Ich bin nicht ein Juden!
Mr Berezovsky, 61, a former mathematician, turned to business during the Yeltsin years and made his fortune by capturing state assets at knockdown prices during Russia's rush towards privatisation.GuardianUK 13.Apr.07
Although he played a key role in ensuring Mr Putin's victory in the 2000 presidential elections, the two men fell out as the newly elected leader successfully wrested control of Russia back from the so-called oligarchy, the small group of tycoons who had come to dominate the country's economy.
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Ich bin nicht ein Mann!
"Theoretically is it possible," Professor Nayernia said. "The problem is whether the sperm cells are functional or not. I don't think there is an ethical barrier, so long as it's safe. We are in the process of applying for ethical approval. We are preparing now to apply to use the existing bone marrow stem cell bank here in Newcastle. We need permission from the patient who supplied the bone marrow, the ethics committee and the hospital itself."IndependentUk 13.Apr.07
[...]
he said there was no intention at this stage to produce female sperm that would be used to fertilise a human egg, a move that would require the approval of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.
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Ethical barriers that may or may not exist but when they do are only there if the authority, the designated official authority, says so. Because otherwise there's just the chaos of everyone's opinion. So all you have to do is find out if the authority says it's wrong or not.
That Dr. Nayernia may not have the vision necessary to recognize the incremental slide toward profane godhood he's in, because of the rewards and the limitless worlds of promise just over the horizon that beckon him onward, shouldn't be used to condemn him. What should be condemned is the thing that uses him to create itself. And we may as well start working toward an understanding of what that is.
The bizarre intolerance for sex that came down to us as institutionalized taboos never made much sense to me. Especially when held up to the serious and awful regard toward death those same institutions carried. But sex and death are Darwinian, aren't they? If you were immortal you wouldn't need sex anymore would you? Physically immortal, not spiritually. You'd still need the physical packaging to get you forward, through time, if you weren't really eternal, but were groping toward that in increments, using every means at your disposal, heedless of the consequences to anything and everyone else. So you'd hate sex and fear death, because sex means death, reproduction means replacement. We're stepping right toward that shining moment, or some thing we carry is, when the keys to physical immortality will replace the keys to spiritual immortality as grail and goal.
What that thing is after is permanence, kind of a biological apotheosis. Dr. Nayernia's doing his part. I guess I'm not.
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Berezovsky's little puff piece in the Guardian never touches on the source of his wealth. And it damn sure doesn't go into what the Russian people might be thinking about his talking stink on Putin, their president.
Berezovsky made his billions by manipulating the Russian economy, raping the gut-shot Russian economy, or gutting the raped and beaten Russian economy - however you're more comfortable phrasing that. As a by-product, and a tangent to this post, the glut of cute young blondes fellating tattooed faceless male bodies that was so much of the early internet experience for so many of us came right out of that. Abject poverty, striking suddenly, like lightning from a clear sky, and thousands of Russian kids were filtered through the gates of hell. And into the do-this-or-die dynamic of Russia's way-evil criminal enterprise or "mafia", though that's a dire insult to the only guys that have a poetic right to the name. Which way-evil criminal enterprise Berezovsky and his fellow oligarchs comported with, ran with, or ran, on their way to the top of capitalism's only metric of success.
Paul Klebnikov, whose picture that is, was murdered in Moscow in July 2004, the same month this article appeared, in Forbes, under his byline.
It had been published in Forbes Russia in May. It's a fairly innocuous story about the oligarchs and their billions, nothing like the direct accusations that almost appear in this story, from Forbes in 1996, in which Berezovsky's virtually fingered as the capo di capo of Russia's crime/business world. That one has no byline, though wikipedia has an entry that says it's by Lebnikov.In that article Berezovsky was linked to the murder of Vladislav Listiev, albeit loosely and indirectly. He sued, evidently got some legal satisfaction.
In 2000 Lebnikov wrote a book whose title can't have pleased our Boris much - Godfather of the Kremlin: The Decline of Russia in the Age of Gangster Capitalism.
wikipedia Lebnikov:
The trial began on January 10, 2006 in closed session because Russian authorities claim case-related documents contain information about secret surveillance methods used by law enforcement ... Soon the original judge, Mariya Komarova, fell ill, and on February 13, according to the Russian law, she was replaced by a different judge, Vladimir Usov. The trial had to be restarted from the very beginning, including the new jury selection process. The trial ended on May 5, 2006 with a jury verdict of "not guilty" for all the accused and they were released from custody in the courtroom.
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Michael Klebnikov, Paul's brother, said it was a remarkable coincidence that the same eight jurors also acquitted the same two men of the murder of Yan Sergunin, a former Russian deputy prime minister of Chechnya, with whom Klebnikov had been in contact; Sergunin was shot dead outside a Moscow restaurant just two weeks before Klebnikov's murder.
Robert Levinson was involved in an FBI investigation in Klebnikov's death. Levinson disappeared in Iran in April 2007.
[though it seems he's still alive]
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Project Klebnikov
