December 3, 2010 — Contents

FRIDAY DECEMBER 3 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Remembering the Mayak Atrocity

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Another “F” for Russian Schools

(3)  Russian Imperialism in Ukraine

(4)  Khodorkovsky exposes Russian Barbarism

(5)  Russian hair is the Best in the World!

NOTE:  Maybe one of our more Photoshop-inclined readers can insert Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev into the following, suitable for framing?

Putinman and Medvedobin?

EDITORIAL: Remembering the Horror of Russia’s Mayak Atrocity

EDITORIAL

Remembering the Horror of Russia’s Mayak Atrocity

A recent independent news report out of Australia reminds the world of what Russia has become under the “leadership” of Vladimir Putin — a toxic waste dump, the world’s nuclear toilet.

Russians, you see, hate it when foreigners look down on them and use them to wipe their feet — until Russians don’t hate it, and actually encourage it.  It seems Russians have absolutely no problem with such attitudes by foreigners if Vladimir Putin, their anointed holy deity, is the one encouraging them to happen.

What  a country!  The details of Russia’s toxic nuclear quagmire are truly shocking, but even more so is the Kremlin’s total failure to try to protect Russians from the nightmare, and indeed its taking every possible step to make the problem much worse..

EDITORIAL: Russian Universities, Awful as Always

EDITORIAL

Russian Universities, Awful as Always

It always amuses us when Russians are “shocked, shocked” to learn that their universities have been exposed before the world as third-rate, as they were once again last week.  The Moscow Times reported:

Not a single Russian university made it to the top 200 list of the world’s best schools released this fall by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, the most authoritative global annual rating of higher education institutions. The top-ranked school is Harvard University, while many other U.S. and British universities prevail on the list.

The ranking is based on 13 elements, including research income, ration of international and domestic staff, income from industry, teaching, and citation impact.

The reasons that they are so wretched are as obvious as the sun.

Russia’s Neo-Soviet Imperialism in Ukraine

Mincing no words, Jeffrey T. Kuhner, president of the Edmund Burke Institute and writing in the Washington Times, warns the world about Vladimir Putin’s neo-Soviet ambitions beyond his borders:

Moscow is on the march. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is the most destabilizing – and reckless – great power on the world stage. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia could have become a stable democracy at peace with its neighbors.

Instead, Mr. Putin is erecting a Great Russian empire. He has imposed a brutal police state at home. Journalists routinely are killed. Critics and dissidents are jailed. Media freedoms and opposition parties are under assault. A gangster elite runs the Kremlin, plundering the country’s vast wealth.

Russia has become a rogue state. Mr. Putin’s aim is to make Moscow the center of an anti-American, anti-Western axis. Russia has waged a genocidal war in Chechnya. It has de facto annexed the Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It has reduced Belarus to an economic vassal. It menaces the Baltic States. Moscow asserts a sphere of influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus. It has sold vital missile and nuclear technology to Iran’s mullahs. It has close ties with Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela.

Khodorkovsky Exposes Russian Barbarism

An editorial from the New York Times:

Russia’s newly outrageous legal treatment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former owner of the country’s largest oil company, is a reminder that Russia has yet to grasp the idea of equal justice under law — especially when the Kremlin decides someone is in the way.

Mr. Khodorkovsky was convicted in 2005 on trumped-up charges of fraud and disobeying a court order and lost his company to Kremlin loyalists. Russians call his sort of case “telephone law,” imposed by the politically powerful through a call to the courthouse. With his sentence almost up, he was just tried again on suspect charges of embezzling and money-laundering. The judge is expected to reach a decision in December.

Russian hair is the best in the world!

Well, at least Russians have finally found something they are great at, being sheered like sheep. If they’re willing to go bald, that is.  Gets kind cold in the winter that way though, doesn’t it? The New York Times reports:

The road into town is a potholed track, passing villages of log cabins and fallow fields that speak to the poverty that has gripped this part of central Russia for as long as anyone can remember.

But on a lane where geese waddle through muddy puddles, a brick building holds crate upon crate of this region’s one precious harvestable commodity: human hair, much of it naturally blond.

For the global beauty industry, this is golden treasure.

“Nobody else has this, nobody in the world,” said Aleksei N. Kuznetsov, the building’s owner. “Russian hair is the best in the world.”