program to support your parents in their retirement – in order to qualify for the expectation that you will be similarly supported in your retirement — by YOUR children. It’s a “natural” extension of a concept (children caring for their elderly parents when they could no longer support themselves) that had worked reasonably well since the dawn of civilization – until the Baby Boomers started worshiping their own navels and infecting their fairy tale followers with the same self-involved “me-ism” idiocy.
Greatest Generation women managed to raise on their own, with zero help from government, the largest, healthiest and best educated generation of children in history – far more than adequately paving the way for their own brief and minor entitlements in retirement. At a time (1960) when half all male workers still died on the job and never reached retirement age, such responsibility enabled them to enact and support modest social welfare programs that would assist those elderly few who “fell through the cracks”.
And what have their children done? For the next half century it’s been nothing but whining women, while promulgating all that asinine propaganda and making ever greater demands on entitlements without providing the taxpaying workers needed to pay for them – even as their own life expectancy was extended by decades. We’ve been importing the largest flood of immigrants (actually mothers willing to have babies and raise children) in world history for the past thirty years just tying to take up the native-born slack, but still falling far short. Over 58%, and steadily rising, of American women have never been married and never had children. And yet over half of the babies born in this country are born to single women, which places ever greater burdens on other entitlement programs trying to address deliberately self-imposed poverty. (And privileged women want to adopt children with disabilities in foreign countries so that those children, too, can be added to entitlement welfare programs, paid for, naturally, by “someone else”.) Today American women as a group enjoy gratis all the benefits that American women a half century ago actually earned, including a huge one-third subsidy from working men in Social Security and Medicare premiums.
The native-born US birth rate is below 1.1 – HALF that needed (2.1) just to maintain the status quo, much less meet all those burgeoning entitlements. The situation is most shameful among America’s super-privileged white women; last year many more whites died than were born in America. Americans today have more dogs than children. Dogs are certainly cheaper and less of a bother than children and permit their owners much greater self-indulgence, but it’s not likely that those dogs are going to be paying taxes to support their owners in old age. And these are the women who demand the most from future taxpayers – who will have to be born to, and raised by, “someone else”, imported to do the job for which privileged white women are now too “special”.
And now in 2012 we learn that the Hispanic immigrant flood has stopped and is actually now in negative territory, with more people returning to their native countries than are coming to ours. (Expect our government soon to go further south into Latin America to find and encourage the needed importees.) At the same time the birthrate of Hispanic immigrants who remain is rapidly falling toward the unsustainable levels maintained so long by native-born Americans. We no longer have anyone to take up our slack – while demanding ever more from our entitlement programs. All of this is moving us rapidly ever closer to the day when those entitlement programs bankrupt us all, for simple lack of enough taxpaying workers to pay for them. On that day we cease even being a nation.
If Americans don’t want to have babies, then they should stop demanding entitlements. You can’t reap the benefits if you don’t make the investment. It’s just that simple. THIS is the adult choice we ALL have. It is LONG past the time when American women need to accept their full share of the responsibility for the mess they have made of our society. There is no “war” against women; there is only disgust with women. Many of us are getting really tired of paying for all the lifestyle rights and choices its privileged women claim for “me” ad nauseam.
Invincible Probity 