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Spawnkamperjager
25 November 2009 @ 17:15
Link

via laughingsquid.com

"I pity the fool who don't phone home"
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Spawnkamperjager
14 November 2009 @ 20:27

Twenty years ago, I went on a Perestroika/Glosnost era student exchange program between my school one in the Soviet Union. It was quite a remarkable experience to be sure. We not only visited Moscow, but got a chance to go to Soviet Asia before the onset of the civil wars in that region (of particular nastiness was the civil war in Tadjikistan, which is memory serves, we missed by about six months).

Someone started a group on Facebook dedicated to this exchange program, and now I am being reunited with a handful of them. As much as I don't want to remember high school, this little gem was worth while.

There is a lot going on these days in the press with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. I'm particularly inspired by an interview with Mikhail Gorbachev.

I have two personal political heroes I hold most dearly these days. One is, of course, King Albert I of Belgium. The other is Gorby.

I have stated before my belief that the most significant factor for the end of the cold war is Gorbachev. It all starts with political change in the USSR. A lot of people, of course, like to credit Reagan. Gorbachev offers more credit to Reagan that I would have believed myself, but coming from him, it has some weight. Interestingly, however, it was not so much that Reagan tamed the USSR, but that he tamed the right in the US. I can believe how important it is, and for that he, and George H. W. Bush deserve credit.

I played a small part in the Soviet Glasnost, so it is not just a serious of important news stories to me. I feel connected to the process. I feel that my role in the cold war, as small and barely significant as it was, was a good one.

Gorbachev talks about Western triumphant arrogant after the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of Boris Yeltsin, but I feel the way that he feels about it. The change that Yeltsin brought to Russia was better than what might have been if the old Soviet system had persisted, but I still feel that what Gorbachev offered, though more difficult, was better. Even though Western influences played a roll in promoting Yeltsin over Gorbachev, it was small, and really, Russia chose a different route. I think they chose wrong, but I can hardly blame them for doing so.

I will never forget these things. It makes me feel part of the world, and part of history.

 
 
 
Spawnkamperjager
13 November 2009 @ 14:01
...and this is what happened today:


  • 12:56 Why does Google App Engine hate YOU? #

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Spawnkamperjager
10 November 2009 @ 14:00
...and this is what happened today:


  • 00:11 In Seattle. Just for a day. First time in Seattle. #

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Spawnkamperjager
09 November 2009 @ 14:00
...and this is what happened today:


  • 22:55 This dog snores. #

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Spawnkamperjager

It may seem absurd to suggest that American democracy today has anything in common with Russia or Poland in the early 1990s, or far-fetched to compare American businessmen and government officials with Russian clans and Polish nomads. But in the aftermath of the financial crisis in the United States, some things are starting to look familiar.

The post-communist players bear a striking resemblance to the interlocking handful of Wall Street–government policy deciders who "coincide" at the highest echelons of power and have come to be symbolized by "Government Sachs." From those who ruined Enron to those who wrought more recent Wall Street wreckage, a lack of loyalty to institutions, including the dearth of regard for shareholders and boards of directors, has characterized the modus operandi of the Wall Street players who brought on the financial crisis in America -- and the world.

In both the East European and U.S. cases, operators at the top challenge governments' rules of accountability and businesses' codes of competition, ultimately answering only to each other.


via www.salon.com

The intertwining of business and government in the US is not entirely unprecedented, as one might hear from the frothing masses on the right. However, this article may raise some interesting points about the nature of these new government-business that might be different from how they were in the past. If it's true that the government contractors have grown as powerful and entrenched as the author says, then it does create a problematic conflict of interest for those who are supposed to serve the public interest and those who may actually be calling the shots.

I am skeptical about the authors comparison between the post-soviet era Eastern European economy and what is going on today. It seems to be a pattern that intellectuals from those countries believe they have the experience and understanding to bring the west a warning of things to come should they become too much like the Soviets. This kind of perceived moral authority is vigorously promoted by the right because usually these intellectuals, having been thoroughly mistreated and made skeptical of ostensible socialist ideology have themselves become right wing reactionaries. Obviously this is not the case with this author, but I worry there is a shade of miscalculation here in that there are very fundamental differences between the US and former Soviet bloc countries that do not often make these lessons applicable.
 
 
Spawnkamperjager
08 November 2009 @ 14:00
...and this is what happened today:


  • 21:29 stuffy tuxedo. brother successfully married off. #

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Spawnkamperjager
Link

via animalnewyork.com

...and this is why I won't go in to the pool.
 
 
Spawnkamperjager
06 November 2009 @ 14:01
...and this is what happened today:

  • 07:26 Jack has different connotations in different parts of the country #
  • 20:03 if you have to eat steak it should be peter lugers. #
  • 22:20 i have forgotten how much i dislike waiting for a subway in the middle of the night. #
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