One of the biggest event’s of the year is Barbie’s 50^th birthday. Like many girls, I played with Barbies. I only had a few and I really couldn’t name which ones they were for the life of me. All I can say is that they were the more generic variety and they were awesome!

            I was a huge fan of looking at Barbie dolls, whether on sale for $14.99 in the aisles of Wal-Mart or the Gone with the Wind commemorative collection lining the shelves of FAO Schwartz Flagship Store on Fifth Avenue. Consequently, I’m very put off by the constant criticism of Barbie.

            The criticisms mainly focus on her appearance. There’s the old issue of her proportions and that if she were to take on actual human form she would, in short, be an infertile giantess. So her body is a little out of whack. That’s nothing that “this is the real world and that is a plastic doll” reminders from loving, Barbie-buying parents cannot remedy.

            I liked Barbie because she was an active, curious and kind girl. I personally feel that Barbie was a steel-toed-boots feminist with a good sense of herself. It’s almost impossible (unless of course you worked for Mattel and this was your job) to count the number jobs Barbie held: veterinarian, teacher, artist, astronaut, doctor, athlete and, now, Angela Merkel. Barbie embraced all cultures with the numerous outfits. She was kind to animals in all farm accessories that came with her and showed compassion to young children as a paediatrician.

            The criticism spikes that too many girls idolize her and her beauty. I don’t think that’s a bad role model, compared to the other options available out there. She embodies a woman that put in her very best effort and achieved professional success, all the while keeping her compassion for those around her in tact. Simultaneously, she hasn’t resisted to giving up the feminine, indulging in well-put together clothes and, yes, make up. (We’re girls, we buy this stuff, some of us really like it, why deny it like it’s an inferior activity?) Anyone who focuses only on her looks may want to reconsider whether the problem lies in Barbie or in his or her own values.

She sure looks like a go-getter and no wonder so many generations have looked up to her.

A few economists and a much greater number of political pundits have labelled this time, amongst other things, the best time to learn from our mistakes. They mean our personal mistakes, our over spending and dependence. Agreed. I haven't bought a piece of clothing in over two months. I think it’s also a good time to learn from the Republican Party and their default leader, Rush Limbaugh. These are the lessons of what not to do.

            I wanted these posts to be Limbaugh-free. (Too bad. I wanted radio to be Limbaugh-free too, but what can you do?) I’m tired of Limbaugh in every other outlet; he’s clogged every media drain in North America.

I’m tired of him. And I’m tired of people treating him with “due respect” as if he is remotely coherent, credible, legitimate or even lucid. He’s not. I don’t care if 20 million people tune in every day to listen to his angry blabber. Britney sold truck loads of albums and I don’t think anyone is praising her vocal chords. This is the same grown guy – “man” is a term reserved for male individuals who possess dignity and respect others – who referred to Chelsea Clinton (13-years-old at the time) as “the White House dog.” Same guy who said that feminism happened “so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.” Same guy who proclaimed that he hopes the Stimulus Package would fail. Let’s translate this call for total downfall into more practical terms “Michigan, I hope your unemployment goes from 10% to 60%. Anyone who used to eat three meals a day, now eats two, I hope you can only afford snack. I hope that the healthcare system falls through completely and everyone seeking medical attention, just drops dead in the hospital hallway.”

What kind of adult talks like this?  

I think I can figure out what kind of an adult Rush Limbaugh is. He’s unhappy with himself. Why? This may not be the high road, but it’s the straight and honest one: he’s fat. And not just chubby-around-the-waist-cute fat: he’s morbidly obese. He can get hundreds of millions of dollars more for his bonehead antics, but he'll always wake up, look at his reflection and see a giant slob, who flunked out of university after one year and clearly hasn't picked up a book after that. 

Rush Limbaugh is the unaccredited poster child of excess. At the CPAC a few weeks back, he looked like a sweating pig on the way to the slaughterhouse – so to speak. He has absolutely no sense of discipline or responsibility. He has lost as much control over what goes into his mouth as what comes out of it. That sort of combination usually leads to disastrous commentary.

Granted, the disastrous commentary didn’t only come from him. It also came from (his) Fox & Friends, who recently deep fried, yes, deep fried, a hard copy of the stimulus package. Do you see a parallel here? Good, but that’s not the point. 

The point is you can’t start criticising an administration a month and a half into its term and especially not on the grounds of “fix this thing that’s been brewing for twenty years and escalated substantially over the last eight.” Obama said he wasn't a miracle worker, listen! If you are going to say the stimulus plan is garbage, please go beyond bashing it in anonymous forwards that are neither witty nor well put together. Educate yourself on the issues, provide structured criticisms and generate reasonable alternatives (that haven’t already been tried, tested and shown to have negative impact over the last decade.) 

Be gratefuly, at least, that John "The fundamentals of our economy are strong" McCain isn't running this show. We'd still be in denial. 

We’re all in this together and everyone will be affected. Throwing a hissy fit – or several on national radio – isn’t reasonable. It's immature.

 Oh one more thing: Limbaugh reminds me of Boris Yeltsin. And those weren’t good years. 

As a true supporter of the East coast media elite, I scrolled upon this story from the New York Times yesterday, Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary. Harvard’s has received a lot of heat from independent evaluators regarding a number of internal issues, from the suspiciously high grade point averages of graduates to deep rooted connections to industries it supplies with labour.

            In brief, students of the medical school discovered that some instructors were simultaneously engaged with or retained as consultants by a number of pharmaceutical companies. This definitely brought up a conflict of interest when discussing, for example, the drugs safety and severity of side effects, both of which were downplayed on some occasions in the classroom. There are no reports of any professors promoting any one specific drug. The students’ main issue came in the breach of trust: there they are, sitting there with open minds, absorbing everything pronounced to them as loyal, trusting students should. Instead, they felt they were getting a half-lesson, half-pitch from a pharmaceutical industry representative.

            I really don’t mean to go off on a tangent, but I can’t help it. I think having professionals teach certain subjects, like pharmacology, finance, accounting and engineering, can bring some pragmatism and real world pressure to learning. On the other hand, I’m sure some of the ‘old tricks’ and cynicisms that get passed down in this interaction between fresh, green students and old timers in a relatively vulnerable environment. It is hard to determine whether there’s more wisdom or bad habits passed down.

I don’t have an answer and there is likely no definite resolution. Do you think that this early-stage interaction had an effect on the regular on-goings of the financial markets? Could irresponsible behaviour have been deep rooted in the college years?

I am definitely not saying that all instructors are evil corporate defenders. I’ve been fortunate to have wonderful “real-world” instructors. This is something to think about, especially as individuals seated in classrooms, often eagerly hanging on to every word of the instructor. If we don’t actively recognize the mistakes of the predecessors in our respective fields, we’ll never be able to change these behaviours and that could lead to slides down some VERY steep hills. 

Recently, I’ve really gotten into the issues of Afghanistan. I blame Hosseini, for the most part, and Obama because he’s decided to extend the American stay there. The other day Bill Maher had Robin Wright, the author of Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (a whopping $18.87 as an eBook at Sony’s store, while only $11 at Amazon but you have to have a Kindle.) She, in fact, supports the idea of leaving Iraq but staying in Afghanistan because there is more potential in that country and, rightly so, greater pay offs. Essentially, Wright, like many people, doesn’t want the Afghani mission to fail because the region is vulnerable to becoming a terrorist training ground.

Maher (naturally) had a response to this. I get it, he’s a comedian but his logic seems to be more lucid than most professional commentators. He noted that, frankly, terrorists don’t need training camps, referring to the often played footage of some turban-clad men swinging on monkey bars and running through tires with a sand backdrop. Maher believes that terrorists need just one cave to sit around and plot “death to America.” He’s right: a muscular, lean and agile suicide bomber seems like a waste of time and resources.

I still think Wright is correct here. She comes off as an intelligent, eloquent woman with a great amount of experience and I am definitely going to read all 480 pages of her book once I find it at a reasonable price. I just wish that instead of saying “training” she said “recruitment.” The villages and small towns in Pakistan and Afghanistan provide wonderful opportunities for members of terrorist organizations to find new blood. There are plenty of young men with hate harboured for the war mongers who tried to tare up their country for many decades. It’s easy to, ahem, “persuade” these young men to defend the honour of their families and their nations. That’s why it is important that there is a presence in a time of transition, a guided, positive presence and an enforced one at that.

The United States army is composed of diverse individuals: doctors, professional educators, engineers, photographers. You name it, it's there. All those resources can be pooled together. I wish that the military presence would expand to offer more medical support to these villages, educational tools for schools, discuss alternative life paths with youths and revival of the region's rich culture. Connect with the people, not just tell them their government is wrong. This would include quite a bit of cultural sensitivity and language training but it would go a long way with cleaning up America’s image in the region. No one said that building sustainable alliances was easy.  

I strongly recommend Bill Maher’s show (don't bother watching Religulous) for its funn and if you can manage to ignore Maher's pompous remarks here and there, you can find some deep and poignant discussion. It’s available at the most reasonable price – free! – on the internet. But please, don’t forget the Stewart.

I remember when I was eight and my family was planning on moving to North America, I was strongly and vocally opposed to the notion. I regularly told my parents that this was a “betrayal of our homeland.” We would become traitors and those who stayed would be the courageous heroes. They still remember my outbursts and, now, so do I. 

One year in high school we read Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. I remember that no one particularly adored the book. We all had our reasons, from her choppy style to the subject matter. It was like listening to a discussion of books – affectively what we were doing ourselves. Our teacher listened to our criticisms carefully, mostly because everyone had a logical explanation and no one simply yelled out “it sucks.” My reason for disliking her book is that Azar Nafisi appeared incredibly and blindly selfish. Nafisi based the book (in my humble opinion, it’s not really a novel) on her experience as a literature professor in Tehran during the reign of Ayatollah Khomeini and her interaction with a few of her closest students.

The episode that really turned me away from the book occurs during the Iran-Iraq war. Nafisi dedicates a fair passage to a description of a night time air raid by the Iraqis. Just as she hears the bombs drop on the city, she runs into the room of her children and brings them to the room her and her husband share. They huddle together because, I don’t remember the exact wording but the meaning is there, if the bombs hit their home, at least they would all die together. This is the reasoning that comes out of an individual who had all the means to abandon such a dangerous country and seek a better, safer home for her children elsewhere. Instead, she chose to romanticize her situation, hailed her acts as heroir, applauded the great history of her nation and ignored the pressing dangers surrounding her very own offspring. Why wouldn’t she just leave???

Recently, I finished A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. It was a splendid book. (If you are planning on reading it, this paragraph will completely ruin the book for you. I’m serious; I’m giving everything away here.) But in it, there was a similar hesitance of the main characters: in this case not to leave, but the inability to stay away. (Last warning, I’m about to tell the end and it’s really a great book. If you want to read it, skip this post entirely and read that Iceland joke instead.) After a few years of living in a relatively safe province of Pakistan with Tariq and her family, Laila yearns to return to Kabul. This is the Kabul distraught by the Taliban and, just recently, an American invasion, in case someone wasn’t keeping track. Every road is lined with bodies of victims of local violence. Although I like this book significantly more than Nafisi’s, I was still puzzled by this inseparability and this everlasting love for the homeland, against all odds.

            Then, when watching CNN News in Prague one night (it was the only English channel and the film Taken had sufficiently scared us out of going out after dark) I came across a special report on Faruq Fu’ad Rafiq Hamdani. Mr. Hamdani is an Iraqi artist in Baghdad’s Mansoor district. With the help of Captain Brett Walker from the 4^th Infantry Division, Mr. Hamdani held one of the first Iraqi cultural shows, complete with paintings and sculptures, since the war in November. He and his family, including two sons in their late teens who shared their father’s love for painting, talked about their dedication to their artwork, their struggles under Saddam and their hope for their country. Mr. Hamdani is a likable guy, with a gentle smile and a twinkle in his eye when he talks about Iraq. And yet he stayed, too. But he stayed so he could make a contribution, so he could see a resurrection of Iraq and aid in it. He summoned the courage to stay put, to wait it out, even as the situation progressively got worse.

            My family didn’t have it absolutely terrible in Russia. But it was definitely not as calm as we have it now (knock on wood.) I’m very proudly Canadian, significantly more proud than I am of being Russian - certain occasions, like May 9^th, are an exception. Unlike the individuals and characters, who have quite a bit of content to be comparable to real individuals, we did not stay in our “homeland” or as I prefer to call it “the place were born.”

I find that a lot of people like to romanticize their connection to their country. I applaud this devotion, this poetic longing. They are heroes in upholding this cultural intimacy. They are taking quite the risk though, and many who have joined in their effort have turned from heroes to victims of crimes and war. My living away from the land where my ancestors roamed is not disrespectful to my family, a unit I find to be more important than a nation full of people I don’t know and some of whom I already don’t like. The move was a safer decision, both socially and economically. I have a great sense of pride for the land I live on, one that welcomed me and my family and provided a healthy foundation for us to grow as part of society while maintaining our individuality. I have encountered many people who share this sentiment. This pride does not make us traitors to the land of our past; it simply means that we are devoted to the well-being and security of our futures.