Dr. Filomena

The New Slovenian President (right) and the Next Prime Minister (left)? (Photo Source)

The word is out. Danilo Türk won the Presidential elections with an almost incredible lead of over 70%. I must admit that while I expected his win, I never thought the polls would predict the final results so accurately. Now, while some will say this is a record win in Slovene history, I would like to point out that while Kučan won the Presidential elections by some ten per cent less, he did so in the first round, so the results are not really comparable.

Peterle surprised me several times in the last week. By starting a negative campaign against his opponent, by caving to the pressures of a not-that-politically-strong mayor and turning his back on his campaign manager in the final stretch of the campaign and lastly today at the time of announcing the results, by his bold explanation of his loss. He basically blamed his poor results on Janez Janša and his government and confirmed that he thought his loss reflected the people’s dissatisfaction with the current Government.

Taking the above into account and combining it with the fact that the STA (Slovenian Press Agency), owned 100% by the Government, reported today on the Article published in a Croatian newspaper claiming Janša had received an enormous amount of money from gun trafficking to Bosnia and Croatia while in the capacity of the Slovenian Defence Minister between 1990 and 1994, Janez Janša (current Slovenian Prime Minister) will probably wish he had not gone to China these days. Things getting slightly out of control? The theory has long been out there that Janša is not being tough on Croatia in the borders-at-sea issues because he is being blackmailed with evidence of gun trafficking, thus compromising the country’s best interests due to his personal issues. This promisses to be an interesting topic to follow.

In his victory speech, Türk emphasized Borut Pahor‘s virtues and profoundly thanked him for his support, at the same time just like Peterle hinting that the results were partly a vote of no confidence to the current Government, which will probably have to change its actions. It was most interesting to see Gregor Golobič there in the back (but “limelight back”) as (again?) a kind of the “number one“.

Another politician we saw give a short interview on the telly was Igor Lukšič, the political strategy brains behind Borut Pahor’s Social Democrats that continue to gain ground in the Slovenian political arean. And so… round one is over and the game continues, with some of the players moving up one level.

Today is the first day of the parliamentary election campaign.
Play fair, kids!

Imagine. It’s all a matter of perspective.

The second round of the election campaign in Slovenia is just about over. The two candidates who made it this far and will be competing for the position of the Slovenian ‘king of hearts‘ during the next five-year term are Lojze Peterle and Danilo Türk. Please note the *ü* – if your keyboard doesn’t include it, alcessa has at least one for sale.

The so-called “election silence” (according to Slovenian election legislation, ‘public election propaganda must cease at least 24 hours before the day of the elections’) will be imposed as of midnight, cutting down on the juiciness of Slovenian news programmes. Not only that, the election silence may even take some wind from talk shows, fashion shows, family shows, cooking programmes and – who knows – maybe cartoons as well? Anything but reality shows: those are far too sacred a topic to smear with something as filthy as politics. Except for the original Big Brother, that is.

You may have heard of the latest declared candidate in the US Presidential elections, Stephen Colbert of the Daily Show. At a web poll, over 80% of more than 27,000 (!) people voted “Yes! Finally a candidate who understands how ridiculous he is.”

Ok so the world is a stage and we should all keep’em laughing as we go, but… never underestimate the power of your own vote. In this apparently media-driven (ok so who is/owns the media anyway, right?) society, it is no longer the political candidates that take on the role of stars during election frenzy, but rather the show hosts who can make them talk about their families, pets, make them cook, sing, maybe do tricks, even?

The trailer for the most popular Slovenian family show at the end of the first round of the campaign actually said something to the effect of: we don’t care about the policies they endorse, we want to get to know them better on a personal level. !”#$”#$&$%##”$%!

Pardon my language, it was a slip of a finger… or two. It’s so easy to forget that the policies the elected people draft will eventually be implemented in a way that will affect your daily lives and it’s equally easy to forget that in democratic elections, your vote counts exactly as much as that of your neighbour, boss or favourite soap opera star.

By failing to vote, you are actually giving somebody else the power to vote instead of you. Think about it. Dr. Fil is definitelly getting off her comfy couch and braving any type of weather and potential ‘maček’ due to ‘martinovanje’ to cast her vote. How about you?

Lipizzaner stallion glancing at the mares in Lipica

Encouraged by Michael Manske’s post at carniola.org featuring Hollywood ignorance of a particular source of Slovenian pride and joy, I thought I’d write a post about the graceful creatures of Lipica that gave them their name, though the world is most familiar with them as the equine version of ballet dancers admired at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna.

The Lipizzaner breed of horse, which is among the most ancient ones in the world (the absolute record being held by the unbeatable Arabian horses) and goes back over half a millennium, is the product of sturdy local Karstic mares, refined by the introduction of “warmer-blooded” Spanish stallions and later on by an Arabian stallion as well. Horses of the Karst had a reputation for resilience and speed even back in ancient Roman times. In 1580, the first Andalusian stallions arrived to the new royal stud farm at Lipica (Southwest Slovenia), built by Archduke Charles, the third son of Ferdinand I of Habsburg. During the Napoleonic Wars, the stud farm was forced to move three times to Hungary, and sought refuge near Vienna during World War I. It took a great effort and dedication to rebuild the stud farm after WW II.

Of the founding stallions, two were brought from Kladruby in Bohemia (Favory and Maestoso), two from Naples in Italy (Conversano and Neapolitano), one from Frederiksborg royal stud farm in Denmark (Pluto) and one directly from Arabia (Siglavy). Lipizzaner mares come from 16 different families.

After careful selection through the centuries, the resulting breed is of medium size, standing at about 15 hh. The lively eyes reveal the horse’s intelligence. The well-muscled neck is set rather high and decorated with a thick, but silky soft mane. Its legs are strong, with well-developed wide joints, ending in strong, small, well-formed hooves. Correct body structure produces the characteristically impressive gate. The high, elegant, energetic, proud gates make the breed the perfect choice in parades.

Although best known as the white horse of the Karst (or of the Vienna riding school, for that matter), Lipizzaners do also come in black and bay. Some breeders specifically specialize in those colours. As is the case in other breeds, the horses that turn white are all born as black, bay or chestnut foals, changing colour later on. Thanks to selective breeding, white Lipizzaners usually turn completely white very quickly. One thing to remember here: white is not a colour, it is absence of colour. Any white horse (or cat, or dog) has a genetic code for a “real” colour, which is overrun by a gene or set of genes that suppress pigment production or cause pigment degradation.

Lipica maintains a top level breeding programme placing great emphasis both on health and performance. All the moving around that the horses were forced to endure while the world was at war decimated the herd, narrowing down its gene pool and the resulting inbreeding nearly caused the famed sturdy horse to lose its reputation for longevity. At Lipica, they are enforcing a strict 5-generation rule under which no two horses with a common relative in the first five generations of ancestors may be bred together; accordingly, the stud farm has been exchanging stallions that meet the same tough selection criteria with other breeding centres. This policy has proven to be highly successful and the white horses of Lipica can again boast excellent health and longevity.

Capriole (Source)

And long lived these horses should be, otherwise the handsome white stallions would get very little action 😀 The first selection of breeding stallions is made at three or four years of age at the time of their “elementary school” training based on how well they meet the breed standard, their temperament and athletic ability. The best ones are allowed to breed once or twice, then they go off to school. Only those stallions who’ve passed this stage and then mastered the difficult “university level” dressage elements over several years of training, preferably including the “PhD level” haute ecole “airs” such as Capriole above, and whose first offspring from their teenage years has already proven to be of high quality, are finally allowed to woo the white mares. Humm… 😈

Over the last 20 years or so, attempts have been made to modernize the Lipizzaner breed in order to make it more competitive in modern sports. Competitive dressage and show jumping calls for a different body type than would be required in an 18th Century battle horse. Thankfully, the attempts have mainly been abandoned and the value of the breed as it is has been recognized before they completely ruined it and turned it into a “ne tič ne miš”.

The only real Lipizzaners that may have the letter L branded in their cheeks are ones from the Lipica area as their bone and hoof structure is influenced by their nutrition, i.e. the lime-stone-heavy grass and hay from the Karst. Lipizzaners from Lipica (and Piber, the Austrian stud farm with whom Lipica has had the most frequent exchange of ‘genetic material’) tend to be lighter in frame and more elegant than those from stud farms in other European countries where part of the herd had been left behind in war turmoils and the horses were bred differently.

In the late nineties, several countries claimed the breed as their own resulting in a political hot potato. Italy and Austria concluded an agreement on keeping the original Lipizzaner studbook records independently of Slovenia, which at the time was not a member of the EU. Incidentally, Italy’s only claim to the breed is the fact that the country occupied south-west Slovenia for a while and took the original stud books from 1926 onwards to Rome at the time of retreat. Most of the older stud books had already been taken to Vienna prior to Italian occupation.

In early 1999, Slovenia responded to said agreement by issuing a regulation on the designation of origin and geographical indications for the name of Lipicanec (in all languages) referring to the history of the breed and its specific characteristics related to the area where it is bred. The fight over the original studbook record-keeping – as most issues tend to – comes down to not mere prestige, but money. In this case, EU agricultural funds.

Anyway – if you’re in Slovenia, you have no excuse not to make a visit to the historic site that is the true home to these beautiful white pearls of the Karst.
Information: Lipica stud farm.

Besides taking a stroll and a guided tour through the farm, you can take riding lessons at all levels, go out for a ride in the beautiful countryside, take a carriage ride, watch a classical riding school show (think Vienna here). When you’re all horsed out, you can play some golf or enjoy the casino if that happens to be where you get your kicks from (hey, I’d rather be out there on horseback myself 😀 ).

EDIT: Not only would I prefer to enjoy Lipica from horseback or horse carriage, but I really hope that these aspects along with the haute ecole shows remain the focal point in Lipica. The powers that be seem to have lost their bearings and forget what the stud farm is all about. Concerned citizens opposing extension of golf courses on the pasture lands of the white equine ballet dancers have their website at Ohranimo Lipico (Let us preserve Lipica).
(Thanks for the link, Jean

Dr. Fil with a Lipizzaner stallion at Lipica

Anyone who’s known me for some time has heard me say those words. Not directed at any particular military force or at soldiers in general. Actually, a more accurate way of putting it would be “I Reject Violence”. Somehow, I’ve never been able to understand how anyone could want to make a career out of learing how to kill other people. Sure, you can say it’s for noble reasons such as defending one’s country. Fine. Chances are I’d pick up a weapon and defend my home and country as well if it were under attack. But if everyone refused to use force against another human, this would be pretty irrelevant. I finally came across a passage that summarizes my thoughts perfectly:

“There is only one circumstance that justifies the use of force: If someone is attacking you, you have a moral obligation to defend yourself. Applying that rule would lead to a surprising conclusion. If all countries upheld the ethic that the only just war – the only legally, morally acceptable use of force – was for defence, then there would be no war. We wouldn’t need military defence. People would use non-violent means of correcting injustices – with protest, with civilian resistance. Paradoxically, if you use armed force only to defend yourself, and if you believe this, what you end up with is a world in which you don’t need it.”

It is sad that I should read it in the context of the author’s obituary. Dr. Randall (“Randy”)Caroline Forsberg, the executive director of the Institute for Defense & Disarmament Studies, a Cambridge-based think tank and the Chair of Political Science at the City College of New York, passed away at age 64 a week ago. She launched a movement with a profound impact on international relations in the 1980s. As a graduate student at MIT in 1980, Randall Forsberg started the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign at a time when the Reagan administration was threatening nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Recognizing that the division among peace groups rendered them ineffectual, she called on them to unite behind a proposal for a U.S-Soviet agreement to halt the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons. When they proved enthusiastic, she began circulating a “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race.”

The Freeze campaign made remarkable progress. Holding its first national conference in March 1981, the Freeze began organizing all across the country. On June 12, 1982, when peace groups sponsored an antinuclear demonstration in New York City around the theme of “Freeze the Arms Race — Fund Human Needs,” it escalated into the biggest U.S. political demonstration thus far, with nearly a million participants. Reaganites did their best to discredit and destroy it, but on the other hand in 1984, the Freeze became part of the Democratic Party’s campaign platform.

On the defensive, the Reagan administration was forced to modify its policies and the President endorsed the “zero option,” a proposal to remove all intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe. Furthermore, in April 1982, shortly after the Freeze resolution was introduced in Congress, Reagan began declaring publicly that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” He added: “To those who protest against nuclear war, I can only say: ‘I’m with you!”
(Source)

Dialog International puts it, “the activities of Dr. Forsberg and people like her are ridiculed. We are closer now to a nuclear conflict – this time with Iran – than we have been for nearly two decades. We will miss Randall Forsberg’s quiet voice of reason. Her message lives on, and the planet cannot afford not to heed it.”

May she rest in peace.

Peace.

My grandmother Amalia, a.k.a. Malka, has been through a lot in her life. As a young girl, she risked her life on numerous occasions in the nation’s struggle to fight off first the Italian and then the German occupying forces during WWII. As so many other young Slovenians, she helped rebuild the country after the war, even taking part in the youth work brigades all around the freed Yugoslav territories. All of that to the point of total exhaustion.

So perhaps it should not come as a surprise that yesterday, when power was cut off in her building, she would not let this stop her from voting in the Presidential elections. Aged 85 and not in the best of health, she walked down 9 flights of stairs in pitch black dark she had to illuminate with her tiny battery light, cast her vote and walked back up. Not too many ladies came from that same mould, huh?

Rather interesting that the electric company should choose a Sunday and an election Sunday at that, to replace a transformer in a neighbourhood predominantly populated by old pensioners, mainly of the same basic political persuasion. Without prior notice except on the Internet and one local radio station. For an added bonus, reportedly, one of the buildings affected by the blackout is home to one of the presidential candidates’ parents. Perhaps even more interesting in the light of the tighter results than anticipated.

You can read a more detailed account of the elections and a commentary on the issue of the mysteriously hard-working electricians on an election Sunday by Človek Lubenica in Slovenian.

but box your vote. I just did 😉

EDIT (21 Oct 07 @ 10.30 pm): For results and updates, I recommend you pay a visit to Pengovsy’s blog.

In a surprising turn of events, Peterle is getting a much lower percentage of votes than predicted. It seems he bled them to the left who bled theirs to Jelinčič. Gaspari and Türk are in a surprisingly close race for the second place so it seems likely that the second-round candidates will be decided by the ballots coming in from abroad sometime by the end of the week.

Go vote!

This text really should be in Slovenian as it’s meant for Slovenian citizens due to cast their votes in the presidential elections tomorrow, but since this is my standpoint regardless of the time and place of elections, here goes: it is one’s right and duty to go and cast a vote.

Never ever let me hear you say I am just one voice that cannot change a thing. The total of votes cast is but a sum of all individual votes whereby yours is worth exactly as much as the next woman’s (or man’s).

I care much less about who you vote for tomorrow than whether you vote at all.

If you’re still wavering, thinkg about what a long struggle it was to secure the Right to Vote to so many. If you’re a woman, think twice as hard.

So go ahead, exercise the right that you have thanks to the fight of so many before you and go fulfil your civic duty.

Vote!

PS: No particular reason to feature the green dragon. I just like that photo. Taken this summer at the “Dragon Bridge” in Ljubljana.

Reading Pengovsky’s post on the new party, Zares, I remembered having written a post reporting from one of this group’s events at the very start of the blog, before it acquired the whopping two or three readers it boasts now so I thought why not recycle some of the old posts.

Here is one I’d originally posted on 28 June 2007:

For a change of pace from the serial killer night I accompanied my university professor aunt to a debate in Cankarjev dom held by Društvo Zares on the topic of proposed changes in Slovenian legislation pertaining to higher levels of education. Društvo Zares literally translates to the For Real Club and is a group of people planning on forming a political party soon.

I will make no comment other than that I found the group of the present people to make for an interesting combination and that I was most impressed by the representative of the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis. Oh just one remark, though. Everyone seemed to listen attentively except when the speaker happened to be a student. Humm.

Added note: That’s the new party’s new President Gregor Golobič on the left in the bottom photo.

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
-Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

Spines may prevent enemy assault,
But make friendly hugs equally challenging.
(I took the photo of the above Eryngium two weeks ago in Croatia.)

He who would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
-Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

A couple of weeks ago, while waiting for Mattie and Dilys, I took a photo of Peter Božič at Prešeren square in the centre of Ljubljana. At the time, Pengovsky mentioned the special relationship between Božič and Miha Jazbinšek. As it turns out, the mountain came to me and I didn’t have to set up a spy camp in downtown Ljubljana as popular as that may have been up until recently.

I was about to order my cocktail at klub300, enjoying the company of Adriaan and our lawyer friend when we noticed Jazbi (Slovene 101: jazbec = badger) sipping his beer and very involved in a debate with his company. Seeing as I haven’t invested into a telephoto lens yet (and actually nikki was left home), I walked up to them with Adriaan’s compact and asked for permission to take a picture at not much of a surprise to the camera’s owner, the lawyer however announced she would deny any association with me. But hey, this badger is a ‘stari maček’ (Slovene 101: stari maček = old cat = old hand) and had no problem having his threemillionfivehundredthirtytwothousandtwentysecond picture taken. So here you go. I still have to do the face-off pic. Soon…

Thanks for the lovely evening, you guys and thanks for being cool about the pic, Jazbi. Oh and the sex on the beach was great, as well.