6 March 2012. The Truth is EXCITING… Heaven is Joyful… Hell is in Earnest… Ponder That…

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To hear some people talk, all the fun’s on the hell-bound train, whilst the road to Heaven is paved with tears and sadness, and one has to subsist on a diet of thin gruel, Brussels sprouts, stewed prunes, and water on the way. Actually, the opposite is true. Heaven’s full of joyful abandon and GOD SMILES… hell’s full of deadly earnest seriousness, humourless keenness, and Satan‘s perpetual grimace of all-consuming care. Makes one wonder, doesn’t it? Heaven is more like the child-like simplicity that Fr Vladimir Sukhobok showed during his life than it’s like the high-minded purposefulness of Panteimon Metropoulos or Gleb Podmoshensky. It’s NEVER “pious”… it’s loving… it’s NEVER “serious”… it’s playful.

Know this… as Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov put it, we need to grasp “unholy holiness”… think on that one… now, there’s a Lenten meditation…

BMD

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Valentina Tereshkova Celebrates 75th Birthday… Многая лета!

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Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman-cosmonaut in the world, celebrated her 75th birthday “in the line of duty” at the RF Gosduma, where she won election in December. Although she’s a newbie parliamentarian, she has much experience in public and state service… she’s given almost twenty years of her life to women’s work in public organisations, starting with the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), and she was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR for many years. The whole world knows her as the first woman lifted form the earth to the stars. In June 1963, people all over the world heard of the Russian “Seagull” (Tereshkova’s radio call-sign). The story of a simple girl from a peasant family, who went to night school after working all day at a textile factory, and, then, soared to the stars, is a legend of a cosmonautic Cinderella.

Valentina was fascinated with aviation during her work and night school years, she was active in the local flying club, she made 163 parachute jumps. However, she wanted to fly… and to become the first female cosmonaut, in particular, she’d have to learn to fly a plane first. She told us, “The pressure on our group of five women was greater than that put on the men”. In general, she stated, the training system in those days was very harsh. However, “everybody was full of crazy ideas… and to carry them out we needed to be impeccably trained”.

Valentina realised her dream; however, the space flight that made her world-famous almost ended in tragedy. She told us a secret that she had kept for many years, “We’d slipped up and miscalculated… the craft was so oriented that instead of landing, it would rise in orbit, with the result that I wouldn’t be able to return to Earth safely, but I noticed this in time, reported it, the experts redid their calculations and corrected them, so, I was able to land in one piece”. The flight of Vostok 6 (call-sign: Seagull), which lasted less than three days, was the last of her career. In 1968, the first female cosmonaut team disbanded. Continuing as a cosmonaut, then-Lieutenant Colonel Tereshkova graduated with honours in 1969 from the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy, qualifying as a “cosmonaut-pilot-engineer”. Not content with that, the first woman-cosmonaut defended her thesis and received the rank of Professor… she has more than 50 scientific publications to her credit. In addition, she became the first female general in Russian history, reaching the rank of Major General of Aviation in 1995.

However, space exploration didn’t let go of her. She confesses that she has only one objective in life… “I want to go to that marvellously mysterious red planet; all of us, including Sergei Korolyov, dreamed of doing that a few decades ago. I’m ready to fly to Mars… even if I don’t come back”, she once told reporters. Valentina won many honours not only in the Soviet Union and Russia, but in other countries as well. She’s an honorary citizen of her native Yaroslavl, as well as in many other cities in the world. A crater on the Moon and a minor planet are named after her, too.

6 March 2012

Voice of Russia World Service

http://rus.ruvr.ru/2012_03_06/67665551/

6 March 2012. Rush Limbaugh Reveals His True Character… GOP Refuses to Repudiate Him… You KNOW what to Do!

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Read this. Note the following:

Conservative David Frum, the Canadian-born pundit and former George W Bush speechwriter, has warned the party for years about Limbaugh’s influence. On Sunday, on CNN’s Reliable Sources, he described Limbaugh’s weekend apology to Fluke, coming in the face of fleeing advertisers and suggestions she has grounds for a libel lawsuit, as “about the most graceless apology ever. What’s good for Rush Limbaugh isn’t necessarily what’s good for the Republican Party”. While Limbaugh may have lost some advertisers, Frum said, “He leaves the Party behind him in a smoking ruin”. …

On The Rush Limbaugh Show last Wednesday, Limbaugh said Fluke’s testimony that birth control should be covered by health insurers, in part to help women deal with painful health conditions, “makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex”. He added that if taxpayers were to be saddled with such bills… itself a misstatement since no tax dollars would pay for the benefits, only employers and health insurance companies… then, Fluke and other “feminazis” should provide some kind of payback. Limbaugh said, “We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch”. …

Indeed, on Sunday, on ABC’s This Week, conservative columnist George Will said that Republican leaders are scared of Limbaugh, including John Boehner, speaker of the House of Representatives, saying, “Boehner comes out and says Rush’s language was inappropriate. Using the salad fork for your entrée, that’s inappropriate. Not this stuff. And it was depressing because what it indicates is that the Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh. They want to bomb Iran, but they’re afraid of Rush Limbaugh”. …

Female voters made up almost 54 percent of the electorate in the 2008 presidential election, and are expected to out-number men in November as well. And a recent poll by CBS News and the New York Times found that 72 per cent of women support requiring private insurance companies to provide contraceptive coverage at no cost to beneficiaries.

Rush Limbaugh’s the son of a well-connected family in Missouri politics. No doubt, that family influence helped him to dodge the draft in the early seventies. Note well that the man is on his fourth wife (how can anyone with such a cavalier attitude to commitment be “conservative?”) and that his… ahem… “misuse” of prescription drugs is well known. Yet, he portrays himself as a moral paragon. Trust me, I’m an ordinary sinful-ginful slogger… there’s more than one sin on my plate. None of us has the “moral high ground”, without exception.

Ask yourself a question… is Rush worth 400 mill (11.87 billion Roubles. 305 million Euros. 255 million UK Pounds) a year? The per capita GDP in the USA is 48,147 USD (1.43 million Roubles. 36,700 Euros. 30,600 UK Pounds) a year, which makes Rush’s income 9,308 times his share of the GDP (that’s not a typo or error… I did the maths). That means that somebody’s picking up the slack for him somewhere. If you have a family of four… that means that your “share of the wealth” is 192,568 USD (5.72 million Roubles. 146,700 Euros. 122,300 UK Pounds)… if you’re not making that, Rush (and those like him) is stealing from you. Oh… he DESERVES it… he’s PRODUCTIVE… and don’t you forget it, you ungrateful and lazy SOB. You nasty and unthankful slug… don’t you know? God approves of such vulture capitalists… Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson said so. Isn’t that SPECIAL? You have to kiss their bums in public… they have more money… that makes them the “elect”… they’re going to heaven. You’re going to hell… for, dontcha know, God gives prosperity to his favourites and poverty to “all the others”. Peachy keen, ain’t it? Oh, yes… I thought that you’d like to know that only 1.5 percent of US households make over 250,000 USD (7.42 million Roubles. 190,500 Euros. 158,800 UK Pounds) a year… and Rush makes 1,600 times the 250,000 USD threshold. Real tribune of the people, isn’t he?

You know what to do… in November mark your ballot. Whilst you do so, bear in mind that the Republican Party endorses Mr Limbaugh’s remarks and attitudes heartily and without reservation. That does “concentrate the mind”, doesn’t it? Mr Limbaugh is NOT repentant at all. He’s only sorry that he “got caught with his hand in the cookie jar”. What he did to Ms Fluke is what he does to anyone who disagrees with him… and he does it to them publicly for the “entertainment” of his drooling soulless claque. I wonder if John Whiteford still has the link up to Rush’s site on his website? Perspirin’ minds wanna know… is Mr Whiteford still dragging Our Lord Christ through the muck (through his endorsement of Mr Limbaugh’s website) or has he “seen the light?” God willing, the latter will prevail and good-sense will win out (don’t we have ENOUGH scandal with a priest suing another priest, during the Great Lent, no less?)…

Barbara-Marie Drezhlo

Tuesday 6 March 2012

Albany NY

6 March 2012. A Photo Essay. Them’s “Good Eats” in the Russian Army… They’re NOT MREs

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What’s for dinner, Mum? “Borsch, solyanka, and pease pudding with meatballs, guys”…sure ain’t “beans n’ muthafuckers” or MREs (“A lie three ways… it ain’t a meal, it’s ain’t ready, and it ain’t edible”). These pictures are from the largest Russian Army mess hall in Leningrad Oblast. To hear the Western media talk, the Russian forces are falling to pieces and they’re unable to do anything correctly. The Westerner doesn’t know the Russian mentality. When a Russian’s pushed to the wall, he’s a tiger. In ordinary times, he doesn’t give a shit. That’s the way of it… always has been, always will be, until the last trump sounds… and that’s all that one can say of it. Russians are not one step from starvation… far from it. Aren’t you ashamed that you listened to Rush Limbaugh and that whole Fox News crew? Sit down, pull up a plate, and chow down… there’s always room for one more… a guest in the house is God in the house!

Barbara-Marie Drezhlo

Tuesday 6 March 2012

Albany NY