#mikhail viktor. 「 thread 」

[ubcs]

Nikolai is a little proud of this one. Everytime that Mikhail types in ‘yes’ or ‘да’ into an email it autocorrects to ‘no’. Good luck old man.

MIKHAIL VIKTOR

To: Zinoviev, Nikolai

Internal Affairs is wondering why I am only saying no to all their requests today. And I do not know what to tell them.

Kolya. Are you responsible for this malfunction. No, or no?

[eulikikuqj23]

[KINDLE] Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

kuna neman wannan littafin?  Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973 By Mikhail Bakhtin

 Book Excerpt :

Whenever Bakhtin, in his final decade, was queried about writing his memoirs, he shrugged it off. Unlike many of his Symbolist generation, Bakhtin was not fascinated by his own self-image. This reticence to tell his own story was the point of access for Viktor Duvakin, Mayakovsky scholar, fellow academic, and head of an oral history project, who in 1973 taped six interviews with Bakhtin over twelve hours. They remain our primary source of Bakhtin?s personal views:? on formative moments in his education and exile, his reaction to the Revolution, his impressions of political, intellectual, and theatrical figures during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and his non-conformist opinions on Russian and Soviet poets and musicians. Bakhtin's passion for poetic language and his insights into music also come as a surprise to readers of his essays on the novel. One remarkable thread running through the conversations is Bakhtin's love of poetry, masses of which he knew by heart in

 >>> START READING NOW

"This book is available for download in a number of formats - including epub, pdf, azw, mobi and more. You can also read the full text online using our Ereader."

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[newstfionline]

Is Russia all out of oligarchs? It says it is.

By Adam Taylor, Washington Post, April 6, 2018

Newly announced U.S. sanctions on Russia aim to target not only its political elite but its financial elite too: the so-called oligarchs.

“Russian oligarchs and elites who profit from this corrupt system will no longer be insulated from the consequences of their government’s destabilizing activities,” Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said in a statement Friday.

But what if Russia doesn’t actually have oligarchs? That may seem like a radical position, but that’s what the Russian government apparently believes.

“There are no oligarchs in Russia,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Thursday. The term the Russian presidential spokesman said he would prefer was “representatives of big business.”

Peskov’s comments echoed those made by Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich in January. The Russian oligarchs of the past are now gone, Dvorkovich told Bloomberg TV while at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “Nowadays we have good hard-working businessman who care about their country and earn money through responsible means,” he explained.

Such remarks may cause many in the West to scoff, but there is a kernel of truth to the idea. The term “oligarch” first came to be used in Russian politics in the 1990s, when enterprising but often corrupt Russian businessman used a chaotic period of privatization after the collapse of the Soviet Union to acquire vast fortunes. With their wealth, these business executives gained serious political influence in Russia’s fledgling democracy.

As David Hoffman, former Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, put it in his 2001 book on these men, “as their power grew, the tycoons became known as simply the oligarchs, the men who owned and ruled the new Russia.”

But times change. After Putin came to power, first as prime minister in 1999 and then as president in 2000, he took to dismantling the power of the oligarchs--using the power of the state to go after the business executives who had used their companies to influence the state. It was one of the major policy threads during the first period of Putin’s rule and was largely popular with the Russian public, which was sick of billionaires influencing politics.

Most of the six tycoons that Hoffman profiled in his book “The Oligarchs” are no longer in positions of political power. Some ended up stuck in lengthy legal disputes with the Russian state: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, perhaps the most famous of all oligarchs, spent 10 years in prison before being released in 2013. Another, Boris Berezovsky, ended up in exile before dying in England in 2013 in unclear circumstances.

Of the six, Anatoly Chubais remains closest to the Kremlin as head of the Russian state nanotechnology company Rusnano. However, when the United States issued a list of politicians and business leaders linked to the Russian president in January, Chubais was not included. In response, he issued a mock apology on Facebook for failing his nation.

Chubais is not among the Russian business executives sanctioned Friday either, but there were other wealthy Russians on that list. Of the seven business executives put on the list, Viktor Vekselberg is probably the wealthiest: According to Forbes Russia, he is in the top 10 most wealthy people in Russia, with a net worth of $14.5 billion. He is the chairman of Renova Group, an investment fund that owns assets in Russia’s energy sector.

Other notable names include Kirill Shamalov, another major player in Russia’s energy sector who is also reported to be Putin’s son-in-law, and Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate with alleged ties to President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

These men are wealthy, yes, and powerful too, but they do not hold the same position as the oligarchs of the 1990s. The first generation of Russia’s tycoons not only drew their wealth largely from the state, but they were also able to influence the state dramatically, even using their vast power to save Russian President Boris Yeltsin during his flailing 1996 reelection campaign.

In modern Russia, wealthy business executives hold much less influence over the state: They own Russia, but they do not rule it. In fact, they are well aware that their own fortunes can be taken away by the state with little notice. Just last week, construction tycoon Ziyavudin Magomedov--estimated net worth $1.4 billion--was arrested on embezzlement charges in a move many saw as a result of political infighting.

Russia’s new generation of tycoons, the so-called oligarchs, may well benefit from the aggressive policies of Putin’s Russia and may well deserve punishment. But unlike their predecessors, these tycoons do not have real power and do not hold real sway over that policy.

Indeed, some analysts argue that sanctioning Russian business executives actually helps the Kremlin control them. Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote on Twitter that the U.S. sanctions could result in a “win-win” situation for Washington and Moscow. The Trump administration gets to say it is striking a blow at the Putin regime, Trenin wrote, but “Putin sees his hand strengthened in his effort to ‘nationalize’ the Russian elites.”

[allmyevilplans]

This is scary. A post from Reddit.

This is a repost from another thread but relevant: "Microtargeting" of content is really interesting. Because [Robert Mercer](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/the-reclusive-hedge-fund-tycoon-behind-the-trump-presidency), the billionaire hedgefund guy behind Trump, is the main investor in Cambridge Analytica - a company that specializes in exactly that. It's parent company is [SCL Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica) (Strategic Communication Laboratories) which has been described as a "global election management agency" known for involvement "in military disinformation campaigns to social media branding and voter targeting". In short, **they specialize in military propaganda or ‘psyops’**. *Cambridge Analytica* was brought in by Mercer to help Trump win. >Cambridge Analytica: The company claims to use “data enhancement and audience segmentation techniques” providing “psychographic analysis” for a “deeper knowledge of the target audience”. The company uses the OCEAN scale of personality traits. Using what it calls **"behavioral microtargeting"** the company indicates that it can predict "needs" of subjects and how these needs may change over time. Services then can be individually targeted for the benefit of its clients from the political arena, governments, and companies providing "a better and more actionable view of their key audiences." Combining data and content obtained through nefarious means (hacking) with sophisticated software and targeting to maximize its effectiveness is evil genius. All the pieces are coming together now. What is becoming much clearer now is that Trump's victory was no bumbling accident. Interestingly, Cambridge Analytica's software is based on models developed by Cambridge academic Michal Kosinski - he didn't want to have anything to do with the company. The guy that first approached Kosinski was Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian. It was Kogan that apparently introduced SCL to Kosinki's models. Kogan then moved to Singapore and changed his name to [Alexander Spectre](http://www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/people/ak823@cam.ac.uk). Was he working for Russian Intelligence? **Given the key role Cambridge Analytica and SCL played in the US election (and in Brexit), it would be good to know who exactly is behind them.** > Who exactly owns SCL and its diverse branches is unclear, thanks to a convoluted corporate structure, the type seen in the UK Companies House, the Panama Papers, and the Delaware company registry. Some of the SCL offshoots have been involved in elections from Ukraine to Nigeria, helped the Nepalese monarch against the rebels, whereas others have developed methods to influence Eastern European and Afghan citizens for NATO. And, in 2013, SCL spun off a new company to participate in US elections: Cambridge Analytica. It gets more interesting. The largest shareholder of SCL was on record as being Vincent Tchenguiz, an Iranian-British businessman. Tchenguiz is a business partner with Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, who is known as a Putin protégé. Tchenguiz used the same Guernsey holding company, Wheddon Ltd., to invest both in Cambridge Analytica’s parent company and in another privately held U.K. business whose largest shareholder was the Ukrainian gas middleman [Dmitry Firtash](http://www.reuters.com/article/russia-capitalism-gas-special-report-pix-idUSL3N0TF4QD20141126) - a close friend of Putin who is [currently indicted](http://abc7chicago.com/news/ukrainian-oligarchs-extradition-to-chicago-on-hold/1768041/) and awaiting extradition on corruption and racketeering charges. > Over the same time period, other documents show, bankers close to Putin granted Firtash credit lines of up to $11 billion. That credit helped Firtash, who backed pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovich's successful 2010 bid to become Ukraine's president, to buy a dominant position in the country's chemical and fertiliser industry and expand his influence. And guess who was Dmitry Firtash's former business partner? [Paul Manafort](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-campaign-chief-paul-manafort-named-in-ukraine-anti-corruption-probe/2016/08/15/fa180f20-6327-11e6-be4e-23fc4d4d12b4_story.html) - Trump's former campaign manager. Manafort of course worked directly for Yanukovych and [Firtash](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/21/austria-grants-us-request-to-extradite-ukrainian-mogul-dmytro-firtash) was the middleman between Putin and the Yanukovych electoral operation in Ukraine. So the largest shareholder of Cambridge Analytica is a business partner with Firtash, who has direct ties with Putin. Firtash is known to operate as a financing middleman for Putin's foreign policy "operations". Could SCL, parent of CA, be a front for a Russian Intelligence operation? If you think about it, SCL specializes in new sophisticated technology models for military propaganda. If you read up on new Russian military doctrine, it's clear they are placing a big emphasis on information warfare. The ['Gerasimov Doctrine’](https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/the-gerasimov-doctrine-and-russian-non-linear-war/) is quite insightful about how Russia views defeating their enemies: > The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness....All this is supplemented by military means of a concealed character, including carrying out actions of informational conflict. > Among such actions are the use of special-operations forces and *internal opposition* to create a permanently operating front through the entire territory of the enemy state, as well as informational actions, devices, and means that are constantly being perfected. Did Russia view Bannon/Trump and co as the perfect vehicles to ferment and support "internal opposition"? Was Cambridge Analytica one of the vehicles to achieve this and to help execute their ideas around information warfare? Guess who a Board Member of Cambridge Analytica was? **Steve Bannon.** And it was Robert Mercer that [bankrolled Steve Bannon](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage) and Breitbart to the tune of $10 million - no doubt to be the front-facing tool to execute on their ideas around influence, manipulation and propaganda. And with the help of Russian Intelligence, it is entirely plausible Breitbart was involved in using bots and social media to help propagate news they knew would damage Hillary and help Trump. There are very clear and direct ties between powerful Russian/Ukrainian figures and Cambridge Analytica - which specializes in military propaganda. Steve Bannon was a board member and Robert Mercer was its biggest investor. And of course Mercer, Banner, Cambridge Analytica and Brieitbart all played a key roll in helping Trump get elected. It's not a big stretch to suggest that there was cooperation and collusion with Russian Intelligence, who provided hacked data to Cambridge Analytica, who then used it to carry out a sophisticated propaganda campaign, with Breitbart as the lead. [Cambridge Analytica also played a key role in BREXIT - offering Firage and the Leave campaign their services *for free*](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/robert-mercer-brexit-nigel-farage-donald-trump-breitbart-facebook-advertisement-cambridge-analytica-a7600041.html). >The firm is said to have advised Leave.eu by harvesting data from people's Facebook profiles to decide how to target them with individualised advertisements. Brexit was of course seen as a big geopolitical strategic win for Putin and Russia. Another interesting bit of info that is a bit tenuous but nonetheless intriguing - the largest shareholder of SCL Group was Vincent Tchenguiz. > In March 2011 the Tchenguiz brothers were arrested in dramatic predawn raids as part of an investigation into the 2008 collapse of the Icelandic bank Kaupthing. Just before its collapse, Kaupthing’s loans to the Tchenguiz brothers totaled 40 percent of its capital. It has been charged that Kaupthing—which had a far-from-transparent ownership structure—was effectively the Tchenguiz brothers’ bank and that they looted the bank, leading to its collapse. > Kaupthing’s largest shareholder, Meidur, now called Exista, which owned 25 percent of its shares, [had ties to Alfa Bank](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exista), the largest Russian commercial bank; Alfa chairman was “deep state” figure Mikhail Fridman, chairman and co-founder of Alfa Group, the parent of Alfa Bank. Meanwhile, Trump adviser Richard Burt (who also was being paid by Russia to promote a Gazprom pipeline) is on the “senior advisory board” of Alfa Bank. Was this how Russian intelligence bankrolled SCL in the early days? Perhaps Vincent Tchenguiz was the cutout man, and funds were channeled from Alfa Bank into Kaupthing and on to Vincent Tchenguiz. Russian Intelligence seems to work well with ambitious businessman who are happy to be corrupted if they can make some money. Trump also seemed to fit this bill. *Alfa Bank was the bank that a Trump Server was mysteriously communicating with and was likely the subject of an FBI surveillance warrant.*

[ubcs]

∗ 93﹕ mikhail  gestures  for  yukako  to  sit  down .

All the while encouraged by his steady words, Yukako complies with his proposal for her to take a seat. "Good, good." The man that she scarcely knew as a UBCS captain braced her by the arm. Only, he wasn't quite as dead as reports had suggested.

Though he was as sullen as the grim reaper in tough tactical fabric, dark and uniform and expertly mended thrice over, covering him nearly up to where he used to keep a beard. The peppery hair was more closely shaved now, raised over subtle mottled scars around the left side of his jaw. Traveling shapes that seemed to suggest the old damage continued beneath the buckled-high collar of his jacket.

Mikhail tipped his head, topped with a sharp black beret. "If they had known someone was inside building, we would have waited to deploy that gas." "They" being the half dozen others, generic in form and full faced masks, that accompanied him. "But you? You will be fine after you catch your breath. It is only lethal to uninfected. Still," his congenial tone sharpened into incredulity, but there was still enough space for concern to eke through. "You should not be here."

[ubcs]

Just because he has that permanently furrowed brow doesn’t mean he’s angry. But the teeth sucking does. “I deserve raise.”

That creased forehead was an expression on Nikolai as certain as sun rising. Deliberating everything always. Too complicated and too foreboding to scrutinize, Mikhail thinks. He would not put all his strategic wit toward pursuing the pathology of a wolf. "Only a palace will satisfy you..."

Sighing, Mikhail made a swirling motion with a raised finger. Two squads of mercenaries ease out of tight formations, dissolving into cliques of chitchat and recovery. His attention divides from them to Nikolai.

"Do not tell me you are spending beyond your means. You make good money already." His expression is non-accusatory, but firm. "Why are you so deserving this time?"

[ubcs]

⠀⠀⠀UBCS / a multimuse writing  roleplay blog  for

⠀⠀⠀CARLOS OLIVEIRA from RESIDENT EVIL*

⠀⠀⠀*(ft. other UBCS mercenaries)

⠀⠀⠀low  activity. est nov ‘22.

PROFILES: THE MERCENARIES.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀RULES BELOW THE READ MORE!

writer.

⠀⠀⠀name's lem (he/him) ~30yrs old, do not call me "mun", down for casual, multi-paragraph, whatever! Let's have fun!   carlos is the main muse on this blog,  but i also write the other lads featured above under THE MERCENARIES link .

*update: i block gen ai users. ai chats. ai photo renders. fuck ai, get away from me.

⠀⠀⠀I ask that you do not use incredibly formatted styles when writing with me, huge spaces between every word, or use of varying fonts and generated text stuff (some variation and small text is ok!)

content.

⠀⠀⠀these characters are for an adult audience. VIOLENCE, ALCOHOL AND DRUG USAGE, LAW BREAKING, and AMORAL BEHAVIOR is apart of their canon and will most likely be present on this blog. also resident evil is a franchise of horror. please use your own discretion.

⠀⠀⠀i am here for a good time and i hope vice versa is true! i do not participate in ooc roleplay related drama. you handle your house affairs and i will handle my own.

if you're into spicier/"nsfw" content, @mercenaryking is where that is at

lastly.

⠀⠀⠀this post is important to read in regards to carlos being a flirt. thank you for reading!