MrX/145; i usually don’t take the bait because you’ve already taken it, usually so that you can offer it back. Soros is a prime example –clearly he has done incredibly good work for the anti-west, anti-Dollar, anti-pax-America, pro finlandized Europe–and the world! — boys at the Kremlin, yet you castigate unmercifully his few unimportant human-rights NGO forays obviously barely at the edge of Mr. Putin’s eagle-eyed periphery. This is the “please don’t throw me in the briar patch” bait, and Mr X, my friend, when you offer it you are taking it yourself in the very same moment. Granted, what you are trying to do, that is, be hortatory, didactic, and casual and friendly all at the same time, is a very tough order, and you do an excellent, entertaining, and engaging job of it –but, well, it may not be fully doable at all, by anyone.

Further, and again not to be unpleasant, but may i offer, to your recent theme of working conditions being so much better there than here, that the problem that the 13% flat tax and massive natural resources can’t overcome –for now anyway –is the autocracy, the reputation of the courts in disputes with the Party. Not just the known assassins being made member of the Duma and thus legally free to ignore extradition, but the state takeovers of Gazprom and the others with their by-no-means-proven-criminal owners and execs jailed it appears for life.

Western oil companies have been repeatedly shafted, thrown out of deals just when the value starts flowing, by a legal system which appears to be fixed in the Party’s favor at all times when the stakes are rich enough. Granted enough Obama and the USA will have descended to statist parity –but that hasn’t had time to fully happen yet.

That’s just scratching the surface. And i’m no anti-Russian –at all. What i’d love to see is peace on earth and goodwill toward all.