Questions For Our Russian Friends

[Nobody1]

Originally Posted by Motorboater

...there's 11,000,000 more women than men in Russia.

Wait, there's more!!

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wil...ote-wilderness



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihn6FuFWZg

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by Motorboater

There was a Russian journalist featured in a lengthy interview on Melbourne radio yesterday. Her name is Anna Nemtsova. She said there's 11,000,000 more women than men in Russia.

Really? I'll take 3 or 4...or 5 for myself if they want to come down here. All with varying hair colour and breast sizes. What a great country to create this imbalance!

If this is true, and I suspect it might be, it represents quite an imbalance. In a nation of 144 million people (according to UN estimated statistics) that would mean 71.5 million men and 82.5 million women. One would think this is good news for men and bad news for women.

The same statistics source seems to suggest that the Russian population has fallen slightly since 1990: 144 million now v. 148 million then. But how to compare like with like must be a problem; the Russian Federation is the remainder entity after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. Should one count Russians only as the ones inside the Federation or should Russians in former USSR members be factored in?

But in general terms is this a real imbalance or is it arising because a lot of young Russian men are working in other countries and sending money home? This was very common in Ireland in the past, that the most able and enterprising men went away in order to do their best for their loved ones and often found they had left for ever without originally wanting to to emigrate. Emigration is a painful subject for many Irish people and it suppose it might be the same in Russia.

[Motorboater]

Originally Posted by Nobody1

Wait, there's more!!

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wil...ote-wilderness



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihn6FuFWZg

It just gets better and better!

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Brian249x

I would hope that the Russian domestic media is not just the shriill anti-American screed that is RT.

Russia has had a pretty good press, but the parameters of acceptable journalism are narrowing dramatically.

Russian journalists are murdered at an alarming rate.

"List of Russian Journalists Murdered" (incomplete list)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...lled_in_Russia

[Nobody1]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

Russian journalists are murdered at an alarming rate.

By whom?

[SanteeFats]

Originally Posted by Nobody1

By whom?

American's with guns of course.

[Mal Hombre]

Originally Posted by Nobody1

By whom?

Originally Posted by SanteeFats

American's with guns of course.

It certainly has nothing to do with Vladimir Putin..

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Nobody1

By whom?

If you read through the case reports, its a mix.

A few are killed covering conflicts, the risks of a war correspondent.

A few more seem to have been killed by random violence-- criminal acts, but not specifically directed at them.

But the largest number appear to have been killed either by agents of the State, or by criminal syndicates, or by folks in the shadowy area that lies between these entities.

So if you look at the murder of, say, Paul Klebnikov, you get three Chechens charged, but acquitted, and no one else brought up on charges. Russian authorities described it as a "contract killing", probably at the behest of one of the oligarchs (Klebnikovo had written about Berezovsky)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Klebnikov

If you look at Dmitry Kholodov, he was killed by a booby-trapped briefcase in his office. That's a planned killing that's characteristic of an intelligence service, not a criminal syndicate. The editors of Kholodov's paper, Moskovsky Komsomolets, accused Russian military leadership, specifically Pavel Grachev, of ordering the killing.

Military officers were arrested for the killing, tried, and acquitted. Note that the judge in the trial of Kholodov's purported killers was, curiously, also the judge in the trial of Anna Politkovskaya's purported killers . . .

RT is interesting on these sorts of things. They ran a story a few years back, in 2009, "Journalist murder still unsolved 15 years on", which though very brief seems quite fair, so far as it goes

Aleksandr Politkovsky, Anna’s ex-husband, says these killings changed the face of Russian journalism.

“When I show my reports from the nineties, my students cannot believe this stuff could have been aired on TV. Back then, we were all a little crazy. It was a risk, but it was romantic as well,” he says. “Nowadays, journalists are the service sector. They all want a big name – like Anna Politkovskaya – and a lot of money, but nobody is willing to risk their lives.”

Fifteen years after his death, Dmitry Kholodov is an icon at Moskovsky Komsomolets. The man, who was a symbol of honest, selfless journalism in Russia, may be considered a rare species nowadays.
https://www.rt.com/news/dmitry-kholo...er-journalist/

RT doesn't run stories like that anymore, being part of the "service sector"; but though they are disinclined to cover it, being a Russian journalist isn't any safer. . .

[Nobody1]

Originally Posted by SanteeFats

American's with guns of course.

Of course with guns. Without guns would be pure nonsense.

Originally Posted by Mal Hombre

It certainly has nothing to do with Vladimir Putin..

Some believe Building 7 was a controlled demolition. Others believe Putin is to blame for anything. Do not we all have our little conspiracy theories Mal?

On a more serious note, let's take a closer look at deepsepia's beloved Gorbatchev and Yeltsin years. Yeltsin and Gorbachev are very popular men in the West. But unfortunately, not in Russia. In Russia, these people are now considered traitors. Why?

In 1998 Boris Yeltsin’s approval rating fell to 6%. As this drunken bear was impeached and stumbled repeatedly on television, he was continually propped up by political capitalists in the West (including Bill Clinton), who salivated over the industrial wealth of the former Soviet state machinery. Over 2 billion dollars a month in Russian wealth was moved out of the country. Billion dollar companies were sold for millions. Yukos, the massive oil company with more oil than all of Kuwait, was sold for 300 million bucks. (It grossed 3 billion a year in revenue prior to the sale.) In 1989, there were 2 million Russians below the poverty line. By the mid-90s, there were 74 million. 3.5 million children were homeless. (There were none recorded under the Soviets.) From 1994-2004 drug use has gone up 900% and alcoholism has since doubled. In 1995, there were fifty thousand people who were HIV positive. In 2005, there were one million reported cases. Like its former client state Iraq who suffered under Saddam, the media mantra was repeated. “You don’t want to go back to Stalin, do you?” Indeed for many, the answer, while under their collective breath, was yes.

http://www.naomiklein.org/reviews/cr...tr%20%20%20ine

Russia under the leadership of the recently departed Boris Yeltsin was a case in point. Beginning in 1990, the Bank led the charge for the former Soviet Union to impose immediately what it called "radical reform." When Mikhail Gorbachev refused to go along, Yeltsin stepped up. This bulldozer of a man would not let anything or anyone stand in the way of the Washington-authored program, including Russia's elected politicians. After he ordered army tanks to open fire on demonstrators in October 1993, killing hundreds and leaving the Parliament blackened by flames, the stage was set for the fire-sale privatizations of Russia's most precious state assets to the so-called oligarchs. Of course, the Bank was there. Of the democracy-free lawmaking frenzy that followed Yeltsin's coup, Charles Blitzer, the World Bank's chief economist on Russia, told the Wall Street Journal, "I've never had so much fun in my life."When Yeltsin left office, his family had become inexplicably wealthy, while several of his deputies were enmeshed in bribery scandals. These incidents were reported on in the West, as they always are, as unfortunate local embellishments on an otherwise ethical economic modernization project. In fact, corruption was embedded in the very idea of shock therapy. The whirlwind speed of change was crucial to overcoming the widespread rejection of the reforms, but it also meant that by definition there could be no oversight. Moreover, the payoffs for local officials were an indispensable incentive for Russia's apparatchiks to create the wide-open market Washington was demanding. The bottom line is that there is good reason that corruption has never been a high priority for the Bank and the IMF: Its officials understand that when enlisting politicians to advance an economic agenda guaranteed to win them furious enemies at home, there generally has to be a little in it for those politicians in bank accounts abroad.

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2...ificial-wolfie

At least under Gorbatchev and Yeltsin there was press freedom American style in Russia, right? And this American style freedom provided for a land full of sunshine, rainbows, milk and honey. For a rat infestation of foreign crooks and liars. The worst scum humanity has to offer. At the moment, here in Europe we have the same sort of lowlife with TTIP in the neck.

They can go [insert word meaning sexual activity] themselves.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by Mal Hombre

It certainly has nothing to do with Vladimir Putin..

Realistically Mr Putin cannot be personally behind every single bad thing which happens in Russia, simply because that is far too much work for one person to carry out.

Re the murdered journalists: anyone remember the Veronica Guerin case in Ireland? There was a rather similar flavour to it in the strange relationship between politicians and organised crime. The Irish establishment were very resistant to the notion of any law to attach the proceeds of crime and to deprive successful drug dealers of their criminal wealth, and in some ways it was Mrs Guerin's murder which drew public and international attention to their evasion of the issue and forced them to act.

I'd love to think nothing similar could ever happen in Britain but in fact I do not think this. It seems to happen in Russia quite a lot though.