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Just last November I was in Georgia visiting Stalin's Museum/his command train carriage/etc. His romantic poet good looks as a young chap fresh out of priestly training (commented upon recently by Julia Baird - she was not wrong - and definitely better-looking than that other chap here in Australia with the wide ears - also fresh out of priestly training who ended up in politics and maintained that lengthy silence in front of a journalist once. Naturally the Museum has a fairly nuanced explanation of the Steely one's history - it supports a reasonably important tourist industry to the town. In Berlin and in Munich earlier last year street tour guides pointed out places associated with Adolf H - things unremarked in Munich when we were living there in 1977 (too close?) But the hypnotic dreadfulness of TV Trump shifting blame for his incompetence right left and centre. Sacking to-day/re-instating to-morrow! That country is exposed in all its cruelties and dysfunctionality now for the entire world to see. How Australia can continue to maintain diplomatic relations with the US totally confounds me.

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Fun fact and a weird not-such-coincidence, one of Stalin's chefs, presumably the guys who prepared the aforementioned mutton anus soup, was Vlad Putin's own grandpa Spiridon.

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