Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
President Reagan tells Nancy one morning: “I had a really, really bad dream at night. I was at the 30th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. The chairman announced the next orator: “The First Secretary of the Alaska Regional Party…
Russians tend to believe, tongue-in-cheekly, that vodka is a remedy against a multitude of health hazards, from a sore throat to radiation. Try half a glass of Stolichnaya with black pepper and you’ll see. (No, I’m not paid to promote…
Chelsea Set for Takeover: a Russian billionaire buys a leading English soccer club. Roman Abramovich, an influential Russian magnate controlling, among others, the oil company Sibneft (and about to become a major shareholder in a combined Yukos/Sibneft group), pays about…
J. of Silver Rights quotes a poem by Langston Hughes before getting down to the latest Michigan riots. I first read it fifteen years ago, but it’s only having reread it in J.’s entrly, I finally appreciated it. What I…
I went to a birthday dinner party at an upscale Moscow restaurant last night. Most guests were rich by Russian standards; some were rich by any measure. A few seats from me, there sat one bearded gentleman in his late…
From the Russian daily Kommersant: …The director “ascertained the reality of a ‘gentle Moslem occupation’ exemplified by the co-existence in a faraway Kostroma village of a few lonely old women and a family of Uzbek refugees with their numerous children.…
Concerning the West Indies, I can tell you in short that it is flooded with Negros, bondspeople of Europeans, who produce sugar, coffee, rum and other produce of warm climates, for their masters. The condition of these slaves (esclaves) is…
Schumpeter was not the first to classify Marx as a (false) prophet of a new world and the founder of a new religion. The Russian religious philosopher (to use a common Russian term) Sergei Bulgakov published an article titled Karl…
Theodore Dalrymple in an interview: <…> in some ways Mrs Thatcher was a mirror-image Marxist. Everything that Marx abhorred she thought was good, and she thought (or she appeared to think—I’m not sure she gave enough attention to it) that…
The Philosopher of Islamic Terror by Paul Berman. [Post edited in 2021.] Gamal Abdel Nasser was the only Nasser whose name Russian announcers articulated with a stress on the second syllable: Nah-SER. The audience enjoyed punning on that surname because…
In case you didn’t know, the word Proletariat was nearly a swearword in Soviet Russia in the 1970s–1980s. The well-off and the educated so labeled the drink-loving, foul-mouthed, good-for-nothing working classes. Well, not exactly good for nothing — when it…
It looks like Russia’s birth rate is still dwindling, but it is hardly the case in Moscow. And there is immigration – from the Caucasus, China, Ukraine, Vietnam, Africa, etc. Not that I’m worried “we” might lose our identity –…