skydogblog

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Trump is a nice guy

We will wipe the floor with big fat ass.

PRESIDENT SHIT STAIN

[skydogblog]

How Totalitarianism Claimed The United States

What is going on right now with president shitstain is an abomination that he and his supporters will pay for.

Shitstain not only deserves to be impeached he should have every single asset confiscated, his children stripped of every privilege and he should be imprisoned in a North Korean labor camp until he is dead.

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How Oligarchs became Oligarchs (You get to be a billionaire and You get to be a billionaire and You get to be a . . . .) in answer to questions about Oligarchs

Oligarchs came from "loans-for-shares" program.

”Concocted by executives in 1995 from the then two year old Oneksim Bank. Russian banks would lend the government money in xchange for temporary stakes in state-owned companies about to be auctioned.”

The reason for this was to keep assets out of the hands of the communists that were competing in the elections.

The banks were actually loaning the gov't the gov'ts own money. Before each deal the Russian Ministry of Finance opened an account with each bank's ‘investor’ and deposited funds there - and that account was the source of the bank's ‘investor’ loan to the gov't.

“Auction organizers began winning at a fraction over the minimum bid.”

“Foreign and domestic investors that were outside the ‘inner’ circle were barred from bidding on the most desirable assets.”

For example:

“Sibneft, . . . one of the largest oil producers in Russia, was sold to Boris Berezovsky for $100 million, $300,00 over the asking price (in 2015 Sibneft earned Roman Abramovich $7.4 Billion with a "B").”

“Similarly Khodorkovsky purchased a 78 percent stake in Yukos, another oil giant for a mere $310 million (in 2004, company valued at $30 Billion).”

“(Khodorkovsky) funded opposition parties to Putin and became an outspoken critic of Putin. In 2003 charged with fraud and jailed; pardoned in 2013, left Russia and launched Open Russia movement to advocate democracy and human rights.”

Everybody on both sides knew the "loans" would never be repaid.

”And, in 1998, the gov't defaulted. The ‘lenders’ kept their shares, and then used the arbitrage between world prices and old domestic prices to carve themselves a place on the billionaire lists.”

As an aside - poor old Boris, who partnered with Abramovich to take over Sibneft, when they both fled to the UK Borozovsky brought suit against Abramovich for proceeds from the sale for $3 billion.

Boris was found hanged in his London apartment in 2013 (”suicide”, yeah, right!) after the UK refused Putin's request for extradition.

This was all supposed to benefit the general populace many of which were issued vouchers which would help them get housing which didn’t happen. Stock markets weren't regulated so the general populace ended up in crumbling buildings.

“Many of the created oligarchs were/are worried their wealth could disappear as quickly as it appeared, thus, many have turned to politics or buying American basketball teams.”

(Abramovich - bought UK soccer team Chelsea Football Club) .

Quoted sources: All The Kremlin's Men (p. 54 -56) - Mikhail Zygar and Putin's Playground, by Anastasia Edel., editorial comments are mine.

[skydogblog]

Ghosts In The Machine – Cyberwarfare and the Mimetic Society.

SkyDogBlog

Beyond The Pale 2

Memes – like shotguns in America – everybody’s got one.

Phonopoeia – Fan-oh Pea-ah - Phanopoeia or phanopeia is defined as

"a casting of images upon the visual imagination," throwing the object (fixed or moving) on to the visual imagination.”*

It’s how we read, isn’t it?  We don’t so much see little black marks moving through our mind but little rapid fire pictures, scenes from an exhibition, as it were.

It has been argued that the idea of “person” is an alien concept to the West.  Essentially a pagan concept it has been linked to the idea of a Mimetic Theory originated with Rene Girard.

The theory is based on the observable tendency of human beings to subconsciously imitate others and the extension of this mimesis to the realm of desire. The consequences are staggeringly profound.

Prior to the technological revolution people tended to define themselves by the physical community they lived in; however, with mass literacy the realm inhabited by the mind expanded expotentially.

The more we expanded our aesthetic vision aided by electronic transport the more we look for elements, events, things, ideas that support and supplement the vision we have of ourselves.

We are an imitative society, a mimetic people.

“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”**

And now we have taken the next step, we exist because we compute, we exist on line.

And, as any good totalitarian propagandist knows, the best way to divide and conquer is to cast the virulent bacteria of doubt into the best expressway your opponents skull.

So, master propagandists that the Soviet’s have always been, they sew the seeds of dissent, anger and hatred with false news designed to “set one in deadly hate against the other”***

Shrug off the Russian election interference, their influence over the President, their continuing monitoring of all we do on-line, and you invite distortion and the torment of unrequited anger to your memory, your imagination; the twin drivers of your free will.

[skydogblog]

Welcome! Dobro Paw-shallow-its!

За Дружбу Между Народам

To Friendship Between Nations - traditional Russian toast.

“ Russia has always been a curiously unpleasant country despite her great literature. Unfortunately, Russians today have completely lost their ability to kill tyrants. ” —

Vladimir Nabokov

Russia, it seems to me, is a country which, at the current time, operates a totalitarian government “under diplomatic cover”.

Greetings! Welcome to Skydogblog – Beyond the Pale

We will be talking about Russia – its culture, history, language, and literature – especially its authors and especially Vladimir Nabokov.  Discussion will also be about current events and especially its politics, current and past.

Current events sometimes overtake us.  So I’m going to post my take on the recent fire in a Siberian shopping mall which took the lives of 64 people, 41 one of them children.

After that will be a little explanation about the blog itself.

It is perhaps indicative of the Russian milieu – a catastrophe born of some significant degree of stupor combined with negligence and shocking lack of ready equipage to deal failed safety mechanisms.

This will be put at the feet of Putin; at the feet of the ultra-conservatives who worship at the feet tradition.  Because tradition dictates in Russia, a certainly chauvinistic society, that men drink vodka for every celebration, deal, or just because.

A society of alcoholics; where life is a joke until it’s not.

Early on in the 90s Putin went after independent tv stations, newspapers, whatever because he was incensed that they would investigate him for corruption.  Even though he was and is involved up to his neck - Putin himself does not consider it corruption.  He considers himself the ruler, backed by a “mandate” of nearly incredible voter turnout for him.  He is, by all accounts, the new “Tsar”, the new “Stalin” the new “Lenin”, if you will.

However, having failed to extradite the “guilty” parties and, in one instance at least, managed to kill one of them in Britain.

After a number of years though he only goes after dangerous people, people with credibility who can provide details clearly which would portray Putin as indeed, another Stalin, writ large.

He did not back off out of compassion, he ignores the Russian independent media now.  They can say whatever they like.  They can call him names, make snarky remarks their headlines and even publish hard-hitting investigative journalistic books, which I will list here as good reads.

All of these media outlets can say and do pretty much as they please because IT DOESN’T MATTER ANYMORE.

Putin has succeeded in making Russia a modern day totalitarian state with all the amenities of a modern civilization.

Diplomatic cover means what it sounds like.  In Russian embassies around the world, esp. here in the US, post FSB (KGB) agents to their embassies who operate under diplomatic cover, in other words, unless we catch them “spying” there is little we can do other than expel the suspected individual.

“A legal resident spy operates in a foreign country under official cover (such as from his country's embassy). He is an official member of the consular staff, such as a commercial, cultural, or military attaché. Thus, he has diplomatic immunity from prosecution and cannot be arrested by the host country if suspected of espionage. The most the host country can do is send him back to his home country as persona non grata.[3] “

p. 12, Shulsky, Abram N.; Schmitt, Gary James (2002). Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence (3rd ed.). Potomac Books, Inc. ISBN 9781574883459.

 I find Nabokov is especially relevant because he was deeply rooted in Russian culture; Tsarist Russia and the Revolution.

Nabokov is considered by many to be one of the greatest American authors.  No less a personage than John Updike called him the best modern author writing in English.

His father – also named Vladimir – was instrumental in facilitating a peaceful revolution in 1917 and was the leading framer of the liberal constitution embraced by the short lived provisional government.

His father was an attorney and volunteered a great deal of time to frame a constitution which included universal suffrage, universal healthcare and free education.  He rallied the troops when the occasion called for it.   The constitution he wrote was used by the Provisional Government in the days following the Revolution of 1917.

Eventually pushed out by Lenin and his gangs, Russia was, for a brief shining moment, the most progressive nation of the  face of the earth.

His father died shielding a fellow party from a right wing assassin.*

Pretty much all of Nabokov’s best works have characters that suddenly die or disappear.  Lolita deserts him exactly half way through the book.

 A word about the name of the blog – Beyond the Pale.

From pale (“jurisdiction of an authority, territory under an authority's jurisdiction”), suggesting that anything outside the authority's jurisdiction was uncivilized.

I found this phrase to be especially meaningful as many in the West would consider Russia to be “beyond the pale” – a political and cultural wilderness.

Nabokov wrote Pale Fire after Lolita was published.  I have always contended that Nabokov did not write Lolita, Humbert Humbert did.  The title itself is a somewhat humorous aside and a tribute to her as well by Humbert – the book itself is really about Humbert.

Pale Fire – the title by itself could also indicate wild fire – a fire beyond the pale, the flames of reality (See Zelazny’s Lord of Light – the sermon of the Budda), “time is the fire in which we burn” – Star Trek.**

This blog will be about Russia, it’s history, culture and it’s current “foreign policy” - I use the quotes because currently the only policy Russia has is whatever passes through totalitarian mindset of Putin.   I don’t believe it’s a coincidence there is such a conjunction of names - Putin or Ras-putin?

 I write about this because I am concerned that many remember only the halcyon days of the 90s when Putin was supposedly going to institute democratic reforms.  He later back tracks and decides against being politically aligned with “liberals” (read: the West), turns against them and turns Russia back to the “bad old days” of conservatism.

 *In March 1922, Nabokov's father was fatally shot in Berlin by the Russian monarchist Piotr Shabelsky-Bork as he was trying to shield the real target, Pavel Milyukov, a leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party-in-exile. This mistaken, violent death would echo again and again in Nabokov's fiction, where characters would meet their deaths under accidental terms. (In Pale Fire, for example, one interpretation of the novel has an assassin mistakenly kill the poet John Shade, when his actual target is a fugitive European monarch.) Shortly after his father's death, Nabokov's mother and sister moved to Prague.

 **Names are not important... To speak is to name names, but to speak is not important. A thing happens once that has never happened before. Seeing it, a man looks upon reality. He cannot tell others what he has seen. Others wish to know, however, so they question him saying, 'What is it like, this thing you have seen?' So he tries to tell them. Perhaps he has seen the very first fire in the world. He tells them, 'It is red, like a poppy, but through it dance other colors. It has no form, like water, flowing everywhere. It is warm, like the sun of summer, only warmer. It exists for a time upon a piece of wood, and then the wood is gone, as though it were eaten, leaving behind that which is black and can be sifted like sand. When the wood is gone, it too is gone.' Therefore, the hearers must think reality is like a poppy, like water, like the sun, like that which eats and excretes. They think it is like to anything that they are told it is like by the man who has known it. But they have not looked upon fire. They cannot really know it. They can only know of it. But fire comes again into the world, many times. More men look upon fire. After a time, fire is as common as grass and clouds and the air they breathe. They see that, while it is like a poppy, it is not a poppy, while it is like water, it is not water, while it is like the sun, it is not the sun, and while it is like that which eats and passes wastes, it is not that which eats and passes wastes, but something different from each of these apart or all of these together. So they look upon this new thing and they make a new word to call it. They call it 'fire.'

"If they come upon one who still has not seen it and they speak to him of fire, he does not know what they mean. So they, in turn, fall back upon telling him what fire is like. 'As they do so, they know from their own experience that what they are telling him is not the truth, but only a part of it. They know that this man will never know reality from their words, though all the words in the world are theirs to use. He must look upon the fire, smell of it, warm his hands by it, stare into its heart, or remain forever ignorant. Therefore, 'fire' does not matter, 'earth' and 'air' and 'water' do not matter. 'I' do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking he knows them in the naming. The thing that has never happened before is still happening. It is still a miracle. The great burning blossom squats, flowing, upon the limb of the world, excreting the ash of the world, and being none of these things I have named and at the same time all of them, and this is reality — the Nameless.

The Tsar’s Winter Palace Livadia - in the Crimea - where Putin vacations and has a Dacha