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Maybe love is thinking that every time your partner does or says something mundane that you want to start a Mexican wave from here to Uzbekistan in utter delight.
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Cecelia Ahern (The Book of Tomorrow)
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Everyone drank to popular education and to the irrigation of Uzbekistan.
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Ilya Ilf (The Twelve Chairs)
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In the former Soviet republics, there are three staples of life: vodka, chocolate, and corruption. I know someone who once survived in Uzbekistan for two weeks solely on these three items.
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Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World)
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It’s a little-known fact that most terrorist groups fail, and that all of them die. Lest this seem hard to believe, just reflect on the world around you. Israel continues to exist, Northern Ireland is still a part of the United Kingdom, and Kashmir is a part of India. There are no sovereign states in Kurdistan, Palestine, Quebec, Puerto Rico, Chechnya, Corsica, Tamil Eelam, or Basque Country. The Philippines, Algeria, Egypt, and Uzbekistan are not Islamist theocracies; nor have Japan, the United States, Europe, and Latin America become religious, Marxist, anarchist, or new-age utopias. The numbers confirm the impressions.
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Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
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Yet the economists in Moscow had no reliable index of what was going on in the vast empire they notionally maintained; the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest.
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Adam Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster)
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Shards of glass.
As Stan escorted me from Caravel, I decided that if I formed a band, I would call it Shards of Glass. And we’d only sing really, really angsty songs about my ex, Dan O’Malley. So many words rhymed with Dan. It was meant to be.
Man. Plan. Fan. Ban. Tan. LAN. Uzbekistan. The songs would basically write themselves.
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Penny Reid (Marriage of Inconvenience (Knitting in the City, #7))
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Maybe love is thinking that everytime your partner does or says something mundane that you want to start a Mexican wave from here to Uzbekistan in utter delight. - Tamara Goodwin
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Cecelia Ahern
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the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest. Shortages
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Adam Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster)
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To whomever she speaks, African students on the shores of Lake Victoria, farmers in a Cuban sugar field, prisoners in an English penitentiary or factory workers in Uzbekistan, she brings the truth they learned in Ravensbruck: Jesus can turn loss into glory.
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Corrie ten Boom (The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom)
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In 1959 Corrie was part of a group that visited Ravensbruck, which was then in East Germany, to honor Betsie and the 96,000 other women who died there. There Corrie learned that her own release had been part of a clerical error; one week later all women her age were taken to the gas chamber. When I heard Corrie speak in Darmstadt in 1968, she was 76, still traveling ceaselessly in obedience to Betsie’s certainty that they must “tell people.” Her work took her to 61 countries, including many “unreachable” ones on the other side of the Iron Curtain. To whomever she spoke—African students on the shores of Lake Victoria, farmers in a Cuban sugar field, prisoners in an English penitentiary, factory workers in Uzbekistan—she brought the truth the sisters learned in Ravensbruck: Jesus can turn loss into glory. John and I made some of those trips with her, the only way to catch this indefatigable woman long enough to
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Corrie ten Boom (The Hiding Place)
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The noun algorithm has become quite common in an age of computerized calculations, although it did not make its first appearance until 1957. Previously the word had been algorism, which was a corruption of the final part of the name of a ninth-century mathematician, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi: the Latin algoritmi was an approximation of al-Khwarizmi, which meant ‘the man from Chorasmia’ (today the Khorezm province of Uzbekistan).
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Henry Hitchings (The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English)
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They can be divided three ways: those that are neutral, the pro-Western group and the pro-Russian camp. The neutral countries – Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan – are those with fewer reasons to ally themselves with Russia or the West. This is because all three produce their own energy and are not beholden to either side for their security or trade. In the pro-Russian camp are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Belarus and Armenia. Their economies are tied to Russia in the way that much of eastern Ukraine’s economy is (another reason for the rebellion there).
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
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Few exchanges in the history of science have leaped so boldly into the future as this one, which occurred a thousand years ago in a region now often dismissed as a backwater and valued mainly for its natural resources, not its intellectual achievements. We know of it because copies survived in manuscript and were published almost a millennium later. Twenty-eight-year-old Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, or simply Biruni (973–1048), hailed from near the Aral Sea and went on to distinguish himself in geography, mathematics, trigonometry, comparative religion, astronomy, physics, geology, psychology, mineralogy, and pharmacology. His younger counterpart, Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina, or just Ibn Sina (ca. 980–1037), grew up in the stately city of Bukhara, the great seat of learning in what is now Uzbekistan. He was to make his mark in medicine, philosophy, physics, chemistry, astronomy, theology, clinical pharmacology, physiology, ethics, and music theory. When eventually Ibn Sina’s magisterial Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin, it triggered the start of modern medicine in the West and became its Bible: a dozen editions were printed before 1500. Indians used Ibn Sina’s Canon to develop a whole school of medicine that continues today. Many regard Biruni and Ibn Sina together as the greatest scientific minds between antiquity and the Renaissance, if not the modern age.
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S. Frederick Starr (Lost Enlightenment)
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Tajikistan's national library, the biggest in Central Asia. It opened in 2012 and covers an area of forty-five thousand square meters over nine floors. It has room for ten million books and, in order to fill all the shelves, each household was asked to donate books for the opening. Journalists who have been inside said there are only books in one of the halls; in the rest the shelves stand empty.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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Geopolitics is ultimately the study of the balance between options and limitations. A country's geography determines in large part what vulnerabilities it faces and what tools it holds.
"Countries with flat tracks of land -- think Poland or Russia -- find building infrastructure easier and so become rich faster, but also find themselves on the receiving end of invasions. This necessitates substantial standing armies, but the very act of attempting to gain a bit of security automatically triggers angst and paranoia in the neighbors.
"Countries with navigable rivers -- France and Argentina being premier examples -- start the game with some 'infrastructure' already baked in. Such ease of internal transport not only makes these countries socially unified, wealthy, and cosmopolitan, but also more than a touch self-important. They show a distressing habit of becoming overimpressed with themselves -- and so tend to overreach.
"Island nations enjoy security -- think the United Kingdom and Japan -- in part because of the physical separation from rivals, but also because they have no choice but to develop navies that help them keep others away from their shores. Armed with such tools, they find themselves actively meddling in the affairs of countries not just within arm's reach, but half a world away.
"In contrast, mountain countries -- Kyrgyzstan and Bolivia, to pick a pair -- are so capital-poor they find even securing the basics difficult, making them largely subject to the whims of their less-mountainous neighbors.
"It's the balance of these restrictions and empowerments that determine both possibilities and constraints, which from my point of view makes it straightforward to predict what most countries will do:
· The Philippines' archipelagic nature gives it the physical stand-off of islands without the navy, so in the face of a threat from a superior country it will prostrate itself before any naval power that might come to its aid.
· Chile's population center is in a single valley surrounded by mountains. Breaching those mountains is so difficult that the Chileans often find it easier to turn their back on the South American continent and interact economically with nations much further afield.
· The Netherlands benefits from a huge portion of European trade because it controls the mouth of the Rhine, so it will seek to unite the Continent economically to maximize its economic gain while bringing in an external security guarantor to minimize threats to its independence.
· Uzbekistan sits in the middle of a flat, arid pancake and so will try to expand like syrup until it reaches a barrier it cannot pass. The lack of local competition combined with regional water shortages adds a sharp, brutal aspect to its foreign policy.
· New Zealand is a temperate zone country with a huge maritime frontage beyond the edge of the world, making it both wealthy and secure -- how could the Kiwis not be in a good mood every day?
"But then there is the United States. It has the fiat lands of Australia with the climate and land quality of France, the riverine characteristics of Germany with the strategic exposure of New Zealand, and the island features of Japan but with oceanic moats -- and all on a scale that is quite literally continental. Such landscapes not only make it rich and secure beyond peer, but also enable its navy to be so powerful that America dominates the global oceans.
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Peter Zeihan (The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America)
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Nations fail economically because of extractive institutions. These institutions keep poor countries poor and prevent them from embarking on a path to economic growth. This is true today in Africa, in places such as Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone; in South America, in countries such as Colombia and Argentina; in Asia, in countries such as North Korea and Uzbekistan; and in the Middle East, in nations such as Egypt. There are notable differences among these countries. Some are tropical, some are in temperate latitudes. Some were colonies of Britain; others, of Japan, Spain, and Russia. They have very different histories, languages, and cultures. What they all share is extractive institutions. In all these cases the basis of these institutions is an elite who design economic institutions in order to enrich themselves and perpetuate their power at the expense of the vast majority of people in society. The different histories and social structures of the countries lead to the differences in the nature of the elites and in the details of the extractive institutions. But the reason why these extractive institutions persist is always related to the vicious circle, and the implications of these institutions in terms of impoverishing their citizens are similar—even if their intensity differs.
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Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty)
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This Uzbek novel gives the reader two for the price of one. The ‘frame’ novel is documentary fiction, a reconstruction of the last months of its main protagonist, the writer Abdulla Qodiriy, as he spend most of 1938 in an NKVD prison during Stalin’s Great Terror, in which three quarters of a million innocent citizens were shot, and several million sent to be worked to death in the Gulags. In Uzbekistan, as in other republics of the USSR, the terror was even worse than in Moscow, for it virtually eliminated, on spurious charges of spying and counter-revolution, not just the Communist Party and local government elite, but much of the country’s intelligentsia and trained professionals.
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Hamid Ismailov (The Devils' Dance)
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Next stop Uzbekistan, by way of Timbuktu.
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Siân O'Gorman (Always and Forever)
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The Internet as a Source of Drugs of Abuse,” the web page for such a site may be physically located in Uzbekistan, the business address in Mexico City, money generated from purchases deposited in a bank in the Cayman Islands, the drugs themselves shipped from India, while the owner of the site is living in Florida.
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Anna Lembke (Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop)
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And as if blowing it up, flooding it, and keeping it behind the klyon wasn't enough, State Security special forces patrolled the area until 1989. Some locals say there was an additional 'live fence' of thousands of vipers specially bred for this purpose by Uzbeks along the southern Black Sea, under something called decree number 56. Why Uzbeks? Why vipers? Did decree 56 read: 'Let us fulfil the five-year snake plan in one year'?
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Kapka Kassabova (Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe)
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In the wealthiest nation in the world, black women are dying in childbirth at rates comparable to those in poorer, colonized nations. The World Health Organization estimates that black expectant and new mothers in the United States die at about the same rate as women in countries such as Mexico and Uzbekistan. The high mortality rate of black women in the United States has been documented by the CDC, which says that black women are 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related causes than are white women.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom (Thick: And Other Essays)
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Anger in men is generally a default emotion, when what they are really feeling is embarrassment or fear.
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Ged Gillmore (Stans By Me: A Whirlwind Tour Through Central Asia - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan)
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Media, Persia, Gedrosia: Contemporary Iran. Babylonia or Mesopotamia: Modern-day Iraq. Parthia: Present-day Turkmenistan. Sogdiana: Presently within Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Bactria, Gandhara: Spanning present-day Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan.
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Jay Penner (Maurya | Historical Fiction Novel set in Ancient India (Whispers of Atlantis Book 6))
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stood like this for an hour, maybe two. The train snaked through the desert and steppe at forty or fifty kilometres an hour. Kazakhstan covers an area of 2,724,900 square kilometres, which is bigger than Western Europe. It is the ninth largest country in the world, and the largest one without a coast. And there, by the dusty train window, I started to realise just how big 2,724,900 square kilometres is. Kazakhstan is more than twice the size of the four other Central Asian countries combined. The Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, today’s Kazakhstan, accounted for twelve per cent of the total area of the Soviet Union, which was a staggering 22,402,200 square metres. By comparison, Russia is currently 17,075,200 square kilometres. In other words, Kazakhstan alone accounts for more than half the territory lost by Russia in the breakup of the Soviet Union.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: A Journey Through Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan)
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The largest United States induced earthquake to date has been the 2011 M5.6 Prague, Oklahoma earthquake (Keranen and others, 2013); however, earthquakes greater than M6 or M7 also have been generated near impounded dams or near sites of gas withdrawal. For example, Gupta (2002) indicates that the 1967 Koyna M6.3 (India) was the largest and most damaging reservoir-triggered earthquake. Simpson and Leith (1985) suggested that the 1984 M7.0 Gazli (Uzbekistan) earthquake may have been induced by gas withdrawal. There is also some debate about whether the 2008 M7.9 Wenchuan (China) earthquake was induced by reservoir impoundment (Kerr and Stone, 2009; Deng and others, 2010; Gahalaut and Gahalaut, 2010). Alternatively, the induced seismicity may trigger tectonic earthquakes on adjacent fault structures, as suggested by Keranen and others (2014). Participants at the workshop felt that the USGS induced seismicity models should consider the possibility of triggering large regional earthquakes and should consider the same maximum magnitude distribution as was used for the tectonic earthquakes in the NSHM model which has a mean of 7.0 but extends from M6.5 to M7.95 with low weights at the ends of the distribution. For the sensitivity study, we also considered a model with maximum magnitude of M6.0, close to that which we have observed. The uniform hazard maps
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U.S. Government (2015 Guide to Earthquakes from Fracking, Hydraulic Fracturing, and Shale Gas - Underground Wastewater Disposal, New USGS Report, Incorporating Induced Seismicity in Seismic Hazard Model)
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When I was drafted into the army in April 1984, I was a nineteen-year-old boy. The club where they took us was a distribution centre. Officers came there from various military units and picked out the soldiers they wanted. My fate was decided in one minute. A young officer came up to me and asked, “Do you want to serve in the commandos, the Blue Berets?” Of course I agreed. Two hours later I was on a plane to Uzbekistan (a Soviet republic in Central Asia), where our training base was located.
During the flight, I learned most of the soldiers from this base were sent to Afghanistan. I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t surprised. At that point I didn’t care anymore because I understood that it is impossible to change anything. ‘To serve in the Soviet army is the honourable duty of Soviet citizens” – as it’s written in our Constitution. And no one gives a damn whether you want to fulfil this “honourable duty” or not. But then I didn’t know anything about Afghanistan. Up until 1985, in the press and on television, they told us that Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan were planting trees and building schools and hospitals. And only a few knew that more and more cemeteries were being filled with the graves of eighteen- to twenty-year-old boys. Without the dates of their death, without inscriptions. Only their names on black stone …
At the base we were trained and taught to shoot. We were told that we were being sent to Afghanistan not to plant trees. And as to building schools, we simply wouldn’t have the time …
Three and a half months later, my plane was landing in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan … We were taken to a club on base. A few minutes later, officers started to come by and choose soldiers. Suddenly, an officer with a smiling face and sad eyes burst in noisily. He looked us over with an appraising glance and pointed his finger at me: “Ah ha! I see a minesweeper!” That’s how I became a minesweeper. Ten days later, I went on my first combat mission.
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Vladislav Tamarov (Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story)
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Supposedly troubled that women would no longer be treated as property, these man saw the hujum as another kind of expropriation, much like the land and water redistribution. One was quoted as saying that unveiling was merely an extension of Soviet land reform, since it aimed to seize the second, third, and fourth wives of bois and transfer them to the poor landless peasants who had to hire themselves out as field hands. (This was a common view, as many Uzbeks also saw the hujum as transferring women from male control to that of the state.)
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Douglas Northrop (Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia)
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OBIT FOR THE CREATOR OF MAD LIBS On Tuesday, in Canton, Connecticut, a town famous for the stickiness of its boogers, a stinky old man died of a good disease at his home at 345 Rotten Lane. Mr. Preston Wirtz, whose parents, Ida and Goober, ran a small jelly farm, died in his yellowish toilet. Mr. Wirtz was hated in Uzbekistan for the series of wordplay books he created for slippery children, books known far and wide as “Mad Libs,” beloved by hairy grumps and farty grampas alike. These books were never appreciated by tall elves, selling over two per year for one decade. When asked to describe Mr. Wirtz, his jealous wife, wearing nothing but an egg carton and flip-flops, called him “in a nutshell, the most sour-smelling, bacon-licking, pimple-footed crab-apple I have ever known. I will never always miss him and his broken underwear.” Then she cried herself to sleep in her fart-house.
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Bob Odenkirk (A Load of Hooey)
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In Lenin's view, such changes were positive: nations, as products of capitalist economic relations, fitted into classic Marxist stage theory of development. Even Stalin, who differed on the implications for Soviet policy, agreed that nations were an inescapable phase through which all humans communities must pass. Ultimately, they (like, capitalism) would be superseded, but for precapitalist societies national development and nationalist movements were treated as progressive. Lenin drew a further distinction between great-power nationalism, which oppressed others, and small-power nationalism, which formed in response o it. In places - such as Russia - that had been responsible for national and colonial oppression of others, nationalism was to be combated without mercy and torn out by the roots. Among groups that had been victims of national or colonial oppression, by contrast-such as in the tsarist imperial periphery, where Russian power had created deep economic, political, and social resentment-the Leninist approach was to build socialism while encouraging indigenous development and national differentiation.
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Douglas Northrop (Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia)
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Let me hit you with one other local legend, one that might seem particularly pertinent to the moment. Right next door to Turkmenistan is Uzbekistan, where, in 1940, Western scholars discovered the oral history of the Karakalpak people. They shared an epic, 20,000-line poem about a legendary group of warriors, called the Kirk Kuz, who would have been active in the early 1700s. There were forty of these warriors, and they were unparalleled in everything: horse-riding, marksmanship with a bow and arrow, throwing axes and knives, sword-fighting and every martial art imaginable. Strength, agility, cunning, nerves of steel—the DNA of these warriors had to be a double helix of sheer concentrated lethality. They repelled invading hordes and every man in every direction feared the ruthless, silent efficiency of the Kirk Kuz warriors. What makes the Kirk Kuz different is that they were all women, yet another group that may have inspired the legend of the Amazons. They only left their sisters in death or marriage.
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Jim Geraghty (Between Two Scorpions (The CIA’s Dangerous Clique #1))
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In the aftermath of the Iraq war, U.S. bases had been extended to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan in the former Soviet domain, and to Afghanistan. From its military position in Afghanistan, U.S. forces could control most of South Asia. Pakistan was dependent on U.S. military pressure. The entire Gulf was now a U.S. military protectorate. With the military control secure in the wake of the Iraq war, one by one the energy dominoes around the world began to fall, with a hefty push from Washington.
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F. William Engdahl (A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order)
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Although Allan had thought he was allergic to lamb his whole life (because he must have tasted mutton in Uzbekistan as a child), Jeane and I told him it was beef, and he adored it.
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Joan Nathan (My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories: A Cookbook)
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Nearly half the Turkmens in central Asia live outside of Turkmenistan, many of them in Afghanistan and Iran. there are more Tajiks in Afghanistan than in Tajikistan. In Samarkand and Bukhara, both in Uzbekistan, the main language is Tajik. The Uzbeks for their part, account for a sixth of the population of Kyrgyzstan and at least a fifth of the population of Tajikistan.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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The Soviet cartographers did not have an easy task of creating order out of the Central Asian patchwork of different peoples, languages and clans. Until 1924, the Russians treated Central Asia as one big region which they called Turkestan - the land of the Turks - as most people who lived there spoke Turkic languages.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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People did often not know which nationality they were. In the 1926 consensus, people could name their tribe and family, but could not always answer if they were Uzbek, Kyrgyz or Tajik.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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in order to discourage people from missing the annual communal work fest, the border to Uzbekistan is closed to everyone except foreigners. Every autumn. hundreds of thousands of doctors, teachers, nurses, bureaucrats and other public sector employees, as well as students, are called on to pick cotton - an old tradition from Soviet times that has been maintained; the only difference being that in the Soviet Union, the majority of the harvesting was done by machine, whereas now it is done by hand, as non one has troubled to maintain and repair the machines. As the flowering season is so short, the 1.4 million hectares of cotton have to be picked in the space of a few frantic weeks and many people have to sleep under the open sky or on cold, crammed floors. An impressive number of public sector employees and people from other affected groups used to take long family holidays to neighbouring countries during the cotton harvest, but a stop has been put to that now.
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Erika Fatland
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He shook his head and waved me on to his colleague, who was responsible for moral checks.
"Do you have any porn with you miss?" The customs officer looked at me with interest.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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There are very few lazy people in Uzbekistan now" he said. "I describe as lazy those who go to Moscow and sweep its streets and squares." - President of Uzbekistan
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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In 1941, a group of Soviet archeologists opened the grave to inspect Timur Lenk's remains. His coffin bore the following inscription: "When I rise from the dead the world shall tremble". It is said that they found another inscription inside the coffin: Whosoever opens my tomb shall unleash an army more terrible than I". Two days after the archeologists opened the tomb, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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the cotton-growing regions of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where so much water has been diverted from waterways to irrigate cotton fields that the fourth-largest lake in the world has almost vanished.
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Lauren Bravo (How To Break Up With Fast Fashion: A guilt-free guide to changing the way you shop – for good)
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India and Pakistan have nuclear bombs now and feel entirely justified in having them. Soon others will, too. Israel, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Nepal (I’m trying to be eclectic here), Denmark, Germany, Bhutan, Mexico, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Burma, Bosnia, Singapore, North Korea, Sweden, South Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan … and why not? Every country in the world has a special case to make. Everybody has borders and beliefs. And when all our larders are bursting with shiny bombs and our bellies are empty (deterrence is an exorbitant beast), we can trade bombs for food. And when nuclear technology goes on the market, when it gets truly competitive and prices fall, not just governments, but anybody who can afford it can have their own private arsenal—businessmen, terrorists, perhaps even the occasional rich writer (like myself). Our planet will bristle with beautiful missiles. There will be a new world order. The dictatorship of the pro-nuke elite. We can get our kicks by threatening each other. It’ll be like bungee jumping when you can’t rely on the bungee cord, or playing Russian roulette all day long. An additional perk will be the thrill of Not Knowing What to Believe. We can be victims of the predatory imagination of every green card–seeking charlatan who surfaces in the West with concocted stories of imminent missile attacks. We can delight at the prospect of being held to ransom by every petty troublemaker and rumormonger, the more the merrier if truth be told, anything for an excuse to make more bombs. So you see, even without a war, we have a lot to look forward to.
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Arundhati Roy (My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction)
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The Soviet cartographers did not have an easy task creating order out of the Central Asian patchwork of different peoples, languages and clans. Until 1924, the Russians treated Central Asia as one big region which they called Turkestan – Land of the Turks – as most people who lived there spoke Turkic languages. The Russians knew perfectly well that the people of Central Asia belonged to different clans and cultures, but saw no reason to complicate things further. It was difficult enough as it was. People often did not know which nationality they were. In the 1926 consensus, people could name their tribe and family, but could not always
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: A Journey Through Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan)
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Week-Day fairies show up in numerous folktales, and no summary of this idea would be complete without the Iranian / Central Asian Bibi Seshanbe (literally, “Queen of Tuesday”). In the deeply Islamic country of Uzbekistan, in Central Asia, she appears as one of the popular female “Saints” whom women can turn to for aid.
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T. D. Kokoszka (Bogowie: A Study of Eastern Europe's Ancient Gods)
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The kingdom’s territory covered parts of modern-day Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Iran,
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Henry Freeman (Genghis Khan: A Life From Beginning to End (History of Mongolia))
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Hussar could wear it on parade. No medals, although the cut and, when she got closer, cloth were such that it could easily support a few decorative diamonds on a neat diagonal across her chest – no one would find them out of place. Either it was high fashion or it had been stolen from the daughter-in-law of some Eastern European dictator who had spent her youth watching old war movies. Brunetti knew that if he were to compliment it, she would look down, flick at it with the back of her fingers, and ask, ‘You mean this?’ After she’d taken a seat, Brunetti asked, anyway, ‘Where’d you get the jacket?’ thinking that Chiara would run mad to have one like it. ‘What? This thing?’ Griffoni never disappointed him. ‘Yes.’ ‘It’s something a cousin of mine picked up in a thrift store.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Tashkent, I think,’ she said seriously. ‘Anyway, someplace where there had been a recent change of government.’ ‘Then it wasn’t Uzbekistan,’ Brunetti said neutrally, adding, ‘How may I help?
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Donna Leon (So Shall You Reap (Commissario Brunetti #32))
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In every conflict of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, more lives were lost to disease than to battlefield injuries. The nineteenth century saw two flu pandemics. The first, which erupted in 1830, is said to have ranked in severity–though not in scale–with the Spanish flu. The second, the so-called ‘Russian’ flu that began in 1889, was thought to have originated in Bokhara in Uzbekistan. It was the first to be measured, at least to some extent, since by then scientists had discovered what a powerful weapon statistics could be in the fight against disease.
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Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
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Nie do wiary, ale dzięki oddanym współpracownikom Wawiłowa jego bank nasion przetrwał ponad dwadzieścia osiem miesięcy oblężenia Leningradu. Władze nie zatroszczyły się o zabezpieczenie dwustu pięćdziesięciu tysięcy nasion, jednak pracownicy Instytutu zajęli się tą sprawą. Wyselekcjonowane nasiona przenieśli do dużej skrzyni i ukryli w piwnicy, gdzie na zmianę trzymali straż. Ani jeden z pilnujących nie uległ pokusie zjedzenia nasion, chociaż dziewięciu z nich zmarło z głodu przed zakończeniem oblężenia w 1944 roku.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: A Journey Through Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan)
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Saipov studied accounting in Uzbekistan. Then he got a U.S. green card and his life fell apart.
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The Wall Street Journal
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Overall, the Social Progress Index ranks the United States number 26 in well-being of citizens, behind all the other members of the G7 as well as significantly poorer countries like Portugal and Slovenia, and America is one of just a handful of countries that have fallen backward. “Despite spending more on healthcare than any other country in the world, the US has health outcomes comparable to Ecuador, while the US school system is producing results on par with Uzbekistan,” the 2018 Social Progress Index concluded.
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Nicholas D. Kristof (Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope)
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He began his tenure proclaiming that he would make Uzbekistan great again and plastered his catchphrase, “Uzbekistan—a future great state!,” on ubiquitous signs.1 He called independent media “the enemy of the people” and hid information about national crises from the public.2 He persecuted political opponents, LGBT citizens, pious Muslims, and other marginalized groups.3 He had an intense yet strange relationship with Russia. And he had a glamorous fashionista daughter who kept inserting herself into political affairs despite her utter lack of qualifications …
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Sarah Kendzior (Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America)
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W gruncie rzeczy nie wyobrażam sobie lepszej ilustracji szczytu melancholii niż pesymista czytający Schopenhauera w Pamirze.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: A Journey Through Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan)
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(...) a kiedy się śmiał, czynił to na ten lekko zrezygnowany, ironiczny sposób, który przyswoili sobie obrońcy praw człowieka na całym świecie.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: A Journey Through Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan)
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(Kleptocracy literally means “rule by thieves.”) Kleptocracy usually goes hand in hand with autocracy—a system of government in which one ruler holds absolute control—and Karimov was no exception. He began his tenure proclaiming that he would make Uzbekistan great again and plastered his catchphrase, “Uzbekistan—a future great state!,” on ubiquitous signs.1 He called independent media “the enemy of the people” and hid information about national crises from the public.2 He persecuted political opponents, LGBT citizens, pious Muslims, and other marginalized groups.3 He had an intense yet strange relationship with Russia. And he had a glamorous fashionista daughter who kept inserting herself into political affairs despite her utter lack of qualifications …4 You may see where I’m going here.
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Sarah Kendzior (Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America)
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They flew over the village in helicopters with banners warning that there would be an explosion at eleven o'clock .
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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As it is sufficient in Sunni Islam for a man to repeat Talaq, the word for divorce, three times for a couple to be divorced, many Tajik women have received the following text message from their husbands in Russia: 'Talaq, Talaq, Talaq'. In 2011, the Council of Ulema in Tajikistan banned divorce by mobile telephone.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)
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Ala kachuu, 'snatch and run', is what the tradition of bride kidnapping is called in Kyrgyz… around one third of all marriages in Kyrgyzstan occur in this way… thirty per day. More than ninety percent of these wives stay with their kidnapper.
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Erika Fatland (Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan)