Chris Navin

How do you preserve and conserve many laws and traditions and institutions likely worth preserving and conserving, and the authority necessary to maintain them with perhaps many people less connected in their lives and minds to those laws, traditions and institutions nowadays?

Are we becoming more individualistic?

Without that presumed moral fabric, and with more choice and opportunity available, will more Americans seek security and purpose in the secular ideologies so often leading to a rather Euro-statist secular authority?

Do you trust the institutional authority claimed by many standard secular liberal humanists on the way toward secular ideals?

How do the more often individualist and atheist libertarians find common ground with social and religious conservatives?

Do they?

Here’s Dalrymple:

‘One of the problems of modern society is the difficulty many people now have with accepting and obeying rules that they neither made themselves nor can they deduce from any of their own, self-chosen first principles, chief amongst which is the democratic one that a cat may look at a king. That is why, if you take the risk of asking a person who is behaving in a mildly antisocial way to desist, he will suddenly turn moral philosopher and demand an incontrovertible proof that he should not behave in that way.’

Speaking of authority, at least one Russian lawmaker thought it was time to take post-Soviet authoritarianism, self-serving ethno-nationalism, and Russia’s low birth-rate to the next level.

First, there was talk of encouraging hook-ups in tents at love camps, mixing sweet, young romance with coolly calculated demographic and political survival:

‘Remember the mammoths, say the clean-cut organisers at the youth camp’s mass wedding. “They became extinct because they did not have enough sex. That must not happen to Russia.’

Now for a more ‘personal’ solution. Ladies, if you’ve seen Vlad on a horse, this really was a next logical step.

-Naturally, Putin still offers photo-ops of himself bare-chested: embodying the virility, strength, and charisma that the Russian people will need going forward to conquer nature and vanquish all enemies.

A meeting of one of Vlad’s country jaunts was caught, miraculously, on tape and in English:

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You can’t enjoy the highs if you haven’t endured the lows, am I right?

***Bonus-1980′s tourist Putin meeting Ronald Reagan as a KGB member in Red Square.

***Double Bonus-Putin and Bush’s love affair in a GAZ M-21 Volga caught on tape. Putin sent Medvedev out to keep the flame alive with Obama on missile defense.

To put it crudely as possible: This guy knows more about love than a fate-tossed Ukranian mail-order bride. You can’t entirely blame him either, as some of its working.

Are we headed toward 19th century geo-politics?: Obama’s Decision On Missile Defense And A Quote From Robert Kagan’s: ‘The Return Of History And The End Of Dreams’

Do we try and invest in global institutions as flawed as they are?: Daniel Deudney On YouTube Responding to Robert Kagan: Liberal Democracy Vs. Autocracy

Theodore Dalrymple at Takimag.com: ‘From Sir, With Love.’

‘I have always liked banknotes as physical artefacts, and have kept one or two from the foreign countries that I have visited (I am not so much a collector as an accumulator). There was displayed in the window what was called “The Tyrant Collection”: six colorful banknotes marked with the portraits of various tyrants’

A surprising amount can be contained in a banknote collection.

‘Among the other lessons I learnt from banknotes is that, in modern times, only communist countries count in threes. Thus I have a Cuban three peso note (with the ghastly Che Guevara on it) and an Albenian three lek note. This in turn demonstrates that the spread of communism was also the spread of Russian cultural influence, for while the Soviet Union printed 3 Ruble notes, this was a continuation of Tsarist practice.’

Tyler Cowen has some links on Gary Becker’s passing, including this quote from Kieran Healy on Foucault on Becker:

‘The shifts in focus Foucault picks out here, and the concepts and methods that accompanied them, are why Becker’s influence has been so enormous, why his work has been the straw man in so many social science articles, why his methods allow for such broad application, why the imagery of choice and responsibility that so often accompanies them has proved so politically attractive, why the world is now full of economists who feel empowered to dispense advice on everything from childrearing to global climate change, and why the audience for this advice is so large.’

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A final note: I’ve got a title worked-out for an upcoming Dan Brown-esque Vatican City intrigue Catho-holic mystery/thriller for any takers: “The Bergoglio Imbroglio: Papal Fire“

I’d like to see it in airport bookstores by the end of the year.

Another Addition: That’s a joke.

Also, check out Les Gelb at the American Interests on what Obama needs to change (note: he’s ideologically rather rigid and rather thin-skinned when it comes to genuine challenges and contrary points of view):

‘To his credit, he questions his subordinates with great intellectual ferocity and skill. Rarely, however, does he allow his own thinking or policies, some already packaged for public consumption, to be rigorously scrutinized beforehand. Even after a productive meeting of top senior officials in the Situation Room, President Obama is said to repair to the Oval Office with a limited group of personal advisers’