Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Putin appointed Andrei Illarionov as his senior economic adviser in April 2000. Illarionov remained in that position until late December, 2005. Those were good years for the Russian economy. Simply put, it was growing, and would keep growing until 2007.…
Andrei Illarionov was a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity for fourteen years, from October 2006 to early 2021. From 2000 to 2005, he served as a senior economic adviser to president Putin of…
It’s good to know that Russia’s number one opposition leader supports an expansive understanding of free speech. Navalny may be wrong on Trump versus Twitter but it’s far more important – in the Russian context – that he get the…
Shortly after watching a performance of Timofey Kulyabin‘s production of The Broken Pitcher (or The Broken Jug) – a remarkably well thought through interpretation – I learned that Kleist had been thinking of Oedipus Rex while writing his comedy: The…
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…
Last Friday, I wrote that election fraud isn’t all that easy to pull off even in a polity dominated by a single party. Even in Russia. Now think about a fiercely competitive environment such as a swing state, like Georgia,…
Looking at the list of heads of states who have congratulated Joe Biden on his win, and at the list of those who have refused to do so or kept silent, it’s pretty clear that Biden has emerged as the…
Up until recently, Putin’s regime committed fraud at every important election. It wasn’t that easy, even though the perpetrators were told they would never face prosecution. In fact, having independent or opposition party observers at polling stations all but closed…
As the US Republicans are preparing to steal the upcoming election, likely with the help of the handmaiden they have installed on the Supreme Court with such brazen haste, it’s probably worth taking a look at some of the reasons…
Once I had great – inflated – hopes for Trump. I was disappointed by Obama’s reluctance to actively resist the Kremlin’s aggression. Obama’s 2014 sanctions, I thought, were inadequate, even counterproductive. It would have been natural for Trump – it…