Joseph u Michelle jirreklamaw l-iSmart Cells
Three weeks old and already dressed as convicts. But stem cells may yet save them - even if nothing can save them now from the curse of pushy parenthood
Are there no heights of pushiness which those two will leave unconquered?
They finally manage to produce a couple of sprogs after years of trying, artificial assistance and much lying around and bleeding (thank you, Joseph – there’s such a thing as too much information).
And the first thing they do when Michelle becomes pregnant with the help of a laboratory team (thanks again, sir – we really needed to know that – qisek William Hague) is plan for their old age – the foetuses’ old age, that is – and the possibility of Alzheimer’s Disease.
That’s not enough, of course, because they also had to publicise their pushy parenthood on the Smart Cells website, with a ‘testimonial’.
But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, jahasra msieken. As Joseph himself said only last week, ordinary families are really struggling to make ends meet. They can’t all afford to take cruises and store stem cells at EUR2,000 a shot (that’s EUR4,000 for twins).
So perhaps Mr – my apologies, Dr – and Mrs Pushy got theirs stored for free in return for giving a testimonial from an up-and-coming member of the European Parliament.
And I’d still like to see that cheque for the cruise, because until I do, I’m going to suspect that it was a gift from Norman Hamilton.
Come on, Norman, dish up the goods. Jew il-flights ma’ George Fenech biss jiswew?
Bunch of charlatans.
From the Smart Cells website
TESTIMONIAL
Dr Joseph Muscat (Member of the European Parliament), wife Michelle and twin daughters Etoile Ella and Soleil Sophie
06.12.2007
As a couple we follow quite closely developments in the health sector and we had first read about the potential of cord blood cells some years back when an international magazine carried a story about it.
When Michelle became pregnant we immediately thought it would be a good idea to store our babies’ cord blood, but we wanted to ask questions and voice our concerns.
Even though we did not contact any other company, we chose Smart Cells (Malta) because they answered our questions honestly. They did not try to oversell and did not stop following our girls even after the Cord blood storage. Cord blood storage is not a miracle – it is important that people should understand this – but it is the best parents can do at present to help their children face future illnesses.
Smart Cells (Malta) gave us a fair picture. The follow-up service showed that Smart Cells (Malta) cared about us as a family and that we were not just a transaction. We would definitely recommend Smart Cells (Malta) to friends expecting a baby.
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Daf, give them the link. It has to be seen to be believed!
http://www.smartcellsmalta.com/testimonials/viewtestimonial.asp?id=18
Be that as it may. But he should have invested in a Smart Brain.
It was all nicely planned Baxxter but Igor f**ked up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0_1F0_20mE
HP, a smart brain costs more than Euro 2,000. Later, Joseph thought it costs Euro 40,000 p.a.
They don’t need a Smart Brain, H.P. (good to see somebody else around at this time of night – I’ve been asleep all afternoon). Those girls are the sole heirs to their grandfather’s Fireworks Kingdom.
Oh and speaking of ordinary families who can’t make ends meet, Joseph and Michelle send those sprogs not to a state school but to that independent school at L-Imselliet – five thousand euros A YEAR just for the tuition fees.
God bless the good ship fireworks and all who sail in her.
Jesus Christ. To think that half this island will vote for that liar. The same half who’s posting adoring get-well messages to Mintoff because they believe he lifted the masses out of poverty. The same half, plus the other half, were posting hagiographies a few weeks ago because de Marco, the successful lawyer, would deign to greet them, the poor proles. We should just give up, call it quits and ask the British to recolonise the island.
Hey, come on, H.P., look on the bright side. This may yet turn out to be a bumper summer, what with one down and the other about to pop off. Funny, but when de Marco died, I thought to myself ‘Now Mintoff will go.’ It’s often like that with besties: one goes and the other loses the will to live.
Why are you taken aback because half the island will vote for that liar? People vote for those they think will represent them best, and Joseph Muscat is truly representative of tens of thousands. They are like him, which is exactly why Malta can be such an unpleasant place to live in.
I’m not taken aback; I’m disillusioned with life. I worked my butt off to try to make something of myself, and I got nowhere. If I learned something it’s that the best gift your parents can give you is money. Mine just gave me love and a Victorian sensibility which has been my curse ever since.
It’s sad indeed when the only thing to look forward to is the prospect of urinating on Mintoff’s grave.
@OMGYHTST
If you really feel that way about life in Malta, just do what some of us have done and leave the rock, unless you’ve already done so. Otherwise don’t complain.
And another thing: please show some respect to the dead (and possibly dying). They are survived by grieving friends and relatives.
Anything else in terms of behaviour would be considered cheap, in civilised (and more pleasant-to-live-in) societies.
Lizard, showing respect to the dead and dying depends on whether they deserve it. Would you speak with respect about Pinochet just because he left a grieving family?
@Antoine Vella
So, Mintoff is now on a par with Pinochet? Maybe a little sense of perspective might be useful here.
[Daphne – How old are you, Peter? Pray tell.]
Old enough to know what Malta used to be like and well-travelled enough to have spent time and worked in places ruled by authoritarian leaders that have overseen the killing and torture of hundreds and thousands. And sensible enough to know that it lacks perspective to get the two confused.
This is unbelievable!
I asked many doctors regarding smart cell storage and they all gave the same answer. If you have money to spare do it, If not don’t even bother. Some added that you might as well use the money for a family holiday as it would be more useful.
With an annual salary for an MEP at around 140 000 euros, Joseph Muscat could have easily spared 4000 euros. For us, ordinary mortals it may not be the case.
Imagine you have a house loan, normal salary, cost of living and now you have to add 2000 euros to the cost of having a baby. It just puts more unnecessarily pressure on couples especially when an MEP presents it as the “best parents can do at present to help their children face future illnesses”.
So with his argument most Maltese parents are not doing their best because they just cannot afford 2000 euros.
I suggest that since you are the leader of the opposition and you really believe that it is the best parent can do, you should fight for us, the ordinary mortals, and make smart cell storage free and part of our national health care.
I think he already planned well for their future by naming them Etoile and Soleil. The impending bullying is sure to make them tough. You know, A Boy Named Sue syndrome.
Just wondering,
You haven’t mentioned the Consuelo Herrera thing in a while. What happened there?
[Daphne – There hasn’t been a hearing in all this time.]
Consuelo: the false security of life-long tenure.
Nice atittude, lizard up above. ‘If you don’t like it, leave’. Can’t you see that this is just what is going wrong here in Malta? All the nice, clever, young people are running away, leaving the rest behind to simmer in malice, ignorance, violence, psycho behaviour and ineptitude.
That’s why the few of us nice, clever people who are left increasingly feel that the malice, ignorance, violence, psycho behaviour and ineptitude are growing all-pervasive. Because they really are. The balance has shifted drastically.
Regretfully it is the only attitude.
Jekk xbajt ghamel bhali u itlaq. If malice, ignorance, violence, psycho behaviour and ineptitude rule, and you still harbour hopes that the place will change, then stay on.
Baxxter, not ‘urinate on Mintoff’s grave’ but ‘queue to urinate on Mintoff’s grave’.
Surely the open coffin would do better?
“Etoile Ella” and “Soleil Sophie”. The poor girls now have to spend all their lives with names that sound like storybook characters created by an author who doesn’t have a clue.
Very sad indeed!
@lizard
Why should we be compelled to leave? If you are living abroad, it is no thanks to Mintoff and his successors.
I agree with you that we should show respect to the dead. But you should have remarked that it is much better to show respect to the living and Mintoff certainly did not show us respect.
He f***ed our lives with consequences going far beyond his time as prime minister. So let’s make a deal. I won’t show him the respect he showed me and many others but I will simply ignore him.
Hear hear! My sentiments exactly.
No one is compelling anyone to leave, here – it’s a question of ‘if it is as bad as you say, and you can’t stand it anymore, just up sticks and leave’. In today’s day and age, when everyone is mobile and barriers have (supposedly) ceased to exist, it is relatively easy to do. The majority of us voted for this in 2003, ergo…
Agreed – Mintoff was Mintoff but I will stop there – because – at least where I come from, society is not expected (out of respect to the family and friends) to slide down the slippery slope of tirades.
Issa ghamlu intom. Unless Malta is really is an unpleasant place to live in where the living curse the sick and old.
[Daphne – You have led a sheltered life with your concerns about middle-class sensibilities. It’s true that people do not curse the old and sick, but only when the old and sick happen to be nonentities or otherwise harmless. When they are people who destroyed their country, the situation is somewhat different.]
@DCG
I said all I had to say to the others replying to my comments here, I will not enter into an interminable diatribe with any of them. To each his/ her own.
But your response to my comment has (genuinely) intrigued me – perhaps because your assumption of my having led a sheltered life borders on the presumptuous as I have very rarely, if ever at all, commented here before and therefore your presumption is based on a few lines about one singular subject being discussed here.
[Daphne – It was what is known as a throwaway remark. Don’t be such a tedious pedant.]
But I would like to ask your opinion about a similar event when, some 20 years back another divisive character (Mons. Gonzi) had passed away. He had been in a critical state for a few days before his death and people who had suffered at the hands of the Church (in the 60s) were saying that his prolonged suffering before his passing was “justified” seeing how much pain he had caused in the past.
[Daphne – Gonzi was before my time and I had no experience of him in the 1960s. But you are mixing issues in any case. Nobody here is saying that Mintoff’s suffering is justified. We’re merely celebrating because we lived to see him die. Unless you lived under his government and that of his puppet successor from the crucial age of 6 to 23, as I did (and so many of my contemporaries feel exactly as I do), you cannot possibly know why we feel an urge to crack open the champagne. The regret my contemporaries and I feel for our lost and wasted youth in which we were denied almost everything is not diminished by the years, but on the contrary it is heightened as we watch our children, who are now the same age we were then, fly free with the world as their oyster and untold opportunities before them. And like a dagger through the heart, it illustrates more forcefully than anything else could just how badly we were traduced. They used to call my generation Generation X, the ones who would never vote Labour. But we have since raised Generation Y, the ones who returned Gonzi to government in 2008. Labour was defeated, in 2008, by the children of those whose hopes and dreams were blighted by Labour in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Get somebody to show you the numbers – but not Jason Micallef, who got them wrong. They didn’t vote for Gonzi because their parents poisoned their minds. They voted for Gonzi for the same reason we voted against Labour: opportunity and the lack of it.]
Without wishing to in any way pry into your own religious convictions but using your argument above, those making the statements at the time of Mons. Gonzi’s death would appear to be perfectly entitled to do so, given his stature at the helm of the Church and its relevance at the time to Maltese society.
[Daphne – What are you asking me here, whether I agree with somebody’s right to express an opinion? I’m not going to quote Voltaire at you; it’s hackneyed. But honestly….]
@ DCG
Your second (long) comment is noted and I would say true, but it was not warranted as I had not finished my argument which came along in paragraph 4.
As regards your third comment, I was not asking you anything – I was making a conclusive statement based on the fact that given your and others’ earlier comments, if people appear to be justified in saying what they have been saying so far about Mr Mintoff despite the current state of his health, then similar abject comments when Mons. Gonzi passed would be equally justified. This I find to be repulsive, but such remains my personal opinion.
In conclusion I have to say that I am mildly bemused at the tone chosen for your response because if you sincerely believe that I am a tedious pedant simply by my making a counter- observation (considering you had made an observation first), then perhaps those who describe you in a very unflattering way might be right. This is rather unfortunate as your non-political writings are normally very objective.
[Daphne – I described you as a pedant because of the pedantic way you express yourself. It IS pedantic – very studied. Unfortunately, you seem to make the common mistake of confusing objectivity with ‘balance’. I have already asked somebody else to list the good that Mintoff did and then to list the bad, and now I am asking you. Then tell me that I am not being objective.]
God, am I proud not to have anything in common with you lot of moronic, narcissistic, disrespectful lot! This blog has reached an unprecedented plateau of hate-talk that sends shivers down my spine. The Ku Klux Klan and other notorious hate groups are retirement home tea parties in comparison. Guido de Marco, who respected his political enemies like no one else, must be turning in his grave with indignation knowing you people vote the same party he represented. And yet, what am I complaining for, as if this comment will ever show up!
[Daphne- You’re a typical example of somebody with no analytical skills. A discussion about the Muscats’ stem cells – a discussion which they provoked by publicising it – is hate talk. But the lanzit, hatred and envy which motivates that freak show you call the Labour Party is….what, exactly?
You are also a poor judge of character. Guido de Marco did not ‘respect his enemies’. He made a point of having no enemies so that benefits would accrue to him personally and politically. It wasn’t a strategy based on a Christian respect for others, but one based on Sicilian control and influence. Guido de Marco was not a party man but his own man, following his own agenda. I could elaborate, but because of my respect for his son, I won’t.]
Daph, I was mainly referring to the disgusting comments some of your adulators in this blog left and not specifically to your article, which, frankly, isn’t an ode to love and friendship either.
[Daphne – Don’t stress about it; just soothe your fraying nerves by reading through these comments, which might be more to your liking http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20100916/local/dom-mintoff-hospitalised ]
Why should I enjoy reading the nice comments about Mintoff? You honestly don’t think that whoever condemns pissing on Mintoff’s grave, even just figuratively, is necessarily a worshipor of Mintoff, do you? Call me a unorthodox sort of being, but I surely believe that no one deserves that sort of tribute, never mind Mintoff himself who throughout his long political life, has done more good than harm. Admittedly, he is a far cry from being my ideal politician, but that’s another story. But to picture him as if he was another Hitler, a Mussolini or a Franco is a mere reflection of how your own analytical skills have succumbed to emotion, a weakness which the Perit himself often evidenced. OMG Daph, you share a common trait with him, did you know that?
[Daphne –
1. Anyone who calls himself il-lejborist is bound to enjoy reading nice comments about Mintoff. I hadn’t noticed there was another Labour Party in Malta.
2. Worshipper. I lived through Mintoff’s entire period of rule and it is precisely because I know just how many, entirely justifiably, would have loved to piss on him alive that I can fully understand their urge to piss on his grave. I don’t feel any such urge myself because I can express my own feelings about the subject in writing and do not have to use urination.
3. I don’t think you’re unorthodox at all. You strike me as extremely conventional: somebody who has views but who doesn’t have the guts to express them under his own name. You are Mister Average.
4. List the good that Mintoff did. Right, now list the harm. As a separate exercise, assess just how Fenech Adami made the working classes the new middle class, and why, under 16 years of Labour, the working classes stayed working class and the middle class all but disappeared except in name.
5. He was not Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini or Franco. The comparisons which you seek are (or were) mainly in South America. In our own time, the most perfect comparison is to Hugo Chavez. I’m sure there will be lots of people pissing on Chavez’s grave when the time comes.
6. My analytical skills almost never succumb to emotion. It’s one of my defining characteristics. Even when I am very angry, very happy or very sad, I think clearly. Mintoff, however, is a sociopath and had no real emotion to which he could succumb. Those rages were all for show, to intimidate others. The mistake you make is to think that Mintoff had a plan after 1970. He did not. Mintoff was/is a nihilist.]
My dear (pen) friend Daphne, my nickname is merely a satirical way of introducing myself to you in your forum/blog and a spoof of how die-hard Nationalists tal-pepe like you (sorry for the label, but ‘tal-pepe’ isn’t really offensive, is it?) consider us Labourites as being hamalli u injoranti. Of course I’m a Labourite but not an obsessed one at that.
[Daphne – Die-hard Nationalist? Both my paternal and maternal families were die-hard Constitutionalists, the polar opposite of the Nationalist Party as it was then. If I am committed to anything, it’s to ensuring that your party doesn’t get away with murder as it did in my growing-up years when there was no free press or freedom of speech. I look at Labour and I laugh. Imbarrazz kien, u imbarrazz baqa. And if you must press on with this, then yes, anyone who looks at Labour and thinks ‘Hmmm, that’s a good lot. I think I’ll vote for them to run the country’ must be damned stupid. Either that or brainwashed from birth into the Cult of Labour.]
As for Fenech Adami, I think he did a lot of good but his biggest weakness was that of being too partisan. He never managed to separate his role of statesman from that of party leader. He disrespected and hated the Labourites and all those with opposing political beliefs and created an unprecedented divide between Labourites and nationalists that is still palpable today. He is the father of this crazy political division that has cursed this island for years. He subtly provoked and took political advantage of the turmoil caused by the then stupid labour extremists. Obviously, in the eyes of a die-hard nationalist he is a god, but if you think that being a Labourite in the 80s/90s (not to mention the 60s, but that’s someone else’s story) was painless, you are seriously mistaken.
[Daphne – Kemm int bahnan, miskin. Another one of those born post 1980 who swallowed whole the fictions of their parents. Yours is a spot-on description of Mintoff and you are too young and silly to be aware of it.]
But it was exactly the “turmoil caused by the then stupid labour extremists” which divided the nation, not Fenech Adami. Of course you were never at any of the mass meetings organised at the time, but the parting words uttered by Fenech Adami were always to keep calm, to turn a blind eye to provocation, to keep the peace.
You were never shot at, never pelted with rocks and metal bars. Never had tear gas thrown at you or had your education stunted. Never been thrown out of work because of your allegiance to a party. Never had your name blacklisted so you’d never get a telephone service – the list is endless.
Mintoff could never accept dissent from foes or friends. Salvatur? Dittatur, more like.
Utter nonsense.
Fenech Adami’s vision transcended bi-partisanship. He freed markets, overhauled the country’s infrastructure and spearheaded Malta’s entry into the EU for everyone’s sake. And everyone reaped the benefits.
Mintoff’s brand of divisiveness ran much deeper. He engineered a cultural class war that rages on until this very day. It’s his fault there are some who want to do something good with their lives and earn their own living, and the thousands who want to live on government handouts; the few who want to learn and better themselves, and the many who are happy to be doing just fine.
“And everyone reaped the benefits.” ….
just look at Joseph Muscat…
Politics was such a way of life in the seventies that you had 6-year-olds at a party – some would want blue balloons, others wouldn’t dream of going home with a blue balloon and would insist on a red balloon.
Similar at school when the children were divided into teams – some would be determined to be in the blue team and burst into tears when it was full (same thing when the red team was chosen).
In the 80’s/90’s things changed. They didn’t become perfect but goodness what an improvement.
Can anyone imagine a radio/TV programme with people phoning in insulting the Prime Minister in the 70s? Or a programme like Xarabank with people yelling obscenities at a Minister or MP?
They didn’t even dare carry the In- taghna but would hide it away.
Although the leaflets were available at the shop, I may have actually seen the “testimonial” online. I can’t remember well, but I do remember thinking how cheap it was of them to provide such a “testimonial”.
People seem to remember the bad things Mintoff did like the violence but seem to forget the good things. As you say draw a list and compare……many of you say he messed 16 years of your life as if we were under hitler or stalin.Are social services,hospitals,votes for women,national airline(ghasafar tac-comb),housing(not like today,keeping you in debt till you retire),all that bad?Ok there was corruption as well,i remember well Lorry Sant and co….but is this present government corruption free?Don’t think so!!
You say you don’t remember the 60’s,neither do i,but my grandparents recall that the true hatred was in the 60’s when the church at that time was hand in hand with PN and did sins that many people to this day can’t forget,can’t forgive.So there lies a pattern that started before Mintoff’s era…shrouded in violence.