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surfguy
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Joined: 13 Apr 2006
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 Posted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 8:09 pm Post subject: |
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| Well I spent some time in Tblisi and also some of the villages while driving from Armenia into Georgia and over to Azerbaijan...the food was nothing special. Indian cuisine is fare more exotic and colorful from my experience. Stalin was a paranoid man so I doubt that he would stray far from his norm. We deviated to foods of India...remote topic for a thread devoted to Stalin. In his day probably we'd have been shot for this |
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StephenB.
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| Posted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 9:27 pm Post subject: |
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Yeah, I'm sure Stalin wasn't the type to favor foreign cuisine. He was a guy who tried to divide the country and destroy ancient cultures.
There is a new book out about the early days of Stalin called, "Young Stalin" by Simon Serag Montefiore. The author says, "The son of a drunken cobbler and a strong-willed mother, Josef Djugashvili, as he was originally called, was raised in conflict. His Father, known as, 'Crazy Beso', vented his fury on both his wife and his son."
I found this statement from the author about Stalin interesting, "His battle squads staged endless robberies to fund Lenin's party or buy more guns, even if that meant holding up a train carrying miners' wages-the very workers the party claimed it was defending."
Stalin had 160 aliases during the time that he was organizing heists, rotating in and out of tsarist prisons or internal exile. Crazy guy!  |
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surfguy
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| Posted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 9:54 pm Post subject: |
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| yes...real loser he was...which is the the reason our for fathers here...gave us powers of impeachment...for high crimes and misdemeanors. A speeding ticket is a misdemeanor...Our president technically can be impaeached for that. And why...because we are supposed to be a society based on morals and values. Of course we all know the realities...but still we should all strive to be the best citizens and people that we can be. Power corrupts...but often and in Stalin's case...so many time the corrupted seize power. Hugo Chavez, Hitler, Stalin, Clinton, Musselini, Pinochet, Castro, Vicente Fox, Chirac, Schroeder, etc etc |
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StephenB.
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| Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2007 2:06 am Post subject: |
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| surfguy wrote: | | yes...real loser he was...which is the the reason our for fathers here...gave us powers of impeachment...for high crimes and misdemeanors. A speeding ticket is a misdemeanor...Our president technically can be impaeached for that. And why...because we are supposed to be a society based on morals and values. Of course we all know the realities...but still we should all strive to be the best citizens and people that we can be. Power corrupts...but often and in Stalin's case...so many time the corrupted seize power. Hugo Chavez, Hitler, Stalin, Clinton, Musselini, Pinochet, Castro, Vicente Fox, Chirac, Schroeder, etc etc |
Also, in order to make the citizens to obey they have all used fear through military force or some special unit that protects a leader, especially, Stalin, Hitler, Cecescu, Musharrief, Adi Amin, Taliban regime etc...It amazes me how easily a country can be taken over by a nut and the next day start excuting people left and right. I remember when the Ayatollah Khomeini took power over from the Shah and then took Americans as hostages, but the whole Iranian society was changed within a couple of months. Special units were in the streets enforcing the Sharia law concerning appropriate Muslim clothes, no shaving of beards, and stoning and public hangings. He took Iranian society back 150 years. That country has been back and forth with progressive leaders and tyrants in the last twenty years. |
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surfguy
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Joined: 13 Apr 2006
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| Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2007 2:40 am Post subject: |
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| StephenB. wrote: | | surfguy wrote: | | yes...real loser he was...which is the the reason our for fathers here...gave us powers of impeachment...for high crimes and misdemeanors. A speeding ticket is a misdemeanor...Our president technically can be impaeached for that. And why...because we are supposed to be a society based on morals and values. Of course we all know the realities...but still we should all strive to be the best citizens and people that we can be. Power corrupts...but often and in Stalin's case...so many time the corrupted seize power. Hugo Chavez, Hitler, Stalin, Clinton, Musselini, Pinochet, Castro, Vicente Fox, Chirac, Schroeder, etc etc |
Also, in order to make the citizens to obey they have all used fear through military force or some special unit that protects a leader, especially, Stalin, Hitler, Cecescu, Musharrief, Adi Amin, Taliban regime etc...It amazes me how easily a country can be taken over by a nut and the next day start excuting people left and right. I remember when the Ayatollah Khomeini took power over from the Shah and then took Americans as hostages, but the whole Iranian society was changed within a couple of months. Special units were in the streets enforcing the Sharia law concerning appropriate Muslim clothes, no shaving of beards, and stoning and public hangings. He took Iranian society back 150 years. That country has been back and forth with progressive leaders and tyrants in the last twenty years. |
Well I was in iran in 2005...and I will say this...the feeling I got was that the people there are wishing...yes wishing for us to come in and do away with the regime there. Look to anywhere in the world where there is conflict today...odds are it is due to muslim extremism. India, Pakistan, Philipines, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, Darfur, Somalia, Ethiopia, etc etc...And hate to say it...But Iran started it all in 1973 |
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StephenB.
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| Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2007 3:09 am Post subject: |
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| Plus giving weapons to Muslim countries regardless if they are friendly with them or not, anything to beat the infidels. Saudi Arabians are wolves in sheep clothing too. If the world didn't rely on their oil they would be still living in tents and warring with each other on the sand dunes. |
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surfguy
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| Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2007 3:29 am Post subject: |
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| StephenB. wrote: | | Plus giving weapons to Muslim countries regardless if they are friendly with them or not, anything to beat the infidels. Saudi Arabians are wolves in sheep clothing too. If the world didn't rely on their oil they would be still living in tents and warring with each other on the sand dunes. |
absolutely they are...half the Saudi family is radical...and the other half needs us to stay in power and to protect them. Something is going to happen though...go figure we are in Iraq. |
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StephenB.
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| Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2007 3:49 am Post subject: |
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| surfguy wrote: | | StephenB. wrote: | | Plus giving weapons to Muslim countries regardless if they are friendly with them or not, anything to beat the infidels. Saudi Arabians are wolves in sheep clothing too. If the world didn't rely on their oil they would be still living in tents and warring with each other on the sand dunes. |
absolutely they are...half the Saudi family is radical...and the other half needs us to stay in power and to protect them. Something is going to happen though...go figure we are in Iraq. |
Finacially we have too much money tied up with the Saudi's, it's a sick relationship we need to break away from them and come up with some other resources other than oil. I think the whole plan is to exhaust the oil from the Middle East and then use our own up. |
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StephenB.
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| Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2007 4:01 am Post subject: |
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| Getting back to Stalin, does anyone know what happened to his parents after he became the communist leader of Russia? I was just curious if he ignored them especially is mother who tried to push him into the religious life. |
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surfguy
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| Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2007 5:23 am Post subject: |
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| StephenB. wrote: | | Getting back to Stalin, does anyone know what happened to his parents after he became the communist leader of Russia? I was just curious if he ignored them especially is mother who tried to push him into the religious life. |
Didn't his dad die early on? Anyways you are right about us using up thier oil first...I've been saying this for a while. Thing is oil is about plastic...not fuel...so how do you replace that and with what? |
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surfguy
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| Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2007 11:59 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | But it was his second book, a sweeping, almost novelistic treatment of the Revolution -- "The People's Tragedy" -- that made his public name. Some academic critics thought he stumbled with his next foray into more popular work -- "Natasha's Dance" -- an excursion through centuries of Russian culture, but they will be hard-pressed to fault much in his latest, equally ambitious if more time-constrained study of the Soviet psyche.
Figes begins with the generation of 1917 and the Spartan, ascetic family relations of committed Bolsheviks. Officially the ideological drive was to break down the intimacies of parent-child connections and foster dedication to the collective and to the project of building socialism. Hearing her parents talk about "party construction," the young Yelena Bonner, who would later become the wife of Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, thought the party built houses! For Bolsheviks there would be no distinction between private and public, and personal interests would coincide with those of society. Yet privacy and intimacy could not be eliminated, and in response people put on a public mask behind which they hid their personal and private feelings. The whole society was made up of whisperers, both those who spoke to one another sotto voce (here, whisperer is expressed by the Russian shepchushchy) and those who secretly "whispered" to the police, reporting on their friends, relatives and neighbors (here, the Russian sheptun carries the meaning of informer).
During the early years of Stalin's rule, Soviet society was turned upside down. Proletarians were elevated; so-called "bourgeois specialists" -- trained professionals, engineers and economists, were arrested; and the most productive peasants, condemned as "kulaks," were driven from their homes and farms, which were turned over to the poorest villagers. Following the example of the infamous Pavlik Morozov, children denounced their parents. People born into formerly privileged or newly repressed classes concealed their social origins or the fact that a parent had been arrested. Young people strove to Bolshevize themselves, eager to take part in the furious struggle to industrialize the country. Fear mixed with enthusiasm, and those who accepted the need to use violence to break with the old and build the new suppressed their emotional attachments to family and their empathy for the victims of the state's ambitions. |
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StephenB.
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| Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2007 8:00 pm Post subject: |
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| surfguy wrote: | | Quote: | But it was his second book, a sweeping, almost novelistic treatment of the Revolution -- "The People's Tragedy" -- that made his public name. Some academic critics thought he stumbled with his next foray into more popular work -- "Natasha's Dance" -- an excursion through centuries of Russian culture, but they will be hard-pressed to fault much in his latest, equally ambitious if more time-constrained study of the Soviet psyche.
Figes begins with the generation of 1917 and the Spartan, ascetic family relations of committed Bolsheviks. Officially the ideological drive was to break down the intimacies of parent-child connections and foster dedication to the collective and to the project of building socialism. Hearing her parents talk about "party construction," the young Yelena Bonner, who would later become the wife of Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, thought the party built houses! For Bolsheviks there would be no distinction between private and public, and personal interests would coincide with those of society. Yet privacy and intimacy could not be eliminated, and in response people put on a public mask behind which they hid their personal and private feelings. The whole society was made up of whisperers, both those who spoke to one another sotto voce (here, whisperer is expressed by the Russian shepchushchy) and those who secretly "whispered" to the police, reporting on their friends, relatives and neighbors (here, the Russian sheptun carries the meaning of informer).
During the early years of Stalin's rule, Soviet society was turned upside down. Proletarians were elevated; so-called "bourgeois specialists" -- trained professionals, engineers and economists, were arrested; and the most productive peasants, condemned as "kulaks," were driven from their homes and farms, which were turned over to the poorest villagers. Following the example of the infamous Pavlik Morozov, children denounced their parents. People born into formerly privileged or newly repressed classes concealed their social origins or the fact that a parent had been arrested. Young people strove to Bolshevize themselves, eager to take part in the furious struggle to industrialize the country. Fear mixed with enthusiasm, and those who accepted the need to use violence to break with the old and build the new suppressed their emotional attachments to family and their empathy for the victims of the state's ambitions. |
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That's why they had a bunch of turkeys running the country after the Czar was killed off and the educated class was wiped out or went into exile. It's like having the Klan's men running a country killing everyone that they hated. Russians say that it's a democratic society that is ruining their country, however, it was years of an infrastructure that collapsed long before Gorbachev took power. Instead of enforcing laws that would have prevented the oligarchs to take power they let these people take control thinking that they were going to help the little people, but instead took care of their friends and families. That's what happens when you wipe out the old educated class who would have created jobs for the Russians, however, you had old KGB and gov't employees who already had special priviledges jump into roles of leadership thus creating this oligarch system of corruption and chaos. Moscow and St. Petersburg are the only Russian cities that are really seeing any foreign investments and financial growth while the rest of Russian smaller cities are dealing with no money or corrupt politicians taking advantage of people. That's why you have some people who want the old system of Communism back because they knew that this would have never happened. |
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surfguy
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| Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2007 11:05 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | We're floundering in a quagmire in Iraq. Our strategy is flawed, and it's too late to change it. Our material resources have been squandered, our best people killed, and our reputation around the world is circling the drain. We must withdraw immediately.
No, I'm not channeling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. I'm channeling Osama bin Laden, for whom the war in Iraq has been a catastrophe.
Al Qaeda had little presence in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein. But once he was toppled, Al Qaeda's chieftains decided to make Iraq the central front in the global jihad against the Great Satan.
"The most important and serious issue today for the whole world is this third world war, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition began against the Islamic nation," Osama bin Laden said in an audio tape posted on Islamic Web sites in December, 2004. "It is raging in the land of the Two Rivers. The world's millstone and pillar is Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate."
Jihadis, money and weapons were poured into Iraq from all over the Moslem world. All for naught. Al Qaeda has been defeated in Iraq. |
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StephenB.
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| Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2007 11:21 pm Post subject: |
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| surfguy wrote: | | Quote: | We're floundering in a quagmire in Iraq. Our strategy is flawed, and it's too late to change it. Our material resources have been squandered, our best people killed, and our reputation around the world is circling the drain. We must withdraw immediately.
No, I'm not channeling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. I'm channeling Osama bin Laden, for whom the war in Iraq has been a catastrophe.
Al Qaeda had little presence in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein. But once he was toppled, Al Qaeda's chieftains decided to make Iraq the central front in the global jihad against the Great Satan.
"The most important and serious issue today for the whole world is this third world war, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition began against the Islamic nation," Osama bin Laden said in an audio tape posted on Islamic Web sites in December, 2004. "It is raging in the land of the Two Rivers. The world's millstone and pillar is Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate."
Jihadis, money and weapons were poured into Iraq from all over the Moslem world. All for naught. Al Qaeda has been defeated in Iraq. |
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That's why we can't be cordial to these Muslim states. Sanctions must be in place, but everyone must be on the same page though. There seems to be one country including ours in the past who gives arms to the enemy. The Christian/Judeo people need to stick together and fight the infidels which are the Muslims instead of the other way around. It appears that the Muslims can't live with other people even among themselves they are constantly fighting. This is where the United States and all the other western countries need to stick together and stop looking at the Middle East for oil, but instead come up with some other alternatives instead of oil. Let the Muslims kill themselves off because their values and traditions are different than ours. It's a harsh statement, but that's how I feel about them. |
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surfguy
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Joined: 13 Apr 2006
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| Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2007 11:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Well big changes in the next 3-3 years...Iran will fall. Iraq will stabilize, Oil Prices will drop, Eastern European countries...Bulgaria, Ukraine, Georgia, Romania...etc etcwill all come into the fold of Europe/Nato....times will be posperous there, The stock market will will stabilize, Real Estate will be up on the rise again..but more stable. The dollar will rise...and there will be a man in the US presidency. Russia's wealth will also start to spread outside of Moscow...and things will improve there as well. And the world will be at a peace never seen before. And as I saw when I was in Afghanistan...there will be golf courses in the valleys there! |
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