One curious thing about the alphabet is that it includes the letters І, Ѣ, Ѳ, Ѵ which had been phased out of the Russian alphabet following the orthography reform of 1918 and were afterwards regarded as a vestige of the “old regime”.
If you were a native Russian, your would look out not for malice but rather for negligence and indifference on part of the authorities. Which is why I, for one, think the right question to ask is: how did it come that a person so evidently in distress could not be located quickly in a place like that? No doubt, Losiny Ostrov is a large park (it is about the same size as Pinnacles State Park in California), but it is surrounded on all sides by urbanized territory and should have excellent mobile coverage. Given that Chervonenkis had a phone on him, couldn't Search and Rescue have the mobile provider determine his location (qv. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_tracking) with at least the accuracy that would allow for a small ground team to find him?
That's a good question. Loeb's primary strength (apart from its exceptional typographics) is that it puts original texts side by side with translations, making it easier for a reader to make sense of the Greek or Latin source by comparing it to English. I'm not aware of any widely accepted digital formats for parallel prose that Loeb could offer for download; PDF or DejaVu have their obvious drawbacks; so that would probably leave us with some proprietary stuff, sadly.
Bottom line: native speakers of English don't grok morphology. When exposed to it, the best among them get fascinated and keen, the worst are cast into despair and ennui. But hey, this way of dealing with words is quite common as languages go. Greek, Arabic, Russian, Turkish, Swahili, all of them work by affixing lots of grammar markers onto roots, sometimes changing the roots and the affixes in subtle ways. (Actually, English used to be like that, too, no more than a thousand years ago.)
What you're trying to do here is to subordinate god to laws of logic. But, from the theist point of view, everything is god's creation. The world, essentially, is a system of laws, and laws of logic are as much part of it as laws of physics. So, they, too, are god's creation, and he is as much at liberty to break them as he is to break physical laws.
Oh, he seems to understand it well enough. Iraq '03 and Libya '11 have been excellent examples of 21st Century Power. (I'm omitting Serbia '99, as it was, formally speaking, 20th century, but that example was very spectacular, too.)
Re. Russian media: I wonder, why their view (extremely biased, no doubt) could be of any concern to HN readers who are predominantly English-speaking and get much of their information from Internet sources?
I have to confess that my knowledge of the history of weapons is rudimentary, so I gladly accede to your point; my previous remark only concerned Soviet geopolitics as it stood in 1947 vs. 1920.
Minor correction: in 1947, when the AK was developed, World Wide Socialist Revolution, as you put it, was not on the agenda for quite some time. The idea of Soviet autarky (“establishing socialism in one particular country”) has been adopted by Stalin as far back as in 1924, the World Revolution slogan has been removed from the USSR Constitution when it was revised in 1936, and by 1943 Stalin has done away with Comintern, the organization which was conceived (by Lenin and Trotsky, originally) with the aim of propagating revolution to capitalist countries.
In 1947, USSR was indeed preparing for a possible World War III against the US and UK, but the general idea of this war, at least in the East, was that of a conflict of nations. That said, guerilla tactics and the involvement of irregular fighting forces had proved to be quite effective during WWII, and so, of course, the new weapon had to be designed with such uses in mind.
Btw., am I the only one to think it rather knavish that the word “materialism” which originally signified a school of thought emphasizing the physicality of the world and all things in it (think Democritus, Indian Lokayatics, de la Mettrie, Feuerbach) came to be used in the sense of “pursuit of property”?
Right, but it works the other way round, too: if your police thinks YOUR competitors (and this may mean, well, gangs) pay better, nothing would prevent it from turning over to protect their interests rather than yours.
You might find interesting Anna Wierzbicka's essay on her own experience of bilingualism (http://www.une.edu.au/bcss/linguistics/nsm/pdfs/double-life....). Wierzbicka is a Polish-Australian linguist specializing in semantic universals and their cross-cultural manifestations, so it's kind of an insider's account, but charmingly personal at that.
I pretty much know the context — I'm from Moscow, we had it no less tough here than you Varsovians. Still, I stand to it that the degradation of architectural aesthetics in the second half of the 20th century was not limited to the Eastern bloc.
Hmm. One funny thing is that VVD, one of the parties in question, is generally labeled as “conservative-liberal”. Your average American con would probably suffer a mental breakdown when trying to sort it out. (I'm conservative myself, by the way, whatever that might mean here in Russia.)
I share your opinion that post-WW2 architecture is nightmarish, but do you seriously think that it has to do with political pressure exerted on the architects and engineers by communist authorities? Compare Warsaw with, e. g., Rotterdam, another city which suffered wide-scale destruction in the war. Netherlands never had a communist government, Rotterdam consistently elected its mayors from the ranks of liberal parties (PvdA and VVP), and the engineers there were presumably Dutch rather than Soviet. The results, however, if we talk about the architecture of re-built city sections, were as dismal as in Warsaw. The same goes for other Western European cities extensively developed after WW2: Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Milan, Nantes, you name it.
Re. the crowd: it might be thin indeed—the most trustworthy estimates for the attendance were around 50k people—but for Moscow, this is extraordinary, as almost all protest demonstrations in the last fifteen years or so were of a narrowly partisan nature and had an attendance of several hundred, rarely two or three thousand, up to 6k just once.