Russian scientists have spent 92 years keeping Lenin’s body in good shape, adding a fresh coat of embalming fluids every other year, according to Scientific American’s Jeremy Hsu, a weeks-long “process that involves submerging the body in separate solutions of glycerol solution baths, formaldehyde, potassium acetate, alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, acetic acid solution and acetic sodium.”
Russian state-run polls show the majority of Russians believe Lenin’s body should be removed from display and buried. But Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Lenin should stay put, and likened the Soviet leader’s mausoleum to displays of relics of Orthodox saints in monasteries.
Not anymore. After a brief spell at the Lenin mausoleum (9 March 1953 – 31 October 1961), Iosif Vissarionovich was transferred to the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. I guess it just didn’t work out.
Methinks you’ve given him far too much credit which he has not earned.
I’ve seen footage of his old interviews from the 80’s, much more than I care to, in fact (but when a train-wreck is this massive, it’s hard to avoid looking.)
He was coherent and spoke like a full grown adult*; but that’s hardly equivalent to being “eloquent.”
*Instead of a half illiterate brain damaged toddler whose mother smoked eightballs while she was pregnant with him, as he does now.
“I have had the best reviews on foreign land. So I go to Poland and make a speech. Enemies of mine in the media, enemies of mine are saying it was the greatest speech ever made on foreign soil by a president.”
I just can’t. I have no words. My assessment of the character of this fuckwit does not fit within any scale I can construct. The self-absorbed arrogance just cannot be put into any rational nor conceivable context. There is perhaps nothing more to say. Consider very carefully that the so-called President of the United States actually said what I have quoted. Ask yourself “why” would he say this. Try to come up with any answer that is not insane. I dare you. Yet, it was formed in his mind and uttered from his lips. If it doesn’t make you reel from some sort of extreme cognitive dissonance (maybe not exactly the right term) you’re not getting it. This statement from a person in this position is so far from my worldview that I feeI sick to my stomach. I am terrified.
Because it’s exactly the same sort of nonsense he spouted during the primaries and the election and it worked then. So far he has no reason to expect that it won’t work now. I don’t think he knows how to behave differently anyway.
I still have trouble believing that “president Trump” has actually come to pass. I am a northern neighbour and I’m not too comfortable with it either. I can’t imagine how sane Americans can sleep at night.
You haven’t met the challenge. That this sort of nonsense works (as you correctly assert) is exactly the insanity to which I allude. It’s a collective insanity that is enabled and leveraged by the orange man-child.
Sadly, you’re correct. The twitiot-in-chief might be a wilfully ignorant, lazy, bigoted, self-serving bully, but that does not render his strategy invalid (yet).
When I lived in European countries for more than a few months, I somehow developed a pretty good local accent/pronunciation along with a bare minimum of the lingo.
So I’d often find myself in the situation where a conversation would start easily but quickly pass beyond my level of comprehension, at which point I would say - in apparently perfectly-inflected Polish, Dutch, or whatever - “I’m sorry, I don’t speak very good Polish/Dutch”.
At which point my disbelieving interlocutor would look skeptically or angrily at me and continue a flow of bewildering fluent foreignese, before I ran away shouting “Lalalala-I can’t hear you…”
(Apart from in Poland, where I discovered after a long time that, due to an error I was making with the verb endings, I was telling people “I’m sorry, YOU don’t speak very good Polish”)
Or, and here’s my theory, she was just being polite and waiting for him to stop talking about himself before replying. In other words she didn’t have the opportunity to speak.
