Tag Archives: en

Kerry recommends to ignore Obama’s statements

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that US Secretary of State, John Kerry, advised him to pay no attention to the statements of US President Barack Obama that the threat emanating from Moscow is comparable to Ebola.

“I paid attention to here these listings of threats that President Obama has allowed himself ever since his speech at the UN General Assembly. Not so long ago, talking with John Kerry, I asked him what that meant. He said: “Do not pay attention”, “- said Lavrov.

“If situation is so serious, of course, it’s sad,” – stated the Russian minister, speaking during the “government hour” in the State Duma. According to Lavrov, Kerry said those words because at that time he wanted to discuss a coordinated approach to address Iran’s nuclear program and the situation on the Korean peninsula.

The minister noted that for such a “large, powerful, great power,” as the United States, an undignified consumer approach to its partners is unbecoming: “Where I need you, you please help me, and where I want to punish you, you listen to me.”

Barack Obama has repeatedly called Russia’s actions in respect of Ukraine a threat to the entire world. “We are leading the international community in the fight against Ebola in West Africa and countering Russian aggression in Ukraine,” – he said in November. Before that, in September, the US president said that the main threat to international security is the Ebola virus, followed by Russia and then – “Islamic state.”… -->

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Medvedev called on U.S. to improve relations with Russia

First steps for improving the relationship between U.S. and Russia belong to U.S. They must take the initiative this time, said Dmitri Medvedev.

“In order to overcome the existing problems, you just need to abandon the sanctions and put the relations on the working plane. It is necessary to return to normal calm, productive negotiations – then everything is stabilized,” – he said after the ASEAN Summit in Myanmar.

Medvedev found it difficult to say when the relationship between the two countries will be able to improve. “It does not depend on us, because we are not the ones who imposed the sanctions,” – he explained.

As usual, CNN is playing fools by trying to ridicule Medvedev in their report and comparing his quiet life style to Putin. Obviously, they have nothing better to say on the subject.

On the other hand, The Wall Street Journal reports a mounting pressure from the European businesses on the governments to lift the sanctions as the businesses suffer severe losses and have to cut jobs to survive the loss of a lucrative market.

U.S. is probably more interested in weakening Europe than taking initiative to repair the relationship with Russia. So the words of Medvedev are likely to fall on deaf ears this time. It is more reasonable to expect that Europe might take an initiative this time under the pressure of its suffering business.… -->

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USA’s working poor are getting poorer

The Economic Populist has published an interesting overview of wages statistic in USA. It turns out that nearly a third of people working are extremely poor. These are not jobless but people who actually have jobs. Still, one third of working people receive wages before taxes below $15,000 a year and nearly 15% of workers – below $5,000 a year. Most Americans, 52.4%, make less than $30,000 a year yet those very Americans only have 15.3% of the total country income from wages.

The chasm between the rich and poor is growing yearly. An astronomical 23.1 million wage earners made less than $5,000 per year in 2013. Those making less than $5000 a year are only getting 0.7% of the total compensation pie as a group. The top wage bracket – over $50 million – has 110 people in it or 0.000064% of wage earners. This top wage bracket received 0,18% of the total net compensation. And this inequality of wages keeps increasing.

 

The Economic Populist concludes that “The bottom line here is the rich are getting richer and most of America continues to get squeezed even though in 2013 wages improved.  As a trend we can see since 1990 just a never ending attack on regular wage earners in this country. The bounce back in 2013 isn’t enough to make up for 30 years of a spiral down.”… -->

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Catalonia votes for independence

Spain’s north-eastern region of Catalonia finally cast their vote despite all of the resistance from the Spain’s authorities. The non-binding vote went ahead after Spain’s constitutional court ruled out a formal referendum. Almost 2 million people out of the population of 7.5 million could vote and the preliminary result is an overwhelming 80% in favor of vote of independence for Catalonia.

Catalan leader Artur Mas hailed the non-binding poll “a great success” that should pave the way for a formal referendum. Spanish Justice Minister Rafael Catala dismissed the poll as “fruitless and useless”, however. “The government considers this to be a day of political propaganda organized by pro-independence forces and devoid of any kind of democratic validity,” he said in a statement.

Judging from the recent events the region will not be allowed to gain independence in any democratic sort of way. Unfortunately, it is completely unclear whether Catalan are prepared to stand up and fight for their rights with weapon in hand. With the non-equivocal resistance from Spain that may eventually remain the only way though, just like the fight of the Eastern Ukraine for independence showed. It may be hard to imagine a bloody military battle in Spain but a year ago it was impossible to imagine a bloody battle in Ukraine either.

One thing that Spanish government made very clear is that they are not letting the region go. That stands to reason, no country is keen on breaking itself up, so why should they? If Catalonia wishes independence, they will have to fight for it. The economics of politics is such that it must become more expensive for Spain to keep them than to let them go. Is there a peaceful and non-destructive way to do that?

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Firefox Accounts doesn’t work in … Firefox

This is just pure nonsense. Trying to access a Firefox Account turns out to be impossible from Firefox. To use your Firefox Account you have to install a competing browser, for example a Chromium, where the Firefox Account works perfectly well. How is that for a marketing irony?

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EU budget fraud steady at €7 billion

The European Court of Auditors published their audit report for 2013. EU budget  totaled €148.5 billion in 2013, or around €290 for every citizen. The average fraud level across all spending areas is estimated at 4.7%, or €7 billion total. In some areas, like energy, transport, fishing, environment and health, fraud level reaches nearly 7% of the budget.

Interestingly, the auditors claim that these numbers are “not a measure of fraud, inefficiency or waste.” What then? Ah, well, they do not say. They just call it an “error”. So no court cases are forthcoming, I guess.

The definition of fraud from the legal dictionary:

A false representation of a matter of fact—whether by words or by conduct, by false or misleading allegations, or by concealment of what should have been disclosed—that deceives and is intended to deceive another so that the individual will act upon it to her or his legal injury.

That does not ring a bell? I think this is precisely what we are dealing with here and they just refuse to admit it.

Fraud must be proved by showing that the defendant’s actions involved five separate elements: (1) a false statement of a material fact,(2) knowledge on the part of the defendant that the statement is untrue, (3) intent on the part of the defendant to deceive the alleged victim, (4) justifiable reliance by the alleged victim on the statement, and (5) injury to the alleged victim as a result.

Let’s see. The officials and businessmen submitting false reports to EU are definitely making a false statement. They certainly know what they claim is untrue: how could a land owner not know that the land he is asking funds for the development of is officially identified as unsuitable for agricultural development? The intent to deceive is naturally there for they submit false reports for financial gain. The victim – the EU – relies on those false statements to send funds to the fraudsters resulting in a substantial financial injury to the EU and its citizens.

Just look at the types of “errors”: false cost claims, ineligible projects and beneficiary organizations, shady public procurement, false declarations… None of those hint at “just an honest error”, do they?

I think the case is quite clear. The fraud is widespread in EU. Most of those cases are likely to be criminal but they will … -->

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“Minority Report” flashback

I am getting one of those uneasy flashbacks, this time to a movie I saw ages ago, called “Minority Report“.

“In a future where a special police unit is able to arrest murderers before they commit their crimes, an officer from that unit is himself accused of a future murder.”

We are really getting the preview of that now in the wake of the shootings in American schools. Some software company claims that their software can alert the schools to future crimes by monitoring students’ social network posts.

Yeah, I know, how stupid would you be to post stuff to your social network when you know there is a program monitoring you. But that aside, we are actually looking at the situation so vividly depicted in the “Minority Report”.

Should this kind of monitoring be welcomed, the students will receive punishments before they actually commit any misdeeds. Okay, that may prevent some of the crimes from happening but are you willing to bet your life that the students would actually commit them if they were left alone? We do not have the presumption of innocence for nothing. Employing the “punishment before crime” system changes that presumption into “presumed to commit crime even though actually didn’t and never will”.

That just does not work in my book. Parents must watch over their children and must bring them up as stable and responsible human beings. When parents fail, we must not give in to the temptation of technology. Remember that those who are willing to sacrifice their freedom for their safety deserve neither.

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egrep: character class syntax is [[:space:]], not [:space:]

Writing complex regex expressions can be daunting. And the task is sometimes exacerbated by strange error messages that you get from the tools. I was tweaking the configuration for logcheck and suddenly started to get this error:

egrep: character class syntax is [[:space:]], not [:space:]

Which is really not providing that much context and therefore very unhelpful. Not to mention that in this case [:space:] may mean any of [:alnum:], [:alpha:], [:digit:], [:space:], [:word:] and others. The error message is exactly the same whatever character class produced the error. So you know there is a problem somewhere but you don’t even know with which class.

The typical problem causing this sort of message is that when you write complex expressions you forget to enclose the class into square brackets. The square brackets are required, for example, for operators like ‘+’. So a correct expression would look like this:

[[:alnum:]]+ [[:digit:]]+

But it is easy to overlook a mistake when you write this:

[:alnum:]+ [:digit:]+

It still kinda looks okay because the square brackets are there but you are missing the extra pair and it is hard to spot. So it may be helpful to look for patterns like ‘:\][?+*]’ in your code with grep or vim search.

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Alcohol is forbidden to women!

Why is it so hard to explain to women that they may not drink alcohol? They seem to not want to understand the simplest elementary things. Let me try one more time.

The blood is fully replaced in 150 days for any adult. When a man drinks, his blood is tainted but will be fully renewed without a trace in 5 months and his sperm, that completely renews in 1,5-2 months, will carry no trace of poison or damage from alcohol. Alcohol does not cause any permanent irreversible damage to the reproductive functions of men.

Women’s ovary contains a limited reserve of ova that do not refresh. The ovaries are formed at the fifth month of fetus development and will only deplete with age but not replenished. Consequently, every alcohol consumption is reflected in mutations of those reproductive cells that the woman carries permanently within her body. Alcohol causes irreversible and permanent damage to the female reproductive function.

Talking to a woman:
– Imagine you have a child, about one year old or so, will you give him whiskey? Or, perhaps, some beer?
– Are you nuts? Of course, not! How could you think I would give alcohol to a child!
– All right, let’s say he is younger, about three months old now, you are breast feeding. If you drink, the child gets alcohol with your milk…
– I am not going to drink while breast feeding!
– Imagine you are pregnant, the child would get alcohol from your blood, would you also not drink?
– I would not! You never drink while pregnant! I want a healthy child.
– Well, so you are not pregnant yet but all of your children are inside you now. You will poison all of them at once every time you drink.
– Huh?

So, does this mean that poisoning one child with alcohol is unacceptable but poisoning all of your children at once – quite okay? Women, you are simply not supposed to drink alcohol! Not at all. Please, stop poisoning your children now.… -->

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