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Saturday, April 08, 2023

The Hammer Of Peaceful Activism

Putin, in his speeches, falls to the gender topic as a reflex action. I need to stay in power or they will come and turn your children into transvestites! I needed to go to war or they might have come and dressed your children into drag queen attires! Send 300,000 men to the front or they might come and turn men into women, and women into men! It is bizarre logic.

Alexei Navalny was safe. He did not have to go back to Russia. It was certain they would jail him and worse. But still he went. And he has indeed been subjected to jail and worse.

Zelensky fights for Navalny.

One man suffers so his country might not have to suffer indefinitely. Navalny chose to go. He was safe abroad.

But the thing about the moral fiber of someone like Alexei Navalny is it is a rope. It ties him to you, and it ties him to me. There is no escape route. You don't have the option to be quiet. You don't have the luxury of inaction. This is the spiritual reality. Just like your soul is a spiritual reality. It is true. It exists. It is indestructible. It is not the pancreas that a surgeon might dig out. But it is much more real. Your soul is more real than heaven and earth.

By choosing to go to jail and suffer Alexei Navalny communicates with the rest of us at the level that souls talk to each other. You can not look the other way. This man speaks for a nation.

Russians are not a different species. Or they might not have been able to produce the world class literature they have. Russians are long accustomed to the life of the mind. They are one of the best suited for this knowledge economy.

I am a friend of Russia. I want the best for Russia. I want a Russia that is richer, more secure, and yes, I want a Russia that is a power. Major powers like the United States and even China need other power centers. The global system needs a strong Russia to provide a counterbalance. How can there be freedom of thought and freedom of speech and freedom of conscience if truth can not be told to power? Be that to powerful America or to a powerful China?

The fight is inside Russia. The fight is in Moscow. All it will take is for one million Russians to take over the streets and not leave until Putin resigns.

I am not liking the war in Ukraine. I want peace. The path to peace is not this talk or that talk. The path to peace is a mass movement for democracy inside Russia that installs Navalny as the country's interim president who steers the country to elections to a constituent assembly. A democratic, federal Russia will make NATO irrelevant, keep Russia one, and shift the center of gravity in Europe to Kyiv.

Putin is a blight on the Russian conscience. Navalny is Russia's Mandela.



The Kremlin throws cold water on China mediating peace in Ukraine as Macron urges Xi to 'bring Russia to its senses' "So far there are no prospects for a political settlement," the Kremlin said. ....... The Kremlin on Thursday said there were "no prospects" for China to play the role of mediator in Moscow's unprovoked war against Ukraine at present, as French President Emmanuel Macron met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and urged him to "bring Russia to its senses." .......... Peskov said there were "no other ways" forward for Russia aside from continuing its offensive in Ukraine, signaling that Moscow has no interest in negotiations in the foreseeable future. ....... This came after Macron in Beijing said that Russia had dealt a blow to international stability by invading Ukraine, and called on Xi to push Russia to see reason and "bring everyone back to the negotiating table." ......... Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has invited Xi to visit Ukraine and repeatedly expressed a desire to speak with him. The two leaders have not spoken since Russia invaded over a year ago. ........ China has claimed that it's neutral in the Ukraine war and unveiled a peace plan in February on the one-year anniversary of Russia's invasion. ........ The war in Ukraine has made Putin a global pariah and isolated Russia economically and politically, but the Russian leader on Wednesday insisted that his country remains a "respected center of world politics." .

China’s Ambassador to the E.U. Tries to Distance Beijing From Moscow The ambassador, Fu Cong, said China was not on Russia’s side in the war in Ukraine. “‘No limit’ is nothing but rhetoric,” he said, referring to a statement from last year about the countries’ relationship......... China tries to present itself as a mediator, insisting that it respects the territorial integrity of Ukraine while endorsing some of Moscow’s narrative about the war. ...... China had not provided military assistance to Russia, nor recognized its efforts to annex Ukrainian territories, including Crimea and the Donbas. ........... Beijing has not condemned the invasion, he said, because it understood Russia’s claims about a defensive war against NATO encroachment, and because his government believes “the root causes are more complicated” than Western leaders say. ......... In her speech, Ms. von der Leyen described the E.U.-China relationship as having become “more distant and more difficult,” and endorsed the view of China as an assertive global player seeking to become “the world’s most powerful nation.” ............. the bloc should “de-risk” its relationship with China by setting new ground rules rather than “decoupling” or withdrawing. ........... China was the third-largest destination of E.U. exported goods in 2022, and the largest exporter of goods to the bloc ......... He said Europe should carve out its own policies and develop more “strategic autonomy,” instead of following Washington’s lead. ......... the backdrop to Mr. Macron’s visit, as it was to the visit of Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in November, with both accompanied by businessmen eager to continue to do deals with China. ...... “E.U. claims to be a big center, a power center in the world, an independent power center in the world, as much as the United States, as much as China,” Mr. Fu said. “So why does it have to listen to the United States all the time?” .

Brooke Shields and the Curse of Great Beauty “Pretty Baby,” a new documentary on Hulu, explores the toll that sexual and commercial objectification takes on women....... Ms. Shields was a generational touchstone of the 1970s and ’80s, an omnipresent vision — in magazines, television ads and films — of astonishing natural beauty. Luminous deep-blue eyes under those famous dark brows, delicate features, dimpled smile and a glossy brunette mane. By the time she was a preteen, her look had developed — or rather, been groomed into — an improbable blend of Renaissance angel and vamp. ....... We use beautiful young women’s sexuality to sell products (including films); we conflate the women with the products; we imagine women need to be ever newer, younger and shinier — like products. As a result, we grow inured to seeing barely pubescent girls presented as “things,” as erotic commodities. (Driving the point home, the film features an old television ad for toys made in Ms. Shields’s likeness, with the tagline “Brooke Shields: She’s a real living doll.”) ....... The film offers many examples of the exploitation and abuse (including one outright sexual assault) suffered by Ms. Shields ........ a loving but troubled (and alcoholic) single mother, Teri Shields, who also served as her manager, and Ms. Shields understood early that her career provided the family’s sole income. ........ Ms. Shields’s uncannily adult persona remained as impeccable and serene as her appearance. But there is a static quality to her in these clips, a blankness suggesting the practiced deflection of disturbing emotion, as if being treated constantly as an object had nearly turned her into one. ......... Recounting the director Franco Zeffirelli’s attempts to extract from her, 16 and a virgin, a scene of erotic “ecstasy” in the film “Endless Love,” Ms. Shields recalls: “I just dissociated.” (Off camera, to try to simulate passion, Mr. Zeffirelli repeatedly twisted Ms. Shields’s toe, causing her to cry out and contort her face in pain.) In such moments, she says she was “zooming out, seeing a situation but you are not connected to it. You instantly become a vapor of yourself.” ......... Eventually Ms. Shields overcame this vaporous existence, largely through the saving grace of a college education. Encouraged by her professors at Princeton to voice her own opinions, Ms. Shields says she “learned I could think for myself,” which “morphed into this big rebellion.” ........... She set boundaries with her controlling mother, discovered her untapped talents for comedy and dance (with which she could break free of those beautiful blank-slate roles) and, for the first time, found a boyfriend. .........

the story of the terrible toll that sexual and commercial objectification takes on women

....... When Ms. Shields’s image is on the screen, it’s almost impossible to look away. It’s that magnetism that everyone wants to bottle and sell. It’s what launched her career. .



‘It Was Not Love at First Sight’ It took Samantha Weinstein and Philip Della Noce a few years to form a friendship, and another few more to become romantic......... “I got to Toronto, and the first person I called was Samantha,” Mr. Della Noce said. “We FaceTimed every single day.” .

U.S. Economy May Be Heading to a Place That Must Not Be Named A hard landing? A banana? Euphemisms for recession have a long history in Washington. Whatever the Fed is stating, it seems to be expecting something ugly, our columnist says. .

@dasha_navalnaya Пошли на аквадискотеку (?) #дашанавальная #навальный #navalny #dashanavalnaya #навальная #partygirl #parents ♬ how would they know bad girls club - Chris Gleason
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ChatGPT: Motorbike For The Mind (Take My Course)

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Friday, April 07, 2023

7: Putin

Putin’s Second Front The War in Ukraine Has Become a Battle for the Russian Psyche .......... Conforming to the regime and showing support for the “special operation” have now become almost essential to good citizenship. ....... a significant stratum of society—teachers, for example—are forced to participate in public acts of support, such as the patriotic lessons that are now mandatory in schools on Mondays. ........ the infamous case of the teacher who denounced a 13-year-old girl for drawing an antiwar picture: the girl’s father was arrested, and she was placed in an orphanage ........ the Kremlin has been fighting a second war in Russia itself, and this war is unlikely to go away even if the conflict in Ukraine becomes frozen. ....... The regime understands that by creating an atmosphere of hatred and mutual distrust, it can make part of society itself more intolerant of those who oppose Putin and the war. Whereas former Soviet heroes were people like Yuri Gagarin, who was the first to conquer space, now the examples of “heroic” behavior are by members of separatist formations or pro-war bloggers with a criminal past—such as the recently murdered blogger with the pseudonym Vladlen Tatarsky. The war has vaulted these people to the top and turned them into “heroes.” ........... Over the past decade, as his hyperauthoritarian model of government matured, Putin was able to awaken in the Russian public a demand for imperial greatness that had long lain dormant. ........ a qualitative leap in public sentiment came with Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. “That's it. We have become great again!” many thought. ......... An increasingly arbitrary justice system now hands down hefty prison sentences to dissenters, and a public culture of extrajudicial violence is being normalized by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner, the paramilitary contractor with close ties to the Kremlin. .......... the regime has proved adept at exporting goods to the east and importing contraband through, for instance, Turkey or some Central Asian countries. .......... Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin ...... when Russians are asked which politician they trust the most, Mishustin is now named more often than Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and is second only to Putin. ............. Sure, everyone understands that victory is the goal. But that goal has been pushed so far into the future that it has become as symbolic and distant as the final stage of communism was for several generations of Soviet people. ........ many feel the compulsion to stay in the social mainstream and go with the flow: this is what twentieth-century psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, writing about the social conditions that contributed to fascism, famously called “escape from freedom.” No one wants to be branded an outcast or enemy of the people. .... the ability of ordinary people to accept radically changed circumstances—as long as some elements of normal life can be maintained ........ ordinary Russians continue to show declining interest in events in Ukraine ........... 47 percent admitting that they were paying little or no attention to the war. .......... The Kremlin has conjured a pantheon of true defenders of the motherland, in which the medieval prince Alexander Nevsky, the sixteenth-century despot Ivan the Terrible, and Joseph Stalin sit side by side with the tenth-century Prince Vladimir, the seventeenth-century tsar Peter the Great, and Vladimir Putin. ..........

another path: inner emigration—opting out of the political process—is still an option for many people, as is actual exile.

.......... There appears to be no end to that status either—at least not before the end of Putinism. ........... He has mobilized a lot of people to support the war—in both the social and the military sense. No wonder he considers himself omnipotent. ........... Putin has managed to concentrate enormous power in his hands. But the more power he accumulates, the harder it will be for him to relax and hand over the reins. He cannot afford to liberalize the system or decrease his dictatorial authority. There is only one way left open to him: to cling to power until the bitter end. Putin is in the same position in which Stalin found himself at the start of the 1950s. It was in those late years that the Soviet dictator had to resort to absurd and irrational measures to shore up his power, from paranoid threats to his own closest companions to combating “rootless cosmopolitans” and supporting obscurantist theories in science. For this reason, Putin needs a permanent war with those he deems “foreign agents” and national enemies—his own “rootless cosmopolitans.” It is a war that has to be carried out at home and abroad, whether hot or cold, direct or hybrid. And Putin has to keep moving all the time: stopping is a luxury he cannot afford. ............... when a train has no brakes, it may crash into a wall. It might also simply run out of fuel and grind to a halt. For now, it is full steam ahead—to nowhere, because no one knows where it is going. That includes the driver. .



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7: Scott Galloway

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Thursday, April 06, 2023

6: Russia



Macron’s China Trip Is a Fool’s Errand Feeling the heat at home, the French president heads to China to ink some lucrative deals and pay lip service to Xi’s pledges of peace. .

Xi and Macron Call for Ukraine Peace Talks, but the Path Is Murky It is not clear that the Chinese and French leaders — much less Russia and Ukraine — have compatible terms for talks or peace, and Mr. Xi has not publicly agreed to pressure Moscow to negotiate. ....... Mr. Macron told Mr. Xi that he was counting on him “to bring Russia back to reason and everyone back to the negotiating table” on Ukraine. ........ He said that “together with France, we appeal for reason and restraint” in the conflict. China was seeking “a resumption of peace talks as soon as possible,” he said, and, in an apparent nod to Russian concerns over NATO’s expansion eastward, “a European security architecture that is balanced, effective and lasting.” ........... “a joint call with France for the international community,” he said that China “appeals for the protection of civilians. Nuclear weapons must not be used, and nuclear war must not be fought.” ......... There have been no known peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv since last April, and each side insists it has no interest in a cease-fire, setting preconditions that are anathema to the other. ......... Any halt in fighting, Mr. Zelensky has said, would simply solidify the Kremlin’s control of the area it has seized and reward its aggression. ............. If Ukrainian forces recapture enough occupied land in the south to reach the border of Crimea, Kyiv would be willing to discuss the status of the peninsula with Moscow ......... the only open question on Crimea was whether Russia left voluntarily or by force. ....... Western nations are wary that the war could drag on for years, or that losses on the ground could prompt Mr. Putin to escalate. ........ “President Xi reiterated his willingness to speak when conditions and the time are right” with Mr. Zelensky. ....... China and Russia declared they had a “no-limits” friendship last year, though a Chinese ambassador recently downplayed that statement. Mr. Xi said last month that Russia and China were together ushering in a “new era” that puts an end to what the two countries see as American dominance. ........... Mr. Macron is determined, in his words, to build “a strategic and global partnership with China.” ......... China, for its part, has embarked on a charm offensive toward France, and to some degree the 27-nation European Union, and offered Mr. Macron an elaborate and flattering reception — marching bands, a 21-gun salute, a review of troops and a long walk side by side with Mr. Xi on a red carpet leading into the vast building at the western edge of Tiananmen Square. Mr. Xi will spend at least six hours with Mr. Macron in Beijing and Guangzhou on Friday, treatment described by Western diplomats as exceptional and a clear statement of conciliatory intent. ........ The United States increasingly sees China as not only an economic and political rival but an adversary and a security threat, and has tried with mixed success to win its European allies over to that view. ...... Beijing would like to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe, a consistent theme during Mr. Macron’s visit. Mr. Xi, for example, said China supports Mr. Macron’s quest for European “strategic autonomy,” shorthand for some European distancing from the United States. .........

“China considers Europe to be an independent pole in a multipolar world,” Mr. Xi said.

......... he does not view America’s alliance with Europe as a defining feature of the continent in a 21st century that China seeks to shape. .......... “Playing up the ‘democracy vs. authoritarianism’ narrative and stoking a new Cold War will only bring division and confrontation to the world,” it said. ......... Europe’s hard-hit economy needs the Chinese market, and Europe provides major economic opportunities to China that are not readily available in Russia. ........ Mr. Xi borrowed some of the French president’s favorite phrases, speaking of changed “strategic architecture,” freed from “bloc confrontation,” and offering European “strategic autonomy.” ....... The hard part is knowing what all this means, how it might be applied, and what place the United States, France’s oldest ally, would have in such a world. .



Ivanka Trump Is Pained

See the rebirth of California’s ‘phantom’ Tulare Lake in striking before-and-after images A once-mighty body of water is rising again in Central California. ......... Tulare Lake was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River and was last full in 1878. It was mostly drained in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as its tributaries were dammed and diverted for agriculture.

This phantom lake in California is back with a vengeance Tulare Lake has filled and dried up at many points in history. But this time, towns and farms stand in the way. ...... Tulare Lake, a so-called phantom lake, once the largest freshwater body west of the Mississippi, is quickly reviving due to California’s extreme levels of precipitation. While an influx of water is a relief to many, easing the drought and refilling reservoirs, it spells disaster for other parts of the state. ...... Tulare Lake was once a permanent feature of San Joaquin Valley. It covered an estimated 790 square miles, creating a biodiverse wetlands ecosystem encompassing approximately 10 percent of California. In the late 1800s, settlers began diverting Tulare’s tributaries for agricultural purposes, incrementally drying the lake and exposing nutrient-rich soil. ....... Now, the lake-turned-farmland is one of the most important agricultural regions in the state and is home to hundreds of thousands of Californians. But as of March 31, current precipitation levels in Tulare Lake Basin exceed the wettest years on record, 1968 and 1969. Residents are already seeing vast amounts of water overwhelm their houses, barns, and fields–and it’s only just beginning. If current conditions keep up, says UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, this may be the worst flood for the Lake Tulare Basin yet. ....... Prior to water diversion, Tulare Lake was estimated to be about 37 feet deep. Shallow lakes evaporate much faster than deep lakes, owing to their larger surface area to volume ratio, allowing the sun to heat up and evaporate the water quickly. California’s hot, dry climate makes its phantom lakes especially ephemeral. ....... Tulare Lake was once a permanent feature of the San Joaquin valley. It’s a natural watershed for the Sierra Nevada and multiple rivers. Today, levees and dams limit the amount of water that can enter the Tulare Lake Basin. Although in the face of such an extreme influx of water, these systems can only do so much. .........

Despite the already significant flood issues, most of the water that will enter the Lake Tulare Basin hasn’t done so yet

............ Rain and snow create the flood, but rising temperatures intensify it. ....... This year, the Sierra Nevada snowpack is three times larger than normal and still growing. As of April 3, 2023, the estimated snowpack for the southern Sierras is 303 percent above average......... In the coming weeks, the Tulare Lake Basin and larger San Joaquin Valley will, unfortunately, experience deeper and more widespread flooding, potentially seeping into urban areas. ........ “There’s just that much water up in the mountains, it can’t go anywhere else, right?” he says, “…In the end, the water always wins.” ......... whatever water enters the basin sits there until it evaporates. An impermeable layer of clay underneath the former lake prevents most water from exiting through the ground. ........ In the last big flood event in 1982 and 1983, the second wettest years in recorded history, the lake did not fully disappear until 1985 ........ The San Joaquin valley has a long history of water wars, and there is no single entity with the authority to make these changes. Private landowners are responsible for many of these decisions.

How to pre-sell your online course .
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