Putin´s Russia: "Media suppression, corruption and the murder of political rivals"

Media suppression, corruption and the murder of political rivals have marked the regime of Vladimir Putin, who, despite mass demonstrations, is set to win his third term as president this week.  That is the sad reality of Putin´s Russia, according to Russian journalist Masha Gessen, who´s new book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin is now out.

Here are a some of the highlights of an NPR interview with Gessen:

"Putin has created a system in which people who run afoul of the government know that they are living with a constant threat to their lives. At this point we are living in a situation where physical attacks on critics of the government and even murders are expected."
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The problem with the Russian government at this point is that any contact an individual has with the state at this point — from getting a driver's license to getting a license for importing something — is unpredictable and humiliating. You're taken for bribes, contracts are broken, there is violence, businesses are taken away. The very wealth that created a long era of contentedness has created this new era of extreme discontent."
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What's going on is a very diverse, very massive movement of people who are fighting for their dignity. The battle cry of the movement is fair elections. But really the main motivator is this humiliation that you feel from dealing with the Russian state. And the elections have become the focus because in a way there's nothing more humiliating than going to vote and having your vote blatantly stolen and essentially being told you don't exist."

"Our audience is not Putin. Our audience is everybody else and largely it's the police and the military, who will eventually — maybe it will happen March 5th — maybe it will happen later, but eventually when Putin feels threatened enough, he will consider using force. And my greatest hope is that by that time, neither the police nor the military will be willing to use force against people who are protesting this regime."

Read and listen to the entire interview here

On must hope that Gessen´s hope regarding the police and the military will turn out to be true.

Does Ted Turner practice what he preaches?

 "We'll be eight degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow"
"Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals"
(Ted Turner in a PBS interview 2008)

Ted Turner likes:

 "I like Obama. I don’t know who could do a better job. He’s got an incredibly tough situation, and a good heart and mind. I’d like to see him rally support a little better."


Ted Turner does not like:

“Certainly the Tea Party people are mean-spirited. It’s so heartbreaking to have [them] say that global warming is a hoax.”


Ted Turner likes:

Lester Brown: World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse
(quote from the book: “civilizational collapse is no longer a matter of whether but when,”)


Ted Turner practices what he preaches?:

Turner shuttles endlessly among his 28 properties — 14 of them ranches with 55,000 bison — traveling hundreds of thousands of miles per year on his private Challenger jet, making numerous speeches when he’s not communing with nature in the "wilderness," as he puts it. With nearly 2 million acres, he was America’s largest landowner until his friend, Liberty Media chairman John Malone, surpassed him. (“He said he was sick of me being No. 1 in land ownership. But he didn’t give $1 billion to the U.N., so he can afford it,” Turner quips.) He retains, according to Forbes, a 
$2 billion net worth.

Read the entire article here

(image by wikipedia)

India’s total grain output is expected hit a record for the second year in a row

Flashback 2009:

Lester Brown explains that what happens to India’s wheat harvest and its agricultural supply chain, including and in large part due to the resulting effect on food prices, will determine the economic status of everyone everywhere, as scarcity and price pressures alter the base economy of every nation around the world.
Population growth and depletion of water resources are determining the future sustainability of an affordable food supply at high volume. With over 500 million people entirely dependent on the Ganges for drinking water and crop irrigation, even the massive US agricultural export base will not be able to prevent price rises at home.
The one river feeds more people than live in the entire 27-nation European Union. Glacial melt is so severe and the reduction in river flow already so marked that there is no tap water in some districts even within Delhi. Water-scarcity riots are already commonplace as residents scramble to siphon as much clean water as possible from the government trucks that distribute the slim supplies day after day.

Read the entire article here

Reality check 2012:

India is reaching records this year in many key agriculture areas, potentially giving rise to more intensification of food crops as the government moves to bolster its food security.

As previously reported in FCI, India has become the world’s largest producer of rice as a result of record production and the lifting of a three-year ban non-basmati rice exports. Rice exports are expected to reach 6 million tons in the 2011/12 growing year compared to 2.2 million tons the previous growing year. Thailand was the world’s top exporter last year, followed closely by Vietnam.

India’s total grain output is expected hit a record for the second year in a row. Agriculture Secretary P.K. Basu said grain output will reach its target of 245 million tons for the growing season ending in June 2012, almost 3.5 million tons more than the production record set in the 2010/11 growing year.

Additional production updates include:- Chili production is expected to rise 10% to 15% compared to last year due to favorable rainfall and temperatures. However, prices for the crop are expected to decline as a result of lower demand domestically and abroad. This year’s relative oversupply could prompt farmers to opt for other crops next year
- A bumper onion harvest and an export ban, which has already expired, has led to price deflation for onion farmers.
- The value of spice exports were up 43% in the last three quarters of last year compared to the same period in 2010, driven largely by heightened demand and price stability for pepper and cardamom.
- Tea prices are likely to rise as a result of early onset of winter in northeast India, which lost 15 million kilograms of the crop. India exported about 990 million kilograms in 2011. Key African producers, including Kenya, are reporting lower harvests as well due to drought, which could contribute to higher tea prices.
- The Indian Council on Agriculture Research is planning to double the production of cashew nuts during the next five years. Powdery mildew disease is the biggest threat to cashew productivity.

Read the entire article here

Wheat exports from India, the world’s second-biggest producer, is expected to more than double to 1.5 million tonnes in the 2012-13 marketing year on account of back-to-back record harvest, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) said in a report.

“Assuming the current export price parity for Indian wheat vis-a-vis other origins, 2012-13 marketing year wheat exports are forecast at 1.5 million tonnes,” the report said.

Read the entire article here

Former German chancellor Kohl thinks the euro is about preventing war

Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, one of the  main architects of the failed euro, has stepped into the debate about the wisdom of further aid to Greece:

On Tuesday, Kohl repeated his mantra that the euro was about nothing less than preventing war. That view, he argued, still applied despite the decades of peace Europe has enjoyed.
"The evil spirits of the past have by no means been banished, they can always return. That means: Europe remains a question of war and peace and the desire for peace remains the driving force behind European integration," wrote Kohl.

It is of course difficult for Kohl to realise that his great project is about to fail. In order to spare him from further embarrassment, hopefully someone tells Kohl to abstain from making further comments.

What happens when a greenie reporter visits an offshore windfarm?

"So grand, so gentle"
"There is nothing more modern and impressive than these turbines"

This is what happens when a warmist newspaper - in this case the Guardian - sends one of its most ardent believers in the cult of global warming on assignment to an offshore windfarm:

The towers that rise so slenderly from the sparkling icy sea look from this boat like monuments to optimism, common sense and human daring.
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The structures themselves have the panache of Thomas Telford's 1826 suspension bridge across the Menai Straits, or Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Britain, launched in 1843 and the world's first propeller-driven ocean-going iron ship.
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But out at the windfarm, there is the spectacle of a new industrial revolution with a difference. While the great achievements of 18th- and 19th-century British engineering filled the air with carbon and laid the foundatns of man-made global warming, this is a benign revolution.
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There is nothing more modern and impressive than these turbines. As we sail through the middle of the farm, they recede in regular rows across the sun-silvered water.
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A Victorian, steampunk version would surely have gothic trimmings, or be painted in stripes like old lighthouses. Perhaps in future, there will be retro-turbines that emulate such traditional nautical structures.
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The Thanet shore is being brought to life by winds that once filled the sails of sloops and brigs and now drive these machines, so grand, so gentle.

Read the entire article here

Hopefully the Guardian reporter already has recovered from his delusional trance.

Having returned to the real world he could take a look at the reality of wind power in UK (as reported earlier by his own newspaper):

Opposition to wind power in rural Wales is said to be "total", with communities threatening peaceful direct action and at least 20 groups fighting plans for 870 of the largest turbines in Powys alone.
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Glyn Davies, the Conservative MP for Montgomeryshire, was heavily criticised last year for backing a Welsh anti-pylons direct action group. He said the entire region was now "up in arms" against the pylon and turbine plans. "They will industrialise the uplands with wind turbines and desecrate our valleys with hideous cables and pylons. The scale is almost impossible to comprehend," he said.
National Grid says it will need to erect a 15-mile row of Britain's biggest pylons to connect a huge offshore windfarm off Anglesey to the grid, as well as a second nuclear reactor at Wylfa. Another line of pylons will be needed to Trawsfynydd.
"No one knows the full implications of these developments or what they will do to tourism. The opposition is total and very impressive," said Welshpool campaigner Richard Jones. "I was broadly in favour of wind power until I saw the scale of the pylon developments."

Read the entire article here

The government and energy industry have quietly shelved plans for windfarms equivalent to four large traditional coal and nuclear power stations, amid growing public and political anger over the cost and sight of the turbines.
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Responding to the latest cost figures, Chris Heaton-Harris, the Tory MP who co-ordinated the letter to David Cameron, said: "The more the true full cost of wind energy is exposed the more you have to ask why we continue to back such an expensive and intermittent source of energy. All this money ends up coming from consumers at the end of the day and this raises the question: how many people will be forced into fuel poverty because we continue with such a high level of direct and indirect subsidy to the wind industry?"

Read the entire article here

(imagey by wiki)

Former head of Central Elections Commission in Russia says prosecutors ignore voting fraud

Another sign of positive development in Russia; a former head of the Central Elections Commission has openly criticized prosecutors for ignoring cases of voting fraud:

The former head of the Central Elections Commission criticized prosecutors for failing to pursue voting-fraud cases and said the street protests that followed December's State Duma elections show that many Russians have lost faith in the system.
The outspoken comments made by Alexander Veshnyakov, Russia's ambassador to Latvia, in an interview published in Izvestia, were highly unusual for a currently serving diplomat.
Veshnyakov served as elections chief from 1999 to 2007. After being critical of Kremlin-backed voting laws and campaign tactics, he was replaced by current elections commission head Vladimir Churov, a strong ally of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
In the interview published Monday, Veshnyakov said cases of falsifications brought to prosecutors by the elections commission during his tenure were often not tried.
"Unfortunately, such facts [of voting falsifications] were uncovered when I worked as chair of the Central Elections Commission. But they only made it to court sometimes. In a few cases, prosecutors had to be appealed to several times to make them reopen a criminal case that they had opened, but then closed, and take it to be examined in court," he said.
"And when a case made it to court, the maximum punishment was, to my chagrin, probation," Veshnyakov said.
The former elections chief said the recent opposition demonstrations are evidence that many Russians doubt the results of the controversial parliamentary elections, which the opposition claims were tarnished by mass falsifications.
"It can be stated that a rather significant portion of Russian citizens do not trust the election results. And that lack of trust was expressed in a democratic form — as was demonstrated at the protest on Dec. 10 [on Bolotnaya Ploshchad] and the following [ones]. That is a worrying signal," Veshnyakov said.
"After all, if such a large group of people does not trust [the results], that means there are grounds for that," he said.

Ambassador Veshnyakov is to be congratulated for speaking out on election fraud only a few days before the presidential election. However, knowing how the Putin system works, chances are that his tenure as Russian ambassador in Latvia will not last for long.

Taxpayers funding global warming indoctrination campaign in American zoos

"Call them the ursine Al Gores"

Global warming alarmists are desperate. Despite years of massive taxpayer funded propaganda efforts, the American public is not convinced about catastrophic human caused global warming. But there is no end to "creativity" of the warmists: The Brookfield Zoo in Chicago has decided to begin indoctrinating its visitors about global warming. American taxpayers are financing the indoctrination campaign in the form of a grant from the National Science Foundation:

Brookfield Zoo received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to lead a team of 15 zoos and aquariums across the country in exploring the issue of climate change among zoo and aquarium visitors. While nationally 64 percent of Americans believe climate change is happening, that percentage rises to 82 percent for zoo and aquarium visitors, surveys at the participating institutions showed.

“The American public is not that engaged on climate change,” Grajal said. “This is a great opportunity. We have a favorable audience.”

The survey of 7,200 zoo and aquarium visitors also revealed that about 90 percent of those who believe climate change is happening don’t believe they can do anything about it. Grajal is also working with educators and psychologists to determine the best way to educate on a subject that can be dry and overwhelming.

“The mistake we made in the past was saying this was a huge problem and unless you change your lifestyle radically and all the politicians worldwide get together we’re doomed,” Grajal said. “It’s very pessimistic.”

The focus now is on encouraging people to make small lifestyle tweaks, like not idling their cars, using more energy efficient light bulbs and, when possible, eating locally grown produce.

Michelle Parker, the Shedd’s vice president of Great Lakes and sustainability, said that a series of videos shown before the Shedd’s aquatic show highlighted efforts the aquarium is making to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. In the summer, the aquarium is growing flowers, food and vegetables for some animals to cut down on food shipments. Aquarium staff are also growing tiny shrimp, snails, crickets and plankton for food.

Read the entire article here

A million dollars may not be a huge sum nowadays, but still American taxpayers´ money could - and should - be used for something else than financing global warming propaganda in the zoos!

(image by wikipedia)