This is fascinating. It’s also rather embarrassing for the Kremlin.
Selfies taken by Russian soldier Alexander Sotkin appear to provide damming evidence that Russian forces have been operating in Ukraine. Sotkin posted a number of images on social networking site instagram, apparently without realising that they were being geotagged to reveal his location when he took them.
Last night we had dinner with friends in a hilltop restaurant in Provence. We sat on the terrace, looking down on the valley below, with the blue remembered hills of the Luberon in the distance. It was one of those beautiful Provencal evenings — warm and comforting, with that marvellous light that brought Van Gogh, Cezanne & Co to this part of the world. All around us were the murmurs of conversation from other diners. At a nearby table was a large party of Spanish cyclists who had just returned from climbing Mont Ventoux. It was wonderfully peaceful and convivial, made even better by the company and two nice Cote du Rhone wines.
And then I suddenly thought that on an evening just like this, 100 years ago, there would have been parties of comfortable French bourgeoisie sitting in just such a restaurant as this, enjoying a quiet evening together, with no idea of what was to come, no real appreciation of the horrors that European nations were about to unleash upon one another.
And then I thought: surely it couldn’t happen again. Could it?. See Article 5 of the treaty that set up NATO.
Terrific NYT column by Nicholas Kristof. Sample:
If we had the same auto fatality rate today that we had in 1921, by my calculations we would have 715,000 Americans dying annually in vehicle accidents.
Instead, we’ve reduced the fatality rate by more than 95 percent — not by confiscating cars, but by regulating them and their drivers sensibly.
We could have said, “Cars don’t kill people. People kill people,” and there would have been an element of truth to that. Many accidents are a result of alcohol consumption, speeding, road rage or driver distraction. Or we could have said, “It’s pointless because even if you regulate cars, then people will just run each other down with bicycles,” and that, too, would have been partly true.
Yet, instead, we built a system that protects us from ourselves. This saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year and is a model of what we should do with guns in America.
Whenever I write about the need for sensible regulation of guns, some readers jeer: Cars kill people, too, so why not ban cars? Why are you so hypocritical as to try to take away guns from law-abiding people when you don’t seize cars?
That question is a reflection of our national blind spot about guns. The truth is that we regulate cars quite intelligently, instituting evidence-based measures to reduce fatalities. Yet the gun lobby is too strong, or our politicians too craven, to do the same for guns. So guns and cars now each kill more than 30,000 in America every year.
Interesting also that the Second Amendment to the US Constitution (the right to bear arms) was not viewed as being sacrosanct until comparatively recently. Kristof points out that “the paradox is that a bit more than a century ago there was no universally recognised individual right to bear arms in the United States, but there was widely believed to be a ‘right to travel’ that allowed people to drive cars without regulation.”
I asked a friend the other day whether he had read Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
My friend is a very busy guy, and has to read a lot of stuff for his work, so I could sympathise with his conclusion.
The essence of Piketty’s argument is pretty straightforward — inequalities in wealth, which had declined over the period 1914-1950, are now again rising to Belle Epoque levels– and many of the innumerable reviews summarise it pretty well. But taking that utilitarian view of a book is a bit like straining dumpling soup through a colander. You get the dumplings, sure, but the soup escapes. And the nice thing about the Piketty book is that it’s very well written and in many places a delight to read. (Which of course is partly a tribute to its translator, Arthur Goldhammer.) So Piketty’s literary style, the allusions to fiction, etc. is the analogue of the soup.
Still, at least ‘Capital”s has sold in huge numbers. A couple of years ago, however, I came on another case of a really ‘big’ book: Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity
And then a friend who is published by the same publishing house (Penguin) told me that its executives were discombobulated by the book’s poor sales in the UK.
My interpretation was that the publicity campaign had been too successful. As with Piketty’s book, Pinker’s main message — that, in the long view of history, the level of violence in human society has been steadily decreasing over a long period — is both intriguing and straightforward. So people felt that they didn’t need to wade through 1056 pages to get it. And so they didn’t buy the book.
This morning’s Observer column
A funny thing happened on the way to this column. Browsing idly through the Publishers Weekly site, I came on the list of the Nielsen bestselling books of 2014 (so far) in the US. The Top 20 list was dominated by “young adult” fiction, books such as Divergent by Veronica Roth and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, plus the usual movie tie-ins. At No 9 ,there’s a religious book, Jesus Calling: Enjoying Peace in His Presence by missionary Sarah Young. At No 11 is Heaven is for Real (“A little boy’s astounding story of his trip to Heaven and back”).
Two slots further down there’s a “junior novelisation” of the Disney film, Frozen. At No 15 is an “activity book”, complete with 50 stickers, based on the same film.
At this point, your columnist was losing the will to live. Is this, he wondered, what a free society really chooses to read? But what’s this? At 16 and 17 there are two computer game manuals – Minecraft: Redstone Handbook and Minecraft: Essential Handbook.
The only people in your household who will be astonished that two computer game manuals are selling like hot cakes are the adults. This is because they don’t know what every child from the age of six upwards knows, namely that Minecraft is the most absorbing and intriguing gaming idea since David Braben and Ian Bell created Elite in 1984…
The view from the top of Fox-Amphoux this evening as the sun went down.
From an interesting OpEd piece by Dmitri Trenin
The sanctions will not make Putin back off. He also knows that if he were to step back, pressure on him will only increase. The Russian elite may have to undergo a major transformation, and a personnel turnover, as a result of growing isolation from the West, but the Russian people at large are more likely to grow more patriotic under outside pressure—especially if Putin leans harder on official corruption and bureaucratic arbitrariness. If the Kremlin, however, turns the country into a besieged fortress and introduces mass repression, it will definitely lose.
It is too early to speculate how the contest might end. The stakes are very high. Any serious concession by Putin will lead to him losing power in Russia, which will probably send the country into a major turmoil, and any serious concession by the United States—in terms of accommodating Russia—will mean a palpable reduction of U.S. global influence, with consequences to follow in Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere. Ironically, the challenge to the world’s currently predominant power does not come from the present runner-up, but from a former contender, long thought to be virtually defunct. China could not have hoped for such a helping hand.
Interesting times ahead, alas.
General de Gaulle, when he was President of France, was once asked by a journalist: “what about France’s friends?” “Great nations”, mon General haughtily replied, “do not have friends. They only have interests.” I was reminded of this when contemplating the strange response of the Dutch government to the downing of the Malaysian airliner by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine. The Dutch public is, understandably, traumatised by the huge loss of (Dutch) life. Yet their government’s response to the atrocity seems strangely muted, confined mostly to insistence on a full and proper investigation of what happened and who was responsible.
At first I interpreted this as an example of Dutch reserve. I once lived and worked in Holland, and came to love the country and to value its quiet civility and modernity. Like the English, the Dutch do not go in for showy sentimentality, and there’s something admirable in that.
But now, a more insidious thought surfaces: is this an example of a government making a calculation that, whatever the level of popular grief, the Netherlands is in too deep with the Russians to risk offending Putin? What triggered the thought was a sobering piece in the Economist. The Dutch government’s cautious responses, it says,
reflect Dutch commercial interests in Russia, such as Shell’s huge investments in Siberian oil fields, as Thomas Erdbrin reports in the New York Times. The Netherlands is also one of the world’s premiere hubs for shell companies created for tax avoidance, which Russians have made liberal use of. As the Dutch investigative website Follow The Money reports, these Dutch-registered Russian holding companies have made the Netherlands, on paper, the world’s second-largest investor in Russia. (Another Dutch website noted that the Russian defence conglomerate Rostec, which most likely built the missile that shot down flight MH17, operates several shell companies headquartered in Amsterdam.) Dutch political attitudes are often described as a seesaw between de dominee en de koopman, or “the preacher and the merchant”: at times the Netherlands adopts a moralistic tone towards the rest of the world, other times its interests are purely businesslike. For at least the past decade the merchant has had the upper hand.
This suggests to me that the Dutch government is increasingly going to find itself trapped between a rock and a very hard place. All the evidence is that, far from pulling back, Putin is effectively doubling his bets in Ukraine. There’s no real sign of remorse from anyone involved over there. I’ll be very surprised if this doesn’t trigger a wave of inchoate anger and disturbance in the Dutch public analogous to the one that swept the country after the assassination of Pim Fortuyn in 2002. And who knows what the consequences of that might be?
What it all goes to show, of course, is that Ukraine is not, to use an infamous cliche, “a faraway country of which we know nothing”.
Robert Hooke would have been 379 today. The British Library has marked his birthday with a nice blog post on how he did his remarkable drawings of tiny organisms while peering through a crude microscope. It includes this astonishing drawing of a flea.
“The internet is the first thing humans have built that humans don’t understand.”
— Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google
Well, some humans. The ones at Google understand it only too well.