You think your worst years define you.
Your brain just made that up.
We don't remember life as it was. We remember its loudest moments. And then we mistake those moments for the whole.
Russia spent the 1990s watching foreigners - Americans and Europeans - extract its wealth on their own terms - until Putin.
Under Yeltsin, Russia’s vast natural resources on Sakhalin were handed to foreign investors - literally, for pennies on the dollar. Production-sharing agreements gave foreign companies such as the American ExxonMobil or British Shell extraordinarily favorable terms: Russia received as little as 10 cents from every dollar of oil profits while investors enjoyed sweeping tax exemptions - even as ordinary people on the island froze in the cold.
Putin later called these deals “a colonial practice that had absolutely nothing to do with Russia’s interests,” and said the officials who signed them in the 1990s should have been jailed.
Immediately after taking power in 2000, Putin began dismantling the system. By 2004, 260 of 262 agreements had been terminated. The remaining projects were gradually returned to Russian control - Sakhalin-2 in 2006 and Sakhalin-1 in 2022.
Yet Western narratives still insist Yeltsin was the decolonizer.
Watch the video. This is what real decolonization looks like.
2009. Pikalyovo, Russia.
A steel mill town on its knees: three factories dark, wages unpaid, a community pushed to breaking point. Residents begged the authorities to act.
Then Putin arrived.
Locked alone in a solitary confinement cell, a man serving a long sentence for murder passed the endless hours with sudoku puzzles — until the day he noticed another inmate handing out little envelopes full of math problems. He asked for one. He solved it. He asked for another. And what happened next, from inside a prison cell with nothing but a pencil and paper, would astonish mathematicians on the other side of the world...
His name is Christopher Havens.
Let's be honest about how his story begins, because it matters. In 2010, Havens took a man's life in a drug-related shooting. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in a Washington state prison. He was in his late twenties, his life in ruins, and he struggled badly in his early days behind bars. After an altercation with another inmate, he was thrown into solitary confinement for about a year.
And it was there, in that isolation, that something completely unexpected happened.
To pass the crushing hours, Havens started doing sudoku. Then he noticed a fellow inmate passing around small envelopes stuffed with math problems, and asked if he could have one. He worked it out. Then he asked for another. And another.
Something about mathematics — its logic, its order, its quiet, unshakable truth — connected with Christopher Havens in a way that nothing in his life ever had before. He hadn't been a math student. He'd never chased the subject. But now, alone in a cell, it found him. And he threw himself into it completely, studying, by his own account, as much as ten hours a day.
He devoured every math book the prison library had — and then he ran out. So in 2013, Havens did something audacious. He sat down and wrote a letter to an academic mathematics publisher, asking how he might subscribe to a research journal, and whether any mathematician in the world would be willing to correspond with a prisoner about advanced mathematics.
Most letters like that go straight into the wastebasket. But this one found its way to a number theorist named Umberto Cerruti, a professor at the University of Torino in Italy.
Professor Cerruti was skeptical, to put it mildly. He assumed Havens was probably a "crank" — one of the many amateurs who fall in love with numbers and convince themselves they've discovered something. So, to test him, Cerruti mailed him a difficult problem to solve.
What came back in the mail stopped him cold.
Havens mailed back a strip of paper nearly four feet long — about 120 centimeters — covered in one single, enormous, handwritten formula. Cerruti, half-expecting nonsense, carefully typed the whole thing into his computer to check it. And to his astonishment, it was correct. Completely correct.
This was no crank. This was a genuine mathematical mind — one that had taught itself, alone, in a prison cell.
From that moment, a remarkable transatlantic collaboration was born, conducted entirely through handwritten letters crossing the ocean. Cerruti began sending Havens real material in number theory — one of the oldest branches of mathematics, with roots going back more than two thousand years to the ancient Greek Euclid. And here is the part that makes it truly extraordinary: the work was never dumbed down for him. Havens was handed genuine, unsolved research problems — the kind that challenge trained, professional mathematicians — and he worked through them with nothing but a pencil, paper, and the prison mail. No computer. No classroom. No professor down the hall.
The obstacles were constant. When Cerruti tried to send him math books, the prison blocked them, until Havens negotiated with the administration to let them through. With no computer to typeset his work, he taught himself LaTeX — the intricate coding language mathematicians use to format equations — entirely by hand, visualizing every symbol in his head and mailing pages of handwritten code to his collaborators.
#drthehistories
A man boarded a flight and discovered the stranger sitting next to him looked almost exactly like him.
Same ginger beard, same hair, same smile.
Their selfie went viral, and after landing, they discovered they were even staying at the same hotel. 😭
Бог вынес Себя и всё божественное за рамки сией человекчиской умении познавать и липить и пирилепливать то....
....Кабы вы точно поняли об чом кот говорит, для вас ба сие стало главным доказательствам существования Бога , Который не от мира сего , но без Которого нет мира .
"Кот вошол внутрь здании и погрёп по длинным прикрасным коридорам , наблюдая как хрукты -грешники с мишками грихоф ожыдают сваей очириди в главную приёмную жа"
Фчирась сию очиредь видала в ленте ютюбуса😺
Путин посетил Архангельский собор Московского Кремля. Президенту рассказали о реставрационных работах, в результате которых были обретены мощи Дмитрия Донского. Глава государства осмотрел захоронение и принял участие в молебне.
@katMotja Благодарю за постУ, прикрасный Котус -рыжотус! На котовых лапах усё намного луччи получаится пояснить то :)
(в древние времена читал у Евгения Трубецкого по этой теме, тяжко было ыхыхы, но он всё равно шыпка хороший)