MOSCOW (Sunday, April 2nd, 1972) -To illustrate to viewers how cold it has gotten this winter, a Moscow television commentator said even street corner Ice cream sales had fallen. When that happens in Moscow, comrades, you know its cold…
Russians love ice cream They eat tons of it every year indoors, outdoors, summer or winter. It is estimated that Moscow residents consumed nearly 330 tons of the stuff in the recent week. And that is while the temperature dipped to -13 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit…
Still served
In Moscow, outdoor ice cream stands operate year around (Vendors have electric heaters inside in the winter and lines in front of then of young and old alike are common. Muscovite’s favorites according to the newspaper, are ice cream cones of chocolate, vanilla and strawberry and the “Eskimo,” chocolate-covered ice cream on a stick. Cones have been around in he Soviet Union for years: but the Eskimo is a fairly recent innovation. The idea was brought back from the United States in 1936 by former ambassador after he made a trip there as commissar of trade. Eskimos sell for 11 kopeks (13 cents) at the outdoor stands and are the cheapest Ice cream. They are sold everywhere on the street, in the subways, at movie theaters; and in grocery and department stores. Crowds of men. women and children can often be seen at store entrances bundled in heavy clothing and munching on cones while taking a shopping break. While Muscovite’s prefer Eskimos and cones, those living outside the capital are said to favor bricks of Ice cream and the “Leningradskoye,” a chocolate covered ice cream bar without a stick.
The Leningradskoye sells for 22 kopeks (26 cents and is double the size of the Eskimo. Lacking a stick. It also is a bit messier to eat.
Russians also eat ice cream rolls with a vanilla filling, sometimes with nuts, surrounded by chocolate ice cream packaged bricks, and chocolate covered bars decorated with sugared flowers or other designs. The ice cream enthusiasts can also Indulge at any one of Moscow, numerous Ire cream cafes where, the favorites are sundae-types of Ice cream with jam type sauces. Russians often drink a glass of white wine with such treats…
Sources report that Mr. U repeatedly signed and approved overtime that was not worked except when a particular individual went to services for Passover. Mr. U apparently did not do that for Christians during the Christmas Holiday. The same individual of the Jewish faith was berated in front of peers for not attending a Christmas tree lighting ceremony. Mr. U also referred to a black American intelligence analyst as ‘that boy’, according to sources.
“The associations that senior military officers have with corporate defense CEO’s and the proliferation of defense contractors with former military experience, literally overnight, providing dubious services, gadgets, and programs, is stunning. I don’t blame them. I blame the American people and the US Congress. At the end of the day, someone is going to ask: What did we get for all of the money we poured into the HTS program, and can you actually prove that it did what it claimed to do?”
“HTS got through three major funding hurdles, without a scratch. My bet is that after a cursory examination of where the money went, HTS will survive in some form or another. Because it is a cash cow, they [investigative personnel] don’t have to prove anything. There is no oversight of the program and no one is going to admit at this point that the program had gathered all the useful information about Afghanistan four years ago.”
How is this for a confluence of events?
USA Today’s Tom Vanden Brook, its Pentagon and Military affairs, had a dynamite piece on the US Army Human Terrain System (HTS) titled Army plows ahead with troubled war-zone program,” dated 18 February 2013. Shortly thereafter, on 19 February, another article by Vanden Brook appeared in USA Today with the heading “Congressman: Troubled Army program needs more oversight.”
Earlier on 17 February 2013, Dr. Max Forte, long time veteran of HTS debates posted on his Zero Anthropology site “The End of Debates on HTS?” Having learned of Vanden Brook’s work on the 19 February, Forte posted what might be the most comprehensive compilation of HTS documents on the web to include the US Army’s AR-15 investigative report; the Center for Naval Analyses Congressionally Mandated Assessment of HTS; and the National Defense University behemoth analysis of HTS featuring a worthy attempt to quantify the performance of HTS whilst taking pains not to criticize any party too seriously.
After all, the reports are so, like, really Washington, DC, and, as Forte has pointed out, HTS and linkages exist in a political context, as do we all.
Meteor Hits US Army TRADOC/HTS: Updates 2013
Sources have commented on a number of matters relating to HTS during 2013. Some of those insights are listed below.
According to a source, “Most of the guilty have already collected their awards, letters of recommendation, and left the scene of the crime. I suspect that there were numerous programs like HTS that were also money pits that started out as good ideas, but then deteriorated into a morass of fraud and corruption.”
A source firmly believes that “there is no one in HTS who can look you in the face and tell you that anything new or useful has been learned in Afghanistan in the last three years, or that a single report generated by HTS bears any resemblance to any academically inspired research document that will assist any commander in the field in making a sound tactical or operational decision. With tactical operations winding down for the last year this is even more true.”
“HTS has a new EEO/discrimination complaint based on the period October 2011-January 2012. Most of the people responsible have left the program, so nothing will really be accomplished. Even if the victim’s claims are substantiated, she will still have to sue the Army to get any compensation. On the other hand, the door might be open to closer scrutiny of hundreds of programs like this that sprang up overnight,” said a source.
“At a time when military casualties were rising, all you had to do was convince one or two key people, that your gadget/program will save lives. Take a look at the anti-IED programs. None of those gadgets really saved any lives…the lower op-tempo is what saved lives, along with killing bomb makers. Now the military has warehouses full of these gadgets, and no war or conflict to use them in, even on the horizon. The next frontier for the US military is the drug war in Central and South America.” What about Africa? The many different cultures, customs and languages of the nations of Africa dwarf those of Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of complexity. Given the HTS track record in those two countries, HTS would likely do more harm than good putting uniformed military and support contractors in death’s path.
“Each HTS research mission should have begun with a question from the commander or his staff, for example: What is the feeling among the population at X village about the presence of American or foreign soldiers? The easiest way to find out, is to go ask a representative sample, which HTS teams NEVER DID. The sample sizes and the corrupt research methodology of the teams, made this information totally useless. HTS used raw percentages to widely exaggerate their findings. For example, they might go into a village of about 2000, question four people, and only get responses from three. They could then report that ‘75% of the respondents said…’ This looks very impressive and fools anyone except those people with a background in qualitative or quantitative research methods, or statistics. The HTS leadership was attempting to hide all the research reports conducted on their watch, behind a classified firewall, so they could not be accessed by casual observers and critiqued for their uselessness. Many of these reports eventually found their way to the Internet, and can be found there now, because the researchers were eager to toot their own horns.”
“The fact that HTS cleared the final funding hurdle of 2 January 2103 tells me two things,” said one source. “That the program is here to stay despite its lack of any real utility, and that it has some very heavy hitters within CGI who are somehow, keeping this zombie animated. I go back to my original premise, that fraud, mismanagement, incompetence, and indolence on this scale, without any appreciable oversight from TRADOC or DOD, must be a cover for some other program, but then as Freud once said, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” and sometimes, the obvious is true.”
John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security matters. His reports on HTS are widely available on the Internet-World Wide Web. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com
Truth is the best propaganda. Or try this…..We are #1 (Repeat all day long!) This belief in the unfettered right of the US to use force anywhere in the world for any reason it wants is sustained only by this belief in objective US superiority, this myth of American exceptional-ism…
Now that is a coffee thinking for this Tuesday, February 19th, 2013…
I think you will find that kind of arrogance everywhere, especially in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East…
But isn’t anti-Americanism as always the most popular, the most simple, and the most lazy way to deal with it all?
To a certain extent, that may be right. However, I think that the ubiquity of American culture worldwide and America’s ability to enforce their own view through foreign policy have developed this “doctrine of superiority” beyond that of other countries/peoples. Actually, many places in the developing world, people tend to accept that to be American is better than to be, for example, from the Middle East and many people emulate American culture to a ridiculous (and sometimes very funny) extent.
With great power comes great responsibility, and I think that the consequences of America’s belief in its ultimate superiority have led to some very serious consequences…
the notion that “anti-Americanism” even exists in your canon speaks volumes. If I were to criticize, say, Vladimir Putin, or the dominant nationalistic culture in Russian elite society that inoculates him from criticism, would I be considered “anti-Russian?” Likely only in the eyes of those whom I am criticizing. Is there a tendency among some to blame ills on the United States to which they can’t be attributed? Surely. And to be fair since I levied no examples yet, I can not discern whether I am pointing to that phenomenon or not. But the term “anti-Americanism” is as totalitarian as one can get, and is routinely employed by just the type of individual that I am calling out in this column to drown out honest debate with nationalistic bromides. That by being a social or political critic you are somehow operating against an entire nation of people is, in fact, the laziest, most simple, and most popular method of dismissing the very pertinent ideas raised here…
You may not have traveled much, which might excuse your ignorance, but even the most inane must see the difference between a popular belief that your country is great and the much stated and widely held doctrine that your country is the greatest in the world ever and can do no wrong. Politicians in the USA have to keep saying “This is the greatest country in the world” to get elected, you hear it every day in the USA, it’s ingrained in a way that is not mirrored anywhere else in the world. Here in Russia and I’m sure in other countries, we are self-deprecating in a way you just wouldn’t hear in the USA…
This belief in superiority harms the USA not just externally but is a strong bar to progress internally and externally. It’s nothing to do with anti-Americanism…
For the rest of the world, in general, people do not confuse their own cultural bias for objective truth. Americans genuinely believe that the rest of the world agrees with them or is merely ignorant of the truth. They believe that everything outside their borders is simply inferior, even in cases where people have studiously copied Americans’ ways of doing things. This national mythology does enormous harm, not only in foreign relations, but also domestically because Americans cannot imagine that anything about their country needs improvement…
Kind of proves the point, doesn’t it, that when you make a rational comment about the excesses of American nationalism, you are presumed to be non-Americans. That’s how strong the orthodoxy is…
I’m American and I love America. I’ve worked there, traveled extensively there and have very dear friends there. But if I criticize, then I’m just a whining jealous Expat living in Russia, because I couldn’t toe the line there…
I have always thought that there was certain similarity between USA and the old USSR in their world outlook and perceptions of their role in the world. The obvious exceptional-ism, the missionary zeal to spread your values around the world, the inability to accept criticism and the great power anti-nationalism with semi religious symbolism. Thankfully, USSR is now gone… and I wonder what is to become of USA. It is looking like a USSA following the same path…
There’s a slight difference. The USSR was trying to spread communism like the Vatican tries to spread ROMAN Catholicism, whereas the USA is trying to spread a nationalistic Americanism. Oops, I guess both suck…
Don’t forget Obama’s claim during an election debate: “America remains the one indispensable nation.” Obama, being a reasonably sane chap, couldn’t possibly believe this. But the fact that he thought it needed to be said publicly, suggests political discourse in the US, borders on the deranged end of society…
The social theorist Jurgen Habermas has a name for this: “Systematically Distorted Communication.” It occurs when the conditions for achieving a rational consensus are eroded, usually through power and money (alternative means of coordinating action), and so a situation of pseudo-consensus takes the place of rational discourse, whereby people are prepared to accept as rational things which are untrue, unjustified, insincere, meaningless, morally dubious, and so on. Of course, trying to engage in rational argument becomes impossible within such an environment, which is probably why tribal loyalties and ad hominem attacks are employed instead…
UPDATE: MOSCOW, March 2 (RIA Novosti) – The investigation into the death of a 3-year-old adopted Russian boy in the United States earlier this year was hampered by overriding political concerns, Russia’s child rights ombudsman suggested on Saturday, after US officials ruled his death was an accident. “His bruises disappeared, the medicine vanished, his adoptive parents were acquitted and the authorities have backtracked,” ombudsman Pavel Astakhov tweeted. “The 3-year-old boy became a victim of big politics.”
Original: After being brutally beaten by his American stepmother, who gave him psychotropic medication for an extended period of time, a 3-year-old Russian boy named Maksim has died in Texas, Russian Children’s Ombudsman Pavel Astakhov wrote on Twitter…
Maksim Kuzmin died before medics, called by his stepmother, arrived at the scene. An autopsy showed that the boy suffered multiple injuries to his head, limb, abdomen and internal organs prior to death…
The investigation revealed that the boy was beaten by his stepmother, who had also fed him strong psychotropic medication…
The US State Department did not comment on the boy’s death, which reportedly happened on January 21. Nevertheless, the incident became known to the Russian Embassy in the US…
Russian Children’s Ombudsman Pavel Astakhov has asked the country’s Interior Ministry to conduct an impartial investigation, and to keep Russia informed of all details concerning Maksim’s death…
Around the same time this happened, Ambassador Michael McFaul said that Russian authorities would lose consular access to adopted Russian children. He blamed it on the adoption ban, but there was never any reason to stop this. How much did he know about this child’s death?
Every once in a while life throws me a pitch that is easy to hit and yesterday life tossed me a wonderful pitch and I took advantage of it. In Russia it has been a lot of long years since I saw any real Mexican food, or at least real enough to get excited about it. Sveta and I usually on a Sunday walk to the huge Globus store and eat dinner, plus do some shopping…
Low and behold this Sunday, I get in the cafeteria line and then I started to jump up and down and babble inconstant words sounding like blubbering. I had spied two Quesadilla’s that looked just plain delicious. In fact I asked Sveta to verify (I don’t always trust my reading of Russians language in high stress conditions!) that this was indeed Quesadilla’s, before I exploded with true delight and squeals of sound that would make a pig happy and blush…
I got both huge Quesadilla’s on one plate and grinned all the way to the cashier. I know they thought I was a crazed American at that point…
Now I realize that you are probably wondering what the hell is wrong with this idiot and why is he so happy to see a Quesadilla?
Well Russia is known for many things, but Mexican food it is not known for and if they try to say it is Mexican, well it is usually death on a plate. I will not eat Mexican in a Russia, or at least until I saw these tasty delights yesterday and something inside of me said, “German based Globus Store serving Mexican! That just might be safe and work out for me!”
OMG it was the best thing I have had in years. It was a well done imitation of the real thing and it was close enough that my taste buds relished in the flavors, like I had never eaten in years, anything but cottage cheese…
So what a treat for me and Sveta being the good little Russian, never touched the thing and that was fine with me! It was more for me! She does not realize what she is missing out on, when it has to do with Mexican food… 🙂
It is a known fact that a majority of Russians do not eat spicy hot food. It just is not in the menu as a normal staple. If a Russian wants spicy type food they can use Korean recipes and then they get their spicy foods and those foods are different than Mexican…
So my Sunday was fantastic and my tummy was a happy tummy all the rest of the day. As it sang Mexican songs all day…
Yes Russia has a Fairy Tale Cake and it is very rich and moist. It only seems natural that Russians would have a cake like this. They are very much into fairy tales and stories equivalent to that…
So lets make a Fairy Tale Cake and enjoy a little Russian tradition
Ingredients for cake:
10 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon real vanilla extract
Ingredients for Icing:
3 sticks of real butter at room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
4 egg yolks (I take these yokes from the 10 eggs in the cake!)
1 cup milk
1 Tbsp. Orange Liqueur
1 Tbsp. lime Liqueur
1 Tbsp. cherry Liqueur
1 Hersey’s Milk Chocolate Bar (Melted)
Ingredients for Syrup:
3/4 cup water
1/2 Tbsp. Orange Liqueur
1/2 Tbsp. lime Liqueur
1/2 Tbsp. cherry Liqueur
1/4 cup sugar
How To Make The Cake:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. (180 C.)
On high speed beat the eggs with the sugar for 6-7 minutes. Blend by hand, not a mixer, the flour and the vanilla extract, so the batter stays fluffy…
Pam spray a baking dish (I used 13 in by 9 in) with cooking spray. Transfer the batter into the baking dish and bake for 25-30 minutes…
Check if the cake is ready with a tooth pick, if nothing sticks to it, it is done…
Directions for Icing:
In a saucepan mix egg yolks, milk and sugar- on low heat bring to a boil. Simmer for 5 minutes, mix frequently. Turn off the heat and let it cool completely…
On medium to high speed beat the butter with liqueur. It will expand with air insertion. Slowly pour in the cooled egg mixture, beat for another 2 minutes…
Directions for syrup:
Mix water with sugar and the Liqueur until all sugar dissolves…
Ignore Chocolate Bar until later…
Create The Cake:
Cut the cake in 3 equal layers.
Wipe all 3 layers evenly with syrup. Allow syrup to soak in and wipe with syrup until all gone. I usually wipe them once and then pour the extra on top the whole cake and let it sink in…
Place one cake layer on a flat dish spread 1/4 of a icing on cake layer…
Then take another cake layer and place it on top of the iced layer cake. Repeat this for the third layer…
For rest of the icing add a Hersey’s Chocolate bar melted and mix it well, apply that icing to the top and sides of the cake. It is a chocolate covered cake…
Refrigerate this cake and it will form a hard shell from the Hersey’s bar. I use a Hersey bar because they are so popular in America. Russians have a thousand better chocolates and anything to suit you can be used. I also like to use the ice cream hard shell chocolate coating…
While many Russians like to decorate their cakes to look very fancy. I just like mine plain. The cake is so rich and wonderful that you need nothing else to present it. Besides once they taste it and those mingled flavors of Liqueur hit the taste buds…
(Added Video for all you that think they broke the glass…)
On Saturday the regional emergencies ministry said that over 4,000 buildings, mostly apartment buildings, had been damaged in the incident and 200,000 square kilometers of glass was broken. Then the Governor of the Chelyabinsk Region Mikhail Yurevich had to even come forth and quell media instigated rumors…
“It is not true – nothing like that happened. That information is a journalistic spoof. No one broke any glass on purpose!”Governor Yurevich said as he shook his head in disbelief…
The main stream media has came out with full ignorance of a life time. They must have been storing ignorance for months and waited for just the right moment to release all that ignorance…
Try this Headline…
Locals broke windows hoping to get meteorite-related insurance…
Cool, they would get so much money that it was worth blowing every window out of their buildings and freezing their asses off in sub-zero weather, when it would amount to just a few hundred rubles at the best. Besides who in Siberia would have meteorite insurance? I doubt they have insurance of any type, much less meteorite insurance…
Maybe just maybe since the 1908 incident that blew 80,000,000 trees flat in Siberia, there is a mandatory insurance against meteorites and the damage inflicted by the said above as it strikes the earth and destroys all around it. But in any case it would not pay out on this type of situation anyway. The damn thing blew up in the air with an estimated 1000 kiloton warhead explosion 30+ kilometers in the sky and only just blew the windows out of a whole city and scared the poo n pee out of thousands and thousands of Siberianites…
Okay I believe that meteorite insurance will be the next insurance scam, all over the world…
I think 1200+ people injured and a Zinc Factory would disagree with all the crap that is being spread about what happened. The factory was almost level by a 1 kilo chunk of rock and all those windows that broke inwards cut a whole bunch of peoples faces, including children in schools…
Oh – I guess those children had fun according to the main stream media! They broke the windows for money…
Why is everything always circling back to money?
I still say that we are very lucky that 10,000 ton flying chuck of energy did not hit the earth in one piece. We would have been able to witness first hand 80,000,000 trees being flattened again all over the ground. But instead they (people) all lived and we get to blame them for breaking windows to gain a few hundred rubles at the best..
But we also got to look at dozens of videos of what the end of the world could look like if mother nature decided to clean the planet from us parasites…
Russia’s oil major Rosneft is borrowing $30 billion, from China, this will be in exchange for doubling its oil supplies to China and that would make China the largest consumer of Russian oil. Rosneft needs this loan to close the $55 billion acquisition of rival TNK-BP in 2013 to become the world’s largest listed oil producer in the world…
China and Rosneft are in discussions as you read this…
This is all part of the planned shift from the western empire and her issues, to the eastern empire and her needed energy needs. The issue is that Russia like all other energy countries has only so much energy to be able to transport at once. Russia has been working on shifting that transfer to the east as the west has bit the hand that feeds it too many times…
This is why you hear so much “ta-da” about shell oil and shell gas. Then fracking has become the savior of the world at the same time. It is all “hoopla,” but the west is trying to keep a panic from happening as they scramble to gather resources, by destroying other countries…
I have made it clear that this is happening and have several articles in the past years as to what is going on…
China has exceeded $3 billion in Forex reserves and they have to do some diversifying of their funds. This is a drop in the bucket and it allows China to garner more of that “Black Gold” and “Texas Tea” that she is so fond of sipping at as she builds her empire in the world…
This all started years ago as the west has played some serious games that Russia has not been able to ignore and I saw the writing on the wall after the fiasco that we call Libya happen. Russia learned a hard lesson about Libya and she knew that never again could the west be trusted. Maybe she will work with the west, but trust is gone and out the window…
Don’t worry about it! America will continue to destroy countries to secure that energy, as she tells the world she will be number one in oil production by 2025…
A series of explosions in the skies of Russia’s Urals region, reportedly caused by a meteorite shower, has sparked panic in three major cities. Witnesses said that houses shuddered, windows were blown out and cellphones have stopped working.
Please follow RT’s live updates on the Urals meteorite explosion.
Check out eyewitness accounts of the meteorite phenomenon, handpicked by RT.
According to unconfirmed reports, the meteorite was intercepted by an air defense unit at the Urzhumka settlement near Chelyabinsk. A missile salvo reportedly blew the meteorite to pieces at an altitude of 20 kilometers.
A bright flash was seen in the Chelyabinsk, Tyumen and Sverdlovsk regions, Russia’s Republic of Bashkiria and in northern Kazakhstan.
Zinc Factory Blew Up meteorite…
Over 400 people sought medical attention as a result of the incident, according to the Russian Interior Ministry. No serious injuries have been reported, with most of the injuries caused by broken glass and minor concussions.
Lifenews tabloid said that at least one piece of the fallen object caused damage on the ground in Chelyabinsk. According to preliminary reports, it crashed into a wall near a zinc factory, disrupting the city’s Internet and mobile service.
The Emergency Ministry reported that 20,000 rescue workers are operating in the region. Three aircraft were deployed to survey the area and locate other possible impact locations.
Witnesses said the explosion was so loud that it seemed like an earthquake and thunder had struck at the same time, and that there were huge trails of smoke across the sky. Others reported seeing burning objects fall to earth.
Cool – Like something out of a science fiction book…
Could you imagine what would have happened it the huge meteorite had hit? Ouch…
Truth is the best propaganda. Or try this…..We are #1 (Repeat all day long!) This belief in the unfettered right of the US to use force anywhere in the world for any reason it wants is sustained only by this belief in objective US superiority, this myth of American exceptional-ism…
For rest of the icing add a Hersey’s Chocolate bar melted and mix it well, apply that icing to the top and sides of the cake. It is a chocolate covered cake…
Why is everything always circling back to money?
China has exceeded $3 billion in Forex reserves and they have to do some diversifying of their funds. This is a drop in the bucket and it allows China to garner more of that “Black Gold” and “Texas Tea” that she is so fond of sipping at as she builds her empire in the world…