Two Borat-related videos came to my attention.

Chris Merriman has put up the BBC coverage of the London premiere of Borat’s film, with discussion of the uproar, Aliyev’s invitation, and his insistence on remaining in character.

Second, the first four minutes of the Borat film, the bit set in Kazakhstan:

It’s not particularly funny to me, but I never went for that line of comedy anyway.

EDIT: A Bolashak Scholar in New Zealand spoke to the news there about Borat.
Video here Click on the video below Archive, where it says

We talk to some visiting Kazakstani’s about their reaction to the upcoming “Borat” movie.

One great source for information, often obscure information, about Kazakhstan comes from adoption blogs. Kazakhstan is now 5th in the world in terms of countries from which children are adopted, which means when you search for Kazakhstan on blog-searches, you find a lot of adoption blogs.

One of the best sources of information is the web directory at Kazakh Adoptive Families. The owner has found just about every link on the Internet to Kazakh language, culture and music. It’s immense!

Another blog for a couple that seem equally devoted to knowing everything about Kazakhstan is The Den Hartog Stork. There’s a great entry about the Museum of Archaeology in Almaty, which I have never gotten to, because it’s always closed for repairs so I was grateful for the photos.

And I just discovered The Hunts blog, whose saga appears to be over, but it’s interesting stuff and really gives an idea of day-to-day life here.

Redneck Peril has their whole adoption saga listed out, with some nice stories about his kids and their family. There’s less about life in KZ, but you get some nice personal stories and an idea of what kids face growing up here as orphans.

It’s one place to start, if you’re looking for ideas of what life is like here.

EDIT: Since this entry is starting to get hits from people clearly looking for help in adopting children from Kazakhstan, I wanted to give two useful links.

1. Kazakhstan Adoption Blogs part narrative and part useful advice/links to useful sites.
2. Information from the Kazakhstan Embassy on adoption, what documents you need, etc. As with all things government, check to make sure this list is updated before starting out
3. I can’t find anything on the test E-Gov site in English, but I’m sure once they get that up and running, it will be there.

Nathan at Registan.net made me aware of this project.

Wikki Central Asia to expand the knowledge and information about Central Asia. I, for one, am totally in:

If you would like to help, please inquire on the talk page.

EDIT: for those who suck at Wikkipedia, as I do, on the talkpage, you need to click the plus sign at the top. Or click here. That should do it as well. You might need to create an account as I did. It takes all of 2 seconds and doesn’t ask any scary questions!

As has been widely reported, Kazakhstan wants to be one of the 50 most competitive countries in the world. My wife and I often joke about this when we get bad service. For example, when the workmen came to hook up our cable TV, they were late and very drunk. We complained and they got very aggressive, very quickly, threatened to leave several times, and after we invited them to come in and get to work several times, they did in fact leave. Competitive?

Well apparently all that hustling and bustling accounted for nothing: World Economic Forum, Kazakhstan went from 51st to 56th place. I think Borat will be less of an embarassment than being ranked below Mauritas and Costa Rica and just above Panama!

However, the press release has all good things to say, confusing many a reader (including me–for about 1 hour this entry stood showing an improvement which you may have caught):

Boosted by its natural resource wealth, it experienced a major improvement in its macroeconomy, thanks to its significant government budget surplus, low debt-GDP ratio, high savings rate and a considerably reduced interest rate spread, possibly reflecting more financial market efficiency or less perceived lending risk. It also saw improvements in market efficiency, rising 8 places to rank 44, boosted by less red tape and more competition in the goods markets, but still impeded by the prevalence of trade barriers and still relatively underdeveloped or unsophisticated financial markets. The country also benefits
from flexible labour markets.

Kazakhstan press release here in PDF format

So perhaps this is a call out for politicians and businesses to start paying attention to the litte guys, those of us trying to get our cable hooked up, or the heating to be turned on before the 15th of October (Dear Kazakhs, is the 15th of October some kind of magical date? Did Timurlane swear he would rise again if the heat got turned on before then? It’s colder in Astana than Almaty, why should the heat get turned on in both cities at the same time? What if there’s a cold freeze in September?). One of the big issues here, in my opinion, is that businesses don’t engage in marginally profitable activities. More than one businessman has reported to the government that consumer services, or setting up certain types of financial markets will not produce the huge (multi-million) dollar profits that buying and selling real estate in Georgia, will and thus they see no reason to enagage in small business.

The summary and downloads of the WEF report are here.

Interviews with two of the authors are here

Ken Pierce, who blogs at Redneck Peril runs the CCCP foundation, which help orphans in Kazakhstan. Right now, they are setting up youth houses for former orphans in Karaganda so that these kids have somewhere to go. He also puts his money where his mouth is, and has adopted a few Kazakhstani orphans.

Here is a list of the foundation’s needs
Here are ways to help out.

I note also, that unlike a lot of other religious groups acting in this area, proselytizing and converting are not goals of the CCCP Foundation.

Video of the Andijon Uprising
This video–70 minutes long–was put together from two videos made on the scene, both confiscated by the government of Uzbekistan. It’s been edited and used to prove the government’s case that it was just defending itself from well-armed and funded international terrorists (In one accusation–well-armed Islamic terrorists bent on creating an Islamic caliphate in Central Asia funded by the US government!). Even so, it’s a primary source, made possible by the Carnegie Endowment and Martha Brill Olcott.

And the NYT article about it and the video.

In the last post, I should have mentioned more explicitly that the IFES mailing group is excellent for a wide range of news on the election–international, local, and foreign news sources are compiled and sent out once a week. It’s a nice range of views presented without commentary–and unfortunately without links!

You can subscribe at yahoogroups: Kaz-Elections

DNews, claiming to be: “Opinionated news exctraction (sic) for all by that geeky accountant type guy…” proves that the Borat incident has hit such levels as to reach Australia.

I neglected to append the comment from the official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that 1) Borat might be an agent of someone or other–that always means America or the opposition and 2) They might take legal action to prevent future pranks, cause that seemed to get good coverage

He provides in answer, I’m not sure pro or anti or netural, 50 Things About Kazakhstan You May Not Know, apparently originally published by The Independent. If that isn’t a drinking game, I don’t know what is.

Highlights with commentary
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