These guys are just incredible… They usualy give an impromptu performance on Prešeren square in Ljubljana and if you’re lucky you might catch them on a Saturday morning, drawing crowds of people coming from and going to the Central Market. The only problem is that noone knows when they’ll give the next performance. I suspect they don’t either 😀
But if you happen to catch their show, remember… They are The Poušters 🙂
Directed and produced by Pengovsky, of course
A raw map of Liberation day hike route – click image to enlarge – and see below for details
Good morning, comrades! 😀
As you know, the hike around Ljubljana with Pengovsky on 12 May is now officially on and as promised, I’m posting more details about the event and on how to sign up.
SIGN UP
Well, that’s easy… You can find my email on the about page, so just drop me a line confirming you’ll be there, but please include the following: Your name (if you’re a blogger, a link to your blog as well) and your mobile phone number, so I’ll be able to contact you in case of an emergency. You’ll receive a confirmation and my phone number in return.
DEADLINE
The deadline for signing up is Sunday, 6 May (inclusive).
START
I propose we start the hike at 0700 hours. This is not a given, as I expect fierce opposition by some late risers and I also imagine that those of you who are not living in Ljubljana might have a bit of a problem making it this early. Any thoughts on this, Jean? 😀
In any case, there will be a 20-30 minute window for you to make it to the start of the hike.
So time of departure is yet to be comfirmed, provisionally it is set at 7. AM, but bear in mind that the checkpoints close at 1700 hours, so we cannot start much later.
WHAT DO YOU NEED I.
A hat or a cap. You don’t want to get a sunstroke. A spare pair of socks. Better yet, make that two. Band-aids or similar for blisters. Good sneakeres or hiking boots. This is a seven-hour hike. True, it’s mostly flat terrain, but belive you me it can be a real killer if you can’t take care of your feet. Oh, and terrain is mostly sand and rubble with some concrete.
WHAT DO YOU NEED II.
Liquid. And plenty of it. You yourself know how much will you need, but do pack some extra just to be on the safe side.
Chocolate or something similar to replenish your energy.
Some fruit might be in order (apples) and an odd sandwich. But don’t expect to eat too much along the way. This is not a picnic, but a hike to comemorate liberation of Ljubljana 😀
WEATHER
As I said in my first post on the issue, I’ll do it regardles of the weather. If it goes bad I don’t expect anyone to actually come. But if you decide to come nevertheless, I’d be thrilled.
Oh, and just so there is no misunderstanding: “weather going bad” in this case means “heavy rain and worse being forecasted”. If you bail out due to “sporadic showers” forecast, I’ll think of you as a pussy (only kidding, the decision if of course yours to make).
CANCELATIONS
Obviously you can cancel by just failing to show up. But I’d hate that. So if you think of canceling, please do so via email until noon on Friday, 11 May.
LOCATION
We’ll start the hike at “Agrotehnika Gruda”, which is just across the street of the final bus stop of line No. 6, direction Dolgi Most, (not Črnuče). See this Google map for more details:
Click image to see Google map with directions
We will then proceed in a counter clock-wise manner, finishing where we started approximately seven hours later.
MISCELLANEOUS
It is strongly advised that you bring any war-time, easy-to-carry paraphranelia, if possible of course. Most likely candidates are partisan caps or hats, things with red stars, old socialist flags etc, etc… They will not make you walk any faster, but you might get a curious and approving smile or two along the way 😀
Peter Jančič, Editor-in-Chief of Delo daily became an object of an elaborate prank. Namely, Delo’s automatic answering system has a nice feature, where you can apparently type in the initials of a person and your call is then transferred to his or her extension. As far as I get it, if you punch in “PJAN”, you ought to get through to newspaper’s current editor in chief. But before you do get through the system tells you the name you punched in and asks for confirmation. Or so they tought…
You have reached Satan…
For those of you, who don’t understand Slovene: in the last section, when the person placing the call types in numbers 75266 (PJAN), the system is suppose to respond by “you requested Peter Jančič”, but instead it responds by “you requested Satan!”. Why is that, I hear you asking…
Jančič was named Delo’s editor in chief shortly after Danilo Slivnik became the newspaper’s CEO in a switch which more or less exactly failed to please the eye, as it was obviously aimed at making the largest daily “government-friendly” in a new political eviroment with Janez Janša as PM.
Despite his repeated attempts at asserting himself as being worthy of his post, Jančič is widely perceived as a straw-man, with Slivnik effectivelly running and editing the newspaper, so Jančič (once a respected journalist and columnist for Večer daily) became tha laughing-stock of Slovene journalism. The atmosphere at Delo, however is poisonous at the moment. Given this and Jančič’s less-then-adequate performance, it is little wonder Delo’s quality is dropping rapidly
Winston, among other things, provided some good quotes on democracy, like “it’s a bad system, but the best we’ve discovered so far”
Again, our resident translator is responsible for some (self)reflection on my part. Yesterday, I promised to post
Pengovsky’s First (And Only) Law on Democracy:
In a democracy, noone is requrired to believe anything or anybody
Naturally, there is also an Addendum to Pengovsky’s Law:
The said goes for the above law as well
Obviously this statement is entirely unscientific, especially since the statement invokes itself for confirmaton (sort of a continous loop), which is exactly something you would expect from a political scientist like myself. 😀
Freedom (liberty, if you will) seems to be at the centre of modern liberal democracies (liberal democracy being a sub-system with a set of values prevalent in Euro-American types of democracy, not necesarily a country with liberal democratic government). There are two main types of freedom: freedom from (say, being harmed) and freedom to (say, speak freely)
On another level, freedoms are excercised against two players: The State (government) and other private individuals. Both are tricky. Due to the ancient right of limiting one’s freedom with another man’s freedom, an instutition must be empowered to judge where individuals’ freedoms collide and whose freedoms take precedence, and even enforce its rulling if necesary. Thus the modern State came about. And since even the state’s powers must be curbed, the division of power between judicial, legislative and legislative branch was eventually developed (but more on that some other time).
Freedoms in different planes
But at the core of every system, even a democratic one, is a set of beliefs. In this case, a belief that rights and freedoms can be excercised, regardless of everything. But what I like about a concept of a democracy is the fact that you don’t have to believe. You can choose to. Thus you are free from compulsory believing and are at the same time free to believe.
The first Slovene government had 27 ministers. Today there are fourteen. (source)
On Sunday, April 8th Slovenia “celebrated” 17th anniversary of the first democratic elections in it’s modern history. Thankfully there was no real celebration – but you can put that down to the fact that most people celebrated Easter anyhow.
The elections were “general” – meaning that voters chose both the members of the Parliament as well as members of the Presidency. At the time Slovenia had a radically different political system in place. The Parliament (officially: The Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia) was a three chamber body which consisted of the Chamber of Municipalities, Chamber of Work(ers) and Societal-Political Chamber (the translation is a bit awkward, I know). The latter was deemed the most important, although the three chambers were equal in power.
There were numerous parties running in the elections, some were trully exoctic, such as Party of Beer Lovers, Society of Mushroom Pickers and even a gay club. As everyone expected, the oppositon DEMOS coalition won, but it got only 54 percent of the vote in stark contrast with other countries where socialism collapsed and where the opposition basically wiped out the rulling Communist party. Even more – on a party by party count, the League of Communists got the most votes. Surprises did not stop there, though.
An agreement was reached within DEMOS, the party wchih got the most votes within the coalition would name the Prime Minister and everyone thought the victory of Slovene Democratic Union was a foregone conclusion. Everyone but the voters, that its, who gave the most votes within the DEMOS coalition to Christian-Democratic Party, thus making a little known geographer Lojze Peterle the president of the first Slovene democraticly elected government (which at the time went by the name of Executive Council)
At the time Slovenia had a collective presidency, which consisted of the President and of four members, each of whom was equally empowered to run the presidency in case of President’s absence. The main contenders for the President of the Presidency were Milan Kučan, who had just resigned as the President of the League of Communists and the late Jože Pučnik, the leader of DEMOS.
Kučan won after the second round of elections, delivering a major overall blow to the opposition, which based it’s campaign mostly on anti-communism.
Thus the political field was divided between left- and right-wing options. It is generally agreed that the voters (knowingly or otherwise) balanced the field by giving actual power to the right-wing opposition, but accepting the positive role of the League of Communists, which had brought about changes in the constitution just a year before, enabling a relatively smooth transition from a single-party to a multi-party system, and – most of all – the voters recognized the fact that the “old structures” were willing to relinquish the power, thus being radically different from the likes of Ceausescu
In 1990 the Organisation of Socialist Youth, which was the main force of change within the socialist system, got a handsome amount of votes. This party was then renamed to Liberal Democrats and went on to become Slovenia’s most powerful party for more than a decade, from 1992 to 2004.
The Assembly, the Executive Council and the Presidency were primarily charged with holding a referendum on independece, declaring and sustaining the independence (an armed conflict was always considered a likely option), securing international recognition and passing a new constitiution, which established a proper parlimamentary democracy.
In retrospect, the mandate was fulfilled on all counts. The fact that it was all achieved in little more than two years is frankly astonishing, but at the time noone had the time to stop and think about it, because events were literally overtaking one another. This famous chapter of Slovene history started unfolding after DEMOS dissolved due to internal bickering (as their primary goal – independence – was achieved), Lojze Peterle was replaced by Janez Drnovšek as PM, a new Constitution was passed and another general elections were held, this time to the office of The President of the Republic, and to the National Assembly and the National Council. I covered the relations between the three in more detail here.
From today’s perspective, those were the glory days, when men were real men, women were real women, history was in abundance and the air had a smell of good, glorious and important things. In short: Slovenia’s democratic defloration ended with a multiple orgasm. Was that really as good as it gets?
The hike around Ljubljana on May 12th is now officialy on! So pack a spare pair of socks, clean up your sneakers or hiking boots, run out to buy a couple of bottles of water, a chocolate bar and some bateries for your camera.
Details will be forthcoming some time next week – no later than next Saturday. In the mean time, applications are welcome!
For those of you who have missed it: a follow-up on this post…
It’s the same scenario all over again…
The Po-lice have concluded that it was two junkies who stole the two laptops belonging to the Movement for Justice and development. Even more, they apparently already recovered both laptops.
Convenient, isn’t it? I’d almost believe it if I hadn’t seen that particular scenario unravel five years ago – different target, different cirumstances, but the same M.O.
The Prez has already retorted. Just a quick translation of two most important paragraphs of his latest blog entry:
Bad people can never find their inner peace. They’re alway driven by wanting more for themselves. They toss and turn but can never achieve fulfilment and inner peace. They cannot achieve that not by means of position nor money. They’re alway worried, restless, affraid of losing what they’ve got. Worries, fear, anger, jelaousy, greed and vanity create negative energy, which is the opposite of good energy, as bad is the opposite of good
(…)
Poor bad guys are so afraid of losing their positions, power and glory. They are so attached to them. Their fear of losing these things makes them vunerable. They are petty as material beings, but they neither know or understand anything else. And that which they don’t understand begins beyond their awarenes, it begins where all good beings. And that is where peace begins, peace which they will never know.
Dear bad guys! Your mud will turn to gold. Once things become bad enough, changes occur. And you’ve made things bad enough.
(complete post here, only in Slovene)
The Prez has signed the post with his full name Janez Drnovšek for the very first time. Until now he signed his posts merely by Janez D. The different signature seems to imply that the President is much more serious about it this time around.
And on a related issue: According to Dnevnik daily, an unauthorised entry by PM’s advisor compromised SOVA’s safe house in Ljubljana. While SOVA denies the claim, the paper goes on to say that as a result an entire network of operatives was cut loose, fearing their cover was blown.
So much for national security… Any chance we can rent Dick Cheney for 10 days? I promise we’d give him back… Oh shit… I forgot… He had his advisor blow the cover of a CIA agent for political purposes… Oops 😳
I wonder if Janša and Cheney are sharing notes…
