EDITORIAL
Russia, Nation of Smokestacks
Of the following group of nations, the worst cigarette smokers on the planet, which do you think is the very, very worst, the most suicidal, the bottom of the wretched barrel?
Yes, it’s Russia. Surprise, surprise.
A new survey by the World Health Organization reveals that three out of five Russian men smoke, one out of five Russian women smoke, a total of 44 million adults, well over one-third of the entire population, including the children!
400,000 to 500,000 Russians a year die from smoking-related causes, a figure far larger than any foreign enemy could dream of achieving — proving once again how utterly insane is Russian xenophobia. By far the worst enemy of the Russian people is the Russian people. And it’s only the tip of the iceberg, of course. Russians also set world records for perishing by fire, on the highway, and in the course of violent crimes.
Those lucky enough to reach a doctor before expiring are not really lucky at all, because Russia has vast class of underpaid, under-trained physicians who lack basic equipment and who therefore cannot possibly do much to stave off the inevitable. In fact, because of their incompetence, they may even accelerate disaster, and Russian courts have no means of holding incompetent doctors accountable.
Russia is, in other words, a nation in the midst of committing suicide. Its leaders simply do not care about this, they have written off the vast majority of the population as hopeless fools, and they do as Russian rulers have always done — simply exploit them for personal gain until, once again, the nation collapses.
And who can say that Russia’s leaders are wrong? What have the people of Russia ever done to prove that they are not cattle, that they value civilized values and are ready to fight for them? We’re not aware of much. Instead, the behavior of the majority of Russians looks to us very much like that of cattle, or perhaps even lemmings rushing madly towards the edge of a cliff.
La Russophobe 
What are the WHO’s current figures about Russian alcohol- and drugs-related deaths, for a comparison?
Check and you’ll be surprised, silly boy.
>> Russia is, in other words, a nation in the midst of committing suicide. Its leaders simply do not care about this, they have written off the vast majority of the population as hopeless fools, and they do as Russian rulers have always done — simply exploit them for personal gain until, once again, the nation collapses >>
In view of the above quote, please allow me to offer the following piece of advice to the LR team once again: For your own, ahem, peace of mind, don’t bet on Russia’s terminal prolapse any time soon. After all, Russia is this marvellous blog’s whole raison d’être. You would be considerably better off emulating truly devout Christians, never abandoning their rock-solid faith in Jesus’ second coming but — understandably — not being so stupid as to start guessing when.
On second thought, I must confess I’m surprised by the fact that the team didn’t take an outright jubilatory stance, given the extremely urgent task of freeing the planet from Russia and her people. Some sort of irrepressible love-hate relationship manifesting itself here?
Eine kleine Manfred;
There is no need to be pathetic and bombastic – russian empire is SIMPLY DESINTEGRATING like any other empires in the past – no matter how many presidents Russia slaughters, how many putsches Russia instigates, how many ‘frozen conflicts’ Russia creates, the desintegration process cannot be stopped.
By the way, there are persistant information all over the western press, especially in Canada, warning about upcoming civil war in Russia and not investing in Russia – the risk is too high…
Your comment is the first time I’ve heard about this supposedly ‘persistent’ rumours of an impending civil war in Russia. A civil war is highly unlikely, on the other hand some sort of a coup in which perhaps the Kremlin or the Parliament building get fired on by tanks or bombed while the ordinary Muscovites go about their business as usual, now that scenario seems far more plausible to me.
As for the Russians being ‘lemmings rushing to the edge of a cliff’, with the level of propaganda and shameless lies that Russians get bombarded with every day, any nation would be reduced to this state. A case in point is Nazi Germany.
That’s DISintegrating, dolt. By the way, care to elaborate on the subject of presidents slaughtered by Russia? Where and when? Sounds interesting, anyway.
Well… Presidents… Have you heard that Pres Ford once issued an order explicitly prohibiting assassination of foreign heads of states?
It was, like, hey, the CIA, you need to either commit assassinations AND not be caught every time, or stop attempting at all…
Few pages of the US secret service brave history:
10. Opening of mail to and from the People’s Republic of China from 1969 to 1972 (project SRPOINTER/HTLINGUAL at JFK airport – see also Project SHAMROCK by the NSA)
11. Funding of behavior modification research on unwitting US citizens, including unscientific, non-consensual human experiments.[7] (see also Project MKULTRA concerning LSD experiments)
12. Assassination plots against Cuban President Fidel Castro (authorized by Robert Kennedy)[8]; Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba; President Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic; and René Schneider, Commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army. All of these plots were said to be unsuccessful ones.[9]
And many, many others, among them Canadian PMs and presidential candidates from Pakistan… Because they, like, care, this gallant CIA mob.
Ha! In twenty years, the Muslims in Russia will exterminate
whatever is left of the poor Orthodox Russian people until none is left…
As for Russian doctors, there is NONE!!!
As explained to me a Russian nurse in Miami who used to be a Russian doctor.
She was studying to get her medical license, had a few more years to go.
She envied the Castro Cubans who learned from American books…
noting that the Russian doctor’s knowledge had nothing to do
with modern medicine but was just a jumble of communist
politically correct gobbledygook.
No wonder the Russian life expectancy is as short as that of
the poor rabble of Mumbay…(that may explain the oh so strange
alliance between the two misers…)
The Russian healthcare system is far from being the best in the world and in some places it’s plain inadequate, however, it’s not all that horrible as you make it out to be. There are lots of other reasons for why life expectancy is so short in Russia.
One of them is that a lot of Russians still have a rather medieval attitude towards doctors and hospitals. One glaring example is my own mother, a high school maths teacher, she developed type 2 diabetes in her 50’s, despite her friend and family’s insistence that she go see a doctor about it, she never did. Then one day she had a sharp pain in her stomach; instead of calling an ambulance she went to work as she was teaching a class she suddenly felt warmth spreading in the bottom of her abdomen – her appendix had burst, when she finally went to the hospital, on her own, that evening, she had stage 4 intoxication and had to be operated on immediately, her prognosis was very bad and yet the doctors there worked a miracle and saved her life, they also at long last diagnosed her with type 2 diabetes and prescribed her medications.
I’m personally quite at a loss as to why so many people in Russia seem to be willing to avoid doctors at all costs even when they’re feeling really bad, I do believe, however, that this pathological mistrust of doctors is a big part of the reasons why many Russians tend to die so young. Even with the old fashioned equipment and drugs used by most Russian hospitals (10-15 years behind what’s available in the west) there are still a lot of conditions that Russian doctors can treat successfully if they catch them early, but there’s little they can do when people call the ambulance only when they’re already on their deathbed.
Igor,
Are the young Russians too distrusting doctors? I also wonder about one thing, since so many Soviet doctors used to be Jewish, how much did the Jewish exodus to Israel 20 years ago affect the Russian medicine?
I can’t speak for all young Russians, I personally trust them by and large, you know, if I notice that something’s wrong I usually read up on my symptoms on the internet and then go talk to a specialist doctor about it.
On the other hand I know at least one young person (she’s 26) who does seem to distrust doctors like if she has flu for instance and she calls a doctor she usually won’t tell them that she also has chronic polyarthritis even though they specifically ask her if she has any chronic conditions before prescribing medications. Why she withholds that information from them is beyond me.
I don’t think anyone really noticed the Jewish exodus as far as the healthcare system was concerned, probably because at about the same time the government pretty much stopped financing healthcare and the effects of this lack of money were far more devastating. There was a period of time in the 1990’s when you had to buy your own medications, your own bandages and your own food whenever you were in hospital (i.e. usually your relatives would buy all those things for you). There were still enough doctors to go around, even Jewish ones, it’s just that they couldn’t really do very much as they were left with no resources.
It has to be admitted that the situation changed in the naughties – when my mum was hospitalised with burst appendix, my and my dad’s first impulse was to go and buy her meds but the doctor we spoke to in the intensive care unit told us they had all the antibiotics she needed, neither did we have to buy any bandages or band aides or anything of the sort, which we would have had to buy ourselves if it had happened during Boris Yeltsin’s ‘shock therapy’
Btw, I would think that in all probability the percentage of doctors in that Jewish exodus was probably rather small, because medical skills are not exactly transferable unless you’re some sort of a star medical professor that everybody wants to get their hands on. If you’re an ordinary doctor from a provincial town, chances are you’re going to have to retrain/confirm your qualifications after you emigrate and the majority of people in their 40’s and 50’s don’t really fancy starting their lives from scratch.
Thanks.
Troll is trollish.
Don’t open more than one window on the bus, the draft will kill you!
The greatest recent ‘achievement’ of russian witch-doctors is the survival rate of Perms’ fire. OUT OF 150 VICTIMS 150 DIED. CONGRATULATION!! – doesn’t it ranslate into 0%?? dymasza und kleine manfredasha…
I am sure that some of the russian kgb commentators [with russian, german, chinese, polish, names – to name the few] – who defend their declaining country so vigorousl on this site will find it a resounding success..Let’s wait and see their way of reasonng…..example – but in India and Bangladesh there were even more victims of fire….or in the USA it is even worse than in Russia…
@”OUT OF 150 VICTIMS 150 DIED. CONGRATULATION!!”
Why do you always lie? Why do you lie even when you’re talking about such things?
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Пожар_в_клубе_“Хромая_лошадь”:
От пожара пострадало 234 человека[16], включая 156 погибших.
234 victims. 156 died.
Now – why do you always lie?