Christmas in Moscow

Today's Christmas mass



Tadevuš Kandrusievič, bishop of Moscow. The man is originally from Hrodna, Belarus.



The Cathedral of Moscow





Merry Christmas to everybody!
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finally winter in Moscow

today's foto
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Nazi terrorism in Moscow

http://maskodagama.livejournal.com/440179.html

An other attack against an antifascist activist in Moscow. The youngster was coming home with his mother. On their flat's door they saw a Hakenkreuz and a papersheet saying "Juden Khachi (derogatory for "Caucasians") live here". The boy was about to tear the paper away as he saw a bomb connected to it. They immediately called the police. As the policemen tried to neutralise the bomb, it exploded and heavily injured them.

The Livejournal post above has some comments supporting the "Russian Warriors Fighting Bastardic Antifa" that are also more than illustrative.

And this is not the first such case. Skinhead attacks against people from Caucasus countries, the Central Asia, Africa or even (and more often) from the Russian Northern Caucasus are more than usual news here. The democratic opposition says that this increased activity is supported by the Kremlin to maintain a feeling of insecurity among the people. Besides that, the nazis should therefore become the most probable alternative to "good guys" from the pro-Kremlin parties and movements, so that people would face the choice between neo-Putin and nazis at the coming parliamental and presidental elections.

Be it so or not - we really seem to live in a Russian Weimar Republic that has a realistic chance to become a Russian Third Reich.
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Are you too selfish for kids?

We are less likely than our predecessors to ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask if we are happy. We shun values such as self-sacrifice and duty as the pitfalls of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical

[...]

There is no generalisation in this article, no matter how harsh, that would not apply to me. I care about my own life in the present. I think I should be, but - doubtless because I don't have children - I'm honestly not very fussed about what happens after I die. I'm proud of the Shriver family, but not enough to help to ensure that it outlasts me. As Nora pointed out, my genes are swell. But like my friends', my sorrow at not having passed them on is vague, thin and abstract, and no match for Be Here Now. I fancy I work very hard; in socially crucial respects, I am lazy.

[...]

Meanwhile, as the west's childless have grown more prevalent, the stigma that once attached to being "barren" falls away. Women - and men, too - are free to choose from a host of fascinating lives that may or may not involve children, and across Europe couples are opting for the latter in droves. My friends and I are decent people - or at least we treat each other well. We're interesting. We're fun. But writ large, we're an economic, cultural and moral disaster.

[...]

In its darkest form, the growing cohort of childless couples determined to throw all their money at Being Here Now - to take that step-aerobics class, visit Tanzania, put an addition on the house while making no effort to ensure there's someone around to inherit the place when the party is over - has the quality of the mad, slightly hysterical scenes of gleeful abandon that fiction writers craft when imagining the end of the world.

Not to disparage old people, but "senescent" is not a pretty word. Large sectors of western population have broken faith with the future. In the Middle East, birth rates are still sky-high, whereas Europeans, Australians and many European-Americans cannot be bothered to scrounge up another generation of even the same size, because children might not always be interesting and fun, because they might not make us happy, because some days they're a pain in the bum. When Islamic fundamentalists accuse the west of being decadent, degenerate and debauched, you have to wonder if maybe they've got a point.

// a very good article indeed

My dream is to have at least two or three children.

Also I'm sometimes visited by the idea of converting to Islam, for that part of my heritage has definitely a better chance to survive in the future. Why belong to a group of people that are on their way to extinction and do not have a slight desire to do something for their own survival...?

Yeah, I'm a true volatile Russian inteligentsiya who is never satisfied with the way things are going. Because things really couldn't have been going worse!
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Amazing

KPMG in the UK has rented its new office in London for the period of...
...999 years! %)
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Former East German athletes get compensation for doping

Germany's Olympic Committee has agreed to compensate former athletes who were victims of systematic doping in East Germany under the communist rule.

The committee (DOSB) said 167 sportsmen and women would each receive a one-off payment of 9,250 euros (£6,200).

The deal ends a five-year legal dispute between the athletes, many of whom were made ill by the drugs, and the DOSB.

The athletes argued that the DOSB of unified Germany inherited the liability of East Germany's sports body.

'Moral responsibility'

They said they had been given drugs without their knowledge from an early age.

Many said they had suffered psychological problems as a result. Some female athletes said they had become infertile.

DOSB head Michael Vespers said his committee had a "moral responsibility" to compensate the victims of state-sponsored doping regimes.

"This is a day of celebration. We can now look to the future and stop looking back over years of arguments," Mr Vespers said.

The DOSB will pay a third of the compensation package - the remainder will be given by the federal government.

The former athletes have agreed not to seek any other legal action.

It is the second time that damages have been paid to former East German athletes - 194 received compensation 10,400 euros (£6,900) each.

Some 10,000 athletes are thought to have been given performance-enhancing drugs to help East Germany compete with the major sporting powers like the US and the former USSR.

BBC

I wonder how far this drug story can be applied to training of Soviet sportspeople.

Ah, who cares - whether or not, they will never get a single penny from the "Motherland", even if they'd kill themselves for its glory. That's the way it is in Russia
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Listening to English-speaking on-line radios

American English is definitely much more understandable than British. Maybe because it's a language that went through its being learned by millions of non-native speakers who somehow simplified its pronounciation. At the end of the day, most Americans are descendands of originally non-English speakers - Germans, Polish, Spanish, Africans.

Do all New York radios have weird names? Some British web-radios don't let you listen to 'em from abroad due to some British law.

Internet is a great thing. You may feel like you've left your country with all its bloody dictature, putin and gazprom - without physically leaving your room. A sad illusion indeed
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Wafa Sultan: the Arab-American activist discussing with Islamic clericals

Wafa Sultan, the Arab-American Muslim secular activist discussing with Islamic clericals on the clash of civilisations. Wise and brave.

Because of her ethnicity she may say some of that true things that unfortunately could have been labeled by some leftist as "oooh! bad ugly intolerant racist lies!" if said by a WASP or European.
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Watched Princess Mononoke

Never ever watch Miyazaki's movies alone so you don't have anybody to share this sweet undescribable feeling with.

Yesterday I finally watched his last previously unseen movie - Princess Mononoke". Now I'm having this sweet and painful hangover when listening to downloaded soundtrack by Joe Hisaishi :,)

Yeah, Miyazaki is the man who made me come to the answer about my favourite movie. Almost all his works are.




Coming back to reality, I can't get rid of the disgust of the insensible pragmatic quadratic world we all live in. We Europeans can only brutally tear something out of the environment, chew it up, let it through ourselves and create the product of our human, ehm, culture. This harmony between nature and human is something typical not only for Miyazaki, but for the whole Japanese culture.

I have written more in Belarusian, but am too tired to translate more
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Washington Post about the Litvinenko case

That Murder in London

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, December 8, 2006; Page A39

The poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, renegade Russian spy and fierce critic of Vladimir Putin's government, is everywhere being called a mystery. There is dark speculation about unnamed "rogue elements" either in the Russian secret services or among ultranationalists acting independently of the government. There are whispers about the indeterminacy of things in the shadowy netherworld of Russian exile politics, crime and espionage.

Well, you can believe in indeterminacy. Or you can believe the testimony delivered on the only reliable lie detector ever invented -- the deathbed -- by the victim himself. Litvinenko directly accused Putin of killing him.

Litvinenko knew more about his circumstances than anyone else. And on their deathbeds, people don't lie. As Machiavelli said (some attribute this to Voltaire), after thrice refusing the entreaties of a priest to repent his sins and renounce Satan, "At a time like this, Father, one tries not to make new enemies."

In science, there is a principle called Occam's razor. When presented with competing theories for explaining a natural phenomenon, one adopts the least elaborate. Nature prefers simplicity. Scientists do not indulge in grassy-knoll theories. You don't need a convoluted device to explain Litvinenko's demise.

Do you think Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was investigating the war in Chechnya, was shot dead in her elevator by rogue elements? What about Viktor Yushchenko, the presidential candidate in Ukraine and eventual winner, poisoned with dioxin during the campaign, leaving him alive but disfigured? Ultranationalist Russians?

Opponents of Putin have been falling like flies. Some jailed, some exiled, some killed. True, Litvinenko's murder will never be traced directly to Putin, no matter how dogged the British police investigation. State-sponsored assassinations are almost never traceable to the source. Too many cutouts. Too many layers of protection between the don and the hit man.

Moreover, Russia has a long and distinguished history of state-sponsored assassination, of which the ice-pick murder of Leon Trotsky was but the most notorious. Does anyone believe that Pope John Paul II, then shaking the foundations of the Soviet empire, was shot by a crazed Turk acting on behalf of only Bulgaria?

If we were not mourning a brave man who has just died a horrible death, one would almost have to admire the Russians, not just for audacity but for technique in Litvinenko's polonium-210 murder. Assassination by poisoning evokes the great classical era of raison d'etat rub-outs by the Borgias and the Medicis. But the futurist twist of (to paraphrase Peter D. Zimmerman in the Wall Street Journal) the first reported radiological assassination in history adds an element of the baroque of which a world-class thug outfit such as the KGB (now given new initials) should be proud.

Some say that the Litvinenko murder was so obvious, so bold, so messy -- five airplanes contaminated, 30,000 people alerted, dozens of places in London radioactive -- that it could not possibly have been the KGB.

But that's the beauty of it. Do it obvious, do it brazen, and count on those too-clever-by-half Westerners to find that exonerating. As the president of the Central Anarchist Council (in G.K. Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday") advised: "You want a safe disguise, do you? . . . A dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb? Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you fool!"

The other reason for making it obvious and brazen is to send a message. This is a warning to all the future Litvinenkos of what awaits them if they continue to go after the Russian government. They'll get you even in London, where there is the rule of law. And they'll get you even if it makes negative headlines for a month.

Some people say that the KGB would not have gone to such great lengths to get so small a fry as Litvinenko. Well, he might have been a small fry, but his investigations were not. He was looking into the Kremlin roots of Politkovskaya's shooting. And Litvinenko claimed that the Russian government itself blew up apartment buildings in Moscow and elsewhere in 1999, killing hundreds of innocent civilians, in order to blame it on the Chechens and provoke the second Chechen war. Pretty damning stuff.

But even Litvinenko's personal smallness serves the KGB's purposes precisely. If they go to such lengths and such messiness and such risk to kill someone as small as Litvinenko, then no critic of the Putin dictatorship is safe. It is the ultimate in deterrence.

The prosecution rests. We await definitive confirmation in Putin's memoirs. Working title: "If I Did It."

Washington Post

What a gottverdammt pretty country I was born to
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15 years no Sovok

Today it's the 15th anniversary of the dissolution of the USSR. Something worth a party! ;)
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Multilinguism and no schizophrenia :)

Was it Goethe who said that you are as many times a person, as many languages you speak?

That's indeed my case, my life is - how do you say it? - quatrolingual! Most verbal communication and information inflow is, obviously, in Russian. Workpapers are prepared and ACA is studied in English. Most news and blogs read and a minor part of verbal communication is in Belarusian. Also there is a certain amount of thinking in German - mostly when I am tired or in a bad mood and want to isolate myself from the surrounding. And moreover, I have omitted the Ukrainian language in my life - I even started a blog in the language, but do not update it too often.

Amazing that it really is so that you are each time a different person depending on the language you currently think/speak. Every language with its own grammar sets its own scheme of structuring thoughts and the way thoughts flow and come to the mind. Different words, different vowels and consonants create different emotions and associations and give a different path to the thinking process. The whole really gives you a new viewpoint, and I often find myself thinking on a problem switching from language to language in my mind. Language is indeed an important factor forming the national mentality - and that itself is primarily formed by mentality.
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Accounting and Philosophy

It gets interesting when you try to put principles of accounting and corporate governance on a human's life.

For every debit there is a credit, every asset has an amount of liability as its shadow. Profits are credit and losses are debit. The financial statements always balance.

All you have in your life comes from something you have given for it or from something you'll have to pay for one day, or was invested into you by the shareholder God. To get something you have to loose something. Debit equals credit, and that is like the Harmony of the Universe. At the end of the day, not your assets do matter, but the profit or loss you bring to the Shareholder.

If you see God as your ultimate shareholder, the stewardship concept and the priority of shareholder wealth maximisation suddenly gets a deep Christian meaning! :) You haven't actually done anything to be born into this life, to get the opportunities you got. It's just that the General Meeting of your plc takes place only twice: at your birth and after your death.
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Bank departments and genders

Testing many business cycles of a bank at the same time can be really fascinating. This giant mechanism consisting of dozens of people, information, orders flowing from side to side; this giant organism you feel yourself inside of.

One can compare the allocation of functions within a traditional family, as it is since the Stone Age, with the structure of a bank. The man traditionally serves (served) as as the family's "front office" by bringing home food/money from the external environment and representing the entity on the "market". The woman, to the contrary, had traditionally a "back office" function in the family, being responsible for managing and processing the resources brought in by the man, concentrating on internal issues of keeping the houshold.

Similarly, the bank's front office is the most masculine department of the bank, especially if we take its activities on the fund market. Aggressive adrenaline addict traders taking high risks for high returns, with cold coffee in the cup and an unfinished Counter Strike battle one Alt+Tab far away. The back office is the feminine opposite of it. This cosy place is usually, although not always, inhabited by calm 30-years-old-girls chatting about men and TV series and listening to oldies-radio.

A big pity that this exciting adventure is coming to its end, back to much less interesting substantive tests.
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