Pyotr Patrushev blog

Conservatives war on education in the US?

2012-01-28T03:48:00.000-08:00

http://open.salon.com/blog/robert_elisberg/2011/12/01/the_war_on_education

And so, at one time or another, we get Donald Trump, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, a pizza guy and even Sarah Palin leading the pack for the Republican nomination. And now Newt Gingrich, who, as Paul Krugman put it, is a "stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like."

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Re Doomsday clock

2012-01-10T20:24:00.000-08:00

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-11/doomsday-clock-ticks-closer/3767426

My comment below:

Re Doomsday clock:

We have used up the momentum of resource recovery boom andtechnological post-war innovation of the last 65 years (slightly extendedKondratieff cycle?). Instead of saving for our future, we dug ourselves into adeeper hole with climate change, ecological disruption, and grand theftof our finances by a new class of wily operators on Wall Street and beyond.War(s) are the usual recipe for "recovery" at such points. Warsreduce population, create innovation, wipe books clean, make people leanand hungry again, and make leaders look guiltless and heroic. Except that thistime war(s) may have a momentum of their own and create such havoc that eventhe war mongers among us will shake in their boots. Lurching for so long soclose to midnight is not a good sign for humanity. If there was any progress commensuratewith our rate of technological and scientific innovation, we should be now muchfurther away from midnight, at, say, 6 PM. Signing the Climate deal, stoppingthe nuclear proliferation completely, and finding ways of creating a sustainableworld economy would have been a good sign. Alas, it not there and the clockkeeps ticking.

The China Primer...

2011-12-11T23:34:00.000-08:00

In 2004, he notes, 10 million people went to Beijing seeking redress for injustices in their home districts, only to be harried by police and forced to sleep rough. As he puts it, with typical directness: "The strong prey on the weak, people enrich themselves through brute force and deception, and the meek and humble suffer while the bold and unscrupulous flourish."

Read more:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2100133,00.html

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Will this innovation gradually put human translators out of work?

2011-12-07T19:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2011-12-07&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email

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All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (television documentary series)

2011-11-10T21:34:00.000-08:00

Fascinating BBC series complementing in some way The Trap.

For me the personal story of Ayn Rand and the link to Greenspan and whole capitalist "collective" being undone by messy human emotions that they denied was enlightening....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_(television_documentary_series)

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Ideal for Xmas gift and for any time gift...

2011-11-10T20:38:00.000-08:00

A friend and a collegue have started this website that helps Asian women to reclaim their traditional skills and make some money by honest work instead of working in hotels or brothels...

http://www.sawangboran.com/store/

Help the good cause and buy some authentic craft items!!!

Here is the purpose of the project:

Sawangboran Project – Old Craft, New Life

For centuries the women of South-East Asia had woven for every need of the family, the home, social relations and spiritual benefits, within what could be broadly called a ‘spiritual and material economy’ – not a money-based market. Modern ‘development’ has displaced most of that economy. Most weavers must work for the ‘informal’ market, for shamefully low pay.

In our ethnically Lao region of Isan (North-East Thailand), where development is rather recent, older women still grow silkworms and weave, for family and for sale. As their amazing skills and patient labour earn them a pittance, logically their juniors have turned to better paid jobs. Alarmingly, across the country, girls and women under 30 simply have not learnt a skill that used to be women’s main education and spiritual achievement. An exceptional system of traditional knowledge and cultural heritage is thus doomed.

Sawang Boran is trying to reverse the trend. While it began with women in their sixties, real equitable pay, the cultivation of excellence, the excitement of natural dyeing, and nurturance of the weavers’ ownership successfully attracted younger members. They are far happier as weavers than as factory workers or hired farm hands. Unlike many well-meaning but ephemeral projects, Sawang Boran has demonstrated its staying power and commitment to the weavers – whose daughters in their teens and twenties can now be seen helping (and thus learning from) their mothers.

We mix the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ honestly and creatively – older expertise and younger inventiveness; old natural dyes, and newly discovered ones, old recipes and new combinations; old designs and techniques, and new ways of refining and combining them; old traditional processes, newly labeled ‘organic’. The continuity is a matter of authenticity.

First truly interactive e-book...

2011-11-10T18:33:00.001-08:00

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Danielle de Niese: A flirtatious aria...

2011-10-08T22:39:00.000-07:00

What a joy to see someone so revelling in her sensuality and so beyond mere "sex appeal" of the pop culture (compare to any clip of Madonna, Shakira, etc.!!!

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Money Tips: Get Free DVDs, Avoid Bad Restaurants, Save Money & Mother Nature at the Same Time

2011-09-21T20:47:00.000-07:00

SMART SPENDING
145 Money Tips: Get Free DVDs, Avoid Bad Restaurants, Save Money & Mother Nature at the Same Time
By BRAD TUTTLE | @bradrtuttle | September 16, 2011 |
2

VSTOCK LLC / GETTY IMAGES
There are also money lessons to be learned in this roundup from millionaires who hate fees as much (or more) than you and I, high-profile pawn shop owners who are wise enough to walk away rather than lose money on deals, and parents who rarely if ever splurge on purchases for their kids.

3 money lessons from ‘Pawn Stars.’ The History Channel show “Pawn Stars” has been a hit with viewers. It’s also a regular demo of how to make deals in your best interest. For example, there are times when the wisest financial move is doing nothing and walking away:

If, after you invest a lot of time researching and learning about something, you discover that it’s not what it appears to be, walk away. It’s the idea of sunk cost. It stinks you spent all that time but don’t let that force you to do something you otherwise wouldn’t.

4 things my parents didn’t splurge for (and why I’m glad they didn’t). Kids always feel like they’re missing out. But guess what? Spoil them, and you’re setting them up to expect to be spoiled (and likely, battling debt) for their entire lives. Here’s a reflection of how, in retrospect, kids will wind up thanking their parents for raising them frugally. Someone who doesn’t wear full-price, brand-name clothing as a child will understand the wisdom of avoiding original retail price in the future:

If I had been used to name-brand clothing in my youth, I might not have become the bargain hunter I am today. Now, upon entering any clothing store, I make a bee-line for the sale rack.

5 ways to save on group dinners. Consider having dessert back at someone’s house:

Have sweets on hand for a post-restaurant get-together or split one dessert between everyone, says Stephanie Nelson, who runs CouponMom.com. By skipping individual orders of dessert and coffee, you can easily shave $30 off the bill—not to mention the treat it will be for your waistline.
(LIST: 12 Things You Should Stop Buying Right Now)

5 money lessons from millionaires. Rich people hate getting nickel and dimed with fees as much as the rest of us—perhaps even more so. Always hanging onto as much cash as possible is one way they got rich in the first place, after all:

A client with a portfolio well past the multi-million dollar mark once remarked that despite the fact that $25 to him roughly equated to what a nickel is to me, small bank fees were the bane of his existence. As it turns out, bank fees annoy the heck out of millionaires just as much as those of us who sweat and toil for a living. Even if it’s a nickel.
7 things McDonald’s knows about your brain. One reason fast food is addictive is that the process of getting food in one’s belly—from initial hunger pang to relief upon first bite—occurs so fast:

You don’t even have to get out of your car to pick up a Big Mac. You place your order at the drive-thru and within two minutes you can take the first bite as you drive home. You can hardly get a pan hot enough to fry in that time. The sooner you have the burger in hand, the sooner it can trigger the release of the cocktail of rewarding chemicals in your brain.
7 best things to buy secondhand. Golf clubs, cars, bicycles, and exercise equipment can all be smart, solid values when purchased used. So can hand tools, which shoppers are especially likely to find at yard sales and estate sales hosted by baby boomers who are downsizing or moving:

You’ll have a great chance to stock up on tools that never wearout, such as hammers, pliers, planes, chisels, screwdrivers, and the like. Stay away from files and saws, though; these do wear out, although the wear might not be apparent.
(LIST: Top 10 Cities To Buy Vs. Rent)

7 ways to cut household costs by opting for green alternatives. Save money, and feel better about your impact on Mother Nature by, for instance, subbing hand towels for paper towels:

It’s true that paper towels make for an easy reach when your kid spills something. Yet I’ve seen a number of stories decrying paper towels as an absolute waste. Planetgreen.com, for example, claims paper towels create 3,000 tons of landfill waste a day.
7 urban legends about motor oil. The big one is that all cars need oil changes every 3,000 miles, which even Jiffy Lube says is not the case. But what about the long-accepted idea that the oil should be changed when it appears black on the dipstick?

Experts say this is a myth, as is the related notion that you can identify spent oil by smell. “That is old school,” says Kristen Huff, vice president of Blackstone Laboratories in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “Oil is meant to get dark — it means it’s doing its job,” she says.
(MORE: 127 Money Tips: Snag the Best Deals on Diapers, Cars, Pet Supplies, Healthy Foods, Insurance Premiums, and More)

8 ways to save money and get fit by living inefficiently. Yes, here are suggestions to make your life less efficient—all in the interests of saving money and/or improving health. Committing to biking or walking when handling short errands accomplishes both:

Read more: http://moneyland.time.com/2011/09/16/145-money-tips-get-free-dvds-avoid-bad-restaurants-save-money-mother-nature-at-the-same-time/#ixzz1YeL2ScJX

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We're a nation of fat, sad drinkers, survey finds

2011-09-13T19:03:00.000-07:00

http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/diet-and-fitness/were-a-nation-of-fat-sad-drinkers-survey-finds-20110914-1k89a.html

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How Plants Made the World

2011-09-08T10:04:00.000-07:00

Plants to sustain sealed-off scientist

The experiment will be filmed for a BBC series examining how plants have shaped the Earth. Without plants, the planet's atmosphere would be unbreathable and there would be no soil in which to grow crops.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/living-in-an-airtight-box-with-plants/story-e6frg6so-1226132148946

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Housing gloom in Oz

2011-09-02T19:14:00.000-07:00

The Inevitability of Reality
Saturday, 3 September 2011
The Daily Reckoning Weekend Edition – Melbourne, Australia
By Nick Hubble

The housing gloom virus is spreading to mainstream newspapers. And property spruikers are revising their 'property always goes up' rallying cry. Now the market is 'steadying', faces 'stabilisation', feels 'softer' and prices are 'flat'.

Editor Kris Sayce points out in our sister publication Money Morning that 'flat' means declining if you actually look at the numbers in the Age.
Perth recorded the largest fall in house prices, down by 2.7 per cent, over the quarter. It was followed by Brisbane, down 2.1 per cent; and Darwin and Adelaide, each falling 1.9 per cent. Melbourne and Sydney again proved to be the most resilient of the state capitals; Melbourne's low fall of 0.9 per cent was followed by Sydney's, down by 1.1 per cent.
But let's take a look ahead rather than back. From the Age again:
Separate building approval figures show just 7600 private sector houses were approved in July, almost unchanged from June and down 12 per cent over the year. About 2900 houses were approved in Victoria, down 10 per cent on a year earlier.

These figures add weight to our view that the housing sector is going backwards at a rapid pace," CommSec economist Savanth Sebastian said.

"Homes sales have hit 10-year lows, house prices have been tracking lower for six months and housing credit is at the weakest levels since the late 1970s," he said.
So the housing sector isn't expecting things to be pretty either. Over at the RBA, they are one-step ahead according to the Australian:
RBA deputy governor Ric Battellino said today there were concerns that buyers who bought into the market in 2009, when the federal government grant was increased, may have over-committed themselves
Yes, remember those first-home buyers who had to 'get on the property ladder'? They will soon be found at the bottom of the pile of people who fell off.

To get an idea of what might transpire over coming years, consider what happened in the US, UK and Ireland, just to name a few, when house prices stopped rising. (Here we mean the real definition of 'flat', not the property spruikers definition.)

Property investors suddenly stopped believing their houses were appreciating in value. (Something that is inherently odd to your editor, as houses don't grow.) And it became difficult to justify making a loss year after year on the expenses of owning the property.

Suddenly the true value of the investment asset emerges - it will have to fall in price dramatically before it can return a profit (rent minus the costs of owning, which include paying back the debt).

So the very tax advantage that sucked gullible property investors into the market will be their downfall. Investing in a loss-generating asset may be tax deductible, but that asset obviously isn't much of an investment.

That's what the Americans, Brits and Irish figured out. Then the real selling began, unleashing mayhem on financial markets.

When Australians figure out that a loss-making investment isn't a good one ... well ... they will lose a key part of their national psyche. Perhaps they will no longer be Australian?

Here is another odd phenomenon about housing bubbles. Gold, which is in a bubble according to many property spruikers, has had margins go up with the price. That is, as the price went up, it cost more to hold a position in gold futures. Property investments are the opposite.

The higher house prices go, the less risk banks perceive in lending. That meant they felt comfortable reducing required deposit ratios in the housing boom of the US, UK and Ireland. The initial cost of buying went down as the price went up.

This just adds fuel to the fire. And whenever things slowed, the government stepped in with all sorts of grants and tax breaks, further reducing the costs of 'getting on the property ladder'. The Sherlock Holmes of property investing, Intelligent Finance mortgage broker Justin Doobov, comments: 'I have a suspicion that the grants tend to push the price of a property up by the value of the grant.'

Well done, Justin!

This may be a particularly bad time to be over-optimistic about property.

Ratings agencies, governments and private institutions continue to forecast recoveries that are unlikely to emerge. In fact, many economists who predicted the 2008 economic woes are explaining why recession is a virtual certainty in the US. Some say it has begun already. Factor in Europe's sovereign debt woes and China's attempts to slow down and you get a dismal outlook for Australia.

The 'reputable' forecasters above (people think ratings agencies, governments and big banks are more reputable than people who are consistently correct) base their projections on recoveries that happened back in the day when more debt could be borrowed to spur 'growth'. Too much debt is the problem now. It has to be paid back, or defaulted upon, before growth can re-emerge.

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The end of the road for motormania

2011-09-02T03:25:00.000-07:00

16 August 2011 by Fred Pearce
Magazine issue 2825. Subscribe and save
For similar stories, visit the Comment and Analysis and Cars and Motoring Topic Guides

The interchange is changing (Image: John Humble/Getty)
Something unexpected is happening to our car-crazy culture. What are the forces driving us out of motoring?

IS THE west falling out of love with the car? For environmentalists it seems an impossible dream, but it is happening. While baby boomers and those with young families may stick with four wheels, a combination of our ageing societies and a new zeitgeist among the young seems to be breaking our 20th-century car addiction. Somewhere along the road, we reached "peak car" and are now cruising down the other side.

Peak car takes several forms. Sales of new ... read more:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128255.600-the-end-of-the-road-for-motormania.html?full=true&print=true

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US debt in pictures

2011-08-30T17:23:00.000-07:00

http://saskatoonhousingbubble.blogspot.com/2011/08/us-debt-in-pictures.html

See link above!

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Писатель ловит рыбу в реке, а переводчик - в аквариуме...

2011-08-23T03:31:00.000-07:00

Читайте интервью в газете "Единение":

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Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity

2011-08-22T20:04:00.000-07:00

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mark_pagel_how_language_transformed_humanity.html

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Julian Treasure: 5 ways to listen better | Video on TED.com

2011-08-14T18:41:00.000-07:00

Julian Treasure: 5 ways to listen better | Video on TED.com

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James H Kunstler dissects suburbia | Video on TED.com

2011-08-14T16:57:00.000-07:00

James H Kunstler dissects suburbia | Video on TED.com

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Geoffrey West: The surprising math of cities and corporations | Video on TED.com

2011-08-14T16:56:00.000-07:00

Geoffrey West: The surprising math of cities and corporations | Video on TED.com

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Robert Neuwirth on our "shadow cities" | Video on TED.com

2011-08-14T16:55:00.000-07:00

Robert Neuwirth on our "shadow cities" | Video on TED.com

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Paul Bloom: The origins of pleasure | Video on TED.com

2011-08-14T16:54:00.000-07:00

Paul Bloom: The origins of pleasure | Video on TED.com

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Philip Zimbardo: The demise of guys? | Video on TED.com

2011-08-14T16:53:00.000-07:00

Philip Zimbardo: The demise of guys? | Video on TED.com

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Brits hate kids.. and love toffs...

2011-08-12T21:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/plundering-toffs-rule-on-their-own-terms-20110812-1iqmu.html

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725547,00.html

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Chirality and the Origin of Life

2011-03-22T17:57:00.000-07:00

http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~jbailey/chirality.html

I have met Jeremy Bailey. Fascinating thesis pointing to the possibility of extraterrestrial origin of life on Earth.

Isabel Behncke: Evolution's gift of play, from bonobo apes to humans | Video on TED.com

2011-03-22T16:46:00.000-07:00

Isabel Behncke: Evolution's gift of play, from bonobo apes to humans | Video on TED.com

A Season's greetings video message to all my friends (and humanity at large) :)

2010-12-20T20:14:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3blRhf-npgQ

Клуб российских неудачников...

2010-10-25T17:34:00.000-07:00

Проблему сексуальной неудовлетворенности российских женщин пытается вскрыть немецкая Die Tageszeitung: в империи мачо Путина слабаками мужчин делают депрессия и водка.

http://www.inopressa.ru/article/25Oct2010/taz/rus3.html

Lost Exile...

2010-09-12T22:52:00.000-07:00

The unlikely life and sudden death of The Exile, Russia’s angriest newspaper.

By James Verini
WEB EXCLUSIVE February 23, 2010

Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames, co-editors of The Exile, a subversive English-language newspaper based in Moscow, whose decadelong run came to an abrupt end in 2008. Inset: A Boris Yeltsin cover accompanied by a typical Exile headline. By Martin von den Driesch (Taibbi and Ames).

The demise of The Exile began, as so many demises have in Russia, with an official letter. Faxed to the offices of the newspaper late on a Friday afternoon the spring before last from somewhere within the bowels of Rossvyazokhrankultura, the Russian Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications, and Cultural Heritage Protection, it announced the imminent “conducting of an unscheduled action to check the observance of the legislation of the Russian Federation on mass media.” The Exile, a Moscow-based, English-language biweekly, stood accused of violating Article Four of that legislation by encouraging extremism, spreading pornography, or promoting drug use. The letter scheduled the unscheduled action to take place between May 13 and June 11. This being Russia, it wasn’t faxed until May 22.

An Exile sales director, about to leave for the day, received the fax and phoned an editor, who called the real target of the letter, Exile founder and editor in chief Mark Ames, at that moment a world away in Los Gatos, California. Ames in turn promptly called a few lawyers in Moscow, who warned him he might be arrested if he returned. Someone, apparently, had it out for The Exile.

But who? Ames likes to indulge a grandiose paranoia whenever possible, and did. A functionary? An enraged oligarch? Someone on President Dmitry Medvedev’s staff, or, more to the point, in Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s circle of spooks? (The Exile’s first cover story on Putin, in 1999, grafted the man’s head onto the body of a latex-clad dominatrix over the headline putin commands mother russia: kneel!) Egotism aside, the possibilities were in fact endless. Since its debut, in 1997, The Exile, which read like the bastard progeny of Spy magazine and an X-rated version of Poor Richard’s Almanack, had pilloried, in the foulest terms possible, almost everyone of importance, and no importance, in Russia, and had made a point of violating not one but all of Article Four’s provisions. But everyone knew that.

So why now?

No one seemed to know that.

The one thing that Ames did know: he was going back to Moscow. Putin’s Russia is an infinitely more dangerous place for journalists than the crumbling country that had drawn Ames 15 years before from the same suburban town where he paced about now, but still it was Russia, and not America, that was his spiritual home. It was not for nothing he’d named his paper The Exile.

Several days after Ames returned to Moscow, the dour Federal Service officials, three men led by a woman, arrived at the paper’s office. When they walked in, a staffer old enough to remember some of the worst parts of the Soviet era, crossed herself and simply ran from the office, Ames says. The officials questioned Ames for more than three hours, going through issue after issue of The Exile, by turns offended, disgusted, baffled. Ames suppressed his urge to start cursing at the officials in mat, Russian’s profane slang, as he watched them thumb through his life’s work, but his restraint meant little: news of the interrogation soon got out, and stories appeared in the Russian press, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters. Ames’s investors broke off contact. The distributors stopped sending trucks. “They worried that everybody would be sent to Siberia,” Exile sales director Zalina Abdusalamova says.

Just like that, The Exile’s era was over.

Ames is angry—he’s often angry—about how it all ended. He’d always pictured some exultant, bloody end for The Exile. But he can’t claim to be surprised. “I always assumed that every issue would be the last,” he says. Indeed, it’s a mystery to many why Mark Ames didn’t end up in jail or a grave years ago. In its time The Exile was arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia, and Ames and his staff had paid for that fact, or at least for the fact that they were arrogant reprobates, many times before. Columnist Edward Limonov, the 66-year-old political provocateur in whom the Federal Service officials were particularly interested, filed his copy from prison for two years after being convicted of possessing arms, which he admits he intended to smuggle into Kazakhstan in an effort to incite a coup there. Writer Kevin McElwee, an American expatriate, had both legs broken when he was torn from the side of a building he was scaling to escape an angry mob of Muscovites, an incident that had nothing to do with anything he’d written—McElwee, The Exile’s film reviewer, was just a rambunctious drunk. On another occasion, a deranged and slighted man sent a letter promising to kill the “frat boy” Ames. Ames in turn published an editorial urging the loon to instead off his co-editor, Matt Taibbi. True, the many death threats Ames received took less of a physical toll on him than loading up on Viagra and attempting to bed nine Moscow prostitutes in nine hours, which he wrote about to commemorate The Exile’s ninth anniversary, but that was only because Ames approached the assignment with a rigor befitting a Consumer Reports exposé—“There really was no other way to tell whether these drugs actually worked,” he recalls with sincerity and audible exhaustion.

But far more dangerous in Putin’s Russia was The Exile’s serious journalism. By the time it was shuttered, the paper had published damning views of Russian life through three administrations, two wars, and a stock-market crash, ever since the freezing February night in 1997 when, penniless and infuriatingly sober, Ames had put out the first issue in a torrent of outrage at the sharpies and frauds who insisted that post-Communist Russia was a new democratic paradise, at the liars in the Kremlin, the dreamers in Washington, the academic careerists, Wall Street, the World Bank, the idiots in the press who’d never hired him—at pretty much everyone save Ames himself. Never mind that he and Taibbi would prove the hardest-partying Moscow media celebrities of their time, never mind that they wouldn’t just expose the place’s hedonism but come to embody it—Ames was pissed off. He wasn’t George Plimpton chasing Hemingway’s Sad Young Men as part of some romantic lost generation. He was living in the unromantic rubble of a lost empire.

“Everything was about free markets and capitalism and democracy, and it was all leading us to some great new future, but all you had to do was look around in the streets and see there was something fucking wrong with it,” Ames says. “We were in the middle of total devastation, one of the worst, most horrible fucking tragedies of modern times.”

Ames was from the start vindictive, and carping, and paranoid, and, in the opinion of Exile devotees, a group that includes many of its victims, he also happened to be right.

“They were incredibly gutsy,” former Moscow-bureau chief of The Economist Edward Lucas says. Ames once devoted a cover story to deriding Lucas’s reporting, and The Exile panned his book, but nonetheless Lucas read the paper regularly. “There was kind of a suspension of disbelief in the 1990s—it may be corrupt, but it will work. The Exile spotted very perceptively that the most optimistic Western interpretation was wrong.”

“They were very direct and visceral and often very scurrilous, but they caught a side of Moscow that no one else did,” Owen Matthews, currently Moscow-bureau chief for Newsweek, says. “They didn’t feel the need to hedge around with reportorial politesse,” and Ames is “a great stylist. I don’t compare him to Céline lightly. He has that quality of brutal honesty.” This from a man whom Ames repeatedly savaged in print, once describing his teeth as leaning “randomly like Celtic temple ruins.” Still, he’s an admirer. “I haven’t seen a newspaper that’s so breathtakingly dark and cynical and brilliant,” Matthews says. “They had something going that really couldn’t be repeated anywhere. It would be out of business in three seconds if they tried to publish it in the U.S.”

“They took me on for using journalistic clichés, and at the end of the day I was like, ‘You know what? You’re right,’” says Colin McMahon, a former Moscow-bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, adding, “I read it because it was good for story ideas, frankly. These guys were deeper into a subculture of Moscow than I could ever have allowed myself to be. I’d see something in The Exile and say, ‘How can I get this into a story without mainlining cocaine?’”

Yet The Exile was too vitriolic to romanticize for long or to consult just its fans. And listening to the critics is too fun. They call Ames and Taibbi, singly or in combination, children, louts, misogynists, madmen, pigs, hypocrites, anarchists, fascists, racists, and fiends. According to Carol Williams, of the Los Angeles Times, “It seemed like a bunch of kids who’d somehow gotten funding for their own little newspaper.” A former New York Times Moscow-bureau chief, Michael Wines, offered a no-comment comment. “I think I’ll pass, thank you,” he e-mailed, “except to repeat what I said at the time, and what Shaw said a lot earlier: Never wrestle with a pig. You just get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”

Of course, a pig is probably not the farm animal that comes to Wines’s mind first when he’s reminded of The Exile. It was Wines, then the Times’s Moscow-bureau chief, who, having won The Exile’s coveted Worst Journalist in Russia March Madness contest in 2001, was typing in his office when Ames and Taibbi rushed in unannounced and, by way of congratulations, slammed a pie in his face. The pie was made with fresh vanilla cream, hand-puréed strawberry, and five ounces of horse semen.

‘That’s what he said?,” Ames asks when I relay Wines’s comment. “He said the same thing back then, the poor bastard.”

It’s a late-November afternoon and Ames is sitting unrepentantly at his kitchen table, next to a window looking out onto a cheerless backyard complex, in the second-floor Brooklyn sublet where he and his wife moved a month earlier after deciding to leave Russia for good. It’s been 15 years since Ames first moved to Moscow. Now a contributor to The Nation and the Daily Beast and a guest commentator on MSNBC, Ames, who’s just woken up—it’s 2:30 p.m.—is typing a Nation column indifferently on a laptop. He’s more interested in a documentary on TV about life in the Pleistocene era. “I feel bad for the Neanderthals,” he says. “They ran into Cro-Magnon man and just got stomped.” He takes a break to crush some Adderall pills in a bowl, the powder from which he then daubs onto his tongue, washing it back with his third cup of black coffee.

Ames looks younger than his 44 years, handsome in a prehistoric and only slightly demonic way, at six feet four inches with the thick neck and headstone torso of the all-league defensive end he was in Los Gatos, a San Jose suburb. He’s wearing black jeans, a black T-shirt, white socks with no shoes, and a black Oakland Raiders cap pulled low over his already shadowy eyes and vehement face, which seems to grow darker by the hour. Thanks to his coloring, the Moscow police often mistook him for a “black ass,” slang for a migrant from the Caucuses, and delighted in shaking him down for bribes.

In the bedroom, his 27-year-old wife, Anastasia, is still asleep, and in the next room over, among half-emptied suitcases, sits an unopened hulking green Samsonite festooned with FedEx packing tape. It contains the complete and now sole paper archive of The Exile. Just before the interrogation, Ames had Exile editor Yasha Levine secretly pack up all 285 back issues and fly them to the States.

Ames opens the suitcase and removes the bundles of newsprint, gingerly laying them on the floor. Some have been professionally bound and jacketed, while others, in fitting samizdat fashion, have been thrown together and sewn up with string. Kneeling, he opens the most yellowed bundle to the inaugural issue, No. 0, dated February 6, 1997. The red X in The eXile, a graphic betrayal that in two strokes turns democracy into anarchy, is faded but still big and raw and eye-grabbing. He leafs through his first columns. I ask the last time he’s looked at them.

“It’s been a long fucking time. I don’t like looking back,” he says.

“Why?,” I ask.

“What’s the point?” he says.

That Ames produced even a single issue of The Exile is a minor miracle. His entrance into the Moscow media world could hardly have been less auspicious. After stints working for a wine dealer and a Mauritian importer, he started the paper out of gall, having tried and failed to get work as a writer at The Wall Street Journal, the Moscow Times, the L.A. Times, and on. (Ames confirms only the Moscow Times.)

At first, “The Exile was about petty, personal vengeances as much as it was about anything political,” he says. “Why have a newspaper if you can’t have these arguments and win?”

By the time he got to Russia, Ames relished rejection, he says. At U.C. Berkeley, he’d rebelled against the “bland liberal consensus” by flirting with right-wing politics, getting into arguments with humorless lefties, and falling under the wing of John Dolan, a literature professor and campus cult figure who liked Ames’s personal essays and macabre short stories, loathed though they were by his fellow students. Ames still remembers Dolan’s first somber career advice: “He said, ‘You’re talented, but one thing you’re going to have to get used to is that you’ll never get published in The New Yorker.’” Dolan also introduced him to that urtext for masochistic littérateurs everywhere, Dostoyevsky’s The Devils, the story of a doomed anarchic plot hatched by amateurs. Ames was hooked from the words “Stepan Trofimovich was, for example, greatly enamored of his position as a persecuted man and, so to speak, an exile,” thereafter tapping at every chance he got the grotesque vein in Russian letters, idolizing Gogol and Bulgakov, shunning Tolstoy and Chekhov. After graduating, Ames bounced around between menial jobs and taught himself Russian, and when the Iron Curtain fell, in 1989, one place beckoned. “The only way to escape was to go somewhere that scared off all those frauds and idiots,” Ames says. Russia “was perfect for me.”

Ames’s first attempt to stay in the country, in 1991, was thwarted when Communist generals tried to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev, which led to the heroic rise of Boris Yeltsin and his dissolution of the U.S.S.R. Ames watched coverage of the coup from Berlin, enraptured. Two weeks after Ames finally moved to Moscow, in 1993, Yeltsin, no longer much of a hero, disbanded parliament. Then the rebels attacked the White House. Ames had just turned 28. He ran around the city, chasing tank fire, ducking behind soldiers until they kicked him away. “It was this different world where everything was more intense and consequential and full of surprises,” he says. This was home.

By the mid-90s, a different species of expatriate was flocking to the Wild East, as it was known. The decade had all the indulgence of 1920s Paris and Weimar Berlin, without the bothersome art and poetry. There was too much money and sex to be had. Perestroika and glasnost were all very nice, but Russia was broke, and Yeltsin, committing to a raft of hasty privatization measures, ushered in Western bankers, consultants, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and opportunists of every other stripe, who joined the nascent capitalists and native raconteurs of Russia. According to The Christian Science Monitor’s Fred Weir, “It was, of course, the sexiest story in the world, because the great Soviet giant was transforming itself—we thought—into a Western country.” In fact, he says, “the fuckers were just looting Russia.” It was hard to keep your eye on the looting, though, when Moscow was overflowing with young Russian women coming in from every corner of the country to find work. “Every woman was hot,” says Alexander Zaitchik, an Exile editor. “The policewomen were hot. The tram drivers were hot.”

“Russians are always anarchic, but at that time they wanted to try everything—new drugs, new positions,” the Wall Street Journal Moscow correspondent Alan Cullison says. “The esteem of Americans was enormous. The men wanted to drink with you, the women wanted to sleep with you.”

But if libertinism was regnant, propping it up were graft, poverty, and murder. Many Russians were living in worse squalor than they had under the Soviet Union. Horrific public violence was routine, and Westerners were not immune, a fact driven home early in the party when an Oklahoma-born bon vivant hotelier, Paul Tatum, was perforated with Kalashnikov rounds in a metro station one evening in 1996. Nor did reporters enjoy special protection. Carol Williams investigated the Tatum murder for the Los Angeles Times and after concluding it had likely been a contract killing, she got a call from someone in the government who told her it was “unhealthy to pursue certain avenues of inquiry,” Williams says. The trickle-down venality began with Yeltsin’s cadre of billionaires and bumptious economists and descended to the streets and storefronts of Moscow, controlled as they were by overlapping criminal syndicates and factions of the city police and the F.S.B. (the K.G.B.’s successor), which provided the requisite krisha, or roof—protection by way of extortion, in other words.

“When I opened a business in Moscow, the question wasn’t if we’d be successful, but whether we’d be able to keep it,” says one American financier and entrepreneur who works for a large Wall Street firm in Moscow. “Would I be in danger, get kidnapped? Would I get extorted by a criminal racket, or by the K.G.B.?” He adds, “All of us were scavengers on the carcass of the Soviet Union.”

And the place where Moscow’s new expatriate plutocracy ogled that carcass was in the pages of The Exile. By the week in early 1998 when it published a cover story on Yeltsin entitled “The Bribefather,” complete with Mario Puzo puppet-master typeface and Yeltsin’s vodka-bloated mug receding into blackness, the paper was required reading.

“It was the bible. You’ve never seen a paper read like that,” Russianist and journalist Andrew Meier, author of Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall, says. According to James Fenkner, a Moscow fund manager, “It was like Facebook. It kind of just hit.”

Ames had spent the first issues maligning everyone in Moscow who’d never given him a job, but in the paper’s second month, when he took on Matt Taibbi—stole him, actually, from a short-lived alternative weekly that Ames had briefly edited, where Taibbi had been hired to replace Ames—it really took off. The son of NBC reporter Mike Taibbi, Matt grew up in Boston, attended Bard College, and graduated in 1991 while at the University of Leningrad. He became infatuated with Gogol, and spent his 20s bouncing between continents, episodes of depression, and jobs that included a stint in the Mongolian Basketball League. Like Ames, Taibbi was tall and good-looking, but in a safer, corn-fed way, with bright eyes and a wide, boyish smile. Unlike Ames, he spoke Russian without constant profanity and was a born journalist, having reported from Uzbekistan for the Associated Press and then in Moscow for the Moscow Times. Owen Matthews called him “the best city and crime reporter the Moscow Times ever had.”

“Before he came I just wanted to destroy journalism,” says Ames. “I learned how to report from Matt.”

What made The Exile so popular, and still makes it so readable, was its high-low mix of acute coverage and character assassination, sermonizing laced with smut—a balance that has also characterized Taibbi’s work at Rolling Stone, where he has been a contributing editor for the last five years. “One of the big complaints we heard for years—really violently angry complaints—was: You cannot mix, in one paper, satire and real investigative journalism,” Ames says. “And we were like, Why?” Taibbi wrote on subjects ranging from Washington and I.M.F.’s policy in Russia to Moscow prisons, labor strikes, and religious cults. He hung out with crime bosses, cops, and rogue politicians and wrote a series in which he lived the lives of ordinary Russians for days and weeks, working as a bricklayer, a miner, and a vegetable hocker and attending a Moscow high school. He was among the first foreign journalists to speculate openly on the connection between a series of suspicious apartment-building bombings and Putin’s ratcheting up of the Chechen War, now a mainstay of the anti-Putin canon.

Taibbi also served as The Exile’s good cop. When its prey had to beg for mercy, they’d turn to him. “There was always that slight fear that Ames would double-cross you,” says Peter Lavelle, an investment banker and journalist in Moscow in the 1990s. “Taibbi was the straight guy. When I met him at an Exile party for the first time, he says, ‘Oh, I lampooned you—I’m sorry. Let me get you a T-shirt.’”

Despite their contrasting personalities, or because of them, soon into their collaboration Ames and Taibbi were inseparable. Working to all hours in the Exile office or from Ames’s apartment in a monstrous Stalinist high-rise, the pair would pore over Russian publications, write, talk with sources, and bullshit, and then stomp through the snowdrifts and ice into the Moscow night, where their confessional columns and towering American swagger had already rendered them luminaries.

Stepping out with the Exile crowd meant invitations to the newest restaurants and nightclubs—including, one surreal night, to the grand opening of the Chuck Norris Supper Club & Casino, where the star of Walker, Texas Ranger and Braddock: Missing in Action III was, apparently, asking why they didn’t show—but Ames and Taibbi usually rejected those to throw their own debauched Exile parties or to get back to their regular hangout, the Hungry Duck, a place Ames, not given to squeamishness, describes as a “vile flesh pit.” Ask Moscow veterans about the bar and the most common response is a long, regretful groan. “Everything you’ve heard about it is conservative,” Peter Lavelle says, a hint of fear in his voice. “That place changed people.”

According to Doug Steele, the bar’s Canadian owner, “at the Duck you got laid even if you didn’t want to.” On Ladies’ Night, the doors opened at seven p.m., but the only people let in were women, as long as they were at least 16 years old. They’d drink for free. At nine, the men were allowed in. It wasn’t until the metro stations opened the next morning that it ended, and in the meantime, anything went. “Orgiastic” is an insufficient description. The only appropriate word seems to be Caligulan, and not just because the Duck was situated steps from Lubyanka, the former prison and Soviet torture chamber that now housed the F.S.B. The action was mostly elevated, according to Vlad Baseav, an early Exile general manager, with women and men alike dancing on the bar and on the tables, disrobing on the bar and on the tables, having sex on the bar and on the tables, fighting on the bar and on the tables, and then crashing in various states of undress onto the floor scrum. “They would get up and continue dancing, blood everywhere,” Baseav says. Steele recalls a night when the deputy head of a Moscow police unit, drunk beyond all reckoning, emptied his pistol into the ceiling and made everybody lie on the floor for three hours. Lavelle claims he saw a man stabbed to death next to him one night. “No one thought it was unusual.”

“Mark and Matt would go there and they’d be celebrities,” Lavelle says. “Especially Ames. People would say, ‘When are they coming, when are they coming?’”

Moving with the Exile guys also meant, if not mainlining cocaine, then at least having access to all the speed and heroin you could imbibe. Ames preferred the former, mixing powdered amphetamine into his drinks, while Taibbi, in a committed relationship for much of his time in Moscow, snorted bumps of white Asian smack.

By most accounts, Ames slept with as many women as any Moscow expatriate of the period. “Russian women liked the kind of sternness and scariness he had that didn’t work in California,” Dolan says.

One of Ames’s first regular columns was “Death Porn,” which rehashed stories of grisly murders and suicides from police reports and Russian media, printing them alongside crime-scene and autopsy photographs. He was most renowned and reviled for his regular “Whore-R Stories,” for which he hired prostitutes and then wrote about them. Like corruption and casual death, prostitution was a reality of Russian life that every reporter saw, often more than saw, but refused to discuss in straight terms.

“Everyone in Moscow at the time—and I mean everyone—used prostitutes. That’s what Moscow was in the 1990s. But no one would talk about it,” Dolan says. Ames seems to have had no need to pay women, and the column appears self-serving only until you read it. Some of the pieces’ poignancy and attention to detail call to mind Studs Terkel’s Working. But Terkel only listened; Ames partook. One memorable Dostoyevskian journey took him into the St. Petersburg night to a ramshackle apartment block whose residents let bedrooms by the hour with a former ballet student. Ames described the blunt safety razor Ira carried in her purse to spruce up for johns.

“I dreaded it, but I knew that it needed to be done,” Ames says of “Whore-R Stories.” “They were migrant workers with shitty jobs. The only way to tell that story was in first person, otherwise you’d end up moralizing somehow.”

“The most refreshing thing about Mark was that he was absolutely truthful, even about the most shameful things in his life,” The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Cullison says.

The honor of being The Exile’s most imperiled writer, however, belonged to neither Ames nor Taibbi, but to Edward Limonov, who embodied The Exile before it existed, from the day Ames first picked up his 1990 novel, Memoir of a Russian Punk, while working in a San Francisco bookshop. By the time Ames moved to Russia, Limonov was his literary idol. At that point Limonov, the son of a Stalinist secret-police man, had already lived several lives, as a thief, an exiled dissident writer, a punk icon, a louche sensation in Paris, a fighter with paramilitaries in Serbia (his memoir about that experience is titled Anatomy of a Hero), and, in his most recent incarnation, an anti-Putin activist and chief of the National Bolshevik Party. Limonov was the first writer Ames recruited, and he agreed to join The Exile on the condition that his spotty grammar and diction not be corrected. His broken English appeared in the paper through its final issue.

Much of the rest of the Exile staff arrived like religious pilgrims. “They represented everything that I wanted to be. They were like me. They escaped from America to escape a graveyard existence,” Yasha Levine says.

“My mother said, ‘Nobody will take you for a job after that,’” Zalina Abdusalamova says. “It was the best time of my life.”

And not just hers. Ames and Taibbi had soon landed an agent at William Morris and a book deal at Grove Press. The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia came out in 2000. Taibbi told The New York Observer he’d written much of it while addicted to heroin. The movie rights were sold to the film-production company Good Machine, now part of Focus Features, before the manuscript was finished.

The Exile offices were furnished with cast-off desks, a few unreliable computers, and boxes of Exile T-shirts, leftover from the last party or awaiting the next one. Ames and Taibbi may have written most of the paper, but it lived or died with Ilya Shangrin, its usually drunk designer, who was at his drunkest around the time they filed, seldom before two a.m. “Ilya would drink a bottle of beer per page that he laid out,” Jake Rudnitsky, an Exile editor, says. “There were 24 pages. By the time we got to the end Ilya was wasted. He’d pass out on his computer.”

Kostantin Bukaryov, the paper’s main backer, was a publisher of Moscow nightlife guides, with sidelines in gentlemen’s clubs. He paid Ames and Taibbi $1,200 a month, and what laughable revenue The Exile generated with its circulation, which never topped 30,000, came from advertisements for nightclubs, restaurants, and, most lucratively, call-girl services. After producing its first issues out of a spare room in, of all places, a defense-ministry building, The Exile landed above a strip club on the ring road, Rasputin’s, where it was situated above the dancers’ changing room. The office next door was outfitted with reinforced steel doors that the Moscow police attempted to batter in every so often.

What The Exile lacked in resources it made up for in ritualistic public humiliation. For one stunt, Ames and Taibbi, armed with forged stationery purporting to be from the St. Petersburg mayor’s office, hired the American public-relations giant Burson-Marsteller to help put a nice spin on the city’s police-brutality problem. Burson-Marsteller, at the time doing a lot of work in Russia on behalf of American companies, happily took the job, and The Exile published the correspondence and phone transcripts. Taibbi masqueraded as an executive from the New York Jets and tried to recruit Mikhail Gorbachev to move to New Jersey to become a motivational coach for the team. Later, reporting from Manhattan, he exposed Wall Street’s complicity in 1998’s disastrous ruble devaluation, bought a gorilla suit, walked to Goldman Sachs’s headquarters on Water Street, and sat down on the lobby floor for lunch, announcing to the security guards, “If Goldman Sachs can make a $50 million commission selling worthless Russian debt, then I can come into their offices in a gorilla suit and eat a sandwich on their floor.” The Exile took overt moral stands, too, vigorously opposing most American military actions, including the bombing of Serbia in 1999, when it published a Moscow city map showing the offices of American defense contractors contributing to the war, with the hope of inciting protests. Ames and Taibbi even staged their own protest near the U.S. Embassy. Taibbi held up a “free mike tyson” sign.

“One thing I couldn’t stand was Westerners who thought they had higher moral values than Russians, these people who came preaching Western civilization and then become connived,” The Economist’s Edward Lucas says. “The Exile exposed them.”

The Exile also ignored or glossed over a lot of important stories, most notably the horrific Moscow Theater siege, the Beslan massacre, and the killings of journalists such as Anna Politkovskaya, and went after people—too often harmless people or friends like Owen Matthews—with an ugly sadism. Taibbi’s press reviews can read like poison-pen letters. He falsely claimed in print that he’d slept with the wife of Russia scholar Michael McFaul, now a special adviser to President Obama on Russia, with whom he’d been carrying on a war of words. There was the cover depicting Condoleezza Rice in minstrel garb, and, during the U.S. presidential primaries, an Ames editorial on Barack Obama saying that his “perfectly bland, business-friendly swagger makes him exactly the sort of African-American who’d earn Trump’s approval,” an admissible argument made less so by the image of Obama’s head on the body of rapper 50 Cent. Ames insisted his real target in both cases was Russian racism.

Nothing won The Exile so many enemies, however, as the attack on the Times’s Michael Wines, a stunt even its allies were repelled by, though the recounting of it was another narrative gem. It launched from the horse’s point of view (“His name was Porobnik. He had never read The New York Times”), described Ames’s bribing of the breeder and Taibbi’s storage of the semen in a special thermos in his refrigerator, where his poor girlfriend had to see it every morning, and then unfurled into a dense indictment of Wines’s career, going back to his tutelage under former Times executive editor Max Frankel and his early dispatches from Indonesia and endorsement of the Kosovo war, and extending up through a recent softball profile of Putin. Taibbi called Wines a “grasping careerist who cheers the bombing of thousands of civilians from the comfort of his Ikea-furnished bedroom many time-zones away.” This ran with photos of a stunned, pie-covered Wines, wiping himself off with an Exile T-shirt. The results were foul but the argument was formidable.

Ames claims he’s not the least contrite about the episode. “We knew we went too far. That was the point, going too far. Everybody errs on some side and almost everybody errs on the side of caution. It was The Exile’s mission to err on the side of incaution.”

In Brooklyn, Ames is still kneeling over the archives. It’s close to five p.m. Anastasia, whom Ames met when she was a 17-year-old Exile administrative assistant, wakes up and emerges from the bedroom and quietly introduces herself. They speak in Russian for a minute. Draped over the Samsonite is the last issue of The Exile, No. 285. The cover depicts Ames, receding into a black background, above the headline good night, and bad luck: in a nation terrorized by its own government, one paper dared to fart in its face.

Puerile to the last.

“It’s kind of terrifying being back here. I find the rules here suffocating,” Ames says when I ask how it feels returning to the States after a decade and a half in Moscow. “I miss the extreme melodrama” of Russia, he says. “Here there are so many horrifying layers of décor and piety. Everything is at stake in this country—in theory it’s Rome, and yet it operates like small-town Nebraska. There’s so little real drama here.”

Yet Ames still sees corruption around every corner. “Maybe it’s from living in Moscow, but he really has a great bullshit detector,” Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel says of Ames. “He has a sense of the absurd and right and wrong and tells it like it is.” This could also be said of Taibbi, whose Rolling Stone coverage and frequent TV appearances (notably on The Daily Show and Real Time with Bill Maher) earned him a reputation as the premier bullshit detector and absurdist on the campaign trail in the last two U.S. presidential elections. He famously followed John Kerry around during the 2004 campaign in a gorilla suit. In 2009, Taibbi made a bigger name for himself with widely read and talked-about columns going after what he saw as Washington’s and Barack Obama’s complicity with Wall Street, particularly his old whipping boy, Goldman Sachs. Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner says of Taibbi that he is “absolutely the first person to come along since Hunter [Thompson] who could be called Hunter’s peer.” Taibbi’s Rolling Stone editor, Will Dana, is more specific. Also comparing him to Thompson, Dana says, “What they share in common is that they hate politicians.”

“When you meet Taibbi and talk to him, he’s this very cheerful, friendly neighborhood kid,” Ajay Goyal, who published Taibbi at the Russia Journal, says. “But he’s unique in that he doesn’t see anything that is good. He just notices the flaws in people.”

And it was not just their intolerance for cant that made Ames and Taibbi work so well together; the pair also shared a raging animus. Where it came from is unclear and probably irrelevant. Asked, Ames allows only that it “starts at home.” Rumors abounded in Moscow then, and continue to circulate in the New York media world now, about Taibbi’s relationship with his Emmy Award–winning father, though no one seems decided whether he’s out to anger Mike Taibbi or please him. Whatever the wellspring of the bile, Ames and Taibbi, at their worst and best alike, evoke Akaky Akakievitch, the civil servant in their beloved Gogol short story “The Overcoat,” bristling with the privileged awareness of “how much inhumanity there was in man, how much savage brutality there lurked beneath the most refined, cultured manners.” It can be too much to bear. One can come away from The Exile depleted from hating. Hating everything. In its eyes, fraudulence is a given. Nothing is pure enough, nothing cool enough. Everyone’s a sellout. As The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Cullison puts it, “I don’t know what their alternative worldview was.”

Chronic contempt may have been a sane take on turn-of-the-millennium Moscow, but in life, generally, it’s an unsustainable one, and eventually, inevitably, Ames and Taibbi came to hate each other. Oddly, the Wines incident seemed to mark the apex of their volatile collaboration and the beginning of its decline. By that point the partying and penury were catching up with them—Taibbi was for a time a full-on heroin addict—and the paper was faltering. “You can’t live like that for that long in a place as intense as Russia and not burn out,” Jake Rudnitsky says. The notoriety made it worse. “I’m sure both of them heard stuff like ‘You’re really good, the other guy sucks.’ Stupid coked-up Aerosmith Steven Tyler–Joe Perry rivalry stuff,” Kevin McElwee says. According to Exile staffers, Ames and Taibbi would get into screaming matches in the office. “Matt and Mark would argue bitterly. Matt would ask him, ‘Why are you so angry?’” one writer recalls. In 2001, Ames escaped to the U.S. for almost a year to do research for a book (Going Postal—Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond) and to come down off a four-year speed binge. Taibbi stayed on, reluctantly.

Shortly after Ames returned to Moscow, in early 2002, Taibbi left for Buffalo, New York, to start a new paper, The Buffalo Beast. Ames says Taibbi made it clear he didn’t want Ames’s help. According to some, it was Taibbi’s plan all along to parlay the Exile buzz into Stateside success. “[The Exile] gave him the Western platform he always wanted,” says Andrew Meier. Ames agrees. “I never thought I’d get anything of mine read. Matt never suffered from that worry. It was his birthright to be read,” he says. “He wasn’t ever comfortable with his own anger. Matt’s fate all along was to end up in a privileged space. He knew that and realized that if he could take an unconventional route there it would make him much more interesting once he arrived.” Ames claims that while he was gone Taibbi mismanaged The Exile, running it into debt and embroiling it in a libel lawsuit with Russian hockey star Pavel Bure after Taibbi ran a prank story claiming Bure’s then girlfriend, tennis player Anna Kournikova, had two vaginas. Ames says Taibbi pushed him to take on Bure, a hero among some of Moscow’s less humor-inclined underworld figures, knowing that it might endanger The Exile and Ames’s safety, even his life. “He wanted out of The Exile and he wanted out of my shadow. He was pretty clear that he wanted The Exile to go down,” Ames says.

Taibbi left the Beast after only 18 issues and wrote a political column for the New York Press (where he became best known for writing the uproar-causing “52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope”) and then moved full time to Rolling Stone in 2005. He tried to get back in touch with Ames many times, but Ames refused, because Taibbi “betrayed The Exile. The Exile was incredibly unique and fragile, and it was the only thing fighting the right fight, and when you turn on that, that’s it,” Ames says. “I don’t believe in giving people second chances.”

“I think he knows he became a mainstream caricature,” Ames says when I ask what he thinks of Taibbi’s Rolling Stone work. Taibbi won a National Magazine Award for it in 2008. Ames and Taibbi have not spoken since 2002.

After Taibbi left, Ames became The Exile’s sole editor in chief and its lead reporter, writing investigative pieces on covert U.S. involvement in Georgia and on oil disputes in the Caspian Sea and, in a painful Socratic episode, covering the trial and incarceration of Edward Limonov, in what may be the best work of his career. Jake Rudnitsky filed excellent dispatches from Siberia and the Urals. John Dolan moved to Moscow and started a first-rate literary column in which he was an early outer of faux memoirist James Frey. But The Exile was never much of a business, and Moscow was changing. It had become expensive and clean and was taking on an ominous neo-Soviet flush. The expats had gone home, and journalists, including Americans, were being killed. Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov, whom Ames knew, was gunned down in 2004. “Even the snow seemed archaic and doomed,” says Dolan, who left in 2006. The Exile nearly collapsed in 2007, before a group of private investors bailed it out.

Certain people close to The Exile, including some of those investors, claim Rossvyazokhrankultura did not cause it to fold. They say that Ames was tired of publishing it and that he used the government as a scapegoat. Alex Shifrin, The Exile’s lead investor, whom Ames accuses of abandoning him, would say only, “There are a lot of half-truths as to what happened.” Another investor claims the officials were simply looking for a bribe. “There was no government plot. I think everybody had it out for The Exile to some extent,” he says. But the investors didn’t “want to get involved with a media fight [Ames was] having with the feds.”

Ames flatly denies this.

Nina Ognianova, a program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, who worked on The Exile’s case, says the fact that the Federal Service officials asked repeatedly about Limonov shows “the audit was politicized.” She says, “Now that the mainstream space is cleared, the state has been methodically moving towards auditing and harassing smaller papers and Internet publications.” The irony is that The Exile was always far harder on America than Russia and, by the end, was probably more widely read by Russians than Americans. Finally, politics and finances may have conspired. “The Exile could never be profitable in [Russia],” Zalina Abdusalamova says. “If you want to be profitable, you have to be nice. The Exile was not nice. It was honest, but it was not nice.”

In June, Ames threw one last Exile party. At a strip club. “It was the most depressing party I’ve ever been to,” Yasha Levine says. “It dawned on a lot of people that they were never going to work on something this cool again. The dream had died and we’d be moving on to lamer and more boring jobs.”

They could at least take solace in the fact that The Exile won’t soon be forgotten. “It infuriated an awful lot of people in this town,” The Christian Science Monitor contributor Fred Weir says, “but they did a lot to keep us honest.” Speaking of reporting from Moscow, he then adds, “As a journalist now it’s pretty fucking bad and getting worse. Once again a foreign journalist is regarded as a spy.”

After a series of attempts at adaptation, the Exile movie, a rocky endeavor from the start, was abandoned. Producers Ted Hope and Anne Carey say that while at a meeting at the Chateau Marmont, in Los Angeles, “we had one writer tell us we were morally repellent for trying to adapt this book, particularly Ames’s part of the story.” Eventually a number of drafts were written, and some big names, including Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle, considered the project, but “by the time we got ready to move forward with it, Matt said he’d chosen not to talk about that part of his life anymore,” Carey says. In 2005, Taibbi declined to renew the option.

The treatment that Good Machine wanted to film may have had something to do with this. Depicting Ames and Taibbi as crusading reporters who uncover Russian war atrocities in Chechnya and are killed for their heroism, it bore, aside from the sex and drugs, little relation to reality.

When I first contacted Taibbi for this story, he replied unenthusiastically. “Ugh. No way I can talk you out of this, huh?” he e-mailed. “In the end nobody really wants to read about a couple of overgrown suburban teenagers writing about anal sex and the clap and then calling themselves revolutionaries when some third-world dictator gets bored of letting them stay published.”

He then fell out of touch, re-emerged a month later, and agreed to meet me for lunch at a Manhattan restaurant. I arrived late, and he was visibly annoyed. There was no boyish smile. “I just don’t see why you’re doing this story,” he said. When I told him that Ames was now living in New York he grew more agitated. I mentioned some of the Exile pieces of his I planned to write about, and he said, “That was covered in the book.” I told him yes, that was true, but the book had been published in 2000, and, frankly, I didn’t think it was very good.

“The book wasn’t good?” he said.

“No, I didn’t think so,” I said.

“My book?” he said.

“Yes, the Exile book. I thought it was redundant and discursive and you guys left out a lot of the good stuff you did,” I said.

At this, Taibbi’s mouth turned down and his eyes narrowed.

“Fuck you,” he snarled, and then picked up his mug from the table, threw his coffee at me, and stormed out.

The restaurant was packed with customers, and they all turned to watch as I sat there, stunned, coffee dripping from my face. The waiter arrived with the milkshake Taibbi had ordered. After wiping myself off a bit, I went outside, where Taibbi was putting on his coat, and asked him to calm down and come back into the restaurant. He walked up to me, glaring, beside himself with rage.

“Fuck you!” he yelled. “Did you bring me here to insult me? Who are you? What have you ever written? Fuck you!”

I tried to talk to him, but gave up when he walked away. I went back inside, paid the bill, left, and began walking up Sixth Avenue. Halfway up the block, I turned around, and Taibbi was behind me.

“Are you following me?,” I asked. He walked toward me, raising his arms as though preparing to throttle me or take a swing.

“I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do with you!” he said.

“Are you kidding?,” I asked.

And at that moment I thought he might be kidding. There was part of me that thought it must have been a prank. I half expected some old Exile accomplice, maybe even Ames, to jump out from behind a tree with a camera. Maybe they’d been setting me up all along. Maybe there was horse sperm in the coffee. But the anger in Taibbi’s eyes was genuine, and, after some more glaring, he fumed off. That was the last I saw of him.

Eventually, Taibbi sent lengthy responses to e-mailed lists of questions. “I once considered Mark my best friend,” he wrote. “When I left I never thought I was burning my bridges to The Exile permanently, and being shut out as I have been from all contact with the paper I helped build during these seven years, not even having my letters answered at any time by Mark or anyone else on the paper during that period, this is one of the truly unhappy things that has ever happened in my life. Both The Exile and Mark’s friendship were very important to me, as were the memories of both of those things, and I’ve lost all of that now. That I’m now being accused of not only wanting to harm the paper, but desiring Mark’s maiming or even his death, only deepens my sadness about all of this.” He went on to say that “most people by the time they get old are full of regrets about the things they never got around to doing when they were young, but thanks to the paper I won’t ever have that problem.” But, he concluded, “if you romanticize any of that ugliness, I’m pretty sure you’re missing the point.”

Acclaimed Chef and Food Activist Jamie Oliver Makes TED Prize Wish for Food Revolution... -- LONG BEACH, Calif., Feb. 10 /PRNewswire/ --

2010-02-11T15:32:00.000-08:00

Acclaimed Chef and Food Activist Jamie Oliver Makes TED Prize Wish for Food Revolution... -- LONG BEACH, Calif., Feb. 10 /PRNewswire/ --

Fame?

2010-02-10T14:54:00.001-08:00

We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

The Ant and the Grasshoper Republican/Liberal/Conservative version corrected

2010-01-28T19:07:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

OLD VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long,

building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away..

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed.

The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!

MODERN VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat and the rain all summer long,
building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summeraway
Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should
be allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving.

Channels 7, 9 and 10,the ABC and SBS show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper
next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.

Australia is stunned by the sharp contrast.

How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, 'It's Not Easy Being Green.'

Acorn stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing,
'We shall overcome.' Cardinal George Pell then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake.

Prime Minister Rudd condemns the ant and blames John Howard, Robert Menzies, Capt James Cook, and the Pope for the grasshopper's plight.

Bob Brown exclaims in an interview on Today Tonight that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper,
and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, Labor in conjunction with the Greens draft the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act
to the beginning of the summer.

The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes,
his home is confiscated by the Government and given to the grasshopper.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his free-loading friends finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in,
which, as you recall, just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn't maintain it.

The ant has disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again.

The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a
gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and once peaceful, neighborhood.

And now a rebuttal to the above version:

The grasshopper is unable to find work, because with 5% unemployment, at least one person out of twenty who needs a job can't find one. If unemployment gets below 5%, the wasps who own the factories start to panic. If the wasps had to compete for employees, instead of the employees competing for jobs, the wasps would have to either raise their prices or keep less of the profits they earn from the ants labor.
Since there are more ants than grasshoppers, and since ants are generally better qualified because they've had access to better education, health care, etc., the grasshoppers are always the last to be hired and first to be fired.
20 years ago, the wasps only kept $50 for every dollar they paid an ant. Since then, the ants have worked longer hours every year (thus spending less time with their families) and improved their efficiencies (thus helping their companies stay competitive by keeping costs down). Now the wasps are able to keep $500 for every dollar they pay an ant!

On the radio, Rush Limbaugh spends three hours a day complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
G. Gordon Liddy spends an hour complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
Laura Schlessinger spends an hour complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
Michael Medved spends an hour complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
Neil Boortz spends an hour complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
Oliver North spends an hour complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
In the newspapers, George Will writes a column complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
Cal Thomas writes a column complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
Ann Coulter writes a column complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
Michelle Malkin writes a column complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
William Safire writes a column complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
The Washington Times publishes an editorial complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
The Wall Street Journal publishes an editorial complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
The American Spectator publishes an editorial complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
The New York Post publishes and editorial complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
On television, Sam and Cokie complain that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
Tim Russert complains that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
Bill O'Reilly complains that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
Sean Hannity walks all over Alan Colmes complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
Paula Zahn complains that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
Brit Hume and Tony Snow complain that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs, while Mara Liason and Juan Williams agree.
John McLaughlin complains that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
Chris Matthews complains that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
John Stossel does a special for ABC complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
Regnery Publishing publishes novels by Bernard Goldberg, Peggy Noonan, Gary Aldrich, Laura Ingraham, and Bill Bennett complaining that grasshoppers are lazy and should just get jobs.
The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Coors Foundation, the Scaife Foundation, and the Olin Foundation each buy tens of thousands of copies, to both ensure that the books hit the bestseller lists and to make sure that every library and school in the country received multiple copies.

Al Gore exclaims in an interview with Peter Jennings that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair share".

Al further explains that the wasps are avoiding taxes by moving their money offshore, exploiting tax loopholes, and ensuring that the bureaucrats appointed to regulate their industries are their friends, through the legal bribery known as "campaign contributions". He claims that more of the budget is spent on corporate subsidies than on welfare,and that a social safety net pays dividends in the form of lower law enforcement and penal system expenses. He is immediately attacked as engaging in "class warfare". Bob Barr draws up impeachment papers. House Majority Leader Dick Armey is quoted as saying, "Buddhist Temple blah blah invented the internet blah blah Love Canal blah blah Love Story blah blah."

Or, would have, had the Supreme Court not struck the act down (5-4),on the grounds that they didn't like it. The fact that two of the Justices had relatives working for the ant, one had a long history of discriminating against grasshoppers, and one had publicly expressed support for the ant was deemed completely irrelevant.

Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal judges that Bill appointed from a list of single-parent welfare recipients who can only hear cases on Thursday's between 1:30 and 3:00 PM when there are no talk shows scheduled.

The ant remembered that since the judiciary had been shifted to the right for 12 years under Reagan and Bush, and since Orrin Hatch's Judiciary Committee refused to even give any center-left judges a hearing, the only Clinton-appointed judges were center-right. The grasshopper's suit was dismissed as having no merit.

Eventually, the grasshopper does in fact manage to find a job, working in the same factory as the ant. In fact, the factory started to hire lots of grasshoppers, since they would work more cheaply than the ants, the low wage still being a huge improvement over the welfare check that had previously enabled his carefree life.
This had unexpected consequences for the ant. One day, the factory foreman came up to him. "I'm sorry, Mr. Ant," he said, trying to avoid eye contact. "There's so much cheap grasshopper labor on the market these days that I can't afford to keep you working for me. I'm going to have to let you go." Not long after losing his job, the ant became ill, he'd contracted cancer through exposure at his job. Because of deregulation and tort reform, the ant had no legal recourse.

Unfortunately, his health insurance had lapsed after he lost his job. Medical expenses quickly devoured his savings and his assets. When his money ran out, he got thrown out of the hospital, and was last seen hanging out in an alley; filthy and wearing a "will work for food" sign.

This was eventually the fate of the grasshopper as well. One day the wasp who owned the factory decided that he could make even more money by closing the factory and opening a new one in Thailand, where the grasshoppers will work for even less money and the government environmental and safety regulations are even less "burdensome". And the wasp lived happily ever after.

The moral of the story: do not trust either the black or the white version. Think for yourself.

The Man Who Swam from Russia

2010-01-25T21:16:00.000-08:00

For Wall Street hedge fund managers, etc.

2009-11-11T04:03:00.000-08:00

Here's One of Life's Lessons ...

An American but universal tale:

A young boy enters a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, 'This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.'

The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks,'Which do you want, son?'

The boy takes the quarters and leaves the dollar.

'What did I tell you?' said the barber. 'That kid never learns!'

Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store & says,'Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?'

The boy licked his cone and replied, 'Because the day I take the dollar, the game's over!'

Wall Street hedge fund managers, derivatives traders, welfare recipients and mortgage loan officers have all taken notes and have learned something from this kid! ...

The Biggest War for the US

2009-10-15T14:05:00.000-07:00

http://www.jeffhead.com/obama/Obama-reaper3.jpg
"Obama said he will attend the ceremony in Oslo if he's not too busy with the two wars he's conducting." –Bill Maher

Well, this is not quite true: the biggest war the US is waging is between the Secret Service that is protecting Obama and all the kooks that want to kill him especially now,when he's got the Nobel Peace Prize.

"Conservatives say the award represents everything they stand against: black people, foreigners, and peace." --Bill Maher

Funny but all the anti-Obama blogs I looked at were full of violent kooks. It seems that the modern American incarnation of the libertarian (Austrian-born) economic guru Friedrich August von Hayek in the US is Timothy McVey.

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek

http://i.realone.com/assets/rn/img/1/0/2/1/12131201-12131205-slarge.jpg

www.russiantranslate.org

Closing the 'Collapse Gap': the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US??

2009-03-10T18:15:00.000-07:00

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/23259

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html

"What if you still have a job? How do you prepare then? The obvious answer is, be prepared to quit or to be laid off or fired at any moment. It really doesn’t matter which one of these it turns out to be; the point is to sustain zero psychological damage in the process. Get your burn rate to as close to zero as you can, by spending as little money as possible, so than when the job goes away, not much has to change. While at work, do as little as possible, because all this economic activity is just a terrible burden on the environment. Just gently ride it down to a stop and jump off.

If you still have a job, or if you still have some savings, what do you do with all the money? The obvious answer is, build up inventory. The money will be worthless, but a box of bronze nails will still be a box of bronze nails. Buy and stockpile useful stuff, especially stuff that can be used to create various kinds of alternative systems for growing food, providing shelter, and providing transportation. If you don’t own a patch of dirt free and clear where you can stockpile stuff, then you can rent a storage container, pay it a few years forward, and just sit on it until reality kicks in again and there is something useful for you to do with it. Some of you may be frightened by the future I just described, and rightly so. There is nothing any of us can do to change the path we are on: it is a huge system with tremendous inertia, and trying to change its path is like trying to change the path of a hurricane. What we can do is prepare ourselves, and each other, mostly by changing our expectations, our preferences, and scaling down our needs. It may mean that you will miss out on some last, uncertain bit of enjoyment. On the other hand, by refashioning yourself into someone who might stand a better chance of adapting to the new circumstances, you will be able to give to yourself, and to others, a great deal of hope that would otherwise not exist."

My response: Hi Dmitri, I tend to agree with most of your theses. However, the past is not a recipe for the future. I.e., modern Russia, having gotten the taste of its scavenger bazaar version of "capitalism" and having progressed through to a sort of neo-feudal stage (with medieval religious beliefs, nationalism, and superstitions on the rise) will respond differently to the new crisis.

Also, the Obama administration is clever enough (I think) to "boil the crab" slowly by raising the temperature 1 degree at a time, so the crab does not jump out of the pot. Of course, this does not change the fundamentals of the impending national bankruptcy but it can stretch it out and disguise it.

Every strata of the community will respond somewhat differently to the crisis, depending on its psychology, material and political means at its disposal, and the international situation (such as a potential state of war).

Reading through forums like this, we may get a wrong idea of how most people think and act. The Chinese, for example, are responding to the crisis by using their surplus of dollars to buy up resources to fuel their next stage of growth (military and industrial).

Will oil get onto another hyper-inflationary spiral, together with the essential commodities like food? Not sure about that one.

www.russiantranslate.org

“The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.“ Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

2009-02-02T15:49:00.000-08:00

This is one of the most thoughtful newsletters I have found

http://www.gaiamedia.org/index_eng.html

Even if you read nothing else, you will be abreast of the really vital intellectual strands of thought that pulsate beneath the general froth of the Internet traffic.

Subscribe to it if you wish and even donate a few dollars. It comes from Switzerland: Gaia Media Foundation

Forward to your friends if you like it.

wwww.russiantranslate.org

Paul and Anne Ehrlich's recepe for a livable planet

2008-11-10T13:56:00.000-08:00

Below is their menu for a livable planet. What’s on your menu?

From the letter to the president-elect from Paul and Anne Ehrlich of Stanford University:

1) Put births on a par with deaths. …As been done in many family planning programs, the happy family should be promoted as one that limits its numbers. But the change should be in the motivation. Traditionally the small family was supposed to supply a higher standard of living — including more stuff for each individual. The new approach could be to promote it as a multi-generational unit that in each generation limits its size in order to maximize the chances of each following generations’ retaining a happy, sustainable life style.

To move in that direction, humanity must rapidly expand programs to educate and give job opportunities to women, make effective contraception universally available, and develop public support of population policies.

2) Put conserving on a par with consuming. At any given level of technology, there is a trade-off between how many people can be born into a society and the level of per capita physical affluence that can be sustainably supported. The more people there are, the smaller each one’s share of the pie. One way of dealing with this trade-off would be a cultural shift away from creating ever more gadgets to creating more appreciation and better stewardship for Earth’s aesthetic assets.

3) Transform the consumption of education. Education is what economists call a “non-rival good” — something that can be consumed without reducing the amount available to others — and as such it is an ideal consumption good for a sustainable society. More quality education could help us solve the human predicament — the combined crises of overpopulation, wasteful consumption, deteriorating life-support systems, declining resources, multiplying weapons of mass destruction, and widening inequity within and between nations.

4) Judge technologies not just on what they do for people but also to people and their life-support systems.

5) Rapidly expand our empathy. We’re a small-group animal, trying to live in large groups…. People are gradually gaining more empathy toward those others distant from us in skin color, gender, religion, class, culture or physical space, but our ability to inflict harm on them has also increased. Cultural evolution is not rapidly enough reducing this discounting by distance (caring less about situations the further away they are). The same can be said about discounting by time — not caring enough about the world we will leave to our children and our descendants in the more distant future.

6) Decide what kind of world we all want. What are the ultimate goals of our lives? Are Americans really happier traveling to work an hour or more each day wrapped in a few tons of steel and breathing smog that threatens their lives?

7) Determine the institutions and arrangements best suited to govern a planetary society with a maximum of freedom within the constraints of sustainability. …In the 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens, states are a recent invention, existing for only a tiny fraction of our existence. In their modern form as nation states, they are only a little more than 200 years old. We need to look closely at possible alternatives that could combine greater awareness of the problems of living at a global scale while regaining family-style psychological comfort. More cooperation at a global level is clearly necessary for civilization’s long-term survival.

All seven of the steps could be written of as an exercise in Pollyannaism. “Totally impractical,” people will say, “not gonna happen.” Well, I tend to agree. But there is nothing more impractical than letting our global civilization go down the drain, with billions of people dying. Pundits seem to think we have choices, but they are wrong. If we don’t change our ways, they’ll be changed for us.

Sarah Palin to swap with Putin McCain goes to Kenya

2008-11-06T04:05:00.001-08:00

Click to Play

The United Nations Presidential Exchange Program:

Sarah Palin to swap places with Putin, McCain sent to Kenya

http://www.patrushev-publications.com

Michelle Obama to be the US President in 2016

2008-11-05T23:35:00.001-08:00

Click to Play

Prediction based on multifactor analisys, including her dress during the victory speech.

"The people have spoken…the bastards." ...

2008-11-05T15:41:00.000-08:00

From: http://www.dailyreckoning.com/

"The people have spoken…the bastards."

America's voters spoke yesterday. And they said, "Give us Obama."

And it came to pass that the man called Obama was given unto them.

"America is a place where all things are possible," said the man himself in his victory speech.

And yes, it is possible for a half-black man to be elected. But no, all things are not possible. It is not still not possible to get rich by spending money. Nor is it possible to save a man from too much debt by giving him more credit. And you still can't trust a politician…or his money.

The election "changed everything," shouts the headline on today's International Herald Tribune. But the eternal verities still apply; Barack Obama is not going to change them.

And that means that a slump caused by too much debt cannot be made to disappear. You can disguise it. You can delay it. You can push the losses onto someone else. But you can't escape it.

And I reply:

Yes, the debt and all of that... But you are the most creative and free society on this earth. And you have chosen a young, enterprising and clever man to help you straighten up your affairs. It may take years or even decades. But you will be on the right track. Good luck to you!

We in Australia also chose a bunch of young and relatively inexperienced politicians to run the country. The problems have not gone overnight (in fact we only now know that the mess the old bunch got us into will take decades to clean up) but we have more sanity and hope than we had for a long time.

The tasks for Obama:

1. Most importantly, foster innovation;
2. develop energy strategies that can help the US and the world reach sustainability instead of funding extremism through oil money;
3. build health care based on prevention rather than treatment;
4. and make education project-oriented and practical, giving young and old skills to cope with the most pressing problems we face as families, communities, and temporary residents of this fragile and abused planet.

SARAH PALIN SWAPS PLACES WITH PUTIN, MCCAIN SENT TO KENYA

2008-11-03T21:05:00.000-08:00

© 2008 Dolphinpower

This was announced by the recently formed UN Presidential Exchange Program (PEP). Kenya was a natural choice for McCain since Barak Obama’s father came from Kenya. It was also judged to be the best country to show off McCain’s skills in cleaning up corruption and reducing taxes to zero (wealthy Kenyans already pay little tax and the poor are too poor to pay). His military skills can come handy on a continent racked by constant wars.

The UN PEP office also announced that Sarah Palin will exchange places with Vladimir Putin (a neighbor she often waves to from her porch). However, PEP later issued a correction saying that due to her poor knowledge of geography Sarah agreed to go only as far as Siberia. Siberian natives were overjoyed, saying that the moose hunting season had just begun. Mr Putin was judged to be too risky for Alaska as it contains mineral resources that the Russian oligarchs might covet. He will be sent instead to Tonga to boost the tourist potential of the flagging, and sinking, island economy.

The North Korean President Kim Jong Il will be sent to run Guantanamo Bay Jail. After a year, he will be locked in with inmates for a night of conflict resolution training.

Arnold Schwarzenegger will go to Pakistan to terminate Osama Bin Laden.

Big Al Greeenspan will be sent to China to ruin the Chinese economy.

French President Sarkozy and the German President Angela Merkel will swap places. Sarkozy was judged to be the best person to improve German cuisine and fashion while Merkel promised to tackle trade unions, slim down overblown French bureaucracy, and impose order on the inevitable student protests.

President Bush will be dispatched to Albania to help run a home for retarded children.

President Clinton will go to the South East Asia as a goodwill ambassador to clean up the sex trade there.

Hilary Clinton will be sent to Saudi Arabia to create at least one crack in the glass ceiling of male dominance there. She will be equipped with a crash helmet.

Italian President Silvio Berlusconi will be sent to India as it was judged to be the only country that would continue on its way, no matter who you sent there.

Keywords: McCain, Kenya, UN, Presidential Exchange Program, comedy.

End of dispatch

Seven deadly sins

2008-10-28T16:16:00.000-07:00

Click on pics to increase size.

US – a fat goose that was laying gold eggs in the past, now overfed with growth hormones (low, and decreasing, interest rates), antibiotics and trans fats. Lays plenty of eggs but they taste awful and are mostly stamped "Made in China". Suffers from late onset diabetes, is nearing a possible coronary occlusion. Normal prognosis: Slow circulation with lethargy, punctuated by irrational and aggressive outbursts. More useless and even harmful medicinal treatment in Bernake & Co. clinic will make things worse.

McCain is old and wants to have good time and go out in a blaze of glory, living the US at war and spending like crazy.

Obama is young and looks to the future for young America. He will make the US lean and hungry again after making it slim through pain and suffering of the "recession it had to have". He is sure to be cursed for this by shortsighted people of all colors and creeds.

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/10/seven-deadly-si.html

comparison_between_the_great_depression_and_now

2008-10-08T02:44:00.000-07:00

Brief conclusion: we are in for a long haul.

House prices in Australia may drop 50% more. Unemployment up to 20%. Interest rates in 2010 - maybe 0%.

Based on Steve Keen's interview on 7.30 report 8/10/08

Steve's page: http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/author/admin/

http://piggington.com/comparison_between_the_great_depression_and_now

Full article: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/20081005-9999-lz1n5dean.html

The Great Depression and now: a comparison of food costs
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October 05, 2008

In 1932, Safeway and Gates and Lydiard Groceteria in Medford advertised these items. Here's what the costs would be, converted into today's dollars and what prices were Friday at local supermarkets:

1932 price In today's dollars 2008 price
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* Memories of the Fall

Bacon, 1 lb. 14.5¢ $2.32 $3.99

Hamburger, 2 lbs. 19¢ $3.04 $3.99

Steak, 1 lb. 17.5¢ $2.80 $4.99

Coffee, 2-lb. can 55¢ $8.80 $6.99

Eggs, dozen 23¢ $3.68 $2.49

Butter, 1 lb. 22¢ $3.04 $3.50

Bread, 1 loaf 5¢ 80¢ $1.79

From: http://www.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081005/NEWS/810050325/-1/NEWS

From Richard Russell, August 18, 2008:

To give you a hint of what I think the combined markets are now telling us -- I believe we are on the eve of world deflation. I pulled out a headline from the August 5 Wall Street Journal headline -- "INFLATION PACE IS FASTEST IN 17 YEARS."

Forget it, this is history -- this is not what's happening in the market. From what I see, the markets are telling us to prepare for hard times, and a global spate of the worst deflation to be seen in generations. This is why gold has been sinking, this is why stocks have been falling -- big money, sophisticated money, is cashing out, raising cash, preparing for world deflation. This is probably why Lowry's Selling Pressure stays at its high, smart money is selling into the stock market, day after day. They're raising cash in preparation for the hard times when deflation is in the saddle. Deflation is ushering in the new strong dollar. Big money sees deflation and the lower rates that go with deflation. Look, if you have five million dollars and you are only receiving 2% in interest on your money, that's only an income of hundred thousand dollars on your five million. Big money realizes that in a deflation you need a mountain of cash to keep up your lifestyle.

What I see is a coming world deflation, and I believe that's the message the markets are sending. What's the best stance in a deflationary situation? Lots of cash, and safe, solid, investments. Two areas that fit that requirement -- US dollars and US Treasury paper. What happens to stocks during deflationary times? They're sold to raise cash. What happens to business in deflationary times? It's crushed by ever-lower prices. What happens to the average citizen who's loaded with debt during deflationary times? They're battered unmercifully, as income buys less and less and as debt crushes them. What happens to assets during deflationary times? They're worth less and less and their sale brings in fewer and fewer dollars. Isn't the price of gold and oil already telling us that?

I just finished reading The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Barron's and there isn't a hint of what I'm writing about above in any of these publications. Unfortunately, these coming deflationary times will come as a complete surprise to most people.

Or is it inflation after all??

Inflation vs Deflation, and how this time is different

By : John Lee

Goldmau.com

http://www.24hgold.com/viewarticle.aspx?langue=en&contributor=John+Lee&Filter=latest&articleid=280980&lastpublishingyear=2008

www.russiantranslate.org

You are such a good pupil of Carl Rove, it would be almost charming -- if it was not so dangerous

2008-10-04T23:55:00.000-07:00

The dumbing down of the GOP

Why aren't more conservatives disgusted that their party nominated a person devoid of qualifications for the vice presidency (again)?

By Joe Conason

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Reuters/Jim Young

Gov. Sarah Palin during the vice-presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis Oct. 2, 2008.

Oct. 4, 2008 | Sarah Palin's debate performance should signal the beginning of the end of her fad. But for the moment it is worth looking at the meaning of her nomination, without the protective varnish of what conservatives usually dismiss as political correctness.

Why should we pretend not to notice when Gov. Palin's ideas make no sense? Having said last week that "it doesn't matter" whether human activity is the cause of climate change, she said in debate that she "doesn't want to argue" about the causes. It doesn't occur to her that we have to know the causes in order to address the problem. (She was very fortunate that moderator Gwen Ifill didn't ask her whether she truly believes that human beings and dinosaurs inhabited this planet simultaneously only 6,000 years ago.)

Why should we ignore her inability to string together a series of coherent thoughts? As a foe of Wall Street greed and a late convert to the gospel of government regulation, along with John McCain, Palin promised to clean up and reform business. But when her programmed talking points about "getting government out of the way" and protecting "freedom" conflicted with that promise, she didn't notice.

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Why should we give her a pass on the most important issues of the day? Supposedly sharing the fears and concerns of the average families who face the burdens of mortgages, healthcare and economic insecurity, Palin simply refused to discuss changes in bankruptcy law and proved that she didn't know the provisions of McCain's healthcare plan.

All the glaring defects so blatantly on display in her debate with Joe Biden -- and that make her candidacy so darkly comical -- would be the same if she were a hockey dad instead of a "hockey mom." In fact, the cynical attempt to foist Palin on the nation as a symbol of feminist progress is an insult to all women regardless of their political orientation.

There was a time when conservatives lamented the dumbing down of American culture. Preservation of basic standards in schools and workplaces compelled them -- or so they said -- to resist affirmative action for women and minorities. Qualifications mattered; merit mattered; and demagogic appeals for leveling were to be left to the Democrats.

Not anymore.

Actually, the Palin phenomenon is the culmination of a trend that can be traced back to Dan Quayle, the undistinguished Indiana senator whose elevation onto the Republican ticket in 1988 had nothing to do with intellect or experience and everything to do with the youthful appeal of a handsome blond frat boy. (That was how Republican strategists thought they would attract female voters back then, which must be why they believe Palin represents progress.) Quayle too was unable to articulate, let alone defend, the policy positions for which he was supposed to be campaigning. He too had to undergo the surgical stuffing of stock phrases into his head as a minimal substitute for knowledge and thought. And in the same sad way, he too benefited from the drastically reduced expectations applied to anyone whose inadequacy is so obvious.

Quayle deserved more pity than scorn, however, because he seemed to know that he was fighting far above his weight class. Palin evokes no such sympathy, with her jut-jawed, moose-gutting confidence in her own overrated "common sense" and her bullying insistence that only "elitists" would question her expertise.

As Biden showed quite convincingly when he spoke about his modest background and his continuing connection with Main Street, perceptive, intelligent discourse is in no way identical with elitism. Palin's phony populism is as insulting to working- and middle-class Americans as it is to American women. Why are basic diction and intellectual coherence presumed to be out of reach for "real people"?

And why don't we expect more from American conservatives? Indeed, why don't they demand more from their own movement? Aren't they disgusted that their party would again nominate a person devoid of qualifications for one of the nation's highest offices? Some, like Michael Gerson and Kathleen Parker, have expressed discomfort with this farce -- and been subjected, in Parker's case, to abuse from many of the same numbskulls whom Palin undoubtedly delights.

The ultimate irony of Palin's rise is that it has occurred at a moment when Americans may finally have grown weary of pseudo-populism -- when intelligence, judgment, diligence and seriousness are once again valued, simply because we are in such deep trouble. We got into this mess because we elected a man who professed to despise elitism, which he detected in everyone whose opinions differed from his prejudices. That was George W. Bush, of course. Biden was too polite and restrained to say it, but the dumbing down is more of the same, too.

www.russiantranslate.org

Life Imitates Farce...

2008-09-22T16:52:00.000-07:00

It is very simple: The US government just bought a lot of bankrupt businesses with taxpayers' money, thus selling into Chinese and Arab slavery a few generations of American youth.

Below is a longer explanation:

Life Imitates Farce
London, England
Monday, September 22, 2008

---------------------

*** Seeing the trillion-dollar figure pop up all over…the War on Bear Markets not much different than the War on Terror…

*** Dems and reps warm up to battle free markets… Principles are fine - until they get in the way of house prices…

*** Forced to decide between Roosevelts…keeping an eye on Central and South America…and more!

---------------------

Life imitates farce, dear reader.

Occasionally, we offer a hyperbolic view - on the nature of man, his markets, or his government. Then, what do you know…some fool goes and makes a prophet of us!

Long ago, we wrote that "Americans would gladly give up their liberties to anyone who could guarantee a rising housing market," or words to that effect.

And here we have the latest news…

Liberation, the French socialist newspaper, has a smug cartoon showing George Bush begging on the street: "Can you spare a trillion?" asks the American president.

Yes, the cost of the bailout is advertised at $700 billion. But it could reach much higher. We see the trillion-dollar figure in several places; it seems to have originated with Harvard economist Ken Rogoff, who figured the cost at about twice as much as the Resolution Trust Company. The RTC cost the nation 3% of GDP as it took over crumbling S&Ls in the '90s. This debacle is much more serious, he guesses; it will cost at least twice in GDP terms…say, 7%…or about $1 trillion in round numbers.

Where do the feds get that kind of ready cash? Ah…they sell their souls…liquidate their rights…and wrap chains of debt around every American's neck. The U.S. government deficit is already $490 billion. With the cost of the slump…and the bailout…it is expected to top $1 trillion…or more.

Not since the '30s has the United States seen such sweeping reorganization of its economic institutions. Not since Roosevelt…and the New Deal.

But wait, the United States was supposed to be a leader in freedom. We were so adamant about it we practically forced it upon the poor Arabs and Afghanis… But now that people are losing their houses and Wall Street bonuses are in jeopardy…freedom is the last thing we need.

Ban short selling! Nationalize the mortgage lenders! Nationalize the insurers! Take on the bad debts and bail out the bad investments of the whole financial industry! Spend a billion. Fifty billion. A thousand billion!

"How fabulous," writes Brian Reade in the British tabloid The Mirror. "Thanks to the way it props up the USA's two biggest mortgage firms, more than half of American homes are now effectively owned by the state… Who'd have imagined that when the most right-wing of neo-cons leaves office 50% of the Land of the Free will effectively be [public housing]"?

Yes, almost every imbecilic act we could imagine has become fact. No exaggeration is too extreme. Life imitates farce.

A few years ago, in a moment of lighthearted hyperbole…we suggested that the War on Terror was such an absurdity… "Why not a War on Bear Markets?" we wrote.

And now, we have one!

Yes, the Prime Minister of England, Gordon Brown, compared the U.S.-led, global fight against falling asset prices to the "war against terrorism."

And yes, it is similar in many respects. It will cost about the same amount - over $1 trillion. And it will produce the same general results: less freedom for everyone.

Already, the dems and reps are warming up for a major battle against free markets.

Both parties seem to think that it would be shameful for prices of debt and equity to fall to what they are really worth - that is, to what willing buyers would pay for them. Over the weekend, the pols joined hands in trying to prevent it. The $700 billion program allows the feds to buy almost any piece of junk that investors don't want. It says so right here in the Financial Times. The feds can buy "residential and commercial mortgage-backed securities, with discretion for the Treasury Secretary and Fed chairman to add others as needed."

We'd put that last phrase in italics, if we knew how to do so. Because it leaves the door of the fed's EZ lending bank open to anything…24-hours a day.

The Treasury has a "blank check…to buy troubled assets," says the FT.

"This was very necessary," said Hank Paulson. Then, slipping from farce into Dada or the theatre of the absurd: "We did this to protect the taxpayer," (showing no confidence that American taxpayers can actually protect themselves.)

While writing a blank check, the politicians also limbered up for their election campaigns…each trying to come up with catchy new slogans and new ways to punish Wall Street publicly, (while actually trying to let them off the hook for billions of dollars worth of bad investments).

"Greed," said Obama, was the source of the problem. "Greed," said McCain, was the real problem. Cap Wall Street salaries! Reregulate!

This was "not time for ideological purity," suggested John Boehner, the Republican House majority leader, calling for unity. No, this was time for pandering…posturing…and promises.

And so, principles were out the window. "I'm a free-market non-interventionist," Boehner continued, "But we face a crisis, and if we don't act, and quickly, we're going to jeopardize our economy."

Principles are fine, in other words, until they get in the way of house prices!

*** Roosevelt is back. But which Roosevelt? Obama is positioning himself as the Franklin version: ranting against free markets and Wall Street.

McCain prefers Teddy - an interventionist too, but one who preferred meddling in the affairs of foreign nations to meddling in the domestic economy.

Which was worse? Teddy, with his bullying guns? Or Franklin with his greasy butter?

Hard to say which did more damage. The first set the United States on its imperial course… He was so worried that the vacillating Woodrow might not get the United States into WWI before it was over, he threatened to raise his own army and intervene on his own. The U.S. has bumbled into practically every important fight on the planet ever since.

Franklin, meanwhile, set up Fannie and Freddie to help solve the nation's housing needs. He set up dozens of other agencies, subsidizers and regulators. Taking Bismarck's example for his model, he turned the United States from a basically free-market economy…to a "mixed economy" - with heavy government influence and control.

And now, we suffer both Roosevelts…both pay for both guns and butter. We bear the burdens of constant inflation and eternal war, in other words; and both will remain with us no matter which Roosevelt wins in November.

*** Niall Ferguson writes in today's Financial Times. We like Ferguson. He usually comes to see the world the way we do; he is just a little slow:

"On one side can be seen the chain reaction of deleveragings as banks, other companies and households all battle to stabilize balance sheets that became much too highly geared in the days of easy money; as the resulting credit contraction and forced asset sales create a vicious downward spiral; as the slowdown spreads to Main Street and from Main Street to the world.

"On the other side are the Fed and the Treasury, desperately manning the monetary and fiscal pumps while trying to decide who is too big to fail and who is not."

So, the war is on! The war on bear markets! The war against deflation! The war against good sense…

Keep your head down, dear reader. We're not sure how this will end; but it may turn out that just $10 could save you from being a casualty.

*** A friend in Buenos Aires sends this analysis…

"Latin America has suddenly become very interesting. There are intersecting issues - domestic and geopolitical. There is a general way to state this. In times of crisis between great powers, local issues get energized by the international conflict. The changes in Russian-American relations reverberate in corners of the world that have been neglected since the Cold War. There are a lot of shifts taking place everywhere, and we have mentioned them all in previous Guidances. Let's focus on Latin America this week. That is not a place that has been really exciting geopolitically in the past, but it is getting there now.

"1. Bolivia nearing the boiling point: Bolivia is in a near civil war, with regional powers - particularly Brazil - looking on uneasily. The United States is confronting Evo Morales, the radical president of Bolivia. It is a very traditional confrontation, with a Latin American radical challenging the United States. New powers like Brazil are in the mix, and Russia could use the crisis to give the United States other headaches. We need to watch both internal and global implications.

"2. Venezuela and Russia: The Venezuelans and the Russians are getting close. The military implications are trivial at this point, but having a potential patron energizes Venezuela in new ways and gives it confidence. We need to watch the effect on foreign companies in Venezuela and long-term collaboration.

"3. Colombian guerrillas: The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) had ties to Cuba and the Soviets in the old days. Those FARC leaders who are still alive and not in nursing homes still have active contacts. The Russians could really jerk the American chain in Colombia - and depending on how the United States acts in the former Soviet Union, the Russians will do just that. We need to watch the FARC now and see if it reaches out to the Russians.

"4. Nicaragua: Nicaragua - dormant since the 1980s - has its old President Daniel Ortega and its old rhetoric back, and it is backing Russia in Georgia to the hilt. We need to watch Nicaragua and the rest of Central America, especially El Salvador, to see if this is going anywhere.

"5. Mexico's cartels: The cartels in Mexico are fighting the government and each other. If Ukraine is invited into NATO, the Russians would love to give payback in Mexico. The Russians used to have close ties to the Mexican left, and Russian organized criminal groups are currently involved in criminal activities such as prostitution and human smuggling in Mexico. And certainly, through the Cubans, the Russians know their way around Latin American drug traffickers.

"Instability in Mexico would be an interesting strategy for Russia - not that Mexico needs much help there. But the smuggling routes could carry all sorts of goodies into the United States.

"6. Cuba: Cuba remains the mystery. Havana is oddly quiet. Are there discussions going on with the United States? There should be, as far as the United States is concerned, but with an election coming, such talks are hard to set up. The Cubans don't seem to want to play the Nicaraguan game. One scenario is that after the election, the Bush administration could move to normalize relations with Cuba and take the heat. The administration's ratings will not matter and cannot go any lower. There is no evidence this will happen; it is just a theory.

"7. Russia's behavior in Latin America: In general we need to see whether the Russians start renewing old friendships on the Latin American left, with intellectuals and ambitious colonels and majors.

"Watch Argentina, Chile and Brazil. They are the big targets always."

Until tomorrow,

Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning

--- Special Offer ---

There it Goes Again!

Gold is on its way back up, with no signs of slowing down.

If things keep going the way they have been, we wouldn't be surprised to see this headline in newspapers across the country.

---------------------

The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS: This week, the Mogambo dresses up as his like-minded counterpart - the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland - and screams with every bit as much disdain as she, "Off with their heads!" Of course, his cries for decapitation are directed at the lying heads of the Congressional Budget Office. Read on…

FINANCIAL HEAD LOPPINGS
by The Mogambo Guru

Now that aggregate government spending is approximately half of all spending in the country, the major point of all the recent losses is the effect that Florida, like many states, is discovering to its horror that tax revenues are falling as the economy spirals down and down.

The governments are reacting as you would expect, initiating all kinds of tiny spending cuts, massive stealth tax hikes, freezing of new hiring, new borrowings (which has now reached 7% of annual tax revenue in Florida), and the raiding of trust funds to "plug" budget gaps, which only get worse and worse now that the predictable economic catastrophe of boom-turning-to-bust has, at long last, started.

The St. Petersburg Times reports that Amy Baker, the chief economist for Florida's government, has discovered "a projected $3.5 billion hole in the state's budget" and has now "sounded a series of alarm bells" that have "added a new term to Florida's fiscal lexicon: a 'structural imbalance', the gap between the growth in the state's revenues and its larger ongoing expenses", which is, of course, wonderful news for those of us who desperately yearn for yet another term that means "A government spending more than it receives in the quest to give everyone a perpetual free lunch."

But you will be glad to know that Florida, like many states, is determined not to let that happen, as the whole problem is immediately rendered insignificant when, as Ms. Baker is later quoted as saying, "The budget's going to grow, independent of any revenue constraints."

At this, I laughed in a tentative, nervous way - "Hahaha" - at the prospect of Ms. Baker finding a way to let the state's budget grow forever, regardless of how much money comes in. Again, her words echoed in my brain; "The budget's going to grow, independent of any revenue constraints." I feel a cold chill.

Desperate for comic relief, I turn to the September 10 article in the Wall Street Journal titled "Budget Deficit Likely Doubled for Fiscal '08", mostly because I thought we WERE in fiscal 2008 already! Anyway, the new fiscal year begins on October 1, less than a month away, and the Congressional Budget Office's new calculation of the "budget deficit" is a terrible, and yet a laughable, $407 billion.

Another reason that I am amused by the Journal article is that with all the talk of a budget deficit, and previous budget deficits, and how calculating it is such a difficulty, blah blah blah…not once does the article mention the size of the damned budget that produced the deficit! Not once! Therefore, I laugh "Hahaha!" to indicate comic bemusement tinged with horror.

I assume, as I always assume since I am such a paranoid, suspicious and very creepy little weirdo that correctly sees government as "goons with badges and guns who are all out to get me", that the Journal is a co-conspirator with the government in down-playing anything that might upset anyone, such as revealing the gut-wrenching fact that the federal budget is now more than a staggering $3 trillion dollars, which is a hefty $10,000 for every man, woman and child in the country, and it's equivalent to $30,000 being spent by everybody who has a non-government job!

Later on, we learn that the 2007 budget deficit is reported as being $161 billion, which makes me laugh again in derision and scorn, "Hahaha!" as my initial reaction, of course, was to loudly heap scorn and ridicule on the Congressional Budget Office, because I happen to know that the national debt is $9,669.9 billion, whereas last year at this time it was $9,006.0, meaning that in the last 12 months, the national debt increased $663 billion.

So, for the Congressional Budget Office to bring up the totally irrelevant 2007 fiscal budget deficit of $161 billion makes me yell, "Off with his head! Off with his head!" with every bit of imperious Red Queen arrogance I can muster.

But the point is not that I look ridiculous dressed up as the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland, or that everybody is lying their heads off about the government's spending deficits and ignoring the government's intellectual deficits, but that all of this deficit spending means that more money has to be created, which will create more inflation in prices, which means more money must be created, which means more inflation in prices, around and around, which is why everyone should be buying gold and silver, but nobody is, making themselves look ridiculous, and then they turn around and say that I look ridiculous in my wig and crown!

Ha! I say, "Off with their heads, severed with a golden sword!", which is so deliciously ironic that they should plotz from it, and even if they don't, I can get my revenge by getting stinking rich by buying gold and silver at these lows, courtesy of them not driving the prices up by buying them, too.

I hope revenge is as sweet as they say it is! Whee!

Until next time,

The Mogambo Guru
for The Daily Reckoning

On the economic crisis in the US

2008-09-16T17:35:00.000-07:00

It’s Official: The Crash of the U.S. Economy has begun

by Richard C. Cook

Global Research, June 14, 2007

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It’s official. Mark your calendars. The crash of the U.S. economy has begun. It was announced the morning of Wednesday, June 13, 2007, by economic writers Steven Pearlstein and Robert Samuelson in the pages of the Washington Post, one of the foremost house organs of the U.S. monetary elite.

Pearlstein’s column was titled, “The Takeover Boom, About to Go Bust” and concerned the extraordinary amount of debt vs. operating profits of companies currently subject to leveraged buyouts.

In language remarkably alarmist for the usually ultra-bland pages of the Post, Pearlstein wrote, “It is impossible to predict when the magic moment will be reached and everyone finally realizes that the prices being paid for these companies, and the debt taken on to support the acquisitions, are unsustainable. When that happens, it won't be pretty. Across the board, stock prices and company valuations will fall. Banks will announce painful write-offs, some hedge funds will close their doors, and private-equity funds will report disappointing returns. Some companies will be forced into bankruptcy or restructuring.”

Further, “Falling stock prices will cause companies to reduce their hiring and capital spending while governments will be forced to raise taxes or reduce services, as revenue from capital gains taxes declines. And the combination of reduced wealth and higher interest rates will finally cause consumers to pull back on their debt-financed consumption. It happened after the junk-bond and savings-and-loan collapses of the late 1980s. It happened after the tech and telecom bust of the late '90s. And it will happen this time.”

Samuelson’s column, “The End of Cheap Credit,” left the door slightly ajar in case the collapse is not quite so severe. He wrote of rising interest rates, “As the price of money increases, borrowing and the economy might weaken. The deep slump in housing could worsen. We could also discover that the long period of cheap credit has left a nasty residue.”

Other writers with less prestigious platforms than the Post have been talking about an approaching financial bust for a couple of years. Among them has been economist Michael Hudson, author of an article on the housing bubble titled, “The New Road to Serfdom” in the May 2006 issue of Harper’s. Hudson has been speaking in interviews of a “break in the chain” of debt payments leading to a “long, slow economic crash,” with “asset deflation,” “mass defaults on mortgages,” and a “huge asset grab” by the rich who are able to protect their cash through money laundering and hedging with foreign currency bonds.

Among those poised to profit from the crash is the Carlyle Group, the equity fund that includes the Bush family and other high-profile investors with insider government connections. A January 2007 memorandum to company managers from founding partner William E. Conway, Jr., recently appeared which stated that, when the current “liquidity environment”—i.e., cheap credit—ends, “the buying opportunity will be a once in a lifetime chance.”

The fact that the crash is now being announced by the Post shows that it is a done deal. The Bilderbergers, or whomever it is that the Post reports to, have decided. It lets everyone know loud and clear that it’s time to batten down the hatches, run for cover, lay in two years of canned food, shield your assets, whatever.

Those left holding the bag will be the ordinary people whose assets are loaded with debt, such as tens of millions of mortgagees, millions of young people with student loans that can never be written off due to the “reformed” 2005 bankruptcy law, or vast numbers of workers with 401(k)s or other pension plans that are locked into the stock market.

In other words, it sounds eerily like 2000-2002 except maybe on a much larger scale. Then it was “only” the tenth worse bear market in history, but over a trillion dollars in wealth simply vanished. What makes today’s instance seem particularly unfair is that the preceding recovery that is now ending—the “jobless” one—was so anemic.

Neither Perlstein nor Samuelson gets to the bottom of the crisis, though they, like Conway of the Carlyle Group, point to the end of cheap credit. But interest rates are set by people who run central banks and financial institutions. They may be influenced by “the market,” but the market is controlled by people with money who want to maximize their profits.

Key to what is going on is that the Federal Reserve is refusing to follow the pattern set during the long reign of Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan in responding to shaky economic trends with lengthy infusions of credit as he did during the dot.com bubble of the 1990s and the housing bubble of 2001-2005.

This time around, Greenspan’s successor, Ben Bernanke, is sitting tight. With the economy teetering on the brink, the Fed is allowing rates to remain steady. The Fed claims their policy is due to the danger of rising “core inflation.” But this cannot be true. The biggest consumer item, houses and real estate, is tanking. Officially, unemployment is low, but mainly due to low-paying service jobs. Commodities have edged up, including food and gasoline, but that’s no reason to allow the entire national economy to be submerged.

So what is really happening? Actually, it’s simple. The difference today is that China and other large investors from abroad, including Middle Eastern oil magnates, are telling the U.S. that if interest rates come down, thereby devaluing their already-sliding dollar portfolios further, they will no longer support with their investments the bloated U.S. trade and fiscal deficits.

Of course we got ourselves into this quandary by shipping our manufacturing to China and other cheap-labor markets over the last generation. “Dollar hegemony” is backfiring. In fact China is using its American dollars to replace the International Monetary Fund as a lender to developing nations in Africa and elsewhere. As an additional insult, China now may be dictating a new generation of economic decline for the American people who are forced to buy their products at Wal-Mart by maxing out what is left of our available credit card debt.

About a year ago, a former Reagan Treasury official, now a well-known cable TV commentator, said that China had become “America’s bank” and commented approvingly that “it’s cheaper to print money than make cars anymore.” Ha ha.

It is truly staggering that none of the “mainstream” political candidates from either party has attacked this subject on the campaign trail. All are heavily funded by the financier elite who will profit no matter how bad the U.S. economy suffers. Every candidate except Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich treats the Federal Reserve like the fifth graven image on Mount Rushmore. And even the so-called progressives are silent. The weekend before the Perlstein/ Samuelson articles came out, there was a huge progressive conference in Washington, D.C., called “Taming the Corporate Giant.” Not a single session was devoted to financial issues.

What is likely to happen? I’d suggest four possible scenarios:

1.
Acceptance by the U.S. population of diminished prosperity and a declining role in the world. Grin and bear it. Live with your parents into your 40s instead of your 30s. Work two or three part-time jobs on the side, if you can find them. Die young if you lose your health care. Declare bankruptcy if you can, or just walk away from your debts until they bring back debtor’s prison like they’ve done in Dubai. Meanwhile, China buys more and more U.S. properties, homes, and businesses, as economists close to the Federal Reserve have suggested. If you’re an enterprising illegal immigrant, have fun continuing to jack up the underground economy, avoid business licenses and taxes, and rent out group houses to your friends.
2.
Times of economic crisis produce international tension and politicians tend to go to war rather than face the economic music. The classic example is the worldwide depression of the 1930s leading to World War II. Conditions in the coming years could be as bad as they were then. We could have a really big war if the U.S. decides once and for all to haul off and let China, or whomever, have it in the chops. If they don’t want our dollars or our debt any more, how about a few nukes?
3.
Maybe we’ll finally have a revolution either from the right or the center involving martial law, suspension of the Bill of Rights, etc., combined with some kind of military or forced-labor dictatorship. We’re halfway there anyway. Forget about a revolution from the left. They wouldn’t want to make anyone mad at them for being too radical.
4.
Could there ever be a real try at reform, maybe even an attempt just to get back to the New Deal? Since the causes of the crisis are monetary, so would be the solutions. The first step would be for the Federal Reserve System to be abolished as a bank of issue and a transformation of the nation’s credit system into a genuine public utility by the federal government. This way we could rebuild our manufacturing and public infrastructure and develop an income assurance policy that would benefit everyone.

The latter is the only sensible solution. There are monetary reformers who know how to do it if anyone gave them half a chance.

Richard C. Cook is the author of “Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age.” A retired federal analyst, his career included work with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, and NASA, followed by twenty-one years with the U.S. Treasury Department. He is now a Washington, D.C.-based writer and consultant. His book “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform,” will be published later this year. His website is at www.richardccook.com.

Richard C. Cook is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Richard C. Cook

Now I am curious to know how much an ounce of gold would be if the $829 billion in actual U.S. cash-and-coin that exists was netted against the 261 million ounces of gold that the Fed is supposed to have. Hmmm!
So, I keep dividing $829 billion by 261 million ounces of gold, and most of the time I get the answer "$3,176.24 per ounce", which sounds really nice, and which sounds even nicer when you realize that this figure is too, too low, even without adding in the additional revaluation of gold to account for all of the money that has been created around the world, and how little gold they have against those mountains of currency!
Whee! This economics stuff is easy!

Palin as Obama's "shadow"?

2008-09-13T21:56:00.000-07:00

I personally think it is a lot simpler: Americans just like Palin's shallowness and childishness, just like they liked George Bush's.

But below is a slightly more complex explanation:

Deepak Chopra | Posted: September 4th, 2008

Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing. Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure. Palin's pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.

She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of "the other." For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don't want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind. (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.)

I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palin's message. In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to change and a higher vision.

Look at what she stands for:

--Small town values -- a denial of America's global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.

--Ignorance of world affairs -- a repudiation of the need to repair America's image abroad.

--Family values -- a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don't need to be heeded.

--Rigid stands on guns and abortion -- a scornful repudiation that these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.

--Patriotism -- the usual fallback in a failed war.

--"Reform" -- an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn't fit your ideology.

Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from "us" pure American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right marches under the banners of "I'm all right, Jack," and "Why change? Everything's OK as it is." The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time. She can add mom to apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing forty years of feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there are millions of women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own good. The Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness.

Obama's call for higher ideals in politics can't be seen in a vacuum. The shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just conservatives possess a shadow -- we all do. So what comes next is a contest between the two forces of progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or has its furtive appeal become exhausted? No one can predict. The best thing about Gov. Palin is that she brought this conflict to light, which makes the upcoming debate honest. It would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in. We deserve to see what we are getting, without disguise.

www.russiantranslate.org

America finding a Middle Way out of Bushmire?

2008-09-06T20:58:00.000-07:00

What do you think are the chances that Obama, if elected, can become a selective foreign policy hawk, and fiscal conservative, tough on all sorts of slackers and cheats, in and out of the government (including the Wall Street), while still retaining his support and the ability to inspire ordinary Americans to pull up their socks and work hard?

What do you think are the chances that McCain, if elected, can increase his appeal to Middle America by cutting taxes for the poor, allowing abortion in extreme cases, tightening gun control, getting out of wasteful wars abroad, and still retaining his support among conservatives, while learning to inspire rich Americans to help the working class and the poor to help themselves?

Do you think either VP will be a help or hindrance to their new President, if they adopted these Middle Ground, bi-partisan polices?

The truth about Sarah Palin

2008-09-04T20:56:00.000-07:00

The following letter written by a long-time resident of Wasilla came off Huffington Post.com.

Dear friends,

So many people have asked me about what I know about Sarah Palin in the
last 2 days that I decided to write something up . . .

Basically, Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton have only 2 things in
common: their gender and their good looks. :)

You have my permission to forward this to your friends/email contacts

Thanks,
Anne

ABOUT SARAH PALIN

I am a resident of Wasilla, Alaska. I have known Sarah since 1992.
Everyone here knows Sarah, so it is nothing special to say we are on a
first-name basis. Our children have attended the same schools. Her
father was my child's favorite substitute teacher. I also am on a
first name basis with her parents and mother-in-law. I attended more
City Council meetings during her administration than about 99% of the
residents of the city.

She is enormously popular; in every way she's like the most popular
girl in middle school. Even men who think she is a poor choice and
won't vote for her can't quit smiling when talking about her because
she is a "babe".

It is astonishing and almost scary how well she can keep a secret. She
kept her most recent pregnancy a secret from her children and parents
for seven months.

She is energetic and hardworking. She regularly worked out at the gym.

She is savvy. She doesn't take positions; she just "puts things out
there" and if they prove to be popular, then she takes credit.

Her husband works a union job on the North Slope for BP and is a
champion snowmobile racer. Todd Palin's kind of job is highly
sought-after because of the schedule and high pay. He arranges his
work schedule so he can fish for salmon in Bristol Bay for a month or
so in summer, but by no stretch of the imagination is fishing their
major source of income. Nor has her life-style ever been anything
like that of native Alaskans.

Sarah and her whole family are avid hunters.

She's smart.

Her experience is as mayor of a city with a population of about 5,000
(at the time), and less than 2 years as governor of a state with about
670,000 residents.

During her mayoral administration most of the actual work of running
this small city was turned over to an administrator. She had been
pushed to hire this administrator by party power-brokers after she had
gotten herself into some trouble over precipitous firings which had
given rise to a recall campaign.

Sarah campaigned in Wasilla as a "fiscal conservative". During her 6
years as Mayor, she increased general government expenditures by over
33%. During those same 6 years the amount of taxes collected by the
City increased by 38%. This was during a period of low inflation
(1996-2002). She reduced progressive property taxes and increased a
regressive sales tax which taxed even food. The tax cuts that she
promoted benefited large corporate property owners way more than they
benefited residents.

The huge increases in tax revenues during her mayoral administration
weren't enough to fund everything on her wish list though, borrowed
money was needed, too. She inherited a city with zero debt, but left it
with indebtedness of over $22 million. What did Mayor Palin encourage
the voters to borrow money for? Was it the infrastructure that she said
she supported? The sewage treatment plant that the city lacked? or a
new library? No. $1m for a park. $15m-plus for construction of a
multi-use sports complex which she rushed through to build on a piece
of property that the City didn't even have clear title to, that was
still in litigation 7 yrs later--to the delight of the lawyers
involved! The sports complex itself is a nice addition to the
community but a huge money pit, not the profit-generator she claimed it
would be. She also supported bonds for $5.5m for road projects that
could have been done in 5-7 yrs without any borrowing.

While Mayor, City Hall was extensively remodeled and her office
redecorated more than once.

These are small numbers, but Wasilla is a very small city.

As an oil producer, the high price of oil has created a budget surplus
in Alaska. Rather than invest this surplus in technology that will
make us energy independent and increase efficiency, as Governor she
proposed distribution of this surplus to every individual in the state.

In this time of record state revenues and budget surpluses, she
recommended that the state borrow/bond for road projects, even while
she proposed distribution of surplus state revenues: spend today's
surplus, borrow for needs.

She's not very tolerant of divergent opinions or open to outside ideas
or compromise. As Mayor, she fought ideas that weren't generated by
her or her staff. Ideas weren't evaluated on their merits, but on the
basis of who proposed them.

While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected
City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from
the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents
rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin's
attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew
her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the
Librarian are on her enemies list to this day.

Sarah complained about the "old boy's club" when she first ran for
Mayor, so what did she bring Wasilla? A new set of "old boys".
Palin fired most of the experienced staff she inherited. At the City and as
Governor she hired or elevated new, inexperienced, obscure people,
creating a staff totally dependent on her for their jobs and eternally
grateful and fiercely loyal--loyal to the point of abusing their power
to further her personal agenda, as she has acknowledged happened in the
case of pressuring the State's top cop (see below).

As Mayor, Sarah fired Wasilla's Police Chief because he "intimidated"
her, she told the press. As Governor, her recent firing of Alaska's top
cop has the ring of familiarity about it. He served at her pleasure
and she had every legal right to fire him, but it's pretty clear that
an important factor in her decision to fire him was because he wouldn't
fire her sister's ex-husband, a State Trooper. Under investigation
for abuse of power, she has had to admit that more than 2 dozen
contacts were made between her staff and family to the person that she
later fired, pressuring him to fire her ex-brother-in-law. She tried to
replace the man she fired with a man who she knew had been reprimanded
for sexual harassment; when this caused a public furor, she withdrew
her support.

She has bitten the hand of every person who extended theirs to her in
help. The City Council person who personally escorted her around town
introducing her to voters when she first ran for Wasilla City Council
became one of her first targets when she was later elected Mayor. She
abruptly fired her loyal City Administrator; even people who didn't
like the guy were stunned by this ruthlessness.

Fear of retribution has kept all of these people from saying anything
publicly about her.

When then-Governor Murkowski was handing out political plums, Sarah got
the best, Chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission: one
of the few jobs not in Juneau and one of the best paid. She had no
background in oil & gas issues. Within months of scoring this great
job which paid $122,400/yr, she was complaining in the press about the
high salary. I was told that she hated that job: the commute, the
structured hours, the work. Sarah became aware that a member of this
Commission (who was also the State Chair of the Republican Party)
engaged in unethical behavior on the job. In a gutsy move which some
undoubtedly cautioned her could be political suicide, Sarah solved all
her problems in one fell swoop: got out of the job she hated and
garnered gobs of media attention as the patron saint of ethics and as a
gutsy fighter against the "old boys' club" when she dramatically quit,
exposing this man's ethics violations (for which he was fined).

As Mayor, she had her hand stuck out as far as anyone for pork from
Senator Ted Stevens. Lately, she has castigated his pork-barrel
politics and publicly humiliated him. She only opposed the "bridge to
nowhere" after it became clear that it would be unwise not to.

As Governor, she gave the Legislature no direction and budget
guidelines, then made a big grandstand display of line-item vetoing
projects, calling them pork. Public outcry and further legislative
action restored most of these projects--which had been vetoed simply
because she was not aware of their importance--but with the unobservant
she had gained a reputation as "anti-pork".

She is solidly Republican: no political maverick. The State party
leaders hate her because she has bit them in the back and humiliated
them. Other members of the party object to her self-description as a
fiscal conservative.

Around Wasilla there are people who went to high school with Sarah.
They call her "Sarah Barracuda" because of her unbridled ambition and
predatory ruthlessness. Before she became so powerful, very ugly
stories circulated around town about shenanigans she pulled to be made
point guard on the high school basketball team. When Sarah's
mother-in-law, a highly respected member of the community and
experienced manager, ran for Mayor, Sarah refused to endorse her.

As Governor, she stepped outside of the box and put together of package
of legislation known as "AGIA" that forced the oil companies to march
to the beat of her drum.

Like most Alaskans, she favors drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge. She has questioned if the loss of sea ice is linked to
global warming. She campaigned "as a private citizen" against a state
initiaitive that would have either a) protected salmon streams from
pollution from mines, or b) tied up in the courts all mining in the
state (depending on who you listen to). She has pushed the State's
lawsuit against the Dept. of the Interior's decision to list polar
bears as threatened species.

McCain is the oldest person to ever run for President; Sarah will be a
heartbeat away from being President.

There has to be literally millions of Americans who are more
knowledgeable and experienced than she.

However, there's a lot of people who have underestimated her and are
regretting it.

CLAIM VS FACT
•"Hockey mom": true for a few years
•"PTA mom": true years ago when her first-born was in elementary
school, not since
•"NRA supporter": absolutely true
•social conservative: mixed. Opposes gay marriage, BUT vetoed a bill
that would have denied benefits to employees in same-sex relationships
(said she did this because it was unconsitutional).
•pro-creationism: mixed. Supports it, BUT did nothing as Governor to
promote it.
•"Pro-life": mixed. Knowingly gave birth to a Down's syndrome baby
BUT declined to call a special legislative session on some pro-life
legislation
•"Experienced": Some high schools have more students than Wasilla has
residents. Many cities have more residents than the state of Alaska.
No legislative experience other than City Council. Little hands-on
supervisory or managerial experience; needed help of a city
administrator to run town of about 5,000.
•political maverick: not at all
•gutsy: absolutely!
•open & transparent: ??? Good at keeping secrets. Not good at
explaining actions.
•has a developed philosophy of public policy: no
•"a Greenie": no. Turned Wasilla into a wasteland of big box stores
and disconnected parking lots. Is pro-drilling off-shore and in ANWR.
•fiscal conservative: not by my definition!
•pro-infrastructure: No. Promoted a sports complex and park in a city
without a sewage treatment plant or storm drainage system. Built
streets to early 20th century standards.
•pro-tax relief: Lowered taxes for businesses, increased tax burden on
residents
•pro-small government: No. Oversaw greatest expansion of city
government in Wasilla's history.
•pro-labor/pro-union. No. Just because her husband works union
doesn't make her pro-labor. I have seen nothing to support any claim
that she is pro-labor/pro-union.

WHY AM I WRITING THIS?

First, I have long believed in the importance of being an informed
voter. I am a voter registrar. For 10 years I put on student voting
programs in the schools. If you google my name (Anne Kilkenny +
Alaska), you will find references to my participation in local
government, education, and PTA/parent organizations.

Secondly, I've always operated in the belief that "Bad things happen
when good people stay silent". Few people know as much as I do
because few have gone to as many City Council meetings.

Third, I am just a housewife. I don't have a job she can bump me out
of. I don't belong to any organization that she can hurt. But, I am no
fool; she is immensely popular here, and it is likely that this will
cost me somehow in the future: that's life.

Fourth, she has hated me since back in 1996, when I was one of the 100
or so people who rallied to support the City Librarian against Sarah's
attempt at censorship.

Fifth, I looked around and realized that everybody else was afraid to
say anything because they were somehow vulnerable.

CAVEATS
I am not a statistician. I developed the numbers for the increase in
spending & taxation 2 years ago (when Palin was running for Governor)
from information supplied to me by the Finance Director of the City of
Wasilla, and I can't recall exactly what I adjusted for: did I adjust
for inflation? for population increases? Right now, it is impossible
for a private person to get any info out of City Hall--they are
swamped. So I can't verify my numbers.

You may have noticed that there are various numbers circulating for the
population of Wasilla, ranging from my "about 5,000", up to
9,000. The
day Palin's selection was announced a city official told me that the
current population is about 7,000. The official 2000 census count was
5,460. I have used about 5,000 because Palin was Mayor from 1996 to
2002, and the city was growing rapidly in the mid-90's.

Anne Kilkenny

August 31, 2008

McCain was a “hero” in a misguided war.

2008-09-03T02:26:00.000-07:00

Judging by his response to the Georgian crisis, he is guaranteed to get America into more misguided adventures that will further ruin the US economy and its image abroad.

As for “reform”, McCain is a reckless craps player (Obama is a circumspect poker player). McCain played a gamble with his choice of a VP, just to get conservatives’ donations and the religious vote. Sara Palin, a woman who wanted to introduce creationism in schools is simply not smart enough to run a country, let alone wage a war, should anything happen to McCain. One simply shudders to think what other “reforms” she might bring on.

Russians are playing GORODKI in Georgia...

2008-08-21T20:00:00.000-07:00

Spengler analysis below sounds elaborate and seductive but it is fundamentally wrong.

Russians are playing GORODKI, the Americans monopoly (with no money in the bank), and the Georgians are playing a Russian roulette…

And the only people possibly playing chess are the Chinese and the Indians who have a waiting game strategy.

First, Russians look clever only if compared to the Georgians and the Americans. If they were really playing chess, they would have buckled down after the Communist holocaust and rebuilt the ruined country, its infrastructure, industries and skills base. Instead, as soon as the oil money began to pour in, they forgot that most of their country still belongs to the Fourth World and began to pretend that they are a superpower again. But, despite Putin’s exhortations and the oil bounty, Russian women are refusing to breed more cannon fodder for the battlefields of Georgia or Ukraine or workforce for the coming Korean, Chinese and Indian factories on the Russian soil (or maybe the Russian women are just too sick and tired after 80 years of constant mayhem).

Giving out Russian passports to the Ossetians and the Crimeans and then bombing their hosts will not solve the problem of Russian depopulation. On the contrary. It will drag Russia into a confrontation with near and far neighbors it can ill afford long-term.

The Georgian conflict is a game of vanity, false pride, and vengefulness, together with some more oil and reconstruction money that will enrich the Russian elite. It is a game of Russian roulette for the vain and stupid Saakashvili, who was egged on by the Americans. Instead of becoming a playground for European tourists, Georgia chose to become the playground for the big power rivalry and confrontation.

By the way, the traditional Russian game of gorodki involves throwing a large stick and smashing elaborately built wooden figures, each signifying different concept (but actually meaning "little towns"). It is like ten pin bowling with a rocket. Russians are good at it. But it ain't chess.

Americans play Monopoly, Russians chess
By Spengler

On the night of November 22, 2004, then-Russian president - now premier - Vladimir Putin watched the television news in his dacha near Moscow. People who were with Putin that night report his anger and disbelief at the unfolding "Orange" revolution in Ukraine. "They lied to me," Putin said bitterly of the United States. "I'll never trust them again." The Russians still can't fathom why the West threw over a potential strategic alliance for Ukraine. They underestimate the stupidity of the West.

American hardliners are the first to say that they feel stupid next to Putin. Victor Davis Hanson wrote on August 12 [1] of Moscow's "sheer diabolic brilliance" in Georgia, while Colonel Ralph Peters, a columnist and television commentator, marveled on August 14 [2], "The Russians are alcohol-sodden barbarians, but now and then they vomit up a genius ... the empire of the czars hasn't produced such a frightening genius since [Joseph] Stalin." The superlatives recall an old observation about why the plots of American comic books need clever super-villains and stupid super-heroes to even the playing field. Evidently the same thing applies to superpowers.

The fact is that all Russian politicians are clever. The stupid ones are all dead. By contrast, America in its complacency promotes dullards. A deadly miscommunication arises from this asymmetry. The Russians cannot believe that the Americans are as stupid as they look, and conclude that Washington wants to destroy them. That is what the informed Russian public believes, judging from last week's postings on web forums, including this writer's own.

These perceptions are dangerous because they do not stem from propaganda, but from a difference in existential vantage point. Russia is fighting for its survival, against a catastrophic decline in population and the likelihood of a Muslim majority by mid-century. The Russian Federation's scarcest resource is people. It cannot ignore the 22 million Russians stranded outside its borders after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, nor, for that matter, small but loyal ethnicities such as the Ossetians. Strategic encirclement, in Russian eyes, prefigures the ethnic disintegration of Russia, which was a political and cultural entity, not an ethnic state, from its first origins.

The Russians know (as every newspaper reader does) that Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili is not a model democrat, but a nasty piece of work who deployed riot police against protesters and shut down opposition media when it suited him - in short, a politician in Putin's mold. America's interest in Georgia, the Russians believe, has nothing more to do with promoting democracy than its support for the gangsters to whom it handed the Serbian province of Kosovo in February.

Again, the Russians misjudge American stupidity. Former president Ronald Reagan used to say that if there was a pile of manure, it must mean there was a pony around somewhere. His epigones have trouble distinguishing the pony from the manure pile. The ideological reflex for promoting democracy dominates the George W Bush administration to the point that some of its senior people hold their noses and pretend that Kosovo, Ukraine and Georgia are the genuine article.

Think of it this way: Russia is playing chess, while the Americans are playing Monopoly. What Americans understand by "war games" is exactly what occurs on the board of the Parker Brothers' pastime. The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.

America's idea of winning a strategic game is to accumulate the most chips on the board: bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a pipeline in Georgia, a "moderate Muslim" government with a big North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Kosovo, missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and so forth. But this is not a strategy; it is only a game score.

Chess players think in terms of interaction of pieces: everything on the periphery combines to control the center of the board and prepare an eventual attack against the opponent's king. The Russians simply cannot absorb the fact that America has no strategic intentions: it simply adds up the value of the individual pieces on the board. It is as stupid as that. But there is another difference: the Americans are playing chess for career and perceived advantage. Russia is playing for its life, like Ingmar Bergman's crusader in The Seventh Seal.

Dull people know that clever people are cleverer than they are, but they do not know why. The nekulturny Colonel Ralph Peters, a former US military intelligence analyst, is impressed by the tactical success of Russian arms in Georgia, but cannot fathom the end-game to which these tactics contribute. He writes, "The new reality is that a nuclear, cash-rich and energy-blessed Russia doesn't really worry too much whether its long-term future is bleak, given problems with Muslim minorities, poor life-expectancy rates, and a declining population. Instead, in the here and now, it has a window of opportunity to reclaim prestige and weaken its adversaries."

Precisely the opposite is true: like a good chess player, Putin has the end-game in mind as he fights for control of the board in the early stages of the game. Demographics stand at the center of Putin's calculation, and Russians are the principal interest that the Russian Federation has in its so-called near abroad. The desire of a few hundred thousand Abkhazians and South Ossetians to remain in the Russian Federation rather than Georgia may seem trivial, but Moscow is setting a precedent that will apply to tens of millions of prospective citizens of the Federation - most controversially in Ukraine.

Before turning to the demographics of the near abroad, a few observations about Russia's demographic predicament are pertinent. The United Nations publishes population projections for Russia up to 2050, and I have extended these to 2100. If the UN demographers are correct, Russia's adult population will fall from about 90 million today to only 20 million by the end of the century. Russia is the only country where abortions are more numerous than live births, a devastating gauge of national despair.

Under Putin, the Russian government introduced an ambitious natalist program to encourage Russian women to have children. As he warned in his 2006 state of the union address, "You know that our country's population is declining by an average of almost 700,000 people a year. We have raised this issue on many occasions but have for the most part done very little to address it ... First, we need to lower the death rate. Second, we need an effective migration policy. And third, we need to increase the birth rate."

Russia's birth rate has risen slightly during the past several years, perhaps in response to Putin's natalism, but demographers observe that the number of Russian women of childbearing age is about to fall off a cliff. No matter how much the birth rate improves, the sharp fall in the number of prospective mothers will depress the number of births. UN forecasts show the number of Russians aged 20-29 falling from 25 million today to only 10 million by 2040.

Russia, in other words, has passed the point of no return in terms of fertility. Although roughly four-fifths of the population of the Russian Federation is considered ethnic Russians, fertility is much higher among the Muslim minorities in Central Asia. Some demographers predict a Muslim majority in Russia by 2040, and by mid-century at the latest.

Part of Russia's response is to encourage migration of Russians left outside the borders of the federation after the collapse of communism in 1991. An estimated 6.5 million Russians from the former Soviet Union now work in Russia as undocumented aliens, and a new law will regularize their status. Only 20,000 Russian "compatriots" living abroad, however, have applied for immigration to the federation under a new law designed to draw Russians back.

That leaves the 9.5 million citizens of Belarus, a relic of the Soviet era that persists in a semi-formal union with the Russian Federation, as well as the Russians of the Western Ukraine and Kazakhstan. More than 15 million ethnic Russians reside in those three countries, and they represent a critical strategic resource. Paul Goble in his Window on Eurasia website reported on August 16:
Moscow retreated after encountering fierce opposition from other countries, but semi-legal practices of obtaining Russian citizenship that began in former Soviet republics in the early 1990s continue unabated. There is plenty of evidence that there are one to two million people living in the territory of the former Soviet Union who have de facto dual citizenship and are reluctant to report it to the authorities. Russia did little to stop the process. Moreover, starting in 1997, it encouraged de facto dual citizenship.

Russia has an existential interest in absorbing Belarus and the Western Ukraine. No one cares about Byelorus. It has never had an independent national existence or a national culture; the first
grammar in the Belorussian language was not printed until 1918, and little over a third of the population of Belarus speaks the language at home. Never has a territory with 10 million people had a sillier case for independence. Given that summary, it seems natural to ask why anyone should care about Ukraine. That question is controversial; for the moment, I will offer the assertion that partition is the destiny of Ukraine.

Even with migration and annexation of former Russian territory that was lost in the fracture of the USSR, however, Russia will not win its end-game against demographic decline and the relative growth of Muslim populations. The key to Russian survival is Russification, that is, the imposition of Russian culture and Russian law on ethnicities at the periphery of the federation. That might sound harsh, but that has been Russian nature from its origins.

Russia is not an ethnicity but an empire, the outcome of hundreds of years of Russification. That Russification has been brutal is an understatement, but it is what created Russia out of the ethnic morass around the Volga river basin. One of the best accounts of Russia's character comes from Eugene Rosenstock-Huessey (Franz Rosenzweig's cousin and sometime collaborator) in his 1938 book Out of Revolution. Russia's territory tripled between the 16th and 18th centuries, he observes, and the agency of its expansion was a unique Russian type. The Russian peasant, Rosenstock-Huessey observed, "was no stable freeholder of the Western type but much more a nomad, a pedlar, a craftsman and a soldier. His capacity for expansion was tremendous."
In 1581 Asiatic Russia was opened. Russian expansion, extending even in the eighteenth century as far as the Russian River in Northern California, was by no means Czaristic only. The "Moujik", the Russian peasant, because he is not a "Bauer" or a "farmer", or a "laborer", but a "Moujik", wanders and stays, ready to migrate again eventually year after year.
Russia was never a multi-ethnic state, but rather what I call a supra-ethnic state, that is, a state whose national principle transcends ethnicity. A reader has called my attention to an account of the most Russian of all writers, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, of his own Russo-Lithuanian-Ukrainian background:

I suppose that one of my Lithuanian ancestors, having emigrated to the Ukraine, changed his religion in order to marry an Orthodox Ukrainian, and became a priest. When his wife died he probably entered a monastery, and later, rose to be an archbishop. This would explain how the Archbishop Stepan may have founded our Orthodox family, in spite of his being a monk. It is somewhat surprising to see the Dostoyevsky, who had been warriors in Lithuania, become priests in Ukraine. But this is quite in accordance with Lithuanian custom. I may quote the learned Lithuanian W St Vidunas in this connection: "Formerly many well-to-do Lithuanians had but one desire: to see one or more of their sons enter upon an ecclesiastical career."
Dostoyevsky's mixed background was typically Russian, as was the Georgian origin of Joseph Stalin.

Russia intervened in Georgia to uphold the principle that anyone who holds a Russian passport - Ossetian, Akhbaz, Belorussian or Ukrainian - is a Russian. Russia's survival depends not so much on its birth rate, nor on immigration, nor even on prospective annexation, but on the survival of the principle by which Russia was built in the first place. That is why Putin could not abandon the pockets of Russian passport holders in the Caucusus. That Russia history has been tragic, and its nation-building principle brutal and sometimes inhuman, is a different matter. Russia is sufficiently important that its tragedy will be our tragedy, unless averted.

The place to avert tragedy is in Ukraine. Russia will not permit Ukraine to drift to the West. Whether a country that never had an independent national existence prior to the collapse of communism should become the poster-child for national self-determination is a different question. The West has two choices: draw a line in the sand around Ukraine, or trade it to the Russians for something more important.

My proposal is simple: Russia's help in containing nuclear proliferation and terrorism in the Middle East is of infinitely greater import to the West than the dubious self-determination of Ukraine. The West should do its best to pretend that the "Orange" revolution of 2004 and 2005 never happened, and secure Russia's assistance in the Iranian nuclear issue as well as energy security in return for an understanding of Russia's existential requirements in the near abroad. Anyone who thinks this sounds cynical should spend a week in Kiev.

Russia has more to fear from a nuclear-armed Iran than the United States, for an aggressive Muslim state on its borders could ruin its attempt to Russify Central Asia. Russia's strategic interests do not conflict with those of the United States, China or India in this matter. There is a certain degree of rivalry over energy resources, but commercial rivalry does not have to turn into strategic enmity.

If Washington chooses to demonize Russia, the likelihood is that Russia will become a spoiler with respect to American strategic interests in general, and use the Iranian problem to twist America's tail. That is a serious risk indeed, for nuclear proliferation is the one means by which outlaw regimes can pose a serious threat to great powers. Russia confronts questions not of expediency, but of existence, and it will do whatever it can to gain maneuvering room should the West seek to "punish" it for its actions in Georgia.

One irony of the present crisis is that Washington's neo-conservatives, by demanding a tough stance against Russia, may have harmed Israel's security interests more profoundly than any of Israel's detractors in American politics. The neo-conservatives are not as a rule Jewish, but many of them are Jews who have a deep concern for Israel's security - as does this writer. If America turns Russia into a strategic adversary, the probability of Israel's survival will drop by a big notch.

Notes
1. See National Review OnlineMoscow's Sinister Brilliance.
2. See New York Post, A czar is born: Bad Vlad wins war, dupes West & proves he's genius

The Great Illusion

2008-08-16T03:26:00.000-07:00

The Great Illusion
Published NYT, Paul Krugman : August 14, 2008
So far, the international economic consequences of the war in the Caucasus have been fairly minor, despite Georgia’s role as a major corridor for oil shipments. But as I was reading the latest bad news, I found myself wondering whether this war is an omen — a sign that the second great age of globalization may share the fate of the first.
If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, here’s what you need to know: our grandfathers lived in a world of largely self-sufficient, inward-looking national economies — but our great-great grandfathers lived, as we do, in a world of large-scale international trade and investment, a world destroyed by nationalism.
Writing in 1919, the great British economist John Maynard Keynes described the world economy as it was on the eve of World War I. “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth ... he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world.”
And Keynes’s Londoner “regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement ... The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion ... appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.”
But then came three decades of war, revolution, political instability, depression and more war. By the end of World War II, the world was fragmented economically as well as politically. And it took a couple of generations to put it back together.
So, can things fall apart again? Yes, they can.
Consider how things have played out in the current food crisis. For years we were told that self-sufficiency was an outmoded concept, and that it was safe to rely on world markets for food supplies. But when the prices of wheat, rice and corn soared, Keynes’s “projects and politics” of “restrictions and exclusion” made a comeback: many governments rushed to protect domestic consumers by banning or limiting exports, leaving food-importing countries in dire straits.
And now comes “militarism and imperialism.” By itself, as I said, the war in Georgia isn’t that big a deal economically. But it does mark the end of the Pax Americana — the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force. And that raises some real questions about the future of globalization.
Most obviously, Europe’s dependence on Russian energy, especially natural gas, now looks very dangerous — more dangerous, arguably, than its dependence on Middle Eastern oil. After all, Russia has already used gas as a weapon: in 2006, it cut off supplies to Ukraine amid a dispute over prices.
And if Russia is willing and able to use force to assert control over its self-declared sphere of influence, won’t others do the same? Just think about the global economic disruption that would follow if China — which is about to surpass the United States as the world’s largest manufacturing nation — were to forcibly assert its claim to Taiwan.
Some analysts tell us not to worry: global economic integration itself protects us against war, they argue, because successful trading economies won’t risk their prosperity by engaging in military adventurism. But this, too, raises unpleasant historical memories.
Shortly before World War I another British author, Norman Angell, published a famous book titled “The Great Illusion,” in which he argued that war had become obsolete, that in the modern industrial era even military victors lose far more than they gain. He was right — but wars kept happening anyway.
So are the foundations of the second global economy any more solid than those of the first? In some ways, yes. For example, war among the nations of Western Europe really does seem inconceivable now, not so much because of economic ties as because of shared democratic values.
Much of the world, however, including nations that play a key role in the global economy, doesn’t share those values. Most of us have proceeded on the belief that, at least as far as economics goes, this doesn’t matter — that we can count on world trade continuing to flow freely simply because it’s so profitable. But that’s not a safe assumption.
Angell was right to describe the belief that conquest pays as a great illusion. But the belief that economic rationality always prevents war is an equally great illusion. And today’s high degree of global economic interdependence, which can be sustained only if all major governments act sensibly, is more fragile than we imagine.

THE US SHOULD TRADE IN ITS LITTLE GEORGIAN PAL SAAKASHVILLI FOR THE LARGER PEACE IN THE REGION (AND SAVE THE INNOCENT CIVILIANS IN BOTH GEORGIA AND OS

2008-08-12T17:14:00.000-07:00

SARKOSY THE DEAL-MAKER IS THE REAL HERO

There is a saying in Russia that the quickest way to make money is to buy a Georgian for what he is worth and sell him for what he thinks he is worth.

Georgians are uniformly hated in the Caucasus, even more than the Russians. They are braggarts and small-time bullies. That is why the Ossetians and the Abkhazians want to get away from them as soon as possible. The Abkhazians, a tiny little nation, beat the crap out of Georgians when the Georgians tried to keep them under control.

Egged on by the real and perceived American support, Saakashvili overplayed his cards by brutally attacking South Ossetia. Russia also went overboard by not just making the Georgians beat a hasty retreat when they saw their bluff against the separatist nation of Ossetia crashing to the ground under Russian assault. Of course, the Russians, upset by the losses of their former territories and the encroachment of NATO, have for a long time fuelled separatist unrest by providing moral and material support for the separatists (as well as Russian passports to the Ossetians, so that Russia could later claim that its citizens are under attack).

The tiny Caucasian nations, with their ancient grievances and animosities, were drawn into big power play that they could little afford. Both the US and Russia, with their remaining and largely futile global ambitions, are to blame for their current plight. But the “plucky little Georgian” Saakashvili, despite his fluent English and his voluble appeals to democratic values, should be seen for what he is – a little upstart and a small-time bully who put his nation in jeopardy by attacking South Ossetia. Maybe a little coaching from Sarkosy will make him come to his senses. Maybe.

Oh yeah. And the crisis would not have happened if Russians did not get their trillions from expensive oil and gas to fuel their global ambitions. So, blame all the gas guzzlers in the world for giving the oil producing nations the advantage that they do not know how to use for their own and the world's greater good. Amen.

www.russiantranslate.org

Dancing with the New Tsars

2008-06-12T10:31:00.000-07:00

Dancing with the New Tsars

With their tricked-out yachts, trained servants and diamond-frosted toys, newly rich Russians have invaded London -- and thrown Britain's elite into a royal tizzy.

By Clare Foges

A woman stands near a jewel-encrusted $25,000 set of bottles of vodka displayed at Extravaganza, a show of super-luxury goods, in Moscow.

June 12, 2008 | LONDON -- On a recent evening in London's nightclub-of-the-moment, Movida, I'm at the sleek steel bar, surrounded by a gaggle of good-looking blondes. Taking in their gaudy Fendi clutch bags, their air of hard confidence and the dinky diamonds embedded in their BlackBerrys, I recognize the breed immediately: They are London's New Russians, super spenders from the land of oligarchs and post-communist ostentation. They slice the air with black credit cards, beckoning for champagne, more champagne and Stolichnaya Elit, the finest potato juice known to man. As I struggle in vain to get the bartender's attention, the lights dim, the crowd parts and a twangy Russian folk song starts blaring from the speakers -- "Kalinka," I think. Two strapping black-shirted young men are making their way across the dance floor, bearing an ornate sedan chair. Feeling a little like a slave in Pharaonic Egypt, I jostle over to get a look.

It turns out the precious cargo is a giant ice bowl holding several bottles of Cristal champagne, destined for a clique of New Russians holding court at a corner table. "It's called a champagne chariot," explains Ilya Taranto, the Russian-born, British-educated event producer whose job it is here to keep such clients sweet. "If you order over 15,000 pounds worth of champagne [about $30,000] it gets brought to you this way. The Russians love it."

The scene is not surprising; it's just one small moment in a five-year super-spending spree that has swept London. Nearly 100 years after the aristocrats of old Russia were rudely stripped of their decadence and forced to flee west, a new Russian elite has hit London with a lust to live like their long-lost tsars. They are the oil- and gas-rich plutocrats, oligarchs and multimillionaires who made a killing when communism fell and Soviet state assets were privatized. Twenty years ago they might have been scratching out tin in the Urals; now, at clubs like Movida, they drink cocktails flecked with flakes of 24-carat edible gold.

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After Perestroika, the economic reforms in the 1980s Soviet Union that permitted private ownership of businesses, Russia's economy spluttered and lurched as the old capitalist machine warmed up again after seven repressive decades of communism. These days, though, it is lubricated by a seemingly endless torrent of oil and natural gas, leaving the nation's elite awash in money. (In the first three months of this year Russian oil production averaged 10 million barrels a day; with the soaring price of crude, calculating the profit potential quickly gets dizzying.) Under the stabilizing influence of a "managed democracy," courtesy of Vladimir Putin's reign as president, the new economy is booming.

The darker side of Russia's new dawn has been well covered in the West, with reports of deep corruption, crackdowns on the free media, assassination attempts on the wealthy, and the prosecution of powerful men like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the multibillionaire whose political ideas apparently didn't sit well with the Kremlin, and who is now languishing in a Siberian labor camp. Putin's authoritarian style and distaste for dissidence have led many rich Russians to seek security elsewhere.

Around 200,000 Russians now live in London (a sizable colony in a population of 7.5 million), and of these, around a tenth are those who would be considered super-wealthy. They come here in large part because of a lax tax law that allows "non-domiciled residents" to escape paying revenue on the mountains of money they bring into Britain. Much to the consternation of the upper-class old guard, they are just the latest wave of flashy, filthy-rich foreigners to crash into London, following in the wake of the oil-rich Saudis of the 1970s and '80s and the Japanese businessmen of the '90s. They have long drawn quiet sneers; lately, some socialites about town have been handing down harsher denouncements, and doing it very publicly.

But there is something refreshing and even distinctly appealing about these wealthy Russians, even if it is entirely lost on Britain's old-guard elite. Although individual examples of astonishing extravagance may certainly seem distasteful, the Russians' spending spree is in some sense redeemed as a long, noisy and joyful retort to decades of communist dictatorship.

Given their wealth and growing notoriety, the super-rich Russians may now try to duck attention as they flit from their mansions to their million-dollar Maybachs. But you know a Novi Russki when you see one: The "biznismeni" are built like bricks and tanned from a month on their yachts in St. Tropez (which, by the way, boast helipads and submarines, and make poor P. Diddy's ride look like an old tin can). You'll find them in London's smartest restaurants, dark-suited and discreet in the corner, planning a new pipeline through Kazakhstan or plotting to float millions on the Micex, Moscow's booming stock exchange.

Their wives and girlfriends follow the dress-down "Dynasty" school of fashion -- the furs have been folded away for modesty's sake (and the Moscow winters), but they still favor luxe silk shirts, crocodile skin handbags and a heavy dose of diamond frosting. "There is a lot of brand bashing going on," admits Ilya Taranto. "We Russians just like nice things."

You're most likely to catch one of these gaudy butterflies at the high-class events that constitute English society's summer season -- Wimbledon, Henley Royal Regatta, Cartier Polo, Glorious Goodwood -- where they'll be dressed in the best Versace, Dolce and Gabbana or Cavalli, and causing a stir among the old guard. "Events like Henley and Goodwood are seen as epicenters of Englishness, so it's seriously obvious when the Russians invade," says Sophie Sharpe, a full-time socialite on the London scene and a veteran of the top events. "They're pretty flash with their cash on the horses, on the alcohol -- on everything really. They come along with these huge jeroboams of vodka and ludicrous amounts of caviar and it's a bit in-your-face. It's just a totally different attitude to what we're used to."

You can imagine the derision they attract in London's elite epicenter, where the best money is still old money and snobbery is a sport. A friend was enjoying breakfast in one of London's smartest hotels recently when she nearly choked on her eggs Benedict. There, at the next table, was a classic Novi Russki -- resplendent in retina-rupturing red lipstick and, to match, the most eye-wateringly extravagant ruby necklace she had ever seen. "Rubies -- at 8 a.m.! At breakfast!" my friend mock whispered in the tones snobby Brits reserve for the insufferably vulgar. Such brash flashiness is simply not done in London.

The legendary profligacy of the rich Russians has been raising eyebrows all over town. Taki Theodoracopulos, the famed socialite and professional snob, has for months been waging a high-profile campaign against the crowd he dubs the "Nouveau Russes," calling them "crude, vicious, fat, vulgar, coarse, loud ... uncouth, uncultivated, boorish and brutal," and raging against their "humongous super-yachts, colossal houses [and] gargantuan egos." According to Taki, the New Russians' "obnoxious spending and lack of basic manners amount to a grotesque deformity." Though few would dare to be so explicit, it's not an uncommon attitude.

Some, however, have welcomed them with open arms. Indeed, many rich Russians come to London because it is a city supinely eager to cater to their whims.

Next page: Mansions bought with cash, soaring demand for Russian-speaking butlers, fresh sushi ready at takeoff, and so much more

A whole host of specialist services has sprung up to relieve the Russians of their rubles. Most of London's top realtors now offer Russian-speaking agents, and offices in Moscow, to attract buyers in the ludicrously lucrative market. "The Russian impact has been hugely significant, especially in the 5 million pound-plus bracket" of properties, says Rupert des Forges, an agent with Knight Frank of Belgravia. "It's the prevalent force in the high-end market now."

According to des Forges, wealthy Russians often decide to buy on the spot and pay upfront (though not with cash-stuffed attaché cases, as some gossips would have it). It's a market led by extravagant oligarchs like Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea football club, who recently applied for planning permission to build a private residence that will be worth a whopping $300 million.

Once they've got their palace, the New Tsars need palatial furnishings. There's been a massive increase in Russian interest in the art market in recent years, says William MacDougall, who in 2004 capitalized on the spending spree by establishing an auction house specializing in Russian art. "Last year we sold over $34 million worth of art -- and 90 percent of our buyers were born in the former Soviet Union."

In the auction rooms, the New Tsars stop at nothing to secure their spoils, loudly outbidding each other with little obeisance to auction etiquette. Their desire to augment their status with art has created a frenzied appetite for old imperial treasures and Soviet-era souvenirs, driving up the value of the Russian art market from $66 million in 2004 to over $260 million last year.

Alexis Gradar is another beneficiary of the Russian Ruble-ution. As founder of upmarket transportation company Avolus, he provides private jets, yachts, helicopters and limousines to the super-rich. Business is booming: "Russians account for about a third of our private jet hire at the moment," he says. "They're very discerning, always wanting the latest model, often insisting that the planes are no more than one or two years old. They like soothing light beige interiors and they want fresh sushi and fresh fruit ready for takeoff."

Whatever the cost? Gradar laughs at the absurdity of the question: "Whatever the cost."

The Russian invasion has caused sales of caviar, vintage champagne, jewelry and all manner of luxe loot to skyrocket. You can't get much more indulgent than a full fleet of butlers, housekeepers, nannies, chauffeurs and chefs to service your home (or homes), but according to Jane Urquhart, director of the Greycoat Placements agency for domestic staff, such extravagance is par for the course these days: "There has been a marked increase in demand for Russian-speaking butlers and other servants in recent years, and many of our staff are willing to learn Russian to land the good jobs." Incredibly, the number of butlers on Greycoat's books has almost doubled in the past five years, as more and more Russian multimillionaires seek the ultimate accessory of the affluent classes.

While most of the English afford the rich Russians a filigree of courtesy, behind their backs there are plenty of sniggers. Most wealthy Russians are well aware of this quiet snobbery, says Ilya Taranto: "Basically, any friction comes down to an old-fashioned conflict between English traditional conservatism and Russian decadence."

It's a conflict that has repercussions far outside elite high society circles, argues the Russian ambassador to Britain, Yuri Fedotov. Last year the diplomat caused a storm by claiming that hostile feeling toward Russians in London was so strong that his countrymen were being refused service in shops, restaurants and taxis. "From time to time Russians in London encounter some sort of mistreatment," he said. "It is hard to say whether it is some kind of Russophobia or whether it is a particular case of xenophobia which is developing here."

If Russophobia is on the rise in London, it's quite possible that the high-profile hedonism of an elite wave of immigrants has played a part in it. But all the pride and prejudice afflicting the Brits seems to miss something essential about these proud peacocks and their colorful charms. Against the grain of social conscience and even common sense, there is something to celebrate about their extravagance -- something to dig about their "dusha," the bold Russian soul that fears little.

In some sense, the New Tsars' exuberance and honest enjoyment of their wealth is far preferable to the understated smugness of London's snobby intelligentsia, or, for that matter, the calculated stylishness of America's East Coast aristocracy. In Cape Cod, in Nice, in London, in Manhattan, in Paris -- in all the playgrounds of the old traditional elites -- there is the recognizable froideur of those who consider themselves the true masters of the universe.

However gauche they may be, the rich Russians roll in a different way. They pursue pleasure in a manner that is artless, instinctive and unmediated by the myriad social codes you find in other super-wealthy sets -- perhaps practicing a more attractive brand of hedonism. It is a glorious release of pent-up energy after a near-century of frustration and subordination. It is a joyful assertion of the power of the individual over the state. And it is a powerful statement on the invincibility of human appetites and ambition, un-dulled after decades of ideological oppression.

Several Russians I've spoken to are quick to contextualize the super-spending culture in defense of their compatriots. Elena Ragozhina is the editor of New Style, a glossy magazine published in London for high-earning Russians. It is thick with ads for jewelry, clothing and cars of the decidedly flashy variety, and on the back page is a picture of an object that must be the material apogee of Russian vulgarity: a 22-carat yellow gold ring studded with a gaudy number of sapphires, on which sit a tiny gold and pink diamond stiletto shoe.

As though sensing my own potential snobbery, Ragozhina points out that before the restructuring of the Soviet economy, "we didn't have many colors. Everything was plain and grey and black and brown. So now ..." she says, trailing off. But her point is clear: Now they can be forgiven some peacockery and pride in their economic ebullience.

And who knows? In dark times ahead, when recession hits and the Russians roll out of town, even the snobbiest Brits might take a moment to reminisce about London's dynamic days -- its constellation of New Tsars, and the colorful lives they led.
Pages 1 2

Clare Foges is a writer living in London.

Some letters from readers:

#
I prefer the stiff Brits to the obnoxious Russians anyday

This article is a steaming load of crap. These super wealthy Russians are the most brutal, rude, uneducated, vulgar species you have ever, ever seen. I know I live in NY. I also know how much they disdain humanity...they are known to deliberately crash their cars into pedestrians because they don't feel traffic laws apply to them, or that any LAWS apply to them. They build hideious Pink Palaces in Queens that are surrounded by old 1920's brick bungalows. You can see these pink eye-sores all the way from LIE. God forbid you stop in a restaurant on the boardwalk in Brighton Beach and happen upon a bunch of these boorish brutes. You will be lucky that you aren't kidnapped and sold into a snuff film. I can't beleive this article gushes with such admiration for such truly cruel and awful people.
-- tonia67
[Read tonia67's other letters]
Permalink Thursday, June 12, 2008 05:53 AM
#
potato juice?

Stoli is made with wheat and rye grains.
-- pubpundits
[Read pubpundits's other letters]
Permalink Thursday, June 12, 2008 06:15 AM
#
Starstruck?

What a bizarre article - an apologia for boorishness. The author cites post-Soviet exuberance three times in the article as an "excuse" for behavior that I daresay most of us middle-class folks in the US reading Salon find inexcusable. Post-Soviet exuberance? It's been nigh TWENTY YEARS since the Soviet Union collapsed. How long should we cling to this event as justification for what many would simply call gross-assholism?

The article failed to mention the role that organized crime plays in this theater of obscene consumption. Does a single Russian oligarch exist who doesn't at least rub elbows with the Russian criminal underworld? Indeed all the riches produced by GAZPROM, et al represent massive theft from the Russian people.

To the author: Don't be starstruck. They may be billionaires, but the beds they sleep in aren't any more comfortable than the one you sleep in. The food they eat isn't any more delicious than your own.
-- Samlor
[Read Samlor's other letters]
Permalink Thursday, June 12, 2008 06:48 AM
#
You fell for it

The idea that these people are somehow entitled to behave in this way because of the injustices their countrymen suffered during Communism is frankly laughable. For one, the vast majority of the current crop of Russian oligarchs (and all of their young trophy wives) were born after the worst of the Soviet Union had passed into history. But this is only part of the simpering, self-justifying, disingenuous nature of this line of argument. The fact is, the story of "New Russia" is not a rags-to-riches, up-by-the-bootstraps tale and it is rather arrogant to project this distinctly American delusion onto a foreign country-especially one where the disparity between rich and poor has historically been immense. These oligarchs are the same people who ran things in the Soviet Union--them and their children. What's the expression? "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"? It is the same guy wearing a different mask. Think of Putin, the ex-KGB agent and the face of the "New Russia." Or my ex-girlfriend's father, who held a cushy bureaucratic position before the fall of communism and who now controls one of Russia's largest television stations. These people enjoyed all the privileges denied to regular Russians during the Communist years and now they want you to think that they lived like Ukranian peasants so that you will feel guilty about your completely justifiable disdain for their conspicuous consumption. And you swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Maybe for your next article you can try to excuse the virulent and aggressive racism of the New Russians...is that communism's fault too?

Putin Opponents Are Made to Vanish From TV

2008-06-03T03:53:00.000-07:00

Kremlin Rules
It Isn’t Magic: Putin Opponents Are Made to Vanish From TV
James Hill for The New York Times

A talk show host, Vladimir R. Solovyov, flanked by the politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, right, and a professor, Mark Urnov.

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By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Published: June 3, 2008

MOSCOW — On a talk show last fall, a prominent political analyst named Mikhail G. Delyagin had some tart words about Vladimir V. Putin. When the program was later televised, Mr. Delyagin was not.
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In a still frame from video, the incomplete digital erasure of a Putin critic named Mikhail G. Delyagin from an episode of the program "The People Want to Know" can be seen. Mr. Delyagin's leg and hand remain visible, to the right of the man holding the microphone.
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Not only were his remarks cut — he was also digitally erased from the show, like a disgraced comrade airbrushed from an old Soviet photo. (The technicians may have worked a bit hastily, leaving his disembodied legs in one shot.)

Mr. Delyagin, it turned out, has for some time resided on the so-called stop list, a roster of political opponents and other critics of the government who have been barred from TV news and political talk shows by the Kremlin.

The stop list is, as Mr. Delyagin put it, “an excellent way to stifle dissent.”

It is also a striking indication of how Mr. Putin has increasingly relied on the Kremlin-controlled TV networks to consolidate power, especially in recent elections.

Opponents who were on TV a year or two ago all but vanished during the campaigns, as Mr. Putin won a parliamentary landslide for his party and then installed his protégé, Dmitri A. Medvedev, as his successor. Mr. Putin is now prime minister, but is still widely considered Russia’s leader.

Onetime Putin allies like Mikhail M. Kasyanov, his former prime minister, and Andrei N. Illarionov, his former chief economic adviser, disappeared from view. Garry K. Kasparov, the former chess champion and leader of the Other Russia opposition coalition, was banned, as were members of liberal parties.

Even the Communist Party, the only remaining opposition party in Parliament, has said that its leaders are kept off TV.

And it is not just politicians. Televizor, a rock group whose name means TV set, had its booking on a St. Petersburg station canceled in April, after its members took part in an Other Russia demonstration.

When some actors cracked a few mild jokes about Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev at Russia’s equivalent of the Academy Awards in March, they were expunged from the telecast.

Indeed, political humor in general has been exiled from TV. One of the nation’s most popular satirists, Viktor A. Shenderovich, once had a show that featured puppet caricatures of Russian leaders, including Mr. Putin. It was canceled in Mr. Putin’s first term, and Mr. Shenderovich has been all but barred from TV.

Senior government officials deny the existence of a stop list, saying that people hostile to the Kremlin do not appear on TV simply because their views are not newsworthy.

In interviews, journalists said that they did not believe the Kremlin kept an official master stop list, but that the networks kept their own, and that they all operated under an informal stop list — an understanding of the Kremlin’s likes and dislikes.

Vladimir V. Pozner, host of “Times,” a political talk show on the top national network, Channel One, said the pressure to conform to Kremlin dictates had intensified over the last year, and had not eased even after the campaign.

“The elections have led to almost a paranoia on the part of the Kremlin administration about who is on television,” said Mr. Pozner, who is president of the Russian Academy of Television.

In practice, Mr. Pozner said, he tells Channel One executives whom he wants to invite on the show, and they weed out anyone they think is persona non grata.

“They will say, ‘Well, you know we can’t do that, it’s not possible, please, don’t put us in this situation. You can’t invite so and so’ — whether it be Kasparov or Kasyanov or someone else,” Mr. Pozner said.

He added: “The thing that nobody wants to talk about is that we do not have freedom of the press when it comes to the television networks.”

Vladimir R. Solovyov, another political talk show host, said Mr. Pozner was complaining only because his ratings were down and he was looking for someone to blame if his program was canceled. Mr. Solovyov, a vocal supporter of Mr. Putin, said he had never been bullied by the Kremlin.

Yet last year, his show, “Throw Down the Gauntlet,” regularly featured members of opposition parties. This year, the only politicians to appear have been leaders of Mr. Putin’s party, United Russia, and an allied party.

Asked why he had not invited opposition leaders lately, Mr. Solovyov said: “No one supports them. They have nothing to say.”

Vladimir A. Ryzhkov, a liberal and former member of Parliament who used to appear on the show, said Mr. Solovyov was covering up for the Kremlin.

“He lies, of course,” Mr. Ryzhkov said. “My programs with him were among the highest rated programs of any in the history of his show.”

Mr. Ryzhkov said he was usually allowed to appear in lengthy segments on only one major channel: Russia Today, the English-language news station, which the Kremlin established to spread its viewpoint globally.

“I can go on Russia Today only because they want to make it seem that in Russia, there is freedom of the press,” he said.

After the Soviet Union’s fall, several national and regional networks arose that were owned by oligarchs. Though they operated with relatively few restrictions, their owners often used them to settle personal and business scores. One network, NTV, garnered attention for its investigative reporting and war dispatches from Chechnya.

Mr. Putin chafed at negative coverage of the government, and the Kremlin effectively took over the major national networks in his first term, including NTV. Vladimir Gusinsky, NTV’s owner, was briefly arrested and then fled the country after giving up the network. From that point on, executives and journalists at Russian networks clearly understood that they would be punished for resisting the Kremlin.

All the major national and regional networks are now owned by the government or its allies. And since the presidential election in March, neither Mr. Putin nor Mr. Medvedev has indicated any interest in loosening the reins.

“Our television is very often criticized,” Mr. Medvedev said in April. “They say it is boring, it is pro-government, it is too oriented towards the positions of state agencies, of those in power. You know, I can say that our television — in terms of quality, in terms of the technology used — is, I believe, one of the best in the world.”

Valery Y. Komissarov, a former host on a state channel who is now a governing party leader in Parliament, said television coverage was a convenient scapegoat for opposition politicians and antagonistic commentators.

“These are people who are not interesting for society, who are not interesting for journalists,” Mr. Komissarov said. “But they want publicity and perhaps they want to explain away their lack of creative and political success by the fact that they are persecuted, that they are included on the so-called stop list.”

While the Kremlin has focused on TV because it has by far the largest audience, many radio stations and newspapers also abide by the stop list, either ignoring or belittling the opposition.

There are exceptions: a few national and regional newspapers regularly publish critical news and commentary about Mr. Putin and comments from those on the stop list. In addition, the Internet is not censored, and contains plenty of criticism of the government.

A small national network, Ren TV, pushes the boundaries, as does a national radio station, the Echo of Moscow, which has become the voice of the opposition even though Gazprom, the government gas monopoly, owns a majority stake in it.

The Kremlin seems to tolerate criticism in such outlets because they have a limited reach compared with the major television networks. The nightly news on Channel One, for example, is far more popular than any of its counterparts in the United States. It regularly is one of top 10 most-watched programs in Russia.

Mr. Delyagin, the political analyst edited out of the talk show last fall, said he was surprised to have been invited in the first place. He said he last appeared on a major network several years ago, before he began attacking the Kremlin and supporting the opposition.

“I thought that maybe she forgot to look at the stop list,” he said, referring to the program’s host, Kira A. Proshutinskaya.

(Last week, after a Russian-language version of this article was posted on a blog run by the Moscow bureau of The New York Times, Mr. Delyagin was invited to appear on a show on NTV.)

Ms. Proshutinskaya’s program, “The People Want to Know,” had been censored before.

Mr. Ryzhkov, the liberal former member of Parliament, went on the show last year, but its network, TV Center, refused to broadcast it.

In an interview, Ms. Proshutinskaya conceded that Mr. Delyagin had been digitally erased from the program. She said she had been embarrassed by the incident, as well as the one with Mr. Ryzhkov, explaining that the network was responsible. The Kremlin had so intimidated the networks, she said, that self-censorship was rampant.

“I would be lying if I said that it is easy to work these days,” she said. “The leadership of the channels, because of their great fear of losing their jobs — they are very lucrative positions — they overdo everything.”

The management of her network would not comment. But the network’s news director, Mikhail A. Ponomaryov, said journalists and hosts of talk shows had no choice but to comply with the rules.

“It would be stupid to say that we can do whatever we want,” he said. “If the owner of the company thinks that we should not show a person, as much as I want to, I cannot do it.”

The Future Is Now?

2008-06-03T02:00:00.001-07:00

The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least
Viktor Koen

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By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: June 3, 2008

Before we get to Ray Kurzweil’s plan for upgrading the “suboptimal software” in your brain, let me pass on some of the cheery news he brought to the World Science Festival last week in New York.
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TierneyLab

What do you think the future holds? Join the discussion.
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Further Reading
"The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology." Ray Kurzweil. Viking Penguin, 2005.
"The Law of Accelerating Returns." Ray Kurzweil. KurzweilAI.net, 2001
"The Singularity: A Special Report." IEEE Spectrum, June 2008
"Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity." Gary Wolf. Wired, April 2008
"The Singularity." Vernor Vinge, Vision-21 Symposium, 1993.
"Humanity Now/Humanity Next." World Science Festival, May 29, 2008.
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Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.

Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.

Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

At least that’s Dr. Kurzweil’s calculation. It may sound too good to be true, but even his critics acknowledge he’s not your ordinary sci-fi fantasist. He is a futurist with a track record and enough credibility for the National Academy of Engineering to publish his sunny forecast for solar energy.

He makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, a concept he illustrated at the festival with a history of his own inventions for the blind. In 1976, when he pioneered a device that could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of a washing machine.

Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.

This invention, Dr. Kurzweil said, was no harder to anticipate than some of the predictions he made in the late 1980s, like the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by 1998. (He was off by a year — Deep Blue’s chess victory came in 1997.)

“Certain aspects of technology follow amazingly predictable trajectories,” he said, and showed a graph of computing power starting with the first electromechanical machines more than a century ago. At first the machines’ power doubled every three years; then in midcentury the doubling came every two years (the rate that inspired Moore’s Law); now it takes only about a year.

Dr. Kurzweil has other graphs showing a century of exponential growth in the number of patents issued, the spread of telephones, the money spent on education. One graph of technological changes goes back millions of years, starting with stone tools and accelerating through the development of agriculture, writing, the Industrial Revolution and computers. (For details, see nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

Now, he sees biology, medicine, energy and other fields being revolutionized by information technology. His graphs already show the beginning of exponential progress in nanotechnology, in the ease of gene sequencing, in the resolution of brain scans. With these new tools, he says, by the 2020s we’ll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves.

This serene confidence is not shared by neuroscientists like Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who discussed future brains with Dr. Kurzweil at the festival. It might be possible to create a thinking, empathetic machine, Dr. Ramachandran said, but it might prove too difficult to reverse-engineer the brain’s circuitry because it evolved so haphazardly.

“My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer,” Dr. Ramachandran said. “You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.”

Dr. Kurzweil’s predictions come under intense scrutiny in the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, which devotes its current issue to the Singularity. Some of the experts writing in the issue endorse Dr. Kurzweil’s belief that conscious, intelligent beings can be created, but most think it will take more than a few decades.

He is accustomed to this sort of pessimism and readily acknowledges how complicated the brain is. But if experts in neurology and artificial intelligence (or solar energy or medicine) don’t buy his optimistic predictions, he says, that’s because exponential upward curves are so deceptively gradual at first.

“Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace,” he told me after his speech. “They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100 percent in just seven years.”

Dr. Kurzweil is so confident in these curves that he has made a $10,000 bet with Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus software. By 2029, Dr. Kurzweil wagers, a computer will pass the Turing Test by carrying on a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human’s.

I’m not as confident those graphs are going to hold up for fields besides computer science, so I’d be leery of betting on a date. But if I had to take sides in the 2029 wager, I’d put my money on Dr. Kurzweil. He could be right once again about a revolution coming sooner than expected. And I’d hate to bet against the chance to be around for this one.

The World Is Upside Down

2008-06-02T01:58:00.000-07:00

The World Is Upside Down

and we are only trained to see it one way!

Have a look at these identical Mona Lisa paintings. We ca see the distortion only when it is the "right" way up!!!

By ROGER COHEN
Published: June 2, 2008

RIO DE JANEIRO
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Roger Cohen
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For a while the world was flat. Now it’s upside down.

To understand it, invert your thinking. See the developed world as depending on the developing world, rather than the other way round. Understand that two-thirds of global economic growth last year came from emerging countries, whose economies will expand about 6.7 percent in 2008, against 1.3 percent for the United States, Japan and euro zone states.

The sharp rise in prices for energy, commodities, metals and minerals produced mainly in the developing world explains part of this shift. That has created the balance of payments surpluses fueling dollar-dripping sovereign wealth funds in the gulf and East Asia. They amuse themselves picking up a stake in BP here, a chunk of Morgan Stanley there, and why not a sliver of Total.

We of the developed-world Paleolithic species are fair game for the upstarts now, our predator role exhausted. The U.S. and Europe may one day need all the charity they can get.

To place this inversion in focus, it helps to be in Brazil, where winter (so to speak) arrives with the Northern Hemisphere summer, and economic optimism, as exuberant as the vegetation, increases at the same brisk clip as U.S. foreclosures.

Huge offshore oil finds, a sugarcane ethanol boom, vast reserves of unused arable land, mineral wealth and abundant fresh water contribute to Brazilian buoyancy. But natural resources are only part of the story. As in China and India, an expanding internal market is bolstering growth. So is increasing corporate sophistication and global ambition.

At the annual National Forum, a gathering of business leaders, I felt like a first-world pipsqueak as leaders of the national energy company Petrobras (bigger than BP, Shell and Total) and Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, or C.V.R.D. (the world’s second largest mining company), reeled off head-turning statistics.

Petrobras, which has spearheaded Brazil’s push to self-sufficiency from heavy dependence on imported oil 30 years ago, will more than double oil production to 4.2 million barrels a day in 2015 from 1.9 million barrels today.

“With the latest discoveries, the South Atlantic will become a huge oil producer,” predicted Jose Sergio Gabrielli de Azvedo, its chief executive.

Roger Agnelli of C.V.R.D. waved away the United States (“It’s full of debt”) to focus on the company’s ambitions in Asia. It was imperative to be there, he said, because that’s where growth, capital and ambition are. China, he noted, will account for 55 percent of iron ore consumption, 31.6 percent of nickel, and 42 percent of aluminum by 2012. Case closed.

Like many other big emerging-market corporations, C.V.R.D. has been on a buying spree. It’s not just sovereign wealth funds that are acquiring first-world companies these days. It’s the new giants of the NAN (Newly Acquisitive Nations).

Emerging-market mergers and acquisitions are up 17 percent this year to $218 billion, while for the rest of the world they’re down 43 percent to $991 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.

The 2007 Unctad World Investment Report said developing-world direct foreign investment totaled $193 billion in 2006, compared with a 1990s annual average of $54 billion. The U.S. 2006 figure was $216.6 billion.

C.V.R.D. bought Canada’s Inco, a nickel miner, for $17 billion in 2006. It came close to acquiring the Anglo-Swiss miner Xstrata for $90 billion this year. Just last week, India’s Vedanta Resources reached a $2.6 billion deal to buy U.S. copper miner Asarco.

That deal is being challenged by Grupo Mexico, creating a Latin-American-Asian fight for a U.S. company.

If you have trouble getting your mind around that, try standing on your head.

That’s also a good position from which to view India’s Tata Motors agreeing to buy Land Rover and Jaguar from Ford for $2.3 billion, or Tata Steel’s acquisition last year of the Anglo-Dutch Corus Group steel company for $12 billion.

Globalization is now a two-way street; in fact it’s an Indian street with traffic weaving in all directions.

“In an inverted world, not only have developing economies become dominant forces in global exports in the space of a few years, but their companies are becoming major players in the global economy, challenging the incumbents that dominated the international scene in the 20th century,” said Claudio Frischtak, a Brazilian economist and consultant.

A shift in economic power is under way to which the developed world has not yet adjusted. Of course the G-8 and the permanent membership of the U.N. Security Council need to be expanded to reflect this change. The 21st century can’t be handled with 20th-century institutions.

That’s obvious. Less obvious is how the United States, which underwrites global security at vast expense, begins to share this burden, so that the new multi-polarity of wealth is reflected in a multipolarity of security commitments.

Headstands are in order for the next U.S. president.

Controversial bestselling author Michael Pollan warns our twenty-first century diet is gradually killing us.

2008-05-27T04:11:00.000-07:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Pollan

The rules are simple:

Eat mostly fruit and vegs (pref. locally grown)
Eat less
Eat unprocessed foods
Eat meat as a condiment, not main meal

What should we have for dinner? The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather, or grow ourselves? The omnivore’s dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth.

In this groundbreaking book, one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.

The surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us. Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore’s Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.

Kevin Rudd and Ita Buttrose to pose nude for Bill Henson's new series

2008-05-23T23:53:00.000-07:00

Bill Henson newly announced series of post-menopausal women and mature men a sensation ...

The defiant Bill Henson, stung by criticism that his pictures exploit images of pre-pubescent girls for commercial gain and cheap notoriety, says he is confident of his artistic skills with any subject matter.

Deeply distressed by the unexpected publicity about his Sydney exhibition, he announced that he is shifting his artistic focus to post-menopausal women and mature men, promising to attract audiences that will rival popular internet porn sites.

The Australia Council for the Arts is evaluating the option of endowing him with a sizable grant to support him in his new artistic endeavour.

Another popular Australian institution, the Australian Bookmakers Association, has said that bets against Bill Henson achieving his ambition are currently running at 1024 to one.

Despite such unfavourable odds, a number of prominent Australian artists and media personalities have wagered modest amounts on Bill Henson to create an impression of a united artistic fraud.

"I am actually tired of riding the gravy train of soft porn masquerading as art," confessed Henson. "All those repetitive nubile bodies in muted black… I would like a new challenge."

"Australia's population is aging. Anyone who is ignoring this fact is doing so at his peril. What I see is a new market niche -- and I'm ready for it."

Kevin Rudd and Ita Buttrose volunteered to pose nude as first subjects for Bill Henson's new series.

The leader of the opposition, Brendan Nelson, afraid of being left even further behind in the popularity stakes, issued a terse media statement, saying simply, "Me too."

Malcolm Turnbull, when informed of the news, commented, "I find the very idea of Kevin's nude photo utterly revolting.... Not that other mature people cannot look beautiful in their own way -- most of my electorate, after all, is made of aging folks. I just prefer the same models that Bill does. There is no arguing about personal tastes, is there?"

See more of Bill's Lolita and Peter Pan photos on:

http://blog.photoshelter.com/2008/05/bill-henson-at-the-opera-1.html

and

http://www.news.com.au/gallery/0,23607,5031912-5010140-1,00.html

The main offending photo and various raves and points of view on art and pornography can be seen uncensored on http://www.sauer-thompson.com/junkforcode/archives/2008/05/bill-henson-6-u.html

Some great nature shots...

2008-05-05T22:03:00.000-07:00

Subject: Music By Abba -- Breathtaking Scenes....

Sit back, relax, put all systems on cruise control and enjoy this beautiful blending of music, animals, and scenery. Music by ABBA.

copy and paste into your browser: www.greatdanepro.com/Chiquitita/index.htm

Who Will Tell the Americans?

2008-05-04T17:14:00.000-07:00

So true... Read the entry before re hyperinflation...

Usually I think T. Friedman is a bit of an airbag but this is spot on...

Who Will Tell the People?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: May 4, 2008

Traveling the country these past five months while writing a book, I’ve had my own opportunity to take the pulse, far from the campaign crowds. My own totally unscientific polling has left me feeling that if there is one overwhelming hunger in our country today it’s this: People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.
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Thomas L. Friedman
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They are not only tired of nation-building in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with so little to show for it. They sense something deeper — that we’re just not that strong anymore. We’re borrowing money to shore up our banks from city-states called Dubai and Singapore. Our generals regularly tell us that Iran is subverting our efforts in Iraq, but they do nothing about it because we have no leverage — as long as our forces are pinned down in Baghdad and our economy is pinned to Middle East oil.

Our president’s latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia and beg King Abdullah to give us a little relief on gasoline prices. I guess there was some justice in that. When you, the president, after 9/11, tell the country to go shopping instead of buckling down to break our addiction to oil, it ends with you, the president, shopping the world for discount gasoline.

We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents’ generation — work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means — have given way to subprime values: “You can have the American dream — a house — with no money down and no payments for two years.”

That’s why Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous defense of why he did not originally send more troops to Iraq is the mantra of our times: “You go to war with the army you have.” Hey, you march into the future with the country you have — not the one that you need, not the one you want, not the best you could have.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

How could this be? We are a great power. How could we be borrowing money from Singapore? Maybe it’s because Singapore is investing billions of dollars, from its own savings, into infrastructure and scientific research to attract the world’s best talent — including Americans.

And us? Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, just told a Senate hearing that cutbacks in government research funds were resulting in “downsized labs, layoffs of post docs, slipping morale and more conservative science that shies away from the big research questions.” Today, she added, “China, India, Singapore ... have adopted biomedical research and the building of biotechnology clusters as national goals. Suddenly, those who train in America have significant options elsewhere.”

Much nonsense has been written about how Hillary Clinton is “toughening up” Barack Obama so he’ll be tough enough to withstand Republican attacks. Sorry, we don’t need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

I don’t know if Barack Obama can lead that, but the notion that the idealism he has inspired in so many young people doesn’t matter is dead wrong. “Of course, hope alone is not enough,” says Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, “but it’s not trivial. It’s not trivial to inspire people to want to get up and do something with someone else.”

It is especially not trivial now, because millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted — enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity — big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, said Shriver, “no one can touch us.”

Hyperinflationary Depression in the US 2010???

2008-04-14T03:26:00.000-07:00

John Williams is interviewed by Jim Puplava - MP3 Audio download: A Hyperinflationary Depression in the US 2010

http://www.netcastdaily.com/broadcast/fsn2008-0412-2.mp3

I would like to recap the argument John Williams made in the interview.

1) It no longer matters what Congress or the President does about the budget. Even if the Iraq War ended today and all the Bush tax cuts were revoked and tax rates on Corporations were 100% and tax rates on people making over $100,000 were 100%, you would not only fail to resolve the budget deficit, but you wouldn't make a noticeable dent in it. The unfunded liabilities cannot be closed without massive changes in Social Security and Medicare and the politicians are arguing about spending $2 trillion on new programs.

2) Given #1, there are only two ways to get the money: borrow it; or print it. The people the US Government is borrowing the money from are becoming increasingly uninterested in lending any more. The only way you can make them more interested is to raise interest rates, but that just adds to the amount you have to borrow due to the cost of interest on the massive debt.

3) Given #2, you print the money.

There is the argument. You have to find somewhere that the argument is flawed.

If you pour a cup of tea...

2008-04-13T19:13:00.000-07:00

This week we learn a helpful technique from Chogyam
Trungpa on how to meditate while doing things that would
seem trivial...

If you pour a cup of tea, you are aware of
extending your arm and touching your hand to
the teapot, lifting it and pouring the water.

Finally the water touches your teacup and
fills it, and you stop pouring and put the
teapot down precisely, as in the Japanese tea
ceremony. You become aware that each precise
movement has dignity.

We have long forgotten that activities can be
simple and precise. Every act of our lives
can contain simplicity and precision and thus
can have tremendous beauty and dignity.

During the next week, as often as possible, slow down and
become mindful and conscious of what you're doing, no
matter how trivial. You'll be stunned at the meaning and
beauty to be found in an act as simple as sharpening a
pencil.

Until next time, meditate every day and let it all go.

Chet

Chet Day
Editor, EarthRain Meditations
http://meditation101.com

The Great Forgetting -- your Blackberry or your mind...

2008-04-11T05:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/opinion/11brooks.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Lucy Ash reports of the Siberian border on the illegal timber trade with China

2008-04-09T19:20:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/crossing_continents/7338623.stm

The house of impermanence will stretch your imagination... and make you live longer...

2008-04-07T18:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/garden/20080403_DESTINY_FEATURE/index.html

The Baton Passes to Asia

2008-03-31T02:32:00.000-07:00

The Baton Passes to Asia

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By ROGER COHEN
Published: March 31, 2008

HONG KONG
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Roger Cohen
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It’s the end of the era of the white man.

I know your head is spinning. The world can feel like one of those split-screen TVs with images of a suicide bombing in Baghdad flashing, and the latest awful market news coursing along the bottom, and an ad for some stool-loosening wonder drug squeezed into a corner.

The jumble makes no sense. It just goes on, like the mindless clacking of an ice-dispenser.

On the globalized treadmill, you drop your eyes again from the screen (now showing ads for gourmet canine cuisine) to the New Yorker or Asahi Shimbun. And another bomb goes off.

There’s a lot of noise and not much signal. Everywhere there is flux and the reaction to it: the quest, sometimes violent, for national or religious identity. These alternate faces of globalization — fluidity and tribalism — define our frontier-dissolving world.

But in all the movement back and forth, basic things shift. The world exists in what Paul Saffo, a forecaster at Stanford University, calls “punctuated equilibrium.” Every now and again, an ice cap the size of Rhode Island breaks off.

The breaking sound right now is that of the end of the era of the white man.

I’d been thinking about this at Dubai airport in the middle of the night, as the latest news came in from the United States of the bloody end to the mother of all spending binges. I was watching the newly affluent from other parts of the world — Asians and Arabs principally — spend their way through the early-morning hours.

The West’s moment, I thought, is passing. Money and might are increasingly elsewhere. America’s little dose of socialism from Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson might stave off the worst but cannot halt the trend.

Then I arrived in Hong Kong. The talk was all about how U.S. economic woes could impact Chinese growth. Might it tumble to 8 from over 11 percent? And what of India, powering along with growth of a mere 8 percent or so?

The West should have such troubles! Even revised downward, these growth rates are at levels Europe and the United States can only dream of.

Decoupling — another Hong Kong buzzword — is not possible in an interlinked world: export-led Asian economies are vulnerable in some measure to U.S. troubles. But that measure dwindles as the Chinese, Indian and Vietnamese domestic markets explode.

Asian statistics can be numbing. With one third of humanity, the numbers get big. There are now 450 million cell phones in China.

But take another — the likelihood that some 300 million people will move from rural to urban India in the next 20 years — and you get a sense of the shifts underway. By 2030, India will probably overtake Japan as the world’s third-largest economy behind the United States and China.

But in the end, transformation is not about numbers. It’s about the mind. Come to Asia and fear drains away. It’s replaced by confidence and a burning desire to succeed. Asian business leaders are rock stars. The culture of education and achievement is fierce. China is bent on beating the U.S.A.

What you feel in Asia, said Claude Smadja, a prominent global strategist, is “a burst of energy, of new dreams, and the end of the era of Western domination and the white man.”

Hong Kong purrs. Its efficiency and high-speed airport train make New York seem third-world. All the talk of Shanghai rising and Hong Kong falling was wrong: they’re both booming. Mainland Chinese tourists come here in droves to play and spend.

I went to see Frederick Ma, Hong Kong’s secretary for commerce. He’s suave in that effortless Hong Kong way, the shrewdness wrapped in a soothing patter of bonhomie. How is it that this is the only place on earth where people think of what you want before you’ve thought of it yourself?

He eased seamlessly from talk of mind-boggling infrastructure plans involving bridges and high-speed trains to a gentle lament for America.

“I am very worried about the U.S. economy right now,” he said. “When I was visiting last November, I asked a banker friend what’s going on, and she told me that a Wall Street problem was soon going to be a Main Street problem.”

Yep, it’s a Main Street problem all right when people lose their homes and realize overnight they’re illiquid and have 1930s visions as Bear Stearns goes “Poof!” in the night.

Everything passes. In the 17th century, China and India accounted for more than half the world’s economic output. After a modest interlude, the pendulum is swinging back to them at a speed the West has not grasped.

It’s the end of the era of the white man; and, before it even began in earnest, of the white woman, too.

Blog: www.iht.com/passages

Faithfulness Is a Fantasy?

2008-03-18T16:18:00.000-07:00

In Most Species, Faithfulness Is a Fantasy
Serge Bloch

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By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: March 18, 2008

You can accuse the disgraced ex-governor Eliot Spitzer of many things in his decision to flout the law by soliciting the services of a pricey prostitute: hypocrisy, egomania, sophomoric impulsiveness and self-indulgence, delusional ineptitude and boneheadedness. But one trait decidedly not on display in Mr. Spitzer’s splashy act of whole-life catabolism was originality.
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"If mother nature intended us to be promiscuous, why did she also invent jealousy?"

Charles Carroll, Toronto

* Read Full Comment »

It’s all been done before, every snickering bit of it, and not just by powerful “risk-taking” alpha men who may or may not be enriched for the hormone testosterone. It’s been done by many other creatures, tens of thousands of other species, by male and female representatives of every taxonomic twig on the great tree of life. Sexual promiscuity is rampant throughout nature, and true faithfulness a fond fantasy. Oh, there are plenty of animals in which males and females team up to raise young, as we do, that form “pair bonds” of impressive endurance and apparent mutual affection, spending hours reaffirming their partnership by snuggling together like prairie voles or singing hooty, doo-wop love songs like gibbons, or dancing goofily like blue-footed boobies.

Yet as biologists have discovered through the application of DNA paternity tests to the offspring of these bonded pairs, social monogamy is very rarely accompanied by sexual, or genetic, monogamy. Assay the kids in a given brood, whether of birds, voles, lesser apes, foxes or any other pair-bonding species, and anywhere from 10 to 70 percent will prove to have been sired by somebody other than the resident male.

As David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle, put it with Cole Porter flair: Infants have their infancy; adults, adultery. Dr. Barash, who wrote “The Myth of Monogamy” with his psychiatrist-wife, Judith Eve Lipton, cited a scene from the movie “Heartburn” in which a Nora Ephronesque character complains to her father about her husband’s philanderings and the father quips that if she’d wanted fidelity, she should have married a swan. Fat lot of good that would have done her, Dr. Barash said: we now know that swans can cheat, too. Instead, the heroine might have considered union with Diplozoon paradoxum, a flatworm that lives in gills of freshwater fish. “Males and females meet each other as adolescents, and their bodies literally fuse together, whereupon they remain faithful until death,” Dr. Barash said. “That’s the only species I know of in which there seems to be 100 percent monogamy.” And where the only hearts burned belong to the unlucky host fish.

Even the “oldest profession” that figured so prominently in Mr. Spitzer’s demise is old news. Nonhuman beings have been shown to pay for sex, too. Reporting in the journal Animal Behaviour, researchers from Adam Mickiewicz University and the University of South Bohemia described transactions among great grey shrikes, elegant raptorlike birds with silver capes, white bellies and black tails that, like 90 percent of bird species, form pair bonds to breed. A male shrike provisions his mate with so-called nuptial gifts: rodents, lizards, small birds or large insects that he impales on sticks. But when the male shrike hankers after extracurricular sex, he will offer a would-be mistress an even bigger kebab than the ones he gives to his wife — for the richer the offering, the researchers found, the greater the chance that the female will agree to a fly-by-night fling.

In another recent report from the lubricious annals of Animal Behaviour entitled “Payment for sex in a macaque mating market,” Michael D. Gumert of Hiram College described his two-year study of a group of longtailed macaques that live near the Rimba ecotourist lodge in the Tanjung Puting National Park of Indonesia. Dr. Gumert determined that male macaques pay for sex with that all-important, multipurpose primate currency, grooming. He saw that, whereas females groomed males and other females for social and political reasons — to affirm a friendship or make nice to a dominant — and mothers groomed their young to soothe and clean them, when an adult male spent time picking parasites from an adult female’s hide, he expected compensation in the form of copulation, or at the very least a close genital inspection. About 89 percent of the male-grooming-female episodes observed, Dr. Gumert said in an interview from Singapore, where he is on the faculty of Nanyang Technological University, “were directed toward sexually active females” with whom the males had a chance of mating.

Significantly, males adjust their grooming behavior in a distinctly economic fashion, paying a higher or lower price depending on the availability and quality of the merchandise and competition from other buyers. “What led me to think of grooming as a form of payment was seeing how it changed across different market conditions,” Dr. Gumert said. “When there were fewer females around, the male would groom longer, and when there were lots of females, the grooming times went down.” Males also groomed females of high rank considerably longer than they did low-status females with nary a diamond to their page.

Commonplace though adultery may be, and as avidly as animals engage in it when given the opportunity, nobody seems to approve of it in others, and humans are hardly the only species that will rise up in outrage against wantonness real or perceived. Most female baboons have lost half an ear here, a swatch of pelt there, to the jealous fury of their much larger and toothier mates. Among scarab beetles, males and females generally pair up to start a family, jointly gathering dung and rolling and patting it into the rich brood balls in which the female deposits her fertilized eggs. The male may on occasion try to attract an extra female or two — but he does so at his peril. In one experiment with postmatrimonial scarabs, the female beetle was kept tethered in the vicinity of her mate, who quickly seized the opportunity to pheromonally broadcast for fresh faces. Upon being released from bondage, the female dashed over and knocked the male flat on his back. “She’d roll him right into the ball of dung,” Dr. Barash said, “which seemed altogether appropriate.”

In the case of the territorial red-backed salamander, males and females alike are inclined to zealous partner policing and will punish partners they believe to have strayed: with threat displays, mouth nips and throat bites, and most coldblooded of all, a withdrawal of affection, a refusal to engage. Be warned, you big lounge lizard: it could happen to you.

Did I Get Iraq Wrong?

2008-03-17T23:16:00.000-07:00

http://www.slate.com/id/2186763/

Did I Get Iraq Wrong? Did I underestimate the self-centeredness and sectarianism of the ruling elite and the social impact of 30 years of extreme dictatorship?

Except that I did not. I just thought that the Iraqis would possibly be killing each other at a slower rate under American supervision. Was I wrong? Who can tell?

The Iraqi imbroglio will certainly help to dismantle the American empire. Is this good? I trust the Chinese even less and Russians not at all. We need a Russian Obama for a start. And an Uighur or a Tibetan to run China.

The British and the French will be run by a Tunisian or a Moroccan one day.

Will this be good?

You tell me.

Oil and Russian political system

2008-03-04T23:35:00.000-08:00

When oil get too expensive, demand slows down and/or substitutes are found.

Oil Price
>
> $150-100 barrel - dynastic cleptocracy
>
> 80 barrel - partocracy, plutocracy
>
> 50 barrel - chaos and unrest, move either to Russian style of "democracy" or
> some form of "warring states" and international piracy.
>
> 10 barrel - famine and civil war?

John McElroy is host of the TV program "Autoline Detroit". Every week he brings his unique insights as an auto industry insider to Autoblog readers.

WHEN THE OIL BUBBLE BREAKS

In 1995, way back in the days of print, I was doing research for the 100th anniversary of a magazine called Automotive Industries. It actually started out in 1895 as a magazine called The Horseless Age, a much more romantic name for a publication, don't you think? It was fascinating to go through all of the back issues and watch how the auto industry evolved literally each time I turned a page.

In the course of my research I started to notice a pattern. Starting in the late 1920s, the magazine ran an article warning that we were running out of oil. And once a decade or so after that there would be another article, written by a different editor, interviewing a different expert who predicted essentially the same thing--that we'd be running out of oil in the next 15 to 20 years.

That got me into looking at the historical price of gasoline in this country, and the data is illuminating (click
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/fsheets/real_prices.html
to see gas prices since 1919). The price of gasoline plummeted after WWI. It soared in the late 1930s as war broke out in Europe and Asia. Then it slid for nearly thirty years after WWII. In the 1970s, two oil crises pushed the cost of gasoline to all-time highs. And that was followed by a collapse in prices. As recently as 1999, the price of oil was only $17 a barrel! Today, of course, the price is soaring again.

But the point is: the history of oil shows a big run-up in prices every two to three decades followed by a collapse. And what are we in today? A big run-up in prices. Do you see where I'm going with this?

There's no question that demand for oil is pushing up prices. China, India and other developing nations are as thirsty for this stuff as we are. But increasing demand is not what made the price soar. That was the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the war in Iraq, the attempt to blow up Saudi Arabia's largest pumping station, the confrontations with Iran, political troubles in Angola, and the billions of dollars speculators are pouring into oil market futures.

Clearly it's the war, political unrest and speculation that primarily pushed the price up nearly five-fold in only seven years. History shows that won't last.

At a time when so many are worried about the impact of high oil prices on the auto industry, I'm worried about the opposite effect. What if, just as the industry is pouring billions into hybrids, clean diesels, fuel cells and other fuel-saving technologies to meet a 35 mpg CAFE by 2020, the price of oil slides back down to, say, $30 a barrel? Will consumers happily pay for this costly technology if gasoline suddenly drops to $1.50 a gallon in the US?

I'm not talking about this happening anytime soon. I figure it'll take about a decade for prices to settle down again. But in automotive terms, that's only two design cycles away.

I know, I know, everyone tells me the price of oil will never, ever go down to $30 a barrel again, not even if you adjust it for future inflation. They all give me a bemused smile that says, "This guy's off his rocker!"

But I point to history. It's on my side.

How the steely Svetlana turned an academic into a president -- echoes of Gorby and Raissa, and Bill and Hillary?

2008-03-02T23:52:00.000-08:00

How the steely Svetlana turned an academic into a president

Nick Holdsworth and Will Stewart in Moscow
March 3, 2008

* A new leader, but who will take the lead?

Dmitry Medvedev was elected as Russia's next president after a vote yesterday that will preserve the power of his mentor Vladimir Putin but which opponents said was unfair.

Mr Medvedev, the low-key First Deputy Prime Minister and chairman of the state-run Gazprom gas monopoly, was in effect handpicked by Mr Putin, who will become prime minister.

The election will guarantee that the popular Mr Putin continues to wield great influence over the Russian government, but the other driving force in Mr Medvedev's unexpected rise to Russia's highest office is his wife, Svetlana.

The couple were childhood friends and high-school sweethearts in St Petersburg. The steely 42-year-old Mrs Medvedev is widely believed to have provided much of the drive that has helped propel her husband - once a mild-mannered law lecturer - to the very top of Russia's political tree.

Sociable and energetic, she is credited with forging the contacts that enabled her husband to break out of academia into the world of commerce, a move that propelled him into Mr Putin's path. She helped draw him into the Russian Orthodox Church, which has endorsed him in yesterday's election.

Now she is expected to be an influential presence behind the scenes at the Kremlin, as well as providing what he calls "a solid and dependable rearguard".

Mrs Medvedev's parents provided a home for the couple when they were married in 1989, allowing them to share their cramped flat. Eventually Mrs Medvedev prodded her husband to form the contacts needed to move into the more lucrative world of commerce, becoming a director of a timber firm, Pulp Ilim, in the mid-1990s.

A source close to them said: "He was happy, really, writing books on law and working at the state university in St Petersburg, but she had the contacts from her social life and she pushed him into the timber company. Everything he has done, she has helped and supported him in."

Stung by opponents' taunts that her husband looked "like a scholar fresh from the library", Mrs Medvedev is also credited with his recent weight loss and increasingly muscular appearance, achieved by making him learn yoga, go to the gym and swim more than a kilometre twice a day.

With her own degree in finance and economics she could have had her own career. But with Mr Medvedev earning good money from Pulp Ilim, his wife immersed herself herself in social work - for which the Orthodox Church gave her a medal - and high fashion.

She heads the board of a church-backed educational program that aims to bring more spiritual and moral discipline to Russia's post-Soviet young generation. The controversial project is part of the Orthodox Church's drive to reintroduce religion into Russia's schools, 90 years after the Bolshevik revolution banished priests from the classroom.

Despite opponents' claims that he has salted away vast fortunes, Mr Medvedev recently declared an annual income of just over $75,000, a Moscow flat, land outside the city and a nine-year-old Volkswagen Golf owned by his wife.

Telegraph, London

Putin's Pariah?

2008-03-02T02:35:00.000-08:00

Putin's Pariah

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By ANDREW MEIER
Published: March 2, 2008

Correction Appended

It began inauspiciously. On a frozen afternoon in late November, as Moscow was draped with blocklong plastic billboards, banners and flags, each proclaiming a variation on a single theme — “POBEDA PUTINA — POBEDA ROSSII!” (“A Victory for Putin Is a Victory for Russia”) — a few thousand Russians converged on the city center for a rare act of political theater. It seemed, at first, like a tableau from the last days of the U.S.S.R., those heady months when glasnost swelled the streets with protesters. A handful of dissidents stood on a flatbed truck; a jumble of loudspeakers were stacked below; the crew of foreign reporters vastly outnumbered the local press; and across the way, the secret policemen with their unseen amplifiers were drowning the protest in canned laughter and Soviet waltzes.
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Donald Weber

Edward Limonov
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Vadim Krokhin

THIS AIN’T NO PARTY (YET): A farewell gathering for the artist and author Vagrich Bakhchanyan (in box, left) in March 1974, shortly before he left Russia. Limonov, next to him, was also soon to emigrate (that is, was asked to leave).

That afternoon all eyes and lenses were fixed on Garry Kasparov, the valiant chess master trying in retirement to end the reign of Vladimir Putin. After Kasparov clapped his hands and shouted “Davai!” — “Let’s go!” — he started toward the Central Election Commission, where he planned to deliver a list of complaints. As he marched, however, it was clear that he was not alone at the head of the demonstration. He had locked arms with his unlikely comrade in one of modern Russia’s most quixotic quests — Edward Limonov, the 65-year-old poet-turned-populist who heads the National Bolshevik Party, or NBP.

After the presidential election in Russia, taking place today, not much is likely to change. Putin’s anointed successor, the young lawyer Dmitri Medvedev, is little more than a proxy. But there remains one genuine opposition force, the Other Russia, a threadbare alliance comprising the remnants of the Westernizing camp led by Kasparov and the banned National Bolsheviks, the Nat-Bols, as Limonov’s young followers call themselves. In the face of Kremlin control of the airwaves and the small army of police deployed to muzzle their protests, the alliance has proved more adept at internecine warfare than at grass-roots politicking.

Limonov, however, has not given up. With his bizarre, often half-baked yet latently sinister populism, he remains hellbent on ruining the Kremlin’s party. And despite his strident nationalism and affinity for rogue youth, he works in close partnership with the liberal-minded Kasparov. “Russia is rich in generals without armies,” Kasparov told me last fall. “But Limonov has foot soldiers. He commands street power.”

The crowd at the rally was not large; in fact it was depressingly small to anyone who remembered the last days of the U.S.S.R. Yet at the fore stood a disciplined corps of 200 or 300 Nat-Bols — young men and women dressed in black whose faces beamed with unexpected joy. The march ended, as expected, nearly as soon as it began. The riot police formed walls on either end of the procession and closed the vise. When they roughed up Kasparov and threw him in a paddy wagon, the foreign press surrounded it. When they sent him to jail for five days, European leaders and even George W. Bush’s spokesman issued peals of condemnation.

Limonov, however, also vanished. A babushka in the street swore he’d been hauled off, bag over his head. Ekho Moskvy, the liberal Moscow radio station and a last preserve of independent media in Russia, reported he had been arrested. No one, however, could find Limonov in the jails. Only days later, the truth emerged. “It was my boys,” Limonov told me. The Nat-Bols had forsworn their party flags — notoriously similar in color and design to the Nazis’, only with a black hammer and sickle replacing the swastika — and executed their game plan. Before the police could reach Limonov, his supporters carted him off. “My boys saved me,” he said. “Just like they can save the country.”

“Russia is back,” they like to say in Moscow these days. What a difference a sea of oil and gas can make. Bentleys, Maseratis and Maybach 62s — those Bavarian chariots that set you back upward of $400,000 — rule the prospekty. At the Ritz-Carlton, a new marble palace erected on the remains of the old Intourist Hotel across from Red Square, the smallest singles run $1,200 a night.

Still, in Moscow, and out across the hinterland, there is something else — a new generation untouched by high-speed globalization and mired in uncertainty. Russia’s youth ranges widely in its political sympathies — from the neo-Nazi thugs who posted the beheading of a dark-skinned man on the Internet to the neo-Soviet youth groups spawned by the Kremlin. But Limonov’s National-Bolsheviks came first and now stand somewhere in the middle of Russia’s odd political spectrum, part Merry Pranksters, part revolutionary vanguard. The party does not tally its membership, “for security reasons,” Limonov says, but claims to have 1,000 to 1,500 hardcore activists and some 56,000 loyalists. Unmoored by economic upheaval and unmoved by Putin’s restoration project, they have found in the NBP a satisfyingly fierce ideology, often mediated by black humor, that can be refashioned, as Limonov readily admits, “to fit anyone and anything.”

Limonov founded the NBP in 1993 after returning to Russia from years abroad. Since then, his message has changed — from anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism to anti-Putinism and anti-fascism — though rabid nationalism has dominated. He has sought the mantle of everyone from Mikhail Bakunin, the 19th-century anarchist, to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French ultranationalist. He has shifted course so often that by now only the goal — revolution — and the means — young people — remain constants. “In the bureaucratic KGB-cop state, youth are expendable,” he has written. He maintains that young Russians, “physically the most powerful group in society,” are regarded by authorities as “the internal enemy,” just as the Chechens are seen as the external one. Disaffected youth are Russia’s “most exploited class” in Limonov’s view and, as he readily admits, his core supporters. There are young men with shaved heads in the party, though these days they are more likely to be left-wing punks than right-wing skinheads.

If the party’s agenda remains murky, its targets — and methods — are well known. Since the summer of 2003, the NBP has escalated its campaign of “direct actions,” propaganda stunts that have often led to prison terms. The “velvet terrorism,” as Limonov has called it, picked up when a Nat-Bol shot a jet of mayonnaise at Alexander Veshnyakov, the chairman of the Central Election Commission. Then there was the pelting of the Communist leader Gennadi Zyuganov with tomatoes, and the egging of Putin’s first prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, on election day in 2003. The following summer, after a law cut subsidies to the poor and elderly, the Nat-Bols raided the Ministry of Health. Three dozen party members took over offices on two floors, including the minister’s. For their participation in the action, seven Nat-Bols received jail sentences of 2.5 and 3 years.

The best-known stunt came just after May Day in 2005. Two young Nat-Bols rappelled down the face of the Rossiya Hotel, a Soviet monstrosity that until recently stood across from the Kremlin. From 11 stories up, Olga Kudrina, a 22-year-old Muscovite with long blond hair, and Yevgeny Logovsky, a 20-year-old from the small city of Arzamas, unfurled a 40-foot banner emblazoned with the words “PUTIN UIDI SAM!” (roughly, “Putin Retire Yourself!”). Kudrina and Logovsky also managed to drop leaflets offering the president further advice: “Dive After the Kursk!” — a reference to the submarine that sank in the Barents Sea in 2000, killing 118 sailors. The two smoked a couple of cigarettes and made a few cellphone calls before the police arrived with scissors and handcuffs. Logovsky got a suspended sentence. Kudrina, sentenced to three and a half years, went underground.

I first met Limonov last summer in a dimly lighted apartment in the center of Moscow. The apartment, which serves as the NBP chancellery, was tucked away on a grim side street in a concrete gulch below one of Moscow’s most fetid locales, the Kursk train station. I was met on the street and escorted by a man in his 20s who had a shaved head and wore a red T-shirt emblazoned with the words NOT MADE IN CHINA. As many as 20 Nat-Bols serve as bodyguards for Limonov, whom they address as Vozhd’, “the Leader.” It was the first time I had ever heard the word employed in speech, and I wondered if “the boys” knew the term was once reserved for Stalin.

The shtab — an officious term for headquarters — had the feel and all the comforts of an I.R.A. safe house. Limonov greeted me in all black — black jeans, black T-shirt, black narrow tie. With his glasses, thin mustache twisted to points at the ends and graying goatee, the Leader bears a striking resemblance to Leon Trotsky.

It was not always so. Back in the ’70s, when Limonov emerged from the underground as the author of the autobiographical novel “Eto Ya Edichka” (“It’s Me, Eddie”), he more closely resembled an extra in “Godspell.” Tight jeans, floppy-collared shirts and pimp-high platform shoes were essentials of his costume. He did his best to taunt and tease, seduce and castigate, but in an émigré demimonde crowded with agents provocateurs, provocation alone did not suffice. Emulating one of his heroes, Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet of the revolution, he wanted to lay down his life for a cause. Just what cause, at least back in the U.S.S.R., remained unclear.

Limonov was born Edward Veniaminovich Savenko in 1943, the only child of an officer in Stalin’s secret police, in Dzerzhinsk, the most polluted town in the U.S.S.R. He grew up in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, the Soviet Detroit, where he skirted the local institutes, opting instead, after a stint in the foundry of the local Hammer and Sickle motor plant, for a job in a bookstore. In the early 1960s he edged into the underground world of Kharkiv’s fledgling bohemia. “We were all considered superfluous men and girls, and of this we were of course deeply proud,” says one of his closest friends at the time, Vagrich Bakhchanyan, invoking the traditional Russian literary conceit. It was Bakhchanyan, a painter, who christened Savenko “Limonov” — the name connotes “lemon.” (“He was very pale, almost yellow,” he says by way of explanation.) To a Russian ear it sounds impossible and strange — “something punk, like Johnny Rotten,” Limonov says.

In 1967, Limonov moved to Moscow and acquired his first typewriter. “The capital was the dream of all poets in the U.S.S.R.,” he told me. “Not for publishing — impossible, but for women and glory.” He succeeded. Limonov self-published his poems samizdat-style, typing out copies and, unlike most of his comrades in the underground, hawking them for five rubles each. In 1974, the KGB called him in and offered him a choice — “rat out your degenerate friends or go into exile.” He left the U.S.S.R., first for Vienna, then Rome, before settling in New York. He did not go alone, but with “the beautiful Elena,” his second wife, who soon became, or so the legend goes, the first ex-Soviet fashion model to work in Manhattan.

Limonov says he has written “more than 44 books” — novels, poetry, prose and essays. For most Russian readers, however, he has written only one, his first — “Eto Ya Edichka,” published in New York in 1979. “Edichka” closes with a prediction that seems to have shaped his activities since:

“Whom shall I meet, what lies ahead, none can guess. I may happen upon a group of armed extremists, renegades like myself, and perish in an airplane hijacking or a bank robbery. I may not, and I’ll go away somewhere, to the Palestinians, if they survive, or to Colonel Qaddafi in Libya, or someplace else — to lay down Eddie-baby’s life for a people, for a nation.”

Completed in New York in 1976, and rife with profanity and graphic sex — all genders, all combinations — “Edichka” was rejected by three dozen U.S. publishers before it was accepted by an émigré Russian house. It later appeared in France as “Le poète russe préfère les grands nègres,” and in Germany, where it became a best seller. For many Russians, it stirred the biggest literary fuss since “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” In 1983, when Random House published an English translation, Americans got a sense of why. On the second page, Edichka celebrates his dependency on the U.S. welfare system: “I consider myself to be scum, the dregs of society, I have no shame or conscience, therefore my conscience doesn’t bother me and I don’t plan to look for work, I want to receive your money to the end of my days.” To date, more than a million copies of the book have been sold in Russia.

The walls of Limonov’s office are lined with books — biographies of Mussolini and Che, a Russian edition of Leonard Cohen’s “Flowers for Hitler,” an economics text by Robert Heilbroner and a shelf full of KGB exposés. Above the books are large photographs, souvenirs of his tour of the unlovely little war zones of the post-Soviet era — Bosnia, Tajikistan, Abkhazia, Trans-Dniester. The images record Limonov, whether on a tank or on foot, shoulder to shoulder with real warriors. One stop, above all, enhanced his infamy: he was filmed shooting a machine gun in the company of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader. When the Hague indicted Karadzic on war crimes, the footage — taken from a vantage overlooking the besieged city of Sarajevo — was shown in the courtroom. (It is now on YouTube.) To anyone who has read Limonov, the martial urge was not new. This is the man who wrote: “The love of weapons is in my blood. As far back as I can remember, when I was a little boy, I used to swoon at the mere sight of my father’s pistol. I saw something holy in the dark metal.”

Limonov has helped to import a new word from English into the Russian political vernacular: luzer. As a politician, he is, to put it charitably, feckless. “He has no hope of gaining state power,” says Alexei Venediktov, the director of Ekho Moskvy and one of Russia’s sharpest political journalists. “But that’s not what motivates him. Limonov loves the street, and like any fighter he needs an arena.”

Alexander Dugin, a 46-year-old philosopher who founded the NBP with Limonov, would agree. He and Limonov parted ways nearly a decade ago. Today, Dugin is best known as the high priest of Eurasianism and as an ideologue favored among the state security organs. (He serves as an unofficial “youth adviser” to the Kremlin.)

“The name made no difference to Limonov,” Dugin told me. “He wanted to call it ‘National Socialism,’ ‘National Fascism,’ ‘National Communism’ — whatever. Ideology was never his thing. . . . The scream in the wilderness — that was his goal.” Limonov, Dugin went on, is like “a clown in a little traveling circus, the kind that shuttled across America in the beginning of the 20th century, one of those guys in the freak show, a worm eater, or a bearded woman. The better he performs, the more attention he wins, the happier he is.”

The Kremlin, however, does not dismiss Limonov as a clown. In April 2001, the Leader was arrested for arms smuggling — “AK-47’s and some explosives,” he told me. The plot, as described in court, read like a page ripped from a history of the Bolsheviks’ earliest days: a terrorist takeover of a swath of northern Kazakhstan, the gold-mining region in Central Asia that, not coincidentally, is dominated by ethnic Russians. The judge, however, dropped the terrorism charge and sentenced Limonov to four years. He was released in the summer of 2003.

Four years later, Putin finally had enough. Russian authorities banned the NBP as an “extremist group.” “We are the first non-Muslim party to be banned,” Limonov said. “It is quite an honor.” The ruling has been challenged — and reaffirmed — several times, most recently last month. At least 14 Nat-Bols are in jail — including three women. Several more remain in hiding.

The Kremlin has not only proved incapable of ignoring Limonov; it has also adopted his tactics. Putin’s ideologues, led by his deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, have created a raft of “youth groups” like Nashi (“Our Own”) and Molodaya Gvardiya (“the Young Guard”). As well financed, unyielding and patriotic as their patrons, they have earned the collective nickname “Putin Jugend.” While some discount their reach, and Nashi may soon lose its state financing, the British ambassador, Anthony Brenton, learned their power firsthand. Two years ago Nashi activists — Nashisty, as the Nat-Bols call them, with a deliberate ring of fashisty, fascists — began shadowing the diplomat in Moscow. For months, they leafleted his car, picketed his residence and heckled him in public, before the Russian foreign minister stepped in. Brenton’s offense? He had attended an opposition conference, sitting in the company of Limonov.

The anti-Limonov campaign has only grown uglier. On Nov. 22, two days before the march in Moscow, Yuri Chervochkin, a young Nat-Bol activist, was attacked as he posted campaign notices near his home in the Moscow suburb of Serpukhov. (On the Other Russia list of 359 Duma candidates, Chervochkin had been No. 180.) Earlier that day, he called a journalist, reporting that he was being trailed by the police. He recognized the officers, he said, from previous encounters. Severely beaten, Chervochkin fell into a coma. On Dec. 10, three weeks shy of his 23rd birthday, he died.

“Edik was never political,” says Bakhchanyan, Limonov’s old friend. “New York politicized him. This city was his awakening.” Five years older than Limonov, Bakhchanyan was a veteran of Kharkiv’s bohemian circles when he brought the hopeful provincial to Moscow. In the capital, painter and poet roomed together. Then in the early 1970s, Bakhchanyan was the one who encouraged Limonov and Elena to join his wife and him in exile.

Limonov, who is not Jewish, left the U.S.S.R. on an exit visa intended for Soviet Jews, in 1974, following the departure of Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky and Baryshnikov. The poet loved to rail against those icons of the so-called Third Wave of Soviet emigration. But Brodsky, the greatest poet of his generation, was the one Limonov envied most. “He liked my poetry,” Limonov told me. “He really did.” (Others who knew both men second the claim.) Brodsky, Limonov went on to say, “was the one who took me to Tatiana Yakovleva and Alexander Liberman’s” — the East 70th Street home of the Condé Nast editorial director and his wife. “Amazing, extraordinary personalities. Big people. Not only to me but the whole of the Russian émigré world. Brodsky introduced me to them — he wanted to help me.

“I was this underground poet,” he continued, “a freak in jeans and high heels. But Brodsky was a psychologist — he knew I knew Lilya Brik in Moscow, Mayakovsky’s old mistress.” Tatiana Yakovleva had also been Mayakovsky’s lover. Brodsky, Limonov recalls, “understood that Tatiana would like to hear about the woman who stole Mayakovsky from her.” Limonov inserted himself in the Libermans’ circle. Having worked as a tailor in Moscow, he made clothes for Tatiana. He and Elena were invited to the Libermans’ soirees. He made his way into Baryshnikov’s world too. “Misha read ‘Edichka’ between rehearsals,” Limonov claims. “And loved it!”

Limonov arrived in New York in 1975, at the dawn of punk. He discovered CBGB, fell for Patti Smith and Richard Hell and knew everyone from Steve Rubell to the local members of the Socialist Workers Party. “Edichka” oozes with bodily fluids — the hero, abandoned by his wife, Elena, goes on “nocturnal rambles on the West Side” that feature serial sexual encounters with homeless black men. The thin plot lines, however, thread two dominant leitmotifs: self-indulgence and condescension. “Edichka” may have been cast as a postmodern Underground Man — debauched and self-pitying, prickly in his pride and scornful of others. But his creator comes off like a cross between Mailer, the public brawler and political freelancer, and Mayakovsky, the restive and ultimately self-destructive literary revolutionary. “I did something no other Russian writer ever did,” Limonov says. “I broke down the wall. There were only two types of literature at the time: Soviet and anti-Soviet. My books were just books, about my life first and foremost.”

Late in 1978, Limonov found the émigré’s ultimate sinecure. He moved into 6 Sutton Square, a 17-room mansion at the dead end of 58th Street. The U.N. secretary general’s residence was around the corner. Limonov had entered the employ of Peter Sprague, at the time the chairman of National Semiconductor and co-chairman of Aston Martin, the English sports-car maker. Limonov later wrote a novel, “His Butler’s Story,” chronicling those years.

Sprague insists the novel does not record reality. “It was as if Hunter Thompson had written ‘The Nanny Diaries,’ ” he told me over drinks in Midtown Manhattan. “I know from butlers. Edward seems to have never understood the difference between ‘housekeeper’ and ‘butler.’ ”

The two made an intriguing match. An entrepreneur and onetime New York Congressional candidate (he ran as a Republican against the incumbent, Ed Koch), Sprague had quit working on a Ph.D. in economics at Columbia to start a chicken farm in Iran. He also had his own ties to the Russian literary world. The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was a friend, as was another poet, Bella Akhmadulina. “For a time, my house was a crash pad for a wide slice of Russia’s cultural minority,” Sprague said.

Asked why he hired Limonov, Sprague drew a blank. “Hardly spoke to the guy, I was traveling so much,” he said. “Edward made borscht and he made coffee. And he drank his way through a fine wine cellar. What else he did, beats me.” The cellar held more than a thousand bottles, but to Sprague what lingers is Limonov’s portrayal of him as a Gatsby-like figure. “He got it all wrong,” Sprague says. “At the time I was bottoming out, and before long I lost everything, including the house.” Limonov remained in Sprague’s employ until 1980, but by 1982 he was living in Paris with Natalya Medvedeva, a model and singer who would become his new wife. In France, Limonov basked in the critics’ spotlight, but with the Soviet collapse and the restoration of his citizenship, he returned to Moscow. Within months he entered the fray; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the Liberal Democrats — who were neither liberal nor democratic — invited Limonov to join his shadow cabinet.

It has been an eventful winter in Russia — one of those periods when the fatalists among the locals, which is to say nearly everyone, cock an eye and forecast a Smutnoe vremya>, a “time of troubles.” In the wake of the November march and Kasparov’s arrest, the Other Russia coalition was all but dead. Kasyanov, the former prime minister who was once egged by the NBP, reawakened hopes when he broke sharply with Putin and joined the opposition — but he and Kasparov feuded. “Two giant egos in a single room,” Limonov told me, explaining the problem with a Russian proverb: “They tried to divide the bearskin before the bear was dead.”

On Dec. 2, Putin got the Duma he ordered. In elections that the West condemned as a sham, United Russia, the Kremlin’s party, increased its share of the Duma’s 450 seats to 315. Even Andrei Lugovoi, wanted by British authorities for the murder of the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, won a seat, running as a liberal Democrat. Then on Dec. 10, Putin named Medvedev his favored heir, and the next day, Medvedev named Putin his favorite for prime minister. On Dec. 13, Kasparov, at the funeral for Chervochkin, the murdered Nat-Bol, ended his bid for the presidency. Kasyanov, hoping to run on his own, was denied access to the ballot.

But if the Other Russia hasn’t amounted to much, it is just about all that Putin’s foes have. In a recent conversation, Kasparov told me that his alliance with Limonov has borne fruit: “We helped dismantle the democratic aura of Putin’s regime.” Limonov and Kasparov plan to hold marches the day after election day and are thinking boldly of convening some kind of “alternative parliament” later this month. Yet state power in Russia, it seems, will play on, like an infinite loop, in the same hands.

One Friday afternoon in late November, I returned to the shtab. It was early, but the Moscow sky was gray-black. The streets sloping away from the train station were filled with icy swales and the cast of old — a trio of grizzled men who’d spent the morning drinking their pensions; two boys, no gloves, no hats, no older than 14, drinking Czech beer from large bottles, hands welded to the green glass; a line of women swaddled in woolens, selling herbs from the countryside. Limonov operates, I realized, out of a corner of the city that reveals no sign of the changes of the last two decades. The skies continued to darken. The only brightness came from a giant illuminated billboard: “A Victory for Putin Is a Victory for Russia!” it read, but no one took note of the victory promise. Everyone, whether climbing the hill or dodging the streetcars, moved slowly, in silence.

This time, as I entered, the bodyguards took their leave, and the Leader dead-bolted the iron door. Though the office was dark, he did not turn on a light. Limonov seemed unnerved. He kept taking his wristwatch off and putting it on, turning it over in his hands. He swiveled time and again toward the windows, clouded with dirt and the cold, to scan the courtyard outside.

A fat manuscript dominated the desk. “Just finished,” Limonov said, packing it up with care. “It’s something completely insane, which of course makes me insanely happy.” We spoke of a Putin speech (he’d referred to opposition leaders as “jackals”) and Kasparov’s stubbornness (the chess master called twice during our talk).

Again, Limonov was wearing black: black turtleneck, black jeans, black dress shoes. In the gray light seeping in, he looked almost spectral. He was wearing his usual pinkie ring, but now I also noticed a wedding band. He married for the sixth time two years ago. (Limonov enjoys marriage. Two former wives, however, have died, the first by suicide. “That one,” Limonov said, “had nothing to do with me.”) Katya Volkova, his new wife, is an actress and a singer. At 33, she is a stunning woman, at the height of her career and recently radicalized. When I noted in an earlier talk that Katya is nearly half his age, Limonov sighed. “That’s nothing. I was with a 16- or 17-year-old before prison.”

The two and a half years Limonov spent behind bars earlier in the decade proved a boon to his writing; it was his most prolific time since his days in New York welfare hotels. In prison, he finished eight books — “nearly 2,000 pages,” he said, measuring his output like a Soviet shock worker. The guards left him alone to write. He only had “to push a button and ask to go to work,” he said. Limonov emerged from jail, in the Russian tradition, with a manifesto, “a series of lectures for NBP members”: “Drugaya Rossiya” (“the Other Russia”). Kasparov liked the title; it became the name of their coalition. An inchoate wide-ranging treatise, the book calls for a “new civilization,” a collection of “armed communes” to replace the evils of urban Russia and restore the insulted and injured to their rural roots. To reverse Russia’s dismal birth rate, polygamy will be permitted, free love encouraged and childbirth required, “like military service for men.” Abortion will be outlawed, and all women, before they reach 35, must have “no fewer than four children for the motherland.” Limonov, however, wants to have it all. “One should not view the new civilization as a leap backward,” he wrote. “The newly civilized shall not wage war against science, against the useful and intelligent achievements of technological progress. Not at all. We will develop the Internet and genetics and HDTV. TV and the Internet will unite the armed communes as one in the unified civilization of free citizens.” The takeover of power, Limonov promised, will not come from an external force, as it did in Afghanistan when the Taliban swept in from refugee camps in Pakistan. “It will come from within.”

Limonov sleeps in three different locales. Lately he’d been sleeping here, in the party office. He does not want his family disturbed. (His first child, a boy named Bogdan — “God-given” — was born to him and Katya on Revolution Day, 2006.) There may be “slozhnosti” — “difficulties,” the Soviet euphemism for trouble with the state. The police were sleeping here, too. He nodded toward the dvor, the courtyard now filled with parked cars. “They sleep in their Zhigulis. Poor guys.”

Limonov spoke of the revolution to come, the need for Russians to cast off the yoke of “Putinism” and liberate themselves from the KGB state. It was a monologue oft rehearsed, but when a dog outside barked loudly, he stumbled. He tried again: running down the list of Nat-Bols who will soon get out of prison and ticking off the schedule for “street actions,” with or without Kasparov, Kasyanov or any other leaders of the deflated opposition. Yet somehow he seemed lost, a performance artist who could not perform.

Edichka, I realized, was drifting. Not just away from the interview, but from Kasparov, the evil Putin, the Nat-Bols, even his newfound familial bliss. A man in a long dark coat entered the courtyard with his back to us. “The Ramones,” Limonov said, watching the figure move amid the cars. “I knew them. Not just Joey. All of them. It was a rich life then. Never knew Warhol but I did see him, more than once, at Tatiana’s parties. I always felt inferior. You see, I had a complex of inferiority. Avedon was there, too. And Dali. And Warhol. Capote, too. Tatiana gave ‘Edichka’ to him. Capote read one chapter. He was very enthusiastic. He was. We met only once, on the East Side, when he lived at the U.N. Plaza. Capote always came to Tatiana’s. It was always an enormous crowd. Once I stood near Vladimir Kirillovich — the Romanov heir. It was a great time, a legendary time. I have now a certain nostalgia.”

For a moment, Limonov fell quiet, studying the watch in his hands. After a time, he lifted his head sharply and, averting my eyes, looked out to the dvor. The man was still there, whether cop or secret policeman or parking attendant, no one could say. “It’s exciting, and dangerous of course, what we’re doing now,” he said. “But to have lived in the ’70s in New York, it means a lot. Still.”

Andrew Meier is the author of УBlack Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the FallФ and УThe Lost Spy,Ф which will be published this summer.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 1, 2008
An article on Page 32 of The Times Magazine this weekend about Edward Limonov, a Russian novelist and political dissident, misspells the name of a city he spent time in during the early ’60s. It is Kharkiv, not Kharkov.