Edward II themed costume party at the Elysee. 

Adam Kirsch. The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century.

     

Isaac Babel (1894-1940), a Soviet-Russian Jewish writer as distant from Judaic religion as possible.

       Adam Kirsch is very insightful in his study of the (secular) literature created by the Jews. His penetration into literary genre is deep and enlightening. However, his partiality as an art critic of the Wall Street Journal is showing. All the discrimination and oppression of the Jews is attributed to the Germans and Russians and, a little bit, to the French. Supposedly, the Jewish life in the Anglo-Saxon countries was all sunshine and roses. In fact, until the end of the World War II, in the US and England, there was little of the educated Jewish middle class. All Jews were either business and banking tycoons, who imitated the tastes of the upper classes of their respective countries, or lower classes struggling for surviving. The Jewish experience was framed by others, e.g. Fagin in Dickens. Only when the reader of the Jewish books appeared, so did the writers (P. Roth, S. Bellow, I. Asimov, N. Mailer, etc.). 

Martin Sixsmith and Daniel Sixsmith. Putin and the Return of History: How the Kremlin Rekindled the Cold War.

       

            A screed written by a Blair acolyte straight from the templates of the Goebbels propaganda. Only the Goebbels' staff probably learnt about the Jews more than Sixsmith, which is strange given that he spent a few years in Moscow as a BBC correspondent. Why his son, an archeologist, changed his calling into agitprop writing, in unclear. Unless, of course, he was an "archeologist" of the vintage Her Majesty's service sent to the East during the times of the Great Game, or that vicious agitprop pays much better these days. 

    Only one example: his derisive mentioning of Putin's supposed lies about Ukrainian history, Civil War in particular, can be attributed to the clichés of British propaganda [1]. Yet, his inability to explain the meaning of the Russian word (бандеровцы), he transcribes as banderovites or something, and considers an ethnic slur, testifies to his complete lack of interest to any thing Russian and Soviet. Shtepan Bandera who is now considered something like a patron saint of Ukraine whose name is given to the streets, plazas and the state awards was a pre-war Polish terrorist. During the Second World War he became a chief purveyor of Nazi ideology in the occupied Soviet Ukraine. Unlike Croatia, which did not play much role in the Nazi plans and could be entrusted to a demented sadist like Ante Pavelic, and similarly to the oil-rich Romania, which could not be left in the hands of Sima Horia; Bandera, whose peasant bands did not only mass murdered the Jews and Gypsies but also Russians and Poles, i.e. non-Jewish technical and business class imperative for keeping its factories and railroads running, was too unstable for such an important task. So Germans tucked him in a Berlin hotel until 1944 when they had nothing to lose and replaced him with a reliable Hauptschturmfuhrer SS Shushkevich, also a mass murderer of the Jews and a revered figure in modern Ukraine, but without a popular following among the contemporary unwashed. 

  This mish-mash of lies, multiplied by woeful ignorance and arrogance does not deserve more. 

[1] British propaganda closely follows a revisionist history of Ukrainian nationalists. In fact, a dozen or so regimes changed on the territory of the modern Ukraine, few controlling more than 10% of the territory, which was claimed by the representatives of the Ukrainian People's Republic Government in Exile, formerly the Directory, at the Versailles Conference. This territory, never being a state, is considered by the post-Maidan regimes as its natural borders. Many regimes were foreign.  Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles, but also Rusyns, Hungarians and Romanians fought on the different sides. The Jews were mostly the victims. The only autochthonic force was Makhno's army of anarchists, which never espoused statehood. So any story as a part an interview is bound to cut the corners. Yet, during the Civil War these regimes generated a lot of jokes of the type: "In the car is our Directory, under the car is their territory", or "here the powers to be changed again today".  

Joseph Tainter, Collapse of Complex Societies and Paul Cooper, Fall of Civilizations.

  The first book is well grounded in scientific facts, reflects author's own original research and hardly readable, at least by a layperson. The second book is eminently readable and mostly grounded in Google searches. No wonder that the second book is everywhere on Amazon, while the first book is hidden and unpopular. 

Robert Sapolsky. Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will.

     Sapolsky, a titular genius, wrote a book denying a free will entirely. Interestingly, in my old age, I begin to believe in the absence of the free will more and more because during my life I made the same mistakes in absolutely similar situations. So, I got to assume that my behavioral failings were conditioned by my genetics and upbringing. Sapolsky's outlook on the culpability of the criminals and a possibility of punishment in the absence of the free will is decidedly odd, the chapter is called "Fun of punishment" or something like that. So he suggests to replace penitentiary system and ritual by private vendettas and retribution? I think, not.  

    However, from both philosophical and scientific point of view, Sapolsky's argument, as much as I solidarize with his statement does not seem to be convincing. From the philosophical point of view, he does not define correctly what the "free will" is. He implicitly means by that the actions, which are not conditioned on heredity, past history and the current environment. But these must be completely random as it was already clear to Jean Buridan (c. 1301 - c. 1359). 

    My definition of the "free will" would be as follows. Whether it is possible to predict human actions (in a strong form, infinitely long into the future) knowing everything about the individual that is allowed, in principle, by physics, chemistry and biology? I cannot find a plausible argument why it is. 

    The "in principle" clause is important because our current knowledge of the mind and its working is incomplete. Yet, the thought argument, in which we copy someone's brain with molecular precision and then attach it to the robot -- is possible. Would this organism behave exactly like the person whose brain was copied? I very much doubt that. 

    Too bad, I cannot talk directly to Sapolsky and have to restrict myself to talking to my landlord's dog.