Daisy Dunn. The missing thread.

         

                A totally misguided book by the beautiful lady Daisy Dunn. Greek and Roman women could not influence politics except as through their men. And the content of their pillow talks is forever lost. So Mrs. Dunn invents them as if she was present there. A few women (Empress Livia and Severan Syrian broads) influenced politics on their own but their influence was mostly destructive. 

    Whatever was the influence of the wives and lovers of the powerful Hellenistic and Roman politicians and generals, the influence of their catamites was much greater. Emperor Claudius was particularly derided by the contemporaries because he did not seem to express any noble interest to boys and men, preferring to them company of low-born women. 

Alexander Etkind. Nature's Evil.

     George Soros created a plethora of his NGOs to grow new neo-colonial elites of the post-Communist world. His strategy worked in some small, economically unviable countries: Armenia, Moldova, Balkan and Baltic states but failed miserably in Russia and China, which were the first targets of re-colonization. So, most graduates of Soros' "academies" had to enjoy teaching or journalistic jobs somewhere, mostly on the periphery of the Western world. One of these is Etkind.

    His book rechewes an old racial-colonialist discourse that the "backward nations" cannot put their natural resources to a good use and so have to be robbed from them. In a new packaging, this sounds as follows. The abundance of natural resources allows undemocratic elites to keep power by distributing goods to the populace in lieu of democratic rights. So they have to be despoiled of their natural wonders, which must be transferred to the efficient Western corporations.

      Why these "undemocratic elites" appear only in Venezuela, Iran and, first and foremost, Russia but not in Norway, Canada, Australia and, by the way, UK, which has no large scale real, non-financial, non-service economy barred the extraction of the North Sea oil, of course, is glossed upon. This screed belongs to a long tail of garbage neocon propaganda, which currently fills the bookstores and libraries, probably subsided by the invisible hand of non-market forces.