I have to laugh when Nathan Hamm of Registan copies my blog. How do I know he even reads it? Because he sometimes kicks up a fuss on Twitter, and because the person who comes here nearly every day from "hidemyass.com" has to be him (most people wouldn't bother with that sillyness). He was also hear using software to scoop up all the pages, imaging they would be changed or something.
Oh, sure, everybody is writing about the dancing dictator, the story first covered by Radio Ozodlik. And you wouldn't have to be copying me to say that Karimov is interested in protecting his family's wealth, that's a no-brainer.
But to dig into an uzmetronom.com post that was days ago and already buried on that site and reference that AND to mention Sobirov, who is never in the news -- as I did -- that's just too much of a coincidence.
Funny, Hamm looks at the dancing video and says Karimov looks like he's vigorous. Actually, not, he looks pale and sick and moves stiffly.
As for uzmetronom.com, which isn't reliable, way in the bottom of a story already gone from the first page and even the "previous" pages, there's Ezhkov's theory that the next ruling party head will be the next head of state, so watch that space (i.e. in the December 2014 elections).
But Hamm really needs to learn Russian better, it is the lingua franca for this region. He mistranslates uzmetronom.com as follows:
that the election was shifted so that it would take place when large numbers of seasonal agricultural workers were out of the country and unable to vote.
But what Ezhkov wrote (in a part I skipped because it was just speculative snark) was about workers inside the country:
Experts analyzing the Constitutional Law of the Republic of Uzbekistan, "On the Next Elections to Representative Bodies of State Authority and the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan" do not understand why the next elections of the president (but not all subsequent elections -- that's fundamentally important) coincide with the peak of spring field work, at which usually about 60 percent of the population of the republic are occupied.
The confusion emerged because previously the moving of the elections to the head of state from January to December was explained in fact because in December, the agricultural population has finished its season and has free tome, which is necessary for an objective evaluation of the campaign platform of every candidate for president.
The Uzbek government isn't terribly worried about the vote of the migrant workers who in principle could vote in Uzbek Embassies abroad -- they manipulate the vote to be the percentage they need, so it's not so important.
