Applebaum's conspiracy theory: maybe Putin overthrew Yanukovych via fake far right?

One of America's most prominent centrist experts on Eastern Europe, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, whose husband Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, negotiated a powersharing deal to end the crisis in Kiev that was overridden by the triumph of the streetfighters, insinuates an interesting conspiracy theory in Slate:

Certainly the organization formerly known as the KGB has some expertise in destabilizing foreign countries... a rapidly organized political movement of the far right or far left ... Putin, himself trained in KGB methods, knows all of this very well.

Nor will this be the first time that such games have been played in Ukraine. No one has yet explained, for example, why Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych not only left Kiev after signing an European Union–brokered treaty last week, but also ordered security guards to abandon all government buildings as well. Was that an unsubtle invitation for the opposition to ransack the offices, so that he could claim he had been chased out by a violent coup? The evolution of Ukraine’s “far right” also bears watching. Although at the moment it is a lot smaller than the far right in France or Holland, I wouldn’t be surprised if it begins to grow: It’s amazing how far the ruble goes in a cash-strapped country. A few Molotov cocktails have already been thrown at synagogues. In the current political environment, it’s important to ask: Did they come from real anti-Semites? From paid agents? From both?

Now, note that she doesn't exactly say that the apparently far right streetfighters who played such a sizable role in rendering her husband's diplomacy nugatory were paid for by Putin to provoke a crisis. She's throwing out two ideas in one paragraph without claiming they are aspects of the same phenomenon.

Still, it's an interesting question: how would you know? 

Presumably, fakers wouldn't get themselves killed for a paycheck. But what if the money was going to real nationalist extremists through cut-outs? Of course, the problem with that line of thought is that anything is then possible.

On the other hand, Applebaum's conspiracy theory sounds a little bizarre. My guess is that she's surprised how crazy things got in Kiev and is turning to convoluted thoughts of false flag operations to reassure herself. But who knows?

   

By the way, is her husband related to Władysław Sikorski, leader of the Free Polish government in exile during WWII, whose death in a plane crash at Gibraltar in 1943 has been the subject of endless conspiracy theories? (I have a picture in my head of General Sikorski dying in a helicopter crash, but I'm just confusing him with Igor Sikorsky, the Russian (and somewhat Polish) American from Kiev who did so much to develop helicopters around this time ...)

   

George Kennan, Fareed Zakaria, Kim Kardashian

Fareed Zakaria, the Indian princeling (his father was the deputy leader of the ruling Congress Party in India), has enjoyed a glittering career in America. He reviews the diaries of American diplomat George Kennan (1904-2005), author of the "containment" strategy of the Cold War that successfully threaded the needle between WW3 and Soviet domination of Western Europe. He reviews in the NYT Kennan's newly published diaries.

As I've mentioned before from reading Kennan's late-in-life book Around the Cragged Hill (1994), Kennan was a Gloomy Gus, but exactly the kind of depressive realist an optimistic country like America needs to pay attention to.

Daniel Engerman wrote:

My one conversation with Kennan, who once was ambassador to Moscow, began with Russia and quickly turned to the depth of his conservatism. Asked what shaped his ideas about Russia, he recalled his professors at the University of Berlin in 1927. They had taught him about Realien, the givens of geography, climate and race that shaped nations and international relations. (The English "realities" doesn't suggest the word's resonance in 18th Century German philosophy.) Realien outlasted ephemera like ideology and even political systems--and should, he believed, be the basis of any foreign policy.

(By the way, Henry Kissinger is another follower of this German mindset. I'm rereading his memoirs and he makes relentlessly clear that he viewed each foreign statesman he dealt with as just a variation on the permanent themes of that country's national character. As illustration, here's Kissinger's foray into sportswriting previewing how national soccer teams would play in the 1986 World Cup based on their deep national traits: the Italians play like miserly Mediterranean peasants, the Germans play like the General Staff fought the Great War with lighting counterstrikes when the opponent overreaches -- such as when the Italians' eleventh uphill offensive against the Austro-Hungarians left them exhausted, German reinforcements in October 1917 suddenly swept down into the Italian plains in the attack described by Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms, etc.)

Kennan's views on immigration were hardly a secret in the past. I quoted his 1994 passage in VDARE in 2005:

"However one cuts it, the question is not whether there are limits to this country's ability to absorb immigration; the question is only where those limits lie, and how they should be determined and enforced—whether by rational decision at this end or by the ultimate achievement of some sort of a balance of misery between this country and the vast pools of poverty elsewhere that now confront it. The inability of any society to resist immigration … is a serious weakness, and possibly even a fatal one, in any national society." (p. 19) ...

But, you could actually say stuff like that in the past, before immigration ascended to an unquestionable sacred civil right that the rest of the world's population holds over the citizens of the United States (an ideological development of roughly the period when Carlos Slim bailed out the New York Times -- purely coincidental, I'm sure).

As a former student of Samuel Huntington, Zakaria likes Kennan's foreign policy but is shocked, shocked by Kennan's "racism" and proprietary British-American view of his country. 

Writing on a flight to Los Angeles in 1978, Kennan thinks about how few white faces he will see when he lands and laments the decline of people “of British origin, from whose forefathers the constitutional structure and political ideals of the early America once emerged.” Instead, he predicts, Americans are destined to “melt into a vast polyglot mass, . . . one huge pool of indistinguishable mediocrity and drabness.” 

The residents of the Los Angeles of 2014 take deep offense at Kennan's 1978 prediction, or at least they would if Kim Kardashian ever brings it to their attention via TMZ.

  

Victoria Nuland's triumph

The Chicago Tribune considers the interesting question of who was behind Eastern European policy in the U.S. government: 

The escalating crisis also raises questions about whether the White House was quick enough to recognize the seriousness of the Ukraine issue and to give it adequate attention. 

U.S. officials and other sources said that the State Department, particularly the hard-charging assistant secretary of state for Europe, Victoria Nuland, had for months been raising alarms about Russia's more aggressive posture toward former Soviet states, and Ukraine in particular. 

Washington's engagement accelerated after a November 2013 European summit at which Ukraine - along with Armenia - declined under heavy Russian pressure to sign association agreements with the European Union. 

"That's when you saw the Americans stepping up," said Damon Wilson, executive vice president of the Washington-based Atlantic Council, and a former adviser on Europe to President George W. Bush. 

Nuland, he said, "created U.S. policy really out of very little at the time." 

   

Don't bring back the passenger pigeon

For a long time people have kicked around the idea of bringing back extinct species. Now, the technological hurdles are becoming less overwhelming. Whole Earth Catalog guru Stewart Brand has a guy working on bringing back the passenger pigeon, which sounds like a terrible choice. Back around 1880, passenger pigeons made up about 25%-40% of all birds in North America. Then, after massive hunting and turning forest into farmland, they suddenly were extinct by 1914 .

Passenger pigeons only mate when they live in huge flocks. That's why conservation attempts at the U. of Chicago around 1900 failed. Humans would have to restore immense numbers of passenger pigeons and then they might get out of control. Charles C. Mann in 1491 called the vast flocks of the early 19th Century "pathological." The emergence of stupendous numbers of passenger pigeons probably was the result of European or Indian impact on the landscape in some fashion.

Bringing back the Rocky Mountain Locust would be the only worse plan. Or maybe some kind of vicious flying dinosaur predators.

The right kind of animal to bring back is something that is spectacular, hasn't been gone for long, has a cousin species alive today to bear a cloned fetus, and can't fly or swim away from its preserves and set off unexpected ecological chain reaction.

In other words, wooly mammoths!

The ideal place for a herd of wooly mammoths would be the remote Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean.

This French possession is isolated and unpopulated but surprisingly large (over 2,000 square miles). The climate is appropriate for Ice Age beasts.

Billionaires could pay ten million dollars to go wooly mammoth hunting on the Kerguelen Islands with a gun (or only a million to hunt with a spear and atlatl).

   

David Brooks defends Victoria Nuland's previous misadventure

From the NYT last year:

The Next Scapegoat 

By DAVID BROOKS 

Published: May 13, 2013     424 Comments

Twenty years ago, when she was a young Foreign Service officer in Moscow, Victoria Nuland gave me a dazzling briefing on the diverse factions inside the Russian parliament.

So, that's why David Brooks' opinions on who were the good guys and who were the bad guys in Russia in 1993 turned out to be so on the money.

Now she is a friend I typically see a couple times a year, at various functions, and I have watched her rise, working with everybody from Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton, serving as ambassador to NATO, and now as a spokeswoman at the State Department. 

Over the past few weeks, the spotlight has turned on Nuland. The charge is that intelligence officers prepared accurate talking points after the attack in Benghazi, Libya, and that Nuland, serving her political masters, watered them down. 

The charges come from two quarters, from Republicans critical of the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi and intelligence officials shifting blame for Benghazi onto the State Department. 

It’s always odd watching someone you know get turned into a political cartoon on the cable talk shows. But this case is particularly disturbing because Nuland did nothing wrong.

Perhaps, but has Nuland ever done anything right? She seems to skate from one misadventure to another without ever becoming a scapegoat, rising up the hierarchy of power all the time.

For instance, does anybody expect her career to take a hit because her policy of Bear-baiting in the Ukraine contributed to a violent putsch that set off a large and predictable but basically pointless international crisis?
   

The war over the War of 2008

The Georgian invasion of Russian-supported South Ossetia on August 8, 2008 remains a touchstone. My recommendation is to never trust anybody who can't bring themselves to admit that, in the most meaningful sense, Georgia started it.

From the New York Times:

James F. Jeffrey was Mr. Bush’s deputy national security adviser in August 2008 and the first to inform him that Russian troops were moving into Georgia in response to what the Kremlin called Georgian aggression against South Ossetia. As it happened, the clash also took place at Olympic time; Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin were both in Beijing for the Summer Games. 

Mr. Bush confronted Mr. Putin to no avail and then ordered American ships to the region and provided a military transport to return home Georgian troops on duty in Iraq. He sent humanitarian aid on a military aircraft, assuming that Russia would be loath to attack the capital of Tbilisi with American military personnel present. Mr. Bush also suspended a pending civilian nuclear agreement, and NATO suspended military contacts. 

“We did a lot but in the end there was not that much that you could do,” Mr. Jeffrey recalled. 

Inside the Bush administration, there was discussion of more robust action, like bombing the Roki Tunnel to block Russian troops or providing Georgia with Stinger antiaircraft missiles. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice bristled at what she called the “chest beating,” and the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, urged the president to poll his team to see if anyone recommended sending American troops. 

None did, and Mr. Bush was not willing to risk escalation. While Russia stopped short of moving into Tbilisi, it secured the effective independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, while leaving troops in areas it was supposed to evacuate under a cease-fire. Within a year or so, Russia’s isolation was over. Mr. Obama took office and tried to improve relations. NATO resumed military contacts in 2009 and the United States revived the civilian nuclear agreement in 2010. 

Mr. Jeffrey, now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Mr. Obama should now respond assertively by suggesting that NATO deploy forces to the Polish-Ukrainian border to draw a line. “There’s nothing we can do to save Ukraine at this point,” he said. “All we can do is save the alliance.”

  

My impression of the 2008 war is that George president Mikhail Saakashvili, who came to power in the Soros-backed Rose Revolution of 2003, bumptiously overestimated the power of his neocon and neolib friends in America and Israel, and the appetite of the truly powerful in those two countries for a shooting war with Russia. 

Nonetheless, Saakashvili was responding, in his cartoonish fashion, to a genuine reality: that America projects power all around the world, while Russia is much weaker and is largely limited to projecting power to ethnically friendly enclaves within the old Soviet Union.

  

McCain: "We are all Ukrainians"

From Time Magazine:

Senator John McCain: “We Are All Ukrainians”

Rod Dreher responds:

No, Sen. McCain, We Are Americans 

I'd add that a lot of Ukrainians might not agree that "We are all Ukrainians," or would have very different opinions about what Ukrainians are. Unlike Senator McCain, I feel very little urge to arbitrate these confusing disputes that I barely knew anything about until a month ago.

Time continues:

McCain made his declaration in response to a question from TIME about his famous 2008 statement, “We are all Georgians,” issued when he was a Republican presidential candidate after Russia invaded Georgia.

Okay, "Russia invaded Georgia" in 2008 in the sense that the Soviet Union invaded Germany in 1945. The war started on August 8, 2008, when George sent over 10,000 troops across the de facto border into South Ossetia, which had been de facto not ruled by Georgia for a decade and a half. Now, there are many arguments you can make on Georgia's behalf, such as its legal right to rule the South Ossetians based on old Soviet borderlines, or various provocations across the de facto border.

But, there was no war until Georgia, using over 10,000 men and 80 T-72 tanks, invaded South Ossetia. 

I remember it clearly. The news came as a big surprise to everybody except the Georgian government. The lowly wire service stringers immediately reported that Georgia was invading South Ossetia.

After about a day, the bigfoot American pundits were saying that Russia must have invaded Georgia, and that was the dominant Narrative for awhile.

But in the wake of the war, various journalistic organizations did investigations and concluded that the stringers on the spot got the story right originally, and the Bigfoots were wrong. That's how Wikipedia tells it today.

But who care about what really happened in 2008 when you can just keep misleading Americans over and over so that they remember the past wrongly?

   

Crimean problem practically solved

From the Kyiv Post:

Kadyrov: Chechens ready to keep peace in Crimea

     

Neo-Trotskyism: Globalism in All Countries

My theory of what I don't like about Russia has always focused upon the observation that, lacking natural military defenses such as the English Channel or the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Muscovites have always sought security in gigantism, with the bad consequences that so often go along with imperialism.

But, it's worth pointing out, the neoconservative movement that has had so much influence over post-Cold War American foreign policy, with its own gigantist-imperialist tendencies, traces its origins back to a 1920s debate in Moscow over whether or not the Soviet Union was big enough for the survival of the reigning ideology. Stalin cautiously argued that the Soviet Union was adequate in size for "socialism in one country" to work for now. But the original neoconservatives' first icon, Trotsky, argued that only permanent global ideological revolution was adequate.

In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky added an appendix denouncing Stalin's policy of "Socialism in One Country:"

The reactionary tendencies of autarchy are a defense reflex of senile capitalism to the task with which history confronts it, that of freeing its economy from the fetters of private property and the national state, and organizing it in a planned manner throughout the Earth. 

In Lenin’s Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People – presented by the Soviet of People’s Commissars for the approval of the Constituent Assembly during its brief hours of life – the “fundamental task” of the new regime was thus defined: “The establishment of a socialist organization of society and the victory of socialism in all countries.” The international character of the revolution was thus written into the basic document of the new regime. No one at that time would have dared present the problem otherwise! 

      

Which Sergei Aksenov is which in Crimea?

Trying to keep track of what's going on in Eastern Europe is difficult because there are two sets of spellings. For example, the capital of Ukraine is Kiev in the familiar transliteration of Russian, but Kyiv in Ukrainian. 

This can be particularly confusing when there are individuals with similar names. The NYT reports:

The newly installed, pro-Russia prime minister of Crimea declared on Saturday that he had sole control over the military and the police in the disputed peninsula and he appealed to President Vladimir Putin of Russia for help in safeguarding the region. 

Ukraine’s government accused Russian armed forces on Friday of taking up positions in Crimea, an autonomous republic on the Black Sea, in what Ukrainian officials said was an invasion and a violation of Ukraine’s sovereign territory. President Obama on Friday warned Russia against military intervention.
In his statement, the Crimean prime minister, Sergei Aksenov, said: 

“Understanding my responsibility for the life and safety of citizens, I appeal to the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, for assistance in providing peace and tranquillity on the territory of the autonomous Republic of Crimea.”

I went to look up who this new ruler of the Crimean peninsula Sergei Aksenov is on Wikipedia. It said:

Sergei Aksenov (Russian: Серге́й Аксенов, born April 3, 1971, Vladimir) is
Russian political dissident, publicist, former prisoner, member of National Bolshevik Party since 1997, cofounder of coalition The Other Russia[1] ...

National Bolshevik babe

So, this guy is sort of associated with Aleksandr Dugin, who was in the National Bolsheviks a long time ago. Above is the flag of this Aksenov's new party The Other Russia (at least according to Wikipedia).

Swell.

But I think the NYT is confused or their transliteration policy is confusing, because Wikipedia says the two-day-old ruler of Crimea is Sergey Aksyonov:

Sergey Valeryevich Aksyonov (Russian: Сергей Валерьевич Аксёнов; born November 26, 1972 in Bălți, in the Moldavian SSR of the Soviet Union) is a Ukrainian politician and the current Prime Minister of Crimea.[1] Aksyonov was elected into office during an armed occupation of the Crimean parliament by pro-Russian militia. The position of Prime Minister is normally appointed by the President of Ukraine.[2]; and in Aksyonov case this consultation never took place.[original research?]  

In 1993 he graduated from the Higher Military-Political Construction College in Simferopol.

The Higher Military-Political Construction College sounds like a real hippie-dippie place, doesn't it? Kind of the Bennington or UC Santa Cruz of the Crimea ...

Here's his "Russian Unity" party of Ukraine logo. Just screaming eagles, so that's a lot more reassuring than the other guy's logo.

   

Shootout in Crimea

From Reuters:

Russia said unidentified gunmen sent by Kiev had attempted overnight to seize the Crimea region's Interior Ministry offices and that people had been wounded in the attack. It accused Kiev of a "treacherous provocation."

This probably won't amount to much (I hope), but Russia v. Ukraine warfare is not a good thing.  

U.S. needs a better foreign policy team

From the WSJ:

"We are now deeply concerned about reports of military movements taken by the Russian federation inside of Ukraine," Mr. Obama said from the White House. 

"The U.S. will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine," he added, without detailing what actions the U.S. and international community would take. 

The president's statement came amid a day of heightened tension in Ukraine, after heavily armed gunmen surrounded two airports in the restive pro-Russian region of Crimea, which prompted outcries from authorities in the region that Russia was behind the invasion.

Meanwhile, as the Russkies fly troops into Crimea, the Russian diplomats continue to point out that the president of the Ukraine was overthrown in a violent coup by street fighters and demand that the peaceful deal worked out with the opposition and with American proxies like Slate columnist Anne Applebaum's husband Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, be reinstated. The Guardian quotes Russian UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin:

Ukraine had a democratically elected president with a democratically elected majority in parliament. Yatsenyuk could’ve taken the post [of prime minister, offered during negotiations], and could’ve signed the agreement with the European Union if he wanted, but then they went for toppling the president and a regime-change operation. 

Interference from our western colleagues has not been helpful, and they have certain responsibilities to those dramatic consequences and also responsibilities for not following through on those agreements they affixed their signatures on February 21. 

The best way to resolve the crisis is to look hard at the February 21 agreement. They need to [reform] a constitution. they need to refrain from a hasty presidential election which is likely to cause more friction. They need to show that this is about national unity.

The Guardian adds: "Churkin did not acknowledge that protesters in Kiev never accepted the agreement and that Yanukovych had fled the capital by last Friday night."

If that's not Democracy! I don't know what is.

I presume that Obama and Kerry would have been very happy with Sikorski's deal, but the street bravos weren't. Yet, the Obama Administration and its allies like George Soros (but which is the tail and which is the dog?) have some degree of responsibility for setting in motion the putsch.

Did Obama and Kerry realize they were playing with fire?

Personally, I didn't see myself as suffering all that much from the fact that until a week ago Ukraine had an elected president whose policy was to try to play off Russia and the West in economic negotiations to try to get the best deals for his government (not necessarily for his citizens, of course -- but I'm struck by how much of the anger in the American press at the former Ukrainian president is over his impudence at trying to extract more money from Putin than whatever the West was willing to offer).

But now we've got a new Cold War, and I suspect I'll be paying for it for a long, long time.

Do you get the impression that 70-year-old John Kerry is in over his head as Secretary of State? I don't particularly dislike Kerry, but he's not exactly Henry Kissinger as an intellect, and he's not getting any younger. He looked like a fool in the Syrian crisis, fortunately blundering into a peaceful resolution.

The other big issue that is hard to explore is how much control do Obama and Kerry really have over the more aggressive elements of the Deep State, such as the Nuland-Kagans and Soros. Does anybody know? How would you find out?

For example, I've seen only the most coded interest in the mainstream press in investigating the question: Did we go too far in the Ukraine? By unleashing -- whether unintentionally or intentionally -- a bunch of Banderaite hard men to overthrow the elected president, that's naturally upsetting to Russians (and to Poles, too). But, will there be any accountability within the U.S. for overplaying a strong hand?

   

Commodification of labor: movie star division

Since movie and TV star salaries spiked back in the 1990s, entertainment companies have been working hard to tip the balance of power back toward the owners of intellectual property (themselves) by emphasizing superhero characters rather than star power. A few actors in superhero franchises, most notably Robert Downey Jr., have been able to maintain enough leverage to cash in royally. Yet, Downey's take from playing Iron Man in the vastly successful The Avengers -- supposedly $50 million -- was roughly what Jack Nicholson is said to have earned for playing the Joker in Batman way back in 1989.

Here's an article on all the movie star hopefuls who workout at Gold's Gym at Venice Beach:

Almost any actor, even some of Hollywood’s most scrawny, can be physically transformed for the part if he’s willing to put in the hard work. The studios know this, which is why any inexpensive unknown can be chosen. ...

For last summer’s megahit “Man of Steel,” Snyder sent Cavill to work out with Twight. “I wanted Henry to be the personification of physicality,” Snyder told me. Cavill and Twight worked together for five months before production started and continued training during the six months of filming. Twight packed the pounds onto Cavill’s 6-foot-1 frame by putting him on a 5,000-calorie-a-day diet. Leading up to Cavill’s two shirtless sequences — a few days at the beginning of October 2011 and about six days at the end of that month — Twight scaled Cavill’s caloric intake back to about 2,800 calories. According to Twight, the pressure on Cavill was intense: “Henry was not a well-known guy, and he had chosen to be one of greatest comic-book icons ever. You’re not going to give that guy an inch.”

The whole physical transformation process is also part of the promotional campaign for the movies. That was part of Sylvester Stallone's brilliance in the 1970s-1980s to tap into this previously inchoate longing on the part of the audience that that the early 20th Century German poet Rilke (who has become a posthumous self-help guru) summarized as: "You must change your life."

A number of trainers and actors told me that steroids were out there and that everybody had a good idea of who was on them — though nobody is willing to name names. But as trainers like Twight make obvious, the Hollywood fitness mechanism is brutal and advanced enough to make any performance-enhancing drug seem primitive by comparison. “Post-‘300,’ there is a machine in place — it doesn’t work for everyone, though,” Twight said. “Not everybody can handle the training.”

Uh, that's what the steroids are for -- to speed recovery times to allow more lifting. 

I'm interested in learning more about the opposite process than adding all that muscle: the guys who went back to being normal. For example, in 2009 I ran into Jake Gyllenhaal at the frozen yogurt stand and he looked kind of silly all pumped up for his 2010 Prince of Persia starring role, but wearing normal Dockers-type clothes instead of a loincloth or whatever is more fitting for that level of musculature. But the next movie I saw him in, 2011's sci-fi Source Code, he looked reasonable again.

Presumably, if Prince of Persia hadn't bombed, he'd still be beefcaked up. Now, he's kind of gaunt for his next role.

Here's something that I can't recall male stars talking about: what it's like to be different shapes. How does it affect how you think? How does it affect your moods? By this point, Christian Bale, say, has a lot of data points on what it's like to be muscular, emaciated, pudgy, etcetera. But there isn't much public interest in that, but there is intense interest in the process of changing body shape.

On the female side, there is a slight bit more freedom for actresses to complain about the ferocious diets they have to maintain (but not to go off them). I can recall about a decade ago that Sandra Bullock's management issued a press release saying that she had decided to not starve herself anymore just to get roles. But, judging by her late-in-career Oscar success in Gravity and The Blind Side, she changed her mind.

  

Another colossal Slavic politician: Alexander "The Experiment" Karelin

Commenter John Craig points out that Just Not Said was all over this question of immense tough guy Slavic politicians like boxers Wladimir Klitschko and Nikolai Valuev back in 2013. 

Another member of the Duma in Russia is Alexander Karelin, the greatest Greco-Roman wrestler of all time (lifetime record: 887-2). The Siberian heavyweight's loss to American Rulon Gardner at the 2000 Olympics is the only thing Americans like me have ever heard about Greco-Roman wrestling. Karelin's nicknames include the "Russian Bear," "Alexander the Great," and, my favorite, "The Experiment." He is 6'3.25" and wrestled at 286 pounds.
   

Karelin is now on the International Relations committee of the legislature.

(Thanks to commenter roundeye, too.)

By the way, Secretary of State John Kerry's recent attempt to improve Russian-American relations by exclaiming "This is not Rocky IV," when, yeah, now that you mention it, it kind of is Rocky IV, reminds me of the underrated intelligence of Sylvester Stallone at sensing where guys' heads were heading. As an analyst of where modern culture was going, was anybody else as perceptive as Stallone was in 1976 to 1985?

The usual assumption today is that, well, sure, Arnold Schwarzenegger was obviously always a shrewd guy, but Stallone was kind of a meathead. Yet Stallone wrote one of the ten most influential screenplays in movie history in Rocky. I'm sure somebody before Stallone made a movie about working out and getting into shape, but Rocky's montage scene was a bolt from the blue in skinny 1976. Hollywood immediately knew it was an all-time great script, so Stallone was able to leverage the demand for his screenwriting talent to insist upon the right to play Rocky himself.

And Rocky IV is a bizarrely different from Rocky: while Rocky has all the great lines Stallone saved up from his first 30 years of life, Rocky IV has almost no dialog, just insane images. (And that's not to mention Stallone's Rambo movies.) So, while I'd much rather invest my money in a real estate development put together by Schwarzenegger, Stallone had more moments of genius in his decade.
    

The Rape of Russia explained by Anne Williamson

When the Soviet Union cracked up, American journalist Anne Williamson was a popular freelancer on all things Russian for the Wall Street Journal and other prestigious outlets. A major New York publisher signed her to a contract for a book on Russia in 1993. But when she finally delivered a manuscript in 1997 predicting that the Russian bond market would crash in 1998 (which it did), nobody in the publishing world would touch it. Williamson believes that her criticism of the Clinton Administration and, especially, of George Soros made it radioactive. According to a 2001 essay in the New York Review of Books, Williamson's unpublished book was "widely read in manuscript."

By the way, all this interest in Russia recently reminds me of an old mystery from before the recent economic unpleasantness: the Harvard endowment grew in the 1990s at a rate that would seem to call into question the hallowed Efficient Markets Theorem. When asked to share tips for how you too could achieve such a high ROI, Harvard's gnomes usually made vague noises about investing in timber.

It finally occurred to me that during this period, Harvard was, coincidentally enough, being paid by American taxpayers to advise the government of Russia how to privatize its vast holdings. Indeed, this process went so swimmingly for Harvard that in 2001 Harvard made the Clinton Administration's central manager of Russian policy, Larry Summers, its president. 

Here's Williamson's 1999 testimony to Congress. I won't vouch for all her Austrian economics, but it's pretty interesting. 

Testimony of Anne Williamson

Before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the United States House of Representatives

September 21, 1999 

... In the matter before us – the question of the many billions in capital that fled Russia to Western shores via the Bank of New York and other Western banks – we have had a window thrown open on what the financial affairs of a country without property rights, without banks, without the certainty of contract, without an accountable government or a leadership decent enough to be concerned with the national interest or its own citizens’ well-being looks like. It’s not a pretty picture, is it? But let there be no mistake, in Russia the West has truly been the author of its own misery. And there is no mistake as to who the victims are, i.e. Western, principally U.S., taxpayers and Russian citizens’ whose national legacy was stolen only to be squandered and/or invested in Western real estate and equities markets.

The failure to understand where Communism ended and Russia began insured that the Clinton Administration’s policy towards Russia would be riddled with error and ultimately ineffective. Two mistakes are key to understanding what went wrong and why. 

The first mistake was the West’s perception of the elected Russian president, Boris Yeltsin; where American triumphalists saw a great democrat determined to destroy the Communist system for freedom’s sake, Soviet history will record a usurper. A usurper’s first task is to transform a thin layer of the self-interested rabble into a constituency. Western assistance, IMF lending and the targeted division of national assets are what provided Boris Yeltsin the initial wherewithal to purchase his constituency of ex-Komsomol [Communist Youth League] bank chiefs, who were given the freedom and the mechanisms to plunder their own country in tandem with a resurgent and more economically competent criminal class. The new elite learned everything about the confiscation of wealth, but nothing about its creation. Worse yet, this new elite thrives in the conditions of chaos and eschews the very stability for which the United States so fervently hopes knowing full well, as they do, that stability will severely hamper their ability to obtain outrageous profits. Consequently, Yeltsin’s "reform" government was and is doomed to sustain this parasitic political base composed of the banking oligarchy. 

The second mistake lay in a profound misunderstanding of Russian culture and in the Harvard Institute of International Development advisers’ disregard for the very basis for their own country’s success; property rights. It was a very grave error. Private property is not only the most effective instrument of economic organization, it is also the organizational mechanism of an independent civil society. The protection of property, both of individuals’ and that of a nation, has justified the existence of and a population’s acceptance of the modern state and its public levies. 

Russian property rights are tricky; property has never been distributed, but only confiscated and awarded on a cyclical basis. For the big players property exists, as it always has, only where there is power. For the common man, the property right hasn’t advanced much beyond custom which prevents the taking of any man’s shelter, clothes or tools so long as continuous usage is demonstrable. An additional, purely Slavic feature of the Russians’ concept of property is the shared belief that each has a claim upon some part of the whole. 

In ancient ‘Rus, property existed for the individual as a claim - or an entitlement if you will - to a shared asset, a votchina or "estate", held by all the members of a particular clan. This understanding of property still informs the culture; though Westerners bemoan Moscow mayor Yury Lyuzhkov’s retention of the system of the residential permit ("propiska") as an impediment to a flexible labor force, the policy is one of Lyuzhkov’s most popular. Muscovites are well-satisfied with a mayor who polices outsiders as they believe any proprietor of such a great estate as Moscow should. 

The Russians’ failure to accept the Roman concept of private property has compelled them to suffer the coercive powers of the state so that at the very least a civil order, if not a civil society, might be established and sustained. The hackneyed idea that Russians have some special longing for tyranny is a pernicious myth. Rather, they share the common human need for predictable event undergirded by civil and state institutions and their difficult history is the result of their struggle to achieve both in the absence of private property. 

Since only the Tsar or the Party had property, no individual Russian could be sure of long-term usage of anything upon which to create wealth. And it is the poor to whom the property right matters most of all because property is the poor man’s ticket into the game of wealth creation. The rich, after all, have their money and their friends to protect their holdings, while the poor must rely upon the law alone. 

In the absence of property, it was access - the opportunity to seek opportunity - and favor in which the Russians began to traffic. The connections one achieved, in turn, became the most essential tools a human being could grasp, employ and, over time, in which he might trade. Where relationships, not laws, are used to define society’s boundaries, tribute must be paid. Bribery, extortion and subterfuge have been the inevitable result. What marks the Russian condition in particular is the scale of these activities, which is colossal. Russia, then, is a negotiated culture, the opposite of the openly competitive culture productive markets require. 

Here's a more detailed discussion of the various problems with property rights in Czarist Russia, which contributed to the general air of fecklessness that ensnared the Russian economy up through the end of the 19th Century, and which remains familiar to us from Chekhov plays.

The rest of Williamson's testimony is below the fold:

Why are Americans so deferential?

The Tory Telegraph's U.S. editor asks:

Why are Americans so darned deferential?

By Peter Foster       World Last updated: February 26th, 2014

It is an orthodoxy of American politics – and indeed America more generally – that the "land of the free" doesn't do dynasties and class-based deference, when everyone knows perfectly well that they do. 

I've been pondering this piece of cognitive dissonance this week after Jeb Bush – the former Florida governor and younger brother of Dubya – hinted that he's seriously considering a tilt at the White House in 2016. 

Of course that immediately sparked the old debate over the "dynasty" question, since if Jeb won the nomination and faced off against Hillary Clinton, the list of White House occupants since 1988 would read Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama and then … Bush or Clinton. 

As a Brit living in America, I often hear American friends making assumptions about how deferential and class-bound Britain is, particularly in comparison with America with its eponymous dream and meritocratic ideals. 

Perhaps this anachronistic view of Britain is down to watching too much Downton Abbey – Hillary Clinton, rather disturbingly, is a big fan – but it never ceases to surprise me how accepting of authority Americans are, and how lacking in self-awareness they are about the culture of deference in their own country. 

This is not just exhibited in the obvious power of American political families to captivate the voting public in a way that is unthinkable in Britain – people are already speculating, only half-jokingly, about Chelsea Clinton's 2032 bid for the White House – but extends to almost all office and holders of official rank. 

It starts at the top with the President of the United States who attracts a level of bowing and scraping that a British Prime Minister could only dream of, and continues right on down to the lowliest beat-cop or tinpot airport security or immigration official who bullies and berates the citizenry in a way that would cause a riot in Britain. 

Perhaps the people are cowed by the knowledge that any insolence is liable to be met with a drawn firearm or Taser-zap from which there will almost certainly be no legal recourse, but the sheer compliableness of the US public surprises many of us foreigners. 

The US media is also reflects that culture of deference. American pundits shudder at the mention of the British "tabloid press" – an appellation it extends to pretty much all forms of British journalism – but that is partly because the US media seems to have become institutionally incapable of appreciating the value of judicious disrespect. 

The British media is indeed often thuggish and cruel, but it does have an anti-establishment, insurgent quality that seems largely to have gone missing in America. 

 
Anybody have any suggestions for how to investigate quantitatively how these perhaps disparate phenomenon vary over time or from one country to another?

I have a vague sense that JFK's presidency had something to do with a lot of this: his James Bond looks, his brothers, his glamorous consort, his nearly blowing up the world in 1962, and his martyrdom, they all combined together to make his uncool successors, such as Johnson and Nixon, unsatisfactory. From this point of view, what happened in The Sixties after 11/22/63 was less a revolt against authority than a demand for more awesome authorities.
 

Then again, Secretary Kerry, maybe this is "Rocky IV"

From The Independent:

Ukraine crisis: Kerry warns Putin 'This is not Rocky IV'

This picture of Secretary of State John F. Kerry, who towered over George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential debates, meeting a month ago with three leaders of the former Ukrainian opposition (From left: heavyweight champ Vitali Klitschko, Petro Poroshenko, John Kerry, and Victoria Nuland's favorite Arseniy Yatsenyuk), reminds me of just how many Eastern European politicians are Ivan Drago-sized.

For example, here's a picture of Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, who came in third in the 2012 Russian presidential election with 8% of the vote. He's now owner of the Brooklyn Nets of the NBA. The only one of his three players in this picture who is taller than the boss is Kevin Garnett, who is a seven-footer.

The Russians don't lack enormous boxer-politicians either. From today's NYT:

Three high-profile members of Russia’s lower house of Parliament arrived in Crimea on Thursday, visiting the city that is home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. “I arrived in Sevastopol to support residents of Crimea,” Nikolai Valuev, a former boxing champion who was elected to the Parliament in 2011, wrote on Twitter. “Friends, Russia is with you.”... 

Mr. Valuev, an unmistakable presence at 7 feet 1 inch tall, described the visit as a fact-finding mission “to personally interact with the residents to know the situation from the inside.” 

Like many officials in Russia, he said the crisis in Ukraine, or at least the foreign news media reporting on it, was clouded by Western propaganda. “There is an information war,” he wrote on Twitter.

Valuev is quite the debonair-looking fellow. Polish sculptor Stanislaw Szukalski (1893-1987) would have felt vindicated.

I was hoping to find a picture of Parliamentarian Valuev with President Putin. But, perhaps not surprisingly, Putin doesn't seem to have been enthusiastic about arranging that photo-op.

Here's a photo of Putin with Leonardo DiCaprio (5'11.5"). (And here's a link to a photo of DiCaprio sitting on Szukalski's lap, but that's getting completely offtrack.)

The Klitschko-Valuev dispute isn't just geopolitical, it's personal. From Bleacher Report in 2010:

Vitali Klitschko Calls Russian Giant Nikolai Valuev a "Chicken" 

By Colin Linneweber , Senior Writer Mar 11, 2010

WBC world heavyweight champion Vitali “Dr. Iron Fist” Klitschko called former two-time WBA heavyweight titlist Nikolai Valuev a “chicken” this week for rejecting a $2.5 million contract offer to fight this spring.

Instead of scrapping the enormous Russian Valuev (50-2-0-1, 34 KOs), Klitschko (39-2, 37 KOs) will defend his crown versus Polish pugilist Albert Sosnowski (45-2-1, 27 KOs) on May 29 in Germany.

“I don’t want to speak bad about him, but I gave Valuev the biggest financial proposal of his career,” said Klitschko, 38, a Ukrainian who has the highest knockout percentage (94.9 percent) of any heavyweight champion ever. 

“He [Valuev] told me ‘No, four.’ There are two reasons why he’s done this. Firstly, he wanted to say no anyway. Four million is unrealistic for someone who has just lost their title. The second point is that he understands if the loses to me straight after losing his title, that’s it for him. Valuev is a chicken.”

Russian immigrant Alex Yuzhakov stated that he agrees with Klitschko that Valuev is indeed a coward.

“Klitschko is right, Valuev is a chicken,” said Yuzhakov, 28, who was born in Moscow and currently resides in Somerville. “For a Russian man to turn down $2.5 million a lot of fear must have been involved. Maybe he’s waiting for a more opportune time to fight Klitschko. No matter, he will never beat the true ex-Soviet beast.”

P.S., a commenter has found a photo with Putin and Valuev in the same frame:

 

Moneyballing movies: "The Gender Gap in Screen Time"

From the NYT:

The Gender Gap in Screen Time 

Cinemetrics Extracts Statistical Data From Movies 

By KEVIN B. LEE      FEB. 27, 2014 

... Today the Cinemetrics website, run by Yuri Tsivian, a scholar at the University of Chicago, Daria Khitrova and Gunars Civjans, holds statistics on more than 14,000 films. 

... One disquieting finding from my research is that this year’s lead actors average 85 minutes on screen, but lead actresses average only 57 minutes. (When you add in supporting categories, all competing actors averaged 59 minutes, while all competing actresses averaged 42 minutes.) Last year’s results were even more imbalanced: nominated male stars averaged 100 minutes on screen to the lead actresses’ 49 minutes.

I've always said that Best Actor is a much bigger award than Best Actress.

Actors have longer to perfect their crafts as leads in big pictures than do actresses (e.g., Best Actor last year was 55-year-old Daniel Day-Lewis in Spielberg's Lincoln versus 22-year-old Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook.) While Judy Dench and Meryl Streep continue to get Best Actress nominations, the size of their movies drops as they age.

Most screenwriters and almost all top directors are male (e.g., Silver Linings Playbook was David O. Russell's quasi-autobiographical tale about his mental problems, so Bradley Cooper is the main character while Lawrence is cast as The Girl).

Mr. Bordwell said genre might help explain the gender gap. Male stars are typically the protagonists in action or goal-oriented narratives that require the viewer to follow the story through the lead’s experiences. Female stars are more typically cast in melodramas that require the lead to serve as a hub connecting different characters and subplots. ...

Mr. Cassidy [editor of American Hustle] wagered that there wasn’t much of a gap in the screen time between the two nominated leads of his film. But Christian Bale actually has 60 minutes of screen to Amy Adams’s 46 minutes, a significant difference even in an ensemble movie.

Is there really any doubt that Christian Bale's conman is the main character? American Hustle opens and closes with him. He's the character David O. Russell most identifies with. It's not exactly a secret that successful directors like Russell or Scorsese often see a lot of themselves in the flim-flam man main characters that attract them to projects like American Hustle or Wolf of Wall Street.

In general, as you go up the quality scale, the gender gap gets bigger. There are plenty of run-of-the-mill TV shows where actresses of a certain age solve crimes. There are huge audiences who buy a lot of heavily advertised products for those shows.

But when you get to major film auteurs, you get their obsessions. Martin Scorsese, for instance, thinks about guys, all the time. I doubt if he's thought about any of his five wives as much as he's thought about Robert De Niro or Leonardo DiCaprio. (Maybe one of those ex-wives, however, is slightly ahead of Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel for third place in the Scorsese Attention Sweepstakes.)