You’ll laugh, but yesterday at a meeting of the Kirov Region Legislative Assembly’s ethics committee (!!), they literally put my personal case on trial. The initiators were deputies from United Russia (the most unrestrained faction among them). As one of the deputies told me, the guys hauled in a stack of printouts from LiveJournal (heh-heh-heh) and voluptuously complained to each other: - here he uses foul language, - here he’s slandering people, - here he’s mocking residents of Kirov, - and here he’s insulting the police. At first I wanted to put up a short post explaining exactly what I think of those deputies with their printouts. But then I realized: this is sabotage. In the heat of their frenzy, while denouncing all those idle blogger layabouts, they went after not just me but also blogger D. A. Medvedev (the one whose day job is being president). In the context of “people should be doing real work instead of fooling around on the internet.” Witnesses say the United Russia deputies went so far as to utter truly horrifying and unacceptable curses like, “all he does is type into his computer and want to change light bulbs—who’s supposed to do the actual work?” and even “modernization-schmodernization.” What is going on here? The president tells officials to “get into blogs and become the ringleaders of virtual discussions,” and Kirov’s United Russia is not only sabotaging the boss’s orders, but also mocking modernization itself. That’s not far from armed mutiny. Measures must be taken. P.S. And now a little message from me to the deputies of the Kirov Region Legislative Assembly: Be afraid. I’m a popular blogger. They read me in the Kremlin. High-ranking idle bureaucrats. They’ll read this post and punish you. For disobedience and for denying the Holocaust not believing in Modernization. They’ll make you live on a single salary.