Russian police just raided a secret underground city beneath Moscow inhabited by hundreds of illegal immigrant workers employed making clothing at rows of sewing machines. The subterranean world, where the workers were allegedly kept by lock, had no natural light but did have a market, cafe, chicken coop, casino, and movie cinema. What a metaphor for our economic structure:
We were sorry to learn of the untimely death of Aleksei Balabanov, director of Cargo 200, one of Disinformation’s rare forays into foreign film distribution. His obituary from the New York Times in relevant part:
…In 16 films, Mr. Balabanov offered a world of hit men, shamelessly corrupt officials and corpses upon corpses in a cinematic pastiche reminiscent of the work of Quentin Tarantino in artistic achievement and exuberantly brash taste…
“The films of Aleksei Balabanov are a collective portrait of our country at its most dramatic time in history,” Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev wrote on Facebook after the director’s death.
Mr. Balabanov’s movies developed a robust cult following in Russia and won prizes there. They were shown abroad in art houses and at film festivals…
Mikhail Trofimenkov, a film critic for the Russian newspaper Kommersant, called Mr. Balabanov “the best Russian film director of the past two decades.”…
The title of his 2007 film, Cargo 200, was taken from the Soviet Army code for bodies of slain Soviet soldiers.
On June 30, 1908, something exploded over an isolated region of Siberia. Theories abound over what that something could have been, with explanations both prosaic (meteorite or comet) and preposterous (UFO crash, one of Tesla’s experiments gone wrong) offered over the years since that mysterious event. While I personally love the idea of a UFO crash, it turns out that scientists working with the Russian Academy of Science may have turned up the first solid proof that a meteorite may have been the actual culprit:
In the 1930s, an expedition to the region led by the Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik returned with a sample of melted glassy rock containing bubbles. Kulik considered this evidence of an impact event. But the sample was somehow lost and has never undergone modern analysis. As such, there is no current evidence of an impact in the form of meteorites.
That changes today with the extraordinary announcement by Andrei Zlobin from the Russian Academy of Sciences that he has found three rocks from the Tunguska region with the telltale characteristics of meteorites.
We know what kinds of rodents and lizards we are sending up into space, but the question is, what sort will return? Yahoo! News:
Geckos, mice and gerbils and other animals launched into orbit Friday to begin a month-long Russian experiment to study how space travel affects living creatures. The space mission, scientists assure, will return the animals to Earth alive.
A Russian-built Soyuz 2 rocket carried the Bion-M1 space capsule, with 45 mice, eight Mongolian gerbils, 15 geckos and numerous other species. They are expected to spend a month in orbit, flying 357 miles above Earth while scientists on the ground monitor the health of the capsule’s passengers.
While the project is run by Russia’s Federal Space Agency, an international team of scientists is overseeing the mission’s many experiments. Bion-M1 is Russia’s first mission dedicated to launching animals into space in 17 years. The last Bion mission carried rhesus monkeys, geckos and amphibians into orbit for 15 days in 1996.
For any MMA fans: what do you make of this? Does it detract from the sport, or add a new dimension with whole new skill sets?
… Read the rest
Why do a significant portion of serial killers seem to dabble in paranormal powers? Russia Today reports:
Moscow police have detained a psychic, who they suspect killed three photo models. All the victims, young ladies also allegedly engaged in prostitution, knew about the man’s ‘paranormal powers’ and are said to have visited him to cleanse their karma.
Forty-two-year old Georgy Martirosyan, was a well-known “karma cleanser” within a narrow circle of Moscow magicians and psychics, and is said to have called himself a “wizard”.
The young women are thought to have visited Martirosyan believing that he could clear their souls, as well as add to their wealth. Tempted with the victims’ savings, he is said to have killed and robbed three of his clients as well as the mother of one girl.
Was the meteor flash of two weeks ago a UFO, divine miracle, or weapons test? Take your pick. The Christian Science Monitor reports:
A survey published today by the fairly staid Moscow daily Noviye Izvestia found that barely half its readers believe the official report that the blast a week ago in the Ural Mountains was caused by a meteor.
According to the newspaper, the other half prefer to believe in an assortment of bizarre explanations, including that the blast was a secret U.S. weapon test, an off-course ballistic missile, a message from God, or a crashing alien spaceship.
Russian ultranationalist parliamentarian Vladimir Zhirinovsky, has suggested that anti-Russian hardliners in the United States staged a secret weapons test over Russia. And the trade union newspaper Trud made the cheery suggestion that the meteorite could be carrying deadly viruses from outer space, possibly the work of malevolent extraterrestrial forces.
Strange formations arise in Russia. Who Forted? writes:
Watchful Moscow residents with their eyes to the sky were given an interesting view on Christmas Eve, as a huge “celestial spiral” closely resembling a strand of DNA appeared over the city.
One of the strangest cloud formations ever is detailed in a handful of images snapped around a 20 mile stretch of the city. As you can imagine, this has stirred up some interesting conversation as to what could be the cause of such an event. As of now, sky-savvy internet sleuths believe the strange clouds were caused by contrails, or thin artificial cloud formations caused by the water exhaust emitted from aircraft.
As I understand it, many Russian drivers utilize dashboard cameras in their vehicles to provide documentation in the event of an accident. Like this one….
Global leaders’ ironically alluding to conspiracy theories is fast becoming a trend. Via the Moscow Times, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev forgets that the first rule of the vast alien-takeover coverup is that it never to be mentioned publicly:
Medvedev spoke about top-secret files on aliens that may have landed in Russia. In footage recorded Friday after a television interview, the former president joked that each Russian leader gets two folders with information about extraterrestrials that visited our planet and stayed here.
Unseen in the footage, he is heard telling a Ren-TV journalist that he could not tell “how many of them are among us because it may cause panic.” During his 2008-12 presidency, Medvedev showed a sense of humor slightly more subtle than that of his successor, Vladimir Putin.
