Russia round-up

Most have probably already read about the satellites that crashed over Siberia, but aside from that there has been a flurry of important news coming out of Russia.

• The world-wide economic shit-fest has forced the Kremlin into making sane decisions, the result of which is the ruble jumping 2.5% against the dollar and the euro. It's still lost one-fifth of its value since November, though.



• Secretary Clinton and Sergei Lavrov will be meeting in Geneva in what will hopefully be the first step towards "resetting" the relationship between the U.S. and Russia. Although, I think this will ultimate be a long process - it's hard to change outlooks regarding a country that was your main enemy for seventy odd years - this is certainly a good sign.



• Furthermore, we're easing off the whole missile shield nonsense. This is no doubt influenced by Kyrgyzstan's cutting off U.S. use of its Manas airbase. We're going to need Russia's help getting troops into Afghanistan and besides, the missile shield is a stupid idea anyway, likely to further alienate Russia more than deter Iran.



• A Reese Witherspoon lookalike and pro-Kremlin blogger, Maria Sergeyeva is making waves in Russian political circles after a recent speech in which she expressed undue faith in Putin and Medvedev to ensure hers and other's financial stability. The Moscow Times article also gives a general overview of the political climate among Russia's youth - which is the polar opposite of what you find on American campuses, oddly enough.



• LUKOIL is salivating over two Iraqi oil fields, hoping that Russia's forgiving the almost thirteen billion Iraqi debt to the country will allow them to competitively bid. LUKOIL will be allying with the American company Conoco to hopefully get some of that foreign investment back into Russian energy markets, which took a severe hit last year.



• The New York Times reported this week that Russia had a banner year for arms sales in 2008, increasing exports by ten percent. They are second to, you guessed it, the United States. Medvedev bemoaned the fact that most countries will likely be strapped for cash this year and thus won't be able to buy Kalishnikovs.



• Finally, the AP reports that 7 people (4 police officers, 3 insurgents) have been killed in the Ingushetian city of Nazran. In October the governor of Ingushetia, a wonderfully psychotic asshole by the name of Murat Zyazikov, resigned and residents cheered in the streets. Medvedev appointed Yunus-Bek Yevkurov in the hopes that he would bring order to the troubled region, but this has yet to happen.

And thus ends my playing around with bullet points for the day.

Case sets huge precedent for how websites link

Wendy Davis has a piece up at Slate about a lawsuit which could have a profound effect on how most websites operate. The case refers to a dispute between BlockShopper, a real estate news site and a law firm, Jones Day. BlockShopper ran a few stories about two Jones Day lawyers who made house purchases and linked back to Jones Day for the bios on the respective lawyers. Jones Day, in turn, sued BlockShopper for trademark infringement, flimsily arguing that by linking to their website BlockShopper may be confusing readers into thinking there is a correlation between the two sites.

This is pretty much a bullshit, frivolous lawsuit and a number of law groups spoke out about it. But as Davis outlines in the article, the judge in the case ruled in favor of the law firm, BlockShopper decided to settle and the result is rather obnoxious to anyone who writes on the web:

The idea that readers of a real estate news site would somehow be confused by links to Jones Day, on the other hand, shouldn't have passed the straight-face test. One legal blogger proposed that the attorneys who brought the suit take ethics classes. Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen described the lawsuit as a "new entry in the contest for 'grossest abuse of trademark law to suppress speech the plaintiff doesn't like.' " The digital rights groups Public Citizen, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Citizen Media Law Project, and Public Knowledge tried to file a friend-of-the-court brief asking for the case to be dismissed.

No go. In November, federal district court Judge John Darrah rejected the amicus brief and denied BlockShopper's motion to dismiss the case before trial. Two months earlier, he had issued an injunction requiring BlockShopper to remove the Jones Day articles while the case was pending.

Faced with the prospect of big legal bills and an unfriendly judge, BlockShopper co-founder Brian Timpone decided to settle. On Tuesday, the real estate site said it agreed to change how it links to Jones Day. BlockShopper will no longer use the names of Jones Days attorneys as anchor text. Instead, it will use the full and cumbersome URL. In other words, Timpone said, instead of posting "Tiedt is an associate," the site will write "Tiedt (http://www.jonesday.com/jtiedt/) is an associate." (The agreement also calls on BlockShopper to say that the lawyer in question is employed at Jones Day and that more information about the attorney is on the firm's Web site.)

Obviously, this does little to stop BlockShopper from writing unflattering articles about Jones Day employees, but the law firm has won a big victory which would make it very expensive to run a website. If a website has to alter their "linking protocol" it would not only change the style of the writing, making it look more clumsy and haphazard, but it would also be, as Davis points out, more labor intensive. That basically means more costs to the websites.

In Wisconsin there's a similar suit brought forth by Jennifer Reisinger, a political critic, who is suing city officials - including the mayor - in Sheboygan for violating her first amendment rights by forcing her to take down links to a police department. Hopefully the result of this case will be different.

*Edit* Just to let you know, I fucked up the links in this article at first. MAYBE THE INTERNETS ARE TRYING TO TELL ME SOMETHING

Incredible

A Republican state representative in Missouri, Bryan Stevenson, referred to the Civil War as The War of Northern Aggression. I am not making this up. The full quote was, "What we are dealing with today is the greatest power grab by the federal government since the War of Northern Aggression."

He was referring to the pro-choice Freedom of Choice Act.

Stevenson later apologized for his comment at the behest of an African American representative.

(Via Show Me Progress, which has video of the incident.)

Edit: Oddly enough, there's a professor at NYU law named Bryan Stevenson who is the founder and executive director of the civil rights group Equal Justice Initiative.

I think dementia is a subjective experience which hinders interpretative ability

Stanley Fish has always been an insane hypocrite, but he's not even bothering to make a coherent argument anymore.

The thesis for his latest blog entry is that professors are omnipotent and are mentally molesting your children at your expense. Except he elucidates said thesis in such a way that only Andy Rooney and possibly Thomas Friedman could understand how he arrived at it.

He takes the case of an anarchist physics professor at the University of Ottawa who has obviously gone batshit and isn't teaching science anymore but rather teaching political activism and yelling at his students to fight the power. Apparently there are some letters between the professor and the dean in which the latter asks the former to stop being insubordinate and do his job and the former tells the latter that being insubordinate is his job and I'm pretty sure at this point the former is winking into the camera and knowingly stroking his beard while the latter is shaking his fists and screaming at the ceiling fan in a vain attempt at making it fall on both of their heads.

But nothing gets by Fish! The man who destroyed Duke University proceeds to contradict this Canadian professor's claim by citing an Arizona court case which ruled that a teaching method could be grounds for dismissal. Brilliant, but he's forgotten that Arizona is not in Canada, you know, where the Canadian professor teaches. At a Canadian university. Oops!

But that's just a minor error, really. Fish's point is that these types of radical professors have jobs for life, can never be fired, and can therefore do whatever they want. Except this guy WAS fired. He received exactly the kind of punishment which Fish bemoans is lacking in North American schools.

So therefore I'm not really sure what his objection really is. Because he says that this case, a case, I repeat, in which a tenured professor with specific professorial duties was dismissed from his position for not abiding by those duties, confirms his belief that professors are exempt from the standard outside the ivory tower which holds people accountable for the responsibilities of their professional positions. What the hell? I know I've underlined that twice in this entry but that's because I'm still trying to process. I don't believe he's actually really saying this shit. Maybe he didn't have anything better to write about? Maybe he just really likes that special feeling you get when you complain? The man is inscrutable.

A whole lot of words about Mahler

Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra's recording of Mahler's Sixth is incredible. Aside from the fact that they put the Andante second, it's flawless and even that can be easily fixed by just putting it third in iTunes or whatever. The percussion in the opening movement is syncopated in such a way that it truly does feel like a march and the pace never slackens. At just under twenty two minutes, it's neither rushed nor boring.

The scherzo doesn't really have a Viennese quality to it and I suppose that Mahler purists will find it's atypical of other conductor's interpretations. But whatever. It works. Gergiev's best quality as a conductor is his ability to underscore contrasts - which is why I don't understand why they put the Andante second, but I'll get to that in a moment. This knack for shifting tempos and emphasis is what makes him so good an interpreter of Prokofiev's music and what gives his Shostakovich's Ninth an acerbic wit that is rare in a work usually dismissed as "one big scherzo." As usual, the LSO's string section sounds great in the middle section and everything is balanced perfectly. I love this scherzo because it's so hysterical in the climaxes, with horns screeching, thunderous blasts from the timpani, etc. But it's also quite humorous and playful at times, most notably in the twinkling glockenspiels and the halting pseudo-waltz and minuet. Mahler seemed to have a lot of fun with the dances of his native country, transforming traditional drinking dances into satanic whirlwinds and aside from the middle movements of the Ninth nowhere is this more evident than in this part of what is otherwise definitely not a lighthearted symphony.

I was expecting not to like the Andante, but the only qualm I have is that they kind of rush through the cowbells. I know, I know, but I really love the goddamn cowbells, who else has cowbells in a tragic symphony? Valery Abisalovich leads the orchestra through it at about fourteen minutes, which is three or four shorter than most recordings I've heard. The only one that was around this tempo was Boulez and I didn't like it at all because it seemed like he was embarrassed and tried to avoid it sounding too sorrowful or emotional. Gergiev, however, takes the opening at just the right slow pace underscoring its wistfulness, hinting at what's to come. The sighing violins are often criticized as being too kitschy, too cliche, but I think when played right the opening gives a cohesion to the emotion found in the rest of the movement. This music never really strikes me as depressing or pathetic in the way that, say, Tchaikovsky's Sixth does; this is more like a longing for some past peace, a memory which distance transforms into an idyllic calm. The real pathos is that these memories are distorted and whatever hero Mahler had in mind when he wrote the symphony knows this basic human fault of comparing rough times to some non-existent golden era. The quick tempo of the climaxes aids in this, making the first utterance of that lilting melody in the first half seem flippant and dismissive. When it returns, much more powerful, towards the end there is all the more impact, the whole thing effortlessly and powerfully flowing towards the end of my favorite piece of music by Mahler.

This movement is the heart of the symphony and when put third it gives a brief respite between the bite of the scherzo and the unrelenting finale. Also the emotional, uncontrolled end of the movement is a perfect contrast with the grotesque clashing in the beginning of the last movement. The reason given by people who put the Scherzo third is some misguided sense of historical correctness, namely that Mahler himself played the movement third. But he was unsure and when it was first being performed it was not definitive how Mahler wanted it to be played. He toyed with the work for two years. The other reason is that the opening of the scherzo sounds similar to the first movement. This is undoubtedly true, but there are some slight differences and again, I think it still stands as a kind of contrast, however paradoxically that might sound. The first movement is a march, the scherzo is a dance and both seem to share the same origin. This becomes more clear when heard back to back. Also, when played third the transition to the finale just sounds odd.

All in all, however, I think I'll always prefer Karajan and the Berliners for this Andante, probably because I heard that recording first. Then again, I'm a dilettante, not an actual critic so take the blathering above as an exercise in descriptive solipsism.

The best part is in the finale, by far. Everything that makes this movement what influenced Alban Berg to call it "the only Sixth, Beethoven's included" is here: the offstage celesta sounds perfectly eerie, the hammer blows aren't overwrought and they make it seem like the symphony is running into a brick wall, the fucking unhinged, ceaseless attack in the sustenuto is as exciting as any piece of Romantic music you could listen to and the final full orchestral clash perfectly closes the whole thing. This is just great playing, masterfully controlled by Gergiev. He hasn't been this dead on since his Rite of Spring, and that's saying a lot.

So buy this disc, or download it - whatever. It's the perfect introduction into what is one of the greatest symphonies written in the 20th Century.

Some notes about Biden's speech

Biden's speech was overall very promising, and except for some minor quibbles regarding Russia, I was pretty happy with it.

But going forward with the missile defense system is a mistake and Obama said he thought it was a fatuous deterrent. In his speech, however, Biden indicated that we'll go on as planned with the shield, adding the caveat "only if the technology proves cost-effective." Well, it probably won't prove cost-effective so who knows what that means. And who knows what the recent decision in Krygyzstan to ban the use of their base at Manas will mean. And that's pretty much my sentiment about his remarks about the future of U.S. and European relations with Moscow. It's not possible to get anything definitive out of it. Of course we can assume that the Obama administration will be more open to dialogue than its predecessor, but on the whole there was nothing substantive enough in Biden's speech to really forecast what is going to happen in the next few years. Certainly, Moscow's response is a good indication. According to the NYT summary of the speech, Konstantin Kosachev, a representative in the Duma, said that he was pleased with Biden's remarks about inclusion.

Relatedly, there was one phrase of the speech which bothered me. It really doesn't have anything to do with Biden because it's such a heavily ingrained part of our general rhetoric. It was this: "We will not recognize any nation having a sphere of influence."

The uncompromising and somewhat damning aspect to that statement is counterproductive in a way. Russia reasserting control over former Soviet republics is not a good thing, certainly, but in a way it's inevitable. And what this type of moralizing does is just make us seem like hypocrites. I don't know how many times I've read in the Russian press comments about the hypocrisy of the United States, who asserted massive amounts of influence in our back yard, and the Europeans, who, you know, had a few colonies and what have you. I get that the intent is to somehow try to convince the Russians that this kind of extroverted projection of control is ultimately not worth it, either in terms of security or economy.

And what the hell, right? Russian leaders should certainly learned something from their experiences in Afghanistan. But as we've seen with our own foreign policies decisions, we don't learn either. What we need to do is re-frame our criticism toward the Kremlin in such a way that highlights our own mistakes and problems with the idea of a "sphere of influence" and emphasizing the overlap of experience between us. This is the only way to effectively critique their foreign policy without wounding Russian pride. The opposing position to this, of course, is that any admission of culpability will provoke a Russian response along the lines of them thinking we're weak. But that concern is trumped by the possibility of really transforming our relationship by assertively underlining what we have in common.

There's a hell of a lot we don't have in common, naturally. They're not a democracy and they do not have a solid legal foundation. We need to stop pretending that they do and try to work with them in spite of this. But, we need a different approach if we are to avoid a regressive path back to a 20th century relationship with Russia.

I don't know why I was ever optimistic about this

They reached an agreement on the stimulus legislation. It's...uh, not all that great. The new bill cuts $40 billion in aid to bankrupt states and $20 billion to broken schools, all in favor of $30 billion in fucking tax rebates for people who buy homes or cars.

Why should we use this money for sorely needed investments that will pay off in the long run, when instead we can do more regressive shit that has proven to be stupid and doesn't work. Why should we learn from the past eight years? Why should the ideas of the people who got us into this mess be given any kind of credence. You guys failed. You guys collapsed entire industries and eroded the middle class. It's time for something different.

Maybe there's a light at the end of the tunnel, as some folks seem to think, with the upcoming conference committee. Maybe they can work on some of these numbers and convince themselves that they have the political capital to bail out states and dying schools.

As it stands now, this is not a good deal.

Funtime in Munich

Brilliant, controversial international security expert slash cartoonish, supervillainy war criminal* Henry Kissinger is going to be given some kind of shiny thing honoring his contributions to world peace at the Munich Security Conference.

Aside from all that, the conference will also feature what will hopefully be an entertaining but not embarrassing speech by Vice President Joe Biden.


(*seriously, when Christopher Hitchens takes you down a peg without revealing his own batshit insanity, then there are problems)

Joshua Keating has hurt my feelings

Moscow Times runs an article which exposes the vast contrast between Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin which is mainly that the President likes horrible bands from the 70s like Deep Purple and Pink Floyd while the Prime Minister likes lovable Nordic bands, namely ABBA; the least insane poster over at the Foreign Policy blog, Joshua Keating, posits that this makes Medvedev more of a "badass" than Putin.

What he doesn't know is that Medvedev probably likes ABBA too. Everyone in Russia likes ABBA. This is because Russians have excellent taste when it comes to the Arts. In the winter of 2007 there were roughly A BILLION posters advertising the "smash hit musical" Mamma Mia! and people would whistle such golden tunes as "Knowing Me Knowing You" and "Dancing Queen" on the streets. Students at the Technical Institutes would take study breaks, put down their maps, stop worrying about how best to punish the Caucuses and recreate dance numbers. If ABBA were to reunite and play a free concert in Norilsk, Muscovites would ride on the backs of wolves to the frozen Siberian tundra to hear the group's glorious, inspired pop sensibilities.

If the doom and gloom from our own economy isn't enough for you

Kyrgyzstan is going to shut down the American military base at Manas. Our military officials say this won't affect operations in Afghanistan, but I think that's downplaying the situation a bit since, as the article mentions, militants recently blew up a key bridge along a supply route in Pakistan. Not being able to use the Kyrgyz base will make things a bit tougher. Tensions have been high since an incident in 2006 when a Kyrgyz man was shot by a U.S. soldier, but although many resent the presence of American soldiers, blaming them for everything from wounding national pride to destroying their grazing land - one farmer said the Americans were bad for the Kyrgyz nature - I doubt that's the leading factor. Kyrgyzstan will be getting about $2 billion dollars in credit from Moscow.

I'm not really sure what the thinking on this is. Moscow wants the U.S. out of its backyard, sure, but it's putting Kyrgyzstan in a bit of bind here. The Kyrgyz can't afford to lose us as an ally and while the economic aid from Russia will temporarily lift some of the economic pressure every country in Central Asia is feeling, if the Russian economy goes further down the drain what are they going to do?

And speaking of Russia's woes, the rouble hit an all time low this week, Bulgaria is demanding a new gas deal after being cutoff a few months ago, Fitch has downgraded Russia's debt rating to the second lowest investment grade -this is the first time its been hit since the fun times of 1998 - and the government is also bailing out their banks, injecting about $33 billion in exchange for 25-30% stakes in the various companies. The financial sector was one of the few areas the Kremlin didn't gobble up significant portions of over the best decade, probably because Russia was booming. It's going to be an interesting couple of months.

And finally, in what is surely a blow to national pride, Andrei Arshavin has left St. Petersburg and will transfer to Arsenal. He could have at least gone to Chelsea, but hey given the recent speculation of a bidding war involving every Britons favorite enemy, The Russian Billionaire, the Gunners could be experiencing a Slavic invasion soon.

Drunk or just suffered a stroke?

A disturbing but somewhat hilarious article in the Moscow Times about a Russian Aeroflot pilot who was incomprehensible and could barely stand on his feet before a flight. Passengers on the flight - which was going from Moscow to New York - demanded that he be taken out of the cockpit but were told to stop causing trouble. The pilot was eventually removed, but only after Ksenia Sobchak started getting concerned and complained. Ksenia is the daughter of former St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak and she is the Russian equivalent of Paris Hilton. After the pilot was taken from the cockpit he was seen to have had bloodshot eyes and denied being drunk, stating he had suffered a stroke.

There are so many good quotes from this:

"His speech was so slurred it was hard to tell what language he was speaking."

...

while pilots are forced to undergo a battery of medical tests before each flight, a test determining blood alcohol level is not among them.

...

"I don't think there's anyone in Russia who doesn't know what a drunk person looks like," said Katya Kushner, who, along with her husband, was one of the first to react when the pilot made his announcement. "At first, he was looking at us like we were crazy. Then, when we wouldn't back down, he said, 'I'll sit here quietly in a corner. We have three more pilots. I won't even touch the controls, I promise.'"

...

an Aeroflot representative sought to assure them that "it's not such a big deal if the pilot is drunk."

"Really, all he has to do is press a button and the plane flies itself," the representative said. "The worst that could happen is he'll trip over something in the cockpit."

Keep in mind that in September an Aeroflot plane crashed, killing 88 people. The pilot was found to have had alcohol in his system.