Sigrid Weidenweber's Blog, page 9

Opportunistic comments on Blogs

Whenever I check the comments on my blog, I come across the many opportunistic comments by persons latching on to the blog for a chance to sell something, raise an interest in a product or gain insight into the bloggers and the commenters preferences. Mostly these attachements are benign. But earlier today I had a funny occurence. Funny, because the sender wrote in another language, hoping to get by undetected. Well the hapess man, I assume from the text that it is a man, did not know--how could he--that I can read Cyrillic. Not only can I read it but I still remember quite a few Russian words, for I spoke it once almost fluently. So how could he know that I would erase his blog instantly, while laughing out aloud. Here is why--the Russian visitor to my blog was an ordinary pimp, advertising young girls for hire. The word he used was prostitutky in cyrillic. Well he is gone from my site and I hope he does not come back. As a precautionary measure, I will eradicate all foreign language comments in languages I do not speak.

By the way, here is a word to the guy who commented that my blogs have been a little blah lately. Thanks for the critique--it woke me up.

 In the days to come I will be blogging a lot--perhaps on a site from my publisher to announce my book's arrival on the internet. There will be four. Escaping The Twilight--story of a woman in the Sudan, and the trilogy The Volga Flows Forever. First out will be Catherin, story of a great female monarch. Followed by The Volga Germans, story of the German emigre`s to Russia during Catherin's reign, and From Gulag to Freedom, story of the selfsame people under the Stalinistic regime. I do hope that a few of you following my blog are avid readers and interested in a wide variety of topics. You must be, or you would not read my eclectic blog.

Will the Muslim World ever be Democratic?

I  believe that the upheavals in the Muslim world are the beginning of an internal war for freedom. Not only for freedom from strongman governments, but also from a pernicious culture of restrictions. The problem is, much of the culture is enshrined in the Islamic religion. Islam goes back to the sixth century and has never been reformed to fit modern concepts, advances in science and psychological understanding.Where are the mental hospitals and criminal insanity wards in Muslim countries? If there are any, I, for one have never heard of them. Time and again we hear of the horrid deeds perpetrated by a psychopath in Afghanistan, Palestine,Turkeyor any other Islamic country you care to name--even by a Muslim  in one of their European communities. If there is any prosecution of the guilty man, with the exception of prosecution in the European country, nothing ever happens to him.  Why is that so? According to the Koran a Muslim man is made by Allah and, therefore, perfect. So, if this man stabs his wife thirty times until she is dead, he must have had a very good reason to do so--so the explanation goes. For thousands of years crimes against women and children committed by Muslim men went mostly un-revenged. Furthermore, crimes committed by psychopaths belonging to the members of the hierarchy never came to light, because often the witnesses died with the victim.

Before these countries can become democratic entities, a worldwide, open discussion about their culture and their religion needs to take place. As long as speaking openly about flaws in the Islamic religion is forbidden and even threatened by murderous fatwas, democracy will be an unattainable beacon for the masses of people trapped in the culture.

My Books are going on the Internet

Dear Reader,

Because you are faithful and true, you should be the first to give me your input on the changes that are taking place on the covers of my books. The first to be published online are the trilogy The Volga Flows Forever. I just was informed of the new cover design, which was chosen by committee. I like it because of its background story. It is a copy of an authentice Russian post stamp. The cool thing about this stamp is that it unifies the trilogy in appearance. I hope my upload will open to view and you can tell me which of the two images you prefer. I will mention the one chosen by committee in my next blog. By the way, my books have finally left the sheltered environment of academia and the Volga German community and found their way into libraries. My daughter did a double take when she saw Catherine in the new arrivals of the amazing Camarillo library.

Well, I just tried to open the image and I could not. I have to beg the experts to explain to me what went wrong. I am beginning to believ that the computer has been invented for the sole purpose to keep me mentally alert, involved and frustrated.

 

Lately all the News are Reports about Politicians gone sexually nuts

What do Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwartzenegger and New Yorker congressman Weiner have in common? It is too easy a question to ask. Everyone knows the answer--they are narcicists. What does that mean? A narcicist is defined as one to have an excessive interest in one's own appearance, having a self-erotic interest in one's person and body. According to Greek mythology the first recorded case of such a person was Narcissus or Narkissos, a man so enarmored by his own beauty that he refused the love of others and ended his life staring into a pool, admiring the beauty he beheld therein.

The narcissists of our day have one symptom in common with the beautiful Greek shepherd--they believe themselves to be more beautiful, more gorgeous than the avarage person. They also believe that they are more intelligent, wiser and beyond the measures of human conduct applied to the average man of the culture they live in. It is only thus that we can explain the aberrations of behavior of those men. Aberration is defined as an unwelcome or unacceptable deviation from what is normal. Therefore, we find ourselves looking at individuals, who, in other ways act rational, but have a total psychological breakdown in the area of sexual behaviors. Speculating on the antecedents of these behaviors, I have found that there seems to be more than one cause causing the unhealthy self-absorbtion.

It seems that mothers who treat their sons with pathological admiration, while witholding true nurturing care, instruction and love, are one reason the young males, often insecure, overcompensate with their male attributes. Another group observed, suffered from bi-polar disease.  Then there are all the unexplained oddities of the human psyche that have a part in behavior of this kind. One thing is certain--it is mental illness we observe. Moreover, this is not a male shortcomming, a sort of male sexual aberration only. No, one can document the same aberrative behavior in females and I can start a long list of such females beginning with Paris Hilton, reaching back to Marilyn Monroe, many playboy centerfolds and other females going back to Aphrodite in the aforementioned Greek Mythology.

By Way of Elimination

Every year between 60 and 70,000, if not more, books are published. Some are announced with all the grandure a well-off publisher can afford, some come into this world with no publicity at all. Believe me, often the latter have more to offer you than the former. In order to save my time and temper, I get annoyed if read material that features badly reasoned thesis, I read reviews. Fortunately for me and others there are a few very good reviewers at the Wall street Journal who save me from buying books with bad dialectic and they cheer me by cutting illogical reasoning like surgeons cut a cancer.

Example: THE FAIR SOCIETY by Peter Corning. It is subtittled as THE SCIENCE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE, and, therefore, a book I would choose to buy and delve into. Well, once again, I was spared. This time by Kenneth Minogue, who deserves kudos. Mr. Corning proposes in his book that America should be transformed into a fair society, much along the lines the socialists in Europe are striving to do with their hapless domain. Mr. Minogue pulls this enlightening quote from the book, with which  the author tries to explain the extent of his envisioned endeavor. He would like to ..."bend the arc of the moral universe, " and thus make this country fair for all. Just reading this smidgen makes me want to gag. "The arc of the moral universe?" First off, is there a moral universe and does it have an arc, or does moral thinking run more along straight lines, namely along the lines cultures and their religions? Secondly, let us assume there is such a thing as a moral universe arc and it is bend sufficiently, one arrives at the very beginning of human culture where man settled disputes with fellow Cro-Magnon men by swinging an enormous club. 

Perhaps I will write more on this--perhaps not. In any case, the gist of the book is that those who produce and earn must share all with those who don't. Well that is an old hat!!! Having lived under communism I have heard all that pablum, and lived it, and I can assure the readers of this blog that I have never seen more poor, sad, dejected people as under the socialist banner. 

Plagiarism of Blogs--The newest Theft

Well, it had to happen sooner or later in a society where the crooks at the top make off with enormous amounts of tax-payer money, and even famous historians, senators and academic greats are caught lifting texts and giving themselves academic heft and titles. In yestersay's Wall Street Journal we were informed that dull minds, incapable of producing either whole sentences or able to come up with any novel ideas, are engaged in lifting entire blogs and placing them on their sites. Will this really enhance their stature? Really turn them into bright illuminaries? In the end they will fall victim to recognition that their head-dress contains stolen feathers. Should the unimaginable happen and my blogs be lifted, I guarantee that the thief shall be hoisted by his or her petard and exposed by either my uniquely foreign timbre or the casual edit of the product. A good Sunday to you all and watch for the hidden traps deposited in the blogs, which will expose plagiarists.

My books will be soon on the Internet

In a few short weeks my books will be available on the internet from different market sources. (Amazone, Barnes and Noble, Borders, Apple ibookstore, and others.) The process is exciting because we will have new covers for the trilogy and I am looking forward to see what our artist is designing. The publisher is Green E Books and perhaps we can also offer through this publisher our recent and as yet unpublished material. It is my fond hope that this will be a successful enterprise. 

Witness the End of the Last Golden Age

Whenver I meet with friends of my cohort we sooner or later come to a point when we discuss the current situation of our planet. From this point it does not take long for us to focus on the unavoidable truth that we seem to be the last, and very fortunate, receivers of a long period of relative peace and a bounty of material wealth bestowed upon Europe and America. We are always of one mind about the facts, leading to this enormous prosperity. Foremeost of those is, of course, the industrialization of those countries, followed by the open enterprise system of capitalism and extensive trade. One factor determining success is a light hand of government. It was obvious that those countries with the least governmental intervention were doing better then others. Another factor, contributing enormously to the private fortunes of citizens, was limiting the family size. It was observed, again and again, that families with few children, on the whole, did better than those with extended clans. But the greatest factor were the Judeo-Christian principles that had, through repeated reformations been cleansed, created environs of tolerance.

Fast forward to today. The planet is bursting out of its seams with populations gone wild. Europe is overrun with the rampant African populations.  Expections in individuals of exploding nations have sky-rocketet. Televison has brought the American dream into the lives of most people on the planet.  In Europe, govenments, confronted with spoiled populations expecting to have all their needs met by fiat, are staggering under financial burdens and often keep doing the same things that brought on their predicament. In the Middle-East the political dams have broken and the seakers of freedon and prosperity spill into a sea of Islamic intolerance. The last reports from Israel do not bode well. Iran and Syria, hoping to save their political thrones, stirr the masses to attack Israel to deflect from their own horrid governing excesses. Where is the vaunted tolerance in the Muslim world especially since Muslims want to be treated with kid-gloves?

As we look about us, we feel relief that we will not have to deal with the political volcanos that rock almost every part of the globe. We thank our Maker that we were allowed to live pleasent lives, were allowed to pursue dreams, unfold talents and raise families in peace; and then, we pity our grand-children who will have to deal with challenges byond our imagination.

The Hope and Change in the Islamic Sphere

As I follow the upheavals in Islamic countries, one thing emerges: large, ugly but clear--the change the revolutions bring is nothing the average Muslim envisioned. No, the hope of the secular leaning Muslim is being dashed with every minute the change proceeds. Salafists in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah and whatever the jihadists want to call themselves in other settings have taken over the freedom movements and will bring oligarchic, terroristic governments to the countries seeking freedom and prosperity. It has been the sad end of most revolutions  to be usurpt by the most violent segment of the upsurge which, in the end, killed everything good, spiritual and foreward-looking the people had envisioned. 

Friedrich Nietzsche's Assessment of Socialism

Over a lifetime, thankfully fairly long, I have come across a plethora of wonderful, insightful and poignant quotes. Unfortunately, no matter how much effort I invest to keep these precious morsels in memory, they never stay with me for very long. So it feels like a gift, when I find another of the forgotten gems. I recently found one of Nietzsche's quotes quotes in the WSJ. What struck me was Nitzsche's discernment and understanding of the fundamental disease of socialism already in 1882 , (The Gay Science,) before the full extent of socialistic excesses had been fully revealed. He said, and I quote: "China......is a country in which large-scale dissatisfaction and the capacity for change have become extinct centuries ago; and the socialists and state idolatters of Europe with their measures for making life better and safer might easily establish in Europe, too, Chinese conditions and a Chinese happiness."

He nailed the truth to the letter. However, as most people never read the works of philosophers, and those who do are not always of the same mind, his farsighted analysis of the Europe to come did not stimulate thought in those who eventually came to govern in Europe. Country after country, most of them well to do with lifestyles far above the rest of the world, came to embrace the ease of life promised by communists and socialists. In so doing individuals lost their freedom and their countries became poor. Example Greece, Spain, Portugal and so on. Henceforth, the masses dependent on dole vote for those who will provide largess for little service. And now the socialist applecart is tilting and will possibly bring all of Europe down.