If you are not one of the 75+ million people who have seen this video on YouTube, here is Navalny's investigation into Putin's ridiculous $1 billion royal palace on the Black Sea, built on taxpayers' money.
You may need to sit down for this.
It's subtitled
Among the highlights:
- A full-size hockey arena built underground
- A full-size luxurious theater
- Handmade Italian furniture, with couches that cost $20-30K
- A hookah room with a stage for pole dancing
- A tunnel blasted through a hillside for a wine-tasting room with a view
- A private casino
- Thousands of acres of forests and vineyards
- $1000 toilet paper holders and toilet brushes
- A no-fly zone around the compound
The slush fund required to build the Venetian palazzo was started with money meant for purchase of medical equipment for hospitals
This is full-scale Dr. Evil shit. And none of this is in any way surprising, considering what Russian rulers are prone to do with unlimited money, unlimited power and zero accountability.
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Here is a story on which several of my general circles of interest overlap quite wildly. Namely, it's Russia, politics, hockey and craziness. I will try to make it short, though this won't do it justice.
This is the story of Vityaz, the KHL's own Charlestown Chiefs...
Vityaz is a club that should never belong to a top-flight professional league. If you have ever seen Slap Shot, just give all the characters there a Russian accent, throw in a lot more criminality, and you will have the picture. They are as bush league as it gets...
Vityaz was founded by Russian mafia in the city of Podolsk, Moscow Region. The entire area was run by warring gangs in the 1990s and well into the 2000s, and the leader of one of them, Nikolai Pavlinov, was known for his posh manners, decadent tastes and the love of sports...
Comparing Trump to Navalny makes such perfect sense, it's obvious why Newt has been considered the right-wing's intellectual heavyweight for 30 years now.
Let's dig in.
1) Trump is a corrupt national leader ousted in a free and fair election, despite desperately clinging to power and attempting to destroy democratic institutions.
Navalny wants Russia, via elections, to oust its corrupt national leader who clings to power and destroys democracy.
2) Trump is an authoritarian who has abused power and bullied and persecuted his political foes, often endorsing violence against them.
Navalny has been a victim of power abuses, has been bullied and persecuted and had violence directed at him by an authoritarian.
There is absolutely nothing, nothing at all, that would make anyone watching the #Sabres play hockey in any way hopeful, excited or willing to ever repeat the experience again.
If a long-dead corpse still moving due to escaping gasses were a sports franchise, this would be it.
Literally. All attempts to revive the team with new talent or new coaching approaches are akin to giving electric shocks to a rotting corpse. It shakes up the maggots, but nothing more.
The Sabres are the most depressing sight in sports. They are not even adorable losers...
They are not "so bad, it's good" or "a ragtag gang of misfits." Their badness, their sheer, utter inadequacy is simply appalling. It's revolting. It makes one question the existence of truth, morals, right and wrong. It makes one doubt that there is a limit to human depravity...
I get a lot of questions about #Navalny. I am not the world's leading expert on the man, but I can answer most of them with enough veracity.
Specifically:
"Is it true he is a neo-Nazi/homophobe/mysogynist/anti-Semite?"
"What are the charges against him?"
"Why did he return?"...
"Why is Putin afraid of him?"
"Does he pose real danger to Putin?"
OK, let's start with the first one, because it definitely contains bad news.
Yes, Navalny has in the past openly promoted views that can only be described as white nationalist and xenophobic. No doubt here at all
He has attended and has been a vocal participant in "The Russian March", an annual gathering of right-wing nationalist groups, most of whom are unambiguously anti-semitic, anti-minority and doubtlessly homophobic. He has made videos portraying Muslims as pests...
To all you media types who still think we need to talk to Trump voters, understand them, hear them. Can I save you a bit of trouble? Here is a (short, I promise) thread about who they are, what they want and where they are coming from.
It's not complicated, either...
My bio says "sports writer", and this is what I used to be (and still am, occasionally), but my full time job is a public school teacher. I teach in Baltimore, in low-income areas. One of my former jobs was in a mostly white, working-class community, full of rabid Trumpers...
This was probably the worst job I ever had, which had little to do with the community or the kids and a lot to do with admin, but that's beside the point. The kids all came from very poor, very dysfunctional families, rife with drugs, abuse and violence. Many were unmanageable...