From Russia with Love; Discern this?

RantWoman has been sitting with very heterogenous reading habits and with discernment about what is and is not working in many pieces of her life.

RantWoman notes the 30th anniversary of her grad school study abroad semester in what was still Leningrad,  the Soviet Union.and is now St Petersburg Russia

RantWoman also notes the 20th anniversary of the protests against the WTO ministerial in Seattle.


RantWoman notes video of idealistic young Russians committed to having opposition candidates in upcoming local elections. These activists sit by the Russian flag and reading the Russian constitution aloud--until police start just pounding on them with clubs.

RantWoman notes the latest email from Friends House Moscow which by request she does NOT repost. Sorry. Google it. Sign up yourself..

ONE path of discernment has to do with RantWoman's academic background in Russian literature and Russian area studies: RantWoman has a master's degree. Should she weigh a call to teach at say a community college?

Never mind. Detailed Discernment is more than RantWoman should attempt at this hour.

Instead RantWoman will celebrate Johan Maurer, one of RantWoman's favorite Quakers with serious Russia connections. Here is Johan's most recent blog post with typical for Johan mix of reflections on world events, local life wherever he is, and music links.

https://blog.canyoubelieve.me/2019/09/at-zoo.html

It is of course redundant to include links already in the post above but RantWoman is going to do it anyway.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/07/03/the-paradox-of-american-russophobia-a66241


And another thing: give us this day our daily blindness tourism. Screen reading sucks sometimes. RantWoman has never figured out what international version of JAWS it would take to read Russian. RantWoman has not gotten fluent enough in NVDA to test its rumored capacity to switch back and forth between languages more easily than JAWS does. So when RantWoman tried to read this article, two sad things happened:
--JAWS just skipped over all the Russian words.

--There was some kind of ad covering up big chunks of content so even though RantWoman has screen enlargement sufficient to read the words, the website made this impossible.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/09/04/how-low-can-you-go-in-russian-a67141