Tag Archives: en

Interim results of 2010-2014 for Russian economy

Awara Group published an interesting overview of the Russian economy for the last 14 years: “Putin 2000 – 2014, Midterm Interim Results: Diversification, Modernization and the Role of the State in Russia’s economy.” The document contains the analysis of economics and progress made demonstrated with diagrams that quickly show that there is no economic crisis in Russia and that it is not dependent on the gas and oil export. On the contrary, Russian economy made an incredible progress in these 14 years and is going strong.

This study takes aim at disapproving the continuously repeated claims that Russia has supposedly not diversified and modernized its economy. Our report shows that it is especially false to claim that the Russian government has not done anything in this vein, that it would be “relying” on oil & gas rents and lacks an understanding that more must be done. Quite the opposite, the Russian state under Putin’s leadership has devoted all its spare resources to address this problem; the early results are impressive and a lot of effort and strategic initiatives are currently being implemented.

And really, in the last 14 years the food manufacturing in Russia doubled, the industry has been fully modernized and increased output by 50%, export increased five fold while the actual share of gas and oil in the GDP of Russia shrank to only 16%.

So any claims that Russia “relies on oil and gas” for its livelihood or does not develop its economy are completely false and do not have any basis in facts.

Copy of the report: Awara-Study-Russian-Economy-2014.pdf… -->

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Are you prepared to deal with non-humanity?

Interesting how the media changes the world, the perception of the world. Just recently, until the nineties, the media (movies, really) was all about defending the Earth against an invasion by some other “thing”, be that Terminator, Aliens, or Martians Attack. Humanity all stood as one and some heroes emerged from within to fight the enemy and defend the humankind from extermination. People showed bravery and heroic abandon in this fight, demonstrating how much they value the Life over their own life.

Since the nineties, we see more and more of the other kind – the humanity is fighting against some enemy that is either external to it or grows from within. The people are weak though and cannot fight the enemy on their own. Now, there is always some external power, be it the Mutants, the Autobots or the Fantastic Four that save the day while humans scream and cower in terror. The heroes are always non-human in some way.

What does it teach us?

  1. We are weak and in the future war we cannot resist the might of the invaders,
  2. So all the humans can and should be prepared to do is cower in a remote corner and weep and that’s okay, because
  3. There is some other form of life that will save us.

Lesson: be prepared to discover the monsters in your midst compared to whom you are nothing but do not get too aggravated because some of them are actually going to protect you from harm out of purely altruistic motives. Great state of mind, eh?… -->

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Amazon sets the rules of the box for Japan Post

Amazon has faced an interesting problem in Japan, like everywhere else: the boxes that Amazon delivers goods in are always big, they are much bigger than the goods when the goods are small. The box comes filled with packaging materials, paper and plastic where you fish for your goods. This is done for logistical reasons as handling large uniform sized objects is easier. The downside is, of course, that Amazon standardized on a box that’s way too big to fit in any of the letterboxes world around, causing grief to delivery companies, post offices and customers. Not to mention the amount of waste.

How do you think Amazon handled the problem? Do you think Amazon downsized the shipping boxes to save on materials cost? Do you think they were nice to the post office and customers and introduced a smaller packaging that would fit the letterboxes for the smaller objects? Nah. That’s not Amazon way.

Amazon started selling new letterboxes in Japan last year that are designed to be large enough to accommodate Amazon’s own post. How is that? They now set the rules: “Here is the post size that we will send to you and, here, buy this box to replace yours because we designed it to actually be big enough for our post.”

All in the name of “efficiency”. Of course.

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Prison population in democracy and totalitarianism

Quite often, the data on repressions are used to demonstrate that a country is not “sufficiently democratic”. Here is some rather interesting data on the prison population in different countries from the International Centre for Prison Studies.

Let’s start with Russia, as it is now again the new enemy #1 of the “democratic world” as announced by the leaders of USA. In Russia, the number of prisoners equals to 467 people per 100,000 of national population. Is that a lot or not?

Let’s compare with other well-known totalitarian regimes. Their neighbor – Belarus with their totalitarian leader Lukashenko sports 335 people per 100,000 of population in jails. Uhm, okay, so Belarus is not as totalitarian as we thought. But certainly Iran would qualify as a totalitarian state, where people are thrown into jail for minimal brushes with the Muslim laws, right? Iran has 283 people per 100,000 of population in jails. No, this cannot be right. China! China is the totalitarian state of the century! China’s oppression of the “small man” is iconic and this is confirmed by their prison rate of … 124 people per 100,000 of national population. Strange, isn’t it?

Okay. Let’s get to the democratic side then. How are the things in the leader of the world democracy – United States? United States welcomes you to democracy with a prison rate of 707 detainees per 100,000 of national population. Oops. USA has 5% of the world population and 25% of the world incarcerated population.

Does this mean that to reach proper enlightened democracy Russia has to put double the number of people into jails and China would have to get five times as fast at locking people up?

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Media is quick to jump into Cold War

Here I am, peacefully reading this article in BusinessWeek about the recent shooting at Charlie Hebdo in Paris where criminals shot several people to death. The article is interesting as it talks about the origins of violence towards those who dare to create dissenting satire and evoke laughter at the corruption of powerful and sacred.

Suddenly, halfway through the article it turns into an unfounded rhetoric about the “iron fist of Putin” in Russia and false interpretations of the quasi-political dissent in Soviet Union in the last century. What gives?

BusinessWeek is hardly an independent magazine but it was not yellow press either, as far as I remember. Amazing to see how quickly most media joined the Cold War on Russia with all the anti-Russian hysteria building up now. I cannot name any mainstream Western or U.S. magazines or newspapers that would write anything close to the truth about Russia anymore.… -->

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Intel joins the ranks of discrimination against white males

Intel CEO, Brian Krzanich, speaking at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 6, announced that Intel would like to become more “diverse”. What he means by that is that Intel wants to be less male and less white. Intel wants to be more black and female.

So, look around you. All of what you see, the whole of civilization, was created mostly by white males. Invented, designed, produced by hard work and sweat of white males. And now you see that as a reason to discriminate against the white and male? Why?

Why is it suddenly that it became okay to discriminate against the whites? Why is it suddenly okay to discriminate against males? And not only quietly discriminate but announce the discrimination from the highest tribunes in the world? Why is this not a scandal? Why Brian Krzanich is not in jail yet for discrimination?

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The Outlook for the New Year by Paul Craig Roberts

Reprint from: The Outlook for the New Year by Paul Craig Roberts

Washington has shaped 2015 to be a year of conflict.  The conflict could be intense.

Washington is the cause of the conflict, which has been brewing for some time. Russia was too weak to do anything about it when the Clinton regime pushed NATO to Russia’s borders and illegally attacked Yugoslavia, breaking the country into small easily controlled pieces.  Russia was also too weak to do anything about it when the George W. Bush regime withdrew from the ABM treaty and undertook to locate anti-ballistic missile bases on Russia’s borders.  Washington lied to Moscow that the purpose of the ABM bases is to protect Europe from non-existent Iranian nuclear ICBMs.  However, Moscow understood that the purpose of the ABM bases was to degrade Russia’s nuclear deterrent, thereby enhancing Washington’s ability to coerce Russia into agreements that compromise Russian sovereignty.

By summer 2008 Russian power had returned.  On Washington’s orders, the US and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian army attacked the breakaway republic of South Ossetia during the early hours of August 8, killing Russian peacekeepers and civilian population. Units of the Russian military instantly responded and within a few hours the American trained and equipped Georgian army was routed and defeated.  Georgia was in Russia’s hands again, where the province had resided during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Putin should have hung Mikheil Saakashvili, the American puppet installed as president of Georgia by the Washington-instigated “Rose Revolution”, and reincorporated Georgia into the Russian Federation.  Instead, in a strategic error, Russia withdrew its forces, leaving Washington’s puppet regime in place to cause future trouble for Russia.

Washington is pushing hard to incorporate Georgia into NATO, thus adding more US military bases on Russia’s border.  However, at the time, Moscow thought Europe to be more independent of Washington than it is and relied on good relations with Europe to keep American bases out of Georgia.

Today the Russian government no longer has any illusion that Europe is capable of an independent foreign policy. Russian President Vladimir Putin has stated publicly that Russia has learned that diplomacy with Europe is pointless, because European politicians represent Washington’s… -->

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Robert M. Pirsig, “Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. An Inquiry into Values.”

“The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself.”

One more completely misrepresented book in our world. This book is typically described as a “travel book”, meaning that it contains a travel description, which it is anything but. This is, au contraire, a philosophical treatise explaining the intellectual path to the enlightenment and the state of human “grown-up”. And as the first quote rightly sums it up, the book is about working on yourself and not about motorcycles.

Pirsig claims that he took the name Phaedrus accidentally, meaning to take the Greek word for “wolf” but ending with “bright” by accident. With all due respect, I don’t believe in accidents. “Phaedrus” stands for “enlightened” and that is who he is. The book contains interesting allegories that explain well how the human awareness comes to existence, how we perceive the world, and how we do it all wrong.

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

The book has a lot in common with other philosophical and mystical books in that it also describes the path to the enlightenment that a person must take. The path that results in discarding of ego, discarding the very idea of who you are and unlearning everything you learned to start understanding the world.

He wanted to free himself from his own image. He wanted to destroy it because the ghost was what he was and he wanted to be free from the bondage of his own identity. In a strange way, this freedom was achived.

And all of the wisdom is described in a very natural (for our culture) “scientific” language that rings true to the ears of the modern man. The examples are everyday things that one can easily relate to and analogies have true meaning for the man of today. This scores a lot of points when compared to somewhat cryptic Eastern books or works of Carlos Castaneda.

One of the important things that the book mentions is a clear distinction between the glorified self-interest and the true growing-up, the true desire of enlightenment. That self-glorification is the disaster of the today’s world.

Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in a disaster. […] When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you

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U.S. hostilities against North Korea continue the economic war

U.S. started hostile operations against North Korea using unknown hackers attack to a Japanese company as an excuse. Just as in the case of continuing hostilities against Russia the sanctions against North Korea are justified only by empty political rhetoric. The unilateral attack against North Korea is not likely to result in anything more than a purely political demonstration but the accompanying rhetoric is worrying as it may hint at the possibility of a yet another war planned by U.S. for the near future against a smaller state.

Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said in a statement that Washington had a “commitment to hold North Korea accountable for its destructive and destabilising conduct.”

The case of North Korea indicated that U.S. is far from being embarrassed by the recent disastrous events in Libya, Iraq and Ukraine. They will obviously not shy away from any means of aggression given even no excuse whatsoever. When needed, an excuse will be manufactured and used, even when it’s as ridiculous as claims that North Korea attacked Sony Corporation.

Anything goes when it’s war time and since many years for USA it is war all the way – economic here, military there.

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Play-doh “dil-doh” is a sign of problems in the society

Play-doh “dil-doh” is a sign of problems in the society, not in the Play-doh manufacturer company.

The people that saw the plastic cake topping as a dildo should ask themselves why they see the world that perverted way. There are many objects around us that may be treated as phallic symbols, down to even every bottle standing upright. That’s not a good reason to actually cry bloody murder about them. Treat bottles as bottles and cake toppings as cake toppings, and everything will be fine. If you see phallic symbols in innocuous things – go see a doctor.… -->

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