U Not Gonna Like This

From the International Herald Tribune:


ST. PETERSBURG The magnificent St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg was an appropriate setting for the reburial service for Empress Maria Fyodorovna, the Danish-born mother of the last Russian czar.

After 78 years, she was being laid to rest by the side of her husband, Czar Alexander III. Her remains had been taken to St. Petersburg by a Danish naval ship from the burial site of the Danish royalty, accompanied on the journey by Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, representatives of the Romanoff dynasty and other foreign and Russian dignitaries.

As I listened to the beautiful chants of the Russian Orthodox Church, and later to Patriarch Alexiy II's eulogy for the empress, I thought it was great that Russia was coming to terms with its history and trying to settle the score with its past.

The reburial concluded yet another chapter in the tragic history of a family and an even greater tragedy in the history of Russia.

But I was also thinking that this was not enough. There is another, much bigger account from Russia's past that needs to be settled.

When will it finally be Lenin's turn?

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and more so since the remains of Czar Nicholas II and his family were reburied eight years ago, there has been talk of moving Lenin out of his mausoleum on Red Square and to bury him alongside his mother in St. Petersburg's Volkovskoye Cemetery, as he requested in his last will. But the idea has not gained any momentum in Russia.

Removing the embalmed body of the father of the Russian revolution from the grand mausoleum, which served as the symbolic heart of the Soviet Union, would be the beginning of a necessary confrontation between Russia and the murderous dictatorships of Lenin and Stalin.

It would begin the catharsis that Russia so badly needs to rid itself of the skeletons in the closets of its history.

Russia needs the same kind of a showdown with history that Germany has gone through, or that South Africa faced in the aftermath of apartheid. Russia, by contrast, has always had trouble accepting and living with its past, preferring to reject it, rewrite it or just forget it.

Of course, removing Lenin from his mausoleum would be a much more controversial and demanding process than bringing back Maria Fyodorovna's remains.

It would require resuming the de- Stalinization process that Nikita Khrushchev started 50 years ago but never completed. Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin picked up some of the pieces, but their attempts drowned in the chaos of the collapsing Soviet empire. So now it is President Vladimir Putin's turn.

The first step would be to bring to an end the bizarre cult of Lenin's remains. That in itself would secure him a lasting place in Russian history.

While I was standing in glorious autumn sunshine outside the Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral for the final part of the reburial ceremony, I recalled President Ronald Reagan's famous phrase when standing in front of the Berlin Wall: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Today we need someone to say, "Mr. Putin, tear down this mausoleum." Give the millions of innocent victims of Lenin and Stalin the apology that they and their descendants deserve and let the historic truth finally be heard all over your country.

Considering that Putin has said the collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest tragedy of the 20th century, it's likely that the reburial of Lenin, with all the repercussions it would trigger, will not happen on his watch.


Like millions of Russian citizens of his generation, he grew up with the slogans "Lenin lives!" and "Lenin is with us!" For him, the mausoleum is a sacred shrine; doing away with the Lenin myth would be like patricide.

The irony is that Lenin is not an idol for very many Russians any more. Not many people are lining up at the mausoleum to pay respect to Lenin.

They are lining up instead at the stands of tourist vendors selling T- shirts with a picture of Lenin and the text "McLenin" along with the McDonald arches. A Lenin look-alike offers visitors to be photographed with him for a few dollars in the vicinity of Red Square.

The new Russia permits this kind of profanity and commercialized mockery. The Russians are ready to bid Lenin good bye. How sad that the Kremlin acts as if Lenin is still with us.

Three sites I thought that I would post before wrapping it up for tonight:

Tired Black Man
http://www.tiredblackman.com

MACHO International
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7596/machoint.html

Bulletproof Pimp
http://bulletproofpimp.blogspot.com

This story was linked from The Daily Cuase a blog on the Mens News Daily network of blogs it's from Opinon Journal:

The Fertility Gap
Liberal politics will prove fruitless as long as liberals refuse to multiply.
BY ARTHUR C. BROOKS
Tuesday, August 22, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

The midterm election looms, and once again efforts begin afresh to increase voter participation. It has become standard wisdom in American politics that voter turnout is synonymous with good citizenship, justifying just about any scheme to get people to the polls. Arizona is even considering a voter lottery, in which all voters are automatically registered for a $1 million giveaway. Polling places and liquor stores in Arizona will now have something in common.

On the political left, raising the youth vote is one of the most common goals. This implicitly plays to the tired old axiom that a person under 30 who is not a liberal has no heart (whereas one who is still a liberal after 30 has no head). The trouble is, while most "get out the vote" campaigns targeting young people are proxies for the Democratic Party, these efforts haven't apparently done much to win elections for the Democrats. The explanation we often hear from the left is that the new young Democrats are more than counterbalanced by voters scared up by the Republicans on "cultural issues" like abortion, gun rights and gay marriage.

But the data on young Americans tell a different story. Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That's a "fertility gap" of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%--explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.

This from Spinbuster:

I wish I had a buck every time a raging single female in San Francisco told me, “There are no single men in The City. They’re all either gay, married or losers.” Now I knew lots of available single guys, including myself. So this mantra translated was: “I can’t attract the males I want, therefore I will subtly demean all of them, including you. That way my problem becomes your fault, and I get to unload my dumptruck of psychic crap on you. You, of course -- being male -- are prohibited from defending yourself. That's why we have laws, you know.”

It’s the same interpersonal strategy a three-year-old employs: I can’t Get My Way every instant, therefore You’re an Asshole.

Any chance comment in the workplace could easily cost me my job. It all depended on how any female within hearing range "felt" about it. Ditto for the universities. To varying degrees, they enacted "interpersonal behavior codes." On some campuses, if I even looked at a female I was liable for disciplinary action, including expulsion. Again, it all depended on how any female "felt" about it.

Astoundingly, American females never stopped to consider what their agendas of complete control might have on my desire to interact with them.

he continues:

Where, asked these Baby Boom women, were all the men? I could have told them, of course, where the men were and are, but being already in possession of all correct wisdom -- not to mention Incarnated Goddesses -- no female ever bothered to ask me. To date, not one has. What could I know? I am, after all, only a male.

The men – what’s left of them -- are in hiding, of course. That’s what any refugee population does when war is made on it, and its homeland is laid to Waste. Sister, understand: only the weakest of males serve the totalitarianism of gynocracy. No real man, confronting his betrayal by American culture and femininity, will teach in your schools, for the lessons are false, and he knows he is conditioning more kids – especially more boys – into further betrayals. No real man will drone in your corporations, corrupt collectivities hiding behind the stained skirts of “market forces.” Go to any indigenous town on the planet. The market is the locus of women, their interests and their power. As for the coercive “forces” of the market -- well, modern American men know all about social coercion.

Man shortage? F*ckin' A there’s a man shortage. America rapes anything even vaguely masculine.

Sister, you’ve spent the last four decades codifying masculinity out of existence. You carry our balls in your purse, and now you’re infuriated because we don’t feel like having sex, much less a “relationship”? As recent census figures confirm, men spent the Eighties and Nineties backing away from women, and right now they are in Full Flee -- not in vengeance, but in self-preservation.

Across the Pond, the song’s the same. Five-hundred women responded to an Edinburgh restaurant’s promotion for a Single’s Night mixer in “honor” of Valentine’s Day 2002.
Two males responded. TWO. The owner of the restaurant – a woman – said: “We’re a bit disappointed because we thought we’d get so many more guys than girls – after all, they’d have a room full of single women. But I think men take themselves too seriously these days.”

Ms. Owner Does Not Get It. Western women criminalize masculinity, emasculate their men, assign males fourth-class citizenship (behind females, “their” children, and household pets) – and then are stunned that men are not crawling after them, demanding “relationships?” Single women have spent the last forty years relieving Western men of their jobs, houses, children, money, basic civil rights, and self-respect. Under highly advantaged conditions, enforced by their State, females now “compete” with males for the necessities of survival.

From a position of assigned inferiority, we must deal with over-empowered single females in every facet of our lives. Why would we voluntarily pay to enter a room with FIVE HUNDRED of them gathered in power? For a “romantic relationship?” Under tyranny of the matriarchate's interpersonal, sexual and social Gulag?

Of course, it cannot be that males are simply avoiding females, out of disgust and very real fear. That is an unacceptable conclusion, not to mention inappropriate and offensive.

Despite confirmation by the last American census, Western cultures MUST pretend that nothing is amiss between males and females. To admit that males are desperately seeking escape from females and the neo-matriarchy is to admit that the West’s endless empowerment of females and disempowerment of males may not be the progressive, everybody-wins bonanza that was, and is, shoved down our throats each day.

As Ms. Restaurant Owner smugly asserts, the problem – as ever – is with men. This time, we are “taking ourselves too seriously.” Females and Western feminist cultures, as always, share no responsibility for the sundering of male and female.

This link found at the Don't Marry Forums from Matt Weeks :

Take a hypothetical husband who marries and has two children. There is a 50 percent likelihood that this marriage will end in divorce within eight years, and if it does, the odds are 2-1 it will be the wife who initiates the divorce. It may not matter that the man was a decent husband. The reality of the situation is that few divorces are initiated over abuse or because the man has already abandoned the family. Nor is adultery cited as a factor by divorcing women appreciably more than by divorcing men.

The new trend that has taken hold of the court system is what as known as the "no fault" divorce, in which the filing party needs only to cite their general discontent with the marriage in order to be granted a hearing. Women initiate these unilateral divorces-on-demand 3 times as often as men.

While the courts may grant the former spouses joint legal custody, the odds are nearly 40 to 1 of the wife winning physical custody. Overnight, the husband, accustomed to seeing his kids every day and being an integral part of their lives, will now be lucky if he is allowed to see them even one day out of the week.

Once the couple is divorced, odds are at least even that the wife will interfere with the husband's visitation rights. Three-quarters of divorced men surveyed say their ex-wives have interfered with their visitation, and 40 percent of mothers studied admitted that they had done so, and that they had generally acted out of spite or in order to punish their exes.

Then, of course, there is the issue of financial losses due to court-imposed payments. In the end (99 times out of 100), the wife will keep most of the couple's assets and --if they jointly own one -- the house. The husband will need to set up a new residence and pay at least a third of his take-home pay to his ex in child support, on top of whatever alimony payments the courts impose upon him. These can run as high as another third of his income. (Add the cost of taxes to that and the man gets to keep exactly 13% of his take-home pay -- he'd better pray that's enough to keep him alive.)

But as bad as all of this is, it would still make our hypothetical man one of the lucky ones. After all, he could be one of those fathers who cannot see his children at all because his ex has made a false accusation of domestic violence, child abuse, or child molestation. Or a father who can only see his own children under supervised visitation or in nightmarish visitation centers where dads are treated like criminals.

He could be one of those fathers whose ex has moved their children hundreds or thousands of miles away, in violation of court orders, which courts often do not enforce. He could be one of those fathers who tears up his life and career again and again in order to follow his children, only to have his ex-wife continually move them.

He could be one of the fathers who has lost his job, seen his income drop, or suffered a disabling injury, only to have child support arrearages and interest pile up to create a mountain of debt which he could never hope to pay off. Or a father who is forced to pay 70 percent or 80 percent of his income in child support because the court has imputed an unrealistic income to him. Or a dad who suffers from one of the child support enforcement system's endless and difficult to correct errors, or who is jailed because he cannot keep up with his payments. Or a dad who reaches old age impoverished because he lost everything he had in a divorce when he was middle-aged and did not have the time and the opportunity to earn it back. Our imaginary man might consider himself lucky if he knew what his life could have been.

Over five million divorced men in America are currently experiencing the situation I just outlined. Without a doubt, their stories and experiences are heard by unmarried men. Can anyone truly blame the men for having apprehension? They stand to gain little and lose everything they've worked for in their entire lives should they "take the plunge", so to speak.

So ladies, if you have a problem with this, speak to your feminist brethren. This is the legacy which they have left behind. By erasing the stigma of premarital sex and encouraging physical liberation, they have eliminated one of the most powerful incentives in history for men to tie the knot. By advocating government as a surrogate husband in the case of single motherhood, they have eliminated the disincentive for women to file for divorce. And through decades of litigious activism, they have given rise to the bloated and intrusive family court system and stacked it so egregiously against the men of this country that it now appears they are subconsciously engaging in what could be called a "marriage strike", preferring to play the odds rather than assume a massively disproportionate amount of risk.

As for the men, make no mistake, they are slowly beginning to realize that the power is now in their favor. They have more and more perfectly legitimate reasons for remaining unmarried every day. Given a choice between not marrying one's lady friend -- assuming no risk whatsoever and still having the historical benefits of marriage (sex, companionship, etc.) available to them, or marrying the woman and having a 50-50 chance of their lives being utterly destroyed should the woman so much as be "unhappy" with the marriage, the decision is a no-brainer. What women perceive as a "fear of commitment" is really nothing more than a pragmatic assessment of the odds facing men in the prospect of a marriage.

INTRODUCTION

What is mobbing?

In the early 1980s, a Swedish psychologist named Heinz Leymann* identified a grave threat to health and safety in what appear to be the healthiest, safest workplaces in the world. German was Leymann’s first language, Swedish his second, but he labeled the distinct menace he had found with an English word: mobbing. ...

Mobbing can be understood as the stressor to beat all stressors. It is an impassioned, collective campaign by co-workers to exclude, punish, and humiliate a targeted worker. Initiated most often by a person in a position of power or influence, mobbing is a desperate urge to crush and eliminate the target. The urge travels through the workplace like a virus, infecting one person after another. The target comes to be viewed as absolutely abhorrent, with no redeeming qualities, outside the circle of acceptance and respectability, deserving only of contempt. As the campaign proceeds, a steadily larger range of hostile ploys and communications comes to be seen as legitimate.

Mobbing is hardly the only source of debilitating stress at work, and it was not the only one on which Leymann did research. He interviewed bank employees who had undergone the terror of armed robbery, and subway drivers who had watched helplessly as their trains ran over persons who fell or jumped onto the tracks. Leymann documented the depression, absenteeism, sleeplessness, and other symptoms of trauma resulting from such stressful experiences.

Bank robberies and subway suicides were no match, however, for being mobbed by co-workers in the personal devastation that ensued. Not infrequently, mobbing spelled the end of the target’s career, marriage, health, and livelihood. From a study of circumstances surrounding suicides in Sweden, Leymann estimated that about twelve percent of people who take their own lives have recently been mobbed at work.

~ Professor Kenneth Westhues, University of Waterloo
(Exerpts from 'At the Mercy of the Mob: A Summary of Research on Workplace Mobbing')

* Professor Heinz Leymann, PhD, MD sci
For more information see The Mobbing Encyclopaedia

Again from Cool Tools 4 Men this post on turn of the century suffragetts plan to kill the British Prime Minister:

Suffragettes 'planned to kill PM'

By Nicola Woolcock

SUFFRAGETTES planned to assassinate the Prime Minister early in the last century and honed their gun skills at a shooting range, according to Home Office advisers investigating the threat.
Their memorandum, from 1909, describes pickets at the House of Commons as “ half-insane totally f_ _king crazy' women” who intended to commit acts of violence.

It includes an investigation report from Special Branch at New Scotland Yard that identifies one of the suspects as “a little woman wearing a tam-o’-shanter”. The documents were released yesterday by the National Archives at Kew.

The Home Office memorandum, which discusses whether the pickets should be removed, reveals that threats were made to Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister. It says that “there is now definite ground for fearing the possibility of the PM’s being fired at by one of the pickets at the entrance to the House”, and that the women were planning “something nearly amounting to a conspiracy to murder”.

The world is a dangerous place,
not because of those who do evil,
but because of those who look on and do nothing.

~ Albert Einstein

I was reading the newset entry at Cool Tools 4 Men that mentions a site about Bullying called Mobbing.ca from there is a link to a story on the right hand column.

When Bullies Go To Work

When bullies go to work Employers that tolerate abuse risk lower productivity, high staff turnover, costly legal fees -- and worse

MARJO JOHNE finds: Special to the Globe and Mail April 17, 2002

Thirteen months after he started working as a district manager for Imperial Parking, Timothy Lloyd decided he had had enough of "going in to war every day."

So he took his lawyer's advice and sent his employer a letter explaining why he wasn't coming back and demanding six months' pay plus full benefits.

"I was very unhappy in my work -- burned out, stressed out . . . There were constant threats of dismissal, constant invading of my personal space, and use of profanity that was personally directed at me," says Mr. Lloyd, who left Imperial Parking's Calgary operation almost nine years ago.

In short, Mr. Lloyd had landed into a pit with an office bully -- who also happened to be his manager. Bullying, a much-discussed topic in recent months following the suicide of a student in Halifax and another in the Vancouver area, is not restricted to playgrounds and schoolyards. It is also an unfortunate reality in the workplace.

Ask anyone you know if they've encountered an office bully, and chances are you'll hear an anecdote or two: the boss who yells at staff, the co-worker who constantly makes fun of your accent, the supervisor who piles on more work and then shortens your deadline.

These are just a few examples of what experts refer to as psychological violence in the workplace -- abuse that takes the form of bullying, intimidation and harassment. The Canadian Initiative on Workplace Violence, a non-profit research group in Toronto, describes bullying as "offensive behaviour through vindictive, cruel, malicious or humiliating attempts to undermine an individual or groups of employees. These persistently negative attacks are typically unpredictable, irrational and unfair."

While physical violence in the workplace tends to come from external parties -- customers or maintenance workers, for example -- psychological violence comes from within. Glenn French, national director of the Canadian Initiative on Workplace Violence, says Canadians are more likely to experience the latter.

"You have a better chance of being a workplace fatality in the United States," he says. "Whereas in Canada, you have a better chance of being bullied, harassed and abused."

Studies suggest psychological violence in the workplace is widespread. In a 2000 survey of Canadian labour unions, more than 75 per cent reported incidences of harassment and bullying.

This problem is not a strictly Canadian phenomenon. A study in 1997 by the International Labour Organization showed that 43 per cent of international civil servants believed bullying and verbal aggression was a problem at work. But just how widespread psychological violence is has proven difficult to gauge. Depending on the country surveyed and how psychological violence is defined, results have ranged from 2 to 45 per cent.

"This is an important problem because organizations are going to lose good people," says Natalie Allen, an industrial and organizational psychologist and professor at the University of Western Ontario. "The consequences are lower productivity and dissatisfaction that leads to turnover."
It may be impossible to measure with any accuracy the financial consequences of psychological violence, but there is little doubt it has a direct impact on the bottom line. In addition to decreased productivity and higher turnover, bullying also results in increased absenteeism, disability leave and legal costs stemming from "constructive dismissal" lawsuits.

One such lawsuit, against Chukal Enterprises in Coquitlam, B.C., ended with a court order for the company to pay its former employee about $38,000 plus legal costs. The employee, Susan Morgan, quit her job as restaurant manager after being subjected to more than two years of yelling and swearing. The abuser was a new kitchen manager who grew hostile whenever customers sent back food. Ms. Morgan, who was responsible for bringing the rejected dishes to the kitchen, bore the brunt of the abuse.

The British Columbia Supreme Court ruled that Chukal Enterprises, which owned the restaurant, knew about the abusive behaviour but did nothing to stop it. And in failing to act, Chukal had breached an implied term of any employment relationship -- to treat staff, as the court put it, "with civility, decency, respect and dignity."

A similar decision was reached in Mr. Lloyd's subsequent lawsuit against Imperial Parking. Five years after he launched the suit, Mr. Lloyd won a judgment of about $31,000 plus part of his legal fees.

"Was it worth it? Financially, definitely not," says Mr. Lloyd, who now works in Standard Life Assurance Co.'s real estate leasing division. "But from the point of view of feeling like you did the right thing and maybe did some good for somebody else in some way -- yes, absolutely."

Joe Conforti, a partner at Goodmans LLP, a Toronto-based law firm, says these rulings deliver a clear and unmistakable message to companies. "Employers are responsible for maintaining the workplace," he says. "They're not able to monitor workers 100 per cent of the time and cannot ensure that everyone is polite and civil all the time, but they have to take all reasonable steps to ensure that civility and decency is maintained. They cannot tolerate [bullying]."

While some bullied employees turn to the courts, others take matters into their own hands.
A few years ago, Pierre Lebrun, an Ottawa Transit employee, killed four co-workers before shooting himself. An inquest later revealed that Mr. Lebrun, who had a speech impediment, had been teased and bullied relentlessly. He left behind a letter, saying in part: "I'm tired, exhausted and completely backed against the wall. They will never leave me alone. I can't go on living like this! They have destroyed my life, I will destroy their life."

For those businesses that tolerate workplace bullying, the risks go beyond decreased productivity, high employee turnover and costly legal expenses. They could also be taking a dangerous chance.