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Donald's Blog
September 30, 2014 Here's the circus; where's the bread? For a spectacular human kalaidoscope, go here. The Chinese show involves a lot of choreography and technology. At first you think it's just a rather astonishing human pyramid, but it turns out to be supported by a crane, a lot of cables and no small amount of athleticism. I thought the most interesting part was at around 6:10, where they all appear to be trying to run while attached to their superstrings. They are like so many ants. It's very impressive, but can they also democratic elections in Honk Kong? September 30, 2014 Learn from history? Forget it History doesn't repeat itself, but it comes back as farce. When I was a kid in Kenosha, I knew that the war was over and that Hitler was dead, but we had a new enemy, Stalin. So that was all right. And then I grew up. Vladimir Yakunin has "this feeling of bitterness, frankly", he says. He is the president of Russian Railways, the country's biggest employer, and a long-time associate of Vladimir Putin, and U.S. sanctions ban him from obtaining a visa and freeze any assets he may have in the USA. And being close to Putin means that he may have assets anywhere. His children live in Europe. Yakunin was once a Soviet diplomat stationed in New York City; now he is a part-time professor at Moscow State University. He has written (or co-written, the newspaper is unclear) a 400-page monograph about Russia vs. the West, which a year ago was described by critics as a conspiracy theory; now it is being widely accepted, because the Putin clique runs Russian media, and the people are being fed a steady diet of nonsense. So according to Yakunin, his opinion that Russia and the USA are doomed to be rivals, and that the American intention is always to sabatage Russia, has become "a very realistic assessment of the situation." Olga Kryshtanovskaya agrees. She's a sociologist who's been studying the Russian ruling class for decades."Within the elite, this ideological matrix has really taken over," she says. "They believe there is no way to mobilize the nation around a leader without an enemy." That's the same impression I had when I was ten years old. But then I grew up. Putin is a lying fascist dictator who is doing all the same things Hitler did, while all Americans want to do is business. Putin and his friends are not building anything, not creating jobs; they are busy buying penthouses, skyscrapers and football teams in the West, using money they have stolen from the Russian people; it's hard to do business with a country that has nothing but gas and oil and gangsters. (Quotes are from Gregory L. White's article in today's Wall Street Journal)
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