BE WARNED. THIS REVIEW HAS MAJOR SPOILERS AFTER THE FOLD. SO DO NOT CLICK IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE
Word of the day
1 hour ago
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Peasant kissing a soldier of the "Army of Liberation" on a Soviet propaganda poster issued after the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland. |
The greatest difficulty in dealing with Russia is this: Russia lies. This blanket assertion sounds like a slogan from the Cold War, and yet it's the only one that does justice to reality. ... Today not only do I write that the country of my birth has become an empire of lies, but that Russia itself is a lie.
...only one thing matters: who is strong enough to impose his truth on his opponent. Putin actually has nothing against NATO, he had initially wanted to join it himself. Now he only claims the right to do the same as all big players of geopolitics in his opinion do, the right to betray and murder. Vladimir Putin and his followers didn't encounter these rules by reading philosophical texts. They learned them on the streets.
... The Putinist only believes in one thing: lying as a way of life. Whoever grew up, like Vladimir Putin or I, in a large Soviet city learned this already at primary school. You get surrounded by a group of bullies. One of them says: "you ratted me out to the teacher", although it's the first time you see him. If you say "that's not true" you get beaten up immediately. If you apologise you will first be mocked. And then beaten.
Cries of victimhood coupled with a clenched fist is not an unknown gesture. Putin's Russia, which jumps into the ring like a world power, complains about Western intrigues. The Kremlin is well aware of the weaknesses of the Russian state, its economy and its military. But in a street-fight one hides one's weaknesses. Your opponent should think you are strong. Your opponent should piss his pants. He should believe that if he doubts your lie you'll punch his teeth out. He can de-escalate, as politicians the world over have been trying with Putin. He can call out: 'Peace!' - with the effect that you will also shout 'Peace!' - and then strike.
If the victim doesn't defend himself against the lies he also won't defend himself against the violence. He will be beaten up, and the attacker has already won from the moment that his victim didn't call him a liar.
Needless to say Russia isn't a nation of thugs who ruthlessly shoot down passenger planes. Needless to say there is another Russia - more than one in fact. But the diversity of Russia has been banished into internal and external exile. As long as the illusion holds, the millions of potato farmers, mathematics teachers, bank cashiers or publishing editors can achieve just as little politically as those who, like me, have left Russia. Only one voice is now heard in Russia. It is the voice of the collective Putin which leaves you speechless.
...The postmodern concept of plurality of truth is being riddled with bullets in Ukraine. Putin is imposing a return to reality. Realpolitik is being displaced by the real, by the old-fashioned adventure of naming things. The luxury of relative truths and devalued values is gone. In Russia the lies have triumphed once again, and once again only simple, black-and-white language does justice to this drama. Solzhenitsyn wrote it thus: "Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence".
The report by the Dutch safety board said that more than 120 objects, “mostly metal fragments”, were found in the body of the first officer, who had sustained “multiple fractures”. When Dutch experts identified the captain’s body they found it had already “undergone an external and internal examination to remove foreign objects”.
Despite apparent attempts to remove shrapnel, “hundreds of metal objects were found”, the report said, as well as bone fractures and other injuries.
Among the fragments of missile shrapnel examined, two were in the shape of a bow tie, which the Dutch board found to be characteristic of a particular type of Buk missile warhead. However, the Russian manufacturer had earlier denied that any such fragments were found, and insisted an older Buk model was used, one that was no longer in service in the Russian armed forces.
Nick de Larrinaga, Europe Editor for IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly, noted that Russia has put forth differing claims, including а Russian Defense Ministry claim that Ukrainian Su-25 jet shot down the plane.
He also dismissed Russian assertions about the 9M38 or 9M38M1 missiles, saying evidence showed both were in service and in Russian military stockpiles as of July 2014.
"It is worth remembering that Russia has a long history of disinformation over its involvement in Ukraine, initially the country denied its troops had invaded Crimea -- something Russia now acknowledges was the case," Larrinaga said.
The four flag choices. |
This election will be remembered as the one that rescued the career of David Cameron, the British prime minister, who was publicly contemplating his own exit from politics only two months ago. It will also be remembered as the election that abruptly ended the career of the Labor Party leader, Ed Miliband, who had confidently carved his electoral promises onto a large piece of limestone only last week. Above all, it will be remembered as the election that every single major pollster got wrong...
Certainly it could literally mark the beginning of the end of the United Kingdom, that union of four nations — Welsh, English, Northern Irish and Scottish — whose stability hasn’t seriously been challenged for quite some time...
...Suddenly, a vision of a different future has opened up, especially for a certain kind of English Tory: Without dour, difficult, left-wing Scotland, maybe they could rule the rest of what used to be Great Britain, indefinitely. For U.S. readers who find the significance of this hard to understand: Imagine that a Texan secessionist party had, after years of campaigning, just taken every Texan seat in Congress. And now imagine that quite a few people in the rest of the country — perhaps in the Democratic Party — had, after years of arguing back, finally begun to think that Texan secession really might not be so bad and were beginning to calculate the electoral advantages accordingly.
This election may also be the beginning of the end of Great-Britain-as-we-know-it in another sense, too. In 2013, Cameron promised that he would, if reelected, hold a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union. He also promised, somewhat more vaguely, that he would first “renegotiate” that membership. Even today nobody knows what that means, for Cameron has never explained it. Nor has he ever sought European allies or partners to help him in that process, and this isn’t the best moment to begin. The rest of Europe’s leaders are involved in a complex financial negotiation with Greece, are forging a strategy toward Russia, are facing an enormous illegal migration crisis on its southern coasts — and aren’t collectively enthusiastic about launching into a long, painful negotiation with Britain.
But whatever the rest of Europe wants, this issue is now of necessity at the center of Britain’s foreign policy. In practice, that means British diplomats aren’t going to have time to worry about Russia or Libya in the next few years, because they’ll be focused on E.U. treaties. At E.U. summits, the British will want to talk about Britain’s role in Europe, not Europe’s role in the world, or Europe’s crises on its southern and eastern borders. The outward-looking, fully engaged Britain that “punched above its weight” has already faded away, and not everybody in London is very sorry about this turn of events either. Cameron has been less interested in foreign policy than any British prime minister in recent memory, his party has just run the most insular election campaign that anybody can recall and he has just been rewarded with a resounding victory for doing so.
[...W]hile much attention has been paid to the growing authoritarianism of the Kremlin and on the support for Putin’s regime on the part of the Russian oligarchs whom Putin has enriched through his crony capitalism, little has been paid to the equally critical role of the Russian Orthodox Church in helping to shape Russia’s current system, and in supporting Putin’s regime and publicly conflating the mission of the Russian state under Vladimir Putin’s leadership with the mission of the Church. Putin’s move in close coordination with the Russian Orthodox Church to sacralize the Russian national identity has been a key factor shaping the increasingly authoritarian bent of the Russian government under Putin, and strengthening his public support, and must be understood in order to understand Russia’s international behavior.
The close relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the Russian state based upon a shared, theologically-informed vision of Russian exceptionalism is not a new phenomenon. During the days of the Czar, the Russian ruler was seen as God’s chosen ruler of a Russian nation tasked with representing a unique set of value embodied by Russian Orthodoxy, and was revered as “the Holy Orthodox Czar”. Today, a not dissimilar vision of Russian exceptionalism is once again shared by the ROC and the Kremlin, and many Russians are beginning to see Vladimir Putin in a similar vein – a perception encouraged both by Putin and by the Church, each of which sees the other as a valuable political ally and sees their respective missions as being interrelated.
Two republics in the Russian Federation. Both predominantly Muslim. Both seeking to secure maximum autonomy from Moscow. Each using dramatically different tactics.
...On the latest Power Vertical Podcast, we discuss Grozny's and Kazan's approaches, Moscow's respective reaction to them, and what this tells us about Russia today.
Since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, citizen defense and paramilitary groups in Poland have seen their numbers swell. The government in Warsaw has officially included these troops in its plans for national defense.
... Poland is the real issue when it comes to defending NATO’s exposed Eastern frontier from Russian aggression. Only Poland, which occupies the Alliance’s central front, has the military power to seriously blunt any Russian moves westward. As in 1920, when the Red Army failed to push past Warsaw, Poland is the wall that will defend Central Europe from any westward movement by Moscow’s military. To their credit, and thanks to a long history of understanding the Russian mentality better than most NATO and EU members, Warsaw last fall, when the violent theft of Crimea was still just a Kremlin dream, announced a revised national security strategy emphasizing territorial defense. Eschewing American-led overseas expeditions like those to Iraq and Afghanistan that occupied Poland’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) during the post-9/11 era, this new doctrine makes defending Poland from Eastern aggression the main job of its military. Presciently, then-Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, contradicting optimistic European and NATO presumptions of our era that conventional war in Europe was unthinkable, stated in May 2013, “I’m afraid conflict in Europe is imaginable.”
Particularly in light of the fact that both NATO and the Obama administration rejected my advice to seriously bolster Alliance defenses in the East with four heavy brigades, including the two brigades that Warsaw explicitly asked NATO — meaning, in practice, the United States — for after this year’s Russo-Ukrainian War began in earnest, the issue of Poland’s military readiness is of considerable importance to countries far beyond Poland. Instead of creating a militarily viable NATO tripwire that would deter Russian aggression, the Alliance, and Washington, DC, have opted for symbolic gestures — speeches, military visits, small exercises — that impress the Western media but not the Russians.
Russia’s aggression against neighbouring Ukraine has changed almost everything. Poland is deeply concerned about its national security and about the degree of solidarity its western allies are able – and willing – to demonstrate. This anxiety is not limited to the ruling class, or politicians. It is deeply felt by the population.
... Poland got one thing right: it never believed in “the end of history”, Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 formula proclaiming the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy over ideology. This scepticism led Poland to push extremely hard for admittance to Nato and the EU, both seen as virtual life insurance policies for the nation.
...Poland would much prefer to have two US brigades under Nato command stationed on its territory. This was opposed by Germany on the grounds that it would violate the Nato-Russia agreement of 1997. Polish officials have a point when they say privately that the German position is questionable, because the agreement explicitly rested on the notion that strategic circumstances would remain unchanged in Europe, which is no longer the case. A Polish diplomat put it to me this way: “In 2014, with the Russian annexation of Crimea and the Russian assault in the Donbass, the unthinkable became reality.”
Novorossia died a quiet death this week.
When separatist leader Oleg Tsarev announced the end of the scheme to unite the Russian-speaking regions of eastern Ukraine into a single pro-Moscow separatist entity on May 20, it was the latest in a series of signs that the yearlong conflict in the Donbas is lumbering toward some kind of endgame.
In remarks reported by Gazeta.ru, Tsarev, the chairman of the self-styled parliament of Novorossia, said the project was being suspended because it "doesn't fit into" the cease-fire agreement signed in Minsk in February.
In reality, Novorossia was stillborn from the get-go. Unlike in Donetsk and Luhansk, where pro-Moscow separatism took hold, Russian-speakers in Odesa, Mariupol, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Kharkiv, and elsewhere remained loyal to Kyiv.
...
Russia had once hoped to partition Ukraine by seizing so-called Novorossia, which stretches from Kharkiv in the northeast to Odesa in the south, which would have given it a land bridge to annexed Crimea.
But having failed at this, Moscow is now seeking to keep the separatist-held enclaves in Donetsk and Luhansk inside Ukraine in order to use them as a fifth column to paralyze Kyiv and keep the country from integrating with the West.
If and how these territories are reintegrated into Ukraine will be the main battleground in the coming phase of the conflict.
Authorities in Krasnodar announce that they will monitor a concert by the popular musician Noize MC for extremism after the liberal-minded rapper criticized Russia's policies in Ukraine.
Local Cossacks in a St. Petersburg suburb unveil a statue depicting Vladimir Putin as a Roman emperor.
The State Duma approves legislation criminalizing "undesirable organizations."
A pro-Kremlin institute unveils a computer program that will trawl social networks in search of chatter about unauthorized protests -- and report it to the authorities.
The latest petty harassment of a socially conscious artist. Yet another cartoonish exaltation of the national leader. And the creation of a couple more blunt instruments to repress dissent.
Just another month in the brave new Russia.
Russia’s communications watchdog has threatened to fine Facebook, Google and Twitter and block their services under a controversial law on blogging.
In a letter to executives on on Monday, the director of the communications oversight agency warned that the three US companies could face sanctions if they continued alleged illegal activities in Russia, Izvestia newspaper reported on Wednesday.
Any action could affect a number of social media sites: besides its eponymous social network, Facebook also owns the photo-sharing service Instagram, while Google owns YouTube, BlogSpot and Google+. Facebook and Twitter, in particular, have been instrumental to organisers of opposition protests in Russia, where the major television news channels are controlled by the state.
A spokesman told the state news agency RIA Novosti that the watchdog’s complaints related mainly to deleting pages with extremist materials and receiving information under what is known as the “bloggers law”. This 2014 legislation requires popular bloggers to register their real identities with the authorities, a measure that prominent bloggers say is designed to have a curb free speech and criticism of the regime.
The agency’s deputy director, Maksim Ksenzov, had issued a warning to the three companies on 6 May, telling them they were in violation of the bloggers law because they had not provided requested data on the number of daily visitors to several users’ pages, as well as information allowing the authorities to identify the owners of accounts with more than 3,000 daily visitors.
According to the law, the agency can fine a violating organisation up to 300,000 roubles (£3,850); a second infringement can incur a fine of up to 500,000 roubles or a suspension of its operations for up to 30 days.
If the companies did not take steps to delete from their sites “information containing calls to participate in mass rioting, extremist activities” or unsanctioned public events, the watchdog would “limit access to the information resource where that information is posted”, Ksenzov warned.
A parent fighting bible lessons in schools admits he's feeling a weight on his shoulders as his High Court battles begins.
Jeff McClintock is taking a case against Red Beach School north of Auckland, and the Attorney-General, Chris Finlayson.
He says it has become a David and Goliath battle that could set a precedent for other schools.
"We've had this system of bible in schools for 100 years or more now and it came about because there was consensus at the time that those who hadn't gone off to Catholic schools were very happy to have some kind of religious education, but there was always a right for people to opt out. Now the opters-out are claiming that this is a terrible prejudice against them."
On May 5, the Ukrainian government released new data which says that they have lost 28 towns to Russian-backed separatists since February 18. That was the day the strategic town of Debaltsevo, which guarded a key highway to separatist-controlled regions, slipped from Ukraine’s control. The map of separatist territory is as alarming as it is illustrative, especially when it is combined with the daily reports of ceasefire violations and fighting coming out of both the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and Kiev.
On May 6, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko addressed the National Security and Defense Council and warned that Russia has 50,000 troops on the border and its proxies have more than 40,000 fighters inside the country. That’s not only a combined 50% increase in possible invaders over July of last year, the month which proceeded the “Russian invasion” on the Ukrainian mainland. It’s more than enough soldiers to invade and gobble up a significant amount of Ukrainian territory.
“There is a convincing evidence that Ukraine strictly complies with the Minsk [ceasefire] agreements and militants constantly violate them,” Poroshenko noted. Separatists do not allow international observers to verify their withdrawal of heavy weaponry. “Militants regularly shoot Ukrainian positions, engage in reconnaissance and subversive activity and provoke armed confrontations in order to disrupt peaceful settlement of the conflict.”
One day later, May 7, the OSCE witnessed a significant amount of fighting both near Donetsk and around a town called Shirokino, 20 kilometers east of Mariupol—part of a trend of heavier fighting which started in late April. The OSCE also reported that one of their surveillance drones was jammed for 10 minutes while attempting to monitor the movement of separatist tanks near Donetsk, in violation of the 50-kilometer demarcation line agreed upon by both sides.
For more than year, there's been a war in eastern Ukraine that nobody called a war. And for the past three months, there's been a cease-fire there that wasn't a cease-fire.
And now that the agreement reached in Minsk in February that was supposed to end hostilities in the Donbas is all but dead in the water, we seem to be lurching toward some kind of endgame. And it is shaping up to be as strange and counterintuitive as every other aspect of this through-the-looking-glass hybrid conflict.
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Pope Francis and President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority at the Vatican |
Emmanuel Nahshon, the spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said he heard a recording of the conversation, had consulted with Israel’s ambassador to the Vatican and was satisfied that the pope had said, “May you be an angel of peace.”
“He is far from an angel of peace,” Mr. Nahshon said of Mr. Abbas, adding, “If he was, perhaps by now there would be peace.”
Anyone who wants to understand the current Russian position on Ukraine would do well to begin with George Orwell’s classic, 1984. The connections go deeper than the adjective “Orwellian”: the structure and the wisdom of the book are guides, often frighteningly precise ones, to current events.
The easiest way to begin, in light of the now entirely open Russian invasion of Ukraine, is with “War is Peace,” one of the slogans of the imagined empire in Orwell’s tale. After all, every attempt thus far at negotiation and cease-fire has been accompanied by a Russian escalation, to the point where we can be certain that this is not a coincidence. If Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with other leaders, we must simply expect that this is cover for the latest outrage, as with the entrance of Russian troops, armor and artillery during the recent talks in Minsk.
But we need to dig a bit deeper into the plot for the three concepts needed to understand this very strange war, in which Putin has radicalized Russian politics, destroyed a European peace order, challenged Europeans’ assumptions about their entire future — and even threatened nuclear war. Every reason proffered to explain a war that is pointless to the point of nihilism is obviously bogus or self-contradictory or both. To grasp this horrible event in which people are killing and dying for no discernible reason, we need to remember some key concepts from Orwell: Eurasia, doublethink and learning to love Big Brother.
In Orwell’s 1984, one of the world powers is called Eurasia. Interestingly enough, Eurasia is the name of Russia’s major foreign policy doctrine. In Orwell’s dystopia, Eurasia is a repressive, warmongering state that “comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait.” In Russian foreign policy, Eurasia is a plan for the integration of all the lands from—you guessed it—Portugal to the Bering Strait. Orwell’s Eurasia practices “neo-Bolshevism”; Russia’s leading Eurasian theorist once called himself a “national Bolshevik.” This man, the influential Alexander Dugin, has long advocated that the Ukrainian state be destroyed, and has very recently proposed that Russia exterminate Ukrainians.
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Created and erected by the St Petersburg Cossack Society, it was unveiled to mark [this year's Russia's] Victory Day celebrations |
The bust, created by the St Petersburg Cossack Society to mark Russia's victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War, has been unveiled on a plot of private land in the north.Well, I cannot image any other leader beyond maybe Kim Jong-un of North Korea getting this sort of hero worship from his subjects.
Andrei Polyakov, a local Cossack leader, said the idea for the bust came about after Russia's annexation of Crimea last year.
He said: 'Cossacks would want to have an emperor for life, who would give strength to the state and would take care of Russia's destiny throughout his whole life. 'Presidents come and go, but an emperor as a symbol is probably what Russia needs.'
It will remain perched in the small town of Vartemyagi, which is located just outside the northern city of St Petersburg.
Vladimir Belyancheko, a member of the society, said: 'In this image we see manhood. This is the image of a victor, and probably a model for our Russian democracy,' according to The Telegraph.
He said: 'Cossacks would want to have an emperor for life, who would give strength to the state and would take care of Russia's destiny throughout his whole life.
'Presidents come and go, but an emperor as a symbol is probably what Russia needs.'
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Slip on Centennial Highway blocks the train track on the right on the hill and the road |
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Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel (L) and President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, Moscow. Photo: EPA/SERGEI ILNITSKY (Source) |
Russian President Vladimir Putin defended 1939's Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as Moscow's response to being isolated and having its peace efforts snubbed by Western nations.
At the close of his Sunday meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Moscow — a day after Russian held grand-scale celebrations of the allied victory in World War II — Putin offered a lengthy defense of the controversial agreement that led to the carving up of Eastern Europe.
"The Soviet Union made massive efforts to lay the groundwork for a collective resistance to Nazism in Germany, made repeated attempts to create an anti-fascist bloc in Europe. All of these attempts failed," Putin told journalists at a joint news conference with Merkel, according to a transcript released by the Kremlin.
"And when the Soviet Union realized that it was being left one-on-one with Hitler's Germany, it took steps to avoid a direct confrontation, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed," Putin said.
Merkel offered a diplomatically phrased objection, telling the joint news conference that the "Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is difficult to understand without considering the additional secret protocol. With that in mind, I think it was wrong, it was done illegally," she said, according to the Kremlin's Russian-language transcript.
The secret protocol, which accompanied what was officially presented as a non-aggression treaty, divided up the territories of Poland, Romania, the Baltic nations and Finland into German and Soviet "spheres of influence." It led to the German and Soviet invasions of Poland, and to the Soviet annexation of the three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — and parts of Romania
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Cartoon by David Low, published in the Evening Standard: 20 September 1939 (Source) |
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Pope Francis holding a crucifix |
The sixty-page complaint was filed with the Washington, D.C. Office of Human Rights by a one-man nuisance-lawsuit factory, George Washington University Law School Professor John Banzhaf. Muslim students are but pawns in Banzhaf’s game against Catholics. Taken to its logical conclusion, his lawfare would wipe out mosques and Islamic learning centers as well. The rules of engagement in the Establishment’s War on Religion have a funny way of changing to accommodate Islam, however, so perhaps those hypothetical logical conclusions will never be reached.
Banzhaf’s complaint alleges that the large amount of Catholic imagery draping the halls of Catholic University creates an “offensive” environment in which Muslims are intimidated out of proper reverence for their own religion.
He further alleges the university “does not provide space – as other universities do – for the many daily prayers Muslim students must make, forcing them instead to find temporarily empty classrooms where they are often surrounded by Catholic symbols which are incongruous to their religion.”
Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception |
Not only that, but Muslim students forced to make do with Catholic University’s chapels find their souls crushed by the oppressive spectacle of “the cathedral that looms over the entire campus – the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.” Banzhaf insists the Muslim students must be provided with facilities where they can conduct their five-times-daily prayers without having to look at anything Catholic, especially that immaculate-conception Death Star of Catholic piety.Well, you've got to wonder if complaining about the Catholic university is time well spent for Professor John Banzhaf. Maybe it's just a ploy to raise his profile and get everyone talking about him. It certainly doesn't look like a serious complaint in any case. Unless you are an anti-Catholic bigot that is.
It’s clear, with a century of hindsight, what a Europe without Wilson and his Fourteen Points would look like. A compromise peace would have allowed the Germans to quickly crush Russia’s nascent Bolshevik thugocracy like a bug, as they planned to do. Without the Bolshevik threat, European politics would have been transformed in positive ways, for without the Communist menace, which was real, with violent Red revolutions in Hungary and Germany in 1919, far-right extremists like Mussolini and Hitler would have enjoyed limited appeal.
My father fought the evil of fascism, but he was taken advantage of by another evil. He and millions of Soviet soldiers, sailors and airmen, virtual slaves, brought the world not liberation but another slavery. The people sacrificed everything for victory, but the fruits of this victory were less freedom and more poverty.
@LuciaMariaNZ Hope we'll get a chance to see you next month @BloggingCon! Russian expansion, eh? That sounds cool. pic.twitter.com/LzUmUWgYS1
— Amplify Blogging (@AmplifyPodcast) April 15, 2015
The reason that we like it, is that it's wholesome isn't it. It's not like these two have met each other in a bar somewhere and kinda like taken each other home with two hours notice. This woman has seen him, she's thought about it, she's missed her chance, she wants a second chance - it's a romantic setting of a beach, you know, one of the greatest love cities in the world - Picton. And he's a man of mystery with tattoos on his body, I mean, it just cites all the things in a classic love story. I mean - look, it worked. The sleepover was the sign that it worked. It's lovely.
‘People tired of #US bombing their countries, #America’s interventionism & exceptionalism’ @DanielLMcAdams https://t.co/sOFXNpcyDE
— RT (@RT_com) February 27, 2015
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New statue of Stalin, with Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta |
[T]he whitewashing of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and of his GULAG prison camp system continued and expanded. Last week, Russian officials put up the first Stalin statue in more than 60 years, and to add insult to injury, they did so alongside statues of Churchill and Roosevelt showing the Western leaders deferring to him and in recently occupied Crimea.
The Russian media justified this by saying that this trinity created the post-war world that Vladimir Putin would like to go back to, but as one more thoughtful Moscow commentator put it, “erecting a statue to Stalin in Crimea is like putting one of Hitler up in Israel.”
And related to this was the celebration rather than lamentation of the 75th anniversary of a GULAG camp, one in which millions of Russians and other Soviet citizens were incarcerated and died between the 1920s and the 1950s. Praising prison camps goes well beyond approving Stalin’s role as a wartime leader.
An emphasis on letting students explore and absorb number sense, rather than teaching them learned algorithms without any understanding, seems to be the right way ahead for students to gain an understanding of number and, possibly more importantly, of liking and feeling comfortable with mathematics itself. At all costs, we should ensure that we never return to the hundreds of algorithms that have made mathematics a wasteland full of rote learning of incomprehensible rules.This style of mathematics is called "Reform Math" or "New Math". It has some laudable aims, as can be inferred from the quote I've given above. In the post from the other day where I linked to Nigel Latta's television programme on education of school children in New Zealand, you get the idea that because it's not like it was when most of us were at school, very few of us understand it, and have trouble knowing whether or not it's better or worse.
It is useful in a comparison of influences in the two periods to have some understanding of the nature of the curricula and how they are different. The 'New Maths' of the 1960s had its origins in the structure of mathematics itself and was concerned with children learning the laws of mathematics from its axiomatic base. Content was organised around algebraic structure and there was little concern for pedagogical matters (Neyland, 1991). Emphasis was placed on rules and the one way of solving a mathematical problem.
The curricula which came out of this were 'teacher proof and textbook driven (Apple, 1992a).
In contrast to this, changes in mathematics curricula in the 1990s focus on the teaching and learning of mathematics with an emphasis on problem solving and multiple ways of 'doing mathematics'. The curriculum aims to "help students to develop a variety of approaches to solving problems involving mathematics, and to develop the ability to think and reason logically" (Ministry of Education, 1992, p8). It is stated that
"mathematics is best taught by helping students to solve problems drawn from their own experience ... real-life problems are not always closed, nor do they necessarily have only one solution" (Ministry of Education, 1992, pl1). Students construct new knowledge and refine their existing knowledge and ideas (Ministry of Education, 1992). The use of technology is encouraged as a tool for learning. Mathematics is perceived as a human activity, culturally produced and socially constructed (Walshaw, 1994).
At stake in the math wars is the value of a “reform” strategy for teaching math that, over the past 25 years, has taken American schools by storm. Today the emphasis of most math instruction is on — to use the new lingo — numerical reasoning. This is in contrast with a more traditional focus on understanding and mastery of the most efficient mathematical algorithms.From the American Thinker: Reform Math Must Be Destroyed Root and Branch:
A mathematical algorithm is a procedure for performing a computation. At the heart of the discipline of mathematics is a set of the most efficient — and most elegant and powerful — algorithms for specific operations. The most efficient algorithm for addition, for instance, involves stacking numbers to be added with their place values aligned, successively adding single digits beginning with the ones place column, and “carrying” any extra place values leftward.
What is striking about reform math is that the standard algorithms are either de-emphasized to students or withheld from them entirely. In one widely used and very representative math program — TERC Investigations — second grade students are repeatedly given specific addition problems and asked to explore a variety of procedures for arriving at a solution. The standard algorithm is absent from the procedures they are offered. Students in this program don’t encounter the standard algorithm until fourth grade, and even then they are not asked to regard it as a privileged method.
[...]
Reform math has some serious detractors. It comes under fierce attack from college teachers of mathematics, for instance, who argue that it fails to prepare students for studies in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. These professors maintain that college-level work requires ready and effortless competence with the standard algorithms and that the student who needs to ponder fractions — or is dependent on a calculator — is simply not prepared for college math. They express outrage and bafflement that so much American math education policy is set by people with no special knowledge of the discipline.
The common denominator of all these inferior programs is an artificial complexity, and an emphasis on learning concepts and “meaning” without actually being able to do problems. These programs teach algorithms that parents don't know. A tremendous separation is created between the generations. Parents are rendered irrelevant. The children are frustrated to tears. In a few years, in all of these Reform curricula, the kids end up dependent on calculators.
Nato declared on Thursday it will set up six new command posts on its eastern borders and create a 5,000-strong rapid reaction force in an effort to show resolve and solidarity in the face of what the alliance brands Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Announcing the new force in Brussels on Thursday, the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said it was “the biggest reinforcement of our collective defence since the end of the cold war.”
Some elements of the new force will be able to deploy to a flash point with 48-hours notice, Stoltenberg said, with the rest being able to move in a week, much faster than current Nato response times. It will be supported by air and sea forces as well as special operations units, and two more land brigades on standby in the event of a major crisis. Altogether, 30,000 Nato troops will be assigned to bolster the alliance’s eastern defences.
New Nato command posts will immediately be set up in six eastern members states – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria – who have been clamouring for a permanent alliance presence on their soil since Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine. They will house about 40 to 60 officers as serve as command and control units, which would help coordinate any deployment of the spearhead force, as well as training.
A confidential Tertiary Education Commission report reveals profound and widespread concerns about the way NCEA prepares students for further study. It paints a picture of substandard mathematics and science education, NCEA students coming unstuck in their first year at university and tertiary providers scrambling to come up with their own diagnostic tests and remedial courses.
The document is a summary of formal reports from 15 tertiary institutions – universities and polytechnics – that offer engineering courses. The institutions are not named. One told the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC): “An extremely significant concern is the poor preparation of the bulk of our student cohort following NCEA study.”
The report, drawn up as part of the Government’s plan to boost the numbers of engineering graduates, was presented at a high-level TEC meeting on September 2. The Listener was leaked a key page and obtained the full document under the Official Information Act.
The problems the report flags with NCEA fall into three main categories:
• students getting confused or being given poor advice on subject choice;
• those who do the right subjects still being unprepared for tertiary level study; and
• the system not creating a good work ethic.
Nigel Latta takes himself back to school to have a look into NCEA and our education system. Spending time at both primary and high schools, he discovers learning is not what it used to be.
Nigel: Now, one of the things that worries me and a lot of other parents is that maybe our kids aren’t being taught Maths properly.He talks to kids about what they’ve been taught through school – no long division by hand, it’s just strategies. Just talked to my 17yo, and at his school at Year 9, no one except for him could do long division (out of approx 200 Year 9 kids in a decile 8 school) and only a few could do short division.
Maths Teacher: In the good old days you were just taught, follow this process and you’ll get the right answer. But not so many people experienced mathematical thinking [question mark in voice] and that’s why people hated [another question mark] maths. It’s likened to learning musical theory without every playing the instrument. So what we’ve tried to do with this generation and it’s a global movement is trying to get students actually playing with maths. They’re solving big problems and thinking mathematically rather than a very small piece of maths that’s just sort of following procedures without much understanding.
What if I told you 250 * 3 is easier for me?That’s to a group of boys just standing around who have just worked out the answer (729).
An emphasis on letting students explore and absorb number sense, rather than teaching them learned algorithms without any understanding, seems to be the right way ahead for students to gain an understanding of number and, possibly more importantly, of liking and feeling comfortable with mathematics itself. At all costs, we should ensure that we never return to the hundreds of algorithms that have made mathematics a wasteland full of rote learning of incomprehensible rules.
Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray;
and do Thou, Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the Power of God,
thrust down to Hell, Satan and all the evil spirits, who roam the world for the ruin of souls.
Amen.
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