Photo, left: Russia in raion (regions), including the Sakha Republic and the Tuvanian republic.
Oblasts
 1. Amur
 2. Arkhangelsk
 3. Astrakhan
 4. Belgorod
 5. Bryansk
 6. Chelyabinsk
 7. Chita (defunct; home of the second-largest Buddist monastery in Russia)
 8. Irkutsk
 9. Ivanovo
10. Kaliningrad
11. Kaluga
12. Kemerovo
13. Kirov
14. Kostroma
15. Kurgan
16. Kursk
 
17. Leningrad
18. Lipetsk
19. Magadan
20. Moscow
21. Murmansk
22. Nizhny Novgorod
23. Novgorod
24. Novosibirsk
25. Omsk
26. Orenburg
27. Oryol
28. Penza
29. Pskov
30. Rostov
31. Ryazan
32. Sakhalin
 
33. Samara
34. Saratov
35. Smolensk
36. Sverdlovsk
37. Tambov
38. Tomsk
39. Tver
40. Tula
41. Tyumen
42. Ulyanovsk
43. Vladimir
44. Volgograd
45. Vologda
46. Voronezh
47. Yaroslavl
 
Republics
 1. Adygea
 2. Altai
 3. Bashkortostan
 4. Buryatia
 5. Dagestan
 6. Ingushetia
 7. Kabardino-Balkaria
 8. Kalmykia
 9. Karachay–Cherkessia
10. Karelia
11. Komi
12. Mari El
13. Mordovia
14. Sakha (Yakutia)
15. North Ossetia–Alania
16. Tatarstan
17. Tuva
18. Udmurtia
19. Khakassia
20. Chechnya
21. Chuvashia
22. Crimea
(See:  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Russian-regions.png )  
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Hour One
Friday  28 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block A: Dan Henninger, WSJ, in re: http://www.wsj.com/articles/hey-conservatives-you-won-1440628311
Friday  28 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block B:  Harry Siegel, New Yok Daily News, in re: Why we can’t censor snuff films   I don’t get off on death, so when my Twitter feed exploded Wednesday morning with reports that two TV journalists in Virginia had been shot, live on camera, I followed the news but didn’t watch, let alone retweet, the video. Or the first-person footage the murderer posted later before shooting himself.
I did see a half-dozen journalists and many others — including some who had the footage auto-play in their feed without warning — call on Twitter to take down that snuff film along with the account the killer posted it from, which it did. Understanding the anguish at losing two of our own, there’s something wrong with journalists, of all people, insisting that videos are too offensive to be seen at all, and demanding platforms remove them.
   Complete this sentence: “Videos and pictures of murder or graphic violence should be allowed to be seen only when ____.”
Generally, this only gets answered, if at all, after some new horrific thing appears, and then with some twist on Justice Potter Stewart’s famous obscenity definition: “I know it when I see it.”
But there’s no way to know it if you never see it. The idea that Twitter or any ad-supported social media site — not the virtual public commons they like to sell themselves as but rather, like shopping malls, spaces open for business — should decide what violence we can see is nuts.
Where newscasts have limited time and newspapers limited space, Twitter — where we can all afford e-ink by the barrel — has to make an active decision to strike down content as beyond the pale.
Letting user complaints to multi-billion-dollar platforms decide which mass shootings, police murders, ISIS snuff films, dead U.S. soldiers, Pakistani civilian drone casualties or state executions we can see is literally offloading our morality to corporations.
Once, when freedom of the press really was reserved for those who owned one, a handful of broadcast stations and publications had a near monopoly on what Americans saw, de facto in loco parentis status.
I thought of that Wednesday, as CNN openly struggled with whether or how to air the footage. Finally, it did, and I saw it. That wasn’t quite an active choice; they warned it was coming and I failed to turn my head.  One of the most disturbing parts of our weird-future present is how easy it is to see people die. Burned, beheaded, bombed, drowned, shot, thrown off buildings. Almost always, the horror is in the event, not in footage that tends to look like botched takes from bad movies.
Some of it speaks to our times. All of it speaks to the human condition. I don’t want to see any of it — certainly not some sick mass-murder-obsessed monster’s would-be star turn. But there’s a simple, crucial separation between what you choose to watch and what you demand no one can watch.
In a world of near-infinite content and cameras, the idea we can distinguish and then enforce that distinction of the obscenely violent from the significantly violent from the rest of it, violent or otherwise, is nuts — let alone that . . . [more]
Friday  28 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block C: Ian Austen, NYT, in re:  Canadian Maple Syrup ‘Rebels’ Clash with Law  Harvesters in Quebec, who provide 70 percent of the world’s supply, must sell through a central system, but some flout the requirement.
Friday  28 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block D: Seb Gorka, Marine Corps University, in re: What we suspected all these months: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/26/spies-obama-s-brass-pressured-us-to-downplay-isis-threat.html; Today's Propaganda Front in Europe: http://www.bbc.co.uk/monitoring/how-tv-propaganda-is-affecting-russian-society
Hour Two
Friday  28 August 2015 / Hour 2, Block A:  Michael E Vlahos, Naval War Collge, in re: Kissinger: If we treat Russia seriously as a great power, we need at an early stage to determine whether their concerns can be reconciled with our necessities. We should explore the possibilities of a status of nonmilitary grouping on the territory between Russia and the existing frontiers of NATO.
The West hesitates to take on the economic recovery of Greece; it’s surely not going to take on Ukraine as a unilateral project. So one should at least examine the possibility of some cooperation between the West and Russia in a militarily nonaligned Ukraine. The Ukraine crisis is turning into a tragedy because it is confusing the long-range interests of global order with the immediate need of restoring Ukrainian identity. I favor an independent Ukraine in its existing borders. I have advocated it from the start of the post-Soviet period. When you read now that Muslim units are fighting on behalf of Ukraine, then the sense of proportion has been lost.
Heilbrunn: That’s a disaster, obviously.
Kissinger: To me, yes. It means that breaking Russia has become an objective; the long-range purpose should be to integrate it.
Heilbrunn: But we have witnessed a return, at least in Washington, DC, of neoconservatives and liberal hawks who are determined to break the back of the Russian government.
Kissinger: Until they face the consequences. The trouble with America’s wars since the end of the Second World War has been the failure to relate strategy to what is possible domestically. The five wars we’ve fought since the end of World War II were all started with great enthusiasm. But the hawks did not prevail at the end. At the end, they were in a minority. We should not engage in international conflicts if, at the beginning, we cannot describe an end, and if we’re not willing to sustain the effort needed to achieve that end.
Heilbrunn: But we seem to recapitulate this over and over again.
Kissinger: Because we refuse to learn from experience. Because it’s essentially done by an ahistorical people. In schools now, they don’t teach history any more as a sequence of events. They deal with it [as] themes without context.
Heilbrunn: So they’ve stripped it of all context.
Kissinger: Of what used to be context—they've put it in an entirely new context.
2.  On China as Wilhelmine: Americans as ignorant of the China POV.
Heilbrunn: Is China the new Wilhelmine Germany today? Richard Nixon, shortly before he died, told William Safire that it was necessary to create the opening to China, but we may have created a Frankenstein.
Kissinger: A country that has had three thousand years of dominating its region can be said to have an inherent reality. The alternative would have been to keep China permanently subdued in collusion with the Soviet Union, and therefore making the Soviet Union—already an advanced nuclear country—the dominant country of Eurasia with American connivance. But China inherently presents a fundamental challenge to American strategy.
Heilbrunn: And do you think they’re pushing for a more Sinocentric world, or can they be integrated into some sort of Westphalian framework, as you outlined in your most recent book, World Order?
Kissinger: That’s the challenge. That’s the open question. It’s our task. We’re not good at it, because we don’t understand their history and culture. I think that their basic thinking is Sinocentric. But it may produce consequences that are global in impact. Therefore, the challenge of China is a much subtler problem than that of the Soviet Union. The Soviet problem was largely strategic. This is a cultural issue: Can two civilizations that do not, at least as yet, think alike come to a coexistence formula that produces world order?
Heilbrunn: How greatly do you rate the chances of a real Sino-Russian rapprochement?
Kissinger: It’s not in either of their natures, I think—
Heilbrunn: Because the Russians clearly would like to create a much closer relationship.
Kissinger: But partly because we’ve given them no choice
Friday  28 August 2015 / Hour 2, Block B: Michael E Vlahos, Naval War Collge, in re: Rites of Spring: Sacrifice, Incarnation, and War, by Michael Vlahos
Abstract   The 20th century’s wars—from 1914-1951, and their aftermath—killed perhaps 150 million individual human beings. We casually ascribe this calamity to madness, evil, or the inevitable efficiencies of an industrial economy. Yet I argue that this killing was embedded in the desire of peoples to fulfill—through war—the vision that drove them. This was the paradoxical, unconfessed vision of Modernity—which replaced universal institutions of collective identity (for centuries vested in social order and Church) with a dynamic new alternative.
This was a vision of collective apotheosis that promised human transcendence through the passion play of the Nation: War. The rituals and symbols of war in Modernity evolved from, and recreated, ancient and prehistoric patterns of human sacrifice and divine incarnation. These worked together, because the nation could truly be fulfilled now only through a passage of sacrifice and ascension. Moreover, this passage could be completed only through the intermediative agency of human body and blood. Modernity’s new framework of meaning thus renewed ancient and prehistoric concepts of the sacred among early human communities—only now these bands of humans numbered in the millions.
Building unconsciously on the solutions of forgotten ancestors, Modernity’s vision offers these insights:
1) 20th century “total war” required mass human sacrifice to create the desired collective vehicle of divine national incarnation;
2) The decisive shift to this modern mode of sacrifice and incarnation came with the emergence of pseudo-universalisms in World War I, and
3) “Total war” national variants all gravitated to the same cultural form and functions, whether Nazi or Soviet or American or British or Japanese. War in Modernity became an extended ritual of existential intermediation, demanding mass sacrifice in which the literal “body and blood” of millions at once renewed and re-fertilized the nation, but also allowed the sacred body of the nation to transcend death and become divine.
This collective belief surged throughout the 19th century, but its horrific realization, in the actual experience of war in the 20th century, was so shatteringly self-destructive that Modernity may now at last, mercifully, break from its own terrible creed.
I. Transcendence  Burdened as we are by consciousness, and its awakening promise of death and a life of pain, we humans responded early with the creation of constructs of alternative promise. Physical anthropologists and evolutionary scientists now hypothesize that our evidence-trail of continuous creativity and a persistent search for the sacred—whose first artifacts date from the early Pleistocene—represents a key human adaptation that has allowed us better to survive and prosper.
But what exactly are these constructs, and how do they work? Lifelong observation tells me that these constructs, in their symbolic essence, are an abstracted form of reality replacement; in other words, they record a deliberate changeling of actual reality for a constructed reality that is equally, if not more, persuasive—in terms of collective belief—than is sensory reality.
Moreover, these self-created reality-changelings solidify their hold on people in community through both sacred and social vectors. Each vector performs a dynamic cultural function. The sacred vector—revealed in both what we call “religion” and what we pretend is not—which we call “ideology”—addresses death by offering the promise of personal-in-collective transcendence. The social vector addresses a life of pain (in the continual presence of death) in daily life, by constructing an elaborate cursus honorum of social punishment and reward—or what is called “status” in the social sciences—that distracts us from the pain of unfettered consciousness: A sort of all-surrounding “game of life” if you will.
But what exactly is “transcendence?” I first came across this term of art for spiritual fulfillment in a speech of Vaclav Havel. I think it works because it is tied to universal patterns of process and passage rather than the workings of any particular [more]
Friday  28 August 2015 / Hour 2, Block C:  Liz Peek, The Fiscal Times, in re: Dump Trump’s Deportation Plan for This Better Way  Donald Trump wants to deport 11 million people who are in the U.S. illegally – and to encourage their family members to leave as well. Let’s be honest: that simply isn’t going to happen. Consider the . . .
Friday  28 August 2015 / Hour 2, Block D:  JimMcTague, senior financialjournalist, in re: http://www.amazon.com/ /dp/0132599686 Crapshoot-Investing-Tech-Savvy-Clueless-Regulators   &  http://www.wsj.com/articles/stanley-fischer-says-fed-on-the-fence-for-september-move-1440780026?tesla=y  [yawn.  –ed]
Hour Three
Friday  28 August 2015 / Hour 3, Block A: Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future, by Henry Sokolski (Author), Andrew W. Marshall (Foreword) (1 of 4)
Friday  28 August 2015 / Hour 3, Block B: Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future, by Henry Sokolski and Andrew W. Marshall  (2 of 4)
Friday  28 August 2015 / Hour 3, Block C: Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future, by Henry Sokolski and Andrew W. Marshall  (3 of 4)
Friday  28 August 2015 / Hour 3, Block D: Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future, by Henry Sokolski and Andrew W. Marshall  (4 of 4)
Hour Four
Friday  28 August 2015 / Hour 4, Block A: Peter Berkowitz, of Hoover, via Mosaic Magazine; in re: The Long Rise of the Secular Faith  The threat to religious liberty has its roots in a progressivist faith that has been steadily gaining momentum in America for at least a century and a half . . .  (1 of 2)
Friday  28 August 2015 / Hour 4, Block B: Peter Berkowitz, of Hoover, via Mosaic Magazine; in re: The Long Rise of the Secular Faith  The threat to religious liberty has its roots in a progressivist faith that has been steadily gaining momentum in America for at least a century and a half . . .  (2 of 2)
Friday  28 August 2015 / Hour 4, Block C: Eli Lake, Bloomberg View, in re: Congressional Fight on Iran Deal Is All But Over Yes, overturning an Obama veto was always a longshot. House Speaker John Boehner in April was privately warning Republicans that his party didn't have the votes to stop the deal. Now Republican leaders are saying this out in the open.
Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Wednesday it was “very unlikely” there would be 67 votes against the deal in the Senate, but there would be a “bipartisan majority” voting to disapprove of the deal. As of now, only two Senate Democrats and 14 House Democrats have come out against the pact.  (The Republicans hold 54 seats in the Senate.)
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is threatening to filibuster the bill altogether, and unless at least four more Democrats promise to vote against the deal, Reid may succeed. Critics of the deal are outraged at the idea that Congress’s only chance at oversight of the initiative might not even get a hearing on the Senate floor. The White House is also reportedly pushing for  . . .  [more]
 
Friday  28 August 2015 / Hour 4, Block D: Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack, in re: New Horizons team picks its next Kuiper Belt target   The New Horizons science team has picked its next Kuiper Belt fly-by target beyond Pluto. New Horizons will perform a series of four manoeuvers in late October and early November to set its course toward 2014 MU69 – nicknamed “PT1” (for “Potential Target 1”) – which it expects to reach on January 1, 2019. Any delays from those dates would cost precious fuel and add mission risk. “2014 MU69 is a great choice because it is just the kind of ancient KBO, formed where it orbits now, that the Decadal Survey desired us to fly by,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “Moreover, this KBO costs less fuel to reach [than do other candidate targets], leaving more fuel for the flyby, for ancillary science, and [for] greater fuel reserves to protect against the unforeseen.”
The press release includes some silly gobbledegook about how the science team can’t announce this as its official target because they still have to write up a proposal to submit to NASA, which [in turn] then must ponder its decision and decree it valid. We all know this is ridiculous. Will NASA sit and ponder and make them miss their target? I doubt it.
The fly-by itself will be really exciting, because this object will truly be the most unusual we will have ever gotten a close look at, as it has spent its entire existence far out in the dim reaches of the solar system.
..  ..  ..