review of Arab culture of regression

Consider some of the important findings in recent Arab Human Development Reports and related studies:

• The total number of books translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years is fewer than those translated into Spanish in one year.

• Greece – with a population of fewer than 11 million – translates five times as many books from abroad into Greek annually as the 22 Arab countries combined, with a total population of more than 300 million, translate into Arabic.

• According to a Council on Foreign Relations report, "In the 1950s, per-capita income in Egypt was similar to South Korea, whereas Egypt's per-capita income today is less than 20 percent of South Korea's. Saudi Arabia had a higher gross domestic product than Taiwan in the 1950s; today, it is about 50 percent of Taiwan's."

As Dr. A.B. Zahlan, a Palestinian physicist, has noted: "A regressive political culture is at the root of the Arab world's failure to fund scientific research or to sustain a vibrant, innovative community of scientists." He further asserted that "Egypt, in 1950, had more engineers than all of China." That is hardly the case today.

The UN Human Development Report reveals that only two Egyptians per million people were granted patents, compared to 30 in Greece and 35 in Israel (for Syria, the figure was zero).

Similarly, the adult literacy rate for women aged 15 and older was 43.6 percent in Egypt and 74 percent in Syria, while for the world's top 20 countries it was nearly 100 percent.

And finally, according to Freedom House rankings, no Arab country in the Middle East is listed as "free." Each is described as "partly free" at best, "not free" at worst.

The sad truth is that it is precisely political oppression, intellectual suffocation, and gender discrimination that explain, far more than any other factor, the chronic difficulties of the Middle East.

These top Russian Comsecgru brass use openly their email boxes

my bot reports that Widnows XP Porofessional computers licensed to Russian Federation opneed critical US documents dirextly from the email boxes ( i.e. mail.xxxxx.zz) of these top directors of the facility:

ALFEROV, Alexander Pavlovich (Алферов Александр Павлович)
KISELEV, Boris Valentinovich (Киселев Борис Валентинович)
PYARIN, Victor Anatolevich (Пярин Виктор Анатольевич)
MITROFANOV, Sergey Vasilevich (Митрофанов Сергей Васильевич)

the computers are assigned or located at the FAPSI commnads:
В/ч 2580
В/ч 16660 one of the commands at the Russia's equivalent of US NSA - FAPSI, ФАПСИ, formerly ЦОПУПС, TsOPUPS, Central Separate Field Center for Government Communications (Центральный Отдельный Полевой Узел Правительственной Связи)

Russian illegal in US reports on military traffic?

This is an unexpected harvest my bots brought in:


It shows that somebody very loyal to the Russian Federation, and not associated with the Russian Embassy in USA, has easily intercepted US-UK radio traffic. The first message deals with a mysterious emergency search and rescue by NATO in the Atlantic. The second message, stored on an unnamed server, this individual says that he left his recording equipment listening to the 6697 Hz frequency, Upper Side Band, RATT transmission mode. What he picked up is a Nimrod, a British maritime surveillance plane leaving US on the way to RAF Kinloss. The Russian listener appears to be professionally experienced in the US-NATO radio traffic patterns. The telegraphic style of the message is chillingly old school.

Do you see anything consistent with the material in this post?

USSR's ghost units alive and well in cyberspace

The Database's bot has found data that can be formatted into this report.
The following military units have used their Sun or Linux machines to attempt and establish unauthorized access to US DOD, Defense contractor, and NATO servers:

40236 Leninsk, Baykonur, (Кзыл-Ординская обл. г.Ленинск, Байконур)
96742 Chita (Чита)

Rostov-on-Don Defense Institute of the Missile Forces (Ростовский Военный институт Ракетных войск / Ростов-на-Дону)

Ghost units still fiuntioning in cyberspace? Excellent deception, diversion, and maskirovka tactic.
two units: в/ч пп 36546 ОБС, and 15332 formerly located in Poland at Borne-Sulinovo (incredible: "Bourne"identity?) Борне-Сулиново

Russia breaks Swiss banks

I launched another bot on Friday morning, and a trifling matter of the day distracted me from following up on the bot's findings. I remembered it just now, on Sunday evening, and, instead of another harvest of secret information on Russia's communication and naval matters, the raw text returned contained the names of Alexey Kudrin, Sergey Ignatiev, Alexey Ulyukaev, Dmitri Pankin, Alexander Gorban and Nadezhda Ivanova (Алексей Кудрин, Сергей Игнатьев, Алексей Улюкаев, Дмитрий Панкин, Александр Горбань и Надежда Иванова).

The reason the bot found these names was that the text originated in a Russian Government's interoffice memo discussing the forthcoming visit of these Russian financial official to Washington, DC. The team , it seems, is to participate in the meetings of the IMF and the World Bank. This all seems to be innocuously Russian, or even nouveau-Russian. Except there appears a sprinkling of neo-Russian words that my acquaintances from Moscow have identified as egotistically pompous proclamation of money withdrawals. Except the withdrawals were from such easily identifiable insittutions as UBS and Credit Suisse, and among the destination were Nekrasovian pseudonyms for Gazprom, and LUKoil(!!!???)

It comes as no suprise that the news now is percolating through the printed media, and, firstly, of course, through the blogosphere (as confirmed by Huffington Post) that the UBS and Credit Suisse and about to writedowns (or writeoffs) of loss, the first in five years, as a result of unprecedented market conditions. It appears that, concerted or not, Switzerland became too small for the Russian Bear's wallet, and might be assigned the status of a quaint and picturesque winter resort.