Showing posts with label alexei navalny. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alexei navalny. Show all posts

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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Friday, March 03, 2023

3: Navalny

As Heat Pumps Go Mainstream, a Big Question: Can They Handle Real Cold? . An electric heat pump is an all-in-one heating and cooling unit, essentially an air-conditioner that runs in two directions. ........ Heat pumps, in contrast, don’t generate heat. They transfer it. That allows them to achieve more than 300 percent efficiency in some cases. ........ a federal tax credit from last year’s climate and tax law can cover 30 percent of the costs of purchase and installation, up to $2,000. .

And Child Care for All Earlier in the pandemic, the federal government did more to help parents than it ever did before. Washington temporarily mandated paid leave for many workers, it gave billions of dollars in aid to child care businesses, and for several glorious months in 2021, it even expanded the child tax credit to provide assistance to most families with children. .

The Era of Shutting Others Out of New York’s Suburbs Is Ending . For much of the 20th century, towns surrounding New York City used a stomach-churning mix of racial covenants and restrictive zoning laws to shut out Black Americans and others considered undesirable from thriving suburbs. The federal government supported this system in myriad ways, including by denying government backing for mortgage loans in Black neighborhoods, a practice known as redlining, which hardened segregation and sharply restricted the ability of Black Americans to secure mortgages and buy homes. After World War II, the government greatly expanded its role in residential segregation by backing large suburban developments across the United States like Levittown, on Long Island, on the condition that they exclude Black buyers. ........ more than half of renters in New York City and its suburbs are paying one-third or more of their income on rent......... The proposal would also require New York City and its suburbs to rezone areas immediately surrounding subway and commuter rail stations to allow for greater housing density. ...... In suburban New York, local zoning control is king and has been used to jealously guard access to some of the best public amenities in the United States, including public services, swimming pools, beaches and especially schools. ......... The Nassau County executive, Bruce Blakeman, in an interview with Politico warned of a “suburban uprising.” .

The Brave Man Whom Putin Wants to Kill Aleksei Navalny, Russia’s leading dissident and opposition leader, may be something of a Mandela of our age. Poisoned, imprisoned, brutalized, Navalny stands unbroken in his cell: still mocking Putin and scathing in his denunciation of the invasion of Ukraine. ....... his 21-year-old daughter, Dasha Navalnaya (the feminine form of the family name). She’s a junior at Stanford University, and while navigating exams and term papers, she is also campaigning for her dad and promoting a superb documentary about him, “Navalny.” It won the award for best documentary this month at the British Academy Film Awards. .......... “I sort of perceive the documentary as this ‘get out of death’ card,” she told me in flawless, lightly accented English. “The more awareness that we create, the less Putin and his posse would be tempted to kill my dad.” ......... “He is sort of living vicariously through me, through a college experience in America, which is very fun for him,” she said wistfully. ......... Navalny today seems so committed to democratic and European values that he is risking his life for them.



Big Money, Big Houses and Big Problems in Brooklyn Heights In Jenny Jackson’s debut novel, “Pineapple Street,” readers get a tour of a world they might learn not to envy by the end of the book. .

For Thomas Mann, the World’s Chaos Is Inside the House A newly translated story by the German master explores a father’s feelings for his children in a time of fierce social change. ....... “When a man has six children, he can’t love them all equally,” Mann claimed. ....... While the family in the story, like the Manns themselves, has not been made destitute by the nation’s collapsing currency, it takes planning and ingenuity to procure even the most basic groceries. ........... The story is also set in a time of fierce social change, during which the two eldest Mann children began to fascinate their father. They dressed as they pleased, said whatever they liked and slept with anyone who struck their fancy. In a letter, their father made his jealousy of their freedom clear: “Why should you be the only ones who constantly sin?” .

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Saturday, April 09, 2022

This War Goes To Moscow

Kyiv did not fall. Instead, Kyiv exported democracy to America. Democracy in America itself has been on shaky ground. 

But this does not mean Putin gets to take eastern or southern Ukraine. What can happen through peace talks is that Russian forces completely withdraw, and a referendum like in Scotland is organized, also in Crimea. If Crimea wants to become independent of Ukraine, it will have to do so through an internationally recognized referendum. 

Russia needs to vacate Ukraine, all of it, up to and including Crimea. 

But the peace talks can put that referendum on the table. Putin can not have any part of Ukraine. Putin needs no reward. 

But up to the border of Ukraine is the Ukrainian army. Beyond that, it is for the Russian people to assert themselves. 

This war needs to go to Moscow. It will only take 500,000 Russians to come out into the streets of Moscow and not leave until Putin resigns. 

Navalny needs to become the Interim President of Russia. An interim government needs to organize elections to a constituent assembly within a year of taking power. Without federalism, Russia is an empire. It is not allowed to be an empire. 

A democratic, federal Russia will be a vibrant Russia. Then it will be a world power. It will have its sphere of influence. 






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Monday, March 28, 2022

I Am Not Eager For A Unipolar World



I am not eager for a unipolar world where the US calls all the shots. In fact, I think Russia is an indispensable country in that it is a major European country like Germany and France, and it is a major Asian country like China, India and Japan. No other country can make such claims. I think a vibrant, robust, democratic, federal Russia that respects its many nationalities and its neighbors could be an important counterbalance to the US, as well as China, for that matter.

I know too much about the US to think it has an ideal political system. It is not. It is an imperfect democracy that needs a fundamental tweak. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin both occupy the same segments of the political spectrum. If Putin is a fan of the North Korean leader, I don't know it. But I do know Trump is.

No, I don't think every country should be like America. I shudder at the thought.

Russia is not a large population, or a large economy. But it punches above its weight. And it can become a much larger economy with a democratic framework.

You need a government in waiting. I am thinking an interim President Mikhail Khodorkovsky and an interim Vice President Alexei Navalny who will form their own separate political parties, and will hold elections to a constituent assembly within a year of taking power.

And a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) populated by over 90% of the Russian diaspora that orchestrates the coming to the streets of 500,000 Russians in Moscow. You come out and do not leave until Putin resigns.

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Saturday, March 26, 2022

A Post-Putin Russia

I see a post-Putin Russia where Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Alexei Navalny have their own political parties and they take turns being in power and in opposition, and Russia is a democracy. And Russia has a massive sphere of influence that is dependent on it having robust trade with all its neighbors. Russia has been an intellectual capital superpower for a century. That should put it in a good place in the global economy.

I will be surprised if Putin is still in power in the Fall.

Ordinary Russians can end this war and are in the best position to do so. Flee if you have to, but get organized in the diaspora with the goal of taking over the streets of Moscow.

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