12:20PM
( ... tālāk ... )
[The IMF] also told me to save the banks that were going bankrupt, and I said no, I will not save them. That sent a very strong message: Don't mess with the money, and don't expect help from the state with problems of your own making. It was very well understood. [..] It was very clear as we started to analyze our situation in 1992 that our police forces were so young, we couldn't use them to fight the criminality or the organized criminality--that needed time. You could not do it fast. So we had to find other areas where we had to stop them. It was very clear we had to use other methods. When we started to analyse what went wrong in Russia, why this organized criminality is taking everything over, . . . we realized that all the bad things were starting from the banks. That means that they first take over the banks, then they take over the industries, and then all political life. So we decided not to let them into the banks. And to stop this we just bankrupted those banks which were taking over. We made a very strong banking regulation and control, and regulations on dirty money that was coming to these banks, and when we found problems that some people were taking over these banks, we moved the state budget out of the banks, and so on. But the message was understood: Don't come to this country with your dirty money. And as a result of this we have the strongest banks in the Baltics. But of course it was connected, because as I bankrupted the first bank, all I said was that the bank was in bankruptcy, and he came to the government to ask for money, and he was totally sure that he would get it because he always had gotten it, and he didn't understand me at all, he didn't believe me. He said that I would be out of office in two weeks. — Mart Laar, "Just Do It"- Kādēļ tomēr Latvija ir iepakaļus Igaunijai?
http://bnn-news.com/broadcast-latvia-di
"One blogger has noted that ‘the number of references to Derrida in political discourse is growing beyond all reasonable bounds. At a recent conference the Duma deputy Ivanov quoted Derrida three times and Lacan twice.’ In an echo of socialism’s fate in the early 20th century, Russia has adopted a fashionable, supposedly liberational Western intellectual movement and transformed it into an instrument of oppression"
Of course, the magnificent moral impulse, the search for truth and goodness, is only a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the successful remaking of a country. It may be enough to bring down the ancien regime, but not to overcome, in one fell swoop, a deep-seated authoritarian national political culture. The roots of the democratic institutions spawned by morally charged revolutions may prove too shallow to sustain a functioning democracy in a society with precious little tradition of grassroots self-organization and self-rule. This is something that is likely to prove a huge obstacle to the carrying out of the promise of the Arab Spring -- as it has proved in Russia. The Russian moral renaissance was thwarted by the atomization and mistrust bred by 70 years of totalitarianism. And though Gorbachev and Yeltsin dismantled an empire, the legacy of imperial thinking for millions of Russians has since made them receptive to neo-authoritarian Putinism, with its propaganda leitmotifs of "hostile encirclement" and "Russia rising off its knees."
"Since the 1950s, a series of dictators had devastated the Argentine private sector, concentrating wealth into the hands of politically connected oligarchs, corrupt government contractors, and, most recently, foreign investors. In Argentine Spanish, the word for businessman—empresario—had become synonymous with criminal, and it was widely assumed that the most successful people had robbed and cheated to get where they were. [..] Argentina, like other countries in which tax evasion is widespread, suffers from a "noncompliance equilibrium." People see their neighbors cheating with impunity and conclude they should cheat, too. "In order to change this, they'd have to do some kind of shock and awe and go after everybody," Bergman says. "But that's impossible. You can't audit everybody.""
It was reasonable for Plato to think that the ideal of, say, a horse, was more important than any individual horse we can perceive in the world. In 400BC, species were thought to be eternal and unchanging. We now know that is not true; that the horses on another cave wall—in Lascaux—are now extinct, and that current horses continue to evolve slowly over time. Thus there is no such thing as a single ideal eternal "horse" form. We also now know that language is like that as well: languages are complex, random, contingent biological processes that are subject to the whims of evolution and cultural change. What constitutes a language is not an eternal ideal form, represented by the settings of a small number of parameters, but rather is the contingent outcome of complex processes. Since they are contingent, it seems they can only be analyzed with probabilistic models. Since people have to continually understand the uncertain, ambiguous, noisy speech of others, it seems they must be using something like probabilistic reasoning. Chomsky for some reason wants to avoid this, and therefore he must declare the actual facts of language use out of bounds and declare that true linguistics only exists in the mathematical realm, where he can impose the formalism he wants.— Peter Norvig, On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
"Markss: cilvēku atsvešinātība no panāktā rezultāta padara darba darītāju neapmierinātu, izraisot nepatiku pret strādāšanas procesu un darba vidi."
"I do not buy the argument that the natural order of things is GOOD. I think the natural order is actually pretty bad"
Go to work, send your kids to school.
Follow fashion, act normal.
Walk on the pavements, watch T.V.
Save for your old age, obey the law.
In June, disillusioned members of the Latvian Riflemen began appearing in anti-Bolshevik circles in Petrograd .... As Latvians were deemed the Praetorian Guard of the Bolsheviks and entrusted with the security of the Kremlin, Reilly believed their participation in the pending coup to be vital and arranged their meeting with Lockhart at the British mission in Moscow. At this stage, Reilly planned a coup against the Bolshevik government and drew up a list of Soviet military leaders ready to assume responsibilities on the fall of the Bolshevik government. While the coup was prepared, an Allied force landed on August 4, 1918, at Arkhangelsk, Russia, beginning a famous military expedition dubbed Operation Archangel. Its objective was to prevent the German Empire from obtaining Allied military supplies stored in the region. In retaliation for this incursion, the Bolsheviks raided the British diplomatic mission on August 5, disrupting a meeting Reilly had arranged between the anti-Bolshevik Latvians, UDFF officials, and Lockhart (Cook 2004).
On August 17, Reilly conducted meetings between Latvian regimental leaders and liaisoned with Captain George Hill, another British agent operating in Russia. They agreed the coup would occur the first week of September during a meeting of the Council of People's Commissars and the Moscow Soviet at the Bolshoi Theatre. However, on the eve of the coup, unexpected events thwarted the operation (Cook 2004).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Rei
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