The court is back in session in the matter of the worst child abuse and sexual torture case in the history of the Czech Republic. Six defendants are charged with several crimes and almost all of them might end up in jail for twelve years. The torture practices included cutting out a piece of flash of one of the victims’ buttocks.

On Thursday several interesting witnesses appeared in court. One of them was an employee of an asylum home for children were taken after they had been discovered in the “dark hole”. She testified that the boys had scars on their backs, or when they ate they said they didn’t even know some food, like apple pies.

The boys’ grandfather said he had been meeting his grandsons regularly until one day his daughter cut him off and he could no longer see them, and she claimed she had to re-educate them.

It is obvious that this destructive behavior of sect members affected everybody. One of the witnesses is a well-known theater actor from Brno whose little daughter’s DNA sample was taken by one of the defendants so it could be swapped with that of another defendants who had to pose as a little girl on several occasions. The actor said he had no idea…

What kind of a father are you, you idiot…

…to be updated…

Quote of the day:

If I had a woman like her, I would start a small country and put her face on stamps, so that I could lick the back of her head.
– Alan Harper, Two and a Half Men

AND, I add, I would become the president and I would make her my spokeswoman.

Sometimes you never realize how important some thing is until you really need it. Czechs in the 21st century living in villages or smaller towns know.

Example: a bank operates an ATM in a small town. According to a cost and profit calculation, the machine is not making profit. And the bank is losing money. It demands that over 200 withdrawals a month be made, otherwise the municipality that ordered the installation would have to compensate the charges. So the bank decides to shut it off, making locals and summer-season tourists having to travel 20 kilometers to the nearest one.

Similarly, not so long ago municipalities would fight with the landline phone company. There is only one in the country, having monopoly, so in a village with population under 1,000 those three grandmas making two-minute calls a week was not enough to keep a public payphone there. And villages that are so small would not have enough money to compensate the costs either.

I must say I haven’t heard of a similar case for a while. Must be because now there are more active cell phones than people (!!!) and even the careful grandmas realized it is better to be in permanent contact with families and if something happens to them it is easy to call an ambulance from a cell phone.

I know a 90 year-old lady who still goes picking mushrooms in the forest and her neighbors know it. So if she gets missing, the rescuers can always track her by her cell phone signal… It happens over here all the time.

Forty years ago, in August 1968, Warsaw Pact armies, especially the Soviet Red Army invaded then Czechoslovakia in order to halt Prague Spring reforms. The occupation lasted for many years and the last Russian soldier left the county in 1990.

Eighteen years later it becomes apparent that some vehicles have not been scrapped. I managed to find some.

Some of them are parked in the town of Olomouc. In an old Czech Army compound…

As you can see on a detail, the Russian signs are still visible! After eighteen years. I do speak some Russian but I can not seem to decode that sign:

The entire facility is a mess and it is obvious that is is unkempt, unused and you can tell by looking if you walk around that the buildings are months from collapsing.

… as you can see on this Maps.cz satellite image…

It is obvious that the Czech Army’s idea of good management is non existent. The facility is guarded by unarmed private security agency employees. There are no MP’s, no sentry towers, just old barbed wire.

So in other words, this is not a wall of an old house where an old Russian slogan would remain for years. This is a facility that a NATO-member military institution shall have done something about years ago.

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UPDATE JULY 22: Walking around the fence, you can see another row of tanks, these are most definitely Czech. But as for the aforementioned mess that the Czech Army is known for, notice the blue barrel ON THE ROOF on the right-hand side…

And since there are no “Do Not Enter” signs, and since there are some big holes in the fence slash wall, I will try to get closer on Saturday…

Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 and they stayed until 1990.

Eighteen years later — some armored vehicles, train cars and other vehicles still have been stationed in rusty military (Czech Army?) compounds, guarded by private security agencies, paid from the taxpayers’ money!!

I managed to take a few photos of such a compound. There are some vehicles with Russian signs on them, such that the Red Army had used.

I will post them with more details on Sunday evening (GMT +2) after I crop them in PhotoShop.

UPDATE: WordPress photo storage system is/was down on Sunday afternoon/evening, so the update will be completed as soon as they get it fixed…

If there is anything about politics that I don’t quite understand, it is the way EU funds work. From what I have heard so far, cities, towns, villages, municipalities, firms, businesses…. GET money from them all the time.

A small Czech village needs a water treatment facility. And bang, all of a sudden the money somehow appears out of nowhere and they can start building so that almost totally clean water comes out of it to a nearby river.

The City of Brno will get close to 100 million CZK for park renovation. Old dead bushes will disappear, there will be new trees, new paths, new lawns and who knows, maybe a new pétanque spot. And the second largest Czech city which of course has more money than a small village will get the money from EU funds.

And so one has to wonder how come officials and other EU bureaucrats managed to find this money and why they gave it to a prosperous city, when there must be hundreds of smaller municipalities all over Europe, especially in Bulgaria or Romania, where they need much more important…necessities. Like public plumbing networks, for instance.

If Senator McCain wins the White House chase, he is going to need a new map, or at least a team of advisers for European matters.

During the last two days he referred to the Czech Republic as “Czechoslovakia”, the iDNES.cz news server wrote.

Czechoslovakia ceased to exist in 1993.

Apparently he made the same mistake a few months ago during one of his campaign meetings…

Hmmm. It is like me saying that Alaska still belongs to Russia. Obviously, McCain did not stick to the rule “if I don’t know what I am talking about I should not talk at all”.

But hey, Bush seems to have “geography issues” as well. The DubyaSpeak.com files speak for themselves…

Good evening, says your news anchor and she starts taking her clothes off.

Yes, the most popular Czech TV station, TV Nova, offers naked news on its news website.

And by linking it I am in fact promoting it, despite the fact I think it is totally demented. Whoever invented the link between an evening news program and nudity must have had a weird sense of humor.

And the viewers: name one good reason why anyone needs to be told the most important news of the day and to stare at bouncing tits at the same time? I think it would be better not to watch the news at all and find some regular porn instead. At least regular porn is not kidding anyone, And the viewers are not kidding themselves

Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek said a few months ago that he would not attend any ceremony of the upcoming Olympic Games in China, thus letting the Chinese know what he thinks about their idea of human rights protection.

Now he says he WILL go. On August 13, to support Czech athletes.

I am not convinced that athletes need that. They DO represent the country, but let’s not kid ourselves, they are also in it for the money. They get huge bonuses for their medals. A word of support from the PM? I think they do not give a damn. Saying thanks afterwards to those who win some medals, that sounds okay. But cheering for them in China, that sounds rather like an exclusive trip that Czech taxpayers will pay for.

Sure, many politicians do it. But that does not make it normal or generally acceptable.

Thousands of Czech mothers/parents have to face a huge problem in July and August: what to do with their kindergarten-aged children.

In the Czech Republic, kindergartens are administered by municipalities and therefore are on a very tight budget.

Plus, as the number of kindergarten teachers is limited by the amount of funds, most teachers can not take many days off during the school year. And since they are all entitled to twenty to twenty-five days of paid vacation, the only month when they can go on holidays in August. So, almost ALL kindergartens are closed in August, and there is usually only one kindergarten per village/town/city borough that remains open.

Of course, private kindergarten owners step in, but one week might cost even CZK 6,000 (over $400) which is too much for most “average families”.

And so, most mothers must “waste” many days of their paid vacation just to stay home with their children…

It has been repeated by many institutions for years that the social welfare authorities did not handle the situation well when they found out that the number of children is increasing as people born in 1970’s are now “having kids”. Years ago the number of newborns was on decline so municipalities started to close down or merge nurseries and kindergartens. They did it really fast. Now they should open new ones at the same speed. But they have been failing to do so.