FYI, Creationism/intelligent design is threatening Schools in the UK and USA quite worryingly.

Kim,

1) Again, you never even tried to rebut the claim that you distorted my words and slandered us as not fact checking posts, in your "I'm haunting the Russophiles for life" malarkey section. I won't take that as an admission of guilt, as you do when someone simply chooses not to respond to your insulting claims, but there it is.

2) Simply because we don't link to the Russian media sources we cite every single time doesn't make them false - but you presume everything you see in the Russian press is false until proven otherwise, and everyone in the Russian government is presumed guilty of doing something until proven innocent (as NYU Prof. Stephen Cohen pointed out, not exactly a good example of Americans to set for Russians of a properly functioning and democratic criminal justice system).

The vast majority of the time we tell readers exactly which Russian publication we are citing. As for reading what else we've written about 9 Rota, that is why we have a search engine and culture section on our blog, in addition to the links.

3) I think even you would agree that $22.5 million combined box office and DVD sales in a country where the average wage is $450-500 a month and that has struggled to crack down on DVD piracy is pretty good, and most Hollywood directors would happily claim a blockbuster if they could double what they actually spent on making and marketing their movies within a matter of months.

According to conservative film critic Michael Medved, most “R” rated films are actually net money losers, though the studious perform some amazing financial legerdemain to make it difficult to determine how much each individual movie actually makes (see the excellent Liberty Film Festival blog for more on that subject).

4) As Discovery Institute’s IT director showed me, traffic tickers on blogs can be faked, so the idea that this is an inherently trustworthy measure of a blog's actual traffic you present is misleading, as is the narrow section of our posts you selected to cite for our comments. At any rate, your Technorati post supports our argument that we are the most read English-language blog about Russia in the U.S., if not the world.

5) Yuri is the only fulltime contributor to Russia Blog, the rest of us are all part timers who have other day jobs, and Yuri has many other duties (fundraising, organizing events, educating young people, teaching piano lessons) besides posting on Russia Blog. That's why we have refused to let anyone contributing to the blog monopolize our time while producing quality content that speaks for itself - including many completely original articles rather than just rants on the news. We are the only source on the web for original reviews of Russian movies both first run and available from Netflix and Amazon.

You keep harping on the fact that you can't Google up the Russian Tax Academy, well so what, I can't Google up where Kim Zigfeld went to University, but you know from Googling that I went to the University of Texas at Austin.
In fact, I am a proud native Texan who grew up steeped in the late Cold War era, with nuclear capable B-52s bombers flying over my house from Carswell AFB. Most of the men in my family have served or are in the U.S. Air Force, and at UT-Austin my favorite professor was a veteran Cold Warrior who worked for Admiral Hyman Rickover and President Reagan. I am hardly a candidate to become a "crazed Russophile", but I acknowledge that the Cold War is over, based on what I have seen, what I have read, and what I know from conversations with ordinary Russians (who love powdered sugar in their tea).

My point to my readers when you attack us is as always this - you know that we are actual people using our real names, and that even if we make a mistake (which you immediately distort into a lie) we are accountable for what we write, while you attack our credibility with total anonymity. I think our readers can decide whom to trust.

6) Nobody "fired" Michael Averko, he is an independent contributor who simply found his content better suited for Sean's Russia Blog and other forums. Mr. Averko's claim that you are a person based in the UK was lent some credibility by your total ignorance about Texas (when I compared the ethnic diversity of Houston, the 4th most populous city in the U.S. to Moscow) expressed in some comments on our site. There is also the matter of your refusal to criticize the notorious UK-based oligarch Boris Berezovsky (for example, while you approvingly cite the late Paul Klebnikov's work, you never mention that in his book Godfather of the Kremlin he accused Berezovsky of ordering contract killings, nor that the last article he wrote before he was murdered was about the mullahs of Iran, after he spent years criticizing oligarchs and the Kremlin). Nor have you really criticized any other Russian oligarch in exile.

Regardless of what you think about the charges of tax evasion, killing people and/or racketeering to build your business are crimes in any civilized country, and Americans deserve to know the truth about why no one in Russia feels sorry for Khodorkovsky.

It was probably not a coincidence that global commodity prices hit record lows not seen since the Great Depression during the Nineties, when oligarchs like Khodorkovsky sold Russia’s natural resources at prices well below market rates, nor was it a coincidence that the hapless Yeltsin could not collect taxes from the oligarchs. The results of these “reforms” were hyperinflation, years of unpaid wages and pensions, and demographic collapse – the very same conditions you blame on the current Russian government.

While the vast majority of Russians are better off today than they were in 1999, there have been many losers both inside Russia and abroad who benefited from the previous oligarchy. If you think that those same powerful individuals are not spending substantial money on PR in the West, then you’re naïve.

7) The reason you were banned from Russia Blog is not because I am afraid to rebut your arguments, as I am doing here point by point, but because you pointlessly hectored and insulted other commenters and ludicrously demanded that we fact check or rebut every single comment. In short, you were banned for being rude and obnoxious.

8) The Real Russia Project is just another program of Discovery Institute, along with the Cascadia Center for Regional Development (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the 2nd largest non-profit foundation in the world) and the Technology and Democracy Program. Neither of those programs is related to Intelligent Design (unless you count intelligently designed transportation).

9) The Real Russia Project is entirely funded by contributions from American businessmen based in the greater Seattle-Tacoma area who like Yuri and his hardworking immigrant's pursuit of the American dream and who admire what he is doing.

Now tell me, who funds La Russophobe, and where did Kim Zigfeld go to college? You can't answer these questions at all. You try to compare yourself to some great anonymous dissident, but you largely swim with the mainstream with only the occasional hysterical addition to it. Meanwhile, we’re willing to take on the mainstream media and U.S. politicians’ views about Russia and succeeding in opening minds.

10) You never question whether there are other agendas at work out there, how much money the oligarchs are spending in the U.S./UK on PR, etc, or the credibility of certain pundits who make ridiculous claims about the future (i.e. Anders Aslund of Carnegie Endowment predicting a color revolution in Russia last year, or The Economist’s Edward Lucas predicting the imminent collapse of the Russian economy, or Robert Amsterdam in the pages of the Wall Street Journal omitting the fact that Khodorkovsky's chief of security was convicted of murder - or for that matter, Amsterdam's ridiculous claim that Iran is a more trustworthy long term partner for Europe on energy than Russia!)

11) You compare yourself to us and approvingly cite the success of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. First of all, that's an insult to Limbaugh, who is the most popular radio commentator in the U.S. for a reason and does have some intelligent things to say besides just insulting liberals. Also, I think as you've noticed from Ann Coulter's recent hijinks, people are getting tired of her insult political theater and even staunch U.S. conservatives are disinviting her from their events. Vitriol may appeal to a lot of people, but in the end people want facts and original information they can't find elsewhere, and that is what we deliver.

You sneered at us being the McDonald's of Russia Blogs (do I detect some Oxbridge snobbery against vulgar American mass culture, there?). Well, billions and billions served actually isn't a bad model for what we intend to do - make news and information about Russia, especially ordinary life and business in Russia, interesting for the masses. That's what we do and we're very proud of it.

Respectfully,
Charles Ganske
Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.A.

Dear Kim Zigfeld/Lenard Daulton,

1) Again, you never even tried to rebut the claim that you distorted my words and slandered us as not fact checking posts, in your "I'm haunting the Russophiles for life" malarkey section. I won't take that as an admission of guilt, as you do when someone simply chooses not to respond to your insulting claims, but there it is.

2) Simply because we don't link to the Russian media sources we cite every single time doesn't make them false - but you presume everything you see in the Russian press is false until proven otherwise, and everyone in the Russian government is presumed guilty of doing something until proven innocent (as NYU Prof. Stephen Cohen pointed out, not exactly a good example of Americans to set for Russians of a properly functioning and democratic criminal justice system).

The vast majority of the time we tell readers exactly which Russian publication we are citing. As for reading what else we've written about 9 Rota, that is why we have a search engine and culture section on our blog, in addition to the links.

3) I think even you would agree that $22.5 million combined box office and DVD sales in a country where the average wage is $450-500 a month and that has struggled to crack down on DVD piracy is pretty good, and most Hollywood directors would happily claim a blockbuster if they could double what they actually spent on making and marketing their movies within a matter of months.

According to conservative film critic Michael Medved, most “R” rated films are actually net money losers, though the studious perform some amazing financial legerdemain to make it difficult to determine how much each individual movie actually makes (see the excellent Liberty Film Festival blog for more on that subject).

4) As Discovery Institute’s IT director showed me, traffic tickers on blogs can be faked, so the idea that this is an inherently trustworthy measure of a blog's actual traffic you present is misleading, as is the narrow section of our posts you selected to cite for our comments. At any rate, your Technorati post supports our argument that we are the most read English-language blog about Russia in the U.S., if not the world.

5) Yuri is the only fulltime contributor to Russia Blog, the rest of us are all part timers who have other day jobs, and Yuri has many other duties (fundraising, organizing events, educating young people, teaching piano lessons) besides posting on Russia Blog. That's why we have refused to let anyone contributing to the blog monopolize our time while producing quality content that speaks for itself - including many completely original articles rather than just rants on the news. We are the only source on the web for original reviews of Russian movies both first run and available from Netflix and Amazon.

You keep harping on the fact that you can't Google up the Russian Tax Academy, well so what, I can't Google up where Kim Zigfeld went to University, but you know from Googling that I went to the University of Texas at Austin.
In fact, I am a proud native Texan who grew up steeped in the late Cold War era, with nuclear capable B-52s bombers flying over my house from Carswell AFB. Most of the men in my family have served or are in the U.S. Air Force, and at UT-Austin my favorite professor was a veteran Cold Warrior who worked for Admiral Hyman Rickover and President Reagan. I am hardly a candidate to become a "crazed Russophile", but I acknowledge that the Cold War is over, based on what I have seen, what I have read, and what I know from conversations with ordinary Russians (who love powdered sugar in their tea).

My point to my readers when you attack us is as always this - you know that we are actual people using our real names, and that even if we make a mistake (which you immediately distort into a lie) we are accountable for what we write, while you attack our credibility with total anonymity. I think our readers can decide whom to trust.

6) Nobody "fired" Michael Averko, he is an independent contributor who simply found his content better suited for Sean's Russia Blog and other forums. Mr. Averko's claim that you are a person based in the UK was lent some credibility by your total ignorance about Texas (when I compared the ethnic diversity of Houston, the 4th most populous city in the U.S. to Moscow) expressed in some comments on our site. There is also the matter of your refusal to criticize the notorious UK-based oligarch Boris Berezovsky (for example, while you approvingly cite the late Paul Klebnikov's work, you never mention that in his book Godfather of the Kremlin he accused Berezovsky of ordering contract killings, nor that the last article he wrote before he was murdered was about the mullahs of Iran, after he spent years criticizing oligarchs and the Kremlin). Nor have you really criticized any other Russian oligarch in exile.

Regardless of what you think about the charges of tax evasion, killing people and/or racketeering to build your business are crimes in any civilized country, and Americans deserve to know the truth about why no one in Russia feels sorry for Khodorkovsky.

It was probably not a coincidence that global commodity prices hit record lows not seen since the Great Depression during the Nineties, when oligarchs like Khodorkovsky sold Russia’s natural resources at prices well below market rates, nor was it a coincidence that the hapless Yeltsin could not collect taxes from the oligarchs. The results of these “reforms” were hyperinflation, years of unpaid wages and pensions, and demographic collapse – the very same conditions you blame on the current Russian government.

While the vast majority of Russians are better off today than they were in 1999, there have been many losers both inside Russia and abroad who benefited from the previous oligarchy. If you think that those same powerful individuals are not spending substantial money on PR in the West, then you’re naïve.

7) The reason you were banned from Russia Blog is not because I am afraid to rebut your arguments, as I am doing here point by point, but because you pointlessly hectored and insulted other commenters and ludicrously demanded that we fact check or rebut every single comment. In short, you were banned for being rude and obnoxious.

8) The Real Russia Project is just another program of Discovery Institute, along with the Cascadia Center for Regional Development (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the 2nd largest non-profit foundation in the world) and the Technology and Democracy Program. Neither of those programs is related to Intelligent Design (unless you count intelligently designed transportation).

9) The Real Russia Project is funded entirely by contributions from American businessmen based in the greater Seattle-Tacoma area who like Yuri and his hardworking immigrant's pursuit of the American dream and who admire what he is doing.

Now tell me, who funds La Russophobe, and where did Kim Zigfeld go to college? You can't answer these questions at all. You try to compare yourself to some great anonymous dissident, but you largely swim with the mainstream with only an occasional hysterical addition to it. Meanwhile, we’re willing to take on the mainstream media and U.S. politicians’ views about Russia and succeeding in opening minds.

10) You never question whether there are other agendas at work out there, how much money the oligarchs are spending in the U.S./UK on PR, etc, or the credibility of certain pundits who make ridiculous claims about the future (i.e. Anders Aslund of Carnegie Endowment predicting a color revolution in Russia last year, or The Economist’s Edward Lucas predicting the imminent collapse of the Russian economy, or Robert Amsterdam in the pages of the Wall Street Journal omitting the fact that Khodorkovsky's chief of security was convicted of murder - or for that matter, Amsterdam and Newsweek International's ridiculous claims that Iran is a more trustworthy long term partner for Europe on energy than Russia!)

11) You compare yourself to us and approvingly cite the success of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. First of all, that's an insult to Limbaugh, who is the most popular radio commentator in the U.S. for a reason and does have some intelligent things to say besides just insulting liberals. Also, I think as you've noticed from Ann Coulter's recent hijinks, people are getting tired of her insult political theater and even staunch U.S. conservatives are disinviting her from their events. Vitriol may appeal to a lot of people, but in the end people want facts and original information they can't find elsewhere, and that is what we deliver.

You sneered at us being the McDonald's of Russia Blogs (do I detect some Oxbridge snobbery against vulgar American mass culture, there?). Well, billions and billions served actually isn't a bad model for what we intend to do - make news and information about Russia, especially ordinary life and business in Russia, interesting for the masses. That's what we do and we're very proud of it.

Respectfully,
Charles Ganske
Fort Worth, Texas
www.russiablog.org

Charlie,

Thanks for the maniacal double post, I couldn't have made you look any more foolish if I had planned it myself.

If you think you are entitled to comment on my blog even though I'm not entitled to comment on yours, you're a real nutjob fella. If you think you somehow get to decide that your comments about "Lenard Daulton" and you being a "real person" are not "obnoxious" but my comments on your blog are, then you are a certifiable megalomaniac.

You've provided no meaningful information about the Russian university Yuri supposedly graduated from nor have you answered any of the other questions I asked you in a meaningful way. I'm not surprised.

Apparently, you think my public third-party counter data could be faked but your private first-party counter data could not be. That's the remark of a madman. I'm well aware that you might be faking your traffic claims. That's why I'm investigating them. If you can read (which I doubt) then you can see Alexa's data shows that both Very Russian Tochka and Siberian Light had more traffic than your blog, and traffic doesn't mean your blog is being read. You've failed to answer my question about how long your visitors spend at your blog on average and failed to provide any kind of documentation of your visitation, while I've had a public counter from day one. Until you do, I'll reject the legitimacy of your traffic claims, which are belied by the tiny number of comments you receive and your puny number of Technorati links. If people are indeed reading Russia Blog, they obviously couldn't care less about what the find there. A very wise policy.

LR:
Russian Tax Academy - Всероссийская государственная налоговая академия Минфина РФ
http://www.vgna.ru/

Russian State Tax Academy of Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation.

Please check with your crappy Russkiy translator. I suggest you file another request for more funds from your sponsors for a better translating monkey.

Kim,
People accidently click a button twice all the time - my apologies.

Here is the link to the website of the All-Russian State Tax Academy for the Tax Ministry of the Russian Federation, where Yuri Mamchur (no alias) obtained his degree:

http://www.vgna.ru/

and here's where I went to school:
www.utexas.edu

I think my reply thoroughly answered every question and argument you raised about Russia Blog and what we actually do. I am not insulting or hectoring you, I am merely setting the record straight for anyone who comes to your blog.

This concludes my public service announcement on La Russophobe.

Cheers!
Charles Ganske
(again, my real name)

ANONYMOUS:

You are a truly amazing moron. Thanks for your comment, it really handed us a huge laugh.

First of all, the correct translation is "All-Russian" not "Russian."

Second, if you look at Russia Blog you will see that not only did Yuri Mamchur omit the "All" he also omitted the "state" and the "ministry of finance" and he added "of law." So it is impossible to have translated back from his "Russian Tax Academy of Law" to get "All Russian State Tax Academy of the Ministry of Finance." What's more, despite mentioning the school several times Yuri never provided a hyperlink to it. He's either seriously lacking in linguistic skills or covering up things he doesn't want people to know. Don't worry, we're going to find out which!

So who's the moron, you pathetic little ape?

CHARLIE:

You lie the way most people breath. You didn't simply click the button twice, you put up two different posts, one with hyperlinks and one without, as anyone can see.

It's quite amazing hubris for you to believe that you get to decide what constitutes "abuse" in both comments on your blog AND mine. Got any of Stalin's bloodline in you there, fella?

Thanks for the link on Yuri's eductation. I'd never dreamed he might have been educated by Russia's Ministry of Finance, things appear to be even worse than I thought. Of course, I'll have something to say about this in a future post, and I've sent you a list of questions by email concerning various points about Yuri's education that are still mysterious. I assume you'll be happy to answer them.