Russian Should Be An Official Language In Latvia

If I was wavering on this issue before I am not anymore. Mrs. T and I have had to deal with official documents in the Latvian language only for twenty years now and generally speaking my wife and I were able to muddle through as the general meaning was something that Mrs. T could figure out on her own as languages are her thing (seriously, she speaks 5) and after years of effort and private lessons she now speaks Latvian. Pretty well by most peoples feedback but when it comes to contracts or official documents we still have to get everything translated at an agency to be sure as the stress tends to cause her to miss important things.

And since we are dealing with the police of late an absolute rock solid understanding of Latvian is of prime importance. There is never enough time to respond to a letter in the mail box in the time allowed if you have to take it to a translation service and who has the money for that nowadays anyway?

If you have read the previous post you will know that we are embroiled in a criminal investigation of myself with the Tukums police but that is just the tip of the iceberg regarding our life here. You get a letter in the mail on a Monday telling you that you need to be at the police headquarters for an interview by next Monday but that is all you can figure out and there is no time to get the letter translated. So you show up without your lawyer and discover that it is much more serious than the seemingly innocuous letter suggested. So you beg for time and get a lawyer and find out what is really going on and show up again when they have a translator available. 

When we set up our company all docs were in Lat/Russ/Eng and the same when you go to the bank plus everyone seems to speak English or Russian in normal society as that is the language of business (in Riga at least, home to 30% or more of the Latvian population). But how can the police service the 30%± of the population that does not speak adequate Latvian and all transactions are done in Latvian only? You are really at a disadvantage!

I used to think of this issue in political terms but now I understand why there are Russian enclaves here and why they will always be here. There is no other way to survive!

Right away in any type of dispute you are at a disadvantage as the whole system is bent towards the latvian speaking citizen. Not just Latvian as a second language but as a mother tongue, it is a very unforgiving situation.

Latvians should really consider taking such a large part of their population more seriously or there will never be peace and harmony here. You really need to reach out and make peace with a rather significant portion of your population.

Property Rights In Latvia And The Rule Of Law

So, I have been warning in previous posts that I had a story to tell as regards this subject and now our situation has progressed to the point where I feel compelled to begin the narrative. I fear this is just the beginning of many posts in our longstanding personal nightmare but regardless how it turns out I hope it stands as a warning to others about an unresolved situation that is still ongoing throughout the country as we speak and the result of not being fierce in ones response. All my heart and best wishes go out to all of you in similar circumstances who are not only not receiving help from officials but are in fact being victimized further by the very people who are supposed to be installing a civil society in Latvia, at the EU's expense. It's not all playgrounds for tiny tots and waste & water infrastructure you know! Drop me a line or point me to a group that will help us out with this matter. 

BACKGROUND:

My wife is a repatriate. Her mother and grandmother were born in a house in Tukums, Latvia but my wife was born in Moscow where her mother was forced to flee after she had her ancestral Tukums land and houses de-privatized by the government of the day. When the Soviet Union fell my wife had her Tukums land and houses made available for her and her relatives to reclaim but through a loophole in the law and the inability of my wife or her relatives to frequently travel back & forth from Moscow to Tukums to prevent the loss of some of this land, my wife and her relatives had a 851m2 centre portion (the house my wife's mother was born in!) taken over by a Latvian couple rendering the remaining larger property into the shape of a donut. A one hectare piece of land with fierce opportunists laying claim to 851m2 in the very centre. My wife and her relatives were compensated with 851m2 of low lying adjacent swamp land of poor quality.

One third of our property was unfenced wild swampland (especially the "compensated" land) along with an area of old orchard that the fierce opportunists in the centre 851m2 had attempted to lay claim, at first by offering to rent it from us and when rebuffed by simply using it without permission and against our directives to not trespass.

So at great expense we fenced all this land, cleared it, posted it as Private and continued to maintain it sometimes hiring local workers who were given access to our equipment but mostly by myself when I was in town. In spite of the greater security provided to the citizens residing in the centre of our property by this newly secured land at no cost to them the personal attacks continued not only on ourselves but on some of our elderly and timid renters with no relief being afforded by the Tukums Municipal Police or State Police who were actually complicit in what can only be described as state approved harassment through laziness. 

The situation eventually degenerated to the point where on September 3rd of this year I was forced to defend myself physically against the male occupant of the 851m2 plot who was flagrantly trespassing and interfering with a survey crew who we had been forced to hire to settle a longstanding and never-ending issue of property borders. They were entitled to 851m2 and any movement of one border would result in a corresponding movement of another border negating the entire process in order to maintain the original 851m2. Pure harassment. 

He attacked me when we attempted to verbally remove him from our land on which he was trespassing and interfering with our survey crew and the police were called. Ambulances were called because there was blood. And so....

I was advised by the police to go the hospital to get checked out and then to the police station to make a statement and to do it that very day. He apparently went to the hospital to get his head sewed up but declined to make a statement at the police station, or so we were told on that day. We were also told that if I wanted to make a criminal claim against this guy, which I surely wanted to do then we would both my wife and I have to stay in the country for six months. Since we were booked to fly to Italy in two days I waved my right to initiate criminal proceeding and off we went on our trip. In two weeks when we came back there was a letter from the Tukums Region State Police stating that criminal charges had been dropped since we had not pursued any action within the 10 days allowed which was pretty much what I expected. But on November 19 we received letters commanding us to return to the Tukums State Police office on November 26 as the instigator of this assault had decided to press his own criminal charges, or rather he had pressed criminal charges two days after the original assault and they were now being acted upon by the authorities, I never did get a straight answer on this. After being told that they wanted statements from both my wife and I separately we declined and told them that my lawyer would be in touch since I was a foreigner I was not comfortable with the action taking place. They were fine with that.

The inspector we have been dealing with has been a professional but someone above her is manipulating the situation where instead of me filing charges against a trespasser who assaulted me in front of witnesses I am now myself the subject of a criminal investigation. As a non-citizen I do not know what my rights are and I do not trust the Tukums Police.

update: I cleaned up the above text and edited it to resemble more closely what I told the lawyer and added the comment below to bring it all up to speed.

So today we acquired a lawyer and she seems to fit the bill. Tukums being a small town of 18,000 souls is basically one big group of relatives and she claims to know how to deal with such sleepy societies. She goes to the town tomorrow and I go to the hospital to get my records. This will move very fast so as to prevent it from moving to the prosecutors office.

What Makes Russians Happy?

Well, I found this some time ago that may answer the question.

But I haven't found anything about what makes Latvians happy! I wonder if it would be much different?

Burning The Latvian Flag

Or Trying to. Too much alcohol I suspect.

This video was in Diena.lv this morning and in the space of a few minutes I watched the comments climb from 12 to 43. Now about six hours later it has 304 views and 170 comments. If nothing else it is a pretty good example of why you shouldn't post yourself to the Internet while doing stupid things with your ugly face hanging out there for all to see.

The best comment that I came across this morning when the count was still at a manageable 43 was something to the effect that Russia would not even take these malcontents back as from a Russians perspective they are Latvians regardless what they personally think. I have first hand knowledge of ethnic Russian Latvians being put in their place when they hit Moscow.

So better get used to it little dudes and dudess's, whether you like it or not, whether you feel accepted or not, you really are Latvian and a citizen of the EU. Might just as well get used to it.

UPDATE: Portal Diena.lv sending material through the Security Police, which promises within its jurisdiction to make an initial check on this video. 

(Post updated with the last paragraph) 

Now at 38,715 views and 377 comments. It will be hard for the Security Police to ignore.

UPDATE: Of course Apollo.lv has picked up this, go here. Respect to Christine for uploading the original video. This is the last I'll post on this event but feel free to follow it yourself.

From A Tech Slave, When Will It All End?

In my house we have three computers, one smart phone and another computer in our away office. I suspect this is average or at least slightly below average for those who have kids and this gives me pause as I have of late come to hate computers in all their various forms.

I hate them mostly but not always because of the software that they run and the incessant and completely unnecessary updates that are required with such tedious regularity. It doesn't much matter what brand of hardware we are talking about. As an example we have a MacBook Pro, iMac, eMachine & a Toshiba Satellite and fortunately only one smart phone. an iPhone4. Between these pieces of hardware our life revolves mostly around keeping up with the the completely useless and annoying software updates/upgrades and 3rd party patches.

Lets take the MacBook Pro as an example. As hardware I still like it very much as it is my personal machine and I keep it well tuned and clean, but it initially cost me LVL 1,580 at Capital in Riga which was hard to justify at the time, but, solid is the description I would use as it is dented from repeated drops at airport security desks and still hasn't missed a beat except for one battery replacement. I have it partitioned to run Mountain Lion (or Snoop Lion as I call it) on one side and Win7 on the other (I WILL NOT be upgrading to Win8). I do this because it is my work machine and I drag it all around to different clients but being a late 2008 model and hard done by it will fail soon I suspect and at the end of the day I will not miss it. It is heavy and when I look at the money I have put into it, primarily it's initial purchase price because it is an Apple device, I have regret and will not be doing the Apple fanboy thing anymore. Same reason I won't be replacing my iPhone4 with the 5 or whatever it is when my current phone fails. I'm just sick of the expense, I paid CAN 850 cash unlocked so as to avoid a contract due to the fact that I don't really have a permanent residence which is kind of a ridiculous price for a phone. I've dropped that Round Cornered Rectangle® several times as well and while I managed to avoid cracking the glass something now vibrates inside when I turn the volume up. But it's a pretty over-hyped hand set anyway and I won't miss it either. I'm so tired of losing my DATA settings every time the OS updates when I sync to iTunes because it always ends up defaulting to the original factory settings. I hate smart phones, will never have another one. My wife's old Nokia 6300 is still ticking along and she likes it fine in spite of still having two working Motorola Razor's and a Nokia NSeries all with SIM cards for other countries.

I could make a rather impressive mobile with all the dead phones we have! StarTac, Nokia 3510, Nokia 6681 (my first smart phone) and a bunch of other Nokia's I can't remember the model numbers for but which are still rattling around my junk drawer slowly distorting from bloating batteries, a hardware version of a Steven King horror novel.

The Toshiba Satellite is a boat anchor around our neck. It has a defective power jack and whenever sideways stress is placed on the power cord the system shorts out and the OS is lost necessitating a clean re-install. This is cumbersome as Microsoft doesn't support the old OS's like XP SP3 (this computer came with SP2 when we purchased it at Gorbuska Market in Moscow and I have to update it to SP3 and then re-load Office from a different Microsoft account, the horror...the horror!). We don't upgrade the OS from XP because it is never online and is used only to run an office projector, printer and produce Word docs. And what a heavy piece of work it is since it's a 2005 model. This is a serious problem with these types of power jacks by the way as I had another Toshiba Satellite circa 2002 that suffered from the same problem which is not shared by Apple which uses a magnetic connector. Most satisfying thing I have ever done was to rip the HD out of my Toshiba case and throw the rest in the bin. Brilliant.

But the eMachine is great. It cost only LVL 200 last year here in Riga and while it is made of cheap plastic and lacks an optical drive it is pretty much the way these things should be. Über cheap and easily replaceable with Win7 loaded. I'm not even sure how to update the thing since it's in Russian!

Finally I have found the answer and it is ignorance. Ignorance is bliss and when this piece of cheap plastic gives me enough grief I will throw it against the wall without remorse and go buy something else, as it should be.

Latvijas Republikas proklamēšanas diena

What is it? November 18: Day of Proclamation of the Republic of Latvia. In 1918, national representatives convened in what is now the National Theatre and proclaimed the independence of the Latvian state. This is an official public holiday.

So congratulations Latvia. I'm going for a walk on Jurmala beach with a cafe' pitstop in Bulduri to celebrate. Pity about the weather but that's November for you.

Dumb Ways To Die

When I can't write I youtube. 

 Brought to you by Australian Metro. Good on ya, mates!

Attn: Team Breezy

It's old but never gets old, knowutimsayin?

Dr. Rock

Ya kill me still!!