Wednesday 24th of April 2024
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seriously funny democratic evolution for a fishing village…...

A petition calling on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to commemorate American pornographic actor Billy Herrington with a monument in Odessa has passed 25,000 votes and must now be considered. Activists want Herrington’s likeness to replace that of Russian Empress Catherine the Great.

Launched in May, the petition passed the threshold of 25,000 votes this week. Describing Catherine II as a “controversial historical figure whose actions caused great damage to Ukrainian statehood and culture,” it calls on Zelensky to ensure that her statue is torn down and replaced with one of Herrington sitting “at the bar with a bottle of beer.”

The petition’s author wrote that this would make the statement that “Odessa is not a part of Russian culture but has its own culture and sense of humor,” and would send “a clear signal that Ukraine supports the LGBT community.” Furthermore, he wrote that a monument to Herrington would be “fun and funny”and would be worth it for “memes.”

Herrington filmed adult movies, most of them with other men, between 1990 and his death in a car accident in 2018. Famous in Japanese ‘Gachimuchi’ memes, Herrington’s name has already been put before Ukrainian politicians, when a similar petition in March called on local authorities in the city of Zaporozhye to rename Mayakovsky Square ‘Billy Herrington Square’.

The activist behind the petition – likely the same culprit responsible for the Odessa campaign – claimed that “generations of not only Americans, but also Ukrainians and Europeans grew up on his films,” and that the square would become “a powerful tourist magnet.”

Aside from generating laughs on Russian television, the petition went nowhere. 

The monument of Catherine II in Odessa caused controversy long before petitions called for its replacement with the likeness of an adult film star. Depicting the empress and four of her companions, the ‘Monument to the founders of Odessa’ was erected in 1900 by Yuri Meletevich Dmitrenko, but removed in 1920 by order of the Bolsheviks. Ukrainian authorities restored the statue in 2007, a move that was opposed by Ukrainian nationalists, among them then-president Viktor Yuschenko. 

A fishing village during centuries of Ottoman rule, Odessa was founded as a city by decree of Catherine II in 1794, and during the 19th century was the fourth-largest city in the Russian Empire. Odessans today predominantly speak Russian.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/russia/558864-billy-herrington-ukraine-zelensky/

 

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europe in the ropes…..

 

BY Rachel Marsden

 

For years, the Western world saw profits in new green and renewable energy sectors and sang from their hymn book on the need to reduce carbon footprints by ditching fossil fuels, or to avoid a potential Chernobyl-style environmental catastrophe by ditching nuclear power. Western officials were going to either earbend their citizens or drag them kicking and screaming towards a new world rife with questionably executable green dreams – all in the interest of supposedly preventing Earth’s temperature from rising by 1.2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels. Good luck controlling the temperature of your own room to within a single degree for any length of time, let alone that of the entire planet. Still, officials agreed on the pretext for the green shift, however dodgy, and forged ahead with their new investments and ventures. The European Green Deal was a centerpiece of the Western strategy, with €1.8 trillion euros of investments.

It’s now clear that the EU has failed to scale up their projects in time to offset the disastrous energy crunch caused by their genius decision to sanction their own gas supply from Russia in order to stick it to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately for the EU’s top economy, Germany, it had bet a few too many of its chips on domestic green projects without any obvious alternative to its reliance on energy imports (and particularly on Russian gas) to power Europe’s primary industrial engine. 

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has since been scrambling – burning up phone lines from Qatar to Canada – in an attempt to find alternative sources, with no immediate solution in sight. Meanwhile, German industry is warning of shutdowns while authorities brace for energy and water rationing and what’s shaping up to be a very tough and precarious winter.

 

Berlin can’t even get repaired parts back from Canada for its own Nord Stream 1 joint pipeline with Russia because of Western anti-Russian sanctions blocking their shipment. Of course, there’s another option that’s literally just laying around – Gazprom’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which had been sanctioned by Washington in a power move against the EU economy even before the Ukraine conflict. Germany refuses to fire it up. Because, what’s a little national energy emergency when you can force Putin to have to flip a switch to redirect the gas to another nation state client, right? That’ll teach him, for sure.

Next door, in France, officials of the EU’s second biggest economic engine have been cheerleading Western solidarity and anti-Russian sanctions, all while Paris has been discreetly enjoying its position as the top importer of Russian liquefied natural gas.

If the hypocrisy of playing footsie under the table with Russia while whispering sweet promises of more weapons to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wasn’t amusing enough, the EU has also been trying to figure out a way to revert to old energy habits while pretending that they’re still on a green path.

The energy shortage due to sanctions amid the conflict in Ukraine has created an even more desperate need for a U-turn on the limitations of green and renewable energy. Which explains why the EU parliament voted this month to officially move the goalposts on what constitutes green energy by simply changing the labeling of investments in gas and nuclear energy to 'green'. You have to almost feel sorry for environmentalists. What’s next? Will Germany’s recent reversion back to dirty coal in its desperation for energy sources soon be reclassified as green, too? At this rate, nothing would be surprising.

 

Imagine being an environmentalist in a Kafkaesque conversation with an EU official who’s trying to tell you that fossil fuels are now 'green', as is a potential future Chernobyl, even though their official policy had long been the exact opposite. You’d feel like you were being gaslit in the same way that a partner would argue that you must’ve imagined that you saw another person’s text messages on their phone.

Some officials are trying to at least pay lip service to the idea of sticking with their climate agenda, while backpedaling hard and fast on the strategy in reality. Perhaps they’re hoping that people just don’t notice or care too much amid such a dire and costly energy shortage. German Economy Minister Robert Habeck is apparently one such official. “On the one hand, the climate crisis is coming to a head. On the other hand, Russia’s invasion shows how important it is to phase out fossil fuels and promote the expansion of renewables,” Habeck said in April.

But that lofty posture was before the impact of the EU’s own sanctions sent its member states scrambling – straight towards any available fossil fuels. 

Changing semantics to suit economic interests to the chagrin of environmentalists arguably started with Paris. Before the Ukraine conflict, France had long felt the heat from environmentalists over its nuclear power plants, which were neglected and allowed to corrode, with a view of phasing them out and shutting them down, to replace them with greener renewable energy. But then French President Emmanuel Macron solved the country’s nuclear image and reliance problem earlier this year by successfully lobbying the European Commission to draft a proposal labeling nuclear energy and gas as green, just in time for Macron to promote a new French “nuclear renaissance” and the construction of 14 new nuclear reactors in his reelection campaign.

What was dirty is now magically clean, and what was the dirty past is now the promising future – all at the drop of a hat. Move over windmills and solar panels – the future of sustainable clean energy is natural gas fossil fuel and nuclear reactors in what’s clearly a triumph of pragmatism over ideology.

As Berlin, Paris, and other European capitals struggle to replace Russian gas while staring at a winter of potential energy shortages, all bets are off. Sorry, environmentalists. The EU no longer has the luxury of fussing with the wallpaper while the house is burning down.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/558790-eu-redefining-green-energy/

 

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destroying history.....

The demolition of a monument to Russia’s Empress Catherine the Great will be considered during the next meeting of the city’s council, Mayor Gennady Trukhanov announced on Saturday, after an online poll on the matter concluded.

The official had vowed on Facebook to personally vote for the removal of the statue and for its relocation into a proposed “park of Imperial and Soviet past.”

“The majority of Odessa residents who voted supported the idea of dismantling the monument from Ekaterininskaya Square. Despite the war that is going on in our country, we have managed to follow a legitimate democratic procedure,” Trukhanov wrote, expressing his gratitude to “every inhabitant of Odessa who took part in the voting.”

The poll on the fate of the monument to the empress, who founded the city in the late 18th century, ran on a local “Socially active citizen” platform over the past month. While the mayor hailed this“democratic procedure,” the voting actually appeared to be less than representative. Less than 8,000 of Odessa’s nearly one million inhabitants took part in it, with some 3,900 supporting its complete demolition and 2,800 voting to leave it in its place while providing additional information about Catherine the Great.

The vote among those users having “confirmed” status, i.e. those who provided proof they actually live in the city, showed an even smaller gap, with 2,900 voting for demolition and some 2,250 supporting the second most popular option. Other suggestions, such as removing “imperial” symbols from the monument, leaving it as is, moving it to a museum, and so on, received only marginal support.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/russia/566040-ukraine-russian-empress-monument/

 

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SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/44664

 

 

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