Thought For The Day No, 40 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste...

But it is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things; they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it.

George MacDonald

What Strangers Lurk On Facebook

Just to reassure people in the light of recent posts that I haven't completely lost it, and in the interest of balance, I'd like to relate something interesting that happened to me not long ago, at least I thought it was interesting..

As posted long ago, I'd suggested the wisdom of buying silver or, if you can afford it, gold, as a hedge against inflation, currency devaluations or general mismanagement of economies by governments that don't really know what they're doing. I still stand by that (indeed, I opened an online account at goldmoney.com, with just a relatively small amount of money, though it's a start) although I'm also prepared to stand by the fact that I don't have a crystal ball and that this movement might prove to be pie in the sky as so many other have.

Be that as it may I signed up to one or two Facebook groups of enthusiasts (who were generally much more enthusiastic than I am) of gold and silver and related issues, many of whom are based in the States. One day I got a friend invite from someone whose name was Joseph and who'd evidently thought we'd be of a like mind, and who'd tracked me down via one of those groups. Seemed like an interesting character, had been in the US military and served, by the looks of it, in Iraq. He liked the San Diego Chargers but I was prepared to forgive that.

Before I knew it, I was in for a whole load of invites, recommendations and postings which were, well, they were very political, and not really related to G& S. Things like survivalism (hiding out in the desert in a sealed impregnable box with enough supplies to last though the streams of people of colour coming out of the cities, until the latter devoured each other and it was safe to come out) and 'I support Israel's right to defend itself'.

Now, I don't know about the Israeli situation, maybe the government there is as brutal and heavy handed as they say it is, but the fact remains, I was only interested in my little gold and silver enquiries and hadn't realised I'd had to sign up to a whole agenda of other stuff ... talk about getting out of my depth.

This is something that seems to happen more and more, especially in the States, this kind of agenda-ism. It seems that, you can't think for yourself on various issues and come to your own conclusions, but rather, have to sign up for a whole smorgasbord of accompaniments that you frankly don't want. So, you think that guns are a bad thing? Well, better understand that you're also pro-abortion and same sex marriage and like to talk about how the christian religion was solely set up as an exercise in mind control. Want less government interference in certain areas? Not without an M16, paid up support for the Israeli government and irrational screaming outbursts against Canada and Europe you don't.

Why can we not pick and choose for ourselves? I realise that certain beliefs tend to go together but these hodge-podges of conflicting and contradicting shibboleths and stereotypes that are forced upon us are as obvious as a beach ball in the snow, do not help anyone, and hinder progress.

Some time later Joseph disappeared from my Fabcebook list of friends- Maybe I'd  posted something that wasn't from the same hymn sheet as he wields, said something cynical (or rather, true) about American 'friendly fire' incidents on British troops and others in Iraq or Afghanistan, or maybe he'd even found his way to this blog and read one of my, er,..Walt's posts - who knows. But in hounour of this oddest of social networking dalliances, I'd like to remind Joseph and others like him, be they right or left or centre, that there is still relative freedom of speech and availability of information in much of the western world, and for as long as there is, and as long as people keep thinking and don't just blindly swallow everything that someone with a microphone and and imposing voice feeds them, like so much candy floss, people can choose for themselves what they think on various issues, and don't have to 'join your club'. Grow up!

Remembering The Dead

..much as I dislike the hippy ideal I can always make an exception, everything is not so black and white after all...

Thought For The Day No. 39 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

..psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste...

When proper respect towards the dead is shown at the end and continued after they are far away, the moral force (tê) of a people has reached its highest point

Ancient Chinese, Analects.

...so the Lithuanians do have the right idea then!

History of Estonia 101: Part Five

This is part five in a series which we hadn't updated for a good couple of weeks but, since nothing much has happened here in Estonia since then, we'll continue where we left off...

Since the PMC has been going for some 60 years here in Estonia, during which time we've seen such comings and goings as the regaining of independence, the imminent introduction of the Euro, and the Beatles concerts at the Lauluväljak, we feel fully qualified to present this, a multi part set of posts on the history of Estonia which will appear, now and again as we're given time.
There's unlikely to be anything new for Estonians, who therefore don't need to read on unless they want to check we're not peddling complete mistruths. The sources are likely to be the usual internet sites such as wikipedia and any links that arise therefrom, but this should save the reader some time in finding all this stuff themselves, the one or two books we have on the subject, and maybe the occasional word of mouth stuff.
You might also want to check out our posts about a year ago now, on the Estonian language.
At the very least we hope to dispel any misconceptions of Estonia being a slavic speaking country, being located in the Balkans or being a place with a lot of stones (although this last is in fact true)...


Part Five: of Gustavus Adolphus, Ivan the Terrible and Martin Luther

The very title of this piece indicates the nature of Estonia's bridging North, East and West, and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw influence from all three directions (plus the South if you include the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth).

As seen in the previous post, the Livonian confederation, which corresponded to modern day Latvia and Estonia and was made up of a patchwork quilt of bishoprics, medieval fiefdoms and the two most northerly Hanseatic ports of Riga and Reval (Tallinn) was shaky at best. The sixteenth century saw the cracks turn into gaping holes when in the 1550s, the disintegration led to the ever-opportunistic Russia moving in to fill the power vacuum, with a military invasion under Tsar Ivan IV (yes, the terrible) in 1558. Incidentally this was the same year that Elizabeth I ascended to the throne of England. She had nothing to do with the Russian invasion. Dorpat (Tartu - which as we have seen had beeb a Russian city in its foundation) and Narva, unsurprisingly, were taken and Reval was besieged. The Reval city council, then as now never slow on the uptake, appealed to the Swedish King Eric XIV for military assistance, which he duly obliged, presumably sensing easy pickings. From an Estonian perspective it would seem that it was a case of the lesser of two evils (or even the least of several); the country's northern and linguistic neighbour, Finland, had gradually come under Swedish domination through the course of the later middle ages and in any case Sweden had become something of a regional power by now. Traces of this period can even be seen on Estonia's coat of arms, which features three blue lions on a gold background (or 'Or, three lions passant guardant azure', if you want the proper heraldic description) which of course remain the colours on the Swedish flag to this day.

After the defeat of the Russians Sweden divided the country into two, the northern part constituing the 'Duchy of Estonia' (as had been the case in the thirteenth and fourteenth century, only this time Denmark had been the colonial power until its hasty selling off of its territory to the Teutonic knights) was secured after the Battle of Wenden in 1578; the southern half 'Swedish Livonia' covered roughly the same territory as the old Livonian confedaration (ie most of Northern Latvia) though this was not secured until much later, due to another regional power, the recently formed Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, having taken some Estonian lands. Many Estonians are unaware of this occupation, which was comparatively short lived, from the 1580s until Sweden's defeat of Poland-Lithuania in 1629.

Swedish rule under Gustavus II (Adolphus) saw an improvement in conditions for many people, with greater autonomy being granted to the peasantry in 1631 and the establishment of a printing press, a relatively new invention, at Tartu the following year. Not for nothing were these times (retrospectively) referred to as 'the good old Swedish times'. But they were not to last forever..

Denmark for its part did not give up without a fight this time (if you remember it had re-taken some Estonian territory in the form of the Bisopric of Ösel-Wiek (Saaremaa and Läänemaa) in the 1560s, but the baltic was clearly not big enough for two Scandinavian powers and the territory was ceded to Sweden. Since the Kingdom of Denmark included Norway, via a union of crowns, it could be said that the era represented a pan-Scandinavian intervention in the region, something that would not have gone amiss much later on in history...

In the meantime, the ruling classes would still have spoken 'low' German, i.e. the form spoken in much of northern Germany, and indeed been ethnic Germans, whilst the bulk of the populace spoke Estonian of course. The north German connection meant that it was only a matter of time after Martin Luther issued his '95 Theses' in 1517 for Lutheran ideas to percolate through; indeed the (Danish) Bishopric of Ösel-Wiek was Lutheran from the outset. Since the religious changeover was likely to have been carried through by the ruling classes, with presumably little protest from the ordinary folk one way or another, and the state by this time was becoming more and more stable under the new occupier, Estonia escaped the horrors of the religious wars of Western Europe. No counter-reformations, divorces, burnings or rival translations here. Either that or Lutheranism happened to sit well with Estonian's methodical and no nonsense way of doing things. Or alternatively that then as now they were not particularly pious people. Or all of the above...

Incidentally the first extant book to have been printed in the Estonian language (though printed at Wittenberg in Germany) dates from this period, a Lutheran catechism from 1535.

                          Albrecht Dürer's 'Three Mighty Ladies From Livonia' (1521)

Retrospective map (top) of medieval Livonia from the time of contemporary Swedish Estonia/Livonia, whose borders it roughly shared and below, less pretty but more cartographically rigorous map of Swedish Estonia /Livonia and environs.

Walt Gleeson With The Story Of Tragic Dwight, 2

Canfield, Proctor, Nightingale, Zagler, Hill, Robbins, Tracy, Winfrey... step aside please..there's a new success guru in town! Walt Gleeson is a highly successful, internationally renowned author of motivational books and CDs and other products. Starting as a rust repairer on a sewage trawler in international waters, on one cent fifty per month, Walt soon rose to control the entire US fleet, and he never even graduated from High School. His career has spanned over half a decade, during which he has acted as advisor to such alumni as Richard Nixon, Oliver North and Mike Tyson, and he has enthralled readers all over the world, from Alaska to Florida and from Hawaii to Rhode Island, with such titles as You Can Do It!, You Can Do It! Too, Literally Make Your House Work For You, My Lai Was Just a Blip and Become a Billionaire Whilst On The Toilet, Walt is the Puumaja Crew's personal realization and fulfilment coach, whatever that is.


Hi Walt here, with an urgent message for you...


Here everything has to go in soft focus, with some slow, mournful reflective, twangy guitar music of the type you got on that movie about the gay cowboys who were much better looking than more or less everybody...

"Ok now we've  got that in place, I'd like to tell you about Dwight....Dwight was born in an ordinary small town, in an ordinary state in middle america. Dad was a cop, mom stayed at home looking after Dwight and his two older sisters. But Dwight was different..."


Cue zinging sound that they make by sliding a piece of metal along the steel strings of an electric guitar

"Early on, when he was just short of his second birthday however, his parents noticed that he couldn't throw a baseball overarm all the way from the outfield, but rather just lamely tossed it in a kind of uncoordinated spasm worthy of on English gayman. Horrified at this affliction, Dwight's parents Brandylene-Jo and Seth, took him to all the doctors in the area and even went as far as New York City to find a cure, just to make Dwight a normal little boy".

Cut to Dwight's grandparents who explain that Dwight is a bubbly boy and full of beans, just to differentiate him from all other people of his age, and that all this means that he probably won't be a starter for the Kansas City Royals, though they'll probably be dead by then and not have to face the shame in the street; all this interlaced with a few finger-picked minor 7th chords..

Show Walt arriving at Dwight's home  in his cadillac and waving to the small child through closed window whilst puffing on a big cigar..

Cut to Dwight surrounded by older kids, playing a game a running round just to underline the fact that he is a normal little kid just like you or I and not some kind of freak as such.

"We ask you to help Dwight, and others like him, but especially Dwight (some of the other ones are black, for example) by sending a donation, as much as you can (but not less than 99.99 USD) to waltgleeson.com and make a little boy and his parents very happy by helping him to not still be throwing like a girl on his third birthday".

Music fades out and cheesy, soft focus family pic of everyone's plastic looking faces appears..

Help Me - I Wanna Be Un-PC For A Day...

Here at the PMC we're in a bit of a quandry, namely, we can't decide which side we back in the American Civil War of 1861-65 we should back.

Now, on the surface, this should be a no brainer, right? The North, obviously, since they were abolitionists. On the other hand, the South had a cooler flag (latterly, I think the saltire-based design came in towards the end of the war), more balls, and the Dukes of Hazard (and Lynryd Skynryd) onside...

...anyway, since the war was resolved (on the side of the righteous) one hundred and forty five years ago now, it's fairly academic, but we're still wondering if any of our readers are faced with the same, "it's-obvious-whose-side-I-should-back-but-in-any -case-I-fancy-the-other-side" dilemma. Perhaps you secretly back the nazis, hoping their far cooler Stuka dive bombers, Tiger tanks and Nebelwerfer rocket launchers would put pay to those pesky Americans, Brits and Russians once and for all. Or maybe you really take pleasure from the British government forces' crushing of the Jacobites at Culloden. Or alternatively you revel in the Conquistadores atrocities, or think that Sadam Hussein's use of chemical weapons against the Kurds and the marsh Arabs were right to hold sway, whatever it is, we'd like to know..

...mark your entries 'The Side That I Secretly Back In a War That Has Long Since Been Resolved, Even Though I Know They Were The Baddies' and there might even be a prize in the offing, for the best entry, who knows...

Thought For The Day No. 38 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste...

Just as a small fire is extinguished by the storm whereas a large fire is enhanced by it - likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicament and catastrophes whereas a strong faith is strengthened by them.

Viktor Frankl