On yer bike! £1.40 per litre of petrol. Refugees heading for Europe, Humanitarian crisis in North Africa. Unemployment,recession, democracy, dictators. How's your 2011?
Who to blame? The bankers?
http://letstryeurope.blogspot.com/2011/03/king-says-living-standards-may-never.html
The dictators?
http://letstryeurope.blogspot.com/2011/02/better-devil-you-know.html
Unemployment and government cuts are brutal in the UK(and Europe).People's standard of living and quality of life is very quickly worsening and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, and as the link above suggests may never actually recover. The relative comfort of the last 30 years may always be seen as the halycon years. European life may now come to resemble that of Americans, the gap between the rich and poor much more obvious. Families may now truly find themselves without the things that we took for granted-3 meals a day, heating, education, healthcare, functioning police and local councils, affordable travel, and the list goes on.
We are lucky here in Hong Kong although we are experiencing some increased inflation, especially in the price of air-fares-but at least we have the sun and warmth. Let's not forget though, that Hong Kong continues to have a sizeable proportion of its population living in crippling poverty-look at the street outside and the elderly collecting rubbish etc. The minimum wage should help to redress slave wages for many, and the inflation that will bring, but Hong Kong is not an island(strangely), it is affected by world events. The effects that Hong Kong experiences are delayed, and uncertain, but they are there nonetheless.
It always comes back to the bankers-no matter where you are. They toddle on regardless, having been saved by their governments.Those banks that were not bailed out throw up their hands and proclaim innocence-they were also bailed out, if the other banks had been let to fall, the dominoe effect would have been devastating no matter how large and secure the bank.
Governments continue to allow these banks to function as before-why? As the true cost to people throughout the globe is becoming apparent, pressure needs to be put on those resonsible for this financial meltdown. Nationalise all banks, or at the very least inflict punitive measures and tight iron legislation upon all of them. Who cares if they move elsewhere?-Let them, as each government falls into line, they will have nowhere to run-FUCK the bankers!
More from me
http://letstryeurope.blogspot.com/p/time-for-revolution.html
Friday, March 04, 2011
Pacquiao loses US$1m in 2 day gambling binge in Macau.
Or should the headline read; Filipino congressman loses US$1m in gambling spree.
....I think, however, that good luck that was brought by his ‘outrageous’ hairdo finally ran out in Macau over the weekend.
A certain Allan Encarnacion reportedly saw the congressman in a casino in Macau for two straight days.
A report further said Pacquiao allegedly lost close to a million dollars at the Wynn Hotel in Macau. This was confirmed by a source from Sarangani who has become close to Pacquiao in recent months.
But I can only speculate that Pacquiao in part decided to finally shed off his hair locks after that alleged loss in Macau.....
Full story
http://asiancorrespondent.com/49540/pacquiao-watch-it%E2%80%99s-all-about-bad-luck/
....I think, however, that good luck that was brought by his ‘outrageous’ hairdo finally ran out in Macau over the weekend.
A certain Allan Encarnacion reportedly saw the congressman in a casino in Macau for two straight days.
A report further said Pacquiao allegedly lost close to a million dollars at the Wynn Hotel in Macau. This was confirmed by a source from Sarangani who has become close to Pacquiao in recent months.
But I can only speculate that Pacquiao in part decided to finally shed off his hair locks after that alleged loss in Macau.....
Full story
http://asiancorrespondent.com/49540/pacquiao-watch-it%E2%80%99s-all-about-bad-luck/
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Family
Anonymous
F A M I L Y
I ran into a stranger as he passed by,
"Oh excuse me please" was my reply.
He said, "Please excuse me too;
I wasn't watching for you."
We were very polite, this stranger and I.
We went on our way and we said goodbye.
But at home a different story is told,
How we treat our loved ones, young and old.
Later that day, cooking the evening meal,
My son stood beside me very still.
When I turned, I nearly knocked him down.
"Move out of the way," I said with a frown.
He walked away, his little heart broken.
I didn't realize how harshly I'd spoken.
While I lay awake in bed,
God's still small voice came to me and said,
"While dealing with a stranger,
common courtesy you use,
but the family you love, you seem to abuse.
Go and look on the kitchen floor,
You'll find some flowers there by the door.
Those are the flowers he brought for you.
He picked them himself: pink, yellow and blue.
He stood very quietly not to spoil the surprise,
you never saw the tears that filled his little eyes."
By this time, I felt very small,
And now my tears began to fall.
I quietly went and knelt by his bed;
"Wake up, little one, wake up," I said.
"Are these the flowers you picked for me?"
He smiled, "I found 'em, out by the tree.
I picked 'em because they're pretty like you.
I knew you'd like 'em, especially the blue."
I said, "Son, I'm very sorry for the way I acted today;
I shouldn't have yelled at you that way."
He said, "Oh, Mom, that's okay.
I love you anyway."
I said, "Son, I love you too,
and I do like the flowers, especially the blue."
FAMILY
Are you aware that if we died tomorrow, the company
that we are working for could easily replace us in
a matter of days.
But the family we left behind will feel the loss
for the rest of their lives.
F A M I L Y
I ran into a stranger as he passed by,
"Oh excuse me please" was my reply.
He said, "Please excuse me too;
I wasn't watching for you."
We were very polite, this stranger and I.
We went on our way and we said goodbye.
But at home a different story is told,
How we treat our loved ones, young and old.
Later that day, cooking the evening meal,
My son stood beside me very still.
When I turned, I nearly knocked him down.
"Move out of the way," I said with a frown.
He walked away, his little heart broken.
I didn't realize how harshly I'd spoken.
While I lay awake in bed,
God's still small voice came to me and said,
"While dealing with a stranger,
common courtesy you use,
but the family you love, you seem to abuse.
Go and look on the kitchen floor,
You'll find some flowers there by the door.
Those are the flowers he brought for you.
He picked them himself: pink, yellow and blue.
He stood very quietly not to spoil the surprise,
you never saw the tears that filled his little eyes."
By this time, I felt very small,
And now my tears began to fall.
I quietly went and knelt by his bed;
"Wake up, little one, wake up," I said.
"Are these the flowers you picked for me?"
He smiled, "I found 'em, out by the tree.
I picked 'em because they're pretty like you.
I knew you'd like 'em, especially the blue."
I said, "Son, I'm very sorry for the way I acted today;
I shouldn't have yelled at you that way."
He said, "Oh, Mom, that's okay.
I love you anyway."
I said, "Son, I love you too,
and I do like the flowers, especially the blue."
FAMILY
Are you aware that if we died tomorrow, the company
that we are working for could easily replace us in
a matter of days.
But the family we left behind will feel the loss
for the rest of their lives.
Psychic?
I NEVER use my phone for IDD(long distance) calls, in the 4 months I have been back here, I have communicated with my mum by e-mail or IM.Last night I had the urge to call her and without thinking I did. At that exact moment someone was trying to mug my mum at an ATM(at 3.45pm in the afternoon), they didn't succeed, my mum just ducked out of the way!
Coincedence? scientifically, I would have to say yes, but then again whales can communicate over thousands of miles, and there may well be a scientific explanation that we don't yet understand.
Coincedence? scientifically, I would have to say yes, but then again whales can communicate over thousands of miles, and there may well be a scientific explanation that we don't yet understand.
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
King says living standards may never recover from the crisis
Bank of England Governor strikes dovish note on timing of interest-rate increase
By Sean Farrell
Wednesday, 2 March 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/king-says-living-standards-may-never-recover-from-the-crisis-2229570.html
The Independent
The Governor of the Bank of England warned yesterday that living standards may never recover from the financial crisis and that households were only just starting to feel the full impact of bankers' mistakes.
Mervyn King told MPs that ordinary people were not to blame for the pain ahead and that he was surprised there had not been more public fury.
"It is not like an ordinary recession where you lose output and get it back quickly," the Governor said when asked if the country would ever recover from a squeeze on living standards on a scale not seen since the 1920s.
"You may not get it back for many years, if ever, and that is a big long-run loss of living standards for all people in this country."
Mr King said that unlike previous recessions, the economy had not needed a shake-up to get industries out of state control or weaken union power and that the people bearing the most pain are blameless.
"They can't look at this and say, 'Okay, something was wrong that has to be put right' and they don't get bonuses on the scale of people in the financial services sector," he told the House of Commons Treasury Committee.
"The cost of this crisis is only now being felt. I'm surprised that thedegree of anger hasn't been greater."...continued follow link above
By Sean Farrell
Wednesday, 2 March 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/king-says-living-standards-may-never-recover-from-the-crisis-2229570.html
The Independent
The Governor of the Bank of England warned yesterday that living standards may never recover from the financial crisis and that households were only just starting to feel the full impact of bankers' mistakes.
Mervyn King told MPs that ordinary people were not to blame for the pain ahead and that he was surprised there had not been more public fury.
"It is not like an ordinary recession where you lose output and get it back quickly," the Governor said when asked if the country would ever recover from a squeeze on living standards on a scale not seen since the 1920s.
"You may not get it back for many years, if ever, and that is a big long-run loss of living standards for all people in this country."
Mr King said that unlike previous recessions, the economy had not needed a shake-up to get industries out of state control or weaken union power and that the people bearing the most pain are blameless.
"They can't look at this and say, 'Okay, something was wrong that has to be put right' and they don't get bonuses on the scale of people in the financial services sector," he told the House of Commons Treasury Committee.
"The cost of this crisis is only now being felt. I'm surprised that thedegree of anger hasn't been greater."...continued follow link above
I am an atheist
I am an atheist. That is not to say that I do not believe in the existence of gods, but rather I have never found a shred of evidence to prove even the basic existence of a god. I also don't believe that time travel to the past is possible, for the same reasons. If a god exists, why hasn't it provided clear evidence of his existence? Some people will say that is what 'faith' is. Is it likely that this supreme being would feel the need to play this cruel game on his creations? Why not just instill that faith and belief into our DNA. Following that logic, this god has also implanted doubt and the intelligence to question our surroundings through science, which has made us the superior beings on this planet. So any failings in our faith and belief are actually a product of god's intention,if he exists.
Biblical God?
Biblical God? We are asked to believe 2 things about the Biblical God, the first is that he is 'perfect' , the second is that he needs us to 'worship' Him. These two points alone defy logic and cancel each other out. A perfect being by definition has no deficiency. It lacks nothing, it is perfect. Therefore it does not need us to worship it. These 2 points are irrefutable, they cannot be reconciled. 'If' there is indeed a god, then either he is not perfect and he needs us to worship him, or he is perfect and doesn't need us to worship him. The religious zealots though would like to have their cake and eat it, but as Dr Spock (who we all know exists, because we have seen him) would say it is purely illogical.
Coolio
Coolio!- HK Govt to give all permanent ID holders $6000-cash! Partytime!
The HK$6,000 handout will not be given directly to recipients, but will be allocated through a new platform yet to be announced. However, Mr Tsang said people may withdraw the full amount if they wish, but it will be structured to encourage them to save. The new measure will replace a highly unpopular plan to inject HK$6,000 into every Mandatory Provident Fund account.
http://www.rthk.org.hk/rthk/news/englishnews/news.htm?hightlight&20110302&56&737728
The HK$6,000 handout will not be given directly to recipients, but will be allocated through a new platform yet to be announced. However, Mr Tsang said people may withdraw the full amount if they wish, but it will be structured to encourage them to save. The new measure will replace a highly unpopular plan to inject HK$6,000 into every Mandatory Provident Fund account.
http://www.rthk.org.hk/rthk/news/englishnews/news.htm?hightlight&20110302&56&737728
A-fucking men
The Midweek Prayer. In the end being fucked up is fucked up, but much better than not being fucked up. Amen. Thank the Lord, he must have made me fucked up-if he exists. Therein lies the paradox, If God exists, He is responsible, If he doesn't then I am responsible, and I really don't give a fuck!
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Monday, February 28, 2011
Friday, February 25, 2011
Nobody's perfect
Jessie J: Nobody's Perfect
When I'm nervous I have this thing yeah I talk too much
Sometimes I just can't shut the hell up
It's like I need to tell someone anyone who'll listen
And that's where I seem to fuck up, yeah
I forget about the consequences, for a minute there I lose my senses
And in the heat of the moment my mouth's starts going the words start flowing
But I never meant to hurt you, I know it's time that i learnt to
Treat the people I love like I wanna be loved
This is a lesson learnt , I hate that I let you down and I feel so bad about it
I guess karma comes back around cause now I'm the one that's hurting yeah
And I hate that I made you think that the trust we had is broken
So don't tell me you can't forgive me
Cause nobody's perfect, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, nobodys perfect
If i could turn back the hands of time
I swear I never wanna cross that line
I should of kept it between us but no I went and told the whole world how I feel and oh
So I sit and I realise with these tears falling from my eyes
I gotta change if I wanna keep you forever
Promise that I'm gonna try
But I never meant to hurt you, i know it's time that i learn to
Treat the people I love like I wanna be loved
This is a lesson learnt and I hate that I let you down and I feel so bad about it
I guess karma comes back around cause now I'm the one that's hurting yeah
And I hate that I made you think that the trust we had is broken
So don't tell me you can't forgive me
Cause nobody's perfect, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,nobody's perfect
Im Not a saint no not at all, but what I did it wasn't cool
But I swear that I'll never do that again to you
I'm not a saint, no not at all, but what I did it wasn't cool
but i swear that ill never do that again to you.
I hate that I let you down, and I feel so bad about it
I guess karma comes back around cause now I'm the one that's hurting yeah
And I hate that I made you think that that the trust we had is broken
So don't tell me you can't forgive me
Cause nobody's perfect, no,
And I hate that I let you down and i feel so bad about it
I guess karma comes back around and I'm the one that's hurting, yeah
And I hate that I made you think that the trust we had is broken
So don't tell me you can't forgive me
Cause nobody's perfect. yeah yeah
dont tell me, dont tell me
no,no
you cant forgive
no
because nobodys perfect
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Dole-ites
Some people in England really are happy living on benefits and believe life is better there, even though they never work.
http://bit.ly/dJiMsX
A SHOPAHOLIC scrounger refuses to get a job because her partying means she can’t get out of bed in the morning.
Champagne-swigging wannabe model Kaycie Yates says she is already out living her WAG dream on government handouts.
Despite walking out of 11 jobs, Kaycie – branded the Cheryl Cole of Reading – lives in a luxury £240,000 flat and spends £1,200 a month on make-up, clothes, hair extensions and nights out.
The 20-year-old gets £800 from the state every month which includes housing benefit, council tax benefits and Job Seekers’ Allowance. And her mum tops this income up with an extra £1,200 a month from her own savings.
It means Kaycie spends most of her time living the life of a celebrity, filling her days sleeping late, watching Jeremy Kyle on daytime TV and caring for her pet Chihuahua Princess.
The scrounger, who left school with four GCSEs, is exposed in a new BBC3 series called Working Girls.
It teams work-shy babes up with successful business women to try to get them away from a life of benefits.
But defiant Kaycie says it’s the Government that is to blame.
She insisted: “I’m not a scrounger. But the Government’s making it easy for me to claim benefits and my mum loves spoiling me.
“I’d like a job, but it’s hard to find something I enjoy that will pay for the life I want to live.
“I’ve tried working in shops but I walked out of four or five jobs because I had to get up too early or I got bored.
“I want a job, but part time would be better so I can keep my benefits.”
Kaycie admits to feeling guilty for taking taxpayers’ money, but argues that it is not her fault. She added: “I’m stuck in a benefits cycle.
“If I got a full-time job I’d be working 50 hours just to pay my bills.
“I do worry about mum making sacrifices for me.
“She does go without things like getting her nails done and having her car serviced to make sure I have things. I
was spoilt growing up. If I wanted it, I got it. Everyone deserves to have nice things, including me.”
Charlotte Linacre of the Taxpayers Alliance, said: “It’s totally unfair that hard- working taxpayers fund self-confessed benefit addicts.”
In the show, one of Kaycie’s mentors is Carina Svendsen, general manager for the five-star Missoni Hotel in Edinburgh.
Viewers will see how Kaycie copes with cleaning the bedrooms and washing up.
Working Girls starts on March 3.
http://bit.ly/dJiMsX
A SHOPAHOLIC scrounger refuses to get a job because her partying means she can’t get out of bed in the morning.
Champagne-swigging wannabe model Kaycie Yates says she is already out living her WAG dream on government handouts.
Despite walking out of 11 jobs, Kaycie – branded the Cheryl Cole of Reading – lives in a luxury £240,000 flat and spends £1,200 a month on make-up, clothes, hair extensions and nights out.
The 20-year-old gets £800 from the state every month which includes housing benefit, council tax benefits and Job Seekers’ Allowance. And her mum tops this income up with an extra £1,200 a month from her own savings.
It means Kaycie spends most of her time living the life of a celebrity, filling her days sleeping late, watching Jeremy Kyle on daytime TV and caring for her pet Chihuahua Princess.
The scrounger, who left school with four GCSEs, is exposed in a new BBC3 series called Working Girls.
It teams work-shy babes up with successful business women to try to get them away from a life of benefits.
But defiant Kaycie says it’s the Government that is to blame.
She insisted: “I’m not a scrounger. But the Government’s making it easy for me to claim benefits and my mum loves spoiling me.
“I’d like a job, but it’s hard to find something I enjoy that will pay for the life I want to live.
“I’ve tried working in shops but I walked out of four or five jobs because I had to get up too early or I got bored.
“I want a job, but part time would be better so I can keep my benefits.”
Kaycie admits to feeling guilty for taking taxpayers’ money, but argues that it is not her fault. She added: “I’m stuck in a benefits cycle.
“If I got a full-time job I’d be working 50 hours just to pay my bills.
“I do worry about mum making sacrifices for me.
“She does go without things like getting her nails done and having her car serviced to make sure I have things. I
was spoilt growing up. If I wanted it, I got it. Everyone deserves to have nice things, including me.”
Charlotte Linacre of the Taxpayers Alliance, said: “It’s totally unfair that hard- working taxpayers fund self-confessed benefit addicts.”
In the show, one of Kaycie’s mentors is Carina Svendsen, general manager for the five-star Missoni Hotel in Edinburgh.
Viewers will see how Kaycie copes with cleaning the bedrooms and washing up.
Working Girls starts on March 3.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Distances
Distance is no obstacle, but time is. The time between the past and present grows ever further minute by minute, day by day, month by month. The gulf widens like a boat setting out to sea, there comes a point when the distance is too far to swim back.The chasm widens, the point of no return is reached.The distance becomes absolute in space, time and ultimately emotionally.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Better the devil you know?
The impact of the revolutions? Authoritarian secular Arab states morphing into Islamic and fundamentalist Islamic states on Europe's doorstep. Think Iraq, think Algeria, but a stone's throw from Italy and Spain. The number of refugees could be overwhelming. Oil supplies disrupted, foreign companies expelled. Libya and Morrocco are most at risk, Benghazi in Libya has already been declared a sovereign Islamic state. We can hope that the people will not accept one prohibitive government to replace the last one, but as has already happened religious zealots often have the loudest voices and the biggest guns. Revolutions are often hijacked, let's hope these are not.In the end though, the people themselves may choose religious states democratically. The reach of the extremists may become uncomfortably close.
Chris Mercer
Chris Mercer
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Friday, February 18, 2011
Monday, February 14, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
More nonsense
Top Tips
SAVE money this Valentine's Day by leading a life of crippling loneliness.
Top Tips
WANKING over photos of your mother in law is not a way of showing your wife you'll still find her attractive in old age. Apparently.
Top Tips
BLOKES. Discover what it's really like to have a baby by phoning in sick for a year to watch Jeremy Kyle.
Top Tips
SEND CONDOLENCES via SMS to save time e.g. ROFG (rolling on floor, grieving).
Top Tips
FOOTBALL FANS. Save money on a Sky subscription by employing a court artist to sketch the action whilst listening to the radio.
Top Tips
HOUSEWIVES. Behind the toilet is not a good place to store your dainty basket of toilet rolls.
Top Tips
ENJOY the Cash for Gold experience by posting me a £50 note and receiving a £5 note in return.
Top Tips
OBITUARY pages in local papers often act as a preview for upcoming job openings.
Top Tips
DAILY MAIL readers. Club together for a flux capacitor and fuck off back to the good old days.
Top Tips
WARNING. Come Dine with Me Down Under is not what you think. It's just a cooking show based in Australia.
SAVE money this Valentine's Day by leading a life of crippling loneliness.
Top Tips
WANKING over photos of your mother in law is not a way of showing your wife you'll still find her attractive in old age. Apparently.
Top Tips
BLOKES. Discover what it's really like to have a baby by phoning in sick for a year to watch Jeremy Kyle.
Top Tips
SEND CONDOLENCES via SMS to save time e.g. ROFG (rolling on floor, grieving).
Top Tips
FOOTBALL FANS. Save money on a Sky subscription by employing a court artist to sketch the action whilst listening to the radio.
Top Tips
HOUSEWIVES. Behind the toilet is not a good place to store your dainty basket of toilet rolls.
Top Tips
ENJOY the Cash for Gold experience by posting me a £50 note and receiving a £5 note in return.
Top Tips
OBITUARY pages in local papers often act as a preview for upcoming job openings.
Top Tips
DAILY MAIL readers. Club together for a flux capacitor and fuck off back to the good old days.
Top Tips
WARNING. Come Dine with Me Down Under is not what you think. It's just a cooking show based in Australia.
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
40 years (Cheers Giles)
MARRIED FORTY YEARS
A man wakes up in the hospital bandaged from head to foot.
The doctor comes in and says, "Ah, I'm glad to see you've regained consciousness. You probably won't remember, but you were in a huge pile-up on the freeway. You're going to be ok, you'll walk again and everything, but your penis was severed in the accident and we couldn't find it".
The man groans, but the doctor goes on, "You've got $9000 in insurance compensation coming and we now have the technology to build a new penis. They work great but they don't come cheap. It's roughly $1000 an inch". The man perks up.
"So", the doctor says, "You must decide how many inches you want.
I understand that you've been married for over forty years and this is something you should discuss with your wife. If you had a five-incher before and get a nine incher now, she might be a bit put out. If you had a nine-incher before and you decide to only invest in a five-incher now, she might be disappointed. It's important that she plays a role in helping you make a decision".
The man agrees to talk it over with his wife.
The doctor comes back the next day and asks, "So, have you spoken with your wife"?
"Yes I have", says the man.
"And has she helped you make a decision"?
"Yes" says the man.
"What is your decision"? asks the doctor.
"We're getting a new kitchen".
A man wakes up in the hospital bandaged from head to foot.
The doctor comes in and says, "Ah, I'm glad to see you've regained consciousness. You probably won't remember, but you were in a huge pile-up on the freeway. You're going to be ok, you'll walk again and everything, but your penis was severed in the accident and we couldn't find it".
The man groans, but the doctor goes on, "You've got $9000 in insurance compensation coming and we now have the technology to build a new penis. They work great but they don't come cheap. It's roughly $1000 an inch". The man perks up.
"So", the doctor says, "You must decide how many inches you want.
I understand that you've been married for over forty years and this is something you should discuss with your wife. If you had a five-incher before and get a nine incher now, she might be a bit put out. If you had a nine-incher before and you decide to only invest in a five-incher now, she might be disappointed. It's important that she plays a role in helping you make a decision".
The man agrees to talk it over with his wife.
The doctor comes back the next day and asks, "So, have you spoken with your wife"?
"Yes I have", says the man.
"And has she helped you make a decision"?
"Yes" says the man.
"What is your decision"? asks the doctor.
"We're getting a new kitchen".
Tax-(cheers Giles and Jason)
Apparently, this is a real reply from the Inland Revenue. The Guardian newspaper had to ask for special permission to print it. The funniest part of this is imagining the content of the letter sent to the Tax Office which prompted this reply!
Dear Mr Addison,
I am writing to you to express our thanks for your more than prompt reply to our latest communication, and also to answer some of the points you raise. I will address them, as ever, in order.
Firstly, I must take issue with your description of our last as a "begging letter". It might perhaps more properly be referred to as a "tax demand". This is how we at the Inland Revenue have always, for reasons of accuracy, traditionally referred to such documents.
Secondly, your frustration at our adding to the "endless stream of crapulent whining and panhandling vomited daily through the letterbox on to the doormat" has been noted. However, whilst I have naturally not seen the other letters to which you refer I would cautiously suggest that their being from "pauper councils, Lombardy pirate banking houses and pissant gas-mongerers" might indicate that your decision to "file them next to the toilet in case of emergencies" is at best a little ill-advised. In common with my own organisation, it is unlikely that the senders of these letters do see you as a "lackwit bumpkin" or, come to that, a "sodding charity". More likely they see you as a citizen of Great Britain, with a responsibility to contribute to the upkeep of the nation as a whole.
Which brings me to my next point. Whilst there may be some spirit of truth in your assertion that the taxes you pay "go to shore up the canker-blighted, toppling folly that is the Public Services", a moment's rudimentary calculation ought to disabuse you of the notion that the government in any way expects you to "stump up for the whole damned party" yourself. The estimates you provide for the Chancellor's disbursement of the funds levied by taxation, whilst colourful, are, in fairness, a little off the mark. Less than you seem to imagine is spent on "junkets for Bunterish lickspittles" and "dancing whores" whilst far more than you have accounted for is allocated to, for example, "that box-ticking facade of a university system."
A couple of technical points arising from direct queries:
1. The reason we don't simply write "Muggins" on the envelope has to do with the vagaries of the postal system;
2. You can rest assured that "sucking the very marrow of those with nothing else to give" has never been considered as a practice because even if the Personal Allowance didn't render it irrelevant, the sheer medical logistics involved would make it financially unviable.
I trust this has helped. In the meantime, whilst I would not in any way wish to influence your decision one way or the other, I ought to point out that even if you did choose to "give the whole foul jamboree up and go and live in India" you would still owe us the money.
Please send it to us by Friday..
Yours sincerely,
H J Lee
Customer Relations
Inland Revenue
Dear Mr Addison,
I am writing to you to express our thanks for your more than prompt reply to our latest communication, and also to answer some of the points you raise. I will address them, as ever, in order.
Firstly, I must take issue with your description of our last as a "begging letter". It might perhaps more properly be referred to as a "tax demand". This is how we at the Inland Revenue have always, for reasons of accuracy, traditionally referred to such documents.
Secondly, your frustration at our adding to the "endless stream of crapulent whining and panhandling vomited daily through the letterbox on to the doormat" has been noted. However, whilst I have naturally not seen the other letters to which you refer I would cautiously suggest that their being from "pauper councils, Lombardy pirate banking houses and pissant gas-mongerers" might indicate that your decision to "file them next to the toilet in case of emergencies" is at best a little ill-advised. In common with my own organisation, it is unlikely that the senders of these letters do see you as a "lackwit bumpkin" or, come to that, a "sodding charity". More likely they see you as a citizen of Great Britain, with a responsibility to contribute to the upkeep of the nation as a whole.
Which brings me to my next point. Whilst there may be some spirit of truth in your assertion that the taxes you pay "go to shore up the canker-blighted, toppling folly that is the Public Services", a moment's rudimentary calculation ought to disabuse you of the notion that the government in any way expects you to "stump up for the whole damned party" yourself. The estimates you provide for the Chancellor's disbursement of the funds levied by taxation, whilst colourful, are, in fairness, a little off the mark. Less than you seem to imagine is spent on "junkets for Bunterish lickspittles" and "dancing whores" whilst far more than you have accounted for is allocated to, for example, "that box-ticking facade of a university system."
A couple of technical points arising from direct queries:
1. The reason we don't simply write "Muggins" on the envelope has to do with the vagaries of the postal system;
2. You can rest assured that "sucking the very marrow of those with nothing else to give" has never been considered as a practice because even if the Personal Allowance didn't render it irrelevant, the sheer medical logistics involved would make it financially unviable.
I trust this has helped. In the meantime, whilst I would not in any way wish to influence your decision one way or the other, I ought to point out that even if you did choose to "give the whole foul jamboree up and go and live in India" you would still owe us the money.
Please send it to us by Friday..
Yours sincerely,
H J Lee
Customer Relations
Inland Revenue
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Irish declare war on France (Cheers Giles)
The French President is sitting in his office when his telephone rings.
>
> 'Hallo, Mr. Sarkozy!' a heavily accented voice said. 'This is Paddy down at the Harp Pub in County Clare , Ireland .. I am ringing to inform you that we are officially declaring war on you.
>
> We voted to reject the Lisbon treaty.'
>
> 'Well, Paddy,' Sarkozy replied, 'This is indeed important news. How big is your army?'
>
> 'Right now,' says Paddy, after a moment's
> calculation, 'there is myself, me Cousin Sean, me next door neighbour Seamus, and the entire darts team from the pub. That makes
> eleven.'
>
> Sarkozy paused. 'I must tell you, paddy, that I have 100,000 men in my army waiting to move on my command.'
>
> 'Begoora!' says Paddy. 'I'll have to ring you back.'
>
> Sure enough, the next day, Paddy calls again. 'Mr. Sarkozy, the war is still on. We have
> managed to get us some infantry equipment!'
>
> 'And what equipment would that be paddy?' Sarkozy asks.
>
> 'Well, we have two combines, a bulldozer, and Murphy's farm tractor..'
>
> Sarkozy sighs amused. 'I must tell you, Paddy, that I have 6,000 tanks and 5,000 armoured
> personnel carriers.
>
> Also, I have increased my army to 150,000 since we last spoke.'
>
> 'Saints preserve us!' says Paddy. I'll have to get back to you.'
>
> Sure enough, Paddy rings again the next day. 'Mr. Sarkozy, the war is still on! We have managed to get ourselves airborne!
> We have modified Jackie McLaughlin's ultra-light with a couple of shotguns in the cockpit, and four boys from the Shamrock Bar have joined us as well!'
>
> Sarkozy was silent for a minute and then cleared his throat. 'I must tell you, Paddy,
> that I have 100 bombers and 200 fighter planes.
> My military bases are surrounded by laser-guided, surface-to-air missile sites..
> And since we last spoke, I have increased my army to 200,000.'
>
> 'Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!' says paddy, 'I will have to ring you back.'
>
> Sure enough, Paddy calls again the next day..
> 'Top o' the mornin', Mr. Sarkozy.
> I am sorry to inform you that we have had to call off the war.'
>
> 'Really? I am sorry to hear that,' says Sarkozy.. 'Why the sudden change of heart?'
>
> 'Well,' says Paddy, 'we had a long chat over a few pints of Guinness and packets of crisps, and we decided there is no way we can feed 200,000 prisoners.'
>
> 'Hallo, Mr. Sarkozy!' a heavily accented voice said. 'This is Paddy down at the Harp Pub in County Clare , Ireland .. I am ringing to inform you that we are officially declaring war on you.
>
> We voted to reject the Lisbon treaty.'
>
> 'Well, Paddy,' Sarkozy replied, 'This is indeed important news. How big is your army?'
>
> 'Right now,' says Paddy, after a moment's
> calculation, 'there is myself, me Cousin Sean, me next door neighbour Seamus, and the entire darts team from the pub. That makes
> eleven.'
>
> Sarkozy paused. 'I must tell you, paddy, that I have 100,000 men in my army waiting to move on my command.'
>
> 'Begoora!' says Paddy. 'I'll have to ring you back.'
>
> Sure enough, the next day, Paddy calls again. 'Mr. Sarkozy, the war is still on. We have
> managed to get us some infantry equipment!'
>
> 'And what equipment would that be paddy?' Sarkozy asks.
>
> 'Well, we have two combines, a bulldozer, and Murphy's farm tractor..'
>
> Sarkozy sighs amused. 'I must tell you, Paddy, that I have 6,000 tanks and 5,000 armoured
> personnel carriers.
>
> Also, I have increased my army to 150,000 since we last spoke.'
>
> 'Saints preserve us!' says Paddy. I'll have to get back to you.'
>
> Sure enough, Paddy rings again the next day. 'Mr. Sarkozy, the war is still on! We have managed to get ourselves airborne!
> We have modified Jackie McLaughlin's ultra-light with a couple of shotguns in the cockpit, and four boys from the Shamrock Bar have joined us as well!'
>
> Sarkozy was silent for a minute and then cleared his throat. 'I must tell you, Paddy,
> that I have 100 bombers and 200 fighter planes.
> My military bases are surrounded by laser-guided, surface-to-air missile sites..
> And since we last spoke, I have increased my army to 200,000.'
>
> 'Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!' says paddy, 'I will have to ring you back.'
>
> Sure enough, Paddy calls again the next day..
> 'Top o' the mornin', Mr. Sarkozy.
> I am sorry to inform you that we have had to call off the war.'
>
> 'Really? I am sorry to hear that,' says Sarkozy.. 'Why the sudden change of heart?'
>
> 'Well,' says Paddy, 'we had a long chat over a few pints of Guinness and packets of crisps, and we decided there is no way we can feed 200,000 prisoners.'
Monday, January 24, 2011
What’s behind the“Tiger Mother” craze?
http://nyr.kr/fvQPTW
America’s Top Parent
What’s behind the“Tiger Mother” craze?
by Elizabeth Kolbert January 31, 2011
“Call me garbage.”
The other day, I was having dinner with my family when the subject of Amy Chua’s new book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” (Penguin Press; $25.95), came up. My twelve-year-old twins had been read an excerpt from the book by their teacher, a well-known provocateur. He had been sent a link to the excerpt by another teacher, who had received it from her sister, who had been e-mailed it by a friend, and, well, you get the point. The excerpt, which had appeared in the Wall Street Journal under the headline “WHY CHINESE MOTHERS ARE SUPERIOR,” was, and still is, an Internet sensation—as one blogger put it, the “Andromeda Strain of viral memes.” Within days, more than five thousand comments had been posted, and “Tiger Mother” vaulted to No. 4 on Amazon’s list of best-sellers. Chua appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and on NBC’s “Nightly News” and “Today” show. Her book was the topic of two columns in last week’s Sunday Times, and, under the racially neutral headline “IS EXTREME PARENTING EFFECTIVE?,” the subject of a formal debate on the paper’s Web site.
Thanks to this media blitz, the basic outlines of “Tiger Mother” ’s story are by now familiar. Chua, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, is a Yale Law School professor. She is married to another Yale law professor and has two daughters, whom she drives relentlessly. Chua’s rules for the girls include: no sleepovers, no playdates, no grade lower than an A on report cards, no choosing your own extracurricular activities, and no ranking lower than No. 1 in any subject. (An exception to this last directive is made for gym and drama.)
In Chua’s binary world, there are just two kinds of mother. There are “Chinese mothers,” who, she allows, do not necessarily have to be Chinese. “I’m using the term ‘Chinese mothers’ loosely,” she writes. Then, there are “Western” mothers. Western mothers think they are being strict when they insist that their children practice their instruments for half an hour a day. For Chinese mothers, “the first hour is the easy part.” Chua chooses the instruments that her daughters will play—piano for the older one, Sophia; violin for the younger, Lulu—and stands over them as they practice for three, four, sometimes five hours at a stretch. The least the girls are expected to do is make it to Carnegie Hall. Amazingly enough, Sophia does. Chua’s daughters are so successful—once, it’s true, Sophia came in second on a multiplication test (to a Korean boy), but Chua made sure this never happened again—that they confirm her thesis: Western mothers are losers. I’m using the term “losers” loosely.
Chua has said that one of the points of the book is “making fun of myself,” but plainly what she was hoping for was to outrage. Whole chapters of “Tiger Mother”—admittedly, many chapters are only four or five pages long—are given over to incidents like that of the rejected smiley face.
“I don’t want this,” she tells Lulu, throwing back at her a handmade birthday card. “I want a better one.”
In another chapter, Chua threatens to take Lulu’s doll house to the Salvation Army and, when that doesn’t work, to deny her lunch, dinner, and birthday parties for “two, three, four years” because she cannot master a piece called “The Little White Donkey.” The kid is seven years old. In a third chapter, Chua tells Sophia she is “garbage.” Chua’s own father has called her “garbage,” and she finds it a highly effective parenting technique. Chua relates this at a dinner party, and one of the guests supposedly gets so upset that she breaks down in tears. The hostess tries to patch things up by suggesting that Chua is speaking figuratively.
“You didn’t actually call Sophia garbage,” the hostess offers.
“Yes, I did,” Chua says.
When the dinner-party episode was read in class, my sons found it hilarious, which is why they were taunting me. “Call me garbage,” one of the twins said again. “I dare you.”
“O.K.,” I said, trying, for once, to be a good mother. “You’re garbage.”
If Chua’s tale has any significance—and it may not—it is as an allegory. Chua refers to herself as a Tiger because according to the Chinese zodiac she was born in the Year of the Tiger. Tiger people are “powerful, authoritative, and magnetic,” she informs us, just as tigers that walk on four legs inspire “fear and respect.” The “tiger economies” of Asia aren’t mentioned in the book, but they growl menacingly in the background.
It’s just about impossible to pick up a newspaper these days—though who actually picks up a newspaper anymore?—without finding a story about the rise of the East. The headlines are variations on a theme: “SOLAR PANEL MAKER MOVES WORK TO CHINA”; “CHINA DRAWING HIGH-TECH RESEARCH FROM U.S.”; “IBM CUTTING 5,000 SERVICE JOBS; MOVING WORK TO INDIA.” What began as an outflow of manufacturing jobs has spread way beyond car parts and electronics to include information technology, legal advice, even journalism. (This piece could have been written much more cost-effectively by a team in Bangalore and, who knows, maybe next month it will be.)
On our good days, we tell ourselves that our kids will be all right. The new, global economy, we observe, puts a premium on flexibility and creativity. And who is better prepared for such a future than little Abby (or Zachary), downloading her wacky videos onto YouTube while she texts her friends, messes with Photoshop, and listens to her iPod?
“Yes, you can brute-force any kid to learn to play the piano—just precisely like his or her billion neighbors” is how one of the comments on the Wall Street Journal ’s Web site put it. “But you’ll never get a Jimi Hendrix that way.”
On our bad days, we wonder whether this way of thinking is, as Chua might say, garbage. Last month, the results of the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, tests were announced. It was the first time that Chinese students had participated, and children from Shanghai ranked first in every single area. Students from the United States, meanwhile, came in seventeenth in reading, twenty-third in science, and an especially demoralizing thirty-first in math. This last ranking put American kids not just behind the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Singaporeans but also after the French, the Austrians, the Hungarians, the Slovenians, the Estonians, and the Poles.
“I know skeptics will want to argue with the results, but we consider them to be accurate and reliable,” Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, told the Times. “The United States came in twenty-third or twenty-fourth in most subjects. We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we’re being out-educated.”
Why is this? How is it that the richest country in the world can’t teach kids to read or to multiply fractions? Taken as a parable, Chua’s cartoonish narrative about browbeating her daughters acquires a certain disquieting force. Americans have been told always to encourage their kids. This, the theory goes, will improve their self-esteem, and this, in turn, will help them learn.
After a generation or so of applying this theory, we have the results. Just about the only category in which American students outperform the competition is self-regard. Researchers at the Brookings Institution, in one of their frequent studies of education policy, compared students’ assessments of their abilities in math with their scores on a standardized test. Nearly forty per cent of American eighth graders agreed “a lot” with the statement “I usually do well in mathematics,” even though only seven per cent of American students actually got enough correct answers on the test to qualify as advanced. Among Singaporean students, eighteen per cent said they usually did well in math; forty-four per cent qualified as advanced. As the Brookings researchers pointed out, even the least self-confident Singaporean students, on average, outscored the most self-confident Americans. You can say it’s sad that kids in Singapore are so beaten down that they can’t appreciate their own accomplishments. But you’ve got to give them this: at least they get the math right.
Our problems as a country cannot, of course, be reduced to our problems as educators or as parents. Nonetheless, there is an uncomfortable analogy. For some time now, the U.S. has, in effect, been drawing crappy, smiley-face birthday cards and calling them wonderful. It’s made us feel a bit better about ourselves without improving the basic situation. As the cover story on China’s ascent in this month’s Foreign Policy sums things up: “American Decline: This Time It’s Real.”
It’s hard to believe that Chua’s book would be causing quite as much stir without the geopolitical subtext. (Picture the reaction to a similar tale told by a Hungarian or an Austrian über-mom.) At the same time, lots of people have clearly taken “Tiger Mother” personally.
Of the zillions of comments that have been posted on the Web, many of the most passionate are from scandalized “Western” mothers and fathers, or, as one blogger dubbed them, “Manatee dads.” Some have gone as far as to suggest that Chua be arrested for child abuse. At least as emotional are the posts from Asians and Asian-Americans.
“Parents like Amy Chua are the reason why Asian-Americans like me are in therapy,” Betty Ming Liu, who teaches journalism at N.Y.U., wrote on her blog.
“What’s even more damning is her perpetuation of the media stereotypes of Asian-Americans,” Frank Chi, a political consultant, wrote in the Boston Globe’s opinion blog.
“Having lived through a version of the Chinese Parenting Experience, and having been surrounded since birth with hundreds of CPE graduates, I couldn’t not say something,” a contributor to the Web site Shanghaiist wrote after the Wall Street Journal excerpt appeared. “The article actually made me feel physically ill.”
Chua’s response to some of the unkind things said about her—she has reported getting death threats—has been to backpedal. “RETREAT OF THE ‘TIGER MOTHER’ ” was the headline of one Times article. (It, too, quickly jumped to the top of the paper’s “most e-mailed” list.) Chua has said that it was not her plan to write a parenting manual: “My actual book is not a how-to guide.” Somehow or other, her publisher seems to be among those who missed this. The back cover spells out, in black and red type, “How to Be a Tiger Mother.”
According to Chua, her “actual book” is a memoir. Memoir is, or at least is supposed to be, a demanding genre. It requires that the author not just narrate his or her life but reflect on it. By her own description, Chua is not a probing person. Of her years studying at Harvard Law School, she writes:
I didn’t care about the rights of criminals the way others did, and I froze whenever a professor called on me. I also wasn’t naturally skeptical and questioning; I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it.
“Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” exhibits much the same lack of interest in critical thinking. It’s breezily written, at times entertaining, and devoid of anything approaching introspection. Imagine your most self-congratulatory friend holding forth for two hours about her kids’ triumphs, and you’ve more or less got the narrative. The only thing that keeps it together is Chua’s cheerful faith that whatever happened to her or her daughters is interesting just because it happened to happen to them. In addition to all the schlepping back and forth to auditions, there are two chapters on Chua’s dogs (Samoyeds named Coco and Pushkin), three pages of practice notes that she left behind for Lulu when she could not be there to berate her in person, and a complete list of the places that she had visited with her kids by the time they were twelve and nine:
London, Paris, Nice, Rome, Venice, Milan, Amsterdam, The Hague, Barcelona, Madrid, Málaga, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Munich, Dublin, Brussels, Bruges, Strasbourg, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Manila, Istanbul, Mexico City, Cancún, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, La Paz, Sucre, Cochabamba, Jamaica, Tangier, Fez, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and the Rock of Gibraltar.
Chua’s husband is not Chinese, in either sense of the word. He makes occasional appearances in the book to try—ineffectually, it seems—to shield the girls. Chua has said that she wrote more about their arguments, but her husband didn’t like those passages, so they’ve been cut. Perhaps had more of his voice been included it would have provided some grit and at least the semblance of engagement. As it is, though, it’s just her. “I’m happy to be the one hated,” she tells her husband at one point, and apparently she means it.
Parenting is hard. As anyone who has gone through the process and had enough leisure (and still functioning brain cells) to reflect on it knows, a lot of it is a crapshoot. Things go wrong that you have no control over, and, on occasion, things also go right, and you have no control over those, either. The experience is scary and exhilarating and often humiliating, not because you’re disappointed in your kids, necessarily, but because you’re disappointed in yourself.
Some things do go wrong in Chua’s memoir. Her mother-in-law dies; her younger sister develops leukemia. These events get roughly the same amount of space as Coco and Pushkin, and yet they are, on their own terms, moving. More central to the story line is a screaming fit in a Moscow restaurant during which a glass is thrown. The upshot of the crisis is that Lulu is allowed to take up tennis, which Chua then proceeds to micromanage.
Chua clearly wants to end her book by claiming that she has changed. She knows enough about the conventions of memoir-writing to understand that some kind of transformation is generally required. But she can’t bring herself to do it. And so in the final pages she invokes the Founding Fathers. They, too, she tells her daughters, would not have approved of sleepovers. ♦
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/01/31/110131crbo_books_kolbert?printable=true#ixzz1Bwd7uvYT
America’s Top Parent
What’s behind the“Tiger Mother” craze?
by Elizabeth Kolbert January 31, 2011
“Call me garbage.”
The other day, I was having dinner with my family when the subject of Amy Chua’s new book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” (Penguin Press; $25.95), came up. My twelve-year-old twins had been read an excerpt from the book by their teacher, a well-known provocateur. He had been sent a link to the excerpt by another teacher, who had received it from her sister, who had been e-mailed it by a friend, and, well, you get the point. The excerpt, which had appeared in the Wall Street Journal under the headline “WHY CHINESE MOTHERS ARE SUPERIOR,” was, and still is, an Internet sensation—as one blogger put it, the “Andromeda Strain of viral memes.” Within days, more than five thousand comments had been posted, and “Tiger Mother” vaulted to No. 4 on Amazon’s list of best-sellers. Chua appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and on NBC’s “Nightly News” and “Today” show. Her book was the topic of two columns in last week’s Sunday Times, and, under the racially neutral headline “IS EXTREME PARENTING EFFECTIVE?,” the subject of a formal debate on the paper’s Web site.
Thanks to this media blitz, the basic outlines of “Tiger Mother” ’s story are by now familiar. Chua, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, is a Yale Law School professor. She is married to another Yale law professor and has two daughters, whom she drives relentlessly. Chua’s rules for the girls include: no sleepovers, no playdates, no grade lower than an A on report cards, no choosing your own extracurricular activities, and no ranking lower than No. 1 in any subject. (An exception to this last directive is made for gym and drama.)
In Chua’s binary world, there are just two kinds of mother. There are “Chinese mothers,” who, she allows, do not necessarily have to be Chinese. “I’m using the term ‘Chinese mothers’ loosely,” she writes. Then, there are “Western” mothers. Western mothers think they are being strict when they insist that their children practice their instruments for half an hour a day. For Chinese mothers, “the first hour is the easy part.” Chua chooses the instruments that her daughters will play—piano for the older one, Sophia; violin for the younger, Lulu—and stands over them as they practice for three, four, sometimes five hours at a stretch. The least the girls are expected to do is make it to Carnegie Hall. Amazingly enough, Sophia does. Chua’s daughters are so successful—once, it’s true, Sophia came in second on a multiplication test (to a Korean boy), but Chua made sure this never happened again—that they confirm her thesis: Western mothers are losers. I’m using the term “losers” loosely.
Chua has said that one of the points of the book is “making fun of myself,” but plainly what she was hoping for was to outrage. Whole chapters of “Tiger Mother”—admittedly, many chapters are only four or five pages long—are given over to incidents like that of the rejected smiley face.
“I don’t want this,” she tells Lulu, throwing back at her a handmade birthday card. “I want a better one.”
In another chapter, Chua threatens to take Lulu’s doll house to the Salvation Army and, when that doesn’t work, to deny her lunch, dinner, and birthday parties for “two, three, four years” because she cannot master a piece called “The Little White Donkey.” The kid is seven years old. In a third chapter, Chua tells Sophia she is “garbage.” Chua’s own father has called her “garbage,” and she finds it a highly effective parenting technique. Chua relates this at a dinner party, and one of the guests supposedly gets so upset that she breaks down in tears. The hostess tries to patch things up by suggesting that Chua is speaking figuratively.
“You didn’t actually call Sophia garbage,” the hostess offers.
“Yes, I did,” Chua says.
When the dinner-party episode was read in class, my sons found it hilarious, which is why they were taunting me. “Call me garbage,” one of the twins said again. “I dare you.”
“O.K.,” I said, trying, for once, to be a good mother. “You’re garbage.”
If Chua’s tale has any significance—and it may not—it is as an allegory. Chua refers to herself as a Tiger because according to the Chinese zodiac she was born in the Year of the Tiger. Tiger people are “powerful, authoritative, and magnetic,” she informs us, just as tigers that walk on four legs inspire “fear and respect.” The “tiger economies” of Asia aren’t mentioned in the book, but they growl menacingly in the background.
It’s just about impossible to pick up a newspaper these days—though who actually picks up a newspaper anymore?—without finding a story about the rise of the East. The headlines are variations on a theme: “SOLAR PANEL MAKER MOVES WORK TO CHINA”; “CHINA DRAWING HIGH-TECH RESEARCH FROM U.S.”; “IBM CUTTING 5,000 SERVICE JOBS; MOVING WORK TO INDIA.” What began as an outflow of manufacturing jobs has spread way beyond car parts and electronics to include information technology, legal advice, even journalism. (This piece could have been written much more cost-effectively by a team in Bangalore and, who knows, maybe next month it will be.)
On our good days, we tell ourselves that our kids will be all right. The new, global economy, we observe, puts a premium on flexibility and creativity. And who is better prepared for such a future than little Abby (or Zachary), downloading her wacky videos onto YouTube while she texts her friends, messes with Photoshop, and listens to her iPod?
“Yes, you can brute-force any kid to learn to play the piano—just precisely like his or her billion neighbors” is how one of the comments on the Wall Street Journal ’s Web site put it. “But you’ll never get a Jimi Hendrix that way.”
On our bad days, we wonder whether this way of thinking is, as Chua might say, garbage. Last month, the results of the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, tests were announced. It was the first time that Chinese students had participated, and children from Shanghai ranked first in every single area. Students from the United States, meanwhile, came in seventeenth in reading, twenty-third in science, and an especially demoralizing thirty-first in math. This last ranking put American kids not just behind the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Singaporeans but also after the French, the Austrians, the Hungarians, the Slovenians, the Estonians, and the Poles.
“I know skeptics will want to argue with the results, but we consider them to be accurate and reliable,” Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, told the Times. “The United States came in twenty-third or twenty-fourth in most subjects. We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we’re being out-educated.”
Why is this? How is it that the richest country in the world can’t teach kids to read or to multiply fractions? Taken as a parable, Chua’s cartoonish narrative about browbeating her daughters acquires a certain disquieting force. Americans have been told always to encourage their kids. This, the theory goes, will improve their self-esteem, and this, in turn, will help them learn.
After a generation or so of applying this theory, we have the results. Just about the only category in which American students outperform the competition is self-regard. Researchers at the Brookings Institution, in one of their frequent studies of education policy, compared students’ assessments of their abilities in math with their scores on a standardized test. Nearly forty per cent of American eighth graders agreed “a lot” with the statement “I usually do well in mathematics,” even though only seven per cent of American students actually got enough correct answers on the test to qualify as advanced. Among Singaporean students, eighteen per cent said they usually did well in math; forty-four per cent qualified as advanced. As the Brookings researchers pointed out, even the least self-confident Singaporean students, on average, outscored the most self-confident Americans. You can say it’s sad that kids in Singapore are so beaten down that they can’t appreciate their own accomplishments. But you’ve got to give them this: at least they get the math right.
Our problems as a country cannot, of course, be reduced to our problems as educators or as parents. Nonetheless, there is an uncomfortable analogy. For some time now, the U.S. has, in effect, been drawing crappy, smiley-face birthday cards and calling them wonderful. It’s made us feel a bit better about ourselves without improving the basic situation. As the cover story on China’s ascent in this month’s Foreign Policy sums things up: “American Decline: This Time It’s Real.”
It’s hard to believe that Chua’s book would be causing quite as much stir without the geopolitical subtext. (Picture the reaction to a similar tale told by a Hungarian or an Austrian über-mom.) At the same time, lots of people have clearly taken “Tiger Mother” personally.
Of the zillions of comments that have been posted on the Web, many of the most passionate are from scandalized “Western” mothers and fathers, or, as one blogger dubbed them, “Manatee dads.” Some have gone as far as to suggest that Chua be arrested for child abuse. At least as emotional are the posts from Asians and Asian-Americans.
“Parents like Amy Chua are the reason why Asian-Americans like me are in therapy,” Betty Ming Liu, who teaches journalism at N.Y.U., wrote on her blog.
“What’s even more damning is her perpetuation of the media stereotypes of Asian-Americans,” Frank Chi, a political consultant, wrote in the Boston Globe’s opinion blog.
“Having lived through a version of the Chinese Parenting Experience, and having been surrounded since birth with hundreds of CPE graduates, I couldn’t not say something,” a contributor to the Web site Shanghaiist wrote after the Wall Street Journal excerpt appeared. “The article actually made me feel physically ill.”
Chua’s response to some of the unkind things said about her—she has reported getting death threats—has been to backpedal. “RETREAT OF THE ‘TIGER MOTHER’ ” was the headline of one Times article. (It, too, quickly jumped to the top of the paper’s “most e-mailed” list.) Chua has said that it was not her plan to write a parenting manual: “My actual book is not a how-to guide.” Somehow or other, her publisher seems to be among those who missed this. The back cover spells out, in black and red type, “How to Be a Tiger Mother.”
According to Chua, her “actual book” is a memoir. Memoir is, or at least is supposed to be, a demanding genre. It requires that the author not just narrate his or her life but reflect on it. By her own description, Chua is not a probing person. Of her years studying at Harvard Law School, she writes:
I didn’t care about the rights of criminals the way others did, and I froze whenever a professor called on me. I also wasn’t naturally skeptical and questioning; I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it.
“Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” exhibits much the same lack of interest in critical thinking. It’s breezily written, at times entertaining, and devoid of anything approaching introspection. Imagine your most self-congratulatory friend holding forth for two hours about her kids’ triumphs, and you’ve more or less got the narrative. The only thing that keeps it together is Chua’s cheerful faith that whatever happened to her or her daughters is interesting just because it happened to happen to them. In addition to all the schlepping back and forth to auditions, there are two chapters on Chua’s dogs (Samoyeds named Coco and Pushkin), three pages of practice notes that she left behind for Lulu when she could not be there to berate her in person, and a complete list of the places that she had visited with her kids by the time they were twelve and nine:
London, Paris, Nice, Rome, Venice, Milan, Amsterdam, The Hague, Barcelona, Madrid, Málaga, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Munich, Dublin, Brussels, Bruges, Strasbourg, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Manila, Istanbul, Mexico City, Cancún, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, La Paz, Sucre, Cochabamba, Jamaica, Tangier, Fez, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and the Rock of Gibraltar.
Chua’s husband is not Chinese, in either sense of the word. He makes occasional appearances in the book to try—ineffectually, it seems—to shield the girls. Chua has said that she wrote more about their arguments, but her husband didn’t like those passages, so they’ve been cut. Perhaps had more of his voice been included it would have provided some grit and at least the semblance of engagement. As it is, though, it’s just her. “I’m happy to be the one hated,” she tells her husband at one point, and apparently she means it.
Parenting is hard. As anyone who has gone through the process and had enough leisure (and still functioning brain cells) to reflect on it knows, a lot of it is a crapshoot. Things go wrong that you have no control over, and, on occasion, things also go right, and you have no control over those, either. The experience is scary and exhilarating and often humiliating, not because you’re disappointed in your kids, necessarily, but because you’re disappointed in yourself.
Some things do go wrong in Chua’s memoir. Her mother-in-law dies; her younger sister develops leukemia. These events get roughly the same amount of space as Coco and Pushkin, and yet they are, on their own terms, moving. More central to the story line is a screaming fit in a Moscow restaurant during which a glass is thrown. The upshot of the crisis is that Lulu is allowed to take up tennis, which Chua then proceeds to micromanage.
Chua clearly wants to end her book by claiming that she has changed. She knows enough about the conventions of memoir-writing to understand that some kind of transformation is generally required. But she can’t bring herself to do it. And so in the final pages she invokes the Founding Fathers. They, too, she tells her daughters, would not have approved of sleepovers. ♦
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/01/31/110131crbo_books_kolbert?printable=true#ixzz1Bwd7uvYT
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior
http://on.wsj.com/esA57L
Can a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids? And what happens when they fight back?
By AMY CHUA
A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:
View Full Image
CAU cover
Erin Patrice O'Brien for The Wall Street Journal
Amy Chua with her daughters, Louisa and Sophia, at their home in New Haven, Conn.
CAU cover
CAU cover
• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin.
I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I'm also using the term "Western parents" loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.
Ideas Market
The Tiger Mother Responds to Readers
Chua's Daughter Sophia Explains What Life is Really With her 'Tiger Mom'
An Asian Father's GIft: Permission to Fail
Ms. Chua answers questions from Journal readers who wrote in to the Ideas Market blog.
All the same, even when Western parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It's hours two and three that get tough.
When it comes to parenting, the Chinese seem to produce children who display academic excellence, musical mastery and professional success - or so the stereotype goes. WSJ's Christina Tsuei speaks to two moms raised by Chinese immigrants who share what it was like growing up and how they hope to raise their children.
More Parenting Videos
Teaching Math to Spark Creative Thinking
Can Bilingualism Make Preschoolers Smarter?
Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be "the best" students, that "academic achievement reflects successful parenting," and that if children did not excel at school then there was "a problem" and parents "were not doing their job." Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.
Journal Community
What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.
Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can't. Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me "garbage" in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn't damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn't actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.
View Full Image
chau inside
Chua family
From Ms. Chua's album: 'Mean me with Lulu in hotel room... with score taped to TV!'
chau inside
chau inside
As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.
The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty—lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent." She later told me that made her feel like garbage.)
Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, "You're lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you." By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they're not disappointed about how their kids turned out.
I've thought long and hard about how Chinese parents can get away with what they do. I think there are three big differences between the Chinese and Western parental mind-sets.
[chau inside] Chua family
Newborn Amy Chua in her mother's arms, a year after her parents arrived in the U.S.
First, I've noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.
For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. If the child comes home with a B on the test, some Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child "stupid," "worthless" or "a disgrace." Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude in the subject or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and possibly the whole school. If the child's grades do not improve, they may eventually schedule a meeting with the school principal to challenge the way the subject is being taught or to call into question the teacher's credentials.
If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.
Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)
View Full Image
chau inside
Chua family
Sophia playing at Carnegie Hall in 2007.
chau inside
chau inside
Second, Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it's probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children. (And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, putting in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating and spying on their kids.) Anyway, the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud.
By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband, Jed, actually has the opposite view. "Children don't choose their parents," he once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids." This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent.
Third, Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children's own desires and preferences. That's why Chinese daughters can't have boyfriends in high school and why Chinese kids can't go to sleepaway camp. It's also why no Chinese kid would ever dare say to their mother, "I got a part in the school play! I'm Villager Number Six. I'll have to stay after school for rehearsal every day from 3:00 to 7:00, and I'll also need a ride on weekends." God help any Chinese kid who tried that one.
Don't get me wrong: It's not that Chinese parents don't care about their children. Just the opposite. They would give up anything for their children. It's just an entirely different parenting model.
Read More
* A Cartoonist on Tiger Parenthood
* In China, Not All Practice Tough Love
* The Juggle: Are U.S. Parents Too Soft?
Here's a story in favor of coercion, Chinese-style. Lulu was about 7, still playing two instruments, and working on a piano piece called "The Little White Donkey" by the French composer Jacques Ibert. The piece is really cute—you can just imagine a little donkey ambling along a country road with its master—but it's also incredibly difficult for young players because the two hands have to keep schizophrenically different rhythms.
Lulu couldn't do it. We worked on it nonstop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over. But whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart. Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off.
"Get back to the piano now," I ordered.
"You can't make me."
"Oh yes, I can."
Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.
Jed took me aside. He told me to stop insulting Lulu—which I wasn't even doing, I was just motivating her—and that he didn't think threatening Lulu was helpful. Also, he said, maybe Lulu really just couldn't do the technique—perhaps she didn't have the coordination yet—had I considered that possibility?
"You just don't believe in her," I accused.
"That's ridiculous," Jed said scornfully. "Of course I do."
"Sophia could play the piece when she was this age."
"But Lulu and Sophia are different people," Jed pointed out.
"Oh no, not this," I said, rolling my eyes. "Everyone is special in their special own way," I mimicked sarcastically. "Even losers are special in their own special way. Well don't worry, you don't have to lift a finger. I'm willing to put in as long as it takes, and I'm happy to be the one hated. And you can be the one they adore because you make them pancakes and take them to Yankees games."
I rolled up my sleeves and went back to Lulu. I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling, but still there seemed to be only negative progress, and even I began to have doubts.
Then, out of the blue, Lulu did it. Her hands suddenly came together—her right and left hands each doing their own imperturbable thing—just like that.
Lulu realized it the same time I did. I held my breath. She tried it tentatively again. Then she played it more confidently and faster, and still the rhythm held. A moment later, she was beaming.
"Mommy, look—it's easy!" After that, she wanted to play the piece over and over and wouldn't leave the piano. That night, she came to sleep in my bed, and we snuggled and hugged, cracking each other up. When she performed "The Little White Donkey" at a recital a few weeks later, parents came up to me and said, "What a perfect piece for Lulu—it's so spunky and so her."
Journal Community
* discuss
“ I am in disbelief after reading this article. ”
—James Post
Even Jed gave me credit for that one. Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.
There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids' true interests. For their part, many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly. I think it's a misunderstanding on both sides. All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that.
Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.
—Amy Chua is a professor at Yale Law School and author of "Day of Empire" and "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability." This essay is excerpted from "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua, to be published Tuesday by the Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © 2011 by Amy Chua.
Can a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids? And what happens when they fight back?
By AMY CHUA
A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:
View Full Image
CAU cover
Erin Patrice O'Brien for The Wall Street Journal
Amy Chua with her daughters, Louisa and Sophia, at their home in New Haven, Conn.
CAU cover
CAU cover
• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin.
I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I'm also using the term "Western parents" loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.
Ideas Market
The Tiger Mother Responds to Readers
Chua's Daughter Sophia Explains What Life is Really With her 'Tiger Mom'
An Asian Father's GIft: Permission to Fail
Ms. Chua answers questions from Journal readers who wrote in to the Ideas Market blog.
All the same, even when Western parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It's hours two and three that get tough.
When it comes to parenting, the Chinese seem to produce children who display academic excellence, musical mastery and professional success - or so the stereotype goes. WSJ's Christina Tsuei speaks to two moms raised by Chinese immigrants who share what it was like growing up and how they hope to raise their children.
More Parenting Videos
Teaching Math to Spark Creative Thinking
Can Bilingualism Make Preschoolers Smarter?
Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be "the best" students, that "academic achievement reflects successful parenting," and that if children did not excel at school then there was "a problem" and parents "were not doing their job." Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.
Journal Community
What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.
Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can't. Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me "garbage" in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn't damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn't actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.
View Full Image
chau inside
Chua family
From Ms. Chua's album: 'Mean me with Lulu in hotel room... with score taped to TV!'
chau inside
chau inside
As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.
The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty—lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent." She later told me that made her feel like garbage.)
Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, "You're lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you." By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they're not disappointed about how their kids turned out.
I've thought long and hard about how Chinese parents can get away with what they do. I think there are three big differences between the Chinese and Western parental mind-sets.
[chau inside] Chua family
Newborn Amy Chua in her mother's arms, a year after her parents arrived in the U.S.
First, I've noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.
For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. If the child comes home with a B on the test, some Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child "stupid," "worthless" or "a disgrace." Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude in the subject or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and possibly the whole school. If the child's grades do not improve, they may eventually schedule a meeting with the school principal to challenge the way the subject is being taught or to call into question the teacher's credentials.
If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.
Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)
View Full Image
chau inside
Chua family
Sophia playing at Carnegie Hall in 2007.
chau inside
chau inside
Second, Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it's probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children. (And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, putting in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating and spying on their kids.) Anyway, the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud.
By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband, Jed, actually has the opposite view. "Children don't choose their parents," he once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids." This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent.
Third, Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children's own desires and preferences. That's why Chinese daughters can't have boyfriends in high school and why Chinese kids can't go to sleepaway camp. It's also why no Chinese kid would ever dare say to their mother, "I got a part in the school play! I'm Villager Number Six. I'll have to stay after school for rehearsal every day from 3:00 to 7:00, and I'll also need a ride on weekends." God help any Chinese kid who tried that one.
Don't get me wrong: It's not that Chinese parents don't care about their children. Just the opposite. They would give up anything for their children. It's just an entirely different parenting model.
Read More
* A Cartoonist on Tiger Parenthood
* In China, Not All Practice Tough Love
* The Juggle: Are U.S. Parents Too Soft?
Here's a story in favor of coercion, Chinese-style. Lulu was about 7, still playing two instruments, and working on a piano piece called "The Little White Donkey" by the French composer Jacques Ibert. The piece is really cute—you can just imagine a little donkey ambling along a country road with its master—but it's also incredibly difficult for young players because the two hands have to keep schizophrenically different rhythms.
Lulu couldn't do it. We worked on it nonstop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over. But whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart. Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off.
"Get back to the piano now," I ordered.
"You can't make me."
"Oh yes, I can."
Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.
Jed took me aside. He told me to stop insulting Lulu—which I wasn't even doing, I was just motivating her—and that he didn't think threatening Lulu was helpful. Also, he said, maybe Lulu really just couldn't do the technique—perhaps she didn't have the coordination yet—had I considered that possibility?
"You just don't believe in her," I accused.
"That's ridiculous," Jed said scornfully. "Of course I do."
"Sophia could play the piece when she was this age."
"But Lulu and Sophia are different people," Jed pointed out.
"Oh no, not this," I said, rolling my eyes. "Everyone is special in their special own way," I mimicked sarcastically. "Even losers are special in their own special way. Well don't worry, you don't have to lift a finger. I'm willing to put in as long as it takes, and I'm happy to be the one hated. And you can be the one they adore because you make them pancakes and take them to Yankees games."
I rolled up my sleeves and went back to Lulu. I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling, but still there seemed to be only negative progress, and even I began to have doubts.
Then, out of the blue, Lulu did it. Her hands suddenly came together—her right and left hands each doing their own imperturbable thing—just like that.
Lulu realized it the same time I did. I held my breath. She tried it tentatively again. Then she played it more confidently and faster, and still the rhythm held. A moment later, she was beaming.
"Mommy, look—it's easy!" After that, she wanted to play the piece over and over and wouldn't leave the piano. That night, she came to sleep in my bed, and we snuggled and hugged, cracking each other up. When she performed "The Little White Donkey" at a recital a few weeks later, parents came up to me and said, "What a perfect piece for Lulu—it's so spunky and so her."
Journal Community
* discuss
“ I am in disbelief after reading this article. ”
—James Post
Even Jed gave me credit for that one. Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.
There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids' true interests. For their part, many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly. I think it's a misunderstanding on both sides. All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that.
Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.
—Amy Chua is a professor at Yale Law School and author of "Day of Empire" and "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability." This essay is excerpted from "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua, to be published Tuesday by the Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © 2011 by Amy Chua.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Hank Moody's letter
I'm writing you a letter. That's right a good old fashioned letter. It's a lost art, really. Shit.
I have a confession to make, I didn't like you very much at first.
You were just this annoying little blob. You smelled nice, most of the time, but you didn't seem to have much interest in me, which I of course found vaguely insulting.
It was just you and your mom against the world. Funny how some things never change.
So I cruised along doing my thing, acting the fool, not really understanding how being a parent changes you.
And I don't remember the exact moment everything changed. I just know that it did.
One minute I was impenetrable. Nothing could touch me. The next, my heart was somehow beating outside my chest, exposed to the elements.
Loving you has been the most profound, intense, painful experience of my life. In fact it's been almost too much to bare.
As your father, I made a silent vow to protect you from the world. Never realizing I was the one who'd end up hurting you the most.
When I flash forward my heart breaks, mostly because I can't imagine you speaking of me with any sort of pride, how could you?
Your father is a child in a man's body, he cares for nothing and everything at the same time.
Noble in thought, weak in action. Something has to change, something has to give.
It's getting dark, too dark to see.
I have a confession to make, I didn't like you very much at first.
You were just this annoying little blob. You smelled nice, most of the time, but you didn't seem to have much interest in me, which I of course found vaguely insulting.
It was just you and your mom against the world. Funny how some things never change.
So I cruised along doing my thing, acting the fool, not really understanding how being a parent changes you.
And I don't remember the exact moment everything changed. I just know that it did.
One minute I was impenetrable. Nothing could touch me. The next, my heart was somehow beating outside my chest, exposed to the elements.
Loving you has been the most profound, intense, painful experience of my life. In fact it's been almost too much to bare.
As your father, I made a silent vow to protect you from the world. Never realizing I was the one who'd end up hurting you the most.
When I flash forward my heart breaks, mostly because I can't imagine you speaking of me with any sort of pride, how could you?
Your father is a child in a man's body, he cares for nothing and everything at the same time.
Noble in thought, weak in action. Something has to change, something has to give.
It's getting dark, too dark to see.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Nonsense
Classifeeds
NICE HORSE available. Unwanted gift, just don't look in the face. Collection only
Top Tips
COMMUTERS. Turn your boring train journey into a madcap crime caper by not buying a valid ticket.
Top Tips
SUPERMARKETS. Add a personal touch to self-checkout machines by assigning a member of staff to assist.
DCALTWIT-My dyslexic girlfriend loves Dildo Baggins
wikiballs The Ancient Olympics featured a "Speed Penis Cleaning" competition which was cancelled due to the amount of wankers it attracted.
DCALTWIT -WOW! Just got a scary text from g/f - "I've got something difficult to tell you and I don't know how to say it - Ken Dodds dads dog's died"
DCALTWIT My mate's dating twins and has difficulty telling them apart - I don't know why, Julie is the blonde and Trevor is the one with a cock
Classifeeds
Single M 49 seeks attractive F 23-27 to come round and finish the ironing. And a cup of tea would be nice while you're up.
Classifeeds
MEN avoid the embarrassment of premature ejaculation by falling asleep before sex.
Classifeeds
THINKING of travelling abroad to "find yourself"? Let me save you three years: you're a cunt.
Classifeeds
NICE HORSE available. Unwanted gift, just don't look in the face. Collection only
Classifeeds
MONOPOLY: 2011 Edition. Almost impossible to buy a house; the money stays with the bank, and the jail is full.
Classifeeds
Lost, one dog with no legs, but good swimmer. Answers to the name of 'Clever Dick'
Classifeeds
FOR SALE: Bonnie Tyler's car. It runs ok but every now and then it falls apart.
Classifeeds
DOG KENNEL, Approx 80' long x 40' tall. Suit medium sized dog. £60. 01907 338 4999, if dog answers, hang up.
Classifeeds
RACIST? But racist in a nice way? We meet every week at the Village Hall in Bannock, Bannock Nice Nazis Guild. Almost all welcome
Classifeeds M - 37, looking for pussy. Her name is Tibbles, have you seen her? If so, please get in touch.
Classifeeds LOST. Copy of this morning's 'Metro' newspaper. Left it on the tube at about 8.30 am. £25 reward. Tel: 07941 309 0999.
Top Tips
FACEBOOK USERS. Negate the privacy risks by posting only drivel and toss. /via
Classifeeds
REQUIRED IMMEDIATELY someone skilled at opening bags of peanut.. Oh bollocks!.. someone skilled at hoovering.
Classifeeds
AVAILABLE FOR HIRE. Sign Language expert. Felt my input in last job was falling on deaf ears. Call, er, text me.
Classifeeds
WANTED; managerial job at a Premiership club that aren't sh*t or run by porn barrons. Contact M.O'Neill
Classifeeds
PET LOVER Friendly F, 37, recently widowed, seeks fit, lively alert M, 35-45 with no fear of commitment or lions.
Classifeeds
For sale, one car with a full tank of petrol, will swap for detached house in Chelsea or kensington.
Classifeeds
FOR SALE 5,000 copies of Guess Who? The Burkha Edition. I got them from a contact in France where it was banned
NICE HORSE available. Unwanted gift, just don't look in the face. Collection only
Top Tips
COMMUTERS. Turn your boring train journey into a madcap crime caper by not buying a valid ticket.
Top Tips
SUPERMARKETS. Add a personal touch to self-checkout machines by assigning a member of staff to assist.
DCALTWIT-My dyslexic girlfriend loves Dildo Baggins
wikiballs The Ancient Olympics featured a "Speed Penis Cleaning" competition which was cancelled due to the amount of wankers it attracted.
DCALTWIT -WOW! Just got a scary text from g/f - "I've got something difficult to tell you and I don't know how to say it - Ken Dodds dads dog's died"
DCALTWIT My mate's dating twins and has difficulty telling them apart - I don't know why, Julie is the blonde and Trevor is the one with a cock
Classifeeds
Single M 49 seeks attractive F 23-27 to come round and finish the ironing. And a cup of tea would be nice while you're up.
Classifeeds
MEN avoid the embarrassment of premature ejaculation by falling asleep before sex.
Classifeeds
THINKING of travelling abroad to "find yourself"? Let me save you three years: you're a cunt.
Classifeeds
NICE HORSE available. Unwanted gift, just don't look in the face. Collection only
Classifeeds
MONOPOLY: 2011 Edition. Almost impossible to buy a house; the money stays with the bank, and the jail is full.
Classifeeds
Lost, one dog with no legs, but good swimmer. Answers to the name of 'Clever Dick'
Classifeeds
FOR SALE: Bonnie Tyler's car. It runs ok but every now and then it falls apart.
Classifeeds
DOG KENNEL, Approx 80' long x 40' tall. Suit medium sized dog. £60. 01907 338 4999, if dog answers, hang up.
Classifeeds
RACIST? But racist in a nice way? We meet every week at the Village Hall in Bannock, Bannock Nice Nazis Guild. Almost all welcome
Classifeeds M - 37, looking for pussy. Her name is Tibbles, have you seen her? If so, please get in touch.
Classifeeds LOST. Copy of this morning's 'Metro' newspaper. Left it on the tube at about 8.30 am. £25 reward. Tel: 07941 309 0999.
Top Tips
FACEBOOK USERS. Negate the privacy risks by posting only drivel and toss. /via
Classifeeds
REQUIRED IMMEDIATELY someone skilled at opening bags of peanut.. Oh bollocks!.. someone skilled at hoovering.
Classifeeds
AVAILABLE FOR HIRE. Sign Language expert. Felt my input in last job was falling on deaf ears. Call, er, text me.
Classifeeds
WANTED; managerial job at a Premiership club that aren't sh*t or run by porn barrons. Contact M.O'Neill
Classifeeds
PET LOVER Friendly F, 37, recently widowed, seeks fit, lively alert M, 35-45 with no fear of commitment or lions.
Classifeeds
For sale, one car with a full tank of petrol, will swap for detached house in Chelsea or kensington.
Classifeeds
FOR SALE 5,000 copies of Guess Who? The Burkha Edition. I got them from a contact in France where it was banned
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Sunday, January 09, 2011
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Ouagadougou
Another windfall!
This woman just lost her husband and she is apparently about to die herself, but she has chosen me to spread the word of God, with the $8.5m dollars she is going to give me. The money is in a bank in Ouagadougou which has really got to be the coolest named place in the world. Unfortunately, in all good conscience i wouldn't leave myself in charge of an umbrella, and just in case there actually is a god, I certainly don't want to nick his dosh, but if you are indeed a person of the cloth, or in need of $8.5m the original letter from the tragic, insanely generous woman is below.
daisymercy0001@gmail.com
Ouagadougou gets a bit hectic on Tuesday afternoons.
This woman just lost her husband and she is apparently about to die herself, but she has chosen me to spread the word of God, with the $8.5m dollars she is going to give me. The money is in a bank in Ouagadougou which has really got to be the coolest named place in the world. Unfortunately, in all good conscience i wouldn't leave myself in charge of an umbrella, and just in case there actually is a god, I certainly don't want to nick his dosh, but if you are indeed a person of the cloth, or in need of $8.5m the original letter from the tragic, insanely generous woman is below.
daisymercy0001@gmail.com
Dear God's elect, I am writing this mail to you with heavy tears In my eyes and great sorrow in my heart, My Name is Mrs. Daisy mercy, and I am contacting you from my country Tunisia I want to tell you this because I don't have any other option than to tell you as I was touched to open up to you, I married to Mr. Daisy Brown who worked with Tunisia embassy in Burkina Faso for nine years before he died in the year 2005.We were married for eleven years without a child. He died after a fatal accident that took his life. Since his death I decided not to remarry, When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of US$ 8.5m (Eight Million Five hundred Thousand Dollars) in a bank in Ouagadougou the capital city of Burkina Faso in west Africa Presently this money is still in bank. He made this money available for exportation of Gold from Burkina Faso mining. Recently, My Doctor told me that I would not last for the period of seven months due to cancer problem. The one that disturbs me most is my stroke sickness. Having known my condition I decided to hand you over this money to take care of the less-privileged people, you will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct herein. I want you to take 30 Percent of the total money for your personal use While 70% of the money will go to charity" people in the street and helping the orphanage. I grew up as an Orphan and I don't have anybody as my family member, just to Endeavour that the house of God is maintained. Am doing this so that God will forgive my sins and accept my soul because these sicknesses have suffered me so much. As soon as I receive your reply I shall give you the contact of the bank in Burkina Faso and I will also instruct the Bank Manger to issue you an authority letter that will prove you the present beneficiary of the money in the bank that is if you assure me that you will act accordingly as I Stated herein. Always reply to my alternative for security purposes Hoping to receive your reply: From Mrs. Mercy Daisy |
Ouagadougou gets a bit hectic on Tuesday afternoons.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Monday, December 27, 2010
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Down
Life is full of fucking surprises,just when you thought you had reached rock bottom, it turns out there is indeed further down to go!
Friday, December 24, 2010
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
Friday, December 17, 2010
Shame
Shame on Hong Kong
RTHK-
Two elderly street sleepers have been found dead as temperatures in Hong Kong plunged to their lowest in December for 11 years. One was lying unconscious in a park in Ngau Tau Kok, while the body of the other was discovered in Kwun Tong. Temperatures dipped around Hong Kong, with the mercury plunging to minus-three Centigrade on Tai Mo Shan. The Observatory, said that a low of 5.8 degrees was recorded there this morning.
RTHK-
Two elderly street sleepers have been found dead as temperatures in Hong Kong plunged to their lowest in December for 11 years. One was lying unconscious in a park in Ngau Tau Kok, while the body of the other was discovered in Kwun Tong. Temperatures dipped around Hong Kong, with the mercury plunging to minus-three Centigrade on Tai Mo Shan. The Observatory, said that a low of 5.8 degrees was recorded there this morning.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Jokes- (via Giles)
A Primary Teacher explains to her class that she is a Liverpool fan.
She asks her students to raise their hands if they too are Liverpool fans.
Everyone in the class raises their hand except one little girl.
The teacher looks at the girl with surprise and says, 'Mary, why didn't you raise your hand?'
'Because I'm not a Liverpool fan,' she replied.
The teacher, still shocked, asked, 'Well, if you are not a Liverpool fan, then who are you a fan of?'
'I am a Man United fan, and proud of it,' Mary replied.
The teacher could not believe her ears. 'Mary, why, pray tell, why are you a Man United fan?'
'Because my mum is a Man United fan, and my dad is a Man United fan, so I'm a Man United fan too!'
'Well,' said the teacher in an obviously annoyed tone, 'that is no reason for you to be a Man United fan.
You don't have to be just like your parents all of the time… What if your mum was a prostitute and your dad was a drug addict, what would you be then?'
'Then,' Mary smiled, 'I'd be a Liverpool fan.
An Australian, an Irishman and a Scouser are in a bar.
They're staring at another man sitting on his own at a table in the corner.
He's so familiar, and not recognising him is driving them mad.
They stare and stare, until suddenly the Irishman twigs: 'My God, it's Jesus!'
Sure enough, it is Jesus, nursing a pint.
Thrilled, they send him over a pint of Guinness, a pint of Fosters and a
pint of bitter.
Jesus accepts the drinks, smiles over at the three men, and drinks the pints slowly, one after another.
After he's finished the drinks, Jesus approaches the trio.
He reaches for the hand of the Irishman and shakes it, thanking him for the Guinness.
When he lets go, the Irishman gives a cry of amazement: 'My God! The arthritis I've had for 30 years is gone.It's a miracle!'
Jesus then shakes the Aussie's hand, thanking him for the lager.
As he lets go, the man's eyes widen in shock.
'Strewth mate, the bad back I've had all my life is completely gone! It's A Miracle.' Jesus then approaches the Scouser who says,
'Back off, mate, I'm on disability benefit.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Anarchy in the UK
AAnarchy in the UK as reported by 3 Dailys.
The Star gets its priorities right as ever!
Sunday, December 05, 2010
Time and space
Being able to contemplate our own existence is probably man's greatest ability. Recent discoveries in quantum mechanics and astrophysics probably our greatest achievements, at least since we landed on the moon, or sent voyager off into the stars. I say 'we' in the same way as I say 'we' had a good win last night if Liverpool have managed to win for a change. These discoveries have had bugger all to do with me, and never will. Instead I am quite happy to hang onto the coat-tails of the great and the good in the name of mankind.
Descartes was way before his time when he said 'I think therefore I am' this simple statement could be the ultimate definition of what it means to be human. Philosophy died between 50 and 100 years ago overtaken by physics, rendering philosophy's 'ultimate' questions irrelevant and redundant. 'Who am I? Why am I here?' are still questions that remain unanswered, but the questions seem obsolete and unnecessary. Obviously the answers are personal, there for the individual to define for themselves, may it be father, mother, millionaire, to serve god....etc
Yet our understanding of our physical world and our origins and the origins of everything has increased so far, within our lifetimes that it is incomprehensible. At the time of Plato and the ancient thinkers, mankind took a small hop forward by using logic to examine our surroundings, a thousand years later we took a skip at the time of Copernicus with our understanding of the planets, and a jump with Darwin's Theory of gravity. We took another jump last century thanks to Einstein's Theory of relativity and have continued making huge strides ever since, but it is the last 10 years that we have made that great leap forward.
Over the last ten years we have confirmed how the universe was formed, The Big Bang theory has been around for a lot longer, but it is only now that we have been able to fully explain it.
The universe began as a single point, outside the confines of space and time. A miniscule point 15 billions years ago, a singularity, where the accepted rules of physics did not apply. That point created the conditions for it to spontaneously come into existence. All this talk of being outside the confines of space and time and outside the accepted rules of physics have until recently sounded more like sci fi than real science, but it has been the huge step forward in Quantum mechanics that have enabled us to understand this paradox.
I do not pretend to fully comprehend all of this, but the gist is clear. Deep within each atom, and deep is the operative word we eventually reach the level of quarks, the strangeness of which is mind blowing. Under a microscope we cannot see quarks, we cannot capture them, not in the conventional sense anyway. It's a little like knowing something is there, but each time you look it disappears! But we can predict where they will be, and are able to trace their path. Quarks don't follow our usual understanding of physics, they behave in ways which are physically impossible , yet everything in the universe is comprised of quarks contained within neutrons, atoms, etc.
It has been the ability to match quantum theory and Einstein's theory of relativity, and a few other theories which eluded scientists, but no longer-'M' Theory is the closest we have come to the Holy Grail of 'The Theory of Everything'. Simply put, each of these theories has now come together separately and at times overlapping to produce a 'map' of the universe and space and time itself. This theory leaves open the existence of other universes apart from our own universe, and that thought is truly staggering.
It is that understanding of our universe, from the quantum level through to the beginnings of our universe and beyond that is surely our greatest achievement. The idea that our puny, miniscule selves are now able to comprehend our place in the whole scheme of things is remarkable for an ape like being. We still have much to learn, and in time we may have a better understanding of other facets of the universe that may at the moment be just too beyond our capabilities. As a monkey may not understand the concept of calculus(neither do I, but I know it involves maths!), there will obviously still be concepts alien to ourselves. I think these may involve space and time, and maybe even our own existence.
All of this doesn't preclude the existence of god or gods. No matter how far we go back scientists may never answer the final question-Why? God could be a small child playing with his chemistry set, and our universe his experiment. A nun once said to me 25 years ago, 'Faith is all you need to believe in God, to prove his existence is not necessary if you have faith that he is there'. Faith is a personal choice.
I have recently begun to question Richard Dawkins' motives, his only role seems to be to prove that God doesn't exist, and in that sense he is missing the point. His questioning the bible's authenticity is meaningless, those that take it literally will always take it literally, no matter what is proved. Richard Dawkins has become what he has fought against-a zealot! The control of religion is a political question, and has no place in science.
Do these findings affect us in our everyday lives? In reality, no! But the knowledge and understanding that we now have about matter, particles, atoms etc may well have practical uses in the coming years.
I find it comforting to think that I have billions and trillions of unpredictable quarks that make up my physical being. In some ways, knowing that these same parts of me will continue into eternity is comforting, and who knows may retain some impression of me beyond my understanding.
Knowing that I am an infinitesimally small part of the universe(s) makes me worry less about my rent!
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