The Leningrad Cowboys is a Finnish rock and roll band famous for its humorous songs and concerts featuring the Soviet Red Army Choir.Here they are singing--yep, that's Eric Idle's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life":
Currently, the band has eleven Cowboys and two Leningrad Ladies. The songs, all somewhat influenced by polka and progressive rock, and performed in English, have themes such as 'vodka', 'tractors', 'rockets', and 'Genghis Khan', as well as folkloric Russian songs, rock and roll ballads and covers from bands as diverse as The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, all with lots of humour.
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The Red Army Choir (Choir Aleksandrov) is a performing ensemble that served as the official army choir of the former Soviet Union's Red Army. The choir consists of a male choir, an orchestra, and a dance ensemble. The songs they perform range from Russian folk tunes to Church hymns, operatic arias and popular music.
In 1991, The Red Army Choir participated in Roger Waters' The Wall concert celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall. They performed an anti-war song "Bring the Boys Back Home".
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Red Army Choir has continued performing, entertaining audiences both inside and outside Russia.
From Cato:Six Reasons to Downsize the Federal Government
Posted by Chris Edwards
1. Additional federal spending transfers resources from the more productive private sector to the less productive public sector of the economy. The bulk of federal spending goes toward subsidies and benefit payments, which generally do not enhance economic productivity. With lower productivity, average American incomes will fall.
2. As federal spending rises, it creates pressure to raise taxes now and in the future. Higher taxes reduce incentives for productive activities such as working, saving, investing, and starting businesses. Higher taxes also increase incentives to engage in unproductive activities such as tax avoidance.
3. Much federal spending is wasteful and many federal programs are mismanaged. Cost overruns, fraud and abuse, and other bureaucratic failures are endemic in many agencies. It’s true that failures also occur in the private sector, but they are weeded out by competition, bankruptcy, and other market forces. We need to similarly weed out government failures.
4. Federal programs often benefit special interest groups while harming the broader interests of the general public. How is that possible in a democracy? The answer is that logrolling or horse-trading in Congress allows programs to be enacted even though they are only favored by minorities of legislators and voters. One solution is to impose a legal or constitutional cap on the overall federal budget to force politicians to make spending trade-offs.
5. Many federal programs cause active damage to society, in addition to the damage caused by the higher taxes needed to fund them. Programs usually distort markets and they sometimes cause social and environmental damage. Some examples are housing subsidies that helped to cause the financial crises, welfare programs that have created dependency, and farm subsidies that have harmed the environment.
6. The expansion of the federal government in recent decades runs counter to the American tradition of federalism. Federal functions should be “few and defined” in James Madison’s words, with most government activities left to the states. The explosion in federal aid to the states since the 1960s has strangled diversity and innovation in state governments because aid has been accompanied by a mass of one-size-fits-all regulations.
For more, see DownsizingGovernment.org.
Herr Urkobold,GUNTHER,
To be pleased am I to encounter your presents of great pencilness. Pardon please my English that I Pornographie sites learned of. I question this: You too great are to type with your own Hände. Types who for your glorification?
Auch, of what opinion Urkobold holding does of Toyota's remembrances for flawed Fahrzeuge?
Aufrichtig,
Gunther S.
A picture of a road sign in Treviso, Italy that is making the rounds on the Intertubials. Interesting. Wonder what it means? I'm not sure, but here are some possibilities:
I got the picture for the "motivational" poster above after reading "17 More Images You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped" on Cracked.com., which also included a couple of photos of dudes riding horses through fire for the Feast of Saint Anthony the Great, the patron saint of animals. Cracked.com in turn got these pictures from a very nice pictorial article on The Boston Globe's "The Big Picture" website, entitled "Fiery European Festivals."Up Helly Aa celebrates the influence of the Scandinavian vikings in the Shetland Islands, marking the end of the yule season, and has employed this theme in the festival since 1870. The event culminates with up to 1,000 'guizers' (men in costume) throwing flaming torches into a Viking longship. The event happens all over Shetland, but it is only the Lerwick galley which is not sent seaward. Everywhere else, the flaming galley is sent into the sea, in an echo of actual Viking sea burials.So awesome.
