Morning Walk

41 degrees. My first thought: No walk today. However, when I step outside to pick up the paper, there is no wind blowing and and the sun looks like it wants to take charge, and very importantly, it has been over a week since my last walk. So, I bundled up and headed out. I think the ducks have been neglected over the cold spell. They all rushed to me hungry.

Kasparov on the Sochi Games

Garry Kasparov, the chess Grandmaster, has a good essay on the Olympic winter games in Sochi, hightlightig the corruption of the Russian government, as well as the International Olympics Committee. This excerpt draws out the dictatorial nature of Putin's rule, with the impoverishing of the common people and the shameless enrichment of the oligarchs, and the mad pride of the leader.

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What was a country with no remaining sports infrastructure for its children doing offering to spend twelve billion dollars to host foreign athletes? The official budget has since grown to over $50 billion, more than the combined cost of every previous Winter Games combined, according to a Dutch newspaper. It would be a surprise if more than 25% of those billions did more than pass through Sochi on their way from the Russian treasury to Swiss bank accounts and the London real estate market.

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Do not mistake the epic graft in Sochi as unusual or incidental. Corruption is the overriding principle of Putin’s 14 years in power and looting the Russian treasury and the Russian people is itself the goal. For all the foolish attempts to interpret Putin’s geopolitical strategy and personal ideology, the common denominator is always whether or not an action helps him maintain the cash flow that in turn enables him and his clique to stay in power.

Putin also wanted the Sochi Olympics to be his Peter the Great moment, the beloved Soviet summer resort town turned into an international jewel the way Saint Petersburg was built into an Imperial capital practically from scratch. It can even be said that, like Peter’s endeavor, Putin’s transformation of Sochi relied on a serf labor force. Foreign leaders coming to cheer by Putin’s side at the opening ceremony, photos with all the Russian medal winners, it is easy to see the attraction. Putin also hoped to drum up some patriotic pride with a big circus to serve with thick black bread. This is the sort of delusion that sets in when a despot confuses himself with the state after too long in power. Absent the feedback mechanisms of a free media and real elections, he begins to believe his glory is the country’s glory, that what makes him happy also makes the people happy.

-- Garry Kasparov at The Daily Beast.com

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Camus and Sartre

With the Germans in retreat and on their way to defeat, a free France emerges and among the elite will be our budding existentialists, led by Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, and the gang. A new world is being born, but one that has been baptized in fire and knows the darkness of the night and the despair of life.

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They agreed on so much, they knew their ideas to be sufficiently fresh and distinct, and they were so congenial with one another that together they could dream of becoming postwar France’s intellectual guides. Now that France could breathe and, more to the point, read freely, they would be at the center of things. As Beauvoir put it, “We were to provide the postwar era with its ideology.” And so they did.

-- Ronald Aronson, “Camus and Sartre”

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