Some informal considerations and illustrations regarding public safety
Created | Updated Mar 30, 2006
Disorder and order likewise are equiprofitable attractor states. One is already sick with hearing about dictatorial stirrings on the expanses of Russia. It is a veneer. But it is worse: The country is swiftly turning itself into a forced reign of oligarchy, or no-state. Dictators at least are good at thinking strategically and planning year’s ahead. But what if you have an impotent dictator, dictator in name and rhetoric only? The grandeur of the state set up with great success to hide its nakedness, infirmity and declining health, to conceal bowels in which down-rush short-termism and impulse to inflict mealy-mouthed Jesuitical distraction and other humours inherent in the fabric of financial oligarchy. Like network of tumours swelling inside the country and battening up on its blood until there is enough of it to suck.
2005: The Ministry for Nuclear Energy was disbanded and superseded by the Federal Agency on Nuclear Energy chaired by no lesser puppet figure than Mr. Kirienko (whose so-called “Kinder-surprise” federal Premiership is still memorable landmark en route towards the era of Default ushered in 1998). The Ministry was for sale and bought for not quite inconsiderable sum. It was a cash-generating Ministry with a mostly overseas portfolio of nuclear-plant building contracts under its management, so this turn of affairs was only reasonable at this day and age. But presently we have the chance to observe much stranger evolutions in this Body: A Reform pursuing further curtailment of (by now much-weakened) Radiological Controls on nuclear facilities.
It is not reassuring to think that affairs of that scale are not done on purpose, in this case grim and macabre purpose. So it comes as no surprise that all the paraphernalia of modern repressions is imposed upon those ranks of silent majority that dare disagree to themselves with that soon-to-be true and real crime against humanity: appropriate research institutions are “reformed” and its aged lieutenants of old school, that once (at least) did something with their hands are cut down, and replaced with pen-pushers of mere zombie species bent on materializing their heinous and conspiratorial bidding, to which multiple “terrorisms” are but shadow-events in scale. Most are afraid to speak, those that do find themselves financially tortured: with their current bare-minimum salaries cut down gradually to below breadline. One person that on an industry-gathering said bluntly about initiation of SECOND CHERNOBUL was civilly invited for cigarette-intermission and not let back into the building. So the question WHO BOUGHT THE MINISTRY? will never be raised after all.
Better to have a corrupt stuffed-shirt wallowing on pilfered wealth than efficient-obedient bureaucrats destroying the country, people and nature: for one thing, efficient – obedient bureaucrats are more expensive when it comes to greasing their hand, and by way of illustration we descry that over the course of the construction boom in Moscow bribes at market prices increased ten-fold: around the time of Default it took only 100 000 dollars of unofficial payment to steer through prime-class residential building contract. Nowadays only official duties will amount to the said sum, and the remainder will overshoot $1mln (if you are an independent developer).
Strenuous are the conditions and terms of planning consents at the apex of this sad building craze, but on the whole are we not right to suggest that they are the least of innocuous indecencies compared to the slavery at the bottom, both things being mirror images of themselves, and having common causation:
Lowly Ant-Laborers on those ghostly building sites putting in 12- hour shifts, little can be said of them but bare facts artlessly arranged and easy of demonstration: illegal immigrants those are, for the most part. Starved in their ghost towns in the collapsing environs of the former Soviet Union, they dared to seize their chance and seek wages in Moscow in what they perceived in their imagination to be the land of opportunity. Their employers were careful at first to foster this image: around 2000 average wages for this kind of labor were decent 11 000 rubbles (approximately $400) a month paid regularly. But at present, 5 years down the line it was discovered by protracted careful experimentation on employers’ behalf – this Law of bare survival: he that is truly down will not dare to put up fight, exploit him to the uttermost degree and reap your pecuniary economy. Economy born out of a true distinction between the Man and an Ant-Slave: for a person without the stamp in his passport is a live- machine, inferior to Man Proper and dead-soul as he appears to the eyes of respectability:
We no longer afford him a promised monthly wage of 8000 rubles. You ungrateful: Don’t you dare forget that we feed him (every second day) with our barley free of charge and give him lodgings (in meagerly-heated iron boxes with little cut-out windows stacked one upon another in two rows, individually smaller than the size of a prison cell, which is the first palpable comparison that comes to mind). As to that wage of theirs, do we not promise to repay it in full as their well deserved summer–leave approaches, whereupon they will travel towards distant homes in state and perfect felicity? Murmur subsides at this.
But in general would it not be naïve to expect such delivery of promise and unnecessary forfeiture of profits, while there is will and a way to avoid it? So at the appointed hour one fine warm morning, the building itself now being nigh finished, ant-men are drawn in line and informed in no vague terms that the police will swoop in on the building site shortly; wherefore general hubbub arises, workmen concerned rush from the gate in exodus getting dispelled halter-scalter.
On the whole I did not go far to hear of this story. For, indeed, this is the state my immediate locality lives in now, and those squalid ant-men having now no place, no food and no money, prowl stealthily around offering themselves on most humiliating terms for any kind of menial duty-- they being little brush-strokes on a bigger canvas of the greatest national plunder ever seen since the discovery of the New world.
One recoils in fear at the unseemliness of all this and asks: what befits in a zero sum-game? Victor’s “Democracy” (or unequal sharing of blessings among select few) or Losers’ “Tyranny” (or an equal share of misery among all)? It was but a week ago that Belorussians voted overwhelmingly in favor of the latter.
2005: The Ministry for Nuclear Energy was disbanded and superseded by the Federal Agency on Nuclear Energy chaired by no lesser puppet figure than Mr. Kirienko (whose so-called “Kinder-surprise” federal Premiership is still memorable landmark en route towards the era of Default ushered in 1998). The Ministry was for sale and bought for not quite inconsiderable sum. It was a cash-generating Ministry with a mostly overseas portfolio of nuclear-plant building contracts under its management, so this turn of affairs was only reasonable at this day and age. But presently we have the chance to observe much stranger evolutions in this Body: A Reform pursuing further curtailment of (by now much-weakened) Radiological Controls on nuclear facilities.
It is not reassuring to think that affairs of that scale are not done on purpose, in this case grim and macabre purpose. So it comes as no surprise that all the paraphernalia of modern repressions is imposed upon those ranks of silent majority that dare disagree to themselves with that soon-to-be true and real crime against humanity: appropriate research institutions are “reformed” and its aged lieutenants of old school, that once (at least) did something with their hands are cut down, and replaced with pen-pushers of mere zombie species bent on materializing their heinous and conspiratorial bidding, to which multiple “terrorisms” are but shadow-events in scale. Most are afraid to speak, those that do find themselves financially tortured: with their current bare-minimum salaries cut down gradually to below breadline. One person that on an industry-gathering said bluntly about initiation of SECOND CHERNOBUL was civilly invited for cigarette-intermission and not let back into the building. So the question WHO BOUGHT THE MINISTRY? will never be raised after all.
Better to have a corrupt stuffed-shirt wallowing on pilfered wealth than efficient-obedient bureaucrats destroying the country, people and nature: for one thing, efficient – obedient bureaucrats are more expensive when it comes to greasing their hand, and by way of illustration we descry that over the course of the construction boom in Moscow bribes at market prices increased ten-fold: around the time of Default it took only 100 000 dollars of unofficial payment to steer through prime-class residential building contract. Nowadays only official duties will amount to the said sum, and the remainder will overshoot $1mln (if you are an independent developer).
Strenuous are the conditions and terms of planning consents at the apex of this sad building craze, but on the whole are we not right to suggest that they are the least of innocuous indecencies compared to the slavery at the bottom, both things being mirror images of themselves, and having common causation:
Lowly Ant-Laborers on those ghostly building sites putting in 12- hour shifts, little can be said of them but bare facts artlessly arranged and easy of demonstration: illegal immigrants those are, for the most part. Starved in their ghost towns in the collapsing environs of the former Soviet Union, they dared to seize their chance and seek wages in Moscow in what they perceived in their imagination to be the land of opportunity. Their employers were careful at first to foster this image: around 2000 average wages for this kind of labor were decent 11 000 rubbles (approximately $400) a month paid regularly. But at present, 5 years down the line it was discovered by protracted careful experimentation on employers’ behalf – this Law of bare survival: he that is truly down will not dare to put up fight, exploit him to the uttermost degree and reap your pecuniary economy. Economy born out of a true distinction between the Man and an Ant-Slave: for a person without the stamp in his passport is a live- machine, inferior to Man Proper and dead-soul as he appears to the eyes of respectability:
We no longer afford him a promised monthly wage of 8000 rubles. You ungrateful: Don’t you dare forget that we feed him (every second day) with our barley free of charge and give him lodgings (in meagerly-heated iron boxes with little cut-out windows stacked one upon another in two rows, individually smaller than the size of a prison cell, which is the first palpable comparison that comes to mind). As to that wage of theirs, do we not promise to repay it in full as their well deserved summer–leave approaches, whereupon they will travel towards distant homes in state and perfect felicity? Murmur subsides at this.
But in general would it not be naïve to expect such delivery of promise and unnecessary forfeiture of profits, while there is will and a way to avoid it? So at the appointed hour one fine warm morning, the building itself now being nigh finished, ant-men are drawn in line and informed in no vague terms that the police will swoop in on the building site shortly; wherefore general hubbub arises, workmen concerned rush from the gate in exodus getting dispelled halter-scalter.
On the whole I did not go far to hear of this story. For, indeed, this is the state my immediate locality lives in now, and those squalid ant-men having now no place, no food and no money, prowl stealthily around offering themselves on most humiliating terms for any kind of menial duty-- they being little brush-strokes on a bigger canvas of the greatest national plunder ever seen since the discovery of the New world.
One recoils in fear at the unseemliness of all this and asks: what befits in a zero sum-game? Victor’s “Democracy” (or unequal sharing of blessings among select few) or Losers’ “Tyranny” (or an equal share of misery among all)? It was but a week ago that Belorussians voted overwhelmingly in favor of the latter.
