Masha Gessen at The New Yorker: ‘Putin’s Russia: Don’t Walk, Don’t Eat, Don’t Drink‘

‘Indeed, the larger message of the Nemtsov assassination and the apparent attempted assassination of Kara-Murza is that no one is safe. Both men are sufficiently well-known to attract the attention of Russia’s dwindling oppositional minority, but neither has the superstar status that would preclude identifying with him.’

More on the Nemtsov killing: Don’t speak out.

Julia Ioffe at her site: ‘The Bizarre End To Vladimir Putin’s Bizarre Marriage:‘

‘An odd moment in the announcement came when Putin mentioned his confirmed children, two adult daughters whom we’ve never really seen, though there were reports in 2010 that one of them was marrying the son of a South Korean admiral.’

A reader passed along a video of Bill Browder, who made a billion, lost much of it, and got a look at Russian politics, money, and power up close.  The way he describes it:  Corruption all the way to the top.

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What goes around, comes around-An oldie but a goodie-George Kennan: ‘The Sources Of Soviet Conduct‘

60 Minutes had an interview with ‘Jack Barsky,‘ an East-German Soviet spy who ended up living in America.  To hell with it!

From The National Interest: ‘Inside The Mind Of George F. Kennan’,,,Eric Postner back in 2008: The Bear Is Back

I wonder if any American operatives went under deep cover to Dschingis Khan concerts to better understand the German soul and its sentimental ties to Moscow:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvS351QKFV4

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Here’s Putin, back in the 80’s, meeting Reagan.  Ho hum, just a tourist, snapping some photos and meeting, how do you say, your premier.

From The Atlantic Photo: Vladimir Putin-Action Man

‘Russia needs a strong state power and must have it. But I am not calling for totalitarianism.’

–Vladimir Putin

Curbside buses can be very cheap, much safer than vehicles, and better for the environment, but regulation can stifle competition.  Chinatown in New York City is leading the way in offering competitive rates.

I think cheap is the key factor for many riders.

So, how soon will you car be driving itself?

How long do you spend in traffic, staring ahead, inching forwards?

Are you willing to cede the freedom your vehicle provides to all the inefficiencies of public transportation?

Probably not.

***Addition: In high density areas, city buses, subways, taxis, uber, zipcar etc. all make sense, but for a large majority of Americans, not so much at the moment.

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Adam Kirsch at the New Republic on Austrian writer Stefan Zweig:

‘The profound pessimism of this view of humanity, and its implications for the liberalism that Zweig cherished, were not lost on him. Zweig’s nonfiction is today much less read than his fiction; none of it has yet been republished, though many of these books were translated into English in the 1920s and 1930s, at the height of his fame. The most significant for understanding Zweig’s political dilemma is Erasmus of Rotterdam, which he wrote in 1933, in the months after Hitler came to power, and just before he himself fled Austria’

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American painter Thomas Cole’s ‘The Course Of Empire,’ which I saw in D.C. years ago, has stuck with me.  Moral, religious, historical and natural themes abound.  He liked parables.

What to do with all this land?

Apparently he was not a fan of the Jacksonian democracy going on around him.

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Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

–Wallace Stevens

Throw something at it and see if it sticks.  I like Helen Vendler’s interpretation….

What do you do with an uncivilized, wild land?  Import European learning and literature “atop” it?

The nature/culture divide?  Nature is wonderful but it is to culture where we must return.  If you are an artist, you turn towards direct experience in this land, but…you also turn to that which inspires you…European learning and thought….the products of other cultures.

Cathy Young at the Washington Post: ‘Feminists Want Us To Define These Ugly Sexual Encounters As Rape. Don’t Let Them‘

‘The quest for perfect consent is profoundly utopian. Like all such quests that ignore human realities, it points the way to dystopian nightmare.’

Many folks driving change are semi-radical, utopian and all about what they think ought to change through moral panic, crises, and shouting opponents down.  You don’t want such folks making rules for everyone.  Facts may not even enter into the picture.

Some details here (pretty graphic and pretty sad).

Cathy Young At The Daily Beast-‘Columbia Student: I Didn’t Rape Her’Cathy Young At Minding The Campus: ‘The Brown Case: Does It Still Look Like Rape?

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Tyler Cowen has a quick blurb on China:

‘How long will this excess capacity last?  How much time will the Chinese future need to “catch up” to this infrastructure?  Will that validation come too late?  We all may have opinions (or not), but the visuals themselves do not tell any specific tale. –

China has excess infrastructure because of government planning.  The people running the government directed capital (the time and labor of individuals) into new buildings and communities that simply weren’t/aren’t currently needed.  Much of the talk over here about infrastructure is coming from people who possess knowledge that would allow them to engage in similar planning.  China’s government used to be Communist, and is now some strange authoritarian/Communist/freer market hybrid.

I’ll let readers draw their own conclusions.

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It’s years old now, but Stoll had a quote that has stuck with me.

‘Indeed, if there is a single fact that sums up the state of American political economy at the present moment, it is this: the Boston office building once home to Inc. Magazine and Fast Company, which chronicled and celebrated small and fast-growing businesses, is now the headquarters of a publication called “Compliance Week.”’

Full piece here.

A few central quotes:

“Huntington was instinctively a conservative because he valued an ordered society, but he also championed conservatism as a necessary instrument to defend liberal institutions against communism. In many of his books he attacked idealistic liberals for holding such institutions to impossible, utopian standards that undermined their effectiveness in the world.”

and:

“An iconoclast to the core, Huntington never threw his lot in with left or right. He was too statist to be a libertarian, too realist to embrace neoconservatism, and too sympathetic to nationalism, religion and the military to identify with liberal Democrats. As a conservative Democrat, then, he is an intellectual rarity.”

An interesting thinker (wikipedia page here).  His Political Order In Changing Societies challenged modernization theory.

Related On This Site:  Stanley Kurtz sticks close to Huntington and points out Fukuyama’s Hegelian influence…From The Hoover Institution: Stanley Kurtz On Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington…Francis Fukuyama after Huntington’s death explains some disagreement…From The American Interest Online: Francis Fukuyama On Samuel Huntington

from The World Economic Forum’s photostream

I still don’t understand how anyone expects those with insurance to subsidize those without insurance by not transferring wealth from one group to the other.  I also don’t understand how anyone thinks that a massive expansion of Medicaid, the IRS, and what will become an enormous political/bureaucratic/health-care sector is really an efficient means to deliver health-care, meeting the promise of helping all groups of interested parties as well as the greatest number of individuals.

Have you observed the design problems inherent in the VA?

Have you ever sat around with a broken foot, counting your blessings that so many politicians/lobbyists could be involved in making it better?

Neither the moral nor practical case has been made to me that this is the way to go, rather, from where I stand,  I see a huge, rather poorly-designed, rammed-through-politically bill that can’t possibly meet all those promises.

Still unfolding…

From The City Journal: ‘The ACA’s Unintended Consequences‘

Megan McArdle at Bloomberg: ‘Life Under Obamacare‘ (we’re not really there yet, speculation abounds)

Previously: Charlie Martin here.

‘Whatever solution we look for though, the really important point is this: the whole basis of Obamacare, the notion that we can have more people, getting more benefits, and pay less, is just impossible. The arithmetic doesn’t work. And if you think that’s “unfair,” I’m sorry.

Avik Roy addressed this before the 2012 Romney/Obama presidential election, before we really started taxiing Obamacare down the runway:

‘Obamacare’s approach to pre-existing conditions, in summary, may help a tiny minority with pre-existing conditions to gain coverage in the short term, but the law will drive up the cost of insurance for everyone else, leading to adverse selection and higher premiums for all. And the price of Obamacare is steep: the individual mandate; trillions in new spending and taxes; deep cuts to Medicare providers.’

Walter Russell Mead At The American Interest notes the noise the Saudis are making in response to the current Iran dealing:

‘President Obama’s push for the nuclear deal with Iran was supposed to prevent just this kind of situation. Many suspect Saudi Arabia’s financing of Pakistan’s nuclear program gives it a turnkey solution to catching up to Iran should it choose to do so. Turkey and Egypt would be likely to follow suit, leading to an unstable multipolar nuclear standoff between relatively weak and poorly institutionalized states—a nightmare scenario’

So, we’ve removed ourselves as the guarantor of much security in the region, given Syria redlines and deadlines, allowing Putin leverage, and standing back as that country has since devolved into a protracted civil war while Assad still clings to power (and chemical weapons).  Syria and the President’s decision to pull troops out of Iraq has direct causal links to the rise of ISIS (so too, did the choice to oust Saddam).  Libya has become a failed state with a huge terrorist and migrant problem.

We’re trying to do business with a thuggish Iranian regime, empowering the folks in charge for questionable gain in a high-risk nuke deal still in process, and which many in our government, the Israelis, the Saudis and other Sunni coalitions are not particularly happy to support under current conditions without seeing their interests represented.

If there’s any place in the world where most people in the world don’t want a nuclear arms race….this is it.

Henry Kissinger & George Schulz Via The WSJ: ‘The Iran Deal And Its Consequences’

George Shultz & Henry Kissinger At The Hoover Institution: ‘What A Final Iran Deal Must Do’ So what are our interests and how do we secure them as the fires in the Middle-East rage? Michael Totten makes a case here in Why We Can’t Leave The Middle-East.’  He gets push-back in the comments

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Richard Epstein at The Hoover Institution examines what the EPA’s been up to lately with regard to the coal industry.

How law, authority and process are used really matters, and because activist-driven environmental policy is generally pushed by people who desire rapid, if not radical, change, on the way to what are usually impossible, utopian ideals, they’re more likely to be poorly used:

At this point, the legal survival of the EPA’s CPP is anyone’s guess. Much will depend on the EPA’s own guidance documents about FIPs, which should come down this summer. But it is dangerous business to let the EPA take the coal industry hostage by this set of aggressive maneuvers. The Supreme Court’s initial wrong was Massachusetts v. EPA, which wrongly held that carbon dioxide counted as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

Full piece here.

Click through for the photo.

‘The system, designed by British cybernetician Stafford Beer, was supposed to allow powerful men to make decisions about production, labor, and transport in real time using up-to-the-minute economic information provided directly by workers on the factory floors of dozens of newly nationalized companies’

A shag carpet probably would have been out of place, but I like the white pod chairs (Captain Kirk to the bridge for fuel price re-allocations).

‘In fact, the network that fed the system was little more than a series of jury-rigged Telex machines with human operators, transmitting only the simplest data, which were slapped onto old-style Kodak slides—again, by humans. The controls on the chairs merely allowed the operator to advance to the next slide’

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In working towards a theme, check out Buzludzha, the abandoned communist monument in Bulgaria’s Balkan mountains, which still draws up to 50,000 Bulgarian Socialists for a yearly pilgrimage.  Human Planet’s Timothy Allen visited the structure in the snow and took some haunting photos.  You will think you’ve stepped into a Bond film and one of Blofeld’s modernist lairs, but with somewhat Eastern Orthodox tile frescos of Lenin and Marx gazing out at you, abandoned to time, the elements and to nature.

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Continuing towards that theme, here are two quotes from a recent Harvey Mansfield review of Steven Bilakovics new book, which could possibly help explain how, say, the Chrysler building and St. Patrick’s Cathedral have become two of New York’s most iconic buildings (hint: we’re not a socialist society):

Tocqueville almost uses the above phrase in a chapter on “why American writers and orators are often bombastic.” He says that there is “nothing in-between,” or more literally, “the intermediate space is empty,” implying that there might have been something there. In democratic societies, each citizen is habitually occupied in the contemplation of a very small object: himself. If he raises his eyes, he sees only the “immense object of society” or even the whole human race. If he leaves his normal concerns, he expects it to be for something indefinitely vast instead of something definite and greater than himself.”

Artists have a particularly tough time in America, because they’re often particularly alone in America.  Ezra Pound and T.S Eliot abandoned the place completely, and many aspiring artists get their training in Europe. This blog believes Wallace Stevens to especially be representative of this dilemma (he never left).  He was an insurance executive by day and perhaps one of America’s best poets;  a romantic, a modernist, as well as a man who possibly had a deathbed conversion to Christianity:  From The NY Times Via A & L Daily: Helen Vendler On Wallace Stevens ‘The Plain Sense Of Things’

On this view, being the good democratic citizens that we are, we reject the aristocratic elements from gaining too much traction, and thus do not create the vine-ripened literary, artistic, and cultural traditions that can make good artists into what they become, and what makes European cities, novels, poets, museums, and Europeans themselves something of what they are (a broad brush, I know).

I think Mansfield’s point is that some folks in the U.S see this dilemma of the democratic man only in terms of a vulgar materialism that must be overcome with the Arts, or High Culture, or Poetry or with a ‘Let’s be like Europe’ approach, especially in many a Liberal Arts Department.  It’s a deep wish.  Democracy is a leveling force.   It’s worth pointing out that the Arts can also be united with a Left-of-Center political philosophy as they are at NPR for popular consumption.  On this site, see: From ReasonTV Via Youtube: ‘Ken Burns on PBS Funding, Being a “Yellow-Dog Democrat,” & Missing Walter Cronkite’…Repost-From NPR: Grants To The NEA To Stimulate The Economy?

Some of these same folks see religion (the Puritan roots especially) as a restrictive, repressive force that needs to be overcome in order for freedom, free artistic expression and individual autonomy to flourish (I believe this is a driving tension in Hollywood).  There’s some truth to this, because I believe religion and politics, and even philosophy itself, have troubled relationships with art.

Mansfield goes on:

‘The theorists of materialism tell us that the long term will take care of itself so long as we do not obstruct materialism in the short run in our everyday lives. With a view to supporting political liberty, Tocqueville wants to limit everyday materialism and to concern us with a long-term goal, such as improving our immortal souls. This is why he fears for the state of democratic souls and speaks so strongly, if not fervently, in favor of religion. This is also why he showed such disgust for socialism.’

Perhaps we can keep it simpler, and not get taken with grand theories, or at least socialist ones anyways:

Too much politics into the arts?

First National Bank of Houlton, Maine

Related On This Site:  From Grist.Org Via The New Republic Via The A & L Daily: ‘Getting Past “Ruin Porn” In Detroit’…Marketplace aesthetics in service of “women”: Dove’s Campaign For Real Beauty: Pascal Dangin And Aesthetics…

Some of Le Corbusier’s work here, examples of Modern Architecture here.

See Also: Brasilia: A Planned City and Review Of Britain’s “Lost Cities” In The Guardian

Cities should be magnets for creativity and culture? –From The Atlantic: Richard Florida On The Decline Of The Blue-Collar Man…From Grist.Org Via The New Republic Via The A & L Daily: ‘Getting Past “Ruin Porn” In Detroit’… some people don’t want you to have the economic freedom to live in the suburbs: From Foreign Policy: ‘Urban Legends, Why Suburbs, Not Cities, Are The Answer’

Philosopher Of Art Denis Dutton of the Arts & Letters Daily says the arts and Darwin can be sucessfully synthesized: Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

How might Nietzsche figure in the discussion, at least with regard to Camille Paglia.  See the comments:  Repost-Camille Paglia At Arion: Why Break, Blow, Burn Was Successful…Here’s Nietzsche scholar J.P. Stern on Nietzsche’s anti-Christian, anti-secular morality (Kant, utilitarians), anti-democratic, and anti-Greek (except the “heroic” Greek) biases…

Nothing that Allan Bloom didn’t point out in the Closing Of The American Mind: Update And Repost: ‘A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche / Strauss Connection’….From Darwinian Conservatism By Larry Arnhart: “Surfing Strauss’s Third Wave of Modernity”

Ira Stoll at Reason: ‘Barack Obama vs. Elizabeth Warren on Trade‘

‘As Obama himself observed, part of the reason this is so raw for the left and labor is that they still haven’t gotten over Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s support, more than 20 years ago, of the North America Free Trade Agreement. If Obama succeeds in getting fast-track authorization from Congress for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and then succeeds in getting a deal passed, it could be a similarly significant achievement.’

In seeking the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the President is getting out-activated and out-progressed by Warren as she stirs up the base in populist fashion.  Will Bernie Sanders and Bill De Blasio jump into the fray?  Surely we can find the nearest guy wearing a Che shirt and ask him?

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From Darwinian Conservatism: ‘Capitalism vs The Climate:‘

‘The key point for Ridley is that capitalism allows for the bottom-up spontaneous generation of innovation through the evolution of specialization and the division of labor.  In such an evolving spontaneous order, we cannot predict the future, because we cannot know what new ideas and new inventions might be discovered by the human mind.  So we cannot know how human beings will solve their problems in the future, including the problem of global warming.

This is what Klein calls “magical thinking”–the assumption that capitalist markets will always create unimaginable technological solutions to our problems.  Her alternative is to argue that the only solution to a problem like global warming is a top-down, centrally-planned policy for slowing down economic production and consumption and investing over 10 percent of the world’s yearly economic output to build renewable sources of energy to replace high-carbon sources.’

Do you recall that Naomi Klein book?:

‘“Democratic socialism, meaning not only socialist parties brought to power through elections but also democratically run workplaces and landholdings,” was “never defeated in a great battle of ideas, nor were [these ideas] voted down in elections. They were shocked out of the way at key political junctures,” she argues.’

Oh boy.

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Passed along by a reader, one of the best classical guitarists out there, David Russell, playing a Celtic piece ‘Spatter The Dew’

Such a ridiculously good guitarist:

Adam Garfinkle at the American Interest stretches an analogy across the globe:

‘What am I trying to say here? Simply this: Cairo and Baltimore suffer from serious structural social dysfunctions. The problems in each are not the same, but both sets of problems have multiple and compound sources that are varied, engrained, poorly understood for the most past, and largely immune to fast-working policy fixes from on high.’

I’d suggest more something like this:  The problems are real, and serious, but the current administration likely sees both Cairo and Baltimore similarly because of a common underlying political philosophy, which focuses on certain problems in certain ways.

That political philosophy tends to the activist, Left-liberal and to be mostly progressive:  It hones in on the suffering, crimes, breakdowns and injustices in black communities and lives and calls for moral inclusion, political power and representation, and populist protest.

Many have focused on the moral good of including black folks into broader society which is a clear moral good to my eyes (basic decency, more opportunities and the responsibilities and the expectations that go with them, to not feel constantly invisible, prejudged, and excluded, no jobs, basic respect, persecuted etc.)

Given human nature and politics being what they are, however, the incentives of such politics on the ground are also what they are:  Activists in positions of political/bureaucratic power often possess clearly defined enemies outside of their ideals and a long agenda of change and activist loyalties (the system is still rotten and the man is still holding them down, even if they are the system and the man).

The actual state of race relations in the country comes to the fore, and there’s plenty of ignorance, mistrust and bad ideas to go around.  The same cronyism and money-trails all politicians leave in their wake remain, and out in the streets a constantly agitated base of constituents is still exhorted to consume the diminishing returns of hope, progress, change, and whatever redistributed wealth such folks can get wrest away from the other people who also want it: Union, bureaucratic, moneyed and other interests in the party that brought them.

Not a good plan for long-term growth, opportunity and stability.

What does this have to do with Cairo?  Well, maybe this: If you saw the people out in Cairo and the ‘Arab Spring’ as generally oppressed, in need of being brought into a community of nations and right-thinking Western universal ideals, and in need of ‘purely’ democratic peace protests and free and fair elections on their way towards progress, then you might have made a lot of the decisions the Obama administration has.

Reality, of course, is another matter.

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On that note: The consequences of removing the U.S. from its post WWII role as guarantor of much Middle-East security, and also trying to go out on a limb with the Iranian regime for a nuke deal (without much support from Republicans at home, and the necessary parties in the Middle-East) are coming home to roost:

‘King Salman of Saudi Arabia has announced at the eleventh hour that he will not attend President Obama’s high-profile Arab summit, which starts today at Camp David. As a result, the Administration, which realized late in the day how much it needed the Gulf powers to make a deal stick, now finds its defining foreign policy effort in jeopardy.’

Such a brave stance to take:  Six writers apparently know what is acceptable speech and what isn’t, and thus don’t think the folks at Charlie Hebdo engaged in acceptable speech.

Have these six happened upon an implacable standard of truth that perhaps might guide them in the eminently mysterious creative process of their own writing?  Do they all share the same truth?  Would they even know if they did?

Such a standard seems at least enough to guide their decision, then, to hold the folks at Charlie Hebdo to such a standard and protest the PEN award:

‘The decision by PEN American Center to give its annual Freedom of Expression Courage award to the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo has prompted six writers to withdraw as literary hosts at the group’s annual gala on May 5, adding a new twist to the continuing debate over the publication’s status as a martyr for free speech.

The novelists Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi have withdrawn from the gala, at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.’

The reasons?  Here are a few:

‘In an email to PEN’s leadership on Friday, Ms. Kushner said she was withdrawing out of discomfort with what she called the magazine’s “cultural intolerance” and promotion of “a kind of forced secular view,”’

Salman Rushdie knows a lot about ‘Islamophobia:’

“If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name,” Mr. Rushdie said. “What I would say to both Peter and Michael and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them.”

In their exercise of freedom, let such writers be one day judged by their own truth.

Genuine radicals and would-be revolutionaries are typically harder to come by (just like actual working Marxist economists, I’m guessing), but the animus of anti-colonial, anti-imperial, multi-cultural logic and postmodern radical chic seems to run a lot deeper.

Not with the activists yawp, but with a cowardly whimper:

Christopher Hitchens watched his friend, Rushdie, basically go into hiding for an indefinite period of time, and he watched how many folks in the West handled genuine threats of death:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyoOfRog1EM

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Here’s Hitchens (nearly a free speech absolutist, railing against many of his former friends on the Left) discussing the Yale Press, which was genuinely afraid that publishing this book could lead to violence in the Muslim street:

“…Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that “[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence.”

Cartoons here.  The cartoonist is still in some danger.

Food for thought.

A British Muslim tells his story, suggesting that classical liberalism wouldn’t be a bad idea…as a more entrenched radical British Left and Muslim immigration don’t mix too well: From Kenanmalik.com: ‘Introduction: How Salman Rushdie Changed My Life’… Via YouTube: ‘Christopher Hitchens Vs. Ahmed Younis On CNN (2005)’…

Free speech (used both well and unwell) meets offended Muslims: ‘Mohammad Cartoonist Lars Vilks Headbutted‘During Lecture’……From The OC Jewish Experience: ‘UC Irvine Muslim Student Union Suspended’…From Volokh: ‘”South Park” Creators Warned (Threatened) Over Mohammed’

See Also:  If you thought the cartoons were bad, more on the Fitna movie here.  From The NY Times: Review Of Christopher Caldwell’s Book “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West”  Libertarians love this issue:  Repost-A Canadian Libertarian Making Noise: Ezra Levant