permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

Great anti war statement for this Christmas season, a posthumous
contribution from Kalashnikov himself:

A brief but fascinating article on Kalashnikov and a vivid snapshot of life
in Russia under Stalin during and after WWII, written by a Russian.

Kalashnikov would have fully supported permaculture with every pore of his
being.

<>

Kalashnikov Should Have Made Farm Tools
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-24/kalashnikov-should-have-made-farm-tools.html

"Mikhail Kalashnikov, who died yesterday at the age of 94, once designed
and built a lawnmower for his own use: Mass-produced mowers weren't
available in the Soviet Union."

"The designer himself might have preferred to be famous for something other
than the world's deadliest gun. He blamed "the Germans" for making him a
weapons designer, and once told reporters: "If it had not been for World
War II, I probably would have designed machinery to ease the hard peasant
labor."

(Leonid Bershidsky, an editor and novelist, is Moscow and Kiev
correspondent for World View.)

- and a comment in the Reddit World News subreddit:

–]7LeagueBoots 7 points 15 hours ago

"Kalashnikov was an interesting fellow. He was angry that his weapon had
been used the way it has and that people have made profits off of it. The
rifle was less "for the motherland" than it was a weapon to put control in
the hands of people attempting to take their destiny in their own hands.

Unfortunately, that didn't work out very well and the lack of a
copyright/patent on it allowed a great many institutions and people access
to it that probably should have been kept at arm's length. He was very much
against the criminal and abusive use of the rifle (though giving any
government access to it could be argued to be both criminal and abusive),
and in 2002 expressed a desire to have built something more generally
useful to the majority of people, "I would prefer to have invented a
machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work —
for example a lawnmower."

I suspect that he was a far more complicated and interesting person than
most give him credit for."

-- 
Lawrence F. London
lfljvenaura@gmail.com
http://www.avantgeared.com
https://plus.google.com/+Avantgeared
Skype: lawrence.f.london