"Fruit of knowledge" was no apple

My elder son is now taught at school creation myths, including the Genesis. In one of his textbooks, the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge was described and painted as an apple, and this annoyed me. I do not claim any expertise on the Bible, but at least I know that the fruit is not identified in the original text. And naturally, having read some careless fiction narratives about pre-Columbian Europeans eating potatoes, I even asked myself whether apples were cultivated in the Middle East at that age.

Here is what I found:

"[T]he fruit of the tree in this passage has for almost 2,000 years been painted, sculpted and described as an apple. But the text speaks only of an undefined “fruit.” How did we get to the apple, of all things, which was unknown in the Near East until a century ago? In Jerome’s fifth-century Latin translation of the Bible, known as the Vulgate, the word for “evil,” with which the snake’s speech ends (Genesis 3:5), is malum. Malum can also mean apple, and so this false apple was projected back three lines, to end up ultimately in Eve’s hands, where it never was in the first place."

(Lapide, Pinchas. "Touching the Forbidden Fruit." Bible Review 4 (1988): 42-43, quoted by Paul J. Kissling, Genesis, p. 193.)

There may be other reasons besides being "lost in translation". The apple has an important place in Indo-European mythology (the golden apples of the Hesperides, the Judgement of Paris, the apples of Idun) and folklore (e.g. Snowwhite). So it was natural for Indo-European Christians, after appropriating the Hebrew Bible, to transplant this culturally important fruit onto it. However, I think today's authors of textbooks should be more accurate and explain old errors, rather than perpetuating them.

Brief history of the Islamic State

On the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, it is sad that the free world hasn't yet scored a decisive victory over its Islamist enemies. Today, the most vicious Islamist terrorist organization is an Al-Qaeda offshoot called Islamic State and known also as ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).

Half a year ago, the Islamic State was unknown to the general public. Now, it wins battles, takes control over large territories in Iraq and Syria, terrorizes residents, subjects religious minorities to genocide and posts on the Web decapitation videos of captive Western journalists. But how did it start? It is my conviction that the Islamic State, like its predecessor Al-Qaeda, is state-sponsored in one way or another. It is hardly a chance that it originated in the realm of the bloody Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, who, like his friend and protector Vladimir Putin, won a license to do any atrocities with impunity by crossing the Western "red line" slowly and gradually. Assad systematically wiped out all opposition except the bloodthirsty psychopathic fanatics of the Islamic State in order to present himself as an acceptable ruler, better than the alternative. The following cartoon by Iranian artist Mana Neyestani (now living in France) says it all:

 

 I copied it from Vox and find it an accurate if brief history of the Islamic State.

Ebola in Siera Leone: Lethal quackery

Quoting from today's report Sierra Leone's 365 Ebola deaths traced back to one healer (by Frankie Taggart, AFP via Yahoo! News):

"Kenema (Sierra Leone) (AFP) - It has laid waste to the tribal chiefdoms of Sierra Leone, leaving hundreds dead, but the Ebola crisis began with just one healer's claims to special powers.

The outbreak need never have spread from Guinea, health officials revealed to AFP, except for a herbalist in the remote eastern border village of Sokoma.

"She was claiming to have powers to heal Ebola. Cases from Guinea were crossing into Sierra Leone for treatment," Mohamed Vandi, the top medical official in the hard-hit district of Kenema, told AFP.

"She got infected and died. During her funeral, women around the other towns got infected."

Ebola has killed more than 1,220 people since it emerged in southern Guinea at the start of the year, spreading first to Liberia and cutting a gruesome and gory swathe through eastern Sierra Leone since May.

The tropical pathogen can turn people into de facto corpses with little higher brain function and negligible motor control days before they die.

The virus attacks almost every section of tissue, reducing organs and flesh in the most aggressive infections to a pudding-like mush which leaches or erupts from the body.

The virus is highly infectious through exposure to bodily fluids, and its early rapid spread in west Africa was attributed in part to relatives touching victims during traditional funeral rites.

The herbalist's mourners fanned out across the rolling hills of the Kissi tribal chiefdoms, starting a chain reaction of infections, deaths, funerals and more infections..."

The common people of course helped the virus by adhering to their traditional funeral rites, highly inadequate during an epidemic. They forgot a basic common sense rule: Never, ever put honoring the dead above the well-being of the living! Or you may have more dead, and fewer survivors to honor them.

However, if that "healer" had not dropped the bomb with her claims, villagers could have continued to say farewell to their dead as they wished and would not be infected, because the virus was not there. She started it all.

This report shows very well why alternative medicine is not only useless but also can cause much harm and must be avoided.

It is not because patients turning to alternative "providers" waste valuable time to be helped by official medicine. For most of those who seek alternative medicine, official medicine either cannot provide much help or is simply unavailable.

However, alternative medicine not only is unlikely to be of any help. It is likely to be harmful. And this is not only because alternative "healers" have not gone to medical school and lack science education. The biggest problem is that they often lack what was there before any science: the critical thinking and the humbleness to admit that you don't know what you don't know. This lack is essential for their "qualification"; for if they admit what they don't know, this will cover pretty much everything.

Alt-med practitioners can be roughly divided into two types: greedy quacks who intentionally deceive their patients and delusional individuals who truly believe in what they are selling. And as the Sierra Leone example shows, the latter, though better from ethical point of view, can actually do more harm.

The self-proclaimed healer made up in her head that she had a cure for Ebola. Had she a mental illness? We shall never know. But she was clearly inadequate, out of touch with reality. She paid the ultimate price for her delusion. Unfortunately, so did hundreds of others.

Of course, official medicine also has no cure for Ebola yet. But at least it admits it. It will not lure you with a false promise to travel many miles, lowering even further your chance to survive. And those victims from Guinea who were doomed anyway would at least have the last comfort of dying at home.

A commenter posting as David says it all: "So much for alternative medicine."

It would be an exaggeration to say that it is worse than Ebola. But it certainly makes Ebola worse.

Supposition about why baby Gammy has Down syndrome

Baby Gammy is a 7-month-old boy with Down syndrome born in Thailand to Pattaramon Chanbua, a surrogate mother. He was ordered by Australians David and Wendy Farnell and has a twin sister named Pipah. When it turned out during Ms. Chanbua's pregnancy that one of the twins she was carrying had Down syndrome, the Farnells allegedly wanted the fetus to be aborted in the 7th month. The surrogate refused based on her Buddhist faith. After the birth, the Farnells took the non-disabled baby girl and returned to Australia.

Gammy remained in Thailand with Ms. Chanbua, his legal mother. She received no child support of any sort and claims that the surrogate agency even did not pay her the entire sum promised before. She had to quit work to care for Gammy but could not afford proper treatment when he developed pneumonia. At that point, she told his story to the world.

The case made an international scandal, especially after it came to light that the biological father David Farnell is a convicted pedophile who has served two prison terms for sexually abusing young girls. Some even speculated that the true reason for leaving Gammy behind was not his disability but his gender. Now, the Thai junta is cracking down on the country's commercial surrogacy business, banning a service for everybody because of the transgressions of a few and leaving in limbo hundreds of parents and babies currently undergoing the procedure.

Let me disclaim that, while I am disgusted to my bones by the Farnells, I have no sympathy to the surrogate mother, either. I see her as just another religious fundamentalist forcing her pro-life views on others. This is of course a minority opinion; most people lavish praise on Ms. Chanbua. Australian immigration minister Scott Morrison called her "an absolute hero" and "a saint". The latter qualification immediately reminded me of Gianna Beretta Molla, who preferred death to abortion and was officially made a Catholic saint in 2004. I'd wish that people stop turning women into role models for the "achievement" of carrying to term a pregnancy in situations where the most sensible choice (or, as in Dr. Molla's case, the only sensible choice) would be to terminate it.

However, the villain in Gammy's story is undoubtedly the father David Farnell. His wife seems to have accepted from the beginning the role of being totally subordinate to him. When media first reported that she is "Asian-born", some commenters immediately said that she must be a Chinese mail order bride ready to do anything for an Australian visa. I am sorry that I initially scorned them - they turned to be absolutely right: Mr. Farnell married Wendy in China, her country of origin, and then brought her to Australia. She knows about his past but says that he is a good man who has just made some mistakes as everybody does. So I agree with those who think that David, unwilling to be charged again for abusing girls outside his family, decided to produce an object within the family, married Wendy to use her as a cover and went ahead to obtain a daughter.

There is a technique called Ericsson method to influence the sex of the embryo by sorting spermatozoa before insemination. It is based on the difference in mass between sperm cells that will produce girls (carrying a big X chromosome in their nucleus) and those for boys (carrying a small Y chromosome). The success rate of gender selection by this method is about 70%. Now, look at the graphic below.

It is from Seidel & Garner's 2002 article Current status of sexing mammalian spermatozoa published in the Reproduction journal. Pay attention that the far right part of the curve is occupied by "aneuploid, e.g. trisomic spermatozoa". Actually, these are spermatozoa that have an additional chromosome and if fertilize an egg, will produce trisomic embryos. Of course, having an additional chromosome will increase the mass and, if the cell is an X spermatozoon, will bring it to the far right end of the curve for X spermatozoa.

There is, however, another opportunity not shown in the figure: if a Y spermatozoon has an additional chromosome, it will bring it to the far right end of the curve for Y spermatozoa... which will be pretty much within the median range for X spermatozoa! In simpler words, preference for X spermatozoa that will produce female embryos is expected to enrich the sample not only with X spermatozoa but also with abnormal Y spermatozoa made heavy by an additional chromosome. The latter sperm cells will produce male embryos with trisomy - an additional 3rd copy of a chromosome, e.g. chromosome 21 in Down syndrome. So I suppose that David Farnell may have used the Ericsson method to increase the likelihood of having a girl because he is not interested in boys. This led to selection of an X sperm cell that produced Pipah, and a Y sperm cell with an extra chromosome 21 that produced Gammy.

My "hypothesis" of course is on thin legs. It is not truly verifiable, unless some person engaged in the procedure opens his mouth. I guess, however, that if Gammy's chromosome set is studied, it will turn out that his extra chromosome 21 is of paternal origin, rather than of maternal, as usual. In a more general sense, I guess that using the Ericsson method to select females will result in a slight but statistically significant increase of the rate of male trisomic embryos.

Anyway, I hope that Australian authorities will keep an eye on the Farnells and find some justification to take little Pipah away from them. Ericsson method or not, a child is hardly safe in the home of a man with 22 child sex convictions.

Russia to USA: You are beating the Negroes!

Copying from the Aug. 15 report Ferguson riots play big in Russia, by Karoun Demirjian, in the Washington Post:

"MOSCOW — In the United States, days of rioting in Ferguson, Mo. over the police shooting of African American teenager Michael Brown are a troubling reminder of how deeply racial tensions still divide the country.

In Russia, they provide an opportunity, in this era of sanctions and new Cold War-style sentiments, to accuse America of being a giant hypocrite.

In the United States, “which has positioned itself as a ‘bastion of human rights’ and is actively engaged in 'export of democracy' on a systematic basis, serious violations of basic human rights and barbaric practices thrive,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Friday, in a special commentary on the situation in Ferguson. “We would like to advise American partners to pay more attention to restoring order in their own country, before imposing their dubious experience on other states.”...

The United States' problems with racism have long been a favored topic for Russians, dating back to the heyday of the Soviet Union.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet leaders pointed to the existence of Jim Crow laws in the United States as a way of asserting the moral superiority of the Soviet Union. Racism, which was illegal in the Soviet Union, was deemed a systematic byproduct of capitalism.

In the civil rights era, especially, the Soviet Union used American anti-black racism as fodder to challenge the United States’ claims to leadership of the “free world.”

Soviet and modern-day Russia alike have had their own problems with racism as well, of course – to the point where Russia was recently rated by one publication as one of the worst countries for people of color to travel in..."


A commenter to the report asks, "If Russia is so great at treating its people of colors, then why don't all the blacks in the USA immigrate to Russia."


The linked report rates Russia as second worst country for black people to travel. It states:

"Black visitors will also have to be extra careful when they venture outside of Moscow into the rest of Russia. In a chilling warning, the Russia expert of  New Republic, Julie Ioffe, said, “There’s quite a bit of violence against people considered to be Black” in Russia... Ioffe warned that nowhere in Russia is safe for a person of color to visit, outside of Moscow’s city center...  

Ioffe was asked by a Black college student whether it is safe for an African-American to study in Russia. Here’s her answer: “Hmmmm, that’s a tough one. I think that, for the most part, you’d be okay — if you consider people glaring at you and cracking racist jokes okay. (Russians are, er, not the most tolerant bunch.) There’s quite a bit of violence against people considered to be black, which includes, in the Russian mind, people from Central Asia and the Caucasus. My advice is go, but stick to the city center and try to go to a bigger city like Moscow. (St. Pete is crawling with skinheads.) Be extra, extra careful and make sure the American Embassy knows you’re there. They have a special unit to deal with threats to American citizens, so you should report anything that happens immediately.”



I would ask the black college student in question, what is wrong with him, to even consider going to Russia voluntarily? If safe life is too boring for him, he'd better engage in some extreme sport.

Some beg to disagree with Ms. Ioffe that at least Moscow is relatively safe for blacks. The New York Times report quoted below, Moscow Journal; African Students' Harsh Lesson: Racism Is Astir in Russia, by Seth Mydans, is based on personal experiences:

"Mr. Diboi Kath, 23, is an exchange student from Cameroon, and like many other African college students in Russia he says he feels threatened by racist thugs every time he leaves his dormitory.

He has been abused, beaten and even shot during his five years at People's Friendship University, where about one-third of the students come from developing countries...

Racist attacks on foreigners here -- Asians, Arabs and especially blacks -- have been a continuing problem whose victims have included diplomats and American Embassy Marine guards as well as students.

Last year, ambassadors from 37 African nations appealed to the Foreign Ministry for protection for their citizens. Human rights groups have documented widespread harassment, often with the compliance or support of the police.

Racist attitudes lie deep within the Russian psyche and are growing even worse now, said Aleksandr Brod, director of the Moscow Human Rights Bureau, a private group that monitors discrimination. The driving force, he said, is the proliferation of white-supremacist skinhead groups, which enjoy widespread support and are fueled by nationalist political groups and publications...

''All this Nazi ideology gives rise to hatred of all non-Russians,'' Mr. Brod said. ''And so, many people even think skinheads are not bandits and hooligans but Russian patriots who are fighting for the purity of Russian society.''

As a result, he said, ''literally every week in Moscow and in other regions of Russia there are attacks by skinheads on members of minorities,'' some of which, he said, are fatal.

A suspicious late-night fire that took at least 42 lives at Friendship University three weeks ago has intensified fears among minority students here. A number of them -- particularly Chinese students -- have cut short their studies and headed home, fellow students said...

An attack can happen anywhere, Mr. Diboi Kath said, but some times and places are worse than others. ''Like the Metro Green Line,'' he said. ''If you want to die, you go there at 6 o'clock.''

National holidays and major sports events -- with their drunkenness and heightened passions -- are times to stay home, many students said. Mr. Diboi Kath said that although he loved sports, he had never been to a soccer stadium or a basketball game in Moscow. ''It's like a dream for me,'' he said. ''The cinema is like a dream. If you go to the cinema or to a stadium, it means you want to die.''


The report is old (from 2003), but I don't think anything has changed to better. We received a proof earlier this month. The image and quote below are from The Independent's Aug. 17 report Barack Obama's 53rd birthday marked with racist laser projection and banner in Moscow, by Kashmira Gander:

"As icy relations between the West and Russia show little sign of improving, protesters in Moscow marked Barack Obama's birthday by unleashing racist imagery in the city, comparing the US President to a monkey.

A YouTube video of the crude projection entitled “Obama “swallows” banana in Moscow” ashows “Obama Happy Birthday” cast in green laser across the US Embassy on Monday evening. 

The words are then followed by an outline of the US President wearing a striped party hat, as a banana enters his mouth.  

The Moscow Student Initiative - which describes itself as “an art group, a circle of common interests, activists, students, patriots,”- took responsibility for the stunt on VK, a social network similar to Facebook which is popular in Russia."

The incident reminded me of an old joke from the Soviet era: An American and a Russian brag about their homelands. The American says, "We are so free in the USA! I can stand in broad daylight in front of the White House and shout insults against the US President, and nothing bad will happen to me." The Russian replied, "Big deal! I can also stand in front of Kremlin and shout insults against the US President, and nothing bad will happen to me as well." To me, it is difficult to imagine that the racist spoiled brats who allegedly insulted Pres. Obama would dare to insult or even criticize publicly their own Pres. Putin, knowing what happened to the Pussy Riot girls and other critics.

Not that I am a fan of Barack Obama. I must admit that, hearing about the racist jokes in Moscow, I even gloated. To me, he will be remembered as one of the worst US Presidents in recent history; and I think that now he is reaping what he has sown, by his politics to be good and appeasing to all bad governments and groups worldwide and seriously hope that they would love America and him in return. If you appease bad people, they only despise you and attack you, interpreting your irrational goodwill as weakness.

At the end, let me return to one sentence from the Washington Post report: "The United States' problems with racism have long been a favored topic for Russians, dating back to the heyday of the Soviet Union." Back in those days, whenever one would point the advantages of the USA over the Soviet Union, Communists would reply, "Don't talk about this, you in the USA are beating the Negroes!" This "argument" was repeated so consistently that not only in Russia but throughout the Soviet block, "Why are you beating the Negroes?" became an idiom for an irrelevant and dishonest counter-accusation. Of course, today it is going out of fashion together with the very word "Negroes", due to political correctness. But we still remember it. And the nice people in Moscow will not let us forget it any time soon.

(Disclaimer: My own country also has an awful record of racism. But at least we are not as hypocritical as the Russians.)

Comparing Putin to Hitler

From John Schindler's article Here's What Can Be Learned From The Putin-Hitler Comparisons
, published at Business Insider's site.

"...My loathing of the bad Hitler analogy notwithstanding, you have to be pretty ignorant of the history of Europe in the 1930s not to be more than a little creeped out by the similarities between what Adolf Hitler sought in Central Europe then and what Vladimir Putin is seeking in the former Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, now.

In both cases, you’ve got a kinda-elected dictator who has successfully stoked powerful ethno-nationalism to remain popular, while bringing the economy back from the dead after a huge national defeat, and focusing attention on the fate of your co-nationals who have been cruelly left outside your borders by the last war.
To fix that, you employ diplomacy, espionage, military power, threats, intimidation, and by far your best weapon is the unwillingness of your (actually far more powerful) adversaries to confront you in any sort of serious way. They fear conflict; you do not.

Hitler thereby managed to pull multiple diplomatic-cum-military rabbits from the hat in the latter half of the 1930s, remilitarizing the Rhineland in 1936, occupying both Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938 without bloodshed, then taking over the rest of the Czech lands in March 1939, meeting no resistance, after having promised London and Paris that was exactly what he would not do.

Only following that humiliation did Britain and France begin to take the German threat altogether seriously, and when Hitler finally pushed too far and invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, at last encountering a victim who fought back, London and Paris had no choice but to declare war on Germany. Not that they lifted a finger to save their ally Poland, mind you.

In a not dissimilar vein, ever since his fiery speech in Munich in October 2007, where Putin informed the world how much he lamented the death of the Soviet Union while harshly accusing the United States of undermining global stability, plenty of Westerners have averted eyes from what the Kremlin has actually been doing. Georgia was invaded in August 2008, in a punishment expedition that allowed Moscow to demonstrate its continuing power, and the West did, well … nothing really.

Estonia was subjected to a serious cyber-attack that caused real pain and, yet again, this allowed the Kremlin to show it’s still there and will not be ignored. Again, the West didn’t do very much. The Obama administration tried its vaunted “reset,” an exercise in wishful thinking masquerading as strategy which history will judge harshly as the wrong policy at the wrong time, implemented by the wrong people.

That said, many Europeans were even more in the thrall of wishful thinking about the Kremlin than Washington DC, and the West did not really begin to pay attention to Moscow’s not-very-concealed agenda in the former Soviet space until this year, with naked Russian aggression in the seizure of Crimea..."

Author predicted Putin's aggression

I am looking at Valerie Pager's review of a book by Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putin's Wars: The Rise of Russia's New Imperialism (Lanham, USA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). Let me give an interesting quote from this review:

"The book, which Van Herpen finished writing late last year, ends with a quotation from former Czech President Vaclav Havel, who stated “I have said it so often: if the West does not stabilize the East, the East will destabilize the West” and is followed by Van Herpen’s commentary that “this is a warning that should be taken seriously” (p. 248). This comes during a section discussing Ukraine in 2013 and a prediction from Van Herpen that “if Ukraine were to opt for deeper integration into the European Union, a Georgia scenario could not be excluded, in which the Kremlin could provoke riots in Eastern Ukraine or the Crimea, where many Russian passport holders live” and could provide the Kremlin with the excuse it needs to intervene and “dismember the country” since they would be acting in defence of the “Russians” living there (p. 247)."

(Emphasis mine - M. M.)

The moral abyss of pro-Russian traitors in Ukraine

After occupying and annexing Crimea, Russia has launched full-scale war in Eastern Ukraine, using as excuse the wish of some of the ethnic Russian minority there to belong to Russia.

Some members of this minority proceeded to actual treason, raising arms against the pro-Western government of Ukraine, and Russia supplied them with military equipment and personnel from across the border. However, this became a huge PR problem for Putin when Russian equipment was used to shoot down a civilian Malaysian Airlines plane (MH17), killing all nearly 300 people on board.

While Putin and his supporters keep calling their opponents "fascists", it is they who have sunk to a moral abyss difficult to imagine. A civilian plane was mistakenly shot down in a war zone... and what happened later?

I am copying below a report from the Sidney Morning Herald:

"MH17: Ukrainian woman allegedly posts selfie using mascara looted from crash site

A young woman in eastern Ukraine has provoked outrage by allegedly posting a picture of herself on Instagram using a mascara wand looted from the crash site of Flight MH17.

Yekaterina Parkhomenko uploaded a photograph on Instagram of her hand holding the Catrice cosmetic with the caption: “Mascara from Amsterdam; to be precise, from the field. Well, you understand.”

Russian and Ukrainian media said it could not be ruled out that the post was a fake, but that it appeared to be authentic.

Asked by another user on Instagram where the mascara had come from, Ms Parkhomenko replied that she had got it “from a looter acquaintance”.

The woman, who apparently lives in the village of Torez near the crash site and employed the username “zolotosya”, defended her actions saying: “I’m a separatist and after the recent events everything Ukrainian makes me feel sick and really infuriated.”

Other users reacted to the picture with emotions from humour to shock and disgust.

One, “annahurma”, replied to the post saying: “Good thing you’re not eating up the in-flight food ... or whatever else you could find there.” To which “zolotosya” replied: “Do you want me to send you some food too? And underwear? And faeces?”

Ms Parkhomenko’s Instagram account was deleted today after a storm of criticism on the Internet.

Poor treatment of the dead and their possessions at the site caused international indignation after the Malaysia Airlines crash on July 17, killing 298 people.

Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, said he was “shocked at the pictures of utterly disrespectful behaviour at this tragic spot”. Ukraine government officials claimed that “terrorist death hunters” were collecting victims’ cash and jewellery, while a Telegraph correspondent saw empty wallets and open purses strewn on the ground.

The family of one British victim said yesterday that they had cancelled his credit card for security reasons."


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/mh17-ukrainian-woman-allegedly-posts-selfie-using-mascara-looted-from-crash-site-20140726-zx723.html#ixzz39Uz7LZ6q

EU member state Bulgaria arrests opponent of Putin, may hand him to Russia

Let me first copy a report from the site of Standart daily paper:

"Nikolai Koblyakov, a political opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin was arrested at Sofia airport. This was announced by Nova TV which stated that the arrest took place on Tuesday evening.

Nikolai Koblyakov is wanted by Moscow and has dual Russian-French citizenship. He has a Paris-based organization called "Free Russia".

The man arrived in the Bulgarian  capital on a flight from Paris and was arrested at the border entry.

"The Russian side has requested custody for a criminal offense committed in 2004-2005. What it is exactly about is unclear as the order is very general, "said the lawyer of the detainee.

It turns out that a Moscow court has issued an arrest warrant on Koblyakov last year, but he has not been detained in France.

On the website of Interpol Koblyakov is not in the red bulletin, the lawyer of the political opponent of the Russian president emphasized.

Koblyakov remains in custody."


Meanwhile, Koblyakov was released and is now awaiting the decision of the court about whether he will be extradited to Russia, as Russian authorities demand. He talked to media, and what he says is worth hearing. Below I am translating from the dir.bg site:

"The City Court of Sofia declared "groundless" the demand of prosecution to keep the Kremlin opponent Nikolay Koblyakov in custody.

He is a physics and law graduate of Moscow University and has lived and worked in France for years.
 
While he has different business activities, Nikolay Koblyakov is known mainly as founder of the Free Russia organization which has for years protested against President Vladimir Putin and in support of Russion opposition activists and political prisoners.

He wonders why, after Interpol has issued a warrant for him, he has been arrested not in Paris but in Sofia.


"...I can much easier be found in Paris where I live and work... But I think that the Russians still feel that in Sofia it is much easier for them to do what they want," Koblyakov said.




According to the Russian federal investigation, in 2004 Koblyakov allegedly conspired with the former CEO of Russian Stankoimport foreign trade company to snatch some trans-border assets of the company.

"Before I was arrested here, I did not know I was charged! Russians say they have sought me since 2012, and I have even renewed my Russian passport in this period... Everybody knew where I was. Apparently, Russian security services just waited for me to leave France and to visit a country in which they could bypass the law," says the opposition activist.



"...What I liked especially was - if I were in Russia, I would have been severely beaten or even killed. (Here), despite my views, Bulgarian police officers behaved in a quite professional way."

...Nikolay Koblyakov will remain in Bulgaria for at least 40 days more, until the process about his extradition is over."


I think the praise Mr. Koblyakov gives to Bulgarian police for not beating him is telltale for the reputation of EU member state Bulgaria, a.k.a. the "Trojan horse" of Russia in EU. I strongly hope that France and the international human rights watchdogs will press in favor of Koblyakov to eliminate all risk of extraditing him to Russia. There is now much talk on all levels about tougher sanctions against Russia. I think that there must also be a mechanism for sanctions against European countries if their eagerness to act as Russian puppets brings them to violations of common EU policy, human rights and international law.

Update: There is an online petition against the extradition of Mr. Koblyakov.

Wood-carved portraits

Our family has a sort of a new enterprise: creating wood-carved portraits and other images from digital photos.

This is me (top left is the original photo):

And this is my family when our elder son was born:

Update: This undertaking, however, turned out to be more art than business. Now, we have specialized in plasma cutting and metal spinning.

My former domain estimated at USD 1,700

My personal site is currently at www.mayamarkov.com, but its original domain name was www.mayamarkova.com. I have already written how I lost this domain or, rather, how it was snatched from me by my former host-registrar company. They abused their position and told me that I either continue being their client or say goodbye to the domain. I preferred the second option. My opinion was that blackmailers should be said "no" and that, if the content of my site is of any use and value, readers will follow it anywhere.

These days, I visited my former domain to see what activity (if any) was going on there. To my surprise, it was offered for sale for $ 1,695. This is much more than my monthly salary. Actually, even in "Old European" and other prosperous countries there are many full-time workers with monthly income less than this.

Like most people, I often have doubts in what I am doing and achieving. I occasionally need something to bring up my self-esteem, and this was a good boost. Someone is hoping to make $ 1,700 from my abandoned domain! Whoever they are, I wish them good luck :-). The world isn't full of people named Maya Markova, and I don't think anyone else would want this domain.

Spiritual paperwork

When a person dies, there are so many things to manage that relatives get up to their knees in paperwork. Some is normal - the certificate of death, the will etc. Some is extra. The saddest thing I remember is how my mother, about 20 minutes after she heard about my brother's sudden death, composed herself enough to tell my father that he urgently needs a visa to attend the funeral.

However, one thinks that the deceased at least has no more worries about paperwork.

Well, he does not do anything more himself, but in most cultures it is thought that something must be done for his soul, or it will have suboptimal fate. In Orthodox Christianity, the religion of my ancestors, it is believed that the soul roams in and close to this world for 40 days after death. On the 40th day, God decides where it will reside permanently: in Paradise or in Hell. On that very day, family members must hold a memorial service - as one priest wrote (unfortunately, I cannot find the quote right now), to try to influence God's decision and lean it to the wished direction.

After my brother's death, I did not care about any churches and services. And because it was known that my family was "that sort of people", a Christian friend of my father's reportedly ordered a service.

After my mother's death, however, I knew that friends and colleagues would like to gather together and remember her at the 40th day. And because there is secular funeral ceremony but no secular 40-day memorial service, I invited them to a church on Friday.

I could actually invite them to the cemetery and offer some food without calling a priest. However, I think that the cemetery is land of the dead and the living should avoid going there. Especially if they are elderly people that would just look at each other and wonder who the next would be. So I prefered a small church not far from my mother's home.

I have many times criticized the church and the clergy, and I surely will do it again in the future... so let me now state that I am thankful. I admit the church was there when I needed it, and although I have surely done some things wrong, nobody made me feel uncomfortable.

Update: A Christian friend of mine who had been guest at my mother's home wrote to me that she has taken care for my mother's name to be mentioned during the church services for 40 days. I was really moved by this.

Self-awareness

Two or three days ago, my 7-yr-old son, like his elder brother, had an existential insight. He asked,

"Mom, why am I needed?"

"Because you are a person," I replied.

"I am myself. And I am real," he stated with a smile.

Roger Cohen on European (lack of) solidarity

I have just read in the New York Times site an excellent op-ed by Roger Cohen, Poor Angry Magnetic Europe. It is so good that it made me forgive the primitive anti-Bulgarian hate campaign carried out by the same magazine several years ago. I am advising you to read the entire column, and now I am quoting parts of it below:

"BERLIN — Europe at the centenary of the war that devoured it is voting in elections for the European Parliament that will no doubt reflect the anger, disillusionment and boredom of people inclined to cast their ballots for an array of protest parties, many from the xenophobic right, some from the pander-to-Putin left...

In some ways Europe’s mood resembles America’s. Focus has narrowed and solidarity atrophied. Europe, like America, does not want to die for anyone else. It has turned inward, wanting its own problems solved, and damn the Libyans and Syrians and Ukrainians and whoever else may be making demands through their plight.

Anyone who believes the spread of freedom, democracy and the rule of law matters is a “warmonger.” The sharing economy is in vogue because it affords a better deal on a car ride or a room. Sharing politics is not because it may involve sacrifice for faraway people with strange names...

The European Parliament election coincides with a critical election Sunday in Ukraine, where Putin has created havoc by annexing Crimea, dispatching thugs to stir unrest in the eastern part of the country, and inventing a “fascist” threat in Kiev to conceal his own growing affinities with such politics (his beloved, much lamented Soviet Union of course allied with Nazi Germany in 1939 before Hitler tore up the pact in 1941; attraction to fascism is nothing new in Moscow).

On Kiev’s Independence Square, known as the Maidan, where Ukrainians died in numbers to escape the rule of an incompetent kleptomaniac backed by Putin, the European Union flag flies in several places. It is equally visible on surrounding streets. It is draped down the facade of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. It stands for something important in Kiev, something that seems almost unimaginable to Europeans in the confusion of their bile: the glowing possibility of freedom and dignity and pluralism, the possibility of a normal life...

But Europe is suddenly full of what Germans now call the Putinversteher — literally someone who understands Putin, more loosely a Putin apologist. Europeans of different stripes see him standing up to America, incarnating “family values,” countering a loathed European Union, and just being tough. Germans in surprising numbers are discovering their inner sympathy for Russia...

Europeans would do well to lift their gaze from the small world of their current anger toward those blue and gold flags fluttering on the Maidan, the better to recall what freedom means and with what sacrifice it has been attained."

European fellow voters, think of Ukraine!

On May 25, EU citizens will vote to elect their representatives in the European Parliament. My vote will be dominated by considerations who will support the best policy with regard to Ukraine.

I am outraged that Russia is attacking other countries and grabbing land again, and EU is practically doing nothing. So I will vote for those who, in my opinion, will be most able to stand against Russia and to think long-term of European solidarity.

And I would advice you to consider doing the same, if you haven't already decided it. Forget your and your country's economic hardships, social problems, ethnic tensions etc. Because you at least enjoy peace and, when you go to bed, you know in which country you will wake up tomorrow. So let's think of Ukraine and not ask for whom the bell tolls!

I lost my mother

When my brother died 4 years ago, I feared that my mother would soon follow him. Happily, she proved strong enough to endure and somewhat recover. Although devastated, she still enjoyed watching her grandchildren grow, meeting friends, following the news, reading books. She never complained of her health, and I hoped she would have more years to live.

She died suddenly on Monday.

The day before, I had been with my sons at a dinner in her home. We did it every week. She always prepared much more food than we could eat and gave the rest in boxes, so that I would not need to cook the next day. Until her very last day, she always cared for her loved ones.

My friend once said the system with the boxes was nice but, as my mother was getting older, hopefully at some moment they would start to travel in the opposite direction, i.e. I would cook and bring food for her. My mother, however, dreaded the very thought of such reversal. She said, "I hope never to live to a day when my child would care for me." And she didn't.

Emerging citizen

This days, my 10-yr-old son is for a first time realizing in earnest that he will die. He has asked me anxious questions about this several times.

Because I do not believe in any afterlife, it is a bit hard for me to confront his questions. I tell him that all people die and that not death as such but premature death is scary (so he must always be careful when crossing the street); but when a person lives to an old age and has seen and experienced much, it becomes easier for him to part with life, he can even get tired of life.

Today, after inquiring about death again, my son asked another, unexpected question:

"Will the city also die?"

I reassured him that cities are not like individuals, they are not doomed and can exist indefinitely, as long as their residents maintain and protect them.

The question surprised me because I have never tried to explain to him what it means to be a citizen, and in our conversations about death I have never mentioned that our deeds continue after us.

Discussions on Ukraine in earlier generations of my family

When I read news and analyses about Ukraine, I often make the mistake to look also at the comments below the articles. It is sickening, because no matter what source and what language I am reading, most of the comments are strongly pro-Russian, pro-Putin. Has the entire world gone crazy?

Analyzing the current situation invariably turns to digging into history, WWII and beyond. What strikes me is the tendency of some pro-Russian commenters to present the Holodomor as a natural and likely unavoidable famine. Quite like the pro-Palestinian Jew-haters with their Holocaust denialism.

This reminds me of my maternal grandfather. I am thinking of him on this day every year, because his name was Lazar, and today in Bulgaria is Lazarovden, i.e. St. Lazarus' day (tomorrow will be Tsvetnitsa - lit. "the day of flowers", i.e. Palm Sunday). I have mentioned in an earlier post that he was a carpenter. My mother still has in her home some excellent furniture made by him.

Unlike my paternal grandfather Georgi, who was strongly anti-Communist (and logically was killed by the Communists within weeks of their coming to power in September 1944), my grandfather Lazar was a Communist until 1945. His life had not been easy. His father Pavel, while serving in the cavalry, died in an accident. As he was riding through a forest, his head hit a branch and he fatally fell from the horse. After that, his family was of course doomed to misery.

The general with whom my great-grandfather Pavel had been serving wished to do something for his children. He arranged for Lazar to be enrolled in a carpentry school. So my grandfather learned his craft due to the goodwill of this general. Unfortunately, I am not sure in his name; I think it was Rusev.

When my grandfather grew up, he left his village Priboy and moved to the capital Sofia. His brothers gave him money that gave him the opportunity to settle in the city; in exchange, he renounced his share in the family estate. Poverty and injustice were widespread in Bulgaria at that time (the 1920s and 1930s). So he started to think that there were defects deep in the core of this society. He was shocked when his best friend's sister, a factory worker, died in an occupational accident. The young girl's death drove him to Communism.

My grandfather married a woman named Rilka, from the village of Herakovo. Her father Vladimir was a farmer - well-to-do, competent and respected. Like most people with a position in society at that time, he was anti-Communist. Thinking of this now, I even wonder how he allowed his daughter to marry a Communist. When he and my grandfather were together, they often had hot arguments on political subjects.

The regular topic of controversy was the Soviet Union. Information about oppression and misery in Stalin's realm was readily available, but my grandfather Lazar dismissed it all as capitalist propaganda. This included all reports of the Holodomor. His father in-law, however, knew that it was true. Not only because his greater experience in life was giving him better judgement, but also because some Russian refugees had settled in Herakovo, and actually one of them was working for him as a farm-hand. Their testimony was reliable. (I do not know what happened to these people after 1944. It is known, however, that many refugees from the Soviet "paradise" were rounded up after WWII and sent to Siberia, where they generally had short life spans.)

After Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, my grandfather, like many other Bulgarian Communists, took part in the Resistance (though not in armed struggle). He told me about going out at night to cut telephone wires of presumed military importance. Happily, he never fell under suspicion. Had he been cought, he would have been imprisoned, tortured and maybe even killed.

When Soviet invasion and occupation of Bulgaria brought Communists to power, my grandfather quickly saw his error and repented. He could no longer close his eyes for the ugly face of Communism - "the face of the Gorgon", as poet V. Svintila called it. In 1945, while many people were applying for membership in the Bulgarian Communist Party, my grandfather left it. However, he never became open and active opponent of the new dictatorship. The situation was clearly hopeless.

Now, grandfather Lazar realized that the anti-Soviet "propaganda" had been right all along and even underestimated the dire reality of Communist totalitarian rule. His regrets were made worse by the thought that he could and should have seen the truth earlier. He remembered e.g. how during the war he and two of his Party comrades visited a poor wagoner, hoping to win him for their cause. He angrily ordered them to leave him alone: "Get out of my sight! When you seize power, you will take my cart and my horse!" My grandfather later said, "And indeed, this is exactly what happened." He was sad for having made an error which the wagoner, poorer and less educated than him, had avoided.

By mid-1980s, when I was a teenager, grandfather Lazar was my only grandparent still alive. He already considered me mature enough to discuss political subjects. He often talked to me about pre-Communist Bulgaria, which he had struggled to reform. He was comparing it to the current Socialist Bulgaria, and the comparison was almost invariably in the favor of pre-1944. As I was listening to his tales, the lost Bulgaria of his youth, made beautiful by the golden aura of nostalgia, was appearing in my imagination. A dead and gone world was briefly resurrected, like the miracle of his namesake Lazarus.

The Socialist society, which had seemed indestructible for so long, was now showing signs of weakness. My grandfather was more optimistic than me. He said every year, "This autumn the Communists will fall (from power)!" Unfortunately, he died at age 86 in 1988, a year before "classical" Communism finally collapsed.

With Russia, the West repeats Chamberlain's errors

The text below is from There is no appeasing Russia's mad king at theweek.com, by former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili.

In early March, the Russian Federation, after staging a referendum under Kalashnikovs in Crimea, proceeded to annex the region and laid the groundwork — according to Moscow — for "new political-legal realities," that is to say, a new Russian paradigm for a lawless world. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in her speech to the Bundestag on March 13, Russia is bringing the law of the jungle to the table. For those of us who have lived through Vladimir Putin's attempts to reverse the results of what he calls "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century — the dissolution of the Soviet Union — what is happening in Ukraine is not unexpected. Nor does it mark the last act of the drama.

It should be abundantly clear now that Putin's initial plan of taking eastern Ukraine by mobilizing the Russian population there has failed. But that doesn't mean he's giving up. Russian strategists talked about a "weekend of rage" that could involve some kind of armed siege of government buildings in southern and eastern Ukraine. It happened — and if these local provocateurs and "self-defense forces" manage to hold these buildings as they did in Crimea, it might serve as a basis for further military intervention. Not that we should be surprised by this cynical playbook any more.

History can be a useful guide for politicians: first, to help prevent new disasters, and second, to help react to disasters that inevitably happen anyway, despite the best laid plans. And yet, plenty of politicians are making the same mistakes they should have learned from decades ago...

In Chechnya, tens of thousands of people were killed just to make Putin president and consolidate his power. Then, when the Colored Revolutions — and their successful reforms — became a menace to his rule, he invaded Georgia in order to kill this contagious model and again reconfirm his power. Now, as before, faced with eroding popularity in Russia, a shale gas revolution in North America, and the need for consistent port access to equip his allies in the Middle East, Putin attacked Ukraine and seized Crimea.
And yet, even with these myriad examples, the West continues to misunderstand or excuse Putin's aggression. These days, many pundits are busy with soul-searching, with one of the constant refrains being how the West overreached with NATO and EU expansion, and how it needlessly provoked the Russian bear. The conclusion they come to is that part of the reason for Russia's behavior, however petulant, lies in Western activism. It's a particular kind of intellectual self-flagellation and, for Putin, a reflection of Western weakness that only emboldens him.

Neville Chamberlain, when presenting the case for the great European powers to acquiesce to Hitler's occupation of the Sudetenland, argued that Europeans should not care about a "quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing." I hear a lot of pundits now talking about the "asymmetry of interests," implying that Russia is entitled to annex neighboring countries' lands for the simple reason that it cares for these lands more than the West. Others opine that we should all get used to the idea that the Crimea is gone, and that Russia will never give it back. This is exactly what I was told in the summer of 2008 — that I should be resigned to the idea that a part of Georgian territory, then occupied by Russia, was gone for good.

But this logic has its continuation. As we know from history, the cycles of appeasement usually get shorter with geometric progression. Soon, the same pundits may declare — with their best poker faces on — that now Moldova is "lost," or Latvia "lost," even some province of Poland. And just because Russia is not in the mood to give it back...


Certainly, Moscow didn't seem to care much about the minority Russian populations in its near abroad — so long as they were comfortably ruled by corrupt cronies of the Kremlin. But over the ensuing decade, Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova have learned to look to the West, not so much because of geopolitical priorities, but because people there aspire to a Western way of life that respects human rights and universal values...The basic facts are very clear. Russia presents the greatest challenge to international law and order since the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. And even though the West has much greater superiority over Russia — both economically and militarily — than it ever had over the Soviet Union, today's leaders are reluctant to take advantage of this asymmetry...

Despite President Barack Obama's rhetoric, the West — particularly Europe — appears reluctant to impose tougher sanctions. Unlike during the Cold War, Western companies draw much more benefit from Russia today, and thus they too will have to pay the price of sanctions... The dilemma is simple: Is the West willing to pay this price now, or delay the decision and pay a much higher price in the future?...


Winston Churchill once prophetically told Hitler's appeasers: "You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war." Surely, we cannot expect modern-day politicians obsessed with polls and midterm elections to be Churchillian all the time. But at a minimum they should not want to go down in history as the Neville Chamberlains of the 21st century. And misreading Putin for the man that he is — and has always been — is at the heart of appeasement.

Some pro-Russian Crimeans already regret their votes

Supporting Russia is one of the choices that often are often regretted later. This is exactly what is expected to happen in Crimea. Some vulnerable people, like canaries in a coalmine, are already regretting.

Quating from Laura Mills' report Crimea side-effect: Addicts deprived of methadone (AP via Yahoo! News):

"Every morning, Sergei Kislov takes the bus to the rundown outskirts of this port city for the methadone doses that keep him off heroin without suffering withdrawal. Now that Russia has taken over Crimea, the trips are about to end...

Russia, which annexed Crimea in mid-March following a referendum held in the wake of Ukraine's political upheavals, bans methadone, claiming most supplies end up on the criminal market. The ban could undermine years of efforts to reduce the spread of AIDS in Crimea; some 12,000 of the region's 2 million people are HIV-positive, a 2012 UNICEF survey found.

After years of rapid growth in the infection rate, the Ukrainian Health Ministry reported the first decline in 2012.

Many have attributed that decline to methadone therapy...In Russia, which recommends that addicts quit cold turkey, HIV is spreading rapidly. According to the Russian Federal AIDS Center, the number of people registered as infected increased by nearly 11 percent in 2013...

In preparation, Kislov has already started reducing his daily intake of methadone by about 10 milligrams each week.

Although he voted enthusiastically for Crimea to join Russia, he didn't expect the methadone program to end so quickly...

Patients say that since the program started here five years ago, local doctors had been nothing but supportive of the therapy. They reassured recovering addicts ahead of the referendum that the program would be extended at least until the end of the year.

That attitude changed on March 20, when the director of Russia's Federal Drug Service, Viktor Ivanov, announced that the program would be banned in Crimea...

Even if the group gets permission from local authorities to extend the program, the Ukrainian health minister told local news agencies Monday that Ukraine would not be sending any more methadone to Crimea, and recommended that any addicts there move to mainland Ukraine if they wanted to continue their treatment.

For Alexander Kolesnikov, a 40-year-old who has now been in the group for four years, moving to Ukraine isn't a possibility. He's proud of being from Sevastopol and has an aging, diabetic mother to care for.

But while the two went proudly to the polls on March 16 to vote for joining Russia, they are now dreading how a return to life without methadone might affect them.

"One half of my mother's heart is for Russia — for example, she will get a higher pension and she'll have a better standard of living," he said. "But the other half of her heart supports me, and she doesn't want to see me in that state ever again.""

Let me first mention that I am filled with disgust to the Crimean voters mentioned in the report. I think that people like Kislov and Kolesnikov who have made such a mess of their lives should have the decency to abstain from voting. They have proven in a dramatic way their decision-making incompetence, and they should not go "proudly" to decide the fate of their country and their fellow countrymen.

As for Mr. Kolesnikov's mother, she shows us in pure form the ugly face of elderly egoism. What is her primary motivation for voting? To get "a higher pension and a better standard of living". For the same reason, elderly Bulgarians keep voting for the Bulgarian Socialist Party, although everyone knows that electing this party is a recipe for disaster. Obsessed with their pensions, selfish old people do not hesitate to doom their young compatriots to misery and nonfreedom. A surprisingly high number of retirees are happy to sell their souls for the equivalent of $ 5. Elderly egoism is a very serious menace for the future of all countries that have completed the demographic transition.

Let me finish by copying a comment to the report, by someone posting as Randy:

"Dude, you voted to become part of Russia and now you are complaining? Maybe you should have voted to stay as part of Ukraine. Given your choice, you would be facing this sooner or later. I don't know why I am having a problem giving you sympathy...  Many people in Crimea will soon realize that they have not exactly solved all their problems by joining Russia. Many things will, in fact, become a lot worse. Better get your visa so you can leave what you voted to create."