The Panda Bear has resolved not eat crackers or sweets(realistically this means eating very few sweets) in favor of snacking on fruits, nuts and cheese. She has read several places that unprocessed food even if it has the same calorie content as processed foods are still much better for you and are less fattening. The Panda Bear has noticed that cold fruit is very refreshing in the summer and for the most part she does not miss her diet ice cream.
The Panda Bear loves coffee. She feels she should reduced the amount of caffeinated coffee because the caffeine makes her tense. Usually, she is not consciously aware that the coffee is making her more tense but she believes on an intellectual level that it makes her tense. However, today she declined an additional cup of caffeinated coffee because she felt it was making her too tense. This is the first time the Panda Bear has turned down caffeinated coffee because of the way it made her feel rather than an intellectual resolve to drink less coffee.
The Panda Bear stated in a previous post how huge amounts of foreign aid gets stolen. This morning the Panda Bear read on http://www.boston.com/ how billions of dollars given to Afghanistan has been diverted to the Taliban whom there is some disagreement among US officials on whether they are the enemy.
In her July 14 posting, the Panda Bear examined the word communism and what it actually meant. She found this information very useful when reading Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest which she was reading this weekend(in a later post she will review the Larsson series). The book also used the term "agent of influence". According to Rodney Carlisle in his book The Complete Idiot's Guide to Spying and Espionage, an "agent of influence" is someone who has friendly dealings with the USSR and its officials and tries influence his/her home country's foreign policy to be friendly to the USSR. According to Carlisle, some officials in Franklin Roosevelt's administration were agents of influence for the Soviet Union,. Also, Carlisle states there was suspicion that British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was working for the KGB. There is discussions in Stieg Larsson's book The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest whether the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme worked for the Soviets.
The Panda Bear had a great, great Uncle who was killed in Nazi Germany for being a Communist. The Panda Bear hears conflicting stories from her relatives whether her father's father who lived in the US was a communist(pro-Soviet) or just a leftist. According to the Panda Bear's father, his father was a communist, other relatives say he was just extremely pro-labor left wing. The Panda Bear's father's father died before the Panda Bear was born.
As stated, in her July 14 posting, the Panda Bear was once written up on her place of work for calling the managers of her work "communists". What the Panda Bear meant when she used the term "communist" was that the motivation to work was the "common good" or good of the organization/humanity rather than the advancement of individuals. Also she meant, that the organization treated good workers and bad workers alike. The Panda Bear remembers in a economics class that in the Soviet Union the most productive farms where being run to profit individuals farmers rather than the collective farms which were growing food for the common good.
In later posts, the Panda Bear will be discussing work place "collectivism" which does not treat people like individuals.
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