Archive for the ‘Society’ Category
Posted on February 14, 2011 - by Venik
Putin’s Palace
Ahead of the presidential election in Russia, the opposition is pooling resources for an early smear campaign. The usual targets are other opposition leaders, the Communists, and the Kremlin. But the all-time favorite is, of course, Vladimir Putin. Will he run for president? Nobody knows. Gorbachev doesn’t think Putin will run. Nemtsov is certain that [...]
Posted on February 3, 2011 - by Venik
Cézanne and Stem Cells
The New York Times ran an interesting story on an unlikely diplomatic dispute between the US and Russia over fine art and inter-museum exchange. Apparently in July of last year a federal judge in DC ruled that Russia was supposed to hand over a collection of books and religious documents to a sect of Hasidic [...]
Posted on December 8, 2010 - by Venik
Nobel Prize for Assange
An unnamed member of Medvedev’s administration told Russian new agency RIA Novosti that nominating Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize should improve his chances resisting legal and political pressure. While it is unlikely that such a nomination will come from the Russian administration, the fact that they are even talking about this in the Kremlin [...]
Posted on December 4, 2010 - by Venik
US Embassy Cables: Amateur Hour
By shining the light on the kindergarten that is the US Foreign Service, Wikileaks has effectively put an end to US diplomatic activities worldwide. No amount of damage control by the Department of State will turn the clock back and give back American diplomats the respect they lost. It will have to be earned from scratch over the coming years and decades. Short of a major asteroid impact, this leak of embassy cables is the most damaging thing that could have hit America’s national interests.
Posted on February 17, 2010 - by Venik
Safety of Luge
The tragic death of Nodar Kumaritashvili on the luge track in Vancouver is the cause of online discussion about safety of this sport. Many criticize track designers and organizers of the Games for the track’s perceived lax safety standards. Others wonder if safety is even possible in a sport where one rides a tiny sled [...]
Posted on February 16, 2010 - by Venik
Olympic Bones
As I am sitting here watching the Olympics, I am reminded of a CNN (I think it was CNN) special a few years ago. Some angry-looking activists were discussing the alarming popularity of online videos depicting street fights, schoolyard brawls and such. The gist of the discussion was that most of us share the responsibility [...]
Posted on February 16, 2010 - by Venik
Ukrainian Elections
“Liberast” is the term coined in Russia in the 1990s that is finding its way into the English language. As you might have already guessed, this term combines the words “liberal” and “pederast”. I don’t think you will have any trouble figuring out the intended meaning of this portmanteau. Western liberasts often use Ukraine as [...]
Posted on January 21, 2010 - by Venik
Oracle vs. MySQL
Sun Microsystems – the creator of Solaris operating system and manufacturer of my favorite computers – is being acquired by Oracle – the maker of the world’s leading commercial database software that works best on Sun servers. This seems like a good deal for both Oracle and Sun. Unfortunately, this merger will be very bad [...]
Posted on October 7, 2009 - by Venik
Your Savings and the Decline of the Dollar
About a year ago I wrote about the plans Russia and other oil-producing nations have for breaking the tie between the price of oil and the value of the dollar. For years Russia and OPEC countries have been tiptoeing around this issue until the recent massive collapse of the US banking industry forced their plans [...]
Posted on August 22, 2009 - by Venik
Victims with Guns
Tomorrow’s seventy-year anniversary of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact is giving some historians and journalists pretending to be historians an unbearable urge to write nonsense. The Pact and, most importantly, its secret provisions are blamed by the Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians for the years of “Soviet occupation”. This was a difficult period in the history of [...]
Posted on August 7, 2009 - by Venik
Happy Anniversary, Misha
Tweeter celebrated the one-year anniversary of the Georgian-Russian war by setting it’s Web servers on fire. (For those of you with long-term memory problem, here is a brief recap of the events.) The Unix gurus at Tweeter’s datacenter blamed the downtime on unspecified hackers unleashing a DDoS attack. According to some networking experts interviewed by [...]
Posted on August 3, 2009 - by Venik
Finland Pushes Putin’s Buttons
As any family feud, this story has many ins and outs. Paavo Salonen from Finland married Rimma from Russia, they had a son – Anton – and they got divorced. Rimma’s older son from first marriage Nikita, who is now 19, lived with his stepfather Paavo in Finland. Rimma was living with her younger son [...]
Posted on June 11, 2009 - by Venik
Buy a Microscope
A rather sad story on CNN tells us about a teenage girl from Washington who for many years has been suffering from an undiagnosed chronic bowel inflammation. For eight years she suffered from severe stomach pain and other serious symptoms, but her doctors were unable to identify the decease. To make the long story short, [...]
Posted on June 3, 2009 - by Venik
Medvedev vs. Putin
A small scandal erupted in Russia’s Karelia region over the decision by a local newspaper to reprint the article from The Vancouver Sun critical of Medvedev. Editors of the Iskra – a small entertainment paper named after Lenin’s famed underground revolutionary newsletter and a relative newcomer to the Russian newspaper market – in a desperate [...]
