From an anecdote, “It’s simpler Muller, you forgot to fasten your fly.” . .
The proletariat dictator seriously thought that he was a dictator and did not work, but drank. . .
I drank what I gave away my Fatherland to the Alcoholic for a bottle

Original taken from vvdom c Because there was no nail in the forge...

About a small but main reason for the bankruptcy of a great country

The Soviet Union collapsed due to the betrayal of the then elite. Now it's already indisputable fact. But there is no need to look for CIA, Mossad or MI6 agents among the party and Soviet leadership of those years. No external enemy did not do more for the collapse of the USSR than those people who stood on the podium of the Mausoleum on November 7 and May 1. Through their efforts proletarian state first it became ideologically and spiritually bankrupt, and only then the end of 1991 brought the final line under its agony.

But it all started much earlier, as evidenced by the very revealing history of the early 1970s. Soviet people remember her with aspiration...

At that time, the future ideologist of the CPSU Mikhail Zimyanin occupied the position of editor-in-chief of Pravda, the main print organ of the Communist Party and the entire Soviet Union. Once he organized the arrival of a delegation to the USSR fellow fighters from the Italian communist newspaper Unita. As the final chord of her study of the achievements of socialism, a meeting was held at the editorial office of Pravda.).

The honored guests were then invited to the editorial board, and Mikhail Zimyanin asked them to talk about their trip around our country. One of the Italians expressed the general opinion:
— We visited the Gardens of Eden...

What's wrong beautiful in this story, what gives reason to consider it an illustration of the betrayal of the Soviet elite?

The USSR of the 1970s, as those who are older have not yet forgotten, was a country of a total shortage of quality goods. Things have not yet reached empty store shelves, as in the late 1980s. But what was on them was not in demand, to put it mildly. This also applied to shoes - even for Czech and Yugoslav products there was a real hunt, and the provinces did not receive such imports at all, going to regional special distributors. And now the party boss, propagating Leninist modesty and Bolshevik asceticism from the pages of his newspaper, flaunts custom-made Italian boots, paid for in foreign currency. And in front of the entire editorial board.

Trifle? Yes, but very revealing. Showing the colossal gap between the party's word and real deeds. It was this abyss that ultimately made the collapse of the USSR so easy and quick - people are not blind or stupid either...

Further, the editor-in-chief of Pravda talks about his partisan past as the legal basis for his right to exclusive footwear. But at the same time they were alive millions front-line soldiers, whose legs, beaten by heavy military roads, needed special care no less. What about shoes? Thousands Veterans of the Patriotic War huddled in communal apartments, dilapidated huts and even barracks with amenities in the yard. By the way, the cost of a good Italian pair of shoes, made to order, was - in the price scale of that time - quite comparable to the price of a cooperative apartment.

Well third- O partisan paths in Belarusian forests. Mikhail Vasilyevich Zimyanin really had a relationship with the Belarusian partisans. As a member of the North-Western Operational Group of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus, this regional headquarters of the partisan movement of the Republic. And in Polesie his legs really appeared: “ In 1941 - one once, in 1942 - two, but in 1943 - already eight "(this was recorded, however, from the words of Mikhail Vasilyevich himself).

In the title photo, Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee M.V. Zimyanin stands behind General Secretary L.I. Brezhnev, to the right of Yu.V. Andropov, who is wearing a general’s jacket.

And now - like the cherry on the cake. From the same memories.

After the editorial board, I asked Mikhail Vasilyevich how he was not embarrassed to take off his shoe? He replied:
— When talking with people, truth is the most powerful argument.

Turn out the lights, as they say! However, why be surprised if by that time the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev himself already fervently believed that the fate of the country and victory in the Great War was predetermined by his party political work on Malaya Zemlya.

This was the Soviet elite of that time - deceitful, greedy, two-faced. Betrayed what lay at the deepest basis of the USSR: faith in the state equality and justice. However, compared to the current ministers and oligarchs, she looks almost like a saint. But only because the current ones - below the baseboard.

Looking at how our modern elites, year after year, day after day, persistently break through bottom and even bottom, sincerely believing in their titanic struggle to build Great Russia, I just want to ask: did the sad and bitter experience of their predecessors teach them nothing?

Great ones about poetry:

Poetry is like painting: some works will captivate you more if you look at them closely, and others if you move further away.

Small cutesy poems irritate the nerves more than the creaking of unoiled wheels.

The most valuable thing in life and in poetry is what has gone wrong.

Marina Tsvetaeva

Of all the arts, poetry is the most susceptible to the temptation to replace its own peculiar beauty with stolen splendors.

Humboldt V.

Poems are successful if they are created with spiritual clarity.

The writing of poetry is closer to worship than is usually believed.

If only you knew from what rubbish poems grow without shame... Like a dandelion on a fence, like burdocks and quinoa.

A. A. Akhmatova

Poetry is not only in verses: it is poured out everywhere, it is all around us. Look at these trees, at this sky - beauty and life emanate from everywhere, and where there is beauty and life, there is poetry.

I. S. Turgenev

For many people, writing poetry is a growing pain of the mind.

G. Lichtenberg

A beautiful verse is like a bow drawn through the sonorous fibers of our being. The poet makes our thoughts sing within us, not our own. By telling us about the woman he loves, he delightfully awakens in our souls our love and our sorrow. He's a magician. By understanding him, we become poets like him.

Where graceful poetry flows, there is no room for vanity.

Murasaki Shikibu

I turn to Russian versification. I think that over time we will turn to blank verse. There are too few rhymes in the Russian language. One calls the other. The flame inevitably drags the stone behind it. It is through feeling that art certainly emerges. Who is not tired of love and blood, difficult and wonderful, faithful and hypocritical, and so on.

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin

-...Are your poems good, tell me yourself?
- Monstrous! – Ivan suddenly said boldly and frankly.
- Do not write anymore! – the newcomer asked pleadingly.
- I promise and swear! - Ivan said solemnly...

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov. "Master and Margarita"

We all write poetry; poets differ from others only in that they write in their words.

John Fowles. "The French Lieutenant's Mistress"

Every poem is a veil stretched over the edges of a few words. These words shine like stars, and because of them the poem exists.

Alexander Alexandrovich Blok

Ancient poets, unlike modern ones, rarely wrote more than a dozen poems during their long lives. This is understandable: they were all excellent magicians and did not like to waste themselves on trifles. Therefore, behind every poetic work of those times there is certainly hidden an entire Universe, filled with miracles - often dangerous for those who carelessly awaken the dozing lines.

Max Fry. "Chatty Dead"

I gave one of my clumsy hippopotamuses this heavenly tail:...

Mayakovsky! Your poems do not warm, do not excite, do not infect!
- My poems are not a stove, not a sea, and not a plague!

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

Poems are our inner music, clothed in words, permeated with thin strings of meanings and dreams, and therefore, drive away the critics. They are just pathetic sippers of poetry. What can a critic say about the depths of your soul? Don't let his vulgar groping hands in there. Let poetry seem to him like an absurd moo, a chaotic pile-up of words. For us, this is a song of freedom from a boring mind, a glorious song sounding on the snow-white slopes of our amazing soul.

Boris Krieger. "A Thousand Lives"

Poems are the thrill of the heart, the excitement of the soul and tears. And tears are nothing more than pure poetry that has rejected the word.

There was no nail - the horseshoe was gone.
There was no horseshoe - the horse went lame.
The horse went lame - the commander was killed.
The cavalry is defeated - the army is fleeing.
The enemy enters the city, not sparing prisoners,
Because there was no nail in the forge

In my bash scripts I insert
#!/usr/bin/env bash set -euo pipefail

Option -e stops the script if the process did not return 0(and writes to stderr on which line the error is).

This prevents trouble if one of the commands in the list fails:
svn up build copy some files delete secret files deploy build to external server Option -u stops the script if used undefined variable. This prevents trouble for example in such cases:

tar -czf download.tarball.tar.gz "$PROJECT_DIR /bin"

If for some reason PROJECT_DIR is not defined, then the system /bin is packaged and sent to users, instead of the compiled project files. And there are less funny failures, turning rm -rf "$1/$2" into rm -rf "/" with erasing everything.

In combination with the previous option, typos in environment variables cease to be an unpredictable cascade-nail fireworks display. option -o pipefail Pipe execution fails if one of the subcomponents is executed with an error. For example,
cat file_that_doesn't_exist| iconv -f cp1251 -t UTF-8 > resulting file.

I explicitly ignore expected errors.
If I don't give a damn about the result of the command, I insert || true after it
cmd || true #"||" runs the second command if the first one returns non-zero. "||" you can read "otherwise".
If I delete a folder that may not exist, I explicitly check that it exists before deleting:
test -d dir_to_delete && rm -r dir_to_delete.
grep with empty output returns code 1, and error code 2 if there is a real error. I explicitly ignore codes less than 2:
cmd1 | (grep c || test $? -lt 2) | cmd2. #$? - return code, test A -lt B - comparison
I don't know how to conveniently check errors in cmd2 in code like this:
cmd1 $(cmd2). Tell?
I’m not an expert on “portable sh”, so if you use #!/bin/sh which is a link to ksh/dash/bash/some pseudo-POSIX, then you need to look in mana/google to see what options are available.
IN bat files programming reliably is difficult, and I don’t want to delve into cmd.exe carefully, I’m afraid for my psyche.
However, if I put a simple list of commands into a bat file, I put || at the end of each command. goto error or || exit /b 1 (or || pause if the script is interactive, always launched with the mouse).

Build || pause copy some files || pause delete secret files || pause deploy build to external server || pause

This technique allowed us to find stupid and cunning errors in the art update script for designers in the first two months of the project (otherwise we would have lived with them for two years).

I try not to write anything complicated in bat files; they are five times more insidious than C++, bash, assembler and perl combined.

If you do not make sure that each command in the chain works correctly,

The story is about the little things that make up victories and defeats in war.

Almost immediately after the outbreak of the First World War, the German light cruiser Magdeburg received orders to begin military operations against the Russians in the Baltic Sea. He begins to lay mines near Libau (Liepaja). Then he receives an order to move to the Gulf of Finland. And there he runs aground in the fog...

The destroyer V-26 and the cruiser Amazon are sent to rescue the cruiser, but the Russian cruisers Bogatyr and Pallada quickly approach Magdeburg. The Germans are trying to evacuate personnel under Russian fire, but panic begins. According to the regulations of the German Navy, it is required to burn the Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine (SKM) signal books in the firebox, but it turns out to be flooded with sea water. And books with codes are simply thrown overboard. The Russians send divers to find them and they find the books near the side of the ship along with other documents and the current encryption key. The ship's commander, Richard Habenicht, seeing the divers, understands that the signal books are in the hands of the Russians. But he is kept under heavy guard - to exclude the possibility of transmitting the news of the seizure of books to his homeland.

One of the three signal books captured is handed over to the British Admiralty, which plays a crucial role in breaking the German naval code. The British manage this book much smarter than the Russians. They create a special cryptographic department - Room 40. In this department they collect all the information about German codes.

In October 1914, the British also received the Handelsschiffsverkehrsbuch, which belonged to the German Navy. This is the code book used by German naval ships, merchant ships, airships and submarines: The Royal Australian Navy obtained a copy of this book from the German-Australian steamship Hobart.

On November 30, a British trawler nets and recovers a safe from the sunken German destroyer S-119, which contains Verkehrsbuch, a code used by the Germans to communicate with German attachés, embassies and warships abroad.

It should be added that back in 1911, the communications department of the Imperial Defense Committee concluded that in the event of war with Germany, German submarine communications must be destroyed. On the night of 3–4 August 1914, the cable ship Alert locates and cuts five German transatlantic cables that reach the English Channel. As a result, the number of messages transmitted by radio increases.

Magdeburg's signal books help break the German code. The encryption was a simple table of replacing one letter with another in all messages. The intercepted messages turned out to be intelligence reports about the location of allied ships. It was observed that such coded messages were transmitted on short wave and were not intercepted due to a lack of receivers. Shortwave transmissions were ordered to be monitored. The result was information about the movements of the German fleet.

British interception services begin experimenting with radio direction-finding equipment in early 1915. The first direction finding station was at Lowestoft, later stations were built at Lerwick, Aberdeen, York, Flamborough Head and Birhington, and by May 1915 the Admiralty could track German submarines crossing the North Sea. Some of these stations operated in the mode of collecting German messages, and a new section was created in Room 40 to determine the location of ships from decrypted messages.

Room 40 played an important role in several naval engagements during the war, particularly in detecting German activity in the North Sea, leading to the Battle of Dogger Bank (1915) and the Battle of Jutland (1916), when the British fleet was sent to intercept German ships.

Over its history, Room 40 staff have deciphered approximately 15,000 German messages. However, the most significant contribution was the deciphering of the Zimmermann Telegram, a message from the German Foreign Office transmitted in 1917 through Washington to the German ambassador to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt. In it, the Germans offered financial assistance to the Mexicans and promised that at the end of the war they would get back the territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona that they had lost. The telegram was transmitted to the United States and was published in print on March 1. In response, America went to war with Germany and quickly defeated it.

Sometimes you have to do strange things. Just now I listened to children's poems by English poets translated by S. Marshak and performed by Sergei Yursky. I came to the poem “The Nail and the Horseshoe.” Here it is, everyone knows it:
"There was no nail -
The horseshoe is missing
There was no horseshoe -
The horse went lame
The horse went lame -
The commander was killed
The cavalry is broken
The army is running!
The enemy is entering the city
Without sparing prisoners,
Because in the forge
There was no nail!"

And I remembered that this poem had a very specific historical basis. That's what they say, anyway. During the Battle of Vatrloo (1815), the French had every chance of winning. Moreover, they even confidently won it. The French cavalry under the command of Murat, having launched an attack that was breathtaking in its audacity and courage, captured the English batteries. The French began to gain the upper hand along the entire front. But the British threw back the cavalry, the battery resumed fire, the tide of the battle was turned, and Napoleon suffered a well-known defeat. After Waterloo, many wondered why the French, having captured the British battery, did not put it out of action. But everything turned out to be simple. In those days, to disable a gun, cavalrymen hammered an ordinary nail into the hole to ignite the gunpowder. Then they knocked off the cap - and that’s it, despite all the external intactness, the gun was not ready for combat. And everything would have been fine, but the cavalrymen really did not like to carry nails with them. An inconvenient thing in a mounted attack... Everyone tried to get rid of their nails, and, if necessary, ask for a dozen or two from their comrades. In the case of the English battery, everyone hoped, and at the decisive moment no one had nails. So the British got a completely combat-ready battery, which changed the course of the battle.
Like this. And you say “nails”...

Nail and horseshoe.
Read by S. Yursky.