Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
The Quadrillion to the fourth power argument graces an insane, dangerous and all-over anti-American lawsuit. As if it weren’t enough, now the states of New California and New Nevada have filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the Texas…
When Trump visited Moscow in 1987, he did some preliminary probing for a possible real estate deal but came back disappointed: the USSR had no private ownership of land at all and the dispute resolution procedure his Soviet counterparts proposed…
Three tweets from the same thread related to the insane lawsuit filed by the Texas Attorney General (himself under indictment for securities fraud) against four other states, seeking to have Trump anointed as the winner despite his loss to Biden…
Ron Charles, a literary critic, writes in the Washington Post of his approach to modern poetry: …I stopped demanding that every poem yield its concealed meaning… Instead I just read — often aloud — letting the words flow over me…
After writing these two posts on Xinjiang, I did some more searching for a comprehensive introduction into the history, geography and culture of the region. I can’t say I found what I’d set out for but I came across this:…
A recount in Wisconsin’s two largest counties (by population) ended with Biden gaining a net of 87 votes over Trump. Together, the two counties make up 26% of the state’s population. Biden’s statewide margin of victory is about 20,600 votes.…
From a conversation with Edward Luttwak published by the Wall Street Journal in March 2020: Ranching has been more than an investment. It has helped him understand the fundamental weakness of post-Soviet Russia. “Between Vladivostok and the North Korean border,…
At the Vereshchagin retrospective in 2018, I spent some time staring at a painting of a ruined Chinese theater somewhere in Central Asia. After posting these notes on Altishar and Kashgaria, I wondered if had Vereshchagin found his theatrical ruins…
In a text to accompany an exhibition of visual works by the artist Mikray Pida, Edward Luttwak wrote: Mikray Pida’s art is her own transcendental creation, yet it is not irrelevant that she is an Uighur, that being a rather…
Simon Saradzhyan has published a long article on the 2020 Karabakh war in The Moscow Times and uploaded an unabridged version of it to his site. I would suggest reading it after or alongside Mark Galeotti’s earlier piece while keeping…
Back in 2014, more than two years before Trump’s elevation to the presidency, Edward Luttwak summed up his thoughts on grand strategy in application to the Napoleonic wars: In retrospect the fight against Napoleon seems to have engendered a new…
Slate ran an interview yesterday with a healthcare worker in South Dakota focused on the Covid crisis and Covid denialism in the state. Having skimmed it, I believe the stressed-out nurse who said that sufferers denied having Covid “until their…