A COSMOPOLITAN LAWYER: JUST SOME READINGS I HAVE ENJOYED LATELY

First, this blog replaces my previous blog, thecosmoplitanlawyerblogspot.com . Second, unlike that earlier blog, the present one is primarily meant as a record of my readings. It is not meant to suggest that others will be or should be interested in what I read. And third, in a sense, it is a public diary of one who is an alien in his own American culture. A person who feels at home just about anywhere, except in his birthplace . . . America.

Wednesday, May 31, 2017

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VIRGIL THOMSON ON MUSIC, ETC.

Virgil Thomson, Music Chronicles 1940-1954: The Musical Scene, The Art of Judging Music, Music Right and Left, Music Reviewed 1940-1954, Other Writings, edited by Tim Page (New York: Library of America, 2014) (From "The Intellectual Audience (I)": "Anyone who attended musical and other artistic events eclectically must notice that certain of these bring out an audience thickly sprinkled with what are called 'intellectuals' and that others do not. It is management and box offices that call these people intellectuals; persons belonging to that group rarely use the term. They are a numerous body in New York, however, and can be counted on to patronize certain entertainments. Their word-of-mouth communication has an influence, moreover, on public opinion. Their favor does not necessarily provoke mass patronage, but it does bring to the box office a considerable number of their own kind, and it does give to any show or artist receiving it some free advertising. The intellectual audience in any large city is fairly numerous, well organized, and vocal." " This group, that grants or withholds its favor without respect to paid advertising and that launches its ukases with no apparent motivation, consists of people from may social conditions. Its binding force is the book. It is a reading audience. Its members may have a musical ear or an eye for the visual art, and they may have neither. What they all have is some acquaintance with ideas. The intellectual world does not judge a work of art from the talent and skill embodied in it; only professionals judge that way. It seeks in art a clear connection with contemporary aesthetic and philosophic trends, as these are known through books and magazines. The intellectual audience is not a professional body; it is not a professors' conspiracy, either, not a publishers' conspiracy. Neither is it quite a readers' anarchy. Though it has no visible organization, it forms its own opinions and awards its own prizes in the form of free advertising, It is a very difficult group to maneuver or to push around." Id. at 786, 786.)

Virgil Thomson, The State of Music and Other Writings: The State of Music; Virgil Thomson; American Music Since 1910; Music with Words; Other Writings, edited by Tim Page (New York: Library of America, 2016).

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Alan Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2012) (From "Culture and Anxiety": "A society that embodies liberal values--that encourages economic ambition and emphasizes individual choice, that espouses the meritocratic route to social mobility and takes for granted the variability of our taste and allegiances--may be inimical to the values embodied in traditional liberal education. There is a tension between the self-assertion that a modern liberal society fosters and the humility required of someone who tries to immerse herself in the thoughts and sentiments of another writer or another culture; there is perhaps a greater tension still between the thought that some achievements in philosophy, art, or literature will stand for all time and the ambition to use those achievements as stepping-stones to something better. It may be a healthy tension rather than a simple contradiction; renewing the gentlemanly ideal celebrated in Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University in a liberal democracy perhaps requires us to live with such a tension, But this is something to be argued for rather than taken on trust." Id. at 63. "[T]he United States is the most productive country in the world [Note: China may have surpassed The United States.]; its popular culture is an attractive to other countries as its technical expertise in aeronautical engineering and computer software. It is neither an intellectually rigorous nor a culturally ambitious society, however; outside major metropolitan areas, there are few bookshops, the radio plays an unending diet of gospel or country-and-western music, and intellectual pretensions are not encouraged. The nation has prospered without inculcating in its young people the cultural and intellectual ambitious that French lycées and German gynmnasia inculcate in their students Why should it change now?" Id. at 66. Food for thought.).

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Monday, May 29, 2017

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MERKEL IS NOW THE LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD.

Merkel, After Discordant G-7 Meeting, Is Looking Past Trump

By ALISON SMALE and STEVEN ERLANGER

After President Trump declined to endorse NATO's doctrine of collective defense and the Paris climate pact, the German leader said Europe should "take our fate into our own hands."

Saturday, May 27, 2017

RUSSIA--BACKGROUND READINGS AS YOU PONDER WHETHER TRUMP IS PUTIN'S TREASONOUS BITCH

"History is the most cruel of all the goddesses. She drives her triumphal chariot over heaps of corpses, not only in war, but also in times of 'peaceful' economic development."--Karl Marx & Frederich Engels, Sochineniya.

Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, updated & expanded edition, translated from the Russian by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited and introduced by Roberta Reeder (Boston: Zephyr Press, 1997) (From "To the Defenders of Stalin"(1962): "There are those who shouted" 'Release / Barabbas for us on this feast," / Those who ordered Socrates to drink poison / In the bare, narrow prison. // They are the ones who should pour this drink / Into their own innocently slandering mouths, / Those sweet lovers of torture, / Experts in the manufacture of orphans." Id. at 763.).

Yevgenia Albats, The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia--Past, Present, and Future, translated from the Russian by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1994) ("I am not trying to say that Gorbachev was simply and utterly a creature of the KGB--that's just the kind of crude thinking that inevitably leads to formulations like 'Gorbachev is a KGB agent.'" "The story is more complex than that: it's about subtle timing and overlapping interests. Gorbachev suited the group within the oligarchy who were capable of seeing how close the Soviet Union was to economic collapse. That meant he suited the KGB as well. So, it was natural for the Committee to guide him through the bureaucratic maze. Of course, it was understood that Gorbachev would have to pay for this favor someday. Yes, he had debts . . ." "But the question of who chose Gorbachev for the role of reformer is finally less relevant than the fact that the reforms themselves were undertaken for the sake of salvaging the MIC, which meant the regime itself. The result was the greatest impoverishment, and ultimate destruction, of the rest of the country. But these reforms did not appear to threaten the security of either the MIC [military-industrial complex] or the KGB--and that's what was most important." "But one thing is certain: perestroika opened the way for the KGB to advance toward the very heart of power." Id. at 202-303. "The definitive book about the Soviet military-industrial complex . . . has yet to be written. What we do know is that as of December 1991, the Soviet MIC numbered 13.4 million people, including soldiers, officers, engineers, technicians, and designers who were kept occupied with an uninterrupted stream of work (not all of it productive) at hundreds of factories, closed towns, proving grounds, and testing ranges. This included an army nearly 4 million strong. In comparison, the U.S. armed forces numbered 2,133,000--about half as large . . . When the war against Fascism broke out in June 1941, in the year when the USSR was under the greatest threat, the Red Army had only 1,333,000 more people under arms than its successor did during the perestroika years, in peacetime--a peacetime in which Russians had a hard time getting enough to eat." "Each year, the MIC produced 1,700 tanks, 5,700 armored personnel carriers, and 1,850 units of field artillery--respectively, 2.3, 8.7, and 11.5 times as many as the U.S. In 1989, the USSR produced 3 times as many nuclear submarines as the U.S., 1.5 times as many destroyers, 15 times as many intercontinental missiles, and more than 6 times as many short-range intercontinental ballistic missile." "Needles to say, this cost quite a bit of money. The MIC's official budget, according to Gorbachev, was 96.5 billion rubles--more than a third of the Soviet Union's entire budget. But the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London disinclined to believe even Gorbachev's statistics . . . , suggests that the military expenditures of the soviet Unction reached 200-220 billion rubles, or almost half of its budget, in 1989. Soviet specialists estimate that in real costs, our expenditures on troops and armaments prior to 1972 were between 236 and 300 billion rubles a year. Thus the budget for the USSR Ministry of Defense, according to official figures, was approximately equal to the same total of expenditures for the subsidy of the national economy, science, social and cultural programs, maintenance of law enforcement agencies, clean of the Chernobyl diaper, and the program to save the endangered Aral Lake region." "No wonder the citizens of one of the richest countries in the world felt so poor." Id. at 188-189.).

Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (New York: Anchor Books/Random House, 2013) ( From Chapter 16, Reluctant Collaborators": "Some sang because they were afraid not to sing. But quite a few of them simply didn't listen to the words or weren't interested in them. Indeed, many of those who clapped at the leaders' speeches, or who mouthed slogans at meetings, or who marched in May Day parades did so with a certain odd ambivalence. Millions of people did not necessarily believe all of the slogans they read in the newspaper, but neither did they feel compelled to denounce those who were writing them. They did not necessarily believe that Stalin was an infallible leader, but they did not tear down his portraits. They did not necessarily believe that 'the party, the party, the party is always right,' but they did not stop singing those lyrics." "There isn't a straightforward explanation for why they did not resist more openly, though some may now think so. For the extraordinary achievement of Soviet communism--as conceived in the 1920s, perfected in the 1930s, and then spread across Eastern Europe after 1945--was the system's ability to get so many apolitical people in so many countries to play along without much protest. The devastation of the war, the exhaustion of its victims, the carefully targeted terror and ethnic cleansing--all of the element of Sovietization described earlier in this book--are part of the explanation. Both the memory of recent violence and the threat of future violence hovered constantly in the background. If one person in a group of twenty acquaintances was arrested, that might suffice to keep the other nineteen afraid. The secret police's informer network was ever present, and even when it wasn't people thought it might be. The unavoidable, repetitive propaganda in schools, in the media, on the street, and at all kinds of 'apolitical' meetings and events also made the slogans seem inevitable and the system unavoidable, What was the point of objecting?" Id. at 337-338. This is a good reminder of the importance of dissent and resistance in any would-be or actual authoritarian regime.).

Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003) ("Our failure in the West to understand the magnitude of what happened in the Soviet Union and central Europe does not, of course, have the same profound implications for our way of life as it does for theirs. Our tolerance for the odd 'Gulag denier' in our universities will not destroy the moral fabric of our society. The Cold War is over, after all, and there is no real intellectual or political force left in the communist parties of the West." "Nevertheless, if we do not start trying harder to remember, there will be consequences of us too. For one, our understanding of what is happening now in the former Soviet Union will go on being distorted by our misunderstanding of history. Again, if we really knew what Stalin did to the Chechens, and if we felt that was a terrible crime against the Chechen nation, it is not only Vladamir Putin who would be unable to do the same things to them now, but we also would be unable to sit back and watch with an equanimity. Nor did the Soviet Union's collapse inspire the same mobilization of Western forces as the end of the Second World War. When Nazi Germany finally fell, the rest of the West created both NATO and the European Community [Note: Both of which Trump is a critic, as is Putin his Best Friend Forever.]--in part to prevent Germany from ever breaking away from civilized 'morality' again. By contrast, it was not until September 11, 2001, that nations of the West seriously began rethinking their post-Cold War security policies, and then there were other motivations stronger then the need to bring Russia back into the civilization of the West." Id. at 575-576.).

Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (New York: Farrar, Struas & Giroux, 2010).

Daniel Beer, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars (New York: Knopf, 2017).

Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia:The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880-1930 (Ithaca & London: Cornell U. Press, 2008) (From the book jacket: "Renovating Russia is a richly comparative investigation of late imperial and early Soviet medicoscientific theories of moral and social order. Daniel Beer argues that in the late imperial years liberal psychiatrists, psychologists, and criminologists grappled with an intractable dilemma. They sought to renovate Russia, to forge a modern enlightened society governed by the rule of law, but they feared the backwardness, irrationality, and violent potential of the Russian masses. Situating their studies of degeneration, crime, mental illness, and crowd psychology in a pan-European context, Beer shows how liberals' fears of societal catastrophe were only heightened by the effects of industrial modernization and the rise of mass politics. In the wake of the orgy of violence that swept the Empire in the 1905 Revolution, these intellectual elites increasingly put their faith in coercive programs of scientific social engineering.")

Stephen Budiansky, Code Warriors: NSA's Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union (New York: Knopf, 2016).

Edward Hallett Carr, A History of Soviet Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923: Volume One (New York & London: Norton, 1950, 1985).

Edward Hallett Carr, A History of Soviet Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923: Volume Two (New York & London: Norton, 1952, 1985).

Edward Hallett Carr, A History of Soviet Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923: Volume Three (New York & London: Norton, 1953, 1985).

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from A Dead House, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Knopf, 2015).

Elaine Feinstein, Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova (New York; Knopf, 2006).

Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Viking, 1996) ("The Bolsheviks were not like any Western party. They were more like a ruling class, similar in many ways to nobility, with which Lenin himself often compared them. 'If 10,000 nobles could rule the whole of Russia--then why not us?' Lenin had once said. The comrades were indeed stepping into their shoes. Joining the party after 1917 was like joining the nobility. It brought preferment to bureaucratic posts, an elite status and privileges, and a personal share in the party-state. The ethos of the party dominated every aspect of public life in Soviet Russia just as the ethos of the aristocracy had dominated public life in tsarist Russia. Perhaps this corruption was bound to happen in a party like the Bolsheviks whose own state-building in the civil war rested on the mass recruitment of the lower classes. In a social revolution, such as this, one of the main motives for joining the party was bound to be the prospect of self-advancement. But the problem was intensified by the fact that the Bolsheviks in office, acted beyond any real control. It was, in effect, a clientele system, with powerful cliques and local networks of patronage and power beyond the control of any party organ in the capital. There was time when the Bolsheviks acted more like local mafia than the ruling party of the largest country in the world." Id. at 682-683. "Stalin always portrayed his revolution as a continuation of the Leninist tradition, the belief that the party vanguard's subjective will and energy could overcome all adverse objective contingency, as Lenin himself had argued during the October seizure of power." Id. at 815. "The state, however big, cannot make equal or better human being. All it can do is to treat its citizens equally, and strive to ensure that their free activities are directed towards the general good." Id. at 823-824.).

Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002).

Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014) ("But the Great Terror was more than a bloodletting among Bolsheviks. It was a complex series of repressions involving many different groups. The striking thing about it, compared to other waves of Soviet terror, is that such a high proportion of the victims were murdered. Of the 1.5 million people arrested by the secret police (and we do not have the figures for arrests by the regular police), 1.3 million were sentenced, and more than half of these (681,692 people) were executed by a firing squad for 'counter-revolutionary activities.' At the height of the Great Terror, between August 1937 and November 1938, on average 1,500 people were shot each day. The population of the Gulag labour camps meanwhile grew from 1.2 to 1.9 million, a figure which conceals at least 140,000 deaths within the camps themselves." Id, at 191. "From the 1930s, the Stalinist regime began to reverse its progressive policies towards the national minorities. . . . In the Soviet 'family of nations' the Russians were assigned the leading role. From 1938, learning Russian became compulsory in Soviet schools. It was the only language of the Red Army. Here was the start of a major shift in the revolution's ideology--from Soviet internationalism to Russian nationalism--which would gain momentum in the Second World War." Id. at 188-189. Russia First? "Informers were everywhere--in factories and offices, in public places and communal apartments. By the height of the Great Terror, millions of people were reporting on their colleagues, neighbors, friends. The level of surveillance varied widely between cities. In Moscow which was heavily policed, there was at least one informer for every six or seven families, according to a former NKVD official. In Kuibyshev the police claimed to have about 1,000 informers in a population of 400,000 people. These figures do not include the paid 'reliables' (factory and office workers, student activists, watchmen, caretakers, etc.) who acted as the eyes and ears of the police in every nook and cranny of society. Nor do they account for the everyday reporting and denunciation--unsolicited by the NKVD--which made the police state so powerful." Id. at 199. See something, say something? Putin did not deny Stalin's crimes. But he argued for the need not to dwell on them, to balance them against his achievements as the builder of the country's 'glorious Soviet past'. In a manual for history teachers commissioned by the President and heavily promoted in Russian schools, Stalin was portrayed as an 'effective manager; who acted rationally in conducting a campaign of terror to ensure the country's modernization." Id. at 295. In short, Putin's implied slogan is"Make Russia Great Again! Like it asunder Stalin." Sound familiar?).

Raymond L. Garthoff, Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary During the Cold War (Washington, DC: Georgetown U. Press, 2015) ("The lesson for intelligence, and for recipient use of intelligence, was that accurate information, while in general a good thing, can be wrongly interpreted." Id. at 31.).

Amanda Haight, Anna Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1976).

Jonathan Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015).

Ken Kalfus, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: A Novel (New York: Ecco, 2003).

Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, translated from the Russian by Nora Seligman Favorov (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2015).

V. O. Kliuchevsky, A Course in Russian History: The Seventeenth Century, translated from the Russian by Natalie Duddigton, introduction by Alfred J. Rieber (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968).

Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (New York: Penguin Press, 2014).

Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Knopf, 1993) ("The open hostility of Russia's Communist regime to 'capitalism,' and especially its denial of the right of private property, should have turned the Western business community into an uncompromising foe of Lenin's government. In fact, many of the pot-bellied, top-hatted capitalists of Soviet propaganda posters turned out to be remarkably friendly and cooperative. Western capitalists lost no sleep over the fate of their Russian brethen: they were quite prepared to make deals with the Soviet regime, leasing or buying at bargain prices the sequestered properties of Russian owners. No group promoted collaboration with Soviet Russia more assiduously and more effectively than the European and American business communities. [] When the first Soviet commercial missions arrived in Europe in the Summer of 1920 in quest of credits and technology, they were shunned by organized labor, but welcomed by big business. Hugo Stinnes, the head of the Union of German Industrialists and an early backer of Hitler, while hosting the Soviet delegation, declared that he was 'favorably disposed toward Russia and her experiments.' In France, the delegate was advised by a right-wing deputy not to rely on Communists and left-socialists: 'Tell Lenin that the best way to win France over to doing business with Russia is through the businessmen of France. They we are our only realists." Id. at 215. "Henry Ford, who manage to reconcile rabid anti-Communism and anti-Semitism with highly profitable commercial arrangements with the Soviet Union, also believed in the moral force of reality: 'facts will control' ideas, he asserted, unwittingly paraphrasing Marx's dictum that being determines consciousness. The more the Communists industrialized, he argued, the more decently they would behave because 'rightness in mechanics [and] rightness in morals are basically the same thing,'" Id. at 216. Beware of those who are in it principally for the bucks.).

Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime (History of Civilization) (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974) ("The theme of this book is the political system of Russia. It traces the growth of the Russian state from its beginnings in the ninth century to the end of the nineteenth, and the parallel developments of the principal social orders: peasantry, nobility, middle class and clergy. The question which it poses is why in Russia--unlike the rest of Europe to which Russia belongs by virtue of her location, race and religion--society has proven unable to impose on political authority any kind of effective restraints, After suggesting some answers to this problem, I go on to show how in Russia the opposition to the absolutism tended to assume the form of a struggle for ideals rather than for class interests, and how the imperial government, challenged in this manner, responded by devising administrative practices that clearly anticipate those of the modern police state. Unlike most historians who seek he roots of twentieth-century totalitarianism in western ideas, I look for them in Russian institutions. Although I do make occasional allusions to later events, my narrative largely terminates in the 1880s because . . . the ancien regime in the traditionally understood sense died a quiet death in Russia at that time, yielding to a bureaucratic-police regime which in effect has been in power there ever since." Id. at xxi.).

Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990) ("This book is the first attempt in any language to present a comprehensive view of the Russian Revolution, arguably the most important event of the [twentieth] century. There is no shortage of surveys of the subject, but they concentrate on the political and military struggle for power over Russia between 1917 and 1920. Seen from the perspective of time, however, the Russian Revolution was a great deal more than a contest for power in one country: what the victors in that contest had in mind was defined by one of its leading protagonists, Leon Trotsky, as no less that 'overturning the world.' By that was meant a complete redesign of state, society, economy, and culture all over the world for the ultimate purpose of creating a new human being.""These far-reaching implications of the Russian Revolution were not evident in 1917-18, in part because the West considered Russia to lie on the periphery of the civilized world and in part because the Revolution there occurred in the midst of a World War of unprecedented destructiveness. In 1917-18 it was believed by virtually all non-Russians that what had occurred in Russia was of exclusively local importance, irrelevant to them and in any event bound to settle down once peace had been restored. It turned out otherwise. The repercussions of the Russian Revolution would be felt in every corner of the globe for the rest of the century." Id. at xxi. "But even approached in a scholarly manner, the history of modern revolutions cannot be value-free . . . The reason is not far to seek. Post-1789 revolutions have raised the most fundamental ethical question: whether it is proper to destroy institutions built over centuries by trial and error, for the sake of ideal systems, whether one has the right to sacrifice the well-being and even the lives of one's own generation for the sake of generations yet unborn; whether man can be refashioned into a perfectly virtuous being. To ignore these questions raised already by Edmund Burke two centuries ago is to turn a blind eye to the passions that had inspired those who made and those who resisted revolutions, for post-1789 revolutionary struggles, in the final analysis, are not over politics but over theology." Id, at xxiii. [Query: Is this not this true of the American cultural war(s), if not civil war, of the past three-quarter century?] "Lenin's cultural equipment was exceedingly modest for a Russian intellectual of his generation. His writings show only a superficial familiarity with Russia's literary classics (Turgenev excepted), most of it apparently acquired in secondary school. [] This cultural poverty was yet another source of Lenin's strength as a revolutionary leader, for unlike better-educated intellectuals, he carried in his head no excess baggage of facts and ideas to act as a brake on his resolve. Like his mentor, Chernyshevskii, he dismissed differing opinions as 'twaddle' and refused even to consider them except as objects of ridicule. Inconvenient facts he ignored or reinterpreted to suit his purpose. If his opponent was wrong in anything, he was wrong in everything: he never conceded the opposing party any merit. His manner of debating was combative in the extreme: he thoroughly assimilated Marx's dictum that criticism 'is not a scalpel but a weapon. Its object is the enemy, [whom] it wishes not to refute but to destroy.' In this spirit, he used words like ammunition, to annihilate opponents, often by means of the crudest ad hominem assaults on their integrity and motives." Id. at 352-353. "The first step in the introduction of mass terror to Soviet Russia was the elimination of all legal restraint--indeed, of law itself--and its replacement by something labeled 'revolutionary conscience.' Nothing like this had ever happened anywhere: Soviet Russia was the first state in history formally to outlaw law. This measure freed the authorities to dispose of anyone they disliked and legitimized pogroms against their opposites." Id. at 796. By 1920, Soviet Russis had become a police state in the sense that the security police, virtually a state within a state, spread its tentacles to all Soviet institutions, including those that managed the economy." Id. at 829.).

Helen Rappaport, Beyond the Limit: Poems, translated from the Russian by Frances Padorr & Carol J. Avins (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U. Press, 1989).

Helen Rappaport, Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917--A World on the Edge (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2017).

Irina Ratushinskaya, Beyond the Limits: Poems, translated from the Russian by Frances Pador Brent & Carol J. Avins (Evanston, IL; Northwestern U. Press, 1987).

Irina Ratushinskaya, Fictions and Lies: A Novel, translated from the Russian by Alyona Kojevikova (London: John Murray, 1999).

Irina Ratushinskaya, Grey Is the Color of Hope, translated from the Russian by Alyona Kojevnikov (New York: Knopf, 1988) ("Years later, we were asked in one house in England: 'To what do you feel allegiance?' And we answered: 'To human rights.'" Id. at 311.).

Irina Ratushinskaya, In the Beginning: A Memoir, translated from the Russian by Alyona Kojevnikov (New York: Knopf, 1991) ("We are not going to let the authorities smear our names with their dirt. We protest, both of us. Here are our names and address. Of course, we were not the only ones to protest against Sakharov's exile to Gorky. But we joined their ranks, and took pride in it. We knew by that time that there is no demarcation between silent abstention and silent participation: there are times when both these positions are dishonorable." Id. at 144.).

Irina Ratushinskaya, Pencil Letter: Poems, translated from the Russian (New York: Knopf, 1989).

Roberta Reeder, Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).

Louis Sell, From Washington to Moscow: US-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the USSR (Durham & London: Duke U. Press, 2016).

Robert Service, Comrades!: A History of World Communism (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2007) ("Questions arose about the nature of the USSR. A fresh answer began to be offered in the last years before the Second World War. This was that the Soviet Union constituted a new kind of state. The word for it was 'totalitarian'. It had been coined by Benito Mussolini, who produced it to define the purposes for fascist Italy. It acquired currency in descriptions of Stalin's USSR and Hitler's Germany. Precise definitions were few on the ground until after 1945, but the general idea was widely agreed. What struck the minds of observers was the common imperatives of these three dictators to suppress political pluralism, quell criticism in the media and minimise the propagation of alternative ideologies. Due legal process was overthrown. The cult of the Leader was installed. A single party operated. A millenarian creed was poured into the minds of all citizens. Commands came down from on high without recourse to consultation with the lower levels of the political system or with the people. Associations of civil society were eliminated or emasculated. It was recognised that none of these three dictatorships fully achieved its objectives. Mussolini left the monarchy in place and signed a concordat with the Catholic Church. Hitler co-opted big business to his purposes without wholly eradicating its freedom. Stalin never liquidated the Orthodox Church or eradicated private profit form the economy. Totalitarianism failed to be comprehensively realised anywhere." Id. at 1580159.),

Robert Service, The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015) ("It steadily became evident, however, that the Cold War had acted as a brake on several chronic regional conflicts, and America's armed interventions in Afghanistan and the Middle East in the twenty-first century had untoward consequences that Washington had not anticipated. Islamic fundamentalism had harmed the USSR in Afghanistan. Now it was focused against the United States and its allies in other Moslem countries and beyond. International jihadist terrorism spread like a plague. At the same time, moreover, the US encountered a growing economic challenge around the world. China emerged as a great industrial power, and countries such as India, Brazil and Indonesia championed their own economic independence. The 'globalization' of financial operations, originally sponsored by US administrations had the effect of weakening America's primacy even further." Id. at 498-499. "It was Russia that became the more overt challenger to US policy. At first Putin accommodated America's wishes by facilitating it armed intervention in Afghanistan in 2001. But he and the Russian ruling group felt that they received too little in return. [] Putin turned his back on compromise. In 2007 he objected to George W. Bush's plan for a missile shield in Poland. He frequently intimidated Ukraine by cutting off the gas supply.. In2008 he invaded Georgia and maintained an occupying force in South Ossetia. From 2011 he stood up for Baathist leader Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war. In 2014 he intervened in the political tumult in Ukraine by annexing Crimea, The West reacted with economic sanctions as he proceeded too destabilize the situation in eastern Ukraine, where there is an ethnic Russian minority. The long truce between Russia and America was over, and Washington led the way in imposing sanctions against economic interests." "Was this the beginning of another cold war?" Id. at 499. Then Putin interfered in the America's 2016 presidential election, which Trump "won." And, quite mysteriously, not a word of criticism of Putin and Russia comes from Trump and his administration. Stay tuned.).

Robert Service, The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution (London: Macmillan, 2017).

Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard U. Press, 2000) ("Although neither Lenin nor his fellow party leaders saw in advance exactly what kind of state they would build, furthermore there was more than random chance about their activity in the early years of the October Revolution. The Leninists carried a set of operational assumptions into power with them. Their understanding of politics gave priority to dictatorship, class struggle, leadership and and revolutionary amoralism. [Stop there, and note that Trump's chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has characterized himself as a "Leninist".] The 'vanguard', they believed, knew what was best for the working class and should use its irrefutable knowledge of the world--past, present and future--to hasten the advent of the perfect society on earth. Lenin was not the originator of these assumptions. On the contrary, they were widespread and could be found in some form or other in Marxism, in mid-nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary terrorism and in Europe's other authoritarian revolutionary doctrines. There were traces of them in tradition of every greater longevity. Not for nothing was Leninism compared to the millenarianism of pre-Petrine Orthodox Christianity as well as to sixteenth-century Calvinism. But the point is that there was no inevitability about the recrudescence of such traditions after 1900. It took a Russian Marxist party. More particularly, it took a Lenin." Id. at 489. QUERY: Is Bannon-ism, presuming Steve Bannon is the "intellectual force behind Trump's administration, an attempt at an American authoritarian revolution?).

Robert Service, Spies and Commissars: The Early Years of the Russian Revolution (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012) ("The story of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 has been told a thousand times and usually the focus is on Russian events to the exclusion of the global situation. [] But this book is an attempt to see things in a different light. The early years of Bolshevik rule were marked by dynamic integration between Russian and the West. [] Looking at this interaction in detail reveals that revolutionary Russia---and its dealings with the world outside--was shaped not only by Lenin and Trotsky, but by an extraordinary miscellany of people: spies and commissars certainly, but also diplomats, reporters and unofficial intermediaries, as well as intellectuals, opportunistic businessmen and casual travelers, This is their story as much as it is the story of 'October'." Id. at 1. "Bertrand Russell's book The Theory and Practice of Bolshevism described a similar reaction: 'I went to Russia a communist, but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.' Russell had done his homework and peppered his conversation with Lenin with awkward questions. He interpreted Bolshevism as a secular religion." Id. at 278. "True believers", be they religious or not, on the left or rights, rich or poor, etc., inflict a lot of misery on others when they have no doubt about their creeds and, then, begin to believe ends justify means.).

Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard U. Press, 2005) ("Stalin's mind was a stopped clock. There was no chance in 1945 that he would satisfy popular yearnings for reform. His assumptions about policy had hardened like stalactites. He knew what he was doing. If he had relaxed his regime, he would have imperiled his personal supremacy. This consideration counted more for him than evidence that his mode of rule undermined the objective of durable economic competitiveness and political dynamism, Stalin thought strictly within the frame of his worldview and operational assumptions. The habits of despotism had anaesthetised him to human suffering. The man who digested a daily melted of facts disregarded information he found uncongenial." Id. at 491).

Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard U. Press, 2009) ("The task of Marxists, he believed, was to expose the iniquities of nationalism and religion. He put himself forward as a socialist, an internationalist and an atheist." Id. at 200.).
Douglas Smith, Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016).

Tom Stoppard, Salvage (The Coast of Utopia, Part 1II) (New York: Grove Press, 2002).

Tom Stoppard, Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, Part 1I) (New York: Grove Press, 2002).

Tom Stoppard, Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, Part 1) (New York: Grove Press, 2002).

George Vernadsky, A History of Russia , 6th rev'd. ed. (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1969) (From serfs and slaves, to only serfs in name but slaves in fact: "In the 17th century the holders of the pomestie estates were chiefly military agents of the government. In the 18th century, on the other hand, the landowning noble considered themselves primarily the economic and financial agents of the government. They also bore administrative responsibilities. In the words of a government official of the beginning of the 19th century, each landowner was a 'free policeman.' In particular the landowners were responsible for supplying recruits to the army from their estates. These functions explain to a considerable degree the government's encouragement of the growth of the landowners' authority over the peasants in the 1700's. The institution of serfdom in the 18th century was completely different from what it had been in the 17th century, when it merely consistent in fixing the peasant to the soil but not to the person of the landowner. As we have seen, this policy toward the peasants was motivated by the needs of the state. Peter the great, even more than his producers, stressed the importance to the state of the institution of serfdom. But beginning with his reign, serfdom was rapidly transformed into slavery. The peasants came bound not to the land but to the landowner. One of the reason for this was the merging of the serfs and the slaves into one social category. We have seen about that in Moscow state there were both serfs and slaves; the latter had no juridical identity and were regarded not as individuals but as chattels, For considerations of fiscal policy, Peter ordered that in drawing up the head tax, slaves were to be listed as serfs. From the legal point of view, slavery was now abolished. Actually, however, the position of the serfs deteriorated since they now were treated as slaves in many respects. The proprietors paid the tax for both, and thus, first in practice and later by llegislation, received complete authority over both groups. In the mid-18th century the nobleman received the right to punish their serfs and to exile them to Siberia, and they also acquired the right to sell serfs. [] Although the laws provided that the noblemen should not misuse the power of punishment, the serfs were completely defenseless." Id. at 174-175.) QUERY: Is not the following passage--with some minor tweaking--applicable today? If so, has the world been marching in place for fifty years? "The crucial task facing humanity is to reach the stage of world cooperation and co-adjustment. The present shaky co-existence is constantly threatened by forces of destruction of every possible kind--conflicting ideologies, economic rivalries, tense nationalism, psychological instability, and ethical confusion in the changing world. The Damocles' sword of atomic catastrophe hangs over mankind, and there are threats of local wars all over the world, each potentially able to kindle a world conflagration. To prevent it, all nations and their leaders mist wholeheartedly strive for the victory of the forces of cohesion and stability over those of disruption. Since the United States and the Soviet Union play such prominent roles in today's world affairs, on their shoulders lies the main burden of responsibilities for the survival of mankind." Id. at 484.").

AM JOY 5/27/17 NSA Chief Admits Donald Trump COLLUED WİTH RUSSİA

Friday, May 26, 2017

Mika: 'What Stephen Miller Said Should Worry Everyone' | Morning Joe | M...

Bernie Sanders Interrogates Mick Mulvaney on Trump's Budget

TRUMP IS AN INFANT

Reports that President Trump betrayed an intelligence source reveal the dangerousness of an immature man.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

When the World Is Led by a Child

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: May 15, 2017

Reports that President Trump betrayed an intelligence source reveal the dangerousness of an immature man.

Thursday, May 25, 2017

READING WALTER BENJAMIN

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated from the German by Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German Volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/ Harvard U. Press, 1999).

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, translated from the German by Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2006).

Walter Benjamin, Radio Benjamin, edited by Lecia Rosenthal, translated from the German by Jonathan Lutes with Lisa Harries Scchumann & Diana K. Reese (London & New York: Verso, 2014).

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

40 Shady Things We Now Know About Trump and Russia | The Resistance with...

QUOTATION OF THE DAY--FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"Frequently, people who go along a treasonous path do not know they are on a treasonous path until it is too late."

John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, testifying before the House Intelligence Committee about his concerns regarding Russian interference in last year's presidential election.

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

So, What About Those Oval Office Tapes? | The Resistance with Keith Olbe...

Sunday, May 21, 2017

COSMIC EVOLUTION

Loren Eiseley, Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos, Volume One: The Immense Journey; The Firmament of Time; The Unexpected Universe; Uncollected Prose, edited by William Cronon (New York: Library of America, 2016) (From The Lost Notebooks: "Every one of us is a hidden child. We are hidden in our beginnings--in the vagaries of the genetic cards that have been dealt out to us by nature; we are hidden in the episodes of our individual lives, environments, events unduplicable that have aided or ineradicably scarred us. We manhole come form poverty or riches,but ironically this tells us another either, for on occasion it ma be the rich child who has suffered trauma and the poor now who has achieved insight,and balance. It is not always so, nor do I give this last as a nostrum or a desirable ripe for success. I merely say to begin with that life is infinitely complex and hidden. We share together some elements of a complicated culture and a language, which, while common to all of us,whispers t to each of us secret meanings, depending upon the live we have led. Our diverging roads begin before birth and intensify afterwards." Id. at 435, 451-452. "No, it is not because I am filled with obscure guilt that I step gently over, and not upon, an autumn cricket. It is not because of guilt that I refuse to shoot the last osprey from her nest in the tide marsh. I possess empathy; I have grown with man in his mind's growing. I share that sympathy and compassion which extends beyond the barriers of class and race and form until it partakes of the universal whole. I am not ashamed to profess this emotion, nor will I call it a pathology. Only through this experience many time repeated and enhanced does man become truly human. Only then will his gun arm be forever lowered. I pray that it may sometime be so." Id. at 454.).

Loren Eiseley, Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos, Volume Two: The Invisible Pyramid; The Night Country; Essay from The Star Thrower, edited by William Cronon (New York: Library of America, 2016) (From "The Lethal Factor": "he past century's seen such great accession of knowledge in relation to these natural events, as well as a growing consciousness of man's exposure to similar dangers, that there is an increasing tendency to speculate upon our own possibilities for survival. The great life web which man has increasingly plucked with an abruptness unusual in nature shows signs of 'violence in the return,' to use a phrase of Francis Bacon's. The juvenile optimism about progress which characterized our first scientific years was beginning early in this [twentieth] century to be replaced by doubts which the widely circulated Decline of the zest by Oswald Spengler documents only too well. As the poet J. C. Squire says, we can turn 'the great wheel backward until Troy unburn / . . . and seven Troys below / Rise out of death and dwindle . . .' We can go down through the layers of dead cities until the gold become stone, until the jewels become shells, until the place is a hovel, until the hovel becomes a heap of gnawed bones." "Are the comparisons valid? The historians differ> Is there hope? A babble of conflicting voices confuses us Are we safe? On this point I am sure that every person of cultivation and intelligence would answer with a resounding 'No!' Spengler--not the optimist--was right in prophesying that this [twentieth] century would be one marked by the rise of dictators, great wars, and augmented racial troubles. Whether he was also right in foreseeing this [twentieth] century as the onsetting winter of Western civilization is a more difficult problem." Id. at 415, 417. QUERY: Are not these concerns more pressing now, in the twenty-first century? Are we not seeing the rise of authoritarian rulers, racial and ethnic animosity? Is not winter coming to Western Civilization?).

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, introduction by Richard Keynes (London; The Folio Society, 2006).

Michael McCarthy, The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (New York: New York Review Book Classics, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Arguing that neither sustainable development nor ecosystem services have provided adequate defense against pollution, habitat destruction, species degradation, and climate change, McCarthy asks us to consider nature as an intrinsic good and an emotional and spiritual resource, capable of inspiring joy, wonder, and even love." Also, see Andrea Wulf, "Saving nature, for the Joy of It." NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/23/2016.).

Saturday, May 20, 2017

george carlin hit the nail on the head back in 2005,fascism.mp4

Friday, May 19, 2017

THE NABOKOVS

Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Vera, edited and translated by Olga Voronina & Brian Boyd (New York: Knopf, 2015).

Stacy Schiff, Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage (New York: Random House, 1999).

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Suggested Fiction

Eimear McBride, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2014).

Eimaer McBride, The Lesser Bohemians (London & New York: Hogarth, 2016) (See Jeanette Winterson, "Interiorty Complex," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/23/2016.).

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Wolf Blitzer 5/16/17 :Trump Aksed Comey To End Flynn Probe

What’s Happening in Donald Trump’s Head? | The Resistance with Keith Olb...

FICTION TO READ TO AVOID GRADING EXAMS

Minae Mizumura, Inheritance from Mother: A Novel, translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter (New York: Other Press, , 2013).

Viet Than Nguyen, The Refugees (New York: Grove Press, 2017).

John Preston, The Dig (New York: Viking/Penguin Books, 2007).

Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2016).

Rupert Thomson, The Insult: A Novel (New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard/Vintage Books, 1996).

Rupert Thomson, Secrecy: A Novel (New York: Other Press, 2013).

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2016).

Friday, May 12, 2017

Shields and Ponnuru on James Comey firing fallout

Laurence Tribe: A Series Of High Crimes And Misdemeanors | The Last Word...

Mika On White House Spectacle: ‘It’s Politics Porn’ | Morning Joe | MSNBC

ALBERT MURRAY, MAY 12, 1916 to AUGUST 18, 2013: LIBRARY OF AMERICA

Albert Murray, Collected Essays and Memoirs: The Omni Americans; South to a Very Old Place; The Hero and the Blues; Stomping the Blues; The Blue Devils of Nadal; From the Briarpatch File; Other Writings, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. & Paul Devlin (New York: Library of American. 2016).

Thursday, May 11, 2017

We Need the Help of Intel Agencies Around the World | The Resistance wit...

JOHNSON'S LIVES OF THE POETS

Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on Their Works: Volume I, with an Introduction and Notes by Roger Lonsdale (New York & London: Clarendon Press/Oxford U. Press, 2006).

Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on Their Works: Volume II, with an Introduction and Notes by Roger Lonsdale (New York & London: Clarendon Press/Oxford U. Press, 2006).

Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on Their Works: Volume III, with an Introduction and Notes by Roger Lonsdale (New York & London: Clarendon Press/Oxford U. Press, 2006).

Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on Their Works: Volume IV, with an Introduction and Notes by Roger Lonsdale (New York & London: Clarendon Press/Oxford U. Press, 2006).

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

On Russia, Let’s Follow the Money | The Resistance with Keith Olbermann ...

Monday, May 8, 2017

Sally Yates is an American Hero

Ivanka Trump’s New Book: Offensively Frivolous | AM Joy | MSNBC

MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO

[Marcus Tullius Cicero], Cicero I: Rhetoric Ad Herennium (Loeb Classical Library 403), translated by Harry Caplan (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1954).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero II: On Invention; Best Kind of Orator; Topics (Loeb Classical Library 386), translated by H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1949).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero III: On the Orator, Books 1-2 (Loeb Classical Library 348), translated by E. W. Sutton; completed, with an introduction by H. Rackham (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1942, 1948).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero IV: On the Orator, Book 3; On Fate; Stoic Paradoxes; Divisions of Oratory (Loeb Classical Library 349), translated by H. Rackham (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1942).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero V: Brutus; Orator (Loeb Classical Library 342), translated by G. L. Hendrickson & H. M. Hubbell, respectively (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1939, 1963).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero VI: Orations: Pro Publio Quinctio; Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino; Pro Quinto Roscio Comoedo; De Lege Agraria (Loeb Classical Library 240), translated by John Henry Freese (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1930).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero VII: The Verrine Orations, Volume I (Loeb Classical Library 221), translated by L. H. G. Greenwood (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1928).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero VIII: The Verrine Orations, Volume II (Loeb Classical Library 293), translated by L. H. G. Greenwood (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1935).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero IX: Orations: Pro Lege Manila; Pro Caecina; Pro Cluentio; Pro Rabirio Perduellionis Reo (Loeb Classical Library 198), translated by H. Grose Hodge (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1927).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero X: Orations: In Catilinam 1-4; Pro Murena; Pro Sulla; Pro Flacco (Loeb Classical Library 324), translated by C. Macdonald (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1977).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XI: Orations: Pro Archia; Post Reditum In Senatu; De Domo Sua; De Haruspicum; Responses; Pro Plancio (Loeb Classical Library 158), translated by N. H. Watts (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1923).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XII: Orations: Pro Sestio; In Vatinium (Loeb Classical Library 309), translated by R. Gardner (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1958).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XIII: Orations: Pro Callio; De Provinctis Consularibus; Pro Balbo (Loeb Classical Library 447), translated by R. Gardner (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1958).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XIV: Orations: Pro Milone; In Pisonem; Pro Scauro; Pro Fonteio; Pro Rabirio Postumo; Pro Marcello; Pro Ligario; Pro Rege Deiotaro (Loeb Classical Library 252), translated by N. H. Watts (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1931, 1953).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XVa: Orations: Philippics 1-6 (Loeb Classical Library 189), edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey, revised by John T. Ramsey & Gesine Manuwald (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2009).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XVb: Orations: Philippics 7-14 (Loeb Classical Library 507), edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey, revised by John T. Ramsey & Gesine Manuwald (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2009).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XVI: On the Republic; On the Laws (Loeb Classical Library 213), translated by Clinton Walker Keyes (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1928).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XVII: On Ends (Loeb Classical Library 40), translated by H. Rackham (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1914, 1931).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XVIII: Tusculan Disputations (Loeb Classical Library 141), translated by J. E. King (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1927, 1945).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XIX: On the nature of the Gods:Academics (Loeb Classical Library 268), translated by H. Rackham (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1933, 1951).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XX: On Old Age; O Friendship; On Divination (Loeb Classical Library 154), translated by William Armistead Falconer (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1923).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XXI: On Duties (Loeb Classical Library 30), translated by William Armistead Falconer (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1913).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XXII: Letters to Atticus, Volume I (Loeb Classical Library 7), edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1999).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XXIII: Letters to Atticus, Volume II (Loeb Classical Library 8), edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1999).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XXIV: Letters to Atticus, Volume III (Loeb Classical Library 97), edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1999).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XXV: Letters to Friends, Volume I (Loeb Classical Library 205), edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2001).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XXVI: Letters to Friends, Volume II (Loeb Classical Library 216), edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2001).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XXVII: Letters to Friends, Volume III (Loeb Classical Library 230), edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2001).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XXVIII: Letters to Quintus and Brutus; Letter Fragments; Letters to Octavian; Invectives; Handbook of Electioneering (Loeb Classical Library 462), edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1972, 2002).

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero XXIX: Letters to Atticus, Volume IV (Loeb Classical Library 491), edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1999).

Friday, May 5, 2017

Andrew Jackson Biographer Fact Checks President Trump's Civil War Remark...

Is a Grand Jury Now Looking into Trump? | The Resistance with Keith Olbe...

"UGLY AMERICAN"

From Wikipedia: " 'Ugly American' is a pejorative term used to refer to perceptions of loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant, and ethnocentric behavior of American citizens mainly abroad, but also at home.. Although the term is usually associated with or applied to travelers and tourists, it also applies to U.S. corporate businesses in the international arena."

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Why Won’t the Press Ask Trump Anything? | The Resistance with Keith Olbe...

'How Donald Trump Could Get Fired': The 25th Amendment | The Last Word |...

The Struggles Of Speaking For The White House | Morning Joe | MSNBC

Hillary Clinton: The One That Got Away: The Daily Show

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Trump is Panicking About Russia | The Resistance with Keith Olbermann | GQ

This Monologue Goes Out To You, Mr. President

Lawrence On What President Donald Trump's Civil War Comments Reveal | Th...

THE IRISH VERSION OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Michael Brown, The Irish Enlightenment (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2016)
("[T]he central philosophical assumption underpinning the rationalist movement inside European Enlightenment: that man was a moral agent, and that the good life could be discerned by his intelligence." Id. at 59."The term 'Enlightenment' identifies a crucial change in the understanding of the world. It is both a movement and an idea. . . . In the first sense it is sometimes used as a shorthand term for progressive eighteenth-century thought; and this leads to a form of social history. Used in the second sense, the Enlightenment as a philosophical category has involved defining it through reference to a set of progressive principles such as toleration, cosmopolitanism, or democracy. But rather than try to maintain that certain political, philosophical, or religious tenets constitute a definition, the Enlightenment is perhaps better conceived of as an idea with various applications. It offers a method of approach to the universe; a means, not a set of preordained ends." Id. at 7. "This book offers a narrative of the Irish Enlightenment." Id. at 10. "[I]t is the central contention of this book that the Irish Enlightenment was characterized by a concern for the issue of confession, by which is meant the public articulation of faith. If the Scottish Enlightenment was prompted by the parliamentary Union of 1707 with England, and the resultant decay in the possibility of enacting civic virtue, and the American Enlightenment was concerned with issues of dependency, the Irish focus was on how to allow a variety of contending faith communities to worship freely. The Irish Enlightenment engaged in an extended debate about which faith or faiths were sufficiently civil as to be permitted to publicly engage in religious, social, and political discourse. The question at stake was less who was Irish--a nineteenth-century question--than who was enlightened. Who could be trusted teenage impartially in the convention at the common good, and who was excluded as a result of preexisting religious (or atheist) convictions, The ambitions amongst all the literati . . . was to answer this question in either a restrictive of expansive fashion and to thereby create a stable basis for civil society on the island(here intended to imply both he modern sense of the term as a community of apolitical actors, and in its early-modern sense encompassing what is not thought of as society and the state). Thus book tracks precisely the rise and fall of that debate--as the community moved away form the religious conflict at the end of the seventeenth century; as a vision of cross-confessional society became a practical, if limited, reality; and as the question of inclusion of Catholics and dissenters in an explicitly Anglican state fractured and eventually destroyed the possibility of sustaining a civilized discussion, The net result of this fracture was the civil unrest of 1798." Id. at 11. Sound familiar?).

Monday, May 1, 2017

Trump’s New War on Free Speech

The Finnish Trump Sketch 2017 (eng-sub)

Ivanka Trump Watches Father Butcher Women’s Rights | AM Joy | MSNBC

100 days that changed America

Ivanka Trump, Against All Odds, Is Probably a Rude Bigot

JUDGE TRUMP BY THE FRIENDS HE MAKE.

POLITICS

Trump’s ‘Very Friendly’ Talk With Duterte Stuns Aides and Critics Alike

By MARK LANDLERAPRIL 30, 2017

President Trump speaking at a campaign-style rally on Saturday in Harrisburg, Pa. CreditAl Drago/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — When President Trump called President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines on Saturday, White House officials saw it as part of a routine diplomatic outreach to Southeast Asian leaders. Mr. Trump, characteristically, had his own ideas.

During their “very friendly conversation,” the administration said in a late-night statement, Mr. Trump invited Mr. Duterte, an authoritarian leader accused of ordering extrajudicial killings of drug suspects in the Philippines, to visit him at the White House.

Now, the administration is bracing for an avalanche of criticism from human rights groups. Two senior officials said they expected the State Department and the National Security Council, both of which were caught off guard by the invitation, to raise objections internally.

The White House disclosed the news on a day when Mr. Trump fired up his supporters at a campaign-style rally in Harrisburg, Pa. The timing of the announcement — after a speech that was a grievance-filled jeremiad — encapsulated this president after 100 days in office: still ready to say and do things that leave people, even on his staff, slack-jawed.

“By essentially endorsing Duterte’s murderous war on drugs, Trump is now morally complicit in future killings,” said John Sifton, the Asia advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. “Although the traits of his personality likely make it impossible, Trump should be ashamed of himself.”

Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on Twitter, “We are watching in real time as the American human rights bully pulpit disintegrates into ash.”

Administration officials said the call to Mr. Duterte was one of several to Southeast Asian leaders that the White House arranged after picking up signs that the leaders felt neglected because of Mr. Trump’s intense focus on China, Japan and tensions over North Korea. On Sunday, Mr. Trump spoke to the prime ministers of Singapore and Thailand; both got White House invitations.

Mr. Duterte’s toxic reputation had already given pause to some in the White House. The Philippines is set to host a summit meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in November, and officials said there had been a brief debate about whether Mr. Trump should attend.

It is not even clear, given the accusations of human rights abuses against him, that Mr. Duterte would be granted a visa to the United States were he not a head of state, according to human rights advocates.

Still, Mr. Trump’s affinity for Mr. Duterte, and other strongmen as well, is firmly established. Both presidents are populist insurgent leaders with a penchant for making inflammatory statements. Both ran for office calling for a wholesale crackdown on Islamist militancy and the drug trade. And both display impatience with the courts.

After Mr. Trump was elected, Mr. Duterte called to congratulate him. Later, the Philippine leader issued a statement saying that the president-elect had wished him well in his antidrug campaign, which has resulted in the deaths of several thousand people suspected of using or selling narcotics, as well as others who may have had no involvement with drugs.

Mr. Trump’s cultivation of Mr. Duterte has a strategic rationale, officials said. Mr. Duterte has pivoted away from the United States, a longtime treaty ally, and toward China. The alienation deepened after he referred to President Barack Obama as a “son of a whore” when he was asked how he would react if Mr. Obama raised human rights concerns with him.

In October, Mr. Duterte called for a “separation” between the Philippines and the United States. “America has lost now,” he told an audience of business executives in Beijing. “I’ve realigned myself in your ideological flow.” He later threatened to rip up an agreement that allows American troops to visit the Philippines.

Administration officials said Mr. Trump wanted to mend the alliance with the Philippines as a bulwark against China’s expansionism in the South China Sea. The Philippines has clashed with China over disputed reefs and shoals in the waterway, which the two countries share.

Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, drew a connection between a visit by Mr. Duterte and the tensions with North Korea. Building solidarity throughout Asia, he said on ABC’s “This Week,” is needed to pressure North Korea on its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

Experts said that argument was tenuous, however, noting that it was more important to corral a country like Malaysia, where North Koreans hold meetings to buy or sell weapons-related technology.

Mr. Trump has a commercial connection to the Philippines: His name is stamped on a $150 million, 57-floor tower in Manila, a licensing deal that netted his company millions of dollars. Mr. Duterte appointed the chairman of the company developing the tower, Jose E. B. Antonio, as an envoy to Washington for trade, investment and economic affairs.

Certainly, the two leaders have similar agendas. Mr. Duterte is battling Islamist extremists who have terrorized the southern islands of the Philippine archipelago. He once declared that if he were presented with a terrorism suspect, “give me salt and vinegar and I’ll eat his liver.”

They are also in tune on the need for a crackdown on drugs, even if Mr. Trump is not advocating Mr. Duterte’s brutal methods. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has revived the language of the “war on drugs,” which the Obama administration shunned as part of its policy to reduce lengthy prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.

Mr. Trump has drawn the line with one autocrat: President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whose chemical weapons strike on his own people prompted the American president to order a Tomahawk missile strike on a Syrian airfield.

But Mr. Trump’s affinity for strongmen is instinctive and longstanding. He recently called to congratulate President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey on his victory in a much-disputed referendum expanding his powers, which some critics painted as a death knell for Turkish democracy.

At his rally in Harrisburg, Mr. Trump went after many of the targets he vilified during the campaign: the news media, Democrats, immigrants. But he reversed course on one — China — and the reason may be that he met recently with China’s president, Xi Jinping, in Palm Beach, Fla.

At home, Mr. Xi is cracking down on dissent and consolidating his power. But Mr. Trump has enlisted Mr. Xi to pressure China’s neighbor, North Korea, and is giving him the benefit of the doubt. “I honestly believe he’s trying very hard,” Mr. Trump told the crowd. “He’s a good man.”

Mr. Trump credited his relationship with Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, as a factor in obtaining the release of an Egyptian-American aid worker, Aya Hijazi, who had been detained there. Mr. Trump played host at the White House to Mr. Sisi, who had not been granted an invitation since he seized power in a military coup nearly four years ago.

Then there is, of course, Mr. Trump’s vow during the campaign to pursue a warmer relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. That effort has faltered somewhat because of persistent questions about links between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.

Even Mr. Trump’s prime antagonist — the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un — has earned a surprisingly generous assessment from the president in recent days. Speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Mr. Trump expressed admiration that Mr. Kim had been able to keep a grip on power.

“A lot of people, I’m sure, tried to take that power away, whether it was his uncle or anybody else,” Mr. Trump said. “And he was able to do it. So, obviously, he’s a pretty smart cookie.”