What Does Nationalism Mean To You?

Omg I remember that game.

That being said, I will take today's free market video games over the USSRs world's biggest electronics

There is a young man from Belarus in the Computer Science program just down the hall from the code programming/engineering program I am in, and I've had a few classes with him.

When I first met him and he started to speak, I said to him, "so you're from Belarus?" and he was puzzled and said, "yes, but how do you know that, did somebody tell you?" and I replied, "no, but you clearly have a Slavic accent, it isn't South Slav or West Slav, you don't look South Slav or West Slav, you're blonde, you just strike me as being from the western Soviet Union, I was thinking Belarus or maybe one of the Baltic states..."

Belorussians are mix of balts and slavs. You have very good deductive reasoning. Not always blond, but more fair haired. My hair is totally black and I'm very tanned, but my mothers family comes from Russian East. I can be mistaken as greek easily. Except I always pay my dept.

He was surprised I even knew about Belarus, he said, "I keep trying to tell Americans I am not from Russia I am from Belarus and they just keep calling me Russian and telling people "that guy there is from Russia, ask him if you have a question about Russia" even though I am not from Russia!"

Heard this before. Most of people think I'm polish and polish people think I'm russian.

He was also surprised I knew about the Baltic States since he said he doubted that most Americans could find them on the map. I explained, "in some of my classes we were made to fill in every country in the world on a blank map... I had to do every country, river, mountain, and sea in Europe, all of the states and capitals in the USA, every country in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, South America, we had blank maps and had to fill them in.

"
We had to go to the middle of a class where there was big map and had to show countries teacher asked. I was hard as kids were laughing if You made mistake. Show me where is Equator. And I was an idiot, I was looking for Ecuador... Kids started to laugh ...

We spoke about Belarus for a while, he was surprised I knew about Lukashenko and had questions about Lukashenko and we discussed some political and historical issues.

Most of Lithuanians have very positive feeling about Belarus. Too bad our government wants to distant us from them. I consider Belorussians our brothers. Like their country, but not a fan of their government too, but Minsk is nice and roads are very good, better than in Poland 1000 times

A short while into our conversation another student came into the room, somehow the topic of Russia came up in a conversation this other student was having and he declared, "ask that guy there, he's Russian" and I replied, "he's not from Russia, he's from Belarus!" and the American student said, "same difference."

Canada and USA. Maybe he thinks it's difference too?

I also had a professor from Romania who used to work with my father. My father told me, "I think he's a Czechoslovak" and I said, "well dad, they won't like that if you call them that, there are Czechs or Slovaks, not Czechoslovaks" and he said, "right they separated, of course."

So when I met the professor, we began speaking, and I asked him, "sir you're from Romania, right?" he was baffled and said, "yes of course, who told you, did your father say that?" and I said, "well no, he thought you were from Czechoslovakia" and then the professor replied, "well then how did you know I am from Romania?" and I said, "well clearly you have a Romance language accent, but it definitely isn't Spanish or Portuguese, it doesn't sound French, you don't look to be Italian, so that leaves only Romania."

We then had some talks about Romania and obviously most Americans don't know anything about Romania and cannot find Romania on the map.

So you are talented linguist. Well my friend from here is Hungarian from Romania. People in UK only think that Romania is very poor and they have Dracula. There were their knowledge ends.

But if you call an American a Canadian, woah boy, watch out!

I was called Canadian by Brit. Even then I had typical slavic accent!

I actually had one guy from the former Com Bloc correct my pronunciation of Ceausescu and I was quite thankful because apparently I had been saying it wrong the whole time. With a lot of Americans you cannot even correct the way they pronounce your name or your home-town.

Better not to hear how eastern europeans pronounce borrowed english words in their language. BoifrNNNd, gerlfrNNNd English is invading our languages.

My mother didn't know that the Soviet Union and USA had a Cold War.


I was talking with her one day and asked her if she remembered when Kruschev came to the United States and what she thought of Kruschev.

The conversation went something like this-


Me- "So do you remember much about Kruschev and when he came here? What do you think of Kruschev?"

Her- "I don't know who that is."

Me- "He was the leader of the Soviet Union for a number of years."

Her- "Was he the guy with the spot on his head?"

Me- "No, that was Mikhail Gorbachev."

Her- "Are you sure?"

Me- "Yes."

Her- "Was he the drunk guy who came after Gorbachev, the guy who stood on the tank?"

Me- "No that was Boris Yeltsin and he was not the leader of the Soviet Union, he became the president of Russia."

Her- "Then I don't know who you're talking about."

Me- "Kruschev was a Soviet leader during the Cold War."

Her- "Was he their prime minister?"

Me- "He was the Premier, not the Prime Minister, they never had a Prime Minister. He was their leader during part of the Cold War."

Her- "What's a cold war? What makes it different from a hot war?"

Me- "It was a period of heightened tensions and strained relations between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies."

Her- "So we had a war with the Soviet Union?"

Me- "No, we had a cold war."

Her- "But then the wall came down, right?"

Me- "Right..."



She also thought that France was the last major power to enter the Second World War... Probably has something to do with the American media pushing the image of the French as cowards who rapidly surrender.


I'm not making that up either.

Also, she was Valedictorian, top in her class, in her high school in the late 1970s early 1980s.

Regular wrote:

I simply cannot conceive of a future for myself in America, at least not a future I would yearn for and enjoy. The American dream is illusory, it is dead, it has not only died but it has morphed into the American nightmare.

Is that universal thinking from American people right now?

Almost everybody I know is unemployed or they've wound up working a crappy menial job for 20-50% of what they used to make as recently as 2007 or 2008.

Broadly speaking there are two general groups in the USA. Those who realize just how rotten things are, those who don't see any chance for improvement short of a revolution, a coup, or something substantial, and those who have not yet been personally impacted by the economic collapse [those who have government jobs, police, soldiers, those with a great deal of job security, older people who have are retired after having spent 40 years working in high paying jobs in a stable career], etc.


I think recent studies have shown that less than 25% of people under 30 are working in a field that uses their degree... Basically, 1/3rd of people under 30 don't have a job at all, 1/3rd are working in part-time jobs, and a large number are in menial service industry jobs, while less than 25% have a job in their major area of study.

I believe that the true unemployment rate in the USA is around 30%, considerably higher than what the government claims.


A lot of people in the USA are thoroughly demoralized, many more are burying their heads in the sand and hoping their problems go away and things get better, while many have decided to simply party and pretend things are fine.

Most people in my age group are either somewhere between outraged and depressed, or they are still naive and believe they have a great career waiting just around the corner and all they need to do is work an unpaid internship for a major company for 3-4 months and they'll surely be hired with a great salary once they show the company how hard-working they are.


Essentially the classes of 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and now 2013 are competing for entry-level jobs in major industries across the nation... Not to mention that many of these companies now demand 2-5 years experience for an "entry level" job because they feel they can be hard-asses given the economic depression, so all of these people are now also competing against professionals in their 30s and 40s who had their careers interrupted and are willing to take a 20-30% cut in salary by going entry level with a new company.

In the USA a job opening for a janitor's position in a high school will have 800-900 applications [this happened in my area]. A job for a secretary offering $12 dollars per hour will have at least 2,000 applications.

Basically all people can say is "it has to get better" without having any thought for how it will get better or when it will get better. They fail to realize that the Great Depression in the USA lasted from 1929 to 1948 so there is no reason that anything has to get better, let alone soon.


About 50% of the people working as waiters and waitresses have a college degree. About 25% of the people working in retail stores have a college degree.

In the USA we are told that we need "highly skilled foreigners to come here on the H1B visa" while we have people in their late 20s and early 30s who hold a PhD doctoral degree, working in coffee shops and sweeping floors.

http://endoftheamericandream.com/ [this website is in the top 17,000 sites in the USA]

Target is a big box retail store similar to Walmart or K-Mart. They advertised approximately 200 jobs at a new store of theirs in New Mexico and they had around 3,000 people show up seeking work, mind you the work is retail service/cashier sort of work and at most it will pay $8 dollars per hour with no benefits and a maximum of 32 hours scheduled per week...

But don't think you can go to the local college at night or work a second job at another store, they change your schedule from week to week, so this week you may work 8 hours starting Monday morning, Tuesday is an off day, 8 hours starting Wednesday afternoon, 8 hours starting Thursday afternoon, Friday is an off day, and then 8 hours starting Saturday morning, but then the next week it might be entirely different, so you have no way to plan or schedule anything else in your life...

You will work 32 hours per week in retail but it will consume your entire life because you will never be able to plan anything more than a few days in advance, you won't be able to work a second job to save up and move ahead in life, you won't be able to go to college/night school or take classes online in the evening because you know your schedule at work will change in one week and you might be working evenings or afternoons.

The basic retail industry model in the USA is that you will make around $256 dollars per week [before they deduct taxes and other issues, so subtract about 20% from that] and you will never be able to get ahead in life or go anywhere in life because your entire life will be devoted to working 32 hours per week and keeping your entire schedule open because they will change your work schedule every on a weekly basis.




http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/we-are-witnessing-the-slow-tortuous-death-of-the-american-worker


Once upon a time, the U.S. economy produced a seemingly unending supply of good paying jobs that enabled American workers to buy homes, raise families and live the American Dream. But now all of that has changed. Over the past several decades, there have been some fundamental shifts in our economy that have steadily eroded the value of the American worker. Thanks to incredible advances in robotics, computers and other fields of technology, many economic activities that once required a tremendous amount of manpower now require very little. Nothing is going to reverse those technological advances, so the jobs that have been lost as a result are now gone forever. But there are millions of other good jobs that we have lost that we could have done something about. Over the past couple of decades, millions upon millions of American jobs have been shipped overseas. Thanks to a whole host of “free trade” agreements that our politicians promised would be very good for our economy, U.S. workers have now been merged into a global labor pool with hundreds of millions of workers on the other side of the globe that live in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. In such a situation, it is only natural for big corporations to shift production from high wage areas to low wage areas. Unemployment in America has skyrocketed and so have corporate profits. Today, corporate profits as a percentage of U.S. GDP are at an all-time high, but wages as a percentage of U.S. GDP are near an all-time low. The lack of decent jobs in the United States is one of the primary reasons why we are in an economic crisis that never seems to end, and things are not going to turn around any time soon. We truly are witnessing the slow, tortuous death of the American worker, and politicians from both political parties are just standing aside and letting it happen.

Back in the old days, just about everyone that was willing to work hard in America could easily go out and get a decent job. But today there is savage competition even for jobs that pay close to minimum wage. For example, thousands upon thousands of people recently applied for just 200 jobs at a new Target in Albuquerque, New Mexico…


Thousands of people applied for 200 new jobs at Target over the last three days in Northeast Albuquerque.

KOAT Action 7 News went to Target’s job fair at the Marriott Uptown every day and continued to find lines snaking around the building.

Candidates only have a one in 35 chance in getting a job, but many have said they’re confident they can stand out from the pack.

Those candidates have less than a 3 percent chance of getting one of those jobs at Target. The odds of getting into Harvard are actually far better than that.


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A casino was being built in Michigan and they posted 1,500 jobs in the casino, dealer, bar-tender, waitress, etc, jobs that probably pay $10 maybe $12 dollars per hour with minimal benefits... They had 140,000 applicants for those 1,500 jobs.

Regular wrote:
As a kid I was reading Tom Sawyer and decided to build myself a raft with empty botels and empty water siphons. We use to get milk from nearby village, it was straight from a cow and we only had to put strawberries we had growing in our garden.

In the USA if you launch a craft into any body of water you will be arrested unless the craft/boat/raft has a license plate and is properly registered.

Even a canoe on a lake requires a license plate and a registration fee. If you don't have the plate you will definitely be fined and possibly arrested.

If you have 60 minutes and want to watch dozens of clips of how American police behave, this video sums it up...

This happened in Stark County [Ohio/USA], perpetrated by both male and female officers of the Stark County Sheriff's Department.

An assault victim called the police for help. When they arrived, they shut off their dash-board camera (for whatever reason it was not on), and the officer/s body-slammed her onto the ground, slapped her around, handcuffed her, and dragged her into the squad car and took her to jail.

Then male and female officers proceeded to throw her on the ground, slap her around, and forcibly remove all of her clothing, leaving her totally naked in the cell for six hours.

The sheriff has said that all of his officers acted within policy and "by the book" even though their own policy on strip-searching mandates that the officers be of the same-sex as the person being searched, and even though the woman they arrested was the VICTIM of an assault, and hadn't done anything. She was later convicted on charges of "resisting arrest" and "disorderly conduct" although her lawsuit against the sheriff's department is pending.

Here is video footage of the inside of the jail and the cell which shows what they did to her... Note that a lot of what they did is simply not on tape since cameras were turned off.



VIDEO- http://www.wkyc.com/video/player.aspx?aid=53820&bw= CONTENT WARNING, it is not pleasant...


http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=82519

This is common police behavior in the USA...



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fouad_Kaady




A young man was involved in a car accident where the car erupted into flames. He was found sitting on the road next to his car, naked, his clothing burnt away, his body covered in 2nd and 3rd degree burns, and in the words of both of the first two police to respond to the scene, his entire body was covered in blood.

They immediately drew their guns and ordered him to lie down on his stomach so they could restrain him, he groaned no that he couldn't lay down, so they told him they would taze him if he didn't comply.

Ultimately they shot him to death and then claimed that he had charged at them like a maniac and had jumped on top of a car and tried to jump on them.

Witnesses were unable to support the version of events the police gave.

What is known is that the man was covered in blood, he was lapsing in and out of consciousness, both police described him as "catatonic," he was covered with horrible burns, and they found it necessary to shoot him to death.


Both deputies claim the man, covered in burns and blood, screamed, "I'm going to kill you" but none of the other nine eye-witnesses heard that and none of them saw him charge the deputies. Several eye witnesses said that the man was begging, "please don't, don't taze me, stop!"

Oh- there are approximately 101 million unemployed people in the USA. However, many of these people have not looked for work in the last month [discouraged] or they are young people, who have graduated high school or college and been unable to find a job, thus they are not counted by the government as unemployed.


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-04-08/more-101-million-working-age-americans-do-not-have-job

More Than 101 Million Working Age Americans Do Not Have A Job
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/08/2013 13:36 -0400

Bureau of Labor StatisticsFox NewsObama AdministrationPurchasing PowerRealityRecessionrecoveryUnemploymentUnemployment Benefits


Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,

The jobs recovery is a complete and total myth. The percentage of the working age population in the United States that had a job in March 2013 was exactly the same as it was all the way back in March 2010. In addition, as you will see below, there are now more than 101 million working age Americans that do not have a job. But even though the employment level in the United States has consistently remained very low over the past three years, the Obama administration keeps telling us that unemployment is actually going down.

In fact, they tell us that the unemployment rate has declined from a peak of 10.0% all the way down to 7.6%. And they tell us that in March the unemployment rate fell by 0.1% even though only 88,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy. But it takes at least 125,000 new jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. So how in the world are they coming up with these numbers? Well, the reality is that the entire decline in the unemployment rate over the past three years can be accounted for by the reduction in size of the labor force.

In other words, the Obama administration is getting unemployment to go down by pretending that millions upon millions of unemployed Americans simply do not want jobs anymore. We saw this once again in March. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 600,000 Americans dropped out of the labor market during that month alone. That pushed the labor force participation rate down to 63.3%, which is the lowest it has been in more than 30 years. So please don't believe the hype. The sad truth is that there has been no jobs recovery whatsoever.

If things were getting better, there would not be more than 101 million working age Americans without a job.

So exactly where does that statistic come from? Well, the following explains where I got that number...

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 11,742,000 working age Americans that are officially unemployed.

In addition, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says that there are 89,967,000 working age Americans that are "not in the labor force". That is a new all-time record, and that number increased by a whopping 663,000 during the month of March alone.

When you add 11,742,000 working age Americans that are officially unemployed to the 89,967,000 working age Americans that are "not in the labor force", you come up with a grand total of 101,709,000 working age Americans that do not have a job.

When you stop and think about it, that is an absolutely staggering statistic.

And anyone that tells you that "a higher percentage of Americans are working today" is telling you a complete and total lie. During the last recession the percentage of working age Americans with a job fell dramatically, and since then we have not seen that number bounce back at all. In fact, this is the very first time in the post-World War II era that we have not seen the employment-population ratio bounce back after a recession. At this point, the employment-population ratio has been under 60 percent for 49 months in a row...