The word of the day - экзистенциальная политология

Via isaak_rozovsky

...Совок был существом наглым и хамоватым, но и лопоухим, лоховатым. Его уши еще были полны отголосками добрых увещеваний и посулов равенства, братства и великого будущего...

...Бобок — агрессивно-депрессивный совок, который ничего хорошего не ждет от мира. А потому готов первым нанести сокрушительный удар — и, разлагаясь в могиле, грозит «бобокалипсисом»…

http://www.novayagazeta.ru/comments/66388.html

Кое-что про пятую колонну

Call to Action in Support of U.S. Business Opportunity in Russia:

The impact of events of 2014 in U.S.-Russian relations are effectively

extracting a disproportionate tax on good U.S. businesses engaged in

legitimate business in and with Russia. Council for U.S.-Russia Relations is

hearing from members uniformly that their 2014 sales in Russia are down and

that they are revising downward projections for business in 2015. U.S.

businesses are losing sales opportunities in Russia as a cost of U.S.

foreign policy. The U.S. economic disengagement with Russia manifested in

part by U.S. and western sanctions and subsequent Russian counter sanction

measures disproportionately impacts a relatively small number of U.S.

companies. The actual costs in lost U.S. business opportunities in Russia

are poorly understood but the effective "tax" on the companies impacted is

unfairly high. 

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worth reading

...This is not a system, in other words, that has come about spontaneously, in reaction to events on Kiev’s Maidan, although to those who haven’t followed the evolution of Russian politics over the past twenty years—or to those who have followed only the narrative of “failed reforms”—it might perhaps appear that way. Indeed, in the months since Putin’s invasion of Crimea, it has become fashionable to suggest that the harder-line face that Putin has more recently shown to the world is somehow, once again, the West’s “fault,” that we have provoked Russia into autocratic behavior through our talk of democracy in Ukraine or that—once again—the “reform process” was somehow brought to a halt because the Russians felt threatened by the expansion of NATO or by Western policy in the Balkans.

But after reading Dawisha’s book, and after absorbing the implications of the stories she has so carefully pulled together from so many sources, it is simply not possible to take this argument seriously. Since 2000, Russia has been ruled by a revanchist, revisionist elite with origins in the old KGB. This elite had been working its way back to power since the late 1980s, using theft on a grand scale, taking advantage of the secrecy provided by Western offshore havens, and cooperating with organized crime.

Once in power, the new elite sought to maintain control using the same methods that theKGB always used to maintain control: through the manipulation of public emotion, and by undermining the institutions of the West, and the ideals of the West, in any way that it can. Based on its record so far, it has every reason to expect continued success.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/dec/18/how-he-and-his-cronies-stole-russia/?insrc=toc