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Saint martyr Trendafil of Starazagora (Starozagorski), little known Bulgarian saint martyred in XVI century

Monday, August 8th, 2022

In memory of the holy martyr Triandafil of Stara Zagora ( Starozagorski )

saint-Nikodimos-agiogarithes-sveti-Nikodim-Svetogorec

According to Venerable Nicodemus Agiorite, "Synaxaristis", Constantinople, 1845, and "Neon Martyrologion", Athens, 1961.

Holy Martyr Triandafil was very young Bulgarian, about 18 years old, a native of Stara Zagora, and he was a sailor.

svetogorskata-ikona-na-sv.Triandafil-ot-hrama-sv.Georgi-v-Zagora-saint-Trendafil

Suffered as a martyr for his Christian faith in Constantinople on August 8.

For the year of his death, Venerable Nicodemus Hagioritis in his work "Synaxarium" published in (Tsarigrad / Constantinople 1845) indicates year 1570 as a year of his martyrdom, and in his other work "Neon Martyrologion" (newly published in Athens in 1961) as a year of martyrdom 1680.

His memory was celebrated on his day (August 8) every year and the tradition continues today in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church as saint Trendafil is one of the constellation of Bulgarian saints.

Nicodemus Hagiorite reports that his life was written by the biographer Ioannis Cariophilis, but it seems that he did not have the original of the living at hand to include in his works.

Ikona-Sveti-Trendafil-ot-hrama-na-sveteca-v-Zagora.

As Bulgaria has been under a Spiritual and Physical slavery both the country and the Church has been under yoke, the country under the yoke of ottoman turks and the Church under the yoke of Greek slavery, only two verses are preserved in honor of the martyr (as the Greeks custom do), those two verses are given by Venerable Nicodemus in his "Synaxarion":

The name Trendafil literally translated is the flower Rosa multiflora.

Thus the glorification verses in the sinaxarion says:

Triandafil  appeared as the new trendafil (Rosa multiflora),
reddened by the flow of his blood.

So far, nothing else is known about this martyr of ours.

© Living of of the saints, translated into Bulgarian from the Church Slavonic text of Cheti-minei ("Chety-Minei") of St. Demetrius of Rostov.

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Posted in Christianity, Educational, Various | No Comments »

Saint protector of the Family and The receipt of Saint Petka Tarnovska by King Asen II story

Thursday, October 14th, 2021

Chapel-Trun-Sveta-Petka-Ikona-ot-16-17-vek-na-Sveta-Petka-v-skalniq-paraklis-na-Trun-231x300

In these hazy and confused times where the family as institution is failing and it is becoming more and more modern for people to live together without official Civil marriages count are steadily declining not to mention that the Church marriages no matter whether it is a Protestant, Roman Catholic is very rare thing. The attack against families is multi-vector one, it is descredited and being pranked on the TV in movies and serials, in the press. Many of the bad sides of marriage are exposed as well as the incapabilities of any traditional marriage to respond to the modern challenges of the world and hence many choose to not marry. But originally God created man to live in a family Adam and Eve were the first marital couple (even though they did not officially binded it on paper) in the municipality or the Church. Of course there situation was slightly different than today as they were the only couple in the beginning when God created man one would say. But even after that through the Ages Marriage and fidelity that stems out of it has been considered normal. However today normality is being pranked and abnormality is being enforced from all sides. 
As the topic of family does directly concern me as I have a family I thought therefore it is useful to mention again today about the feast of Saint Petka Epivatska (Epivates) famous as Saint Petka of Tarnovo who is considered in our Eastern Orthodox Christian countries as a protectress of family.

The reason why we venerate saint Petka here in Bulgaria is because here holy relics has stayed in Tarnovo for almost 2 Centuries and being in Bulgaria, they have worked many miracles, many of which were done over a family husbands and wifes who had their usual trials, like infertility, problems in family, quarrels etc.
For being famous for that miracles she has been invoked for centuries worldwide by believing Christians for help on their family trials.

Below is shortly the history of how St. Petka Epivatska, holy relics were transferred to Tarnovo and the multiple transfers of her relics until she finally choose to reside in Iash Romania.
 

+++

Posreshhane_na_moshhite_na_sv-petka_v_Trnovo-Bylgariq
The reception of Holy Relics of Saint Petka Paraskeva in medieval Capital of Bulgaia Tarnovo

In 1230 King Ivan Asen II the most powerful South-eastern European ruler demanded from the the Knights of the Crusaders to submit him her holy relics who are found still in Tracian city Kaliakratea ruled at that time by the Holy Latin Empire. King Ivan Asen II together with the patriach Joachim the first receives her holy relics with honor and settles her incorruptabilities into the newly creates Church in honour of herself St. Petka behind Tsarevets Fortress. Saint Petka became from that point considered as a protectress of the city, the throne and the country.
Her holy relics arrived from Kallikrateia in Tarnovo, the Capital of Second Bulgarian Empire in year 1230 AD, she has been thus called Paraskeva of Tarnovo and has been venerated as a protectress of the Tarnovo city the Bulgarian nation and the country. The attitude towards Saint Petka Tarnovska as a protectress of Bulgarian nation and contry is been clearly seen by the mention in the Bulgarian and International acts (documents) and manuscripts of that XII – XII century.

To learn more about Saint Petka  Parskeva Epivates of Thrakia feast day today 14 of October check my previous article here.

Let by the Holy Prayers of Saint Petka the Families be granted grace to endure the hardships of life! Saint Petka pray Christ for us!

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Posted in Christianity, Educational, Everyday Life | No Comments »

Finding top access IPs in Webserver or how to delay connects from Bots (Web Spiders) to your site to prevent connect Denial of Service

Friday, September 15th, 2017

analyze-log-files-most-visited-ips-and-find-and-stopwebsite-hammering-bot-spiders-neo-tux

If you're a sysadmin who has to deal with cracker attemps for DoS (Denial of Service) on single or multiple servers (clustered CDN or standalone) Apache Webservers, nomatter whether working for some web hosting company or just running your private run home brew web server its very useful thing to inspect Web Server log file (in Apache HTTPD case that's access.log).

Sometimes Web Server overloads and the follow up Danial of Service (DoS) affect is not caused by evil crackers (mistkenly often called hackers but by some data indexing Crawler Search Engine bots who are badly configured to aggressively crawl websites and hence causing high webserver loads flooding your servers with bad 404 or 400, 500 or other requests, just to give you an example of such obstructive bots.

1. Dealing with bad Search Indexer Bots (Spiders) with robots.txt

Just as I mentioned hackers word above I feel obliged to expose the badful lies the press and media spreading for years misconcepting in people's mind the word cracker (computer intruder) with a hacker, if you're one of those who mistakenly call security intruders hackers I recommend you read Dr. Richard Stallman's article On Hacking to get the proper understanding that hacker is an cheerful attitude of mind and spirit and a hacker could be anyone who has this kind of curious and playful mind out there. Very often hackers are computer professional, though many times they're skillful programmers, a hacker is tending to do things in a very undstandard and weird ways to make fun out of life but definitelely follow the rule of do no harm to the neighbor.

Well after the short lirical distraction above, let me continue;

Here is a short list of Search Index Crawler bots with very aggressive behaviour towards websites:

 

# mass download bots / mirroring utilities
1. webzip
2. webmirror
3. webcopy
4. netants
5. getright
6. wget
7. webcapture
8. libwww-perl
9. megaindex.ru
10. megaindex.com
11. Teleport / TeleportPro
12. Zeus
….

Note that some of the listed crawler bots are actually a mirroring clients tools (wget) etc., they're also included in the list of server hammering bots because often  websites are attempted to be mirrored by people who want to mirror content for the sake of good but perhaps these days more often mirror (duplicate) your content for the sake of stealing, this is called in Web language Content Stealing in SEO language.


I've found a very comprehensive list of Bad Bots to block on Mike's tech blog his website provided example of bad robots.txt file is mirrored as plain text file here

Below is the list of Bad Crawler Spiders taken from his site:

 

# robots.txt to prohibit bad internet search engine spiders to crawl your website
# Begin block Bad-Robots from robots.txt
User-agent: asterias
Disallow:/
User-agent: BackDoorBot/1.0
Disallow:/
User-agent: Black Hole
Disallow:/
User-agent: BlowFish/1.0
Disallow:/
User-agent: BotALot
Disallow:/
User-agent: BuiltBotTough
Disallow:/
User-agent: Bullseye/1.0
Disallow:/
User-agent: BunnySlippers
Disallow:/
User-agent: Cegbfeieh
Disallow:/
User-agent: CheeseBot
Disallow:/
User-agent: CherryPicker
Disallow:/
User-agent: CherryPickerElite/1.0
Disallow:/
User-agent: CherryPickerSE/1.0
Disallow:/
User-agent: CopyRightCheck
Disallow:/
User-agent: cosmos
Disallow:/
User-agent: Crescent
Disallow:/
User-agent: Crescent Internet ToolPak HTTP OLE Control v.1.0
Disallow:/
User-agent: DittoSpyder
Disallow:/
User-agent: EmailCollector
Disallow:/
User-agent: EmailSiphon
Disallow:/
User-agent: EmailWolf
Disallow:/
User-agent: EroCrawler
Disallow:/
User-agent: ExtractorPro
Disallow:/
User-agent: Foobot
Disallow:/
User-agent: Harvest/1.5
Disallow:/
User-agent: hloader
Disallow:/
User-agent: httplib
Disallow:/
User-agent: humanlinks
Disallow:/
User-agent: InfoNaviRobot
Disallow:/
User-agent: JennyBot
Disallow:/
User-agent: Kenjin Spider
Disallow:/
User-agent: Keyword Density/0.9
Disallow:/
User-agent: LexiBot
Disallow:/
User-agent: libWeb/clsHTTP
Disallow:/
User-agent: LinkextractorPro
Disallow:/
User-agent: LinkScan/8.1a Unix
Disallow:/
User-agent: LinkWalker
Disallow:/
User-agent: LNSpiderguy
Disallow:/
User-agent: lwp-trivial
Disallow:/
User-agent: lwp-trivial/1.34
Disallow:/
User-agent: Mata Hari
Disallow:/
User-agent: Microsoft URL Control – 5.01.4511
Disallow:/
User-agent: Microsoft URL Control – 6.00.8169
Disallow:/
User-agent: MIIxpc
Disallow:/
User-agent: MIIxpc/4.2
Disallow:/
User-agent: Mister PiX
Disallow:/
User-agent: moget
Disallow:/
User-agent: moget/2.1
Disallow:/
User-agent: mozilla/4
Disallow:/
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; BullsEye; Windows 95)
Disallow:/
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows 95)
Disallow:/
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows 98)
Disallow:/
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows NT)
Disallow:/
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows XP)
Disallow:/
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows 2000)
Disallow:/
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0; Windows ME)
Disallow:/
User-agent: mozilla/5
Disallow:/
User-agent: NetAnts
Disallow:/
User-agent: NICErsPRO
Disallow:/
User-agent: Offline Explorer
Disallow:/
User-agent: Openfind
Disallow:/
User-agent: Openfind data gathere
Disallow:/
User-agent: ProPowerBot/2.14
Disallow:/
User-agent: ProWebWalker
Disallow:/
User-agent: QueryN Metasearch
Disallow:/
User-agent: RepoMonkey
Disallow:/
User-agent: RepoMonkey Bait & Tackle/v1.01
Disallow:/
User-agent: RMA
Disallow:/
User-agent: SiteSnagger
Disallow:/
User-agent: SpankBot
Disallow:/
User-agent: spanner
Disallow:/
User-agent: suzuran
Disallow:/
User-agent: Szukacz/1.4
Disallow:/
User-agent: Teleport
Disallow:/
User-agent: TeleportPro
Disallow:/
User-agent: Telesoft
Disallow:/
User-agent: The Intraformant
Disallow:/
User-agent: TheNomad
Disallow:/
User-agent: TightTwatBot
Disallow:/
User-agent: Titan
Disallow:/
User-agent: toCrawl/UrlDispatcher
Disallow:/
User-agent: True_Robot
Disallow:/
User-agent: True_Robot/1.0
Disallow:/
User-agent: turingos
Disallow:/
User-agent: URLy Warning
Disallow:/
User-agent: VCI
Disallow:/
User-agent: VCI WebViewer VCI WebViewer Win32
Disallow:/
User-agent: Web Image Collector
Disallow:/
User-agent: WebAuto
Disallow:/
User-agent: WebBandit
Disallow:/
User-agent: WebBandit/3.50
Disallow:/
User-agent: WebCopier
Disallow:/
User-agent: WebEnhancer
Disallow:/
User-agent: WebmasterWorldForumBot
Disallow:/
User-agent: WebSauger
Disallow:/
User-agent: Website Quester
Disallow:/
User-agent: Webster Pro
Disallow:/
User-agent: WebStripper
Disallow:/
User-agent: WebZip
Disallow:/
User-agent: WebZip/4.0
Disallow:/
User-agent: Wget
Disallow:/
User-agent: Wget/1.5.3
Disallow:/
User-agent: Wget/1.6
Disallow:/
User-agent: WWW-Collector-E
Disallow:/
User-agent: Xenu’s
Disallow:/
User-agent: Xenu’s Link Sleuth 1.1c
Disallow:/
User-agent: Zeus
Disallow:/
User-agent: Zeus 32297 Webster Pro V2.9 Win32
Disallow:/
Crawl-delay: 20
# Begin Exclusion From Directories from robots.txt
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Veryimportant variable among the ones passed by above robots.txt is
 

Crawl-Delay: 20

 


You might want to tune that variable a Crawl-Delay of 20 instructs all IP connects from any Web Spiders that are respecting robots.txt variables to delay crawling with 20 seconds between each and every connect client request, that is really useful for the Webserver as less connects means less CPU and Memory usage and less degraded performance put by aggressive bots crawling your site like crazy, requesting resources 10 times per second or so …

As you can conclude by the naming of some of the bots having them disabled would prevent your domain/s clients from Email harvesting Spiders and other not desired activities.


 

2. Listing IP addresses Hits / How many connects per IPs used to determine problematic server overloading a huge number of IPs connects

After saying few words about SE bots and I think it it is fair to also  mention here a number of commands, that helps the sysadmin to inspect Apache's access.log files.
Inspecting the log files regularly is really useful as the number of malicious Spider Bots and the Cracker users tends to be raising with time, so having a good way to track the IPs that are stoning at your webserver and later prohibiting them softly to crawl either via robots.txt (not all of the Bots would respect that) or .htaccess file or as a last resort directly form firewall is really useful to know.
 

– Below command Generate a list of IPs showing how many times of the IPs connected the webserver (bear in mind that commands are designed log fields order as given by most GNU / Linux distribution + Apache default logging configuration;

 

webhosting-server:~# cd /var/log/apache2 webhosting-server:/var/log/apache2# cat access.log| awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c |sort -n


Below command provides statistics info based on whole access.log file records, sometimes you will need to have analyzed just a chunk of the webserver log, lets say last 12000 IP connects, here is how:
 

webhosting-server:~# cd /var/log/apache2 webhosting-server:/var/log/apache2# tail -n 12000 access.log| awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c |sort -n


You can combine above basic bash shell parser commands with the watch command to have a top like refresh statistics every few updated refreshing IP statistics of most active customers on your websites.

Here is an example:

 

webhosting-server:~# watch "cat access.log| awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c |sort -n";

 


Once you have the top connect IPs if you have a some IP connecting with lets say 8000-10000 thousand times in a really short interval of time 20-30 minues or so. Hence it is a good idea to investigate further where is this IP originating from and if it is some malicious Denial of Service, filter it out either in Firewall (with iptables rules) or ask your ISP or webhosting to do you a favour and drop all the incoming traffic from that IP.

Here is how to investigate a bit more about a server stoner IP;
Lets assume that you found IP: 176.9.50.244 to be having too many connects to your webserver:
 

webhosting-server:~# grep -i 176.9.50.244 /var/log/apache2/access.log|tail -n 1
176.9.50.244 – – [12/Sep/2017:07:42:13 +0300] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 371 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MegaIndex.ru/2.0; +http://megaindex.com/crawler)"

 

webhosting-server:~# host 176.9.50.244
244.50.9.176.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer static.244.50.9.176.clients.your-server.de.

 

webhosting-server:~# whois 176.9.50.244|less

 

The outout you will get would be something like:

% This is the RIPE Database query service.
% The objects are in RPSL format.
%
% The RIPE Database is subject to Terms and Conditions.
% See http://www.ripe.net/db/support/db-terms-conditions.pdf

% Note: this output has been filtered.
%       To receive output for a database update, use the "-B" flag.

% Information related to '176.9.50.224 – 176.9.50.255'

% Abuse contact for '176.9.50.224 – 176.9.50.255' is 'abuse@hetzner.de'

inetnum:        176.9.50.224 – 176.9.50.255
netname:        HETZNER-RZ15
descr:          Hetzner Online GmbH
descr:          Datacenter 15
country:        DE
admin-c:        HOAC1-RIPE
tech-c:         HOAC1-RIPE
status:         ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by:         HOS-GUN
mnt-lower:      HOS-GUN
mnt-routes:     HOS-GUN
created:        2012-03-12T09:45:54Z
last-modified:  2015-08-10T09:29:53Z
source:         RIPE

role:           Hetzner Online GmbH – Contact Role
address:        Hetzner Online GmbH
address:        Industriestrasse 25
address:        D-91710 Gunzenhausen
address:        Germany
phone:          +49 9831 505-0
fax-no:         +49 9831 505-3
abuse-mailbox:  abuse@hetzner.de
remarks:        *************************************************
remarks:        * For spam/abuse/security issues please contact *
remarks:        * abuse@hetzner.de, not this address. *
remarks:        * The contents of your abuse email will be *
remarks:        * forwarded directly on to our client for *
….


3. Generate list of directories and files that are most called by clients
 

webhosting-server:~# cd /var/log/apache2; webhosting-server:/var/log/apache2# awk '{print $7}' access.log|cut -d? -f1|sort|uniq -c|sort -nk1|tail -n10

( take in consideration that this info is provided only on current records from /var/log/apache2/ and is short term for long term statistics you have to merge all existing gzipped /var/log/apache2/access.log.*.gz )

To merge all the old gzipped files into one single file and later use above shown command to analyize run:

 

cd /var/log/apache2/
cp -rpf *access.log*.gz apache-gzipped/
cd apache-gzipped
for i in $(ls -1 *access*.log.*.gz); do gzip -d $i; done
rm -f *.log.gz;
for i in $(ls -1 *|grep -v access_log_complete); do cat $i >> access_log_complete; done


Though the accent of above article is Apache Webserver log analyzing, the given command examples can easily be recrafted to work properly on other Web Servers LigHTTPD, Nginx etc.

Above commands are about to put a higher load to your server during execution, so on busy servers it is a better idea, to first go and synchronize the access.log files to another less loaded servers in most small and midsized companies this is being done by a periodic synchronization of the logs to the log server used usually only to store log various files and later used to do various analysis our run analyse software such as Awstats, Webalizer, Piwik, Go Access etc.

Worthy to mention one great text console must have Apache tool that should be mentioned to analyze in real time for the lazy ones to type so much is Apache-top but those script will be not installed on most webhosting servers and VPS-es, so if you don't happen to own a self-hosted dedicated server / have webhosting company etc. – (have root admin access on server), but have an ordinary server account you can use above commands to get an overall picture of abusive webserver IPs.

logstalgia-visual-loganalyzer-in-reali-time-windows-linux-mac
 

If you have a Linux with a desktop GUI environment and have somehow mounted remotely the weblog server partition another really awesome way to visualize in real time the connect requests to  web server Apache / Nginx etc. is with Logstalgia

Well that's all folks, I hope that article learned you something new. Enjoy

Thanks for article neo-tux picture to segarkshtri.com.np)

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Posted in Curious Facts, Performance Tuning, System Administration, Various, Web and CMS | No Comments »

Trip to Shipka Peak,Sopot and 3rd of March Liberation of Bulgaria from Turkish Slavery 1878

Sunday, March 6th, 2016

Shipka_memorial_stone-of-Russian-Turkish-war-and-liberation-of-Bulgaria

Its 3rd of March for one more year, (Bulgaria Independence Day), the Liberation of Bulgaria from Turkish Slavery.
Eternal Glory be to all Bulgarians, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Romanian, Finish, Serbian and Moldovans and All Russian army Soldiers (Eastern Orthodox Christians) who fall fighting for the liberty of  my homeland Bulgaria!

3rd of March is Biggest and perhaps brightest among all the feasts of new history of Bulgaria because on 3-rd of March 1878 San Stefano Treaty (peace contract) between Russian Empire and Ottoman Empire.
My homeland Bulgaria was enslaved under the yoke of Turkish Empire from 1393 (when it fall under Ottoman Slavery) to 1878 received independence and Bulgaria as a country was rebuild for 3rd time (The 3rd Bulgarian Kingdom) arised.

San Stefano's Treaty The treaty created the Principality of Bulgaria with a territory including current territory of Bulgaria plus the Macedonia region (nowadays country of Macedonia) which has historically been most of the time part of Bulgarian Empire and Bulgarian country which at  the time of signing the treaty was mainly populated with Bulgarians. Later the Berlin contract revisioned San-Stefano Treaty because the countries of power at the day didn't wanted such a big country at the heart of Europe.

3rd of March has a very special way of  celebration especially at the places where there was battles between the side of Russian Empire (Ukrainians, Moldovans, Belarusians, Finnish) with the help of  few hundred thousands of Bulgarians, Romanian, Serbians has fought and defeated heroically the Turkish Army – which at the time was better equipped and more numerous than the Russian / Bulgarian and other ally soldiers, but as the saying goes The Power is not in the Multitude but in God alone, so the almost 494 397 soldiers army of Turkish Empire was defeated by just collectively 312  thousands of Russian, Bulgarians and other Christian allies.
This year here in Bulgaria we celebrate 138 years since liberation of Bulgaria from Turkish Slavery, so for one more year, we enjoy freedom from the darkness of economic and religious Turkish slavery.

In the war most of the soldiers that took participation had been Eastern Orthodox Christians so it could be said the war was almost a war of Faiths – On one side All Eastern Orthodox believers and on other Muslims.
The Turkish-Russian war (1877-1878) is hence absolutely epochal and becomes a good history lesson to look back to especially with the latest exarcebation of relations between Russia and Turkey.

The war had been disadvantageous at a certain time and there was a high chances that the Eastern Orthodox armies could have been defeated if it wasn't the heroic win of the Battle for Shipka Peak where about 35000 well equipped Turkish soldiers were defeated by just 5500 mostly Bulgarians and some  Russians.

Shipka-Ottoman-Turkish-fighting-with-Bulgarian-and-Russian-armies-on-Shipka

The Bulgarian and Russian armies has been fortified themselves and has severely fought for 3 days while on Shipka peak with some old fashined battle guns and some old riffles (many of which self produced) and insufficiency of ammos.
The Bulgarians didn't have any food so kept hungry for 3 days while being under a siege of the Ottoman, when they run out of Ammos, the only way to fight was to catch stones and throw over the enemy, when the stones were over, they started picking up the dead bodies of other mates and through over Turkish enemy.

The Bulgarian poet, publicist and Romanist Ivan Vazov has written a glorious poem being inspired by the heroism called "Epic of the Forgotten / Opylchencite na Shipka"
which occured in July / August and September 1877.

Shipka_Bulgarian_turkish-slavery-liberation_memorial_stone
Some years ago I had the chance to visit the Shipka  Monastery and the Majestic Russian Church nearby Shipka  but not until this year I haven't been on the Shipka peak itself nearby the battles where a majestic central majestic monument was build as a memorial stone and few other little memorial stones were build by the Russian Tsarist Army.

Memorial_stone-Shipka-Alexander_II_emperor-of-Russia

Memorial Russian Stone build in honour of the fallen Russian, Moldovian, Belarusian and Ukrainian for the Liberty of the Brotherly slavonic nation.

The stone depicts the Byzantine Empire Eagle (coat of arms) adopted by Russian Empire after fall of Byzantium and a memorial note in honor of Russian Emperor Tsardom Alexander (Nikolaevich) II.

This year by God's grace I had a chance to visit also the central monument stone exactly on 3rd of March as a friend of mine Pavel with his wife Ivanka had already planned a Trip to Shipka for the feast and they didn't objected to join them and visit Shipka Peak.
The monument of Shipka started on 1922 and completed in 1930, the monument was first officially opened in 1934 on top of the entrance of Shipka monument is an enormous bronze Lion (which is a Symbol of Bulgaria and also a symbol of Juda the tribe from which the Saviour God-Man Jesus Christ descended by flesh bloodline. The 3 writtings on the monumentum Shipka, Stara Zagora, Sheinovo are written to commemorate the great battles for liberation that occured on that 3 places.  Traditionally each year since 1934, there is our Eastern Orthodox prayer (Moleben) for the fallen in the fights and great feasts gatherings with Bulgarian and other country officials and a lot of people from VMRO (a nationalist organization), Voini na Tangra (Tangra Warriors) and many mostly nationalists and patriots. It is curious fact that Putin visited Shipka on 3rd of March 2003.
 

We travelled from Sofia to Shipka quite early in the morning 5:45 morning in order to escape the traffic jams and drived to there about 250 km with a short break on an oil station.
Being there nearby the village we had to wait on a long queue with cars of other people going for the Shipka feast and after some 50 mins of jam, we finally parked because it was already impossible to continue because of the multitude of parked cars all around the road.
From there we had to walk about 8 kilometers climb up the mountain as Shipka peak is about 1326 metres high.
Normal way was in a asphalt car road, but as there was many cars going back and forth and the air there was quite dirty after about 2 km we catched alternative wild route through some mountain paths.

God had been good to us these day as even though it is still the end of Winter in Bulgaria and usually March is a cold month the day was Sunny and Warm and there was no rain at all, this was a big grace to us and all of the tens of thousands of people all around …

Being there we entered the monumentum which happens to also be a 4 staged museum with some beautiful monuments inside.

Shipka-Marble-Sarcophagus-with-bones-leftovers-of-Shipka-Heroes-thanks-to-which-Bulgaria-is-free

Sacrophagus with Bone Remains of Soldiers fallen for the Victory of Bulgarian-Russian Brotherly armies on Shipka

Then we had a walk back the road fallowing the 892 steps down from the monumentum to the asphalt road leading back to Shipka village.

Shipka_890-steps-down-the-peak-liberation-monumentum

Going down the stairs from Shipka there are plenty of Souvenirs being sold some Fast Food vans selling coffee, beer sausages and burgers so we took Karnache-ta with Bread (which is a kind of traditional famous Bulgarian hunter sausage) 🙂

Having a kind of dinner we travelled back and went to see the Majestic Russian Church built from 1882 and sanctified in 1902. The Church Crypt (containing also bones of the dead soldiers who left their bones for our freedom), the Church was build with donations from Russians and contains at the moment also a lot of Holy Relics of Eastern Orthodox saints and thus is a great destination for pilgrimage.

memorial-Russian-Church-of-soldiers-fallen-for-liberation-of-Bulgaria

We wanted to sleep in a hotel or a guest house in Shipka but because of the feast everything was already occupied so we travelled to nearby famous Bulgarian revolutionary city Sopot (which is famous for being a very central for the Bulgarian liberation movement of Vasil Levsky) and most importantly the birth place of the patriarch of Bulgarian literature and probably the best poetries, romanist and publicist of Bulgaria of all times Ivan Vazov.

We had called a gues house phone and found a accomodation place to stay for the night in one of the many Guest houses in Sopot and then we our dinner in some local pub called CHICHOVCI (Uncles), nearby Sopot center church which is in famous of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.
Here is time to say that perhaps the fact everything went smoothly with finding an accomodation so easily in so late time and having such a nice dinner nearby the Church was not a coincidence, because earlier on our road back from Shipka, my wife Svetlana was teaching Pavel the Church Troparion of Saint Peter and Paul, which is in honour of st. Paul the protector saint of Pavel.

The guest house accomodation (we got the number to seek for rooms) from a Ads in front of restaurant pub of CHICHOVCI in Sopot turned to be also quite cheap 12 lv (6 eur) per person. So 2 person room costed only 12 euro. We were accomodated straigh in the beatiful crest of the mountain nearby a pine forest.
This night I slept quite peaceful, probably because the air in a small town as Sopot is crystal clear as it is in most mountain parts of our heavinly country Bulgaria.

In the morning we had a quick meal and went for a coffee and tea as we have the custom to do here in Bulgaria mornings on free days in a small but cozy coffee place.

saint_Peter-and-Paul-Church-Sopot

From then on we took some food for a lunch Duners from nearby and went to see the St. Paul, St. Peter church.
The Church is from y. 1840 and is in its authentic form and had plenty of old 100+ years Eastern Orthodox icons and the Christ Grace inside is so heavy. The central icon of the Church in honour of Saint Paul and Peter is considered miraculous and has an all time unexplainable heavy scent.

saint-Peter-and-Paul-church-inside-interior-Sopot

Our next destination was the Museum birth house of Ivan Vazov author of the most famous Bulgarian novel after liberation "Pod Igoto / Under the Yoke", which illustrates very precisely the way of life of common Bulgarian before and throughout the efforts to organize inside bulgaria, liberation war and struggles of Bulgarian ordinary people because of the inhuman Ottoman Turkish enslavers.

Sopot-Ivan-Vazov-monument

As you see behind the monument in remembrance of Vazov, Sopot's mountains and nature just like Shipka's is amazingly beatiful.

Ivan-Vazov-birth-house-the-most-famous-Bulgarian-novelist

Vazov's house is a great place for anyone who wants to go back in time with 130 years back in time and see the way rich Bulgarians housed used to look like, what were people working, what was the common interior of a Bulgarian house for that time as well as many specifics about the glorious (intellectuals) family of Vazov, two of his brothers (Georgi Vazov and Vladimir Vazov), studied in Russian Empire and were succesful and famous Generals in Bulgarian army, where Boris Vazov was famous politician.
Nearby Sopot, there is a special lift for paraglinding and is a famous destination for paragliding very near I heard there is monastery Sveti Spas (Holy Saviour).

Unfortunately this time the time was short and we had to go back so we couldn't visit the monastery, but I'm determined to go there in Sopot / Shipka and nearby hopefully soon in some of coming next holidays – if God bless so.

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Papusza – Polish movie (2013) about the life of the gipsys and first gipsy poet

Tuesday, November 4th, 2014

Papusza-A-movie-about-the-life-of-the-gipsys
Gipsys (Romani-people) as a communities all around mostly Europe has always raised interest during the last few centuries however little is known on their stereotype of living. Gipsys are famous for their illiteracy, for their cheerful temper, wild character and nomadic life-style as well as strong closed community. Gipsys are famous for that they don't have their own writting (even though they have a number of gipsy languages) and because of them Romani, doesn't keep any record of their history and any history or lifestyle of them is only to be found by non-gipsies. Gipsies are famous for being able to steal for their inclination to telling fantastic stories, be involved with fortune-telling, exaggerating facts or telling lies about their private life, they're famous as good virtuosos musicians and good artists. Most of Gipsys are Christian, Muslim or Atheists. The high-level of illiteracy they have makes anyone educated among them to be considered a success in life.

The interesting way of living of Gipsys has triggered many people to create movies, trying to picture Gipsys life-style like Emil Kosturica's Time of the Gipsys.

Yesteday I was invited by Andrea (an ipo-diakonus) in Saint George Dyrvenica Church in the Polish Culture center here in Sofia to see another movie dedicated to Papusza (Bronisława Wajs) – (1908-1987), a famous gipsy who is practically the first (Polish Gipsy Romani) classic poet and singer. The word Papusza in Gipsy language means 'A Doll' – a name given to the future poetess by her mother.
The movie is a great to saw for anyone willing to know more about the history and culture of gipsys in a synthesized form. My interest into Gipsys is because in Bulgaria officially we have about 350 000 Gipsys and I've encounted many gipsys in my life. During my studies in Netherlands, I had the chance to spend quite a lot of time, being in close relations with Bulgarian gipsy family and I was fascinated on how good hearted and primitive truthfulness of gipsys.

Now back to the movie The fact that a gipsy woman could write a beatiful inspired poems and sing so beatiful and most importantly read was almost scandalous! for the post age of World War II and 1960-80s.
Papusza movie is mostly interesting to anyone interested in culturology and antropology as it depicts the Gipsys common lifestyle and for those who already encountered gipsys in their life gives another understanding on why gipsys are who they're and why they choose to live the nomad, poor, uneducated, often careless but joyful and passionable life.

The movie start showing Papusza's mother while still pregnant with the future poetes. In the 1900s when the story goes Roma (Rom meaning man), just like jewish were quite a closed community moving all through the country of Poland or any other country residing using a horse-drawn caravans (tabors) as a moving houses.
Consorting with non-romas (Gadjo's – meaning like the Jewish Goa distinguishment for non jewish) for any reason different than trade was considered unclean. 
However the young poetes had the non-gipsy Wajs surname because according to legend her family used to be touring the great courts of Europe with their harps entertaining kings and aristocrats.

cyganie-historia-i-kultura-2012-08-20-tabor-cyganski-fot-z-dorozynski-caravan-with-gipsys-history-of-gipsy-culture

From her birth Papusza was known to be different. A spirit predicted that she would either bring great honor or dishonor to gipsys.
According to the movie she did both. The young Papusza defies her family's wishes and learns to read and write at time,
where almost none gipsy was literate. She is presented stealing a chicken and preseting it to a Jewish store-keeper lady in return for lessons in learning.
Even though her family is strongly again her education (beats her burns her books) she is strunggling to read secretly which later
is shown to have brought supposedly "a curse" on her people.

Papusza meets the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski in 1949 at a time after being forcefully married to her step-uncle Dionizy Wajs for more than 25 years.
The Gadjo (Ficowski) travels with Wajs caravan for about 2 years as he aims to learn the Romani (Gipsy) language and the gipsy was of life.
He is struck by the beatifulness of Papusza's songs and liking them encourages to continue writting poems.

Papusza-with-gadjo-kissing-non-gipsy

Later Ficowski returns to Warsaw in 1951 and translates from Gipsy Papusza's verses which broughts Gipsy to a mindset that Papusza reveals their secrets. Later the scandal progresses as Ficowski publishes a monograph book "Polish Gypsies" – a book about the beliefs and moral code of the Roma Gipsy people. Being grieved Papusza's clan takes decision to cast her out.

The movie is amazingly giving "a feel" on the fascinating and simple Gipsy nomad lifestyle during the first and second World War in which they were chased marked and killed by Hitler's Germany just like the Jews. The bitter experience later led to Papusza's creating one of her most famous songs. 

papusza_the-first-gipsy-poetrist-with-a-cigar

The movie is quite intersting from jumping from time to different stages of Papusza's life not in a specific order but often showing facts backwards etc.
After the end of the war in Poland Communist authorities enforce laws to make Gipsys settle, tryting to ensure them work and job and try to "program" and make part of communist society gipsy kids by using Kindergarden. Romani's a are shown to have problems with authorities and their desperate discontent to go against the country program for settlement of Gipsys, they cannot any more hire the randomly old houses to survive the winter and while unable to survive the harsh Polish winter, they finally settle in attempt to become part of society.

papusza-with-her-uncle-and-husband-krzyszotof-ptak

However in the newly built communistic society, they fail to fit well as always considered a second class people, they mourn for their old nomadic vagrant way of people and they fail to integrate to society (pretty much like today). Papusza's spent rest of her life in misery being rejected by both her native Gipsy community for betraying some of gipsys secrets and same time unaccepted by Polish people that continue to consider gipsys inferior. 
 

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Bulgarian misery net sponsor of European welfare – Statistics on European Union country installments

Tuesday, June 10th, 2014

european-union-fed-by-people-misery-bulgarian-misery-sponsor-of-european-welfare

Budget of European Union for 2011 is 142 billion Euro. Main source of budget income are installments from country members. Installments paid to EU consist about 1 of countries GDP – and approximately this is the amount of money paid  per EU country member.

For Bulgaria installment is about 426 million euro. The bigger GDP is the bigger the amount of money the respective country pains to the overall European Union budget. Even though payments of member countries is only 1% of GDP, this is the source for about 70% of income of EU.

Other source of money for European Union community comes from VAT taxes, and countries customs taxes (over import / export goods) collected on external border of EU community. In national budgets. Member countries give out 75% of their quotes over the custom incomes, collected in external borders of EU. In national counry budget only 25% of money made from customs control imports and imports influx. In Bulgaria's case we can be talk about the import crossing borders of Macedonia, Serbia and Turkey. Import from VAT taxes in 2011 are 3 370 billion leva and from customs 131 million leva. What percantage of this money went to European Union knows only experts.
For last year the Brussels money for Bulgaria are only 1.33 billion Euro (just to compare Poland received 16 736 billion euro). What is even more sad is that money coming from European union for so called funds influx into the pockets of well known oligarchs.

As it looks even though the glorifications with which Bulgarian government gave to the acquisition of this 1.33 billions eur-obrussel gifts during last year our coutnry still remains net sponsor of European budget. Here are not included the country econonic losses of the membership in EU, for example the closure of reactors of our Nuclear Power Plant in Kozloduy. In mean time about 1% of budget of EU community comes from installments from EU employees, unspent money from EU country members as well as receipts from fines from firms and companies for breachment of laws for protectition of competition and normative acts.
Primary supplier in European Union budget is Germany.
 

  • In 2011, Germany paid to EU 27 954 billion euro. This is about 19.7 of all the Union incomes.
  • Second to Germany by paid country member fee to EU is France with 23.273 billion euros, about 16.4% of all EU income.
  • Third is Italy with 18 447 billion euros or 13% of all EU budget.

As prior mentioned in 2011 direct installment of Bulgaria is 0.426 billion euro (without VAT quotes and incomes from taxation). Less installments paid Esthonia, Lithuania, Malta, Cyprus, Luxemburg (!!!) and Slovenia. Even though all this countries has less teritoriy and less population all this countries are much richer and has a higher GDP per capita!
 

  • Hungary (10 million people)'s installment is 1.135 billions and Romania's installment (Romania – 21.7 million people) was 1.419 billion euro.

Finally – lets take a look of EU country installments per capita of some of member countries.

  • Last year the avarage european give for Brussels burocracy 0.78 euro a day!

Question is how it is possible for everyone to pay 0.78 euro for European Adminsitration? – if there is high unemployment in Bulgaria and a lot of people doesn't receive even 0.78 a day?

European Union returned money in terms of funds does not create fabrics or industry and therefore doesn't create employment – doesn't reduce unemployment ?


Does really Bulgaria and we Bulgarians advantage of the European Union?

Avarage Bulgarian paid 0.16 euro per day – the lowest individual installment in union. 
 

  • average Latvian, Romanian and Lithuanian,  paid (0.17, 0, 18, 0.24 euro cents a day).

     

     

    The most paid citizens of the excessively rich principality

  • Luxemburg – 1.52 euro a day per person, followed by Danes, Belgians, Swedes, Dutch, Irish, French and Austrians (ranging from 1.47 euro to 0.98 euro).

As some of European Union citizens might not known,few million of Euro of this money is spend on a move of European deputies from Brussels to Strasburg every month (money given for travel costs of EU deputies and physical move of resources from Brussels to Strasburg). The exact sum spend per year for this unmeaningful move (in order to fulfil European community old legislation varies from 150 to 200 million a year!)

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Why Russophobes hates Putin – How situation changed in Russia during Vladimir Putin presidency

Thursday, April 3rd, 2014

why-Russophobes-hates-putin-how-situation-changed-in-Russia-during-putin-reign

POSITIVE RESULTS  FOR RUSSIA DURING REIGN OF VLADIMIR PUTIN

  • For last 12 years of government Putin increated Russia's budget 22 times.
  • Increated warfare spendings 30 times.
  • Increated GDP 12 times (by GDP Russia moved from 36th to 6th place in the World).
  • Increated Russian golden reserves 48 times.
  • Returned back 256 oil, petrol and other natural resources sources / mine-yards (under non-Russian government curretnly are only 3 of
  • Russia's source for natural resources.
  • Nationalized 65% of oil industry and 95% of gas industry.
  • For a 5th consequential year 2nd / 3rd place in export of grain (just for a comparison USA is currently ranked 4th largest weed exporter). The avarage sallary of national institution employed increased 18.5 times.
  • Avarage pension increased 14 times.
  • Reduce of population decreased from 1.5 million per year in year 1999 to 21 000 in 2011, i.e. 71 times.
  • Prohibited deputies in Government to have bank accounts in foreign banks.Prevented American attack against Syria.
  • Put an end to war in Chechnya.


From January y. 2000 to present times Russian ruble rate changed from 28 Rubles per dollar to 29 Rubles per dollar – i.e. severe inflation in Russia ended.Present day Russia is a normal European country not that poor country where approimate pension was 20 dollars and where masters was the financial pyramids and the International Monatery Fund

In 1992 Eltsin cancelled completely export duty of oil products.
In 23 January E. Primakov government forced again oil taxes.
In export price of 9.5 dollars per barrel custom taxes were 2.5 euro per tone and in price 12,5 dollars per barrel 5 euro / tone.Such a minor increase in taxes produced 14 billion rubles in already empty Russian budget.

In August 1999 Eltsin assigned Putin for prime minister.
In just a month later the export taxes Putin increased duty taxes to 7.5 euro/tone and in 8 december to 15 euro/tone. Till then incomes from oil taxes has been steadily increasing and nowadays exporters calculate in national budget half of incomes origin from oil prices and export taxes.
From January to November 2007 Russian customs influxed in national budget 2.57 trillion Rubles.
Oil export takes has drastically raised incomes of citizens.This had major impact on construction business.All Russia nowadays is in reality enormous "construction yard", to illustrate from January to September 2007 375 009 homes were built occupying 34 million square meters.
Cement factories cannot satisfy local market requirements and Russia is forced to import cement from China.
Increased incomes of population led to increase in estates search, this increased apartment prices and as a consequence increased incomes from building activies.
Result is in consutriction business are invested enormous amounts of capital and a real construction boom is observed.
Another consequence of increased income was increase in demand for automobiles. Just for 2006 the quantity of demanded automobiles in Russia increased with 45% and reached 32 billion dollars with a count of sold new cars numbering 2 million. By indicator of sold new cars Russia orders on 5th place after in Europe taking place right after Germany, Great Britain, Italy and France.

Currently are being build a couple of new automobile plants, and existing ones increase production volume.
All this is consequence of increase in demand and therefore from increase in citizens income.
rn>For 10 years budets expenditure for social politics (pensions and social help) increased with 30%.

Before Putin pensions were under existence-minimum with appr. 25% and in 90th pensions were not paid at all.
Now pensions are 50% above existence-minimum and is constantly increasing.
In 2000 approximate sallary in Russia was 2223 Rubles (appr. 80 dollars).
Now approximate sallary in Russia 19174 rubles (apprx. 660 dollars).
Purchase of domestic goods for 10 years increased 10 times. Number of own automobilse increased 3 times.
Putin nationalized YUKOS, without 'making nervous' emering Russian busness in a market manner – with bankruptcy and auction. All this happened lawful, following laws adopted by democratic parliament.
The president doesn't have the right to use other  means. Formal occasion for arest of Hodorkovski were taxation frauds of YUKOS. In such machinations are involved practically all large private companies and this is the reason why nobody believes that excuse. It is unbelievable. However Putin simply defended Russia's interests.

 

 

Putin_russia_speech_and-the-russian-flag-a-primer-for-honest-politic


The proof for that is transmission of actives of YUKOS to national corporation "Rosneft". It would have been more righteous if this actives were just confiscated … but there are laws and Putin had just stick to them. After all the President can't go out of framework of his jurisdiction.
It can be just added that after Khodorkovsky  was injailed, collectivity (incomes)of taxes of ex-actives of YUKOS increased 80 TIMES!
In y. 2004 Putin finally removed law "Agreement for Separation of Production  (Separation Agreement)". This law was annexed during Eltsin's regime, in order to benefit Oligarchs (Khodorkovsky, Gusinsky, Beresovsky etc.) in order to make possible Russian oil reserves to be possessed by Western (American and British) oil corporations.
By the power of this law Russian oil and natural fields went into international jurisdiction, and therefore the money from Russian oil doesn't entered budget of Russia but influxed in Western companies.
Money from oil drills went mainly into Dutch "Shell" for covering of corporation expenses. Only after something remained from that they sold it to Russia. In 2006 Putin declared following in that connection "And now we don't get anything from them and if they increase their profit we will not receive it even in 10 years from now."
In fact to this moment Russia didn't get any money from their own oil.
After the law was removed in 2004, revenues in budeg increased from 3 to 4 times.
After cancellation of contracts for oil fields "Sakhalin-1" and "Sakhalin-2" Russia's loans to American company calculated to 700 million dollars, for that time this was too much. The whole Anglo-Saxon world pricked against Putin because of a simple reason: "UK planned to assure its oil reserves for years to come in expense of Russia – only Germany and France who didn't have a direct interest in that process kept neutral …
In 1992 – 1995 the head aparatus of Russia formed its view based on foreign advisors. All legislation from 1990's was hence written by them. In Russian country administration was working 10 000 foreign coaches.  George Soros was financing writting of student history books where the Battle for Stalingrad was mentioned in only 2 pages and about the meeting between Elbe and Soviet and American soldiers (Elbe Day) in 10 pages.

 

Russian_Army_meeting_American_Army-Elba-day


: In that mournful times on pupils notebook you can see portrainst of 4 American presidents of USA.
Until this very day there are left relics from that anti-Russian propaganda but hopefully with time Putin will throw away american propaganda from education system.
But why Putin cannot immediately dismiss all this hostile to Russia clerks? The reason is simple: Constitution of Russia written under dictation of Western coaches, does not allow quick changse into it.
Nowadays the President is just one of many clerks with resticted power. Yes truly president power is a bit bigger than other clerks, but country head can't influence everything. The president can't even define his ministers, even though by law this is part of his jurisdiction.

Overfulfilment of budet in times of Putin govern allowed craetion of country Stabilization fund. Nowdays is collected huge golden-currency reserve and practically Russia doesn't have external debt.

War in Kavkaz is over, separatists were destroyed. All famous terrorist leaders were liquidated physically.
Even Zelimkhan_Yandarbiyev was killed in Qatar, Basaev and Umarov were also destoyed. Putin promised "to drawn them if necessary even in their own toilet dish" and he fulfilled his promise. Of course, separatism is not completely destroyed, such conflicts cannot be quickly solved, but nowadays situation in Kakvaz is the best possible. If Chechnya's elite feels the power of Moscow and benefits of being a surrender – then separatism will fade away. This is exactly what happens. The attempts of western spy centrals to supply terrorists are still leading to separate terr. acts but this is the maximum – there will be no war anymore.
 
For 10 years Putin increased political influence of Russia in world and lifted its image. Today Russia follows its own interests, and not Western ones.
It is not coincidence that Putin was recognized as the most influential world politic of 2013. He prevented Russia's devastation led country out of catastrophe caused by Gorbachov and Eltsin. That's the rason why Western Medias abhor him and compare him with devil.
Everyone interested in political life in Russia seems, that the battle against corruption took unforeseen measures.
At least 2-3 times weekly on TV are shown arrests  of clergy and policeman and news inform about sentences against government employees.
Lets not forget Crimea, here is how it was given to Ukraine.

In 1992 on signature of Treaty of Belovesh for dissolution of USSR Ukrainian representative Leonid Kravchuk noticed that Boris Eltsin is "in play with Vodka" and is delaying signature, he urged him with words: –

"Borya if you like take Crimea, please just  sign the contract!".

Drunk Eltsin nobly waved hand:

"What for I need Crimea? Here it is your present!"

And signed and by one scratch he "killed" efforts of Prince Grigory Potemkin, Catherina the Great, heros of Sevastopol in 1856, heroes defenders of Sevastopol in 1941 …

Few days ago Putin removed consequences of this "joke with history" – and people of Crimea sung and danced on squares, returning to their motherland.
 

Here is Why Russophobes hates Putin!

 

 

Source Materials from http://rublogers.ru
Translated by: Georgi Georgiev
This translation is copyrighted and copying can only be done with explicit allowance of author Author or link to original translation
http://rublogers.ru/

 

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My independent view on Ukraine-Crimea Russia VS Western World crisis

Wednesday, March 19th, 2014

Crimea_New_member-of-Russia-Emblem
I've been following what is happening in Ukraine over the last 6 months and I see with pain this poor brotherly Slavonic country is being literally destroyed by Radicals. It is obvious that the Revolution in Ukraine looks very similar to Revolution in Egypt, the War in Syria and obviously doesn't happen by itself but was financed by foreign forces to serve someone's interests. I known that in Ukraine people live poor, but even after the change in power it is less likely that they will start living better.

In my view Ukraine's people got infected by European Union's external appearance for prosperity and freedom. Such an outlook is just on the surface and everyone who lives in EU knows that well. It is my understanding that the European Union is based on fairy tales for freedom, friendship of nations based on economy. EU sets itself on rules and regulations and vague words combined with economic factors. With the crisis appearing one after another in country members of EU (Greece, Slovenia, Cyprus, Spain etc.) it is obvious that the EU is artificial union and not working well. Many country who belong to EU for some years already have seen that and even some like England want out of the European Union. With this in mind it is fully unclear to me why Ukrainians want and think that membership in EU will solve there economic problems … on the contrary once they join the EU, they will have to fulfill thousands of rules and regulations which will destroy there local country economy and will make them put out all country money out of the country into the pockets of Western Nations. Same nation genocide scenario was executed in Bulgaria and give "good satisfactory fruits". By the rules and regulations on Bulgaria our local economy was destroyed making our contry market completely dependent on other Western country market for daily products and external Western business investments. The failure of Bulgaria as a concurent on EU market run the wheel of EU economy, opening a new space for new investments and trade. Same happened with Romania and most likely will happen also with EU's newest member Croatia very soon.

Ukraine is a brotherly nation to Russia and even historically this two nations share very similar faith. Of course the two nations differ but the similarities and even the language makes them brotherly nations. Ukraine was part of Russian Empire and is called Ukraine (from the word end part of Russia). Historically Ukrainian were known as "MaloRus", Russians were known as "Rus" and Belarusian as (White Rus).
Currently in Ukraine live 8,334,100 Ethical Russians (17% of Ukraine's population), the highest density of Russians is in Crimea with 58 % of Ethnic Russians.

Of course the economic crisis in Ukraine as every Crisis is not only a Crisis of material goods but a Crisis of spirituality. Big part of Ukrainian Church separated from Russian Orthodox Church and are not in canonical unity with rest of Orthodox Churches. Besides that the number of Uniats (Orthodox Christian who are under the rule of the Roman Pope) seem to be growing over the last years there. After the fall of USSR, the number of protestants and other Christian sects in Ukraine also has grown. The decay of Russian Orthodox Church diocese in Ukraine set a space for more and more religious spiritual divisions which affected the material country realm. Talking about religion it is worthy to mention a very curious and not much known fact is that current Prime Minister Oleksandr Turchynov (who took place of Viktor Yanukovych) is protestant pastor. The other key actor of the Ukrainian Revolution is Arseniy Yatsenyuk who is not even Urainian but Ethic Ukrainian Jew.

Concerning Crimea historically give birth to Kievan Rus (and so to say is like mother land of all Russians as we known them), from year 1783 to 1917 was a territory part of Russian Empire, then from 1922 to 1991 it was part of Soviet Union, from 1991 to 1998, Crimea was autonomous Republic. Crimea is well known from history where Russian Empire fought with French Empire in Crimean War (1853-1856). It is no strange why Russia wants Crimea so hard as they have historically fought for this land and over the last few centuries it was Russian teritory. It will be no strange either if Crimea becomes a reason for another war …

So Who is right Russia or the Western World (European Union / United States)?
For me from the facts it is more than clear that neither the Euroepan Union nor United States share a close history / language / culture with Crimea, neither ever this was their territory. Meaning Westerners doesn't have the right to escalate the situation by putting oil in the fire, but should better keep silent and let Ukraine Russia and Crimea solve their problem alone (in a peaceful way). But why Europeans and Americans try to intervene? Well simple economically European Union has more interest to have a new Member country membering ~ 45 millions and a nice tourist destination Crimea than to have a member with 3 million less, and US's influence on world by having a western oriented Ukraine will raise. This is the reason why they make so much noise and don't want to accept the referendum in Crimea for unification with Russia, because they have politic interests there.

Ukrainians was mislead to believe the fight for Ukraine is a nation heroism, where in reality what is happening in Ukraine is just serving biggest countries interests. The bad thing is what is happening there is a good reason for emerge of national war and we know from history such a small conflicts combined with a world economic crisis led to World War I and World War II. I don't say that such a war will emerge but I think Western World should be careful to not provoke a war in Europe through recognizing Crimea's people decision to become part of Russia.

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IQ world rank by country and which are the smartest nations

Friday, March 14th, 2014

IQ_world_rank_by_country_world_distribution_of_intelligence
In a home conversation with my wife who is Belarusian and comparison between Bulgarian and Belarusian nation, the interesting question arised – Which nation is Smarter Bulgarian or Belarusian?

This little conversation pushed me to intriguing question What is the IQ World rank if compared by country? Since a moment of my life I'm trying to constantly prove to myself I'm smart enough. For years my motivation was to increase my IQ. I had periods when studied hard history, philosophy and literature then I had periods to put all my efforts in music and mysticism then there was my fascination about IT and informatics and hacking, I had periods with profound interest in Biology and neourosciences, then of course psychology and social sciences and since last 10 years as I belived in God, I'm deeply interested in world religions and more particularly in Christniaty. All this is connected with my previous IQ (Intelligence Quotient) and my desire to develop my IQ. I'm quite aware that IQ statistics can never be 100% reliable as there is deviation (standard error) and its a very general way to find out about a person psychology. But anyways it is among the few methods to compare people's intelligence… I've done an IQ test in distant 2008 and I scored about 118 out of 180  – meaning my  IQ level is a little bit above average. The IQ conversation triggered my curiousity so I decided to check if my current IQ has changed over the last 6 years. Here is results from test I took March, 2013 on free-iqtest.net

IQ Test
IQtest just prooved, my IQ kept almost same, still a little bit above avarage.
Further on, I did investgation online to see if I can prove to my wife the thesis Bulgarians overall IQ is higher than Belarusian. I googled for IQ world rank by Country
Here is what I found ;

 

Nations Intelligence as sorted by Country

Rank
——–

Country
———————–

%
————-

1

Singapore

108

2

South Korea

106

3

Japan

105

4

Italy

102

5

Iceland

101

5

Mongolia

101

6

Switzerland

101

7

Austria

100

7

China

100

7

Luxembourg

100

7

Netherlands

100

7

Norway

100

7

United Kingdom

100

8

Belgium

99

8

Canada

99

8

Estonia

99

8

Finland

99

8

Germany

99

8

New Zealand

99

8

Poland

99

8

Sweden

99

9

Andorra

98

9

Australia

98

9

Czech Republic

98

9

Denmark

98

9

France

98

9

Hungary

98

9

Latvia

98

9

Spain

98

9

United States

98

10

Belarus

97

10

Malta

97

10

Russia

97

10

Ukraine

97

11

Moldova

96

11

Slovakia

96

11

Slovenia

96

11

Uruguay

96

12

Israel

95

12

Portugal

95

13

Armenia

94

13

Georgia

94

13

Kazakhstan

94

13

Romania

94

13

Vietnam

94

14

Argentina

93

14

Bulgaria

93

15

Greece

92

15

Ireland

92

15

Malaysia

92

16

Brunei

91

16

Cambodia

91

16

Cyprus

91

16

FYROM

91

16

Lithuania

91

16

Sierra Leone

91

16

Thailand

91

17

Albania

90

17

Bosnia and Herzegovina

90

17

Chile

90

17

Croatia

90

17

Kyrgyzstan

90

17

Turkey

90

18

Cook Islands

89

18

Costa Rica

89

18

Laos

89

18

Mauritius

89

18

Serbia

89

18

Suriname

89

19

Ecuador

88

19

Mexico

88

19

Samoa

88

20

Azerbaijan

87

20

Bolivia

87

20

Brazil

87

20

Guyana

87

20

Indonesia

87

20

Iraq

87

20

Myanmar (Burma)

87

20

Tajikistan

87

20

Turkmenistan

87

20

Uzbekistan

87

21

Kuwait

86

21

Philippines

86

21

Seychelles

86

21

Tonga

86

22

Cuba

85

22

Eritrea

85

22

Fiji

85

22

Kiribati

85

22

Peru

85

22

Trinidad and Tobago

85

22

Yemen

85

23

Afghanistan

84

23

Bahamas, The

84

23

Belize

84

23

Colombia

84

23

Iran

84

23

Jordan

84

23

Marshall Islands

84

23

Micronesia, Federated States of

84

23

Morocco

84

23

Nigeria

84

23

Pakistan

84

23

Panama

84

23

Paraguay

84

23

Saudi Arabia

84

23

Solomon Islands

84

23

Uganda

84

23

United Arab Emirates

84

23

Vanuatu

84

23

Venezuela

84

24

Algeria

83

24

Bahrain

83

24

Libya

83

24

Oman

83

24

Papua New Guinea

83

24

Syria

83

24

Tunisia

83

25

Bangladesh

82

25

Dominican Republic

82

25

India

82

25

Lebanon

82

25

Madagascar

82

25

Zimbabwe

82

26

Egypt

81

26

Honduras

81

26

Maldives

81

26

Nicaragua

81

27

Barbados

80

27

Bhutan

80

27

El Salvador

80

27

Kenya

80

28

Guatemala

79

28

Sri Lanka

79

28

Zambia

79

29

Congo, Democratic Republic of the

78

29

Nepal

78

29

Qatar

78

30

Comoros

77

30

South Africa

77

31

Cape Verde

76

31

Congo, Republic of the

76

31

Mauritania

76

31

Senegal

76

32

Mali

74

32

Namibia

74

33

Ghana

73

34

Tanzania

72

35

Central African Republic

71

35

Grenada

71

35

Jamaica

71

35

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

71

35

Sudan

71

36

Antigua and Barbuda

70

36

Benin

70

36

Botswana

70

36

Rwanda

70

36

Togo

70

37

Burundi

69

37

Cote d'Ivoire

69

37

Ethiopia

69

37

Malawi

69

37

Niger

69

38

Angola

68

38

Burkina Faso

68

38

Chad

68

38

Djibouti

68

38

Somalia

68

38

Swaziland

68

39

Dominica

67

39

Guinea

67

39

Guinea-Bissau

67

39

Haiti

67

39

Lesotho

67

39

Liberia

67

39

Saint Kitts and Nevis

67

39

Sao Tome and Principe

67

40

Gambia, The

66

41

Cameroon

64

41

Gabon

64

41

Mozambique

64

42

Saint Lucia

62

43

Equatorial Guinea

59

 

North Korea

N/A

 

– Countries are ranked highest to lowest national IQ score.

Above statistics are taken from a work carried out earlier this decade by Richard Lynn, a British psychologist, and Tatu Vanhanen, a Finnish political scientist. To extract statistics they analized  IQ studies from 113 countries.  

For my surprise it appeared Belarusian (ranking 10th in the world) have generally higher IQ than Bulgarians (ordering 14th). Anyways being 14th in world IQ Ranking is not bad at all as we still rank in the top 20 smartest nations.

IQ is a relative way to measure intelligence, so I don't believe these statistics are revelant but they give some very general idea about world IQs.

I learned there are some claims that in more developed economies people have higher IQs than less developed. If we take in consideration above statistics its obvious such claims are dubious as you can see there are countries in top 5 countries with highest IQ, and surely Mongolia is not to be ordered in countries with high economic development.

There are plenty of other interesting researches like "Does IQ relates to people Income?", Does Religious people score higher than atheists? According to research done in U.S. Atheists score 6 IQ points higher than Religious people. However most "religous" people IQ tested were from protestant origin so results are relative (I'm sure Orthodox Christian would score higher 🙂 ). The IQ nation world ranks fail in a way that, a social, economic and historical factors are not counted. According to Gallups research, the world poorest people tend to be the most religious, a fact supporting well the saying of all saints who say that for saintly life people who preferred deliberately to live as poor people.

 

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Posted in Curious Facts, Everyday Life, Various | 41 Comments »

Interview with Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko (The Independent)

Thursday, January 24th, 2013

Many people and most of the Western European countries blame Lukashenko to be dictator, to be stealing the freedom of Belarusians and as a bad and intolerant. It is my own understanding that though Lukashenko's leadership of Belarus might have it is bad sides he is not so bad. His thinking actually is much more Christian than most of important politics of the Western European Union. Belarus is still keeping some of their society models left from communism and even today. It is very interesting interview, unfortunately no english translations so, one has to understand a bunch of Russian to understand what they're speaking about. What is interesting to compare one representative of Slavonic world against one typical person who even though Russian by blood and genetics (the interviewing person Evgeni) is a cultural traitor. The interviewer for the newspaper "The Independent" is obviously dressed, looks and talks like most of western europeans, his questions like every journalist are mostly tricky. I really liked how Lukashenko understands Democracy, as being identified with justice on the first place. Lukashenko saying that today we have no democracy in western countries, because there is no righteousness in ruling and things in country is very right.
Belarusian economy managed to survive through the so called Perestroika. If my homeland Bulgaria had enough smart politicians to lead the country into proper re-structure of our economy to an open economy, Bulgaria would not have been in such a terrible economic state as it is today ….
 

Lukashenko interview Лукашенко – интервью "The Independent" и "BBC" _ телеве

 

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Posted in Curious Facts, Everyday Life, Freedom Endangered | No Comments »

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